Mexican society is fundamentally racist and classist

Mexican Visual Arts Meet Disapproval

[Brenda Walker] @ 11:11 am [Email author] [Email this article]

What’s Spanish for schadenfreude? The squirming, role reversal and irony backstory all contained in the Mexican stamp imbroglio have been a delight to watch. Tone-deaf Mexican elites are still flopping around like trout in a boat, insisting that their Sambo-esque postage stamps (see the set here) are actually charming reflections of Mexican culture.

You might have thought that Mexicans would make an effort not to insult black Americans after el Presidente Fox’s bonehead remark a few weeks back that Mexicans do work not even blacks will do. Not a chance.

American blacks have responded in anger to the obnoxious stamps, which are based on a decades-old comic character, and the rainbow vision of black and brown people united to overpower whitey is looking increasingly gray.

But NAACP Interim President Dennis Courtland Hayes countered that “laughing at the expense of hardworking African Americans or African Mexicans is no joke and it should end at once.” [...]

Ben Vinson, a black professor of Latin American history at Penn State University, said he has been called “Memin Pinguin” by some people in Mexico. He also noted that the character’s mother is drawn to look like an old version of the U.S. advertising character Aunt Jemima. [ Mexico issues stamp of black cartoon character weeks after racial flap]

Jesse Jackson, however, appears to be angling for a job as the top token on the Hispanic gravy train, judging by his call for a Black-Hispanic coalition. Typically, when Mexicans have felt insulted they squawk loud and long. For example, Mario Obledo and other La Raza types had a tizzy a few years back over the Taco Bell chihuahua, calling it offensive and racist. (Will someone please explain how a dog can be racist?)

And before the Taco Bell chihuahua, there was the Frito Bandito, condemned by the Raza crowd as anti-Mexican. Another was the Warner Brothers cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez, yanked from the Cartoon Network in the service of political correctness, despite being a rather appealing rodent as rats go.

Okay then, let’s have a Mexican scientist character; that’ll be realistic.

(For extra credit, see “Whatever Happened to Speedy Gonzalez?” for a PG-13 animated fantasy where Speedy meets Snidely Whiplash in the Scarface style.)

A sidebar curiosity in the dust-up is how the LA Times included uncharacteristic
honesty about the issue of race in Mexican Postage Stamp Pushes Racial Envelope:

“Mexican society is fundamentally racist and classist,” said Guadalupe Loaeza, a newspaper columnist. “The color of your skin is a key that either opens or shuts doors. The lighter your skin, the more doors open to you.”

Racism extends to political preferences, she added. Many upper-middle-class Mexicans are expected to vote against front-running presidential candidate and Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party because he is partly indigenous and brown-skinned, Loaeza said. That group of voters might tend to support Santiago Creel of the National Action Party because he has light skin and blue eyes, she said.

Racism is one of the many forms of discrimination practiced in Mexico, according to a survey published last month by the federal secretary of social development. It said 80% of Mexicans, among them women, children, indigenous and disabled people and the elderly, suffered discrimination in some way.

In addition, Mexican comic books — one sees them being widely read in Mexico by adults — also include vicious anti-white sexism.

All the while, paleface Mexican elites continue to export indigenous and mestizo people to America.

Just Accept Merger With Mexico, It’s Inevitable, Says The American Spectator’s Angelo Codevilla. Bunk! Says VDARE.COM’s Allan Wall.

June 29, 2009

Memo From Middle America, By Allan Wall

It’s obvious that the Conservative Establishment has dropped the ball on the National Question. That, in fact, is one of the main reasons VDARE.COM exists, and why you should support it. (Donate here ).

The Conservative Establishment, though it might pay some attention to illegal immigration from time to time, is either blissfully unaware about defending our sovereignty—or dead-set against it.

And some Establishment conservatives just tell us outright toc surrender.

For example, there is an absolutely horrible piece by Boston University professor Angelo M. Codevilla [Email him] in the June American Spectator, which I used to really enjoy but I don’t read much anymore. TAS mostly ignores the Mexicanization of America. This article openly calls for it.

To begin with, the article’s very title, “Pro-Mexico” is misleading. Does Codevilla mean to say that, if you oppose the Mexican takeover of the U.S., you are “anti-Mexico”? Are those the only two options? How about a conservative, old-fashioned belief that the U.S. and Mexico are separate nations and ought to remain so?

That happens to be my view—and I lived in Mexico for many years, my wife is Mexican and my children were born there.

Just read the article’s first paragraph and you can already tell where it’s going:

“For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, whether anybody likes it or not, the United States and Mexico are joined at the Rio Grande until the stars fall from the sky. What Geography hath joined together, let no man even think of putting asunder.”

Yes, Angelo, we already know Mexico is our neighbor. However, if things continue as they are, Mexico will not be our neighbor; we will become part of Mexico. Is that what you want?

After the introductory paragraphs, the author provides some historical meanderings, about the Monroe Doctrine, etc., and discusses the U.S. takeover of the Southwest (which I have written about here). But then he writes that the reversal of that conquest is also inevitable:

“Twenty-first-century Americans would be well advised to keep in mind that the peaceful underlying mechanisms that ensured that this area would be Anglo are now working in the other direction, seemingly just as inexorably.”

In other words, the Southwest—if not the whole country— is going to be Hispanic and that’s inevitable.

Codevilla is aware of the enormous and rather recent explosion of the Mexican population in the U.S.:

“… by 1990, only some 2 percent of the U.S. population was Mexican-born. This changed rapidly. By 2008 12 million native Mexicans lived in the U.S. Together with 13 million persons of Mexican origin, Mexicans made up 9 percent of the U.S. population. By 2050, about one in five Americans will be Mexican or of Mexican ancestry. In sum, our Mexican neighbors are also part of us. They are unique among America’s constituent ethnic groups in being numerous neighbors as well as relatives. There is nothing optional about this. The only question is whether our familial relationship will be functional or dysfunctional.”

So Codevilla says the U.S. is being Mexicanized and there is nothing we can or should do about it.

Not only that, says the author, but this is all necessary. In so doing, Codevilla repeats the standard, insulting myths about our economy:

1. The myth that Mexicans do jobs Americans won’t do.

2. The myth that, as Codevilla says, “…American young people’s avoidance of serious science and math means that if we are to have scientists and doctors, they will have to come from India or China.”

3. The myth that immigration will save Social Security and Medicare.

It’s sad, though not alas surprising, that the writer for a supposed conservative magazine would be a purveyor of such misleading propaganda.

Regarding the old saw that Mexicans do the jobs Americans won’t do, is Codevilla not aware that they work for much cheaper than Americans can? (For labor/immigration issues, see previous VDARE articles here, here and here.)

For the myth that all our science workers have to come from China and India, needs a good dose of Rob Sanchez articles, here, here and here.

And as far as the ridiculous idea that mass immigration is going to save social security, check out these previous VDARE.COM articles here.

In the next paragraph Codevilla says how great emigration supposedly is for Mexico.

But does emigration really help Mexico? In a number of past articles I’ve pointed out some negative effects: Does Emigration Really Help Mexico?, Deadbeat Dads Don’t Stop at the Rio Grande, Mexican Emigration Versus Economic Development, and How to Help Mexico—Close the Border!

Even Guillermo Ortiz, chief of Mexico’s Central Bank, has said that a stricter border would help Mexico.

The bottom line for those who truly want to help Mexico: there are many ways to do so besides flooding the U.S. with Mexicans – that is, unless your real goal is to transform the U.S.

And that says more about your attitude to the U.S. than your attitude to Mexico!

This part of Codevilla’s article is really ridiculous:

“For millions of ordinary Mexicans, a certain idealized image of America is the measure of things as they should be. This is as excellent for America as it is for Mexico. This is most visible in Mexico’s northern regions, which have taken to calling themselves el norte, ‘the north,’ the popular name for the U.S.”

Uh, actually, they call northern Mexico “el norte“ because that means “the north” and it’s the northern part of the country!

Codevilla celebrates the idea that northern Mexico and the U.S. border region could merge:

“This is in part because life around places like Monterrey does approximate what one finds just north of the border. Indeed, anyone traveling within 200 miles or so of that line is likely to see less and less difference between life on the two sides. A plebiscite on the southern side of this band would likely indicate a preference for joining the U.S., while on the northern side the increasing proportion of Mexicans might tip the balance in favor of accepting accession.”

Northern Mexico is definitely more prosperous than southern Mexico. But it’s still part of Mexico and its people still identity with Mexico.

Also, note that Codevilla notices “the increasing proportion of Mexicans” north of the border—and doesn’t even seem to care if they assimilate and identify as Americans.

The next section discusses Mexico’s diversity and the political scene. But like so many American commentators on Mexico, Codevilla sees the currently-ruling PAN (National Action Party) as “conservative” and “pro-U.S.”. But, although in many ways the PAN may be preferable to other Mexican parties, it is not a Mexican version of the Republican Party. Economically, it is a left-wing party by U.S. standards.

As far as being “pro-U.S.”, the PAN is still a Mexican political party. It’s not the job of a Mexican political party to be pro-U.S.

I’d just settle for an American political party that was pro-U.S.!

When Vicente Fox was elected in 2000, we heard a lot of excited rhetoric about his being “pro-U.S.”. And throughout his presidency, we were told that we had to do what Fox wanted or the anti-Americans would get in power. In the 2006 election, people like Dick Morris (who was on the payroll of Vicente Fox and probably Felipe Calderon) assured us that if Calderon didn’t win, then Hugo Chavez was on the verge of taking over Mexico. So, Morris told us, we needed to support more Mexican immigration pronto!

But how “pro-U.S” was Vicente Fox really?

The pro-American Vicente Fox administration opposed us in international forums, meddled in our labor law and in our military , offered Mexico as a haven for murderers, worked to win the loyalty of Mexican-Americans, threatened to negotiate with wartime enemies, flooded our cities with dubious documents to aliens, used Mexican consulates to meddle in our internal affairs and in general, did everything possible to sabotage our immigration laws.

Is that “Pro-U.S.”?

Anyway, Codevilla says that different Mexican political parties (all of whom, by the way, agree that Mexico should meddle in U.S. immigration policy) have different visions, and then he says it’s our fault if the wrong “vision” prevails in Mexico:

“Which vision prevails among Mexicans in the future, what kinds of neighbors we will have south of the border, as well as the character of our Mexican-American relatives on the north side, must depend to some extent on how we Americans handle some of our thorny problems. The beginning of wisdom about this is that they are ours. So far, the U.S. body politic has handled them in a way that seems calculated to turn Mexicans into enemies.”

Oh, so it’s our fault if the wrong vision prevails. And as for the Mexican-Americans he mentions, aren’t they Americans? Or is Codevilla admitting (again, tacitly) that many of them are more Mexican than American?

Codevilla follows up with three of these problems: Drugs, Trade and Immigration. On drugs, I agree with Codevilla. Our “War on Drugs” has been a failure and our drug users are financing the Mexican drug cartels. Maybe legalization is the best option.

As for free trade with Mexico, that’s a mixed bag with winners and losers on both sides of the border. The bottom line though is that in today’s environment it’s being used to merge the U.S. and Mexico, which is apparently what Codevilla wants anyway. After all, he writes that “Increasing the economic integration of the U.S., Canada and Mexico makes even more sense politically than it does economically.”

Near the end of his article, Codevilla sums it up and assures us we’d just better accept integration:

“Note well, however, that current U.S. policies on trade, immigration, and drugs cannot possibly stop or even slow appreciably the integration of the U.S. and Mexico. Much less can they separate the United States’ well-being from Mexico’s.  All they can do is continue to make the two peoples’ growing interdependence into a source of trouble for both. These three sets of policies have in common that they cannot achieve their stated ends, and that they tend to make Americans and Mexicans each others’ enemies. “

Note that Codevilla says that U.S. policies “cannot possibly stop…the integration of the U.S. and Mexico.”

This is disputed by the fact that his own article makes clear that immigration from Mexico was effectively prevented at various points in U.S. history, with the result that the Mexican-American population is historically quite new.

We must be careful when an “expert” assures us that something is “inevitable”. Often, what he calls “inevitable” is just what he wants to happen anyway.

There is nothing here about the differences in culture between the two countries, and what a Mexicanized U.S. might be like. That’s simply off the table, you better just accept what is happening, you have no say in the matter.

That is Codevilla’s decree to the conservative peasantry.

Thankfully though, not all of The American Spectator’s readers are buying this hook line and sinker. A good letter (scroll down, entitled Hechos, Por Favor) by Charles Johnson eviscerates the piece.

Furthermore, there are plenty of reader comments taking Codevilla to task for this arrogant piece of defeatist propaganda.

Here’s a comment by Dave Lincoln,

“If you want the truth on this issue, you’ve got to go to www.vdare.com. Obviously, the Spectator is not up to the task on this issue. “

Bravo! I recommend that VDARE.COM readers scroll down to the bottom of the article and add their own comments. (Be polite of course!)

We shouldn’t allow Establishment “Conservatives” lead us into surrender without a fight.

American citizen Allan Wall (email him) recently moved back to the U.S.A. after many years residing in Mexico. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here and his website is here.

That Sotomayor Decision: One Law For Frank Ricci—Another For Emily Bazelon?

By Steve Sailer

This Monday, June 29, is supposed to be the day when we’ll find out if the Supreme Court overturns Sonia Sotomayor’s notorious decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. Sotomayor permitted New Haven to junk the results of its fire department promotional exams because too many whites had done well on them.

Last week, Slate ran a 5000 word article about the New Haven Fire Department, The Ladder, by senior editor Emily Bazelon and intern Nicole Allan. The article turns into an inadvertent reductio ad absurdum of the Sotomayorian conventional wisdom.

Bazelon’s ultimate objection to New Haven’s discarded 2003 testing process is that it wasn’t subjective and arbitrary enough to promote as many minorities as she’s like. She ends her article with a ringing call for a more random selection method that will produce less knowledgeable fire captains and lieutenants:

“The city could come up with a measure for who is qualified for the promotions, rather than who is somehow best. And then it could choose from that pool by lottery.”

Bazelon apparently doesn’t know that lotteries are exactly what cities such as Chicago are already doing with the results of firefighter tests, in an attempt to comply with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s “Four-Fifths Rule“. This regulation puts the burden of proof in discrimination cases on employers when blacks aren’t hired or promoted at least 80 percent as often as whites.

There’s a reason you don’t see much in the newspapers about cities hiring firefighters by lottery: this method is terrifying to anybody who might someday be trapped in a burning building. So politicians don’t explain too vividly to the public what exactly they are up to.

In 2006, the new Chicago hiring test passed all but the bottom 15 percent of the folks who walked in off the street wanting jobs as firefighters. And then, just as Bazelon recommends for New Haven, the Chicago city government picked “randomly” from the top 85 percent—the crème de la crème of the Disparate Impact Age.

Why did Chicago have to go so low?

You can use Microsoft Excel’s “Normdist” function to figure out how low you must set the bar when drawing from “normally distributed” populations to allow blacks to pass a test at the EEOC-mandated rate of Four-Fifths as much as whites.

Assume whites average an IQ of 100 and blacks average one standard deviation lower at 85. (Keep in mind that this model is useful not just for IQ but for most valid cognitive predictors of job performance.)

If you set the IQ cutoff at 100, then 16 percent of blacks and 50 percent of whites pass. Sixteen divided by fifty is only 32 percent, or about One-Third, which doesn’t come close to meeting the EEOC Four-Fifths regulation.

What about setting a minimum IQ of 85? That seems pretty low. Can you get away with that minimal of a standard without the EEOC siccing the burden of proof on you?

Answer: no. Unfortunately, an 85 IQ minimum means that 50 percent of blacks and 84 percent of whites pass. That wouldn’t even meet a Three-Fifths Rule, much less the Four-Fifths Rule.

Not until you cut the IQ bar down to 74 would the EEOC be truly happy: 77 percent of blacks and 96 percent of whites pass. Exactly Four-Fifths!

But, seriously, what’s the point of even giving a test so easy that 96 percent of white people can pass? White people aren’t so smart that somebody at the 5th percentile of the white bell curve is going to make an adequate firefighter.

Bazelon’s lotteries are an incredibly stupid idea because cities end up hiring incredibly stupid people of all races. My own opinion is that, before matters come to this absurd pass, citizens would be much safer if fire departments gave up and used explicit racial quotas. Then at least fire departments could hire the top-scoring firefighters from within each race.

Bazelon asks:

“Why Did New Haven’s White Firefighters Test Better Than Blacks and Hispanics?“

However, it never seems to occur to Bazelon to look at the countless similar situations in which whites, on average, both out-test and out-perform blacks and Hispanics. For example, New Haven’s own Yale Law School makes intensive use of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). It has a black-white gap comparable to the New Haven firefighter’s tests: the median black law school hopeful would score at only the 12th percentile among whites.

But the Yale Law School most definitely does not use a lottery to randomly choose among all applicants whose LSATs are high enough for them to become lawyers. Top-Law-Schools.com reports:

“Admissions to Yale Law School can be considered the most competitive in the country based on the school’s 7.3% admit rate alone. The oft-cited 25th to 75th percentile ranges for admissions run around 3.77-3.97 (GPA) and 170-177 (LSAT). … On the flip side, an average of 3 students who had scored below 160 on the LSAT were admitted per year, although an average of 937 students with comparable scores were rejected each year.”

Clearly, Yale Law School can’t choose by lottery because, well, it’s Yale Law School, and it’s ever so important that it have an average LSAT score at least as high as Harvard Law.

But the New Haven Fire Department should use a lottery because rescuing people from burning buildings is for blue-collar lunkheads. How much do you really have to know about saving lives anyway?

Seriously, the careful reader can figure out from Bazelon’s article why New Haven’s white firemen averaged higher on the controversial tests for leadership positions: Because, on the whole, they knew more about how to fight fires.

And why did the whites know more?

In part, because they studied harder.

And, to Bazelon’s mind, that’s just not fair. Bazelon is much exercised by the racial injustice inherent in white firefighters knowing more about how to do their jobs. She says:

“Is this the best way to choose the leaders of a municipal fire department—the best memorizers win?”

Worse, the white firemen are unjustly learning more about fire fighting because they care more about fighting fires. Bazelon continues:

“As one Hispanic quoted anonymously by the New Haven Independent put it, the test favored ‘fire buffs’—guys who read fire-suppression manuals on their downtime …”

To Bazelon, evidently, this is a bad thing.

By the way, here’s more from the original newspaper article interviewing two Hispanic firefighters in New Haven:

“The pair contended that the real issue isn’t about race: Instead, they argued that the way the test was designed favored ‘fire buffs’ who have spent their whole lives reading fire suppression manuals, and studied like maniacs for the exam. Incidentally, most firefighters matching that description happened to be white, they said. … Those who aced the test were nerds who read fire-fighting books just for fun, said Cordova’s cohort.” [Latino Group Backs White Firefighters, by Melissa Bailey, New Haven Independent, February 6, 2009]

In Bazelon’s utopia of racial equality, the whites would be just as apathetic and uninformed about firefighting techniques as the minorities are.

Moreover, Bazelon laments, some of the white firemen fight fires for free in their spare time:

“Meanwhile, the [predominantly white] firefighters from the suburbs are more likely to have experience as volunteer firefighters—which gives them a leg up on skills when they apply for the job …”

The white firemen also are advantaged, Bazelon says, because they tend

“… to come from families in which firefighting is a legacy. … Frank Ricci has an uncle and two brothers who are firefighters. He studied fire science at college.”

This annoys the Firebirds, the black firefighter’s association. According to Bazelon,

“The Firebirds see the family ties of men like Heins and Ricci as part of a network of influence that only white firefighters can tap into. ‘If you look at the history of the department there’s a group of folks, their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles—they’re all part of this network,’ said Gary Tinney, the head of the Firebirds and one of nine black lieutenants out of about 50 in the department.”

In other words, the white firemen often grew up in households where discussions of firefighting techniques were common around the kitchen table. Sure, this means fewer New Havenites burn to death—but it’s unjust to more ignorant firefighters.

I looked up “Emily Bazelon“ on Wikipedia (accessed 16.59 ET, June 28 2009) and discovered that while she’s very bright, she’s not exactly the most self-aware person. When read in light of her biography, her Slate article about privileged white firemen becomes an amusing epitome of unthinking Gown v. Town prejudice.

Wikipedia tells us:

“[Bazelon] graduated from Yale College in 1993 and from Yale Law School in 2000.”

After clerking for a federal judge, she pursued a career in law-related journalism:

“Before joining Slate, Bazelon was a senior editor of Legal Affairs. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New Republic as well as other publications. She has worked as a reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area and as a freelance journalist in Israel.”

Now, she has a fellowship at Yale Law School:

“Bazelon is a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School.”

You might think that Bazelon would be better qualified to offer advice on admissions and promotion to Yale Law School rather than to the New Haven Fire Department. By Bazelon’s logic, Yale Law School should hire by lottery. Perhaps—just to get the ball rolling—she could publicly offer to give up her position to some randomly chosen person?

Moreover, this legal writer’s concern about the advantages Frank Ricci garnered by being related to firemen seems a little ironic in light of this Wikipedia line:

“She is the granddaughter of Judge David L. Bazelon and cousin of feminist Betty Friedan.”

Actually, as her 2005 Slate article Shopping with Betty suggests, she’s more like the second cousin twice removed of the proto-feminist (and crypto-communist) authoress of the bestselling Feminine Mystique. Still, the two were fairly close despite their age difference.

More strikingly, the legal journalist’s grandfather David Bazelon was the most powerful judge in America not on the Supreme Court when he served from 1962-1978 as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Indeed, considering his close relationship with the Svengali of the Warren Court, William J. Brennan, quite possibly Bazelon was more powerful than several Supreme Court Justices.

Needless to say, I’m not implying that Emily Bazelon’s career as a writer on legal affairs has depended upon nepotism.

Rather, I’m pointing out that a family developing and passing on expertise in a particular field—whether the Riccis in firefighting or the Bazelons-Friedans in law and punditry—is a good thing for society in general, because expertise is always in short supply.

Now tell me: why should we have one law for Frank Ricci and another for Emily Bazelon?

Email Emily Bazelon.

[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

The many ways to calculate adverse impact

On December 1, 2005 by Jamie Madigan

Yesterday I attended a pretty good workshop put on by the Personnel Testing Council of Southern California in which Dennis Doverspike talked about assessing adverse impact –when a test or other hiring system discriminates against one group more than another. (He also spoke on hiring based on a public service work ethic, which I’ll probably write about next week).

Adverse impact analyses had always been pretty straight forward to me. I was certainly aware that other methods existed, but I had always used the “Four-Fifths or 80% Rule” to determine the presence of a hiring system’s adverse impact against minorities or women. Quoth the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures:

A selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths (4/5) (or eighty percent) of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded by the Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact, while a greater than four-fifths rate will generally not be regarded by the Federal enforcement agencies as evidence of adverse impact.

So here’s an example:

In this example 64 males took a test and 16 passed while 17 women took the test and 3 passed. So the passing rates were 20% for males and 15% for females. Is the 5% difference enough to signal adverse impact?

The answer is yes: 15 / 20 = 75% or three quarters. The Four-Fifths rule says that if it’s less than 80% (i.e., four-fifths) then you’ve got evidence of adverse impact. Pretty cut and dry, right?

Well, as the PTC-SC workshop point out, no. There’s also language in the Uniform Guidelines that allows for most rigorous statistical tests like Chi Square or Fisher’s Exact Test, and there’s a history of court cases that use other quasi-statistical rules of thumb, like saying that pass rate for the protected group must be within 1.97 standard deviations of the dominant group’s passing rate. And the thing is that depending on the distribution of your data, one method may yield a red flag while another may not. There are also different assumptions about what’s the population of interest –is it all the people who applied for the job or is it all the people in your labor market who could have applied. And don’t even get me started about setting different levels of alpha (i.e., accepting a 5% or 10% or 1% chance of saying there’s a difference between the groups when there’s not). Seriously, don’t. We’ll be here all day.

Dr. Doverspike’s presentation provided a long list of helpful formulas and procedures, but the thread that ran through them all: There’s more than one way to skin a cat and then not hire it based on discriminatory hiring practices against skinless cats. In other words, the Four-Fifths rule isn’t the final word and whether your hiring procedure has adverse impact may depend as much on your data as your lawyer.

In the end, though, it’s almost all a moot point. My own rule of thumb would be this: Unless you’re actively trying to increase the diversity of your workforce, assume you have adverse impact and move on to looking at validity and utility. If you use your favorite method and find out that you don’t have adverse impact, assume that some other lawyer or expert witness could come along and uncover some just by slicing your data differently or making a couple of assumptions differently. If you want to maximize the usefulness of your test, you should be more worried about whether or not it’s valid and what kind of utility you’re getting out of it.

Schwarzenegger and Navarrette Compare Immigration Reform Patriots To Nazis; Joe Answers Them

By Joe Guzzardi

A single opinion column written by Ruben Navarrette and published by the San Diego Union-Tribune explains why:

• California is in a irreversible financial crisis
• Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will leave office with a popularity rating of about 20 percent.
• The state’s major newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy. (Good!)

To understand fully the impact of what follows in my column, first read Navarrette’s. [Schwarzenegger Defends Immigrants, by Ruben Navarrette, San Diego Union-Tribune, June 17, 2009]

But if you are pressed for time or simply cannot stomach the idea of reading more Navarrette tripe, here’s a brief summary:

• In a meeting with the Union-Tribune editorial board, Schwarzenegger repeated his often-stated position that illegal immigrants are not to blame for the state’s economic crisis.
• Illegal immigrants, continued Schwarzenegger, contribute to California’s economy by paying taxes and doing jobs in “hard-to-staff industries”. Ignored by Schwarzenegger: many aliens work off the books and don’t contribute anything to the tax base.
• Californians who suggest that illegal immigration is an economic drain remind Schwarzenegger of “how Jews were blamed by the Nazis for Germany’s economic difficulties after World War I.” Schwarzenegger warns that linking “hard-working people” to economic strife could lead to “atrocities,” “crime,” and “executions” just as it did when Nazis governed Germany.

Where should I start?

• First, no problem as grave as California’s $25 billion budget deficit can be corrected if those responsible for resolving it refuse to recognize what is, at the least, a major contributor to that problem. For a complete breakdown of those costs, read Nicholas Stix’s blog here.
• Second, no California resident believes that illegal immigration does not play a role in the state’s collapse. And the further south anyone lives (e.g., San Diego), the more crystal clear the relationship is between illegal immigration and California’s financial catastrophe.
• Third, a newspaper’s role is to challenge its sources by asking the hard questions. For the editorial board (of which Navarrette is a member) to allow the governor to come into San Diego, make absurd statements and then print them as gospel—even in an opinion piece— is one of the major reasons no one reads newspapers anymore. Why should patriots who live in San Diego, of whom there are plenty, subscribe to or even read the Union-Tribune only to learn that it associates them with Nazis?
• Any comparison to patriotic immigration reform proponents and Nazis is outrageous. Navarette’s hedge—he wrote: “Obviously, Schwarzenegger’s comments should not be taken literally” only adds to his insult. Obviously, to make the Nazi association and then try to water it down doesn’t fool anyone.

Unless the Union-Tribune editors live in a bubble they, like every other Californian with eyes in his head, see the impact of illegal immigration all day every day.

In most if not all California cities, no one can walk down any street, shop at any supermarket, get medical treatment at any clinic, take his kid to any school, drive on any road or walk through any park without witnessing ample evidence of how pervasive illegal immigration is.

Here’s a quick formula for calculating at least a part of California’s illegal immigration costs. According to the Department of Education website, California schools had more than 1.5 million non-English speakers enrolled during 2007-2008. The same source indicates that more than 85 percent of them speak Spanish as their primary language.

Conservatively assume that one-third is made up of legal immigrants, one-third anchor babies and one-third illegal aliens. The estimated cost (again conservative) of educating each California student is $8,000 per year—not including special language classes that of course English learners would take.

One-third of 1.5 million is 500,000. Multiply 500,000 by $8,000 to arrive at a cost of educating illegal aliens at $4 billion per year.

If you want a more accurate total, remember that anchor babies are directly related to California’s immigrant population then do your math again.

Two-thirds of 1.5 million is one million. Multiply one million by $8,000 and your revised total expenditure for educating immigrants is $8 billion—about two-thirds of the current total California deficit.

Yet according to Schwarzenegger (via Navarrette) I have “limited information” about “immigrants”

I can understand why Navarrette wants to keep beating his drum on behalf of illegal immigration. Navarrette no doubt anticipates that sooner or later an amnesty debate might occur in Congress. The more sympathetically he portrays illegal immigrants, the better their case may appear to his Capitol Hill audience.

But I don’t get where Schwarzenegger or the Union-Tribune are coming from.

Politically, Schwarzenegger is toast. And unlike in some cases where, years later, California politicians are remembered with at least a modicum of kindness (think Richard Nixon) that will not be Schwarzenegger’s case. Too many people, most prominently homeowners, have been scalded under his watch.

If you ask me, Schwarzenegger would be better off at least acknowledging the obvious: that illegal immigration adds significantly to the state’s deficit and that he wishes he had used the substantial influence of his governor’s office to do more to minimize it.

Schwarzenegger must be motivated instead by the thought that when he returns in 2010 to his Hollywood left wing friends, he’ll be embraced for his staunch defense of illegal immigrants and Jews.

And since Schwarzenegger is married to Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan, he’s no doubt better off domestically when he toes the family line.

As for the Union-Tribune, after going on the market in July 2008 it was sold in March to Beverly Hills-based Platinum Equity, a private firm that specializes in troubled buy-outs. [Union-Tribune Sold to Platinum Equity, by Thomas Kuper, San Diego Union-Tribune, March 18, 2009]

Rumors are that Platinum Equity has no interest in continuing to publish the Union-Tribune but purchased it to acquire its substantial real estate holdings that include, according to San Diego County tax records, thirteen acres in Mission Valley as well as another half-acre in La Jolla. [The Copley Sale: Real Estate (and a Newspaper), by Bob Davis, Voice of San Diego, June 23, 2009]

At best, it appears that the Union-Tribune print edition will soon end and it will be available online-only, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Maybe—given all of the gloomy news surrounding the Union-Tribune’s fate and with new bosses on the scene who will likely cut jobs— the editors were too distracted to listen closely to what Schwarzenegger said or Navarrette wrote. (Commiserate with them here.)

What I know is this: to pretend that illegal immigration has no bearing on California’s economic plight is so intellectually barren that if Schwarzenegger exits in disgrace or if the entire Union-Tribune editorial staff is fired, then “frankly, I don’t give a damn.”

Joe Guzzardi [email him] is a California native who recently fled the state because of over-immigration, over-population and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. He has moved to Pittsburgh, PA where the air is clean and the growth rate stable. A long-time instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School, Guzzardi has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It currently appears in the Lodi News-Sentinel.

Escape from New York—Into America

By Matthew Richer

John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape from New York envisaged the national crime rate skyrocketing to such an extent that the federal government walls off Manhattan Island and turns it into a maximum security prison. Inside the city walls, the prisoners form violent gangs that rule over the city.

When Air Force One crashes inside Manhattan, an ex-soldier named Snake Plissken, played by Kurt Russell, is assigned to enter the city and rescue the President before he is killed.

I remember watching Escape from New York on television as a boy and thinking the plot was preposterous. Now, after living in New York City for several years as an adult, the film is actually starting to look plausible to me.

That is because I have decided not just to leave New York City, but to escape it—and all that it has come to represent.

I moved to New York City several years ago, like many recent college graduates, eager to experience the “greatest city in the world”—and I was hardly disappointed.

New York City is a remarkable testament to American ingenuity. Here, Americans have created some of the most extraordinary engineering and architectural marvels on earth, and made historic achievements in industry, finance, and the arts.

There are more interesting things to see and do in New York than in any other city in the world.

The Big Apple, however, has a serious dysfunctional side, as do the elites who preside over it.

Indeed, living in Manhattan has given me a unique insight into the mindset of the American elite. In college, for example, I never understood why the students from New York were so screwed up. They had looks, money, and privilege—and yet they were so utterly miserable.

The reason why became obvious when I moved to the Upper East Side. Here, and in every exclusive neighborhood in the city, you will see scores of nannies—very often Third World immigrant nannies—holding young white children by the hand, or pushing infants, even newborns, around in strollers.

Some kids have been raised by more than a dozen nannies by the time they graduate high school. One friend of mine even lost his virginity to his nanny, an apparently not uncommon rite for teenage boys here.

Members of New York’s upper class care so little for their children that they prefer to hire semi-illiterate foreigners to do the job for them. Is it any wonder then, that our ruling class cares so little about the rest of us?

When I first moved to the Upper East Side, I actually expected to find better manners among the Park Avenue crowd. Instead, I invariably found them to be as boorish and obnoxious as any people I’ve ever encountered.

Peter Brimelow recently expressed disgust on learning that William F. Buckley used to urinate onto the street from the open door of his limousine. (For my thoughts on attending Buckley’s Memorial Mass, see here). I was hardly surprised by such behavior; neither was I surprised that his son Chris found it amusing instead of embarrassing.

Big Apple elites think themselves above the standards of decency ordinary people take for granted.

In fact, what really characterizes Manhattan socialites is their obsession with status—which they define as having the right friends, attending the right schools, identifying with the right causes, and even having the right opinions.

The amusing thing is that those born into high social status, like Buckley, are often the most insecure about maintaining it. They’re always worried about falling out of favor with people, or making the wrong impression, or not getting an invite to this or that social gathering.

One of the socially approved causes that Manhattanites love to prattle on about is “diversity”. They are all for diversity—they just prefer to celebrate it from a distance.

Perhaps my most memorable experience with this racial doublethink began on Sunday June 11, 2000. On that morning, I rode my bike into Central Park, as I often do on Sundays. Except this time, I encountered hundreds of Hispanic youth waving Puerto Rican flags, swarming about me like an invading army.

I suddenly realized that I had chosen to enter Central Park on the morning of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. I quickly turned around and rode my bike home.

Others, unfortunately, were not so lucky.

Later that afternoon, gangs of black and Hispanic youth attacked a number of white women in Central Park. They doused them with beer, tore off their clothes, and sexually assaulted them—all the while laughing and shouting in jubilation.

An 18 year old British female tourist was stripped completely naked and digitally raped for some 30 minutes. A French female tourist was also stripped naked while her husband was held down and forced to watch as his wife was similarly assaulted.

Fortunately, a few people caught some of the assaults on video, and many of the culprits were later arrested. But the media aired little of the footage and buried the racial nature of the assaults.

With characteristic hypocrisy, Manhattan’s elites, who love to pay lip service to diversity, invariably leave town en masse well before the Puerto Rican Day Parade begins. While they are gone, the tony doorman buildings that line the parade route on 5^th Avenue are shielded by a two mile stretch of temporary barricades.

They only return home after the city has cleaned up the trash-littered streets and arrested all the “celebrants” who committed physical and sexual assaults that day.

If you’re wondering if the famed Giuliani crime control has reformed Manhattan, the answer is that it’s not completely reformed, and it’s not all because of Giuliani. Nicholas Stix has written about how the NYPD disappears some crimes, exaggerating the crime drop.

Plus, Hispanicization has pushed blacks out of Manhattan and other boroughs. Hence, less crime for NYC, but more crime for the smaller cities in the Tri State area, like Trenton and Newark.

I asked one State Assemblyman how much it cost the city to host the parade. “Don’t even go there”, he told me.

If living in New York has taught me anything, then, it is the myth of Hispanic assimilation. Puerto Ricans, many of whom have lived in New York for generations, plant their Puerto Rican flags on everything—front lawns, cars, clothing, luggage—you name it.

They do this not out of love for the land they left, but out of contempt for the white America they live within. Displaying the Puerto Rican flag is an act of ethnic intimidation, pure and simple.

So why should we expect all these Hispanic immigrants from other countries to peacefully assimilate when the American citizens from Puerto Rico can’t even do it?

Manhattanites get very nervous when you ask such questions. Reality is not a topic they prefer to discuss.

Indeed, one thing New York has in common with Los Angeles—another status-conscious city now nearly ruined by immigration—is that people move here and live here not so much because they want to experience the good life, but because they want to avoid facing the hard realities of life.

“Don’t even go there” seems to be the standard response to politically-incorrect questions, especially on the subject of immigration.

For example, New Yorkers frequently complain about congestion: overcrowded schools, traffic jams, and cramped public transit. But few will dare suggest that we might not have these problems if the city didn’t have over one million illegal immigrants (not to mention their children).

If anything, the real “huddled masses” of New York are those who are forced to ride a subway jam-packed with illegal aliens, many of whom currently wear surgical masks over their faces to hinder the spread of Swine Flu.

This congestion crisis has spilled over into the entire Tri-State Area. Take the train into the city from New Jersey, Connecticut, or Long Island, and you will often find yourself standing in the aisle, even on weekends.

In the meantime, taxpayers nationwide must finance the overburdened transportation system of America’s largest sanctuary city. Right now, the city is digging a new train tunnel underneath the Hudson River, a new subway line underneath 2^nd Avenue, and a new train terminal underneath Grand Central Station.

We are told that these multi-billion dollar projects are “investments” but any honest person knows that they are really immigration subsidies.

For all of these reasons and more, my wife and I have decided to escape from New York and move to a distant New England town. There, crime is low, traffic is light, and the shop clerks all speak perfect English.

Granted, small-town New England faces threats because it’s too white and well-functioning. Our plan, however, is to begin a new life in our peaceful small town, and enjoy it while it lasts.

Moreover, the prospect of starting a family in New York City is simply unthinkable to us.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the Manhattan skyline with the same sense of wonder it used to evoke in me: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone writing such inspired prose about New York City today. In fact, one currently popular t-shirt features an image of the Queensboro Bridge beneath the logo “Nueva York”—as the city’s surging Hispanic community prefers to call it.

The irony is that the Queensboro Bridge is also the bridge that Snake Plissken and a newly rescued American President race across in the final scene of Escape from New York.

It is also the same bridge I will drive over, in bumper to bumper traffic, when I make my own escape from New York.

And all the while I’ll be looking in the rear view mirror, hoping and praying that it is not following behind me.

Matthew Richer (email him) is a public relations specialist who used to divide his time between New York City and New Hampshire. He is the former American Editor of Right NOW.