01/11/2018
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you would have to have a heart of stone to watch the Left/ MSM’s meltdown over President Trump’s latest remarks without laughing out loud:“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met with on Wednesday…
The comments left lawmakers taken aback…
Trump attacks protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries, by Josh Dawsey, New York Times, January 11, 2018
I'll bet they were "taken aback"!
But of course Trump has a point. This is the epigraph to the"Immigration Has Consequences: Cultural, Social, Environmental … " chapter of my 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (still available in Kindle!):
The most obvious fact about the history of racial and ethnic groups is how different they have been — and still are … .I went on (links added and emphasis added):Human differences are often assumed away in social theories … But this fashionable view of society ignores the fact that groups may carry their own messages with them from country to country — a very different message from those who live cheek-by-jowl with them in the same society and sit next to them in the same school rooms or on the same factory assembly line.
— THOMAS SOWELL,
The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective
Perhaps because he is himself black, or because his formidable reputation deters critics, Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell, quoted above, has not felt the usual inhibitions about studying the varying achievements of different ethnic groups.Of course I don’t think Trump has read Alien Nation. But he has cut to its heart with one brutal sentence. It’s an aspect of what I called in another context his undeniable if weird political genius,His work, begun in his Ethnic America: A History (1981), conclusively demonstrates that cultural patterns are pervasive, powerful and remarkably persistent. Traits like attitudes toward work and education are intrinsically related to economic success. Thus Germans, Japanese and Jews are successful wherever they are in the world.
In addition, Sowell has shown that these ethnic differences persist even after generations of living together under common institutions, as in the United States. What he calls the "messages" that different groups carry still come through loud and clear.
"Ethnicity matters," agrees George Borjas, "and it matters for a long time." His own analyses of census data show that educational achievement, economic success and welfare recipiency differ systematically between ethnic groups. And the disparities last for generations — the effects of the different groups arriving in the 1890-1920 Great Wave of Immigration are still discernible in America today.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.