05/07/2008
Last week I reported on the efforts in Houston to mask the data on attitudes to immigration revealed by a local opinion survey. (Un PC Results from The Houston Area Survey April 29).
The Houston Area Survey’s website has now posted a 10-page summary of the study An Historical Overview of Immigration in Houston, Based on the Houston Area Survey (PDF)
This document differs from a normal academic paper in two ways: first, the extreme stridency and tendentiousness of the pro-immigration spin it exhibits, and secondly the professional fluency of the writing — far removed from the turgid jumble usually emerging from University Sociology Departments (I speak from bitter editing experience).
Perhaps it is not too much to detect the hand of the Houston Chronicle’s Lisa Falkenberg, [Send her mail] who managed to publish a long (and fluent) pro immigration foil to the Survey the day of its press release. (I am informed she has the role of pro immigration Commissar on the Chronicle — thanks JC and GW.) Certainly it is clear that the complaint of the Survey’s progenitor, Professor Stephen Klineberg [Send him mail]:
“No matter how you ask the question,…every measure shows growing anti-immigrant sentiment.”
(VDARE.com emphasis) was heart-felt.
Quite out of place in a professional academic essay is this happy burble:
The United States, which throughout all of its history was an amalgam of European nationalities, is suddenly becoming a microcosm of the world — the first nation in history that can say, “We are a free people, and now we come from everywhere!”
(p2)
Or this polemical fulmination:
Between 1924 and 1965, under the notorious and viciously racist “National Origins Quota Act,” immigration into America slowed to a trickle, and explicit preference was accorded to Northern Europeans.
(P2)
(As Professor Kevin MacDonald has decisively demonstrated, the 1924 legislation was a clash between two groups, one seeking to preserve historic America, the other wishing to overthrow it. Both could be said to be serving their ethnic interests. In 1924 the former won, in 1965 the latter.)
Apart from employing glaring historical falsehoods — (The United States remained overwhelmingly a British, Protestant nation until the 1840s; there is a ridiculous effort on Page 4 to blame the abysmally low educational attainments of Houston’s Mexican immigrant population on the family reunification provisions of the 1965 Act — whereas of course the overwhelming bulk of this group are in Houston because they walked illegally across the border) — the main argumentation in the essay seems to be based on the assumption that the serfs reading it cannot think. Thus the information that half of third generation Hispanics have only Hispanics as their three closest friends is presented as evidence of assimilation! (P8)
As noted last week, the main evidence the report offers of assimilation is the irrelevant one of converging economic profiles — even having access to a computer! (P6-7)
Of course, I suppose it could be that the Klinebergs and Falkenbergs see being American merely as a matter of having similar possessions.
It is clear that the report realizes that Houston has imported itself a probably lethal problem:
More than 40 percent of all Houston’s Latino and Asian immigrants are recent arrivals, having come here since 1995…if the socioeconomic disparities with Anglos are not reduced, if too many of Houston’s “minority” youth remain unprepared to succeed in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to envision a prosperous future for the region as a whole…How the public responds…will do much to determine whether the region’s ongoing demographic transformation will become a significant asset for this port-city as it positions itself for prosperity in the global economy, or whether it will instead become a major liability, reducing rather than enhancing the region’s competitiveness and setting the stage for serious social conflict.
The strong implication is that the burden of adjustment should all fall on the historic Americans.
Instead, “the public” would do well to consider how it was this mess was created.
Tell Professor Klineberg to improve his scholarship — and get a more honest ghostwriter!
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.