Linda is — I write here with all sincerity — a heroine in my book for her decades of work inspired by the ideal of a colorblind society. She seems not to have noticed the sad fact that, in defiance of all her efforts, that ideal still has very little market share among nonwhite Americans. Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are not interested in a colorblind society. They are too busy promoting their own racial interests.

Linda seems to believe that importing a few tens of millions more black, Hispanic, and Asian people will remedy this unhappy situation. I have trouble following her logic on this point. It seems to me that a better idea would be to stop all large-scale immigration for a few decades, as we did 1924-65, so that we can bend our efforts to assimilation, as we did so successfully then.

And if Linda finds that suggestion “troubling,” why don’t we just ask the American people what they think? I am sure Linda would not wish immigration policy, or any other policy, to be imposed by a small vanguard of moralizing virtuecrats on a resisting populace. Would she?

— John Derbyshire is an NR contributing editor.

Mark Krikorian
Now I know we’re winning the intellectual debate over immigration. For several weeks now, our opponents have been so bereft of substantive arguments that they’ve had to resort to “self-righteous moral grandstanding,” as David Frum puts it with regard to the president in the current issue of National Review.

Lindsey Graham calls us bigots, Michael Gerson calls us nativists, Tamar Jacoby calls us yahoos, and Grover Norquist, bless his heart, can’t stop feeling bad about “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion“ in the presidential election of 1884 (listen to his latest performance at the Hudson Institute here).

But Linda Chavez takes the cake. After two columns (here and here) where she says the bulk of conservative opponents of amnesty are motivated by “loathing” of “Latinos,” she has issued a modified limited hang-out: “On reflection, I went too far.” Apparently, she was compelled to write because she discovered that the Internet is populated by vulgar idiots: “There are only so many times that you can be told to ‘go back to Mexico’ and far worse before your blood starts to boil.”

To which one can only respond: Grow up.

So much for the crackpots. Linda then gets down to business, specifically accusing John Derbyshire, Heather Mac Donald, and me of being racists. Derb and Heather are more than capable of defending themselves; as for her smear of me, Mike Nifong of Duke lacrosse infamy couldn’t have come up with a more comically inadequate indictment.

Her only data point is that I once bemoaned the fact that Japan is developing robots to do what we are intent on importing peasant laborers to do, and that this isn’t likely to turn out well for us. She considers it derisive to observe that we are “importing illiterates from south of the border.” Maybe if I were speaking to the Berkeley sociology department, or a third-grade civics class, I would have said “poorly educated people from Latin America,” but what exactly is the problem? The majority of working-age people in Los Angeles are functionally illiterate (today’s P.C. euphemism seems to be “low literacy“) and the Department of Homeland Security estimates that 80 percent of the illegal population comes from Latin America (see here). Furthermore, I’ve written about the harmful effects of mass low-skilled immigration on the industries that use it here and here, and published the work of others on this topic here and here. It would be nice if Linda would specify what part of my concerns over importing a 19th-century workforce into a 21st-century economy she objects to. But it seems that no one told her there would be homework for this class.

And that’s actually the substantive part of her indictment of me. After that it’s all a stew of innuendo and guilt-by-association worthy of the Southern Poverty Law Center (which, unbelievably, has a better position on immigration than Linda). She clearly implies that I share the views of white nationalists like David Duke, that I support forced abortion and infanticide, and that I think America’s population should be cut in half. These lies are essentially the same as those unsuccessfully peddled several years ago by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page (see my responses here and here). She can’t even get her facts straight; the Center for Immigration Studies, which I’ve headed for the past 12 years, is not the “policy arm” of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Rather, people at FAIR and elsewhere more than 20 years ago saw the need for a research organization critical of immigration, and CIS was housed under the umbrella of FAIR’s nonprofit status for several months. This would have been clear from even the most casual attempt at determining the facts.

After a solid page of smears, she attempts to weasel out of responsibility by writing that “it would be interesting to find out by asking Krikorian and others their views.” Actually, it would have been more interesting, and more responsible, to find out before publishing her screed — and easy too, because if she’d been reading NRO she’d know that I’m a pro-life, pro-gun, peace-through-strength, abolish-the-Department-of-Education, semi-crunchy-con nationalist. Though what any of that has to do with the Bush-Kennedy amnesty bill, or immigration policy in general, escapes me.

Gandhi said “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” If the tirades by Linda and her fellow amnesty supporters are any indication, we’re finishing stage three and headed to victory.

— Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.


Stanley Kurtz
When Linda Chavez talks about multiculturalism and affirmative action as barriers to assimilation, she’s very much on the right track. If elites in this country looked at these issues the way Linda Chavez does, we’d all be better off.

I’ve been more open to some sort of “grand bargain” on immigration than many, but I must say that the current bill has driven me to the “right.” There are legitimate concerns about assimilation that a merit-based point system and a paring back of family-reunification laws may well be able to address. But the current bill is so full of deceptive window dressing on this and other issues that it’s made me far more sympathetic to the “enforcement first” viewpoint than I’ve ever been. I understand why many don’t trust our
elites to deal honestly and straightforwardly with this issue. I’ve lost trust as well.

Even the family statistics Linda Chavez cites strike me as indicating that the “strong Hispanic families” argument is in fact pretty weak. I think Americans are rightly concerned about burdening the welfare state with an enlarged underclass, although I also think that legal immigration shaped by intelligent and well-enforced laws and assimilation policies can be a boon.

So I’m glad that Linda Chavez has taken a more temperate tone. She raises important issues, but I must say that, on balance, the fundamental problem with this bill is the bill itself. Conservatives fall across a broad spectrum on the immigration issue, but somehow this bill has managed to line up the great majority of us against it. This bill is a compromise between the business wing of the Republican party and the Democrats.
Conservatives with legitimate concerns have been entirely stiffed by this bill, and that, fundamentally, is why people are so distressed.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.


Heather Mac Donald
Linda Chavez all but declares that my writings on immigration are driven by ethnic hatred. This kind of charge will be familiar to anyone who has taken a public position against affirmative action and found himself called a racist. As a debating tactic, it is low and — not to put too fine a point on it — disgusting. It is meant to bully and intimidate. What should be a spirited debate about facts and the effects of policy becomes an assault on character and motive. I do not question the character of those who favor wholesale legalization and more liberal immigration policies. I disagree with them. I would like to think that the American society that immigrants seek out — the one that new immigrants, we are told, will assimilate to — is one that values civility in debate and a mutual respect between opponents. As I say, I would like to think that.

But if pointing out the facts of underclass behavior among a significant portion of Hispanics is proof of anti-Hispanic animus, Chavez is going to have to widen out her anti-bigotry crusade considerably. She doesn’t like my skepticism towards Michael Gerson’s claim that Hispanic culture is “focused on education.” Here are some other targets that Chavez had better start going after:

UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Faculty Center, which in 2006 sponsored a conference on Hispanic student failure. Conference participants presented research that slightly more than 50 percent of Latino students finish high school and 10 percent graduate from college, based on the 2000 federal census. University of California at Davis education professor Patricia Gandara blamed an “absence of a culture” of college attendance for the low college-graduation rates.

The Brookings Institution. Their 2006 report, “A Fifth of America,” noted that 45 percent of Hispanic students are dropping out of suburban high schools.

The California Research Bureau, which reported in 2006 that the Latino graduation rate in California was just over 45 percent and in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 40 percent. The Bureau noted that a planned high-school exit exam, fiercely opposed by immigrant advocates, would likely depress Hispanic graduation rates to 30 percent. That controversial exam, by the way, would require students to answer just over 50 percent of questions testing 8th-grade-level math and 9th-grade level English. Academic skills among Latino students who do graduate in California are abysmal: Only 22 percent have completed the minimal coursework required for admission to the University of California, noted the Bureau. It is that persistent underachievement among Hispanics (as well, of course, as among blacks) that creates constant pressure for affirmative action in colleges and beyond.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who reported in the Winter 2006 issue of Education Next that the stigma against academic achievement is higher among Hispanic students than among blacks.

Former Congressman Herman Badillo, whose book One Nation, One Standard calls for Hispanics to embrace education as route out of poverty. Chavez notes that I cite Badillo as a source, without explaining why he, too, is guilty of anti-Hispanic bias.

If Chavez can make an argument for a Latino passion for educational achievement with a straight face, let’s see her try.

Chavez derides my City Journal article on Hispanic illegitimacy rates as “based largely on anecdotes gathered in a visit to Los Angeles, frequently supplied by Spanish surnamed social-service providers to lend authenticity, with a smattering of highly selective statistics.” This is called “reporting,” a practice with which Chavez is obviously unacquainted. (For the record, I grew up in Los Angeles, and spend a good part of every year working there.) It might do Chavez some good to get out of her elite Washington think tank existence and spend some time in the 70 percent Hispanic Los Angeles Unified School District, talking to students, parole officers, and anti-drop-out counselors, as I have done. Or perhaps she might do some ride-alongs with Mexican-American gang officers in Santa Ana, Ca., and Los Angeles, who could tell her about the increasing viciousness of Latino gang culture in southern California. But then, even if Chavez bestirred herself to do some hands-on research on Hispanic family values, she would be handicapped by her self-described lack of Spanish. She wouldn’t have understood a word at an anti-gang program at the Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles that I attended in July 2006, for example, for students who are showing signs of gang involvement and their single mothers. Nor would she be able to speak to the illegal alien unmarried mothers who peddle fruit on the streets of Santa Ana, which has the highest percentage of Spanish speakers of any city in the country. If Chavez has any interest in reporting on these topics, perhaps I could arrange Spanish lessons for her with my sister-in-law, a beloved and integral member of our family, who emigrated to this country legally from Mexico after meeting and marrying my brother in Mexico City.


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