Pondering Patterson Series [I ], [ II ], [ III], [ IV ], [V] [VI]

Is Orlando Patterson correct in saying in The NY Times that half of all Hispanics resident in the U.S. are actually white (as the term is understood here)?

Hardly. 

The majority of American Latinos trace their roots to Mexico. According to the CIA World Factbook, only 9% of the residents of Mexico are white. The CIA says that 30% of Mexicans are predominantly Indian and 60% are mestizos (white and Indian mixes).

And the percentage of Mexican immigrants who came from the white ruling caste must be far less than their 9% proportion of the total. After all, why would the whites want to leave? Life is sweet in Mexico if you are born into the race that is in charge of the other 91% of the population.

In fact, the only white Latin American population that has immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers are the Cubans. (Click here for a page of pictures of leading Miami Cuban citizens if you don't believe that they are overwhelmingly white.) And that would never have happened except that a Communist dictator threw them out. Indeed, Miami's Cubans have claimed vociferously that they can't wait to get back to Cuba and take up the life they used to live. (Whether, post-Castro, the current inmates of Cuba will want their old masters back, is, however, very much unknown.)

In fact, although Patterson doesn't understand it, the example of Miami shows that a big influx of white Latino immigrants would pose a more immediate threat to American culture than the same number of mestizo or mulatto immigrants. White Cubans were able to Hispanicize Miami in a generation. In contrast, in three generations the mestizos of San Antonio still haven't been able to get themselves organized enough to take over that city politically. The white Cubans of Miami appear quite capable of succeeding economically without any English-speaking Americans, but the same can't be said for the mestizo and mulatto immigrants in other cities.

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.

[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.]

May 25, 2001