09/11/09 - A California Refugee Lists The Five Reasons He Left (Clue: Illegal Alien—Related)
From: Teri Nilson Baird (email her)
Wasn't Virginia Dare an illegal immigrant?
Or was it just her parents?
Just wondering.
Peter Brimelow replies: At least twice a week since VDARE.COM began in late 1999, some immigration enthusiast stumbles across us and sends a version of this question, with an unmistakably smug "Gotcha!" air.
Sigh. I dealt with this definitively on p 66 of Alien Nation (free download now available!) back in 1995.
If you mention this impending ethnic revolution to some Americans, you can get really hostile reactions. Quite common are:
…
"I think it's all happened before. Look at us and the Indians!''
Many Americans have only a hazy notion even of immigration mythology. They often assume that America's historic immigration has been larger, more diverse and, above all, much less interspersed with pauses for digestion than it actually was. And, surprisingly often, they start telling you about the Indians. They're wrong, of course. The whites tended to try acquiring land by treaty with the Indian tribes, rather than just infiltrating. Remember Manhattan Island, bought by the Dutch for sixty guilders (twenty-four dollars) in 1626—a sum that, if the Manhattan tribe had invested it at a 7 percent interest rate, would have by now compounded to over $1.5 trillion, over a quarter of total American output.
But suppose these Americans were right about the Indians. Well, go ahead—just look at what happened to them.
Are modern day immigrants, legal and illegal, offering us sixty guilders, or anything like it? No, they're asking us to pay them (out of tax dollars), when we still haven't finished paying off the Indians.
As for Virginia Dare, she was a member of a white minority, and seems to have been the victim of typical Native American violence—as the Declaration of Independence called them, "merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When she vanished, she was less than three years old.
[PermaLink] [Top] [Letters Home]
From: Jenna Jordan (e-mail her)
Re: Joe Guzzardi's Column: On Independence Day, The Struggle To Regain Our Classroom Continues
I am a California State employee who is struggling through "Furlough Fridays", the budget balancing act that erases 14 percent of my monthly income so that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can crow about what a great job he's doing.
As Guzzardi wrote about my colleagues and me:
"They are sick to death of being pawns in the budget battle. Some have already been forced to accept two non-paid work days a month—delicately called 'furloughs'—and must now cope with a third." [Furlough Fridays Back—Now Three Days a Month by Jim Sanders, Sacramento Bee, July 1, 2009]
Some of my co-workers who have larger families and more pressing bills than I do have been reduced to food banks. [California State Workers Swallow Pride at Food Banks, By Anita Creamer, Sacramento Bee, September 7, 2009]
Unlike some state employees, I have no problem taking my hit to help get California back on its feet.
But as long as there are illegal aliens receiving any kind of aid and thereby literally getting money for nothing, we as state workers as well as the taxpaying public have a reason to be angry.
The aliens who were given mortgages they could not afford, the reason for the struggling economy, get to live life as they normally do by collecting a host of social services while the rest of us try to figure out how to maintain our integrity and barely get by.
Jordan works in the Department of Consumer Affairs.
[PermaLink] [Top] [Letters Home]
From: Claudia Anderson (e-mail her)
Re: Joe Guzzardi's Column: Senator Specter (Turncoat-PA) Marches On—Or Maybe Not
Guzzardi gave our dear Senator John Cornyn short shrift when he wrote:
"With Ted Kennedy gone, only John McCain matches Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter's record for subverting America, with his ceaseless endorsement of amnesties and increases in non-immigrant worker visas."
Despite disastrous job-loss data, ornyn cosponsored a bill to increase the number of H-2B workers in 2009, the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act (S. 388).
The bill would allow an alien to return as an H-2B nonimmigrant worker without counting against the annual 66,000 cap if they have used an H-2B visa during one of the three previous fiscal years (i.e., potentially tripling the number of H-2Bs in the U.S. at one time).
In addition, this legislation would be effective as if enacted on December 1, 2008 and includes a three year sunset clause. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) is the bill's main sponsor.
Cornyn is my personal favorite for the title of greatest work visa champion. He does so love to please Bill Gates.
Anderson is a designer-goldsmith and the former copy editor and features-writer for her local newspaper, the San Angelo Standard-Times. Her previous letters about Lou Dobbs, illegal alien voters in Texas and Japanese immigration are here, here and here. Anderson's husband is a former sheriff of Tom Green County where San Angelo is located.
[PermaLink] [Top] [Letters Home]
From: Tim Behrend (e-mail him)
Re: Robert Weissberg's Column: Is The Affirmative Action Frankenstein On Its Last Legs?
Weissberg's argument surprised me, in particular his claim that ethnic minorities enjoy an advantaged position in America that unfairly (and irresponsibly, according to Weissberg) showers them with economic and professional benefits.
Surely Weissberg's critical insight that allows him to make that connection must also, and with infinitely more power, convince him that his own life and career are themselves structurally and culturally dependent on the advantages of a system to which his entree was the accidental circumstances of birth.
As a career intellectual, commentator and teacher, how can Weissberg assert that the small advantages that US government policies offer to the weakest members of society can in any significant way compensate for (in social terms, not moral) or overcome the grinding, glacial momentum of centuries of power formations?
How can he with any honesty talk about the floor-crumb spoils of his so-called affirmative action Frankenstein without contextualizing it as a smaller, incidental process within the global spoils factory created over the last two centuries of white European mastery of world order and capital flow?
Finally, the anti-humane thinking in Weissberg's article illustrates one of the reasons why the United States is widely hated and feared around the world today, and why its continued diminishment is greeted with a bit of optimism and not a little pleasure by most nations.
In New Zealand, we feel there's more similarity between Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and the US than there is difference. But only the U.S. has the willingness to use its international dominance aggressively in its own self-interest.
Robert Weissberg replies: George Orwell once said that there are some things so outlandish that only an intellectual could believe them.
Behrend's response illustrates Orwell's point perfectly. For the life of me I cannot imagine how the accomplishments of whites (like me) came at the expense of blacks.
At least in the US, the opposite seems more accurate: American blacks, compared to those in Africa, have profited immensely thanks to whites. For nearly half a century American blacks have enjoyed ample opportunities but still must rely on white help. And this is true universally—blacks always do better in societies dominated by whites (and pouring trillions in foreign aid into Africa only seems to make it worse).
Would forceful affirmative action improve America's image abroad?
Perhaps many of those who voted for President Barack Obama hoped for this miracle but I'm still waiting. The US Foreign Service bends over backwards to recruit blacks to help people love America, and I suspect that sending off an unqualified affirmative black in the diplomatic service to anywhere, including Africa, is taken as an insult.
Ditto if affirmative action black doctors were sent to heal the sick in China. The lame and halt would be sufficiently rejuvenated to storm the US embassy in protest. Such is the wisdom of non-intellectuals—they see through the charade of this "compassion."
[PermaLink] [Top] [Letters Home]
