December 01, 2004

The Fulford File, By James Fulford

WSJ Decoded: the Immigration Arguments Not Fit to Print; etc.

We have written about Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal before. He's one of their gang of anti-restrictionist polemicists. Recently he's been urging everyone to ignore us, just like President Bush seems to.  There is a lot of nonsense in this piece, but I will just point out that in a couple of places, he is dodging specifying his targets. Unless you're a real immigration wonk, you will not know what he is talking about.  WSJ has provided no links, no doubt to avoid the terrible risk of exposing innocent readers to sources of counter-arguments. So I will have to point them out:

“Meanwhile, social conservatives preaching ethnocentrism fret that too many undesirables from south of the border are soiling our Anglo-American cultural fabric. At least one Manhattan Institute scholar is convinced that Latino men are congenital gangbangers.”

Nix on Nativism Ignore the anti-immigrant right. Bush did., by Jason L. Riley, November 22, 2004

This is two cheap shots in two sentences, the first being an attack on Samuel Huntington, whose argument for the danger to America's Anglo-protestant core you can read in full here: The Hispanic Challenge, Foreign Policy, March/April 2004.

The second is an insult to Heather MacDonald, whose work on immigrant gangs in the second generation can be read most recently here. The Immigrant Gang Plague, City Journal, Summer 2004.

Just the usual VDARE.COM service, making for what, unfortunately is the "usual Wall Street Journal service."

Reference the above piece using this permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/fulford/041201_fulford_file.htm#b1

Horrified at Krikorian, but Loving TR

A group calling themselves the Bull Moose Republicans, with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt, announces that support for "New Americans" is one the four pillars of their personal brand of Republicanism.

They are horrified that Mark Krikorian has suggested that Mexicans are more likely, as a group, to engage in corruption.

To be fair, and why not, Krikorian says "illegal aliens from cultures where bribery is pervasive," but why just illegals? If the point is the culture they come from, then the legality or illegality of their arrival is irrelevant. You know, you can take the immigrant out of Mexico, but you can't  take the Mexico out of the immigrant, right Mark? Truly disgusting. You might as well say that German immigrants were more likely to be fascists during WWII and come out swinging in favor of Korematsu. [Krikorian Says the Darndest Things, posted by Bill Fusz October 4]

Now there are all kinds of answers to this, such as "Korematsu was about the Japanese, not the Germans," or "Shouldn't we be more suspicious of criminals from a corrupt society,  than legal immigrants from , yes, the same society?"

But I was curious about what Roosevelt, the historian, and Bull Moose Republican icon, would have thought about the Mexican national character. This is from the index of the Winning Of the West, Volume Four [E-text]

(He's mostly talking about the Spanish colonialists, before the Texas Revolution.)

Spaniards, hostility to Americans;

    intrigues with Indians;
    gross treachery of;
    tortuous intrigues;
    ingratitude of;
    bad faith;
    try to bribe Westerners;
    irritation with frontiersmen;
    trust to corruption and intrigue;
    negotiate with United States Government;
    try to corrupt Westerners;
    refuse to yield territory;
    refuse to fulfil treaty engagements;
    last efforts to corrupt the West;
    and to retain their own;
    yield;
    religious bigotry;
    fear Westerners;
    jealous policy;
    their civilization and government in Northern Mexico,

I don't see how the Bull Moosers can pick on Mark Krikorian, when they have a photo of the man who wrote that on their website, do you?