07 — Signoff. That’s my rant for this week, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening. It’s done me a world of good: I feel much less peevish now.
07/06/2018
02m26s The Fortress North. (Ice People unite!)
12m23s The asylum scams. (Heavens to Betsy!)
17m15s Temporary, since 1991. (Once you're in, you're in.)
22m24s Brexit: the opportunity cost. (Two years of fruitless wrangling.)
27m54s Trump goes calling. (A blimp over Londonistan.)
30m15s Trump’s test. (A real litmus test for the SCOTUS pick.)
32m33s Mexico to the polls. (Not a country, a crime syndicate.)
33m56s Signoff. (From the Calamine Kid.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a clip from one of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire Marches and this is your peevishly genial host John Derbyshire with my weekly batch of comments on the news.
Yes, listeners, I am peevish, defined at Dictionary.com as "cross, querulous, or fretful, as from vexation or discontent." Peevish is not a good thing to be, and I’m certainly not proud of it. The correct path through life, I was taught from childhood by adults who had weathered World War Two, is to keep busy, get on with things, and don’t complain. There’s always someone worse off than yourself. Or, as Winston Churchill reminded us, quote: "Most of the world’s work is done by people who are not feeling very well."
At the moment, though: (a) I am suffering from a major encounter with poison ivy, (b) our beloved family dog — who joined the team ten years ago next Monday — is slipping away from us very slowly, and (c) I’m locked in a bitter struggle with a contractor that will likely end up in Small Claims Court. I am vexed. I am peevish.
Rise above it, Derb! Reach back for that Blitz spirit! Worse things happen at sea!
Being in a mood like the one I’m in, or under, is actually a good time to step way back and try to grasp the big picture. Where are we headed, and how fast are we headed there? Let me give that a try.
02 — The Fortress North. The inspiration for this segment is a piece on the politico.eu website, which I assume is the European version of our own center-left Politico.com. First three paragraphs, quote:
The dehumanization of Europe is on the march.Capitulating to populist anti-immigration politicians, European Union leaders are pulling up the drawbridge to migrants fleeing war, famine and poverty in Africa and the Middle East.
The cries of those drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe were drowned out at the EU summit last week by the sound of the Continent’s leaders washing their hands of the misfortune of asylum seekers to save their political skins. ["EU to migrants: Go home and stay home" by Paul Taylor; Politico.eu, July 3rd 2018.]
The headline to the piece is "EU to migrants: Go home and stay home." The subhead, in smaller print, is: "Fortress Europe hardens its heart." The body of the article is a breathless argument from the bleeding-heart Left that Europe’s leaders are abandoning their open-borders policy towards so-called "asylum seekers" and being led astray from the paths of righteousness by siren songs from populists of the, quote, "extreme right."
The comment thread to the article is almost uniformly hostile to the author’s sentiments. The Europeans are waking up, and open-borders globalism has less and less of a market share. Globalist one-worlders like this Politico writer are in retreat.
The parallel with the U.S.A. is obvious. It’s dawning on great numbers of people, here and in Europe, that unrestrained mass immigration into stable, developed societies like those of the U.S.A. and Europe, is a potential disaster for our civilizations.
Those of us who have been saying this for twenty years and more are entitled to feel a sort of weary satisfaction, like the "premature antifascists" of eighty years ago. We were immigration patriots before immigration patriotism was cool.
A Reuters poll out this week shows immigration as the top issue now for fifteen percent of registered American voters, beating the economy at fourteen percent. Among registered Republicans, immigration is the top issue for 26 percent.
Some of those high percentages are of course people swept up in the anti-Trump hysteria over little toddlers supposedly ripped from their mothers' arms and hurled into metal cages by heartless border guards. Most, though, I’m sure, are citizens waking up, as Europeans are waking up, to what suckers we have been for too long — the fools of the world — for giving free settlement in our nations to anyone from further south with a sob story.
This is a real big, accelerating swing in public attitudes — attitudes among ordinary, not very political, not very reflective people — in the West. The consequences of it will be historic in a major way.
I just said "the West," but that isn’t really right. "The North" would actually be more accurate. All these population flows — blacks and Muslims into Europe, Central and South Americans into the U.S.A. — are from south to north. The barriers going up — or at least, that we are just now seriously thinking and talking about putting up — in Europe and the U.S.A. are barriers against south-north flows.
In my book We Are Doomed I used the phrase "Ice People" to refer to those populations whose deep history took place in northern Eurasia, as contrasted with Sun People, whose remote ancestors evolved closer to the equator. In terms of race, Ice People are the whites of Europe and European settler nations, together with the East Asians of China, Japan, Mongolia, Siberia, and Korea. Sun People are the rest. The great population movements of our age, against which the barriers are beginning to go up, are of Sun People into Ice People territories.
Back in 2007 I wrote a column titled "The Arctic Alliance," in which I argued that we Ice People, the whites and the yellows, with mean IQs higher than the world average but fertility rates lower, needed to join forces in the common interest of preserving our homelands against Camp of the Saints-style mass invasions by low-IQ, high-fertility Sun People.
People who emailed in with comments on that 2007 piece mostly scoffed at my idea for an Arctic Alliance. East Asians, they said, are robustly race realist, and have no intention of permitting settlement by floods of Sun People.
There is certainly something in that; but East Asians haven’t really been put to the test. Perhaps they will be.
In the strait that separates Japan from Korea is the island of Jeju, about the size of Maui. It belongs to South Korea, and its economy depends heavily on tourism. For reasons to do with that, it has a different visa policy from the rest of South Korea. Visitors from most countries — there is a short list of exceptions — can come to Jeju Island visa-free for thirty days.
That’s been causing problems recently. Here’s a story from the English-language version of Deutsche Welle, a German news outlet, June 26th this year, headline: South Koreans resist arrival of Yemeni asylum seekers. The story is that 950 foreign nationals, most of them from Yemen, took advantage of the no-visa policy to enter Jeju as tourists and then applied for refugee status.
A great many South Koreans are mad as hell about this. The June 26th news story quotes a South Korean blog thus, quote:
Politicians are reluctant to respond to the clear voices of the majority of people and the media also supports refugees. It is time to go out onto the streets and make our voices heard.
End quote. That reads like something from a European or U.S.A. blog. Perhaps I was on to something with my notion of an Arctic Alliance.
It may even be the case, if that South Korean blogger is right, that the local media over there, or some portion of it, is as suicidally ethnomasochistic as our own. Bad ideas are no respecters of national borders, nor even of major cultural boundaries — think of communism. Could East Asia turn ethnomasochist? It seems inconceivable, but history is full of surprises.
For sure there is much more going on than is dreamed of in that Politico piece I started with. "Fortress Europe"? The public sentiment that we see developing in Europe, the U.S.A., and perhaps South Korea is more like a desire for a Fortress North.
03 — The asylum scams. An encouraging recent development within that larger schema is the rising skepticism — again, in both Europe and the U.S.A. — towards asylum seekers.
For the U.S.A. case, Betsy McCaughey had a fine forthright piece in the New York Post, July 4th. Sample quote, with an interesting nod to my Arctic Alliance idea near the end, quote:
Being granted asylum means hitting the jackpot. Asylees get access to the Refugee Cash Assistance program, including medical care, a housing allowance and hundreds of dollars a month in cash. In contrast, immigrants who go the green-card route are ineligible for most benefits for years.Half of those who use asylum as their excuse for crossing the border never even file a claim or show up at a hearing. They're also winners. After all, they made it inside, unlike the East Asian waiting 12 years to enter as a legal worker. ["Scams are overwhelming the US asylum system" by Betsy McCaughey; New York Post, July 4th 2018.]
(I'd better add here, for clarification, that I never intended my Arctic Alliance to be an Arctic Union. In my vision, the Ice People nations remain distinct nations, each with its own culture, proud of its own history, enforcing its own rules for crossing its own borders. I do not want the Ice People to merge into an EU-style bureaucratic superstate, with free movement across internal borders. I never liked the idea for Europe, and I don’t like it for Ice People at large. An alliance of independent sovereign nation-states, co-operating for common interests, not a union.)
That’s in parentheses. Back to Betsy.
Our asylum system, she says, set up for reasonable, honorable, and humanitarian purposes, has become an EZPass for Central Americans. DHS tells us that only 12 percent of asylum requests from El Salvador, 11 percent from Guatemala and 7½ percent from Honduras are actually granted; but the claimants don’t care. They're in!
And even those percentages are likely higher than they should be. Who are the people judging these asylum claims? Is it shamefully callous of me to suspect that a high proportion of them are love-the-world liberal ethnomasochists, graduates of lefty law schools or the Peace Corps?
But think of the kiddies, Derb! The kiddies, the poor little kiddies ripped from their mothers' arms!
OK, let’s think about them. How do we know that those arms they're being so cruelly ripped from actually belong to the actual mother?
There are good reasons for suspicion here. Back in 2008 the State Department decided to do DNA testing on refugees from some African countries. The tested people were claiming to be family groups, biologically related. The rate of fraud found by the DNA testing was so high, the whole refugee program from those countries was suspended.
Now I see that our Health and Human Services Department, which runs the detention centers where those Central American kiddies are held — the ones ripped from their mothers' arms — HHS is going to do DNA testing to reunite kiddies with mothers. I wonder what that will turn up.
I further wonder if, when mother and child turn out not to be related at all, the mother will be charged with child trafficking and given a good stiff jail sentence.
04 — Temporary, since 1991. The flood of bogus asylum claims by Central Americans at the border is bad enough, up eight hundred percent in the past six years, leaving us with a backlog of 300,000 cases to be adjudicated.
Now here comes an equal-sized flood from inside the country.
How’s that? Well, we have this program called TPS, Temporary Protected Status. Say you are a native of Upper Bongo, currently in the U.S.A. for some reason or other — probably, but not necessarily, illegally. Upper Bongo suffers some calamity, natural or human: an earthquake, a plague, a revolution. You can apply for Temporary Protected Status, on the grounds that requiring you to go back home to Upper Bongo would put your life in danger.
There is of course nothing temporary about Temporary Protected Status. The grand principle governing all our immigration procedures applies here as elsewhere: Once you're in, you're in. Quote from the Center for Immigration Studies, quote:
Illegal aliens from Honduras and Nicaragua lucky enough to be in the United States when Hurricane Mitch struck have enjoyed this temporary amnesty since 1999. And the few hundred Somalis with TPS received this temporary status in 1991. ["Restoring the 'Temporary' to Temporary Protected Status" by Mark Krikorian; CIS, May 5th 2018.]
End quote. Well, one good thing the Trump administration has been doing is, putting the "temporary" back in TPS. Citizens of Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador are all losing their TPS status. The biggest group is Salvadorans, 263,000 of whom were granted TPS following an earthquake down there seventeen years ago.
So that’s great, right? Not necessarily. Yes, it’s great that an immigration rule means what it says for once; but there’s an escape hatch for these aliens. The name of the escape hatch is, yes, asylum.
Quote:
According to the just released ombudsman’s report from the Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, some of the 328,000 immigrants from four countries that are losing their temporary protected status are expected to consider seeking asylum. ["New immigration crisis: 330,000 losing protected status will seek asylum, double backlog" by Paul Bedard; Washington Examiner, June 28th 2018.]
End quote. If 300,000 of that 328,000 do indeed apply for asylum, which is perfectly possible, that would overnight double the backlog of asylum cases to be adjudicated to 600,000. Asylum Case Adjudicator could become our leading national job category.
The solution here is perfectly straightforward. Congress needs to pass a federal law to the effect that any application for asylum in the U.S.A. must be filed in person by the applicant at a U.S. embassy or consulate abroad.
While that is perfectly reasonable in itself, there are two problems with it.
First problem: Congress needs to pass a federal law … [Laughter].
Second problem: Even in the bizarro word where Congress did pass a law concerning immigration, that law would immediately be challenged by batteries of human-rights lawyers and similar racketeers. Some lefty jurist in Hawaii or somewhere would declare it unconstitutional, and years of legal wrangling would follow. By the time things got sorted out we'd be in the second Gavin Newsom administration, and the law would be repealed.
05 — Brexit: the opportunity cost. It’s been two years and a couple of weeks since the Brits voted for Brexit — that is, voted to leave the European Union. Are they out yet?
Not yet, not even close. There’s a deadline on the horizon here: March 29th next year, when Britain actually leaves the EU. That’s been agreed. What hasn’t been agreed is the terms of separation.
Theresa May’s government keeps putting together proposals for the terms, and the EU keeps rejecting them. May’s latest effort, being presented to her government colleagues as I speak, is pretty much a sellout to the Eurocrats, with, most objectionably to British patriots, a promise that, quote, "British courts will follow European Court of Justice rulings 'where relevant'." ["Brexit White Paper LEAKED ahead of Chequers meeting" by Ciaran mcGrath; Daily Express, July 6th 2018.]
In other words, British people will still be bound by laws not enacted by British parliaments.
There are similar fudges on immigration and trade. There is nothing close to agreement on what’s to be done with the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, as if there has never been such a thing in the world before as a land border between two friendly sovereign nations.
Even this shapeless mass of fudge, assuming the Prime Minister’s colleagues agree on it, will likely be rejected by the EU, leading to months more of wrangling and writhing to add to the past two years' worth.
This is what happens when a populist measure, arising from the people as an expression of their wish to preserve their nation and its sovereignty in some recognizable form, has to be put through debate, revision, and implementation by cultural, business, and political elites who don’t really believe in nations at all.
Why should they, after all? Only a minority of inhabitants of London, Britain’s capital city, are of native British stock. All over Britain there are towns whose population is twenty or thirty percent "Asian," which mostly means Pakistani or Bangladeshi; and of course those twenty and thirty percents have birthrates much higher than native Brits.
The fruitless to-ing and fro-ing between the so-called British so-called government and the EU will drag on for another nine months, at the end of which there will be some qualified, half-hearted pretense of an exit, the final terms being dictated by Brussels. Brits will still be subject to European courts; their borders will still be wide open and undefended; their trade will still be circumscribed by European rules.
Worse than all the cowardice, fakery, and incompetence here has been the opportunity cost. Britain has serious systemic problems. Property prices are out of control; it’s ever harder for ordinary people to make ends meet; crime is rampant, the police utterly ineffectual, except at arresting and jailing political dissidents. Ancient liberties have disappeared under the flood waters of political correctness.
The National Health Service, which has just been celebrating its 70th birthday, is in a sorry state. Most developed countries now have universal health care; most deliver better results than Britain. A recent global study ranked the country 30th in health care, on an equal footing with Cyprus, Qatar, Malta, Portugal and the Czech Republic.
All these issues have needed dealing with. Instead the nation’s political energies have been consumed by this endless, inconclusive bickering over Brexit.
The Brexit vote was taken on Thursday, June 23rd 2016. If the Brits had leaders worth the name, they could have been out of the EU a week later, by Act of Parliament. By now they would have gotten used to being masters of their own national fate once again.
That’s the kind of decisive action you can take when you are a real country, led by real patriots. Britain is a joke country, led by fools, fakers, and financiers. It’s a tragedy.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Just following on from that last segment: This time next week our President will actually be in the U.K. He arrives next Thursday afternoon, has a few engagements in and around London, including with the Queen and her useless Prime Minister, then heads up to Scotland for the weekend, probably to play golf on one of the two golf courses he owns up there.
The British left, who are even more batpoop-crazy than our own variety, are staging protests all over. The one that’s been getting the most publicity is the Trump Blimp. This is a big balloon, like the ones in the Macy’s Parade, described by The New York Times as, quote: "a giant orange balloon of the president depicted as a baby in a diaper," end quote. How thrillingly imaginative and defiant!
This Trump Blimp is to be floated over London with the express approval of London’s Pakistani Mayor already granted, while our President is in the city.
It would be nice to think that Britain’s own Deplorables — I mean, National Conservatives — might stage counter-demonstrations in support of the President of a country that saved Britain’s bacon in two world wars. Alas, we shouldn’t expect that.
There certainly are National Conservatives over there; not to be confused with the official Conservative Party, which on cultural issues and the National Question is a few ticks to the left of Maxine Waters.
However, any attempt by British Deplorables to organize public demonstrations in support of our President would be met with a full-court press by Britain’s thoroughly politicized police force. Dragging middle-class dissidents off to jail is way easier than catching burglars, a thing the Bobbies have given up on. ["95 percent of UK burglaries and robberies not solved, data suggests"; Press Association June 17th 2018.]
Item: What exactly are tenterhooks? I have no clue; but whatever they are, we're all on them this weekend waiting to see who President Trump taps for the Supreme Court vacancy following Justice Kennedy’s retirement.
For those of us hoping for patriotic immigration reform, this pick is a test of how seriously Trump takes the National Question. My impression so far is: not very seriously. Where’s the wall we were promised? Why no tax on remittances? Why doesn’t the phrase "compulsory E-Verify" show up at least once in every presidential speech? Why still the petty resentment against Jeff Sessions, who needs the President’s full support? And so on. National Question-wise, Trump has talked a lot of talk, but hasn’t walked much walk.
In the context of Supreme Court picks we hear a lot about "litmus tests," usually in relation to abortion law. I couldn’t care less about abortion law. Having tighter restrictions on abortion won’t be much of a consolation when the U.S.A. has turned into Venezuela.
If there’s to be a litmus test for this new Justice, let it be on the National Question. Are we a sovereign nation with a right to defend our borders and expel intruders without ceremony? Should American businesses be allowed to displace American workers with cheaper foreign labor?
Above all: Does the Fourteenth Amendment imply birthright citizenship? If you want a litmus test, there’s a good one, right there.
The hell with Roe v. Wade; the litmus test for revisiting by the Supremes should be U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the ruling that gave us birthright citizenship.
Item: Mexico had an election last weekend. The winner was a bloke named Lopez Obrador. He will formally take office December 1st.
Assuming he’s still with us, that is. Politics is a dangerous line of work in Mexico. In the ten months prior to the election, almost 130 candidates were killed. Random sample, quote:
A Oaxaca state congressional candidate was gunned down along with four of his associates. A team of gunmen killed Emigdio Lopez Avendaño as he was visiting the town of San Vicente Coatlan in the southern part of the state. ["130 Mexican Political Candidates Assassinated in 10 Months" by Cartel Chronicles; Breitbart, June 28th 2018.]
End quote. That’s not a country; that’s just a humongous great crime syndicate.
I wish the fine people of Mexico all the luck in the world sorting out their problems; but until they've attained some level of civilization down there, I want a big beautiful wall all along that border, preferably backed with a minefield and machine-gun emplacements every quarter mile or so.
Build the wall!
07 — Signoff. That’s my rant for this week, ladies and gents. Thank you for listening. It’s done me a world of good: I feel much less peevish now.
If this week’s podcast was somewhat shorter than usual, there is an explanation. I’m having trouble recording, speaking, writing, moving about, or doing anything, being currently around sixty percent calamine lotion by body weight.
Assuming I survive this encounter with Satan’s weed, there will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: The Coasters, "Poison Ivy."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.