Pat Buchanan would get it

Randall Parker on the benefits of a higher minimum wage and his support for Ron Unz' California initiative:

The public health benefit: Since fast foods are harmful higher prices will discourage people from eating them. 

Smaller welfare state: People who make more money will qualify for fewer social welfare programs. We net taxpayers will save money. The Gray Lady's article actually mentioned this benefit. 

The immigration benefit: The average skill level of immigrants will go up when the supply of low skilled jobs suitable for low skilled immigrants gets radically curtailed by high prices. 

The innovation benefit: High prices for labor are a great incentive for innovation. Look at what manufacturing unions did to boost investments in equipment that raises productivity. 

Cheaper restaurants in the long run: The automation of food preparation will ultimately lead to cheaper restaurants (so, yes, the public health benefit will be transitory).

When I was in college, I used to unctuously argue that red state governments should ditch the trickle down argument and instead capitulate, admitting they are unable--and their constituents unwilling--to give the poor and downtrodden the legs up they need. Instead, they should use the meager funds they were squandering on such attempts to transport their impoverished populations to blue states where they could be more adequately coddled. It's how someone with a distinctly middle class background morally postures while simultaneously trying to demonstrate independent thought, which I naively thought at the time was something the college atmosphere was actually designed to foster. It made for decent undergraduate discussions at a state university, anyway!

Randall's support for the minimum wage is a variant on that thinking, and unlike urging red states to gift wrap their huddled masses and ship them to the coasts, his idea is practicable. Randall mentions some other western states that allow for ballot initiatives like California does. In addition to the golden state, he mentions Arizona, Oregon, and, worst of all, Colorado. If he had his way, lots more terminally poor immigrants would find low cost-of-living Kansas a reasonable destination. Zip it, Randy!

Contemporary political alignments in the US are such that there isn't one party that backs a bunch of policies that all have the real-world consequences of increasing (or decreasing) the total levels of human capital in the locales that adopt them, or at least not clearly so (ie, the left's support for environmental and other zoning restrictions on commercial and residential construction on one hand and its support for affirmative action hiring practices on the other, etc).

High minimum wages discourage illegal immigration because they negate the the major advantage illegals offer. If slavery still existed as an institution in the US, a mandated minimum wage would, principally, similarly damage it. What it didn't wipe out, it would at least push it underground. Indeed, an almost certain consequence of Ron Unz' initiative, if passed, will be an expansion in the size of the cash (or, more aptly referred to, underground) economy. It's an example of a putatively leftist cause that has the effect of increasing human capital.

Welfare benefits, on the other hand, encourage illegal immigration. This is still one of the biggest issues the left pushes (and the mainstream right opposes) and it has an effect on human capital opposite of what hiking the minimum wage has.

The traditional right needs to get behind artificially pushing up the wage floor while maintaining opposition to increases in social spending. A state that adopted this seemingly 'contradictory' set of policy initiatives, especially one with a large illegal immigrant population (Arizona being the most plausible trailblazer, as it has a heroic recent history when it comes to combating foreign settlement within its borders) could really see an exodus in illegal immigrants from said state as a consequence.

Not everything in life is muddled and befuddled

Ben Southwood left the following comment worth remarking upon in the thread on a previous post concerning feminism's War on Biology:

Mainly interesting and reasonably plausible, but the bit about female entry into the labour market and wages is almost certainly untrue, something I'd bet practically any economist could agree on. When a woman enters the labour force she adds to demand as well as supply. When this sort of argument comes from someone with other reasons they don't like women working, then it sounds very much like motivated reasoning.

Perhaps, though it seems nearly every economist professes to believe that immigration exerts no meaningful downward pressure on wages, too, and I'm unconvinced on that front as well!

In fact, I think there is a lot of overlap in the two fallacies. Adding wage earners will increase total consumer spending, but that's not what anyone outside of GMU cares about. The important issue is whether or not it raises per capita spending power. Annexing Mexico tomorrow would increase the United States' GDP by 8% in one fell swoop, but we'd be a poorer country as a consequence.

If the new wage earners earn more than the existing wage earners, then it is possible (though not necessarily the case) that income per wage earner will increase overall, but if the new wage earners earn less than the existing wage earners--as is overwhelming the case in the US with both women and immigrants--per capita wages are going to stagnate or even decline despite improvements in productivity. Additionally, a growing labor pool and the subsequent increase in competition among wage earners that larger labor pool brings with it, allows those who own the means of production to reap more benefit from productivity gains than those who work for them as employees do. That's been the story for decades now.

Women continue to earn less than men not because of irrational discrimination in the workplace--if that was the case, you or I could get rich tomorrow by starting a firm in an industry where such irrational discrimination is commonplace, overwhelmingly hire the qualified, underpaid women in the field who are getting snubbed, and watch the profits flow in... Okay, that's hyperbolic and oversimplified, and there is of course some level of irrationality in virtually all human affairs, but this sort of irrational discrimination is isolated and marginal in the contemporary scheme of things.

Instead, it is because they are less interested in and less devoted to their careers than men are for obvious biological and cultural reasons--reasons that the vast majority of people instinctively understand. Additionally, they aren't as adept men in industries that pay exceptionally well--primarily those requiring lots of high level math, like engineering and physics.

Parenthetically, immigrants in the US earn less than natives because they tend to be less educated, less intelligent, and less entrepreneurial than indigenous Americans are, and the gap doesn't close even after multiple generations of their descendants have been in the country.

The 41 nations more migrant than this 'nation of immigrants'

Since the phrase "nation of immigrants" was first used in reference to the United States 80 years ago, it's regularly been invoked by politicians, chambers of commerce, journalists, charities, and ethnic activist groups as the most vitally important aspect of our collective national character.

Here is a list of countries who put us to shame by outdoing America and its Dreamers by boasting higher shares of immigrants in their contemporary populations than we do: Andorra, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Monaco, Kuwait, Macau, Palestine, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Jordan, Nauru, Israel, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Brunei, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Switzerland, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Latvia, Canada, Gabon, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Gambia, Estonia, Belize, Palau, Austria, the Ukraine, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Norway, the Ivory Coast, and Moldova.

I wonder if Bryan Caplan is more troubled by how far down we are on this list or how far down we are in the PISA rankings, because going up in one means going down in the other. As the economist well knows, life is about trade offs, after all.

If everyone is a part of everything, nothing means much of anything

Listening to a story on NPR's The World about the US citizenship exam got me wondering on what things involving human membership is the left more discriminating (in the older sense of the word) than the right is:

One of the more obscure questions, she said, includes questions like “Who wrote the Federalist Papers?” 

“Most Americans could not answer the question, so I'm not sure why it's on the test,” she says.  

 Winke has found that US citizens only outperform immigrants on local governance questions, such as, “Who is your House Representative?”  

 “From a test development standpoint, then you start wondering what is this test testing?” Winke says.

There is little inherent value placed on citizenship in this line of reasoning. Citizenship is thought of as a right rather than as a privilege, and certainly not something that should be leveraged for the well being of those who are already citizens.

The citizenist (or political conservative, more generally), in contrast, reasons that given that the value of US citizenship is estimated to be 'worth'* nearly $15,000 per year , a one-time expenditure of $600 for a test of rote memorization (and only 100 potential questions to commit to memory--even with no prior knowledge of American civics or history, it's easy to comprehend the test's 92% pass rate) seems like the deal of the millennium. There are considerations beyond the economic that come into play as well, of course, such as cultural compatibility, language fluency, social harmony, etc.

Anyway, whether it be same-sex marriage, the Augusta country club, women in combat, felons (and felonious!) voting, illegal immigrants being granted citizenship, fat acceptance, dumbing down testing standards, or employing racial quotas, the contemporary left can almost always be defined by a lack of any standards. Exclusion is a great evil, even though the most vociferous opponents of exclusionism tend to be quite exclusive in their own lives. Yet on some issues--environmental ones immediately come to mind--the left dispenses with philosophical concerns about exclusion. What are some others? Exclusion from life in the case of abortion, I suppose, though that might be too emotionally charged to come to a consensus on. Maybe re-designation, too, but because the desire to do so is more attractive to the left and consequently those on the left are the ones who do it, it's ambiguous.

Parenthetically, it's easy to argue that things like racial quotas are zero sum and consequently neither inclusive nor exclusive, but instead merely a version of Cassius' most famous line, more easily (and thus less discriminatingly!) understood by the phrase "Who? Whom?". But while uncomfortable dissonance is a consequence of what the left preaches and how it behaves, I'm not cynical enough to attribute the entire broad philosophical outlook to a complex set of triple bank shots--they're mostly sincere in their instincts, at least as sincere as the religious believer is in the power of the supernatural.

* In reality, comparing the Derbs and the guys riding together in conversion vans to solicit work in Home Depot parking lots with one another is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the point remains that even though there are lots of illegal immigrants in the US who don't care about obtaining citizenship, among the millions and millions of non-citizens who do, there are lots who would pay more than $600 for it.

Here come the Saxons

While there may be a mainstream publication that is more zealously in favor of open borders than the WSJ is, I'm unaware of its existence. So it's a relief to see a letters to the editor section that looks like this in response to Ellis island paeans by a renowned beltway insider like Michael Barone:

Hostility across the board, with the exception of the ethnic activist writing in an official capacity to express solidarity with the thrust of the piece while complaining that 19th century Chinese immigrants to the US were passed over in Barone's xenophilic celebration of settlers.

I say "relief" rather than "hopeful" or "encouraging" because despite popular opposition to continued unchecked immigration, it continues mostly unabated by anything more than economic conditions within the US and the sending countries.

Immigration and inbreeding

Over the last few years, the indefatigable chickadee has been telling a story about the marriage (heh) between outbreeding and modernity. In fairness to her, the approach she takes is informational, not polemical, and that conclusion is mine, not (necessarily) her's. But it's difficult not to come to that pithy conclusion regardless.

My childish infatuation with the ancients aside, I like modernity. It's not all good, though--ennui, atomization, ethno-masochism--and, apparently, the relinquishing of any sort of serious national sovereignty, solidarity, or identity. Taking the citizenship standards index values* from a post derived from World Values Survey responses and correlating them with consanguinity rates (defined as second-cousin or closer), both at the national level, yields a statistically significant positive correlation of .59 (p = .003) among the 23 countries for which both consanguinity and WVS data are available. That is, the more inbred a country is, the more restrictive the attitudes of its population are on the issues of immigration and citizenship. Conversely, the more outbred a country is, the more its inhabitants tend toward unrestricted open borders.

If you'll allow me to shamelessly quote myself:

The paradox presented here for many like myself is that the places inspiring the warmest feelings and that I would like most to live in are the places that tend to put the least effort into maintaining what they have. It's tragic.

Or maybe I'm just a retrograde troglodyte covetously trying to keep to and for myself what my ancestors rapaciously stole from the brotherhood, er, and sisterhood, of mankind humankind. I suppose I should be smart enough to know better--the inverse correlation between estimated average IQ and citizenship standards scores for the same 23 countries is a statistically significant .70 (p = .0002) at the national level. The higher the country's IQ, the more likely its people are to wave the huddled masses on through.

* See here.

** Calculated by obtaining the simple, unweighted averages of all studies reported at consang.net.

Tsarnaev gets bloody Nick's treatment by today's bolsheviks

It's been impossible not to notice the visceral negative reactions among leftists on social media sites and the like to the recent Rolling Stone cover showing the younger tax-eating terrorist from crapistan who helped set off bombs in Boston. We're talking about marathons in Massachusetts, not skeet shooting in Chattanooga--SWPLs were really upset by the bombings. There just isn't much sympathy for the devil on display for this one. Portraying one of the instigators in such a way was bound to garner a lot of attention, but then again car crashes garner a lot of attention, too, but they're usually not good for the drivers.

Sure, there is perspicacity in the observation that some women are attracted to killers and the attention they receive for being identified as such, and the crapistani is no exception. But let's not lose perspective here--for every one girl who wants his nuts, there are hundreds or thousands who would like to put them in a vise. And in fairness to the ladies, if Nina Dobrev's doppelganger did something this nefarious, how many men would masturbate with her in their heads as they read about and watched the subsequent trial unfold? Because we're sophisticated enough to separate love from lust, though, we'd still be fine with having her hang from a lamppost after we were through with her, unlike the crapistani's aspirants, who would like to spend their energy trying to domesticate him instead! Really, before it becomes ancient history to them, ask some female SWPLs about the punk. The reaction is similar to what you'll get if you ask them about Fred Phelps.

For pundits on the mainstream right (that excludes darkly enlightened, red-pill popping HBDers, of course), this should signal the start of a field day. For one, the incident itself is exactly what the polite right opposed to amnesty and open borders dreams about--terrorist activity committed by a white (nothing racist about our anti-amnesty position!) immigrant who was given the green light to stay in country and then subsequently given naturalized citizenship, both far too easily, who targeted an event leftists love in a city leftists love. Moreover, an iconic, cultural standard-bearer for the degenerate baby-boomer leftist worldview not only lines up on the wrong side of the issue, but is perceived as glamorizing evil incarnate in the process.

Parenthetically, I realize the article isn't hagiographic, but in a world where attention spans max out at around 140 characters, few people are going to get that far, and media types like the editors of RS know this, so that's a risible defense.

Law alone?

With a victorious--if only symbolic, temporary, and ultimately futile--stand against amnesty looking to be secured thanks to the majority of Republicans in the House, the only part of the federal government I still have any hope at all in (and that hope is shaky to say the least), let's take a look at international sentiments towards the requirements for citizenship.

In the most recent wave conducted by the WVS, running from 2005-2008, respondents were asked about the importance of four factors in deciding whether or not a person should have citizenship conferred upon him. They were having ancestors from the country, being born in the country, adopting the customs of the country, and obeying the laws of the country. Pithily, the angles we're exploring here are blood, soil, culture, and law. The first table shows the percentages of respondents in each participating country who judged it to be "very important" that a person have ancestors from the country to be considered a citizen of it:

Blood	%VI
Mali	74.1
Morocco	66.9
Egypt	63.9
Burkina Faso	61.6
South Africa	61.1
Thailand	57.1
India	56.6
Jordan	54.2
Ghana	52.9
Indonesia	51.6
Ethiopia	51.3
Mexico	50.3
Malaysia	50.1
Vietnam	47.3
Georgia	46.2
Rwanda	46.1
Zambia	42.8
Cyprus	41.3
China	39.3
Uruguay	37.6
Poland	37.5
Turkey	34.4
Chile	33.4
Trinidad and Tobago	26.9
Bulgaria	26.6
Spain	25.3
South Korea	24.6
Serbia	24.0
Ukraine	22.9
Argentina	21.2
Moldova	20.8
Slovenia	19.4
Brazil	18.5
Romania	17.9
Italy	14.6
United States	14.1
Australia	11.3
Taiwan	10.2
Germany	9.6
Finland	9.4
Norway	6.7
Andorra	4.9
Switzerland	4.5
Sweden	3.3

People of northwestern European descent put the least emphasis on the blood bond of a nation's population. The US is no exception. After all, how can a nation of immigrants, which we've always been since we gained our independence from Great Britain in 1923, prefer that its citizens' family trees be rooted firmly in the land of amber waves of grain? To the contrary, those people are the ones we look down upon with the most superciliousness and disdain today. Northwestern Euros are followed by central, southern and eastern Europeans, then Asians and Latin Americans, and finally by Middle Easterners and Africans, who put the greatest amount of emphasis on it.

There's a pattern here that surely doesn't come as much of a surprise to regular readers of the chickadee's blog. Relatedly, this list looks like it proxies pretty well for a measure of national pride. Parenthetically, I plan on correlating these results with reported rates of consanguinity by country.

The paradox presented here for many like myself is that the places inspiring the warmest feelings and that I would like most to live in are the places that tend to put the least effort into maintaining what they have. It's tragic. It doesn't strike me as overly cynical to presume that this is almost inevitable, as though liberalism doesn't know when or where to stop and just keeps cruising along the progressive highway past the promised land and over the cliff. Unfortunately, the one nation that regularly pops up as an exception to the putative rule in discussions like this was not included in this battery of questions. But even Japan has started down the slippery slope towards open immigration, recently introducing a point system, akin to the policies employed in Australia and Canada, where preference is given to highly skilled prospective immigrants.

What of birthright citizenship? Our own 14th amendment has been read by the courts in such a way that if one is able to spawn somewhere in the country, through hook, crook or otherwise, then said spawn is, jus soli, a child of the land he was born on.

The next table shows the percentages of respondents in each participating country who deemed it very important that a person be born in the country if he is to be entitled to citizenship:

Soil	%VI
Mali	68.5
South Africa	67.8
Ghana	67.7
India	66.3
Zambia	63.0
Malaysia	60.1
Thailand	59.4
Egypt	58.6
Mexico	58.5
Jordan	58.3
Indonesia	56.9
Ethiopia	53.9
Rwanda	52.3
Morocco	51.0
Burkina Faso	48.9
Chile	47.5
Georgia	45.5
Trinidad and Tobago	44.1
Uruguay	43.2
Vietnam	42.6
Poland	40.4
Spain	39.2
China	38.4
Cyprus	37.5
Turkey	34.3
Italy	32.1
Moldova	31.9
Serbia	28.4
Ukraine	28.3
Bulgaria	26.9
Romania	25.5
United States	25.3
Argentina	24.9
Brazil	23.5
Slovenia	22.9
South Korea	20.5
Andorra	17.7
Taiwan	16.0
Australia	15.7
Finland	15.7
Germany	11.4
Switzerland	8.4
Norway	7.9
Sweden	5.0

Keep in mind that the four categories considered here are not mutually exclusive, but can and do layer upon one another. It appears that most Malians, for example, feel it of great importance that citizens be born in the country, to people who have previously established ancestral ties to it, adopt Malian cultural norms, and that they respect the law of the great trading empire.

The following table shows the percentages of respondents in each participating country who deemed it very important that a person adopt the customs of the country to become a citizen of it:

Culture	%VI
Georgia	83.6
Mali	73.3
Egypt	68.7
Morocco	68.4
Australia	68.0
Ghana	66.5
Thailand	65.0
Turkey	63.6
Vietnam	63.4
Jordan	61.9
Indonesia	61.9
Malaysia	60.4
South Africa	59.4
Burkina Faso	59.4
United States	59.4
India	58.4
Mexico	58.2
Zambia	56.8
Ethiopia	53.9
Germany	53.4
Bulgaria	53.3
Chile	50.3
Slovenia	48.2
Spain	47.2
Rwanda	46.8
Finland	46.6
China	44.1
Uruguay	43.3
Cyprus	43.0
Trinidad and Tobago	42.8
Switzerland	42.1
Taiwan	39.9
Ukraine	39.5
Moldova	38.5
Norway	36.7
Romania	35.7
Poland	34.7
Italy	34.7
Argentina	33.6
Serbia	33.5
Andorra	30.4
South Korea	27.1
Brazil	26.3
Sweden	24.1

Are we all Georgians now, senator?

I've always felt a special affinity for Australia. If I were to leave the US, I'd head down under (Switzerland would be a close second, but the cultural and linguistic distances would probably be too far). It may not count for much of anything in the grand scheme of things, but they are one of the few Occidental nations whose population still maintains, with some pride, a semblance of a revered, historically-rooted national identity (the others being Israel, Ireland--dare I say--these United States, and possibly Germany). That shows up here.

With the importance of blood ties to citizenship being an idea entertained only by the most reprobate--hell, even the idea of citizenship is becoming beyond the pale--the concept of a national culture is the next wall the forces of the Cathedral are determined to scale. They've already infiltrated so far that only the most 'extreme' talkers on the mainstream right would call for a national policy resting on the three xenophobic pillars of borders, language, and, most germanely for us, culture!

Up to this point, our Scandinavian representatives haven't shown support for any standards on citizenship at all. But we have yet to discuss governmental policies. The Golem will keep the baddies out, we just need to equip him with the right tools. And then make sure he doesn't strike out against refugees--political, economic, religious, or otherwise--or those offended by depictions of Muhammad, or undocumented workers, or visa overstayers, or asylum seekers, or those looking for a better life, or those who love to feed from the public trough, or...

Law	%VI
Sweden	95.6
Norway	93.5
Australia	93.1
Finland	88.4
Switzerland	87.6
Taiwan	86.7
United States	85.0
Georgia	84.6
Germany	83.5
Trinidad and Tobago	83.2
Indonesia	82.9
Turkey	82.4
Bulgaria	82.1
Mali	81.7
Mexico	80.8
Ghana	80.4
Romania	78.7
China	78.2
Burkina Faso	78.1
Vietnam	78.0
Italy	77.7
Jordan	77.3
Egypt	76.9
Malaysia	74.8
Morocco	74.6
Uruguay	74.1
South Africa	72.9
Chile	71.3
Slovenia	71.2
India	70.9
Zambia	70.4
Moldova	68.1
Poland	68.1
Ethiopia	64.7
Argentina	63.5
Rwanda	62.1
Ukraine	58.7
Cyprus	58.2
Spain	58.1
Serbia	55.0
Thailand	54.4
Andorra	49.4
Brazil	43.5
South Korea	40.4

Several charts in rapid succession there, so here's an overall "standards" index that simply sums the percentages of "very important" responses across the four dimensions considered previously. How curious that Mexicans make greater demands of their citizens than Americans do of their's:

Standards	Index
Mali	297.6
Egypt	268.1
Ghana	267.5
South Africa	261.2
Morocco	260.9
Georgia	259.9
Indonesia	253.3
India	252.2
Jordan	251.7
Burkina Faso	248.0
Mexico	247.8
Malaysia	245.4
Thailand	235.9
Zambia	233.0
Vietnam	231.3
Ethiopia	223.8
Turkey	214.7
Rwanda	207.3
Chile	202.5
China	200.0
Uruguay	198.2
Trinidad and Tobago	197.0
Bulgaria	188.9
Australia	188.1
United States	183.8
Poland	180.7
Cyprus	180.0
Spain	169.8
Slovenia	161.7
Finland	160.1
Moldova	159.3
Italy	159.1
Germany	157.9
Romania	157.8
Taiwan	152.8
Ukraine	149.4
Norway	144.8
Argentina	143.2
Switzerland	142.6
Serbia	140.9
Sweden	128.0
South Korea	112.6
Brazil	111.8
Andorra	102.4

Things are grim on this side of the pond, but they're even grimmer in Europe. With the rise of nationalist parties in several European countries, I wonder when (or if) we'll begin to see the same.

SWPLs, stop emulating the Swedes and start taking after the Andorrans!

WVS variables used: V217, V218, V219, V220

Good old fashioned family values, on which we used to rely

Pew Research delivers some inspiring Saturday morning reading, of the diversity-is-strength variety:

Never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less [sic*]. Their median family income was $17,400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

In fidelity to the blog's raison d'etre, let's look at the risk factors among women of becoming never-married single mothers by comparing non-whites to the non-Hispanic white rate of bastard birthing. The following table shows the rates of this strain of alternative family formation (that is, one in which the state and/or extended family serve as substantial providers, since no one is providing for themselves and their spawn on less than $20k a year) relative to the non-Hispanic white rate:

Illegitimacy	vs. whites
Black	608.5%
Hispanic	258.2%
Asian/PI	49.6%

The Pew figures excluded those aged 65 or older, so I've made the necessary corresponding adjustments using 2010 Census data.

Look, my fellow Republicans, if we stop comparing Hispanics to our own voters and instead compare them to other minorities--which, since we must exclude Asians as they are too inconvenient to think about when we use the term "minority", means blacks--we see that indeed they do display both a penchant for traditional family values and a propensity to vote for the GOP. We need to pass the comprehensive immigration reform now, or, as Bill O'Reilly argues so convincingly, we'll "lose the Hispanic vote and never win another national election, ever!"

It's Marge Simpson's weight loss logic at work: "For low-fat, this pudding is pretty good. Mmm, mmm, I can just feel the pounds melting off."

* This probably should read "less than a high school education", compared to a national high school graduation rate of nearly 80%. As is, it insinuates that 51% of single mothers have gone to college, which, in a country where one-fourth of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, would be quite 'impressive' (at least from the contemporary education-as-panacea viewpoint).

Rand Paul wins google poll

Rand didn't just win the CPAC straw poll, he's winning the Google interest poll, too. Here are the search results for the rest of CPAC's top four, as well as for Jeb Bush, who the AP, swimming against the grassroots tide--in vain, one hopes--describes as "perhaps the highest-profile establishment figure [in the GOP]". Results track from December 2012 through the present (that is, they're post-election):

The filibuster was a publicity stunt. So what? It was in no way at odds with the positions he's maintained from the beginning of his political career, and it worked. It netted him more google traffic than Marco Rubio's insipid state of the union response. The guy's adroit media savviness and polished public presentation are attributes his father sorely lacked. This Paul has a legitimate shot.

Parenthetically, his murky positions on immigration worry a restrictionist like myself, but, unfortunately, whose in the GOP don't? Paul thinks the 14th amendment has been misread to grant birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizens and wants it challenged in the supreme court. If unsuccessful there, he wants to add an amendment explicitly denying birthright citizenship to the Constitution. There's hope for the man, and, just maybe, there's hope for this country, too.

In government we trust?

Just in time for the bipartisan, full-court amnesty press, Pew provides some insight into why our political class is so eager to elect a new people. The research center surveyed people in the US on the levels of trust they have in the federal government.

Guess which group was the most likely to say that they can "trust the government in Washington to do what is right". This group reports higher levels of trust in the federal government than blacks or even self-described liberal Democrats do. Hint: The GOP's response to Obama's state of the union address will be given by an invade-the-world, invite-the-world neocon who will be delivering said response in both English and Spanish.

Amnesty redux

Today, in tandem with the legislative push for open borders, NPR ran a segment on the Dillingham Commission that, in 1911, found that immigration into the US from northwestern Europe was preferable toimmigration from southern and eastern Europe. It served as a segue into how it is illegitimate to empirically and clinically track and measure differences in tendencies and behaviors of various population groups. Reporter Audie Cornish quoted a professor of sociology who "studies the immigrant experience". Says one professor Alba:

If we could, if you will, rank groups in terms of their desirability, in terms of their ability to assimilate--that kind of thinking is still present. ... [The Dillingham Commission] was overtly racist. There can be little question about the importance of scientific racism in the early twentieth century and the degree to which it shaped the thinking that went into the Dillingham commission report. And we are not as racist today, but that doesn't mean that we are today altogether free of this thinking that some immigrant groups are superior to other immigrant groups."

Census data make it quite easy to rank immigrant groups into the US (see here and here). That Alba and others like him would rather plug their ears, cover their eyes, and reminisce about the stories their grandparents told them about Ellis Island than face reality doesn't change this.

Incidentally, isn't it just wonderful how there is always a bipartisan gang of congress critters glowing eagerly in the limelight as they wait to introduce amnesty X.0? Let's take a look at the lifetime immigration grade cards that NumbersUSA gives members of the sensible, even-keeled, putatively middle-of-the-road party of amnesty-pushers this time around:

John McCain, AZ (R) -- D
Marco Rubio, FL (R) -- C-
Jeff Flake, AZ (R) -- C
Lindsey Graham, SC (R) -- C
Michael Bennet, CO (D) -- F-
Dick Durbin, IL (D) -- F
Robert Menendez, NJ (D) -- F-
Charles Schumer, NY (D) -- F

The group gets an F+. Congress as a whole earns a C. Not one of the eight are to the restrictionist side of the Congressional center, while six of eight are on the open borders side of the spectrum. When Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake are your immigration hard-liners, you know you have trouble.

Having grown wary of this seemingly perennial amnesty push, I was at risk of apathy this time around, but tripe like the NPR segment has prodded me into action. I've contacted both my senators and my house member expressing my opposition to 'comprehensive' immigration reform. Pithily, I stated that unemployment is high, the need for low-skilled labor has never been lower, and a path to citizenship is a path to more Democratic voters (all three of my representatives are Republicans) with bastard children in one hand while the other hand stretches out to Uncle Sam.

If you're of a similar mind, please do the same. We've risen up and body-slammed the Establishment before. Let's do it again.

The Silent Xenophobes

Alerted by Steve Sailer of the ability to cross tab exit polling data for free via Reuters, I thought it'd be a fun challenge to try and paint an electoral map red--entirely--to contrast with the easy-to-create blue one. Perhaps married white men earning at least six figures annually (though in honor of Jokah Macpherson, I suspect that demographic trends slightly progressive in Vermont)? Unfortunately, the sample sizes aren't large enough to look at anything interesting in states with electoral college votes of the single digit variety.

The data doodling is available for more than just presidential election exit polling, however--users are free to play with results from other Reuters' polls as well. Speaking of the election, the stage looks to be set for a resurrection of the 2007 'bipartisan' amnesty bill that was torn apart, limb from limb, by a hostile public that won't quite roll over and die:

Emboldened by the large turnout of Hispanic voters in last week's general election, U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday he plans to move quickly to address what he has called the biggest failure of his first term - comprehensive immigration reform.

Steve says "bring it on". Hell yes. This will be Obama's social security privatization push, obsessed over by a handful of wonks but facing populist opposition so deep and widespread that it will taint his entire second term.

Don't take it from me, though, consider public sentiment. In July of this year Reuters polled respondents on their positions (among four, see below) concerning three immigration-related issues germane to the discussion about Arizona's SB 1070. The Establishment regularly labels those who approve of any of said positions as "extremist", "anti-immigrant", "xenophobic", etc, and, excepting Pat Buchanan and maybe Mark Steyn, it's difficult to find a mainstream pundit who vigorously assents to any of them. Randomly open up the phone book, though, and chances are the person picking up the phone will.

I've come up with what will be deemed a restrictionist score by race, computed using a simple formula:

(% strongly favoring * 2) + (% somewhat favoring) - (% somewhat opposing) - (% strongly opposing * 2) = Restrictionist Score

Thus the scale runs from +200 (everyone strongly favoring the enforcement tactic at hand) on the especially restrictionist side to -200 (everyone strongly opposing enforcement) on the utterly open borders end of the spectrum.

"Require law enforcement to check the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens."

Race	R Score
Whites	+107
Blacks	+45
Hispanics	-9

Notice this goes beyond merely authorizing law enforcement to inquire about a person's residency status--it requires that they investigate it. A majority of whites (54.2%) strongly favor this approach while just 6.9% strongly oppose it. More than three-quarters of whites hold anti-immigrant, xenophobic views, uncouthly desiring the people's laws be enforced by those sworn to enforce them! Blacks, skeptical as they are of cops digging into people's personal business, are mostly restrictionist, too. Hispanics, at -9, are almost evenly split--a reoccurring trend, as we shall see--the perfect balance for a rational, informed discussion of the issue to be had among the self-proclaimed leaders of the "Hispanic community", right?

"Allow law enforcement officers to arrest anyone unable to document immigration status."

Race	R Score
Whites	+74
Blacks	+14
Hispanics	-6

Majorities of both whites and blacks feel those without 'papers' should be arrested. Hispanics, again, are divided straight down the middle. Tough to see where the political sell for amnesty is to be made, but we have one more shot remaining.

"Make it a crime for illegal immigrants to try to work in the United States."

Race	R Score
Whites	+101
Blacks	+45
Hispanics	-3

Look, they're just trying to make a better life for themselves and all that--go after the employers who exploit these undocumented workers if you must, but don't punish people for doing the jobs Americans won't do, racists! Nope, the public doesn't buy the tripe about people who've knowingly broken the laws of the land by consciously ignoring the national sovereignty of the US somehow being innocent victims. Again, a majority (52.9%) of whites strongly favors a law such as this, while only 6.5% of whites strongly oppose it. By a 2-to-1 margin, blacks are on board with. Hispanics, once more, are split on the idea.

Be ready to contact your congress critters when the legislative process of electing a new people gets going again in earnest. If you're looking for an easy, comprehensive (heh) way to go about doing so, check out NumbersUSA and sign up for action alert notifications. The war may be lost, but we can still make a heroic stand and enjoy the sweet taste of victory in a few battles. Bring it on.

Charles Murray on (the) Pew (quiz)

Criticizing a joint effort by PBS and Pew Research to construct a 12-item party identification quiz, Charles Murray makes a few questionable assertions. Firstly, his commentary on the "I never doubt the existence of God" item:

So let’s say you’re the Pew researcher making up the test, you know that conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals, and you want an item that will capture that tendency. So far so good. But then do you say to yourself, “The very most religious people are the ones who never doubt the existence of God”? “Lack of doubt in the existence of God has a statistical correlation with conservatism”? This item is clueless. Clueless about the nature of deep religious faith, clueless about the relationship of conservatism to religiosity, and clueless about the different tendencies of libertarians and conservatives regarding religious faith.

Murray's elitism (and I say that not with derision but with admiration, as the best minds are almost by necessity elitist) causes him to be overly pedantic and demanding of too much semantic precision. Blaise Pascal and Mother Theresa may have perpetually struggled with doubt, but generally speaking, the most pious tend to leave the least room for an existence in which God isn't extant, as the GSS clearly illustrates. The percentages of people who express certainty in God's existence by political orientation and then by frequency of church attendance (with no double counting, so "monthly +" includes only those who attend less than weekly but at least once a month, etc), from 2000 onward and among whites exclusively for contemporary relevance and to avoid racial confounding:

Orientation	Certain
Liberal	37.3%
Moderate	58.4%
Conservative	69.3%

Frequency	Certain
Weekly+	86.3%
Monthly+	68.8%
Annually+	49.3%
Less than annually	33.6%

If we really want to pile on, we can criticize the availability of four responses (completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, completely disagree) to a clearly dichotomous question. How is it possible for one to "mostly agree" that he never doubts the existence of God? If he has ever doubted God's existence, he must choose "completely disagree" as his answer; otherwise, he must choose "completely agree".

This is the nature of most of Murray's criticism, and he could've gone a lot deeper on several of the items if he'd wanted to. For example, the item "Gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry legally" could easily be answered in the affirmative by someone entirely opposed to same-sex marriages. Yes, gays should be able to marry but no, we should not change the definition of marriage to include incestuous, multiple, or same-sex partners. A gay man is allowed to marry a woman he is not related to just as a heterosexual man is! However, the sliver of the population that might logically interpret the question and proffered response in this way is going to realize what the survey is intending to measure and thus answer that they completely disagree with the item even though, strictly speaking, they may completely agree with it.

But that's not the point of surveys like these. Look, social survey data aimed at the general public are inevitably going to be found lacking in nuance and precision, but that's more of a feature than a bug. Better to have informed (and those who read Murray are in the top decile of the population) respondents scoff at the simplicity or semantic sloppiness of a question yet answer in the same way as they would have had it been worded more cogently than risk having a substantial slice of the relatively uninformed masses become confused by the question and offer random or bemused responses that confound the entire data pool.

Murray also utters this doozy on the question about immigration, a subject for which I recall John Derbyshire having noted causes otherwise perspicacious pundits to momentarily lose several IQ points upon discussing:

Hasn’t anyone at Pew or PBS noticed that unions, mainstays of Democratic party funding, are among the most vocal critics of immigration?

The AFL-CIO's official position on immigration:

The U.S. immigration system is broken—and U.S.-born workers as well as aspiring citizens are paying a heavy price. America needs to create an immigration process that works for working people—not a system that benefits corporate employers at the expense of everyone else.

 Current U.S. immigration policy is a blueprint for employer manipulation and abuse, and both new American immigrants and American-born workers are suffering the consequences.

 We say, “¡Basta Ya!” or “Enough Already!” That’s why the AFL-CIO supports a comprehensive, worker-centered approach as part of a common-sense immigration process.

Click here to read the union movement's framework for creating a roadmap to citizenship.

To the right of the page linked to are a couple of 'statements and resolutions' explaining the union's support for "in-state tuition of undocumented youth" and "the devastating effects of state anti-immigrant laws". The language used by the nation's largest unions are indistinguishable from the words employed by La Raza. The rank-and-file might not be big fans of open borders, but, like their non-union brethren, their appointed leaders are.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2010), RACECEN1(1), GOD(1-5)(6), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), ATTEND(0-1)(2-3)(4-6)(7-8)

Profiling immigrants

Using the latest Census Bureau data from 2010 and 2011, the Center for Immigration Studies recently released a comprehensive report profiling the country's foreign-born population and comparing it with her native children. Parse and peruse as much as you're inclined to. Some points of interest I gleaned:

- Immigrants are more willing to work and work harder when they do so than natives do, right? Among those aged 18-65, yes, technically, by a statistical rounding error, with 67.7% of immigrants holding a job and 67.6% of natives doing the same.

The native numbers, of course, are dragged down by the poor performance of native blacks, only 56.6% of whom are employed. The native white figure, at 70.5%, is a few points better than the immigrant number is.

- While we're on the topic of favored demographic groups, where are the egalitarians on the prodigious gender gap in employment rates among immigrants in the US? The following table shows gender gap employment scores for immigrants and natives (non-Hispanic unless otherwise indicated) by race, calculated by taking the percentage of men aged 18-65 who are employed and subtracting from it the percentage of women of the same age range who are employed. The higher the figure, the wider the gender gap in employment:

Group	Sex Gap
Immigrants	21.1
Native whites	6.9
Native Hispanics	5.5
Native blacks	(4.7)

By pushing for open borders, the contemporary left is indirectly celebrating traditional gender roles. Only in America!

- Of the 24 major occupational categories listed, the legal profession boasts the smallest share of immigrants (7.1%) among its ranks, with community and social services (9.2%) a few spots up. Small surprise that occupations where practitioners face almost no competition from immigrants (and virtually none at all from those of the illegal variety) in their professional lives tend also to be the most fervent boosters of massive unrestricted immigration. While open borders do not increase the competitive pressures practitioners in these occupations face, they do increase the client base needing their services.

There are occupations all for open borders, like agriculture (47.4%), domestic and commercial cleaning (34.0%), and construction (24.4%) that are significantly staffed by immigrants as well, to be sure. But unlike the legal profession, there are distinct hierarchies and not much in the way of upward mobility in these immigrant-intensive fields. They're characterized by white natives running the operations and menial immigrants doing the dirty work for as little money and as compliantly as possible in the name of fattening the bottom line (at least in the short-run).

- Five years ago, using similarly commendable data from the CIS, I came up with what I deemed a "merit index score" for countries constituted by evaluating how well their emigrants fared in the US. Using four measures included in the report, here's an update. The scores are calculated by adding to 93.3 (set to norm native whites at a score of 100) the percentage of each nation's emigrants to the US aged 25-65 who have attained a bachelor's degree or higher and then subtracting from that the percentages from each that are in poverty, use at least one welfare program, and are without medical insurance:

Rank	Country	Merit index
1.	India	137.6
2.	Great Britain	129.6
3.	Germany	120.5
4.	Philippines	115.7
5.	Canada	113.3
6.	Japan	103.4
x	Native white	100.0
x.	Native Asian	98.3
7.	China	91.1
8.	Korea	88.0
9.	Russia	79.6
10.	Iran	79.3
11.	Pakistan	71.0
12.	Poland	67.7
13.	Colombia	58.6
14.	Jamaica	49.2
15.	Laos	48.3
16.	Peru	35.7
17.	Vietnam	35.5
x	Native black	32.1
18.	Cuba	25.4
x.	Native Hispanic	21.0
19.	Ecuador	12.8
20.	Haiti	8.2
21.	Dominican Republic	4.5
22.	El Salvador	(22.2)
23.	Honduras	(38.9)
24.	Guatemala	(40.4)
25.	Mexico	(42.5)

Half a decade ago, Indians were the cream of the crop. They remain so today. The brahmins most Americans come into contact with here are not representative of the country of over 1 billion from whence they come, a country for which the task of obtaining a "representative sample" seems almost insurmountably difficult to complete. They about perform the Chinese in the states, but I'd guess the smart money is on China outperforming India in the 21st century.

Europeans and East Asians fill out the rest of the top spots, with native whites in the middle of that mix. As we move down into the third world, we see that the people poor, backwards countries send end up being poor and backwards in the country they ultimately settle in, as do their descendants. Mexicans, constituting by far the largest immigrant nationality in the US, come in at rock bottom. With one-fifth of Mexico already here, it's a small wonder that the US is increasingly coming to resemble her southern neighbor.

- It's regularly remarked upon by those in the Steveosphere that political opinion makers in the nation's capital have a skewed perspective of contemporary immigration into the US. Besides being steeped in antiquated images of Ellis Island, immigrants living in states surrounding DC fare better than immigrants in the rest of the country do.

The following table ranks the 16 states with the largest foreign-born populations in the country by how impoverished its immigrants are relative to its natives. The index is calculated by taking the share of a state's impoverished population that is foreign-born and dividing it by the percentage of the state's total population that is foreign-born. A score of 100% indicates that immigrants are as likely to be in poverty as natives; a score under 100% indicates immigrants are less impoverished than natives are; and a score over 100% indicates immigrants are more likely to be in poverty than natives are:

State	Poverty
Virginia	104.5%
Maryland	131.1%
New Jersey	132.4%
Georgia	132.5%
New York	136.3%
Nevada	136.7%
Florida	138.2%
California	139.1%
National	151.2%
Massachusetts	153.7%
Texas	158.8%
Illinois	160.6%
North Carolina	164.9%
Washington	168.2%
Arizona	187.4%
Colorado	197.5%
Minnesota	263.7%

Even in Virginia, immigrants are poorer than natives are. In the US today, importing people is more-or-less synonymous with importing poverty no matter where one travels (with a few notable exceptions like Silicon Valley). That said, distinctions between natives and immigrants are considerably less pronounced in states like Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey than they are in Texas and Arizona.

- There's a certain dignity in a life devoid of material abundance though, isn't there? Perhaps, but that's often an irrelevant question in a country as affluent as the US, where the officially poor have multiple flat screen TVs and iPhones, let alone more food than anyone should eat.

To what extent are we assisting immigrants in obtaining this material abundance? The following table shows the percentages of immigrants, by state, using at least one major welfare program:

State	Welfare
Massachusetts	19%
Virginia	25%
Nevada	31%
Arizona	34%
Georgia	37%
Florida	39%
North Carolina	39%
Maryland	41%
Washington	42%
New York	43%
New Jersey	44%
Colorado	45%
Minnesota	45%
National	47%
California	55%
Illinois	55%
Texas	58%

Again, Virginia looks great and Maryland's foreign-born do better than those in the country as a whole do.

- Open borders apologists like Russ Roberts and Tyler Cowen don't cross paths with a large swath the socioeconomic spectrum, though. They don't experience poverty firsthand in any capacity, so discerning difference in poverty rates is an exclusively academic exercise for them. They do spend more time with those in the upper echelons than the average layperson does, however. And in these circles, immigrants are overrepresented.

The following table shows an immigrant "eduscore" calculated by taking the percentage of a state's immigrant population that has attained a bachelor's degree or higher and dividing it by the percentage of a state's native population that has done the same. A score of 100% indicates a state's immigrants are exactly as likely to have at least four year degrees as natives are; a score under 100% indicates they are less likely to have done so; and a score of over 100% indicates they are more likely to have done so:

State	Eduscore
Virginia	111.5%
Maryland	102.0%
Minnesota	101.1%
Washington	98.3%
Florida	94.1%
Georgia	90.8%
National	90.4%
Massachusetts	86.2%
Illinois	85.5%
New York	84.8%
New Jersey	82.5%
Nevada	78.4%
North Carolina	70.5%
California	70.2%
Texas	69.4%
Arizona	63.2%
Colorado	57.0%

The predominately Mexican incursion into the Southwest has little in common with immigration into Fairfax County. In Virginia and Maryland, and more saliently still in the district they engulf, foreign-born educational attainment surpasses that of natives. It also does so in Minnesota, though I wonder how much of that is due to degrees in Islamic studies among vibrant newcomers to cities such as Minneapolis. In most of the country, however, immigrants tend to be less educated than natives are.

Hispanics favor big, activist government

As the Hispanic tidal wave perpetually approaches election cycle after election cycle, always just about to crash upon the shoreline of US politics, establishment types repeatedly talk about the urgency with which Republicans need to Hispander or face electoral oblivion. This latest WSJ article is just the most recent incarnation of the phenomenon:

Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney's presidential campaign are working to fashion proposals that could make up ground with Hispanic voters, concerned rhetoric on immigration from many in the party is turning away the increasingly powerful constituency.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) [what a great vice presidential candidate he would make!] is developing a scaled-back version of the Dream Act, which would allow people brought to the U.S. as children to gain legal status, but not citizenship, if they enroll in college or the military. Several Senate Republicans have signed on to bipartisan legislation aimed at broadening access to the legal immigrant visa system.

The Romney campaign is looking for new proposals that would show he backs legal immigration, trying to pivot from a primary campaign in which he has taken a tough line on assistance to those here illegally.

That there were ten non-Hispanic white voters for every one Hispanic voter in the 2008 Presidential election, and that swing states are less Hispanic than the country as a whole is are never mentioned in articles like these, of course. While this undue emphasis is annoying, though, it's the self-immolating idiocy of Republican pols that really goads me:

Many Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), argue that if the party could get past the immigration issue, it would be the natural home for many more Latino voters, who are often socially conservative and value entrepreneurship.

The mantra about Hispanic social conservatism (to the extent that it rests on any actual evidence at all) rests almost entirely on modestly stronger opposition to abortion among Hispanics than among non-Hispanics. Well, black opposition to abortion is similarly stronger than non-black opposition is. Maybe Graham has read Jeffrey Kuhner and plans to have the GOP steal black votes from Obama next!

The Pew Hispanic Center provides a dose of reality in a report on Hispanics in the US released earlier this week. The following table breaks down Hispanic and non-Hispanic responses to a dichotomous question on whether one would "rather have a small government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services":

	Small gov't	Big gov't	DK/Refused
Hispanics	19%	75%	6%
Non-Hispanics	48%	41%	11%

The non-Hispanic figure includes blacks, so the non-Hispanic white/Hispanic gap is even larger than the table makes it appear to be. Hispanics, who tend to be poorer than whites, are more likely to receive government benefits and less likely to pay for them than white Americans are, so it's hardly a surprise that they are more favorably inclined towards big government and the associated wealth transfers that come with it than whites are.

Some other interesting findings from the Pew report:

- Despite the push from above to rebrand Hispanics as "Latinos", actual Hispanics, er, Latinos, actually prefer the "Hispanic" descriptor by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

- Similarly, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics (I'll defer to them and continue to employ this term rather than adopt SWPL's favored pet name) do not think of themselves as an umbrella ethnic group sharing a common culture. This is lost on media types and obtuse pols like Newt Gingrich, who were surprised to find that Cubans in Florida don't care much about illegal immigration from Mexico into the US' Southwest.

- Hispanics primarily think of themselves with regard to their country of origin. While 51% of Hispanics think of themselves in this way (as Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans, etc), 24% think of themselves as Hispanic/Latino. Only 21% think of themselves as Americans.

- A staggering 95% of Hispanics say it is either "very important" or "somewhat important" that future generations of Hispanics living in the US are able to speak Spanish. See, they're assimilating just like my German grandmother did when she schooled my mother, who of course schooled me, in the German language I speak so fluently today! Fortunately, 87% of Hispanics also assert that Hispanics in the US need to learn English to succeed here. Bilingualism for all!

For whom Jeffrey tolls

In last weekend's featured editorial page interview, the WSJ's James Taranto wrote about longtime Republican political operative Jeffrey Bell. It makes for interesting reading from a perspective that many WSJ readers probably don't have much firsthand experience with. There are a couple sloppy assertions made, however, that are worth addressing. First, by Taranto:

The rise of the tea-party movement heartened many libertarian conservatives, who saw it as leading the Republican Party away from social conservatism.

While the impetus for the tea party's formation and the primary public focus it places is on reducing the size and scope of the federal government, the presumption that those self-identified as belonging to the tea party movement are more distinctly libertarian than the broader base of Republican voters doesn't seem to be clearly substantiated by the actual data. Taken from a Pew Research survey on tea party voters, the following table compares the percentages of self-identified tea party members from the rest of the Republican electorate on red meat economic and social issues:

Issue	Tea party	Other GOP
Prefer smaller government	88%	80%
Government almost always wasteful	87%	79%
Corporations make too much profit	30%	37%
Favor same-sex marriage	26%	24%
Abortion should be illegal in most/all cases	59%	56%
Better border security should be a priority in dealing with illegal immigration	51%	45%
Protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership	78%	72%

With the exception of same-sex marriage, for which tea partiers are marginally more supportive than the rest of Republican voters are, tea party types are generally more conservative versions of the GOP electorate. Pew didn't query respondents on their foreign policy views, but I suspect tea partiers also tend to be more hawkish on Iran and more firmly supportive of Israel than other Republican voters are.

As summarized by Pew in the aforementioned report:

Tea Party supporters tend to have conservative opinions not just about economic matters, but also about social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In addition, they are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues. And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.

Secondly, from Bell:

Mr. Bell, for his part, sees in social conservatism opportunities for the GOP to expand its appeal among minority communities. "Latino voters tend to be more socially conservative," Mr. Bell says, noting that in 2008 they backed California's Proposition 8, which overturned a state Supreme Court ruling establishing same-sex marriage, by 53% to 47%. Non-Hispanic whites narrowly opposed the measure.

Nothing stated here is explicitly incorrect, but there are problems by way of omission. Blacks voted for Proposition 8 by a 70%-30% margin, so by Bell's logic, blacks should be riper targets for Republican conversions than Hispanics are. But most (though not all) conservative pundits, including Bell and Taranto, know better than that.

Further, to point to Hispanics voting a whopping 4 points to the right of a leftist white electorate (whites opposed Prop 8 51%-49%) like California's as evincing a major opportunity for the Republican party is just silly.

Bell also expresses sympathy for the WSJ's view that immigration restrictionism hurts the Republican party... by turning Hispanics away from it, of course--no one appears to care or have anything to say about how it will affect the much more consequential white vote. In neighboring Arizona, however, where white voters are considerably further to the right than California's whites are (only 40% of white Arizonans voted for Obama, while 52% of white Californians did), Hispanics voted in favor of Proposition 202, which increased penalties on those employing illegal immigrants, by 56%-44%, a level of support just 4 points to the left of white Arizonans. While restrictionism won't win over a naturally hostile voting bloc, the evidence shows again and again that it doesn't do much, if anything, to repel them, either.

Nativist!

"Nativist" is one of many terms used almost exclusively as a pejorative in contemporary American media disourse, but unlike "anti-Semite", "warmonger", "isolationist", and others of the conversation-chilling ilk, I suspect that while few people would self-describe as being hostile towards Semites, trying to precipitate war, or isolating one's country from the rest of the world, a solid majority of the public is favorably inclined towards definitional nativism. The dictionary definition of nativism:

A policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to [favoring] immigrants.

My polemical advice to those labelled as nativists is for them to respond to such "attacks" by merely describing what the term means and and let it stand for itself at that.

Directions for Republicans on how to take cyanide

The strategy is as simple as it is obvious as it is disingenuous. Continue to urge Republicans to abandon immigration restrictionism and instead Hispander at full bore. It's inevitable that Hispanics are going to continue growing not only in absolute numbers but also as a share of the US population, so best not to do anything to offend them:

Mitt Romney "is done," said DeeDee Blase, founder of Somos Republicans in Arizona. "He'll be lucky to get 8 percent of the Hispanic vote" after saying he would veto legislation that would create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants and accepting the endorsement of anti-immigration activist Kris Kobach, architect of two of the strongest immigration crackdown laws in the country.

The GOP front-runner, Romney has referred to the legislation — called the DREAM Act — as a handout.

The fact that Hispanics are more concerned about a host of other issues than they are about immigration aside, this putative inevitability is of course evitable with the enforcement of immigration laws and the halting of illegal immigration from across the US-Mexico southern border:

The government projects Hispanics will account for roughly 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size and boosting their political power. Overall, Hispanics traditionally tilt Democrat, meaning the Republican Party is looking at a threat to their future power if they don't work to make inroads with this politically pivotal group now.

Eating low-fat pudding is not the way to lose weight. If the margin on each additional sale is negative, a business can't make up the loss by increasing sales volume. It doesn't strike me as being overly cynical to presume that the leftists who prescribe this strategy for Republicans are fully aware that it will work to relegate the GOP to permanent minority status.

In a stunning display of amnesia, the AP article provides the following:

Some worry that this year's eventual GOP nominee won't fare much better than McCain four years ago — and may fare worse — if candidates don't soften the way they talk about immigration.

McCain, of course, was co-sponsor of the 2007 Senate amnesty bill, relentlessly courted Hispanics and chastised restrictionists in his own party, and barred those who took a tough line on illegal immigration from the 2008 Republican nominating convention. He was the epitome of a Republican Hispanderer, and yet he still got his clock cleaned among Hispanics, 31%-67%. If most Hispanics are "natural Republicans" save for the party's stance on immigration, McCain would've been the perfect pol for them to rally around to mold the GOP in exactly the image they wanted. They did nothing of the sort though, as the list of reasons that Hispanics tend to vote Democratic is a long one, of which immigration is just one (and a relatively unimportant one at that) of many.

As for Romney, I'm feeling vindicated for having promoted him as far back as the 2008 presidential primary season as a relatively hard-line restrictionist on the issue of illegal immigration. Kobach's endorsement is enough to get this guy to surprise himself by doing something other than throwing his vote away on a third party this November and instead supporting Mitt.

Stay awhile, amigo

Apparently reeling a bit from a publicizing of the uptick in deportations that have taken place under the Obama administration, the department of homeland security announced that it will abnegate deportation proceedings against some 215,000 El Salvadorans illegally present in the US through at least late 2013, citing damage from earthquakes--earthquakes that occurred in the Central American country several months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001:

The Obama administration has extended temporary protected status to El Salvadoran nationals through late 2013, shielding them from deportation and forcible return to their home country.

The Department of Homeland Security cites ongoing disruptions from a series of earthquakes in 2001, concluding that "El Salvador remains unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the return of its nationals."

The Obama administration's deportation policies have come under scrutiny, just as the president has geared up for his reelection campaign. Despite his support for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship, deportations have soared to new highs under the Obama administration— and the president's approval ratings among Latino voters have flatlined.

El Salvador, which has a monetary standard of living about half that of Mexico, is heavily reliant on remittances from its natives living in the US, which constitute one-sixth's of the country's annual GDP. Fittingly enough, one-sixth of El Salvador's native population also currently lives in the US. Only Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica have larger shares of their populations living stateside:

The protected status designation currently applies to 215,000 Salvadorans living in the U.S. illegally and otherwise subject to deportation, and remittances from ex-patriate Salvadorans in the United States help keep that country's economy afloat.

So, it's clear that this de facto amnesty is the right thing for El Salvador. Consequently, it's occurrence must come as no surprise.

What would come as a (pleasant) surprise? A campaign trail denunciation of it, particularly from Mitt Romney, who could use it to shore up support with blue collar whites who might have been taken aback (I guess--that's the media narrative, anyway) by his apology for the creative destruction that makes capitalism work and also to show that he's looking past the primaries and towards next November.