Contra Contreras (Again)
01/03/2002
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"Well, well, shrill racism is surfacing throughout the country. It has been since the attack on September … With the exceptions of a single Chinese immigrant woman and one Cuban immigrant … these anti-Mexican fanatics are generally white males. Their profound hatred for Mexicans is hard to explain, though manifested everywhere. What makes a white male like Peter Brimelow, born an Englishmen who became, first, a Canadian immigrant, then an immigrant to America, such a hater of Mexicans? What makes a white American male like Sam Francis who eats food put on his plate by Mexicans, hate them so much? … What makes a Chinese immigrant woman named Ling Ling, who speaks English with a terrible accent, make her life's work stopping immigration? What makes Cuban [George] Borjas propose stopping immigration of Mexicans without Ph.D's?… Lets see: The targets are Mexicans and 90% of all Mexicans are either mixed blood of European and Indian blood, or pure Indian. The critics, with the exception of the Chinese woman, are all white, including white Cuban George Borjas. What's the juxtaposition here? Before anyone charges "race card," perhaps they should look in the mirror. … Thus, if almost all Mexican haters are white, aren't they related to those white people who terrorized the entire American black population for hundreds of years?

Raoul Lowery Contreras
Calnews.com, December 2, 2001

I must say that I am disappointed that Hispanic Republican columnist Raoul Lowery Contreras left me out of his latest diatribe. I guess he just doesn't know me well enough yet to criticize my pronunciation or excessive nose hair or whatever. Fortunately, he did include me in another recent effort:

When facts smash anti-Hispanic fanatics and scatter their ridiculous and unsubstantiated views to the wind, I laugh. [You gotta love those verbs! Perhaps Raoul took a correspondence course on "Choosing Predicates the Mein Kampf Way." - Steve]

Writers Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer come to mind as do their published views that President Bush and his Republican Party are committing suicide by actively seeking Hispanic support.

Raoul Lowery Contreras
Arizona Republic
November 17, 2001

Now, Peter Brimelow denies that Raoul is secretly on the payroll of the crack VDARE Publicity Department. But I say we should at least send him a nice fruit basket for all the hard work he's done in getting our names out there.

So is Peter Brimelow running a racist webzine? Well, the funny thing about VDARE.com is that more than just about any other outlet in America, we have been systematically critical of Mexico's white elite and its 480-year tradition of discriminating against beige and brown Mexicans. For example, Allan Wall wrote in VDARE on Oct. 11th

Certainly, Mexican immigration to the U.S. helps Mexico's white elite to stay in power. Jorge Castañeda, now Fox's Foreign Minister, stated as much in his famed Atlantic Monthly article of July 1995. The white Mexican elite is determined to keep as many of their poorer, darker-skinned countrymen heading north. The emigration "safety valve" was Zedillo's policy, and now it's Fox's policy—the new president is just more aggressive about it.

Similarly, I've written on "Mexico's corrupt white power elite." I've described Mexico's racial stratification and traced its permanence to discrimination against darker, more indigenous women (as seen so vividly on Mexican TV, where the actresses all look like Lithuanians).

Last summer, I wrote

No, the unexplored problem with massive mestizo immigration is that by creating in America a beige servant caste, mass immigration slowly turns the wealthier native-born Americans into a white master caste. Maybe we'll be able to withstand the temptations inherent in this kind of society better than the whites of Latin America, who were thoroughly corrupted by them. The history of the American South, though, suggests that rich white Americans aren't immune to the sinister blandishments of luxurious living based on a surplus of cheap laborers of dusky hue.

Interestingly, my conclusion was almost identical to that reached in November by the estimable Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks in the New York Review of Books in his important two part series "Who Should Get In?":

Fifty years from now our children could find that admitting millions of poor Latinos had not only created a sizable Latino underclass but—far worse— that it had made rich Americans more like rich Latin Americans.

(For James Fulford's critique of Jencks, click here)

Raoul's second quote refers to billionaire Michael Bloomberg's $55 million victory in the New York City mayor's race, which he sees as vindicating the Bush-Rove plan to trade visas for Hispanic votes.

Of course, Republican mayoral candidate Orlando Sanchez's loss in Houston on Dec. 4th doesn't help Raoul's argument.

Further, I'd be more impressed if there had been any Republicans in the NYC race. Instead, as in LA's mayoral election last June, after eight successful years of moderate Republican leadership, no Republican even made the runoff. Oh sure, Bloomberg is a Republican – albeit for less time than Hillary Clinton has been a resident of New York - but he was a lifelong liberal Democrat who donated ten times more to Democrats than Republicans over the last decade. He refused to deny that he had voted for Hillary last year. Then, on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes and he realized … that he was more likely to succeed in buying the mayor's office as a Republican than as a Democrat. He ended up spending something like $85 per vote. And he still wouldn't have won without Rudy Giuliani's endorsement.

So, if nominating a liberal Democrat billionaire media mogul is the key to winning the Hispanic vote, all the Republicans have to do is nominate Ted Turner for President.

My editor, however, points out that there are operatives in the Republican Party who will take my sarcastic suggestion at face value. They would gladly give Ted Turner the Republican Presidential nomination if they thought it would bring in the precious Hispanic vote. Heck, they'd nominate a ticket of Ted for Prez and the ex-Mrs. Ted (Jane Fonda) for Veep if they thought it would help.

So it's important to note that what actually happened in New York had little to do with the appeal of the national Republican Party to Hispanics. Instead, a large fraction of the Hispanic vote stayed home - to spite Democratic candidate Mark Green for beating the Hispanic candidate, Fernando Ferrer, in the Democratic primary.  Because the Hispanic vote was down, the Republican share of it went up. And, with a key part of the Democratic coalition not voting, Bloomberg won, narrowly.

The New York Times confirms:

Hispanic voters in New York have voted Democratic in the past, but this year, after voting in record numbers during the primary, many stayed away from the polls during the general election. And those who voted were almost evenly divided. Hispanic voters have shown an increasing willingness to vote Republican in recent years, but the anger that many voters felt over the tactics used during Mr. Green's runoff election against Fernando Ferrer, who would have been the city's first Puerto Rican mayor, served as a catalyst that accelerated the trend this year.

For the record, in their articles on immigration and the shifting electoral balance, Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein have been predicting exactly this immigration-induced coalition problem in Democratic primaries: "Thus the vast complication of ethnic politics brought about by current immigration policy may, in the end, confound both parties."

Green's "tactics" that offended New York Hispanics included publicly linking Ferrer to Al Sharpton, a Ferrer ally in the labyrinthine complexities of New York ethnic politics.

So who needs Ted Turner? The GOP should just nominate Al Sharpton for President.

That would get the Hispanics and the African-Americans!

(Hey, Republican strategists! That's just a joke! Right? RIGHT??) 

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]

January 03, 2002

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