October 13, 2007
Saturday Forum
A New York Resident,
Navy Officer And U.S.-Born Citizen, Cannot Get A
Driver’s License; etc.
From: USNAVYO3
Re: Joe
Guzzardi’s Column:
Joe To Dubya—Use ICE Agents Against Illegal Alien
Coddler Eliot Spitzer
The New York license issue holds a special resonance for me. Last
month, I was denied renewal of my license because,
although I have a
social security number, I don’t have a card.
I'm a military officer and I carry a military ID card which bears my
Social Security number. My military ID also has my
photo, a scan of my DNA (nope, not joking), and an
embedded microchip.
While one does occasionally hear of an
illegal alien in the military, as an officer I am
required to be a citizen. I had to endure a three-year
background check where each facet of my life
was carefully examined.
When I reasonably pointed out to the
DMV apparatchiks that I held one of the US's most
secure forms of identification and that a Social
Security card is one of the most easily- and
often-forged documents in the world, I was politely but
firmly invited to leave the building.
Maybe some good will come out of
Gov. Spitzer's plan to reward illegal aliens with driver
licenses.
Since these persecuted,
hard-working undocumented workers (as Spitzer portrays
them) will now have a document they can call their very
own perhaps we can get back to calling them "illegal
aliens."
When we selfish immigration
realists protest Spitzer's scheme to give illegal aliens
and
terrorists driver licenses — literally carte blanche
to go wherever they like in the country without
challenge—we must remember that Spitzer is also ending
discrimination against US military officers.
Presumably I will now, just like
the illegal aliens, be able to obtain my license without
a Social Security card.
I’m sure Spitzer wouldn't want to
be guilty of failure to support the troops.
USNAVY03 is an executive for
an investment adviser in New York and former active duty
US Navy officer now in the Navy Reserve. Send him mail
c/o
witan@vdare.com
[PermaLink] [Top]
[Letters Home]
A Florida Construction
Worker Says Aliens Are Everywhere—Taking American Jobs
From:
David
Ellis
In 1993, I was a homebuilder in a small
mid-western city when
two men approached me looking for work.
They told me they left Los
Angeles because illegal aliens took over the
construction laborer's jobs by working for
lower wages than they were willing to accept. The
two workers explained how their livelihood had been
literally stolen by aliens while the government stood by
and watched.
Since there were
few Mexicans and even fewer illegal aliens in the
mid-west at the time, I told them they wouldn’t have any
problems hiring on.
By the time we left the mid-west in 2003 to live on
Florida’s Gulf Coast, we had so many Mexicans that
Spanish was spoken everywhere. We had been invaded and
it was disgusting.
Of course, we were told that the illegal aliens had
come to town to take jobs Americans wouldn't do. The
problem was they really wanted to take mine!
Send Ellis mail c/o
witan@vdare.com
[PermaLink] [Top]
[Letters Home]
A North Carolina Reader Says Children Of Invaders Grow Up To Be Anti-American
From:
Stephen Bennett (e-mail
him)
One component of all the various amnesty bills really sticks in my craw:
The provision that amnestied aliens must be of “good
moral character.”
But they have all broken multiple laws and stolen social services
neither intended nor paid for by them.
Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promises to
revive as standalone legislation the
DREAM Act, recently
killed, to provide amnesty for child invaders who,
in all probability, will grow up to become
ethnic identity activists for more freebies for
fellow aliens.
One more thing: with the amnesty granted them by the DREAM Act, first
two people sponsored for citizenship by those children
whose education was financed by American taxpayers will
be their illegal alien madre and padre.
Bennett is a safety and environmental consultant
specializing in power plants who recently committed
himself to patriotic immigration reform
[PermaLink]
[Top]
[Letters Home]
An Asian-Canadian Reader Writes in Defense of J. Phillipe Rushton
From:
Ben (e-mail
him)
Re:
A Reader In India Disputes Rushton On Intelligence
I refer to the letter from Indian reader Ganesh
Thiyagesan that disputes Rushton's summary of evidence
of the relatively low Indian IQ as outlined in his
column
Indians Aren’t That Intelligent (On Average).
On the contrary, substantial evidence supports
Rushton. IQ is known to
highly correlate with international test results.
Here I present two data points of the relatively poor
academic achievement of Indians in
India compared to
international standards.
First, India's largest educational non governmental
organization (NGO), Pratham, carried out a survey of
learning achievement in 2005 and repeated the survey
with a bigger sample of about 330,000 household in 2006.
It visited 20 homes each in 30 randomly selected
villages in each one of 549 Indian districts, and
interacted with all children aged 6 to 16 years old in
the sample homes.
The findings make grim reading. In 2006, nearly 47
percent of children who were in school and studying in
grade 5 could not read the story text at grade 2 level
of difficulty. In arithmetic, 55 percent of grade 5 and
25 percent of grade 8 children could not solve a simple
division problem (3 digits divided by 1 digit). The data
is presented
here.
The above figure is self-explanatory, but let's
highlight the findings. Look at the following groups of
primary grade Indian students and their reading skills.
In other words, an
average Indian student (defined as 50 percentile) is
almost 3 years behind in reading by the second grade.
The question naturally
arises as to whether India's abject poverty leads to
such poor academic achievement.
India is a very poor country. A recent
report released by the National Commission for
Enterprises in Unorganized Sector demonstrates that
up to 77 percent of Indians, i.e. approximately 836
million people, subsist on less than US $0.50 a day.
India has a
higher rate of malnutrition than children in
Ethiopia. Therefore, will richer Indian children
therefore fare dramatically better if they attend rich
private schools?
Such a study has in fact been carried out and the
results are available
here.
Page 33 the 70-page
report:
"Findings: The findings
are, to say the least, quite worrying. Students from the
'top' schools of our metros are performing below average
international levels. The performance of the class 4
students is significantly lower than the international
average in each one of the 11 questions. More
strikingly, students of a higher class (class 6)
performed only marginally better than the international
average for class 4 students."
Considering India's astounding
39% illiteracy rate, children who go to (1) top (2)
private and (3) metro schools are often the elite. Yet
their achievements are still "significantly lower"
than the international average.
Second, some speculate that India may evolve towards
a Brazilian model, where a highly intelligent and
competent elite will lead, while the country as a whole
will be dragged down by a large, amorphous, and
anonymous mass of desperately poor and illiterate
people.
There is a surrogate data point for this: the
International Math Olympiad
(IMO). The IMO is the World Championship
Mathematics Competition for High School students and
is held annually in a different country. The first IMO
was held in 1959 in Romania,
with 7 countries participating. It has gradually
expanded to over 90 countries from 5 continents.
Ranking is population size dependent (i.e. larger
countries should have proportionately larger numbers of
very bright and intelligent high school students and
thus should score higher in rank). It is therefore
instructive to compare India
to China.
Here's
the summary of the results of the last 20 years,
from 1987 - 2007, when data is available. Note that the
equal sign " = " means draw with another country
or countries.
India's Ranking:
Even allowing for the speculation that there is a
wider standard deviation of Indian IQ, poor
China still trounces poor
India, year after year,
at the very top level.
And furthermore China, while having a higher GDP per
capita (PPP adjusted) compared to India, is also a poor
country.
Lynn in 2006 noted that poor China has an IQ that is
not incomparable to that of its much richer East Asian
neighbors: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.
And yet India's IQ is, as all evidence demonstrates,
significantly lower. Of note, this stark IQ differential
is by no means limited to India
alone. There is an over 20-point
IQ gap separating the
four South Asian country cluster (India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka)
and the four North East Asian country cluster (Japan,
South Korea, China,
Taiwan).
As Rushton notes, IQ's utility is in prognosis and
forecasting, and it is best viewed as a prospective and
prognostic variable.
To the extent that
IQ predicts national GDP and wealth, it is not
surprising that Shankar Acharya, Honorary Professor at
Icrier and former Chief Economic Adviser to the
Government of India, famously quipped: "As an
economy,
we are simply not in China's league."
Ben describes himself as a
former modern liberal turned "evolutionary
conservative". He is of Northeast Asian descent and
is a professional who is currently residing and working
in Toronto, Canada.
[PermaLink]
[Top]
[Letters Home]
An Illinois Reader Notes That All Those Hindu Successes Occurred In America
From:
Darren Simmons
Re:
A Reader In India Disputes Rushton On Intelligence
Perhaps readers noticed, but in case they did not—most
of those great
Hindu success stories the Indian reader extolled
occurred in the West or colonies thereof.
Simmons writes that his Christmas wish list includes his
hope that
“political correctness falls by the wayside so
intellectual life can flourish once more.”
[PermaLink]
[Top]
[Letters Home]
