After two shorter syndicated columns, Linda Chavez wrote a lengthy piece on conservatives, Hispanics, and immigration for National Review Online, published Monday. Today those named in Chavez’s “The Company You Keep” and other immigration-policy experts respond to Chavez.
Ward Connerly
I have known Linda for years. She is a good friend. Good friends are not immune from the tendency to misspeak occasionally, however. In her initial column that has caused so much anger, Linda was “intemperate,” to say the least. Although there is a certain degree of “anti-Mexican” animosity among some who are opposed to illegal aliens, it was not appropriate to characterize those who oppose illegal immigration as a bunch of racists, as Linda’s column seemed to suggest. I have already shared that perspective with Linda. In addition, I do not share Linda’s critique of Heather Mac Donald in her long NRO
Nonetheless, Linda has done more for the conservative movement and the preservation of traditional American culture than many of those who are criticizing her combined. What concerns me is the inclination among conservatives to cannibalize our own. It seems to me that we should acknowledge the right to disagree on specific issues, and not hold it against those who disagree with us within our conservative family. I have encountered a number of conservatives, unfortunately, who are willing to throw her overboard merely because of her column. I have read a number of blogs that have been unbelievably harsh and intolerant of Linda’s right to be against the prevailing sentiment about immigration. For example, last week, I ran an ad in the Washington Times about preferences and immigration. Linda was one of the signatories. I had two individuals ask, “Why are you allied with Linda Chavez?” This is ridiculous; Linda doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.
– Ward Connerly is founder of the American Civil Rights Institute.
John Derbyshire
Linda finds my attitude towards Mexicans “distasteful.” Well, there is no arguing with taste. I find distasteful Linda’s implied assertion that I and Heather Mac Donald are bad company for National Review to be keeping.
On “Aztecs”: It is a pretty good rule of civilized society not to take offense where plainly none was intended. Neglect of this rule causes bar fights. It also, however, enables one to recalibrate and re-recalibrate the offense-o-meter without limit, ensuring that one need never abandon one’s pose of lofty moral superiority towards one’s less refined fellow citizens.
As well as violating a sensible social rule, this endless evolutionary advance to ever thinner skin prevents us from talking about obvious and important features of reality. I was astonished a few months ago to be told by piece. Joey Kurtzman that the word “Irishman” is now politically incorrect. I should not have been. A chap in Iowa was fired from his job the other day for referring to a co-worker from Mexico as — gasp! — “Mexican.”
I hasten to assure Linda that I would not be so outrageously uncouth myself; but if I see a lawn crew whose profiles bring to mind Mesoamerican art work, I think “Aztecs” is crisply descriptive of the situation. I know next to nothing about Mexico — I am not, in fact, aware of having any “attitude to Mexicans” at all — but I have a vague impression that Mexican indigenes are proud of their Aztec heritage.
Linda expresses her “hope that most conservatives” would find “troubling” (there’s a Hillary Clinton word if ever I saw one!) my “view that race and ethnicity should be a factor in deciding whom to admit to the U.S.”
Here’s a suggestion for Linda, and for anyone else who would like to see race-consciousness, race pandering, racial favoritism, racial separatism, and racial hostility purged from our society: How about we stop importing tens of millions of people who cherish their racial identity? Hispanics, for example, whose most prominent U.S. lobbying organization is named National Council of The Race. (Oh, but I see from Linda’s previous sentence that only 52 percent of Hispanics consider themselves as belonging to The Race. So that’s all right, then!)
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.
Let us add to Chavez’s list of anti-Hispanic bigots Latino students in southern California, who attest to the culture of teen pregnancy in their schools. These would include Jackie, a vivacious illegal alien from Guatemala, who is getting her GED at Belmont High School in Los Angeles’s Rampart district. “Most of the people I used to hang out with when I first came to the school have dropped out,” she observed. “Others got kicked out or got into drugs. Five graduated, and four home girls got pregnant.” The anti-Hispanic bigots would also include Liliana, an American-born senior at Manual Arts High School near downtown Los Angeles. “This year was the worst for pregnancies,” she said in 2004. “A lot of girls got abortions; some dropped out.” There’s no stigma attached to getting pregnant, Liliana reported. Asked if her pregnant friends subsequently got married, Jackie guffawed. George, an 18-year-old of Salvadoran background who was kicked out of Los Angeles’s Manual Arts for a vicious fight, estimated that most girls at the school are having sex by age 16. Teachers say that for many Hispanic male students, being a “player” now includes fathering children out-of-wedlock.
It is inconceivable to me that Chavez could spend any time in heavily Hispanic schools and come away with a radically different picture.
Also in line for a Chavez thrashing is the Centers for Disease Control, which reports that 48 percent of all Hispanic births in 2005 occurred outside of marriage, compared with 25 percent of white births and 16 percent of Asian births. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country — over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the CDC. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women.
Conservatives have long decried the steady rise in American illegitimacy as a bellwether of social breakdown. The national illegitimacy rate and the white illegitimacy rate — both considerably lower than the Hispanic rate — are considered a dangerous portent for the future. But when it comes to Hispanic illegitimacy, Chavez tells us not to worry, because “most Hispanic children are being raised by two parents.” But so are most white children and most American children on average, without that fact diminishing justified concern over out-of-wedlock child-rearing. And the percentage of children born to U.S.-born Hispanics who are being raised by their actual parents — 56 percent, according to the March 2003 Current Population Survey — is not exactly cause for celebration.
Chavez falsely accuses me of expressing “alarm over Hispanic fertility rates.” To the contrary. I wrote in 2006: “But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers” — not Hispanic fertility rates in general, which, according to the Pew Hispanic Center are twice as high as those of non-Hispanics.
Chavez doesn’t like my figure from my 2004 City Journal article that “in Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.” It was given to me by a source in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Fugitive Warrants Section and I stand by it. It is consistent with other data: In 2005, 20 of 23 suspects wanted on homicide or attempted homicide in Milwaukee, for example, were Hispanic — that, in a city with a miniscule Hispanic population compared to L.A. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 15 percent to 20 percent of illegal aliens wouldn’t qualify for amnesty based on their criminal record, reports the Wall Street Journal. As I explained to Chavez, the fugitive-warrants data is cumulative over a period of years; the homicide data for 2004 is irrelevant. The high proportion of Hispanics and illegal aliens among fugitives reflects the fact that suspects from those groups often flee back to their home countries. I’m not surprised that the press office of the LAPD won’t confirm the LAPD data; the department’s leadership is one of the most politically correct in the country, having for decades embraced a sanctuary policy that has resulted in a virtual cordon sanitaire between officers on the street and federal immigration authorities.
Here again, Chavez would benefit from getting out and talking to members of high-density Hispanic communities and the officers who police them. To deny a Hispanic gang and crime problem simply defies reality. Chavez focuses exclusively on first-generation Mexicans to try to rebut my writing on Hispanic crime. But I myself have pointed out “the relatively low crime rate among immigrants.” I added, however, that “unless we can prevent immigrants from having children, a high level of immigration translates to increased levels of crime. Between the foreign-born generation and their American children, the incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans jumps more than eightfold, resulting in an incarceration rate that is 3.45 times higher than that of whites, according to an analysis of 2000 census data by the pro-immigrant Migration Policy Institute.”
The Hispanic crime problem has also been documented by sociologists Alejandro Portes of Princeton and Rubén G. Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine (presumably, they must be anti-Latino, too), in their Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study. A whopping 28 percent of Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 reported having been arrested since 1995, and 20 percent reported having been incarcerated — a rate twice that of other immigrant groups.
Last week, I had the unpleasant experience of debating Chavez on NPR’s Tell Me More. I prefaced my remarks by saying, as I have in virtually every media spot I have done on immigration, that the majority of Hispanics are enormous assets to their communities and to the United States. But that reality exists simultaneously, I said, with the undeniable fact of a growing underclass culture among Hispanics. Chavez retorted snidely that I had never made such a statement praising Hispanics before — an outright falsehood, had she listened to any of my radio or TV interviews. (She also claimed that the individual fee in the Senate immigration bill for legalization was $9000, which would be a surprise to the bill’s drafters.) In 2004, I wrote: “To be sure, most Hispanics are hardworking, law-abiding residents; they have reclaimed squalid neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. Among the dozens of Hispanic youths I interviewed, several expressed gratitude for the United States, a sentiment that would be hard to find among the ordinary run of teenagers. But given the magnitude of present immigration levels, if only a portion of those from south of the border goes bad, the costs to society will be enormous.” That is the complex reality of Hispanic immigration on which I have reported. Chavez says that it is bigotry to do so. I disagree.
– Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Ramesh Ponnuru
If Linda Chavez’s original column had merely said that some foes of her favored immigration bill were racist, and that the non-racist foes should take care to distance themselves from these people and their noxious sentiments, I would not have objected. I would have agreed. But her column went considerably further.
The clear import of that column was that critics of the bill she favors are all racists, and that they make non-racist arguments against it in public only to hide their racism. (The “‘No Amnesty’ crowd,” she wrote, is “a tiny group of angry, frightened and prejudiced loudmouths backed by political opportunists who exploit them.”)
Chavez says that after her column ran, I went “so far as to suggest [that she] must be publicly shunned.” What I actually said is that since she had smeared millions of conservatives and other Americans as racists because of their position on immigration, she had no credibility as a bridge-builder among conservatives on the issue. It is true, however, that I wanted people on her side of the immigration debate to distance themselves, in public, from the views she had expressed. (As an example of how people on her side can make their case without insults, see how Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman opened their op-ed on immigration.)
A silent codicil was, however, attached to that counsel: until she apologizes. She has now done so. It is true that she has done so very half-heartedly. She is still glad she wrote the column, and she does not seem to be burdened by any sense that baselessly accusing people of racism is a nasty thing to do. She also makes it sound as though the only problematic part of her column was the passage in which she tars “a fair number of Republican members of Congress, almost all influential conservative talk radio hosts,” and others as racist. What is most important, however, is that she has belatedly affirmed that people are allowed to disagree with her about immigration policy without being called racists.
Chavez’s colleague Roger Clegg says it is important for conservatives “to be above suspicion when it comes to sounding anti-minority or associating with those who are.” It is also important for conservatives — for all participants in public debates — not to throw around poisonous charges on a whim. I hope that in the future, Chavez will not allow hate mail, which everyone in public life gets, to cloud her judgment.
– Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review.
Michael Radu
Linda Chavez’s indignation at some of the opinions of Hispanics expressed by a number of NRO contributors are perhaps understandable but, just as she believes conservatives have gone too far in their opposition to immigrants from Latin America, she does the same on their defense.
To begin with, the very term “Hispanics” is a bureaucratic concoction that makes no sense — it is not a racial term and, a common language (albeit with enormous dialectal and vocabulary differences) does not a culturally homogenous group make. Simply put, there is no such thing — a Cuban is not a Puerto Rican is not a Mexican is not a Salvadoran — except in the mind of government bureaucrats. Hence, it is hard to see how anyone could be “anti-Hispanic” — how many conservatives are anti-Cuban ( as distinct from anti-Fidel)?
As a student of and writer on Latin American politics for decades, and a frequent traveler from Chile to Mexico, I know what Ms. Chavez prefers to disregard — not only are “Hispanics” a fiction, but those we are unwillingly importing are, in their majority , from among the least desirable elements.
To begin with Mexicans, who are the largest number by far, a huge majority are unskilled, many illiterate, and, considering the last decade’s shif in their geographical origin southward, from the central states to Chiapas and Oaxaca, many are speaking poor Spanish and are illiterate in that language as well. To pretend that we could assimilate them when Mexico failed to do so in centuries is delusional. All this without even mentioning the fact that, from primary school on children in Mexico are indoctrinated in hostility to the United States (the greenback excepted).
While the Mexican illegal aliens bring with them poverty and an innate hostility to government and rule of law (and government and all laws) — as anyone who knows Mexico could testify, Salvadorans, although probably the best workers south of the borders, bring a historic tradition of extreme violence — as the huge gangs they populate in California and Washington abundantly demonstrate.
Chavez, to her credit, did indeed oppose racial preferences and quotas, but the fact remains that the sheer numbers of Latin American aliens here only strengthen such practices — innevitably so. Members of Congress are elected by small numbers of voters because large parts of their districts are populated by illegals — and representatives of such “rotten boroughs” are, naturally enough, mostly “Hispanics”and advocates of open (southern) borders. Quotas or not, states allowing children of illegals to pay in state tuition discriminate against (mostly non Spanish speaking) out of state American citizens.
As for criminality, long time ago Thomas Sowell and others have observed that “Hispanic” second generation immigrants do not repeat traditional patterns of assimilation, better education and economic prosperity (such as those of Irish and Italians), but instead tend to adopt the social pathologies of blacks. Once again, that applies to Mexicans and Central Americans (and Puerto Ricans) but not to Cubans.
Finally, one does not have to be a “racist” (against what “race”? Mexicans, Salvadorans?) to note and react to the reality that Latin American, especially Mexican mass immigration brings with it not just poverty and illiteracy, but also drugs, gangs, contempt for law and the atomization of society. Unlike the cases of Poles, Irish, or Italians before, and most Asians today, there is no ocean between Latin Americans and their countries of origin, to increase pressure for assimilation — certainly not in today’s multicultural America. As a European immigrant who could speak Spanish with my Latin American spouse, I could make the distinctions above. Does that make me a “racist”?
– Michael Radu is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.