April 11, 2007
By Peter Brimelow
[This article
appeared in yesterday's
Washington Times,
and is reprinted here
with our trademark hyperlinkage.]
Herman Badillo, the first Puerto
Rican-born U.S. congressman, architect of key federal
bilingual
voting and
education laws and a fixture of New York City
politics for nearly five decades, is now 77 and
senior fellow at the conservative
Manhattan Institute think tank. It's a great fit.
Mr. Badillo's partial
autobiography, One Nation, One Standard,
reflects
his dramatic end-of-career conversion on questions like
the unintended,
assimilation-retarding consequences of
institutional bilingualism and the failure of
government programs, and
political action generally, to improve the lot of
the Hispanic community to which he devoted his life. His
book is a testimony to the efficacy of this remarkable
public policy shop's brew of
libertarian and
neoconservative ideas—and ominous evidence of their
ultimate limitation.
Mr. Badillo's message is blunt and
bracing:
"American Hispanics need, first and foremost, to
envision and adopt a
completely new culture of self-improvement. ... the
true solutions to their problems lie not with government
but within themselves."
In effect, Mr. Badillo is
advocating Hispanics adopt the
Protestant Ethic. This strikingly echoes
neoconservative
development expert
Lawrence E. Harrison, who has
argued in works like Culture Matters
and
The Central Liberal Truth that
differing religious and Colonial histories go far in
explaining the differing
economic performances of Third World societies. And
indeed, Mr. Badillo explicitly blames what he repeatedly
calls Latin America's
"five century siesta" on Spain's authoritarian
Colonial and Catholic legacy.
Amazingly—and I don't remember
hearing about this while Mr. Badillo was active in New
York politics—it materializes that he actually is a
Protestant, one of Puerto Rico's very few, from a family
persecuted for its Protestantism
way back into the 19th century. Orphaned at 5, he
reports laconically that he persisted in attending a
Baptist church, though the only
Protestant in the neighborhood, "because
somebody, probably my dying mother, must have impressed
upon me that I had to attend the Protestant church, even
if I had to go alone." Clearly, this was culture
that mattered.
Mr. Badillo's personal experience
differs from the
Hispanic norm in another way, the memory of which
seems to have resurfaced to influence his thinking now.
On being brought to the United States as a
Spanish-speaking 11-year-old, he was dispatched to an
uncle who had married an American and lived a
completely English-speaking life in a paradisiacal
Southern California suburb. Totally immersed, Mr.
Badillo got himself elected high school class president
within two years.
He does not say, probably wisely,
whether the suburb
remains completely
English-speaking or paradisiacal today.
Mr. Badillo eventually became a
lawyer and a CPA, courtesy of public schools and the
legendary free City University of New York. He quite
reasonably regards himself as living proof that
education is the ladder out of poverty. He is enraged
that
racial politics has
substantially destroyed that ladder in New York. The
core of his book is his epic struggle with
New York's educational bureaucracy, latterly as
Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani's education special counsel and
chairman of CUNY's Board of Trustees.
Some of this is so tragic you have
to laugh. For example, Mr. Badillo reports he has spent
40 years trying to retire obsolete airplane engines from
the vocational high schools he
once attended, even finding law clients who would
pay for new ones, only to fail because of the difficulty
of retraining teachers (aka
union rules). So students are still prepared for
non-existent jobs.
At one point, Mr. Badillo
discovered New York was recruiting "bilingual"
teachers from Spain who spoke no English—proof that the
policy he helped develop had become a language-retention
racket. As CUNY chairman Mr. Badillo attacked
Hostos Community College for
graduating students who did not know English—only to
discover this was standard practice at all community
colleges, though none admitted it.
Mr. Badillo says frankly that
"bilingual" education
is still in place. Paradoxically, reading about his
heroic efforts leads inexorably to the conclusion that
an education system that must be led by heroes is
fundamentally flawed. The
problem is that education is a
socialized industry. The only answer is
privatization—replacing
politics with market processes. But this is
apparently still unsayable.
Similarly, though Mr. Badillo's
criticisms have
inflamed Hispanics, the brutal truth is that he does
not
go far enough. He disregards accumulating evidence
that the United States is importing a second,
Spanish-speaking underclass (and even repeats the
long-exploded claim that
44 percent of Hispanics voted for President Bush in
2004). The real question, which neither Mr. Badillo nor
his new allies want to ask, is: Why does the United
States
want another
underclass anyway?
Peter Brimelow is editor of
VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,
(Random House -
1995) and
The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)
