The conservative New York City Journal has a profile of some recent research by Robert Putnam (the Bowling Alone guy who studies social isolation). He’s convinced immigration has a destabilizing effect on communities, and they’re convinced that’s bad news.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income.
Note that “devastating”, “surprisingly negative”, and “crushing” are their terms, not Putnam’s. But even so, there is something going on here. Typically, the article gives little information just what it is. Putnam is not a crackpot, and his prior findings have mostly stood up. But this article gives no information at all on how the research was conducted, or what variables were controlled for.
In particular, the article makes clear he controlled for geography, age, and class, but it says nothing at all about how he even defined “diversity” (what groups - national, racial, religious, etc. - contribute to making a community “diverse”?), and it does not indicate whether he controlled for rate of population influx and outflux in a community independently of “diversity”. There is some suggestion he may not have: he refers to longitudinal effects, implying that disruption diminishes over time; if that is the case, then it’s clear that greater disruption occurs at a point in time at which “diversity” begins to affect a community, and diminishes at a later point in time - which immediately evokes a time-dependent phenomenon like population flux rather than a static one like ethnic percentages. Without information on that point, the findings described above do not distinguish between change in identity groups making up a community, or simply change in the individuals residing in the community, as cause.
I suspect that change itself - the accumulation of mere difference in a population, independent of its diversity - contributes significantly to Putnam’s findings. That is, I would suspect that communities undergoing significant population turnover while maintaining a fairly constant racial or religious makeup would demonstrate many of the same features as the ones Putnam studied. Not knowing your neighbors is probably the single greatest factor in not trusting them, and is a barrier to forming community groups and all the rest as well. (This would also explain why port-of-entry locales like San Francisco and LA show less sense of community, and rural South Dakota cowtowns show more. The latter have less “diversity” because they also have less turnover - nobody wants to move there.)
I would be willing to retract that hypothesis if, when his paper is published, it proves that Putnam did consider tenure in residence independently of racial/ethnic/religious diversity, but absent such a control I would think Putnam has no grounds for concluding that increasing diversity uniquely contributes to short-term loss of community other than by way of being simply a form of population turnover. The fact that his results disappear over time would seem to support such a supposition. (The article suggests that he believes communities respond to diversity by “constructing new identities”, but it doesn’t give any detail. It’s not clear what this means or what evidence he has for it.* Absent that evidence, again, it seems simpler to imagine that social tension diminishes over time simply because the residents get used to each other.)
This suggests something about the function of “diversity”, as well. There are certainly some features of “diversity” that inherently make it hard for people to get along: the experience of Muslim immigrant communities in England right now is a case in point. When certain practices among communities in contact are so incompatible that they make it materially difficult for them even to live together, there are problems. But a great deal of national, ethnic, or religious tension often seems to be of that mindless kind of bickering over issues that have no material impact - which is a sign that it is not really the diversity itself that is the problem, it’s people’s discomfort at living with others unlike them. And that, at bottom, is the problem of “difference”, not “diversity” as we use that term. It’s the same problem, whether it arises between racial groups, religious groups, or new neighbors: an inability to trust or to regard the other as a part of one’s circle because of the simple lack of shared background or experience. The flimsy rationalizations given - they’re “shiftless”, “ill-bred”, “infidels” - only point up the fact that the problem does not lie in any overt points of distinction between the groups, but merely in the fact of lack of mutual connection. Differences in race, ethnicity, cultural practice, and so forth can make those connections harder to establish, but it is the difference, not the diversity, that is the heart of the problem. And if that is true, there are two implications: that lack of community can be overcome in time (as Putnam appears to have shown), and there is no reason to fear diversity any more than there is reason to fear people moving from one location to another in the same country (both are disruptive, but for the same reason, and in each case those disruptions are manageable).
* Why is there such a firm rule that journalism dealing with technical matters or scientific research must always be written by someone completely ignorant of the topic and who knows nothing whatsoever about how science, math, or the research process work? I know that most reporters do not have detailed technical knowledge, but can’t they at least dig back down to their third-grade lessons on “the scientific method” and ask “what variables did you control for?” It’s simple: just say the words “what variables did you control for?” and write down whatever comes out as an answer, then put that in the story. You don’t even have to know what it means. Just say “what variables did you control for?” and print the answer. If that works out, you might consider going on to ask “Were these results statistically significant?”
June 27th, 2007
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General, Politics, Economics, Religion, Culture, Science, News & Current Events, Immigration, Race |
7 comments
Ramesh Ponnuru takes on the - for him - gutsy role of criticizing others for their combination of vanity and flawed logical analysis. Irony, then, is not dead.
His ire is roused by Steve Landsburg’s calculation of the relative economic value of illegal immigration and its justification as a ban on immigration. Landsburg first notes, correctly, that the “stealing our jobs” argument is somewhat hampered to begin with by the fact that every study of the economic impact of illegal immigration reveals that it is a major economic benefit to America (the taxes paid by illegal workers vastly outweigh the benefits they receive, no matter how loudly racists yawp to the contrary). Even restricting the analysis only to the question of depressed wages for low-skilled American workers - presumably the strongest argument against immigration - works against the anti-immigration position over the long run. But Landsburg finally puts the issue in the most favorable terms possible to his opponents and asks, if you ignore all secondary and other effects and calculate only the short-term marginal utility of wage increases for immigrant workers (from moving into a higher-wage market) vs. wage decreases for local workers (facing competition from low-paid immigrants), what is the relative gain or loss to each? He comes up with a rough answer that the immigrants gain about 5 times as much as the locals lose, in relative terms - which means, of course, that from the perspective of those who offer the “stealing our jobs” argument for restricted immigration, the loss in wages to one local worker is 5 times more important than a similar gain by one immigrant. He goes on to note that the Constitution’s assignment of 3/5 value to blacks, compared to whites, for census purposes was regarded as offensively racist, and asks whether this is relevant to the nativists’ assignment of 1/5 value to Mexicans, compared mostly to whites, for wage-tallying purposes.
Ponnuru is not amused at being asked to explain himself, and offers this response (in its entirety):
Steven Landsburg proves, to his own satisfaction, that immigration restrictionists must value the life of an immigrant at one-fifth the value of a native-born American. “[T]here was a time when the U.S. Constitution counted a black slave as three-fifths of a full-fledged citizen. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley has recently apologized for the ravages of slavery. How long till politicians apologize for the ravages of our restrictive immigration policies?” There is, however, an alternative to the hypothesis that restrictionists place a low value of immigrants’ lives, which is that we don’t think about the issue in the narrow terms Landsburg wants to confine us to, and which seem contrived to puff up his moral vanity.
Note that, true to form, Ponnuru offers no alternative analysis to demonstrate what the relative value of wage gains by immigrant workers would come out to be, to his satisfaction. He merely offers the standard right-wing response to inconvenient science: denunciation devoid of technical detail of any kind. But the rest of his response, oddly, is even worse. He does not seem to realize that he has essentially conceded that nativists are dismissive of Mexicans’ lives by way of his insistence that they are not so on economic grounds.
Landsburg’s argument is this (take notes, Ramesh): by every calculation of the impact of illegal immigration, the average immigrant benefits at least 5 times as much as the average local worker is harmed, even granting that immigrant labor depresses wages. (The reason: Mexican wages are so low to begin with that a few dollars per hour’s gain, for such a worker, is worth more to them than a few dollars per hour’s loss to the US-based worker; this is the economic concept of “marginal utility” - the less money you have, the more even a small gain is worth to you. This gap only widens when you take into account the fact that the wage depression is ameliorated by other factors, which Landsburg does not include.) The standard economic argument against immigration is that it does depress wages - but, as we’ve seen, only by about 1/5 as much as it increases wages for the immigrants. So, on a one-to-one basis, keeping Mexicans out in order to protect wages for US-based workers means valuing those Mexican workers’ gains at less than 1/5 those of locals - because treating immigrants’s benefits as equally as important as locals’s harms would redound overwhelmingly in favor of immigration.
Ponnuru responds that this isn’t the only reason they’re against immigration. So, apparently, they have other arguments that show immigration to be a bad thing. Very well, then: immigration is a bad thing - taking these (also conveniently unnamed) other arguments and the relative economic impact into account. But the economic impact favors immigrants by 5:1. So the (secret) other reasons must disfavor immigration by what amounts to a greater-than-5:1 ratio, commensurated to the economic impact (or, in simpler terms, by “a lot”). What could these be? The only other arguments generally offered are the racist ones (”diluting our culture” “a majority-minority country!” “¡bilingual education!”) and the rather convenient “rule of law” argument (we must make sure they stay illegal because they’re illegal; if we made them legal, they wouldn’t be illegal, but we can’t because of the rule of law). Which is to say that conservatives are willing to keep Mexicans in poverty either because it just galls them so much that they have fake Social Security Numbers (jeez, what would they do if they caught a Mexican with an expired yacht club membership card?), or because they’re racist, and in either case even in spite of the tremendous benefit that can be done for poor workers by allowing them to immigrate.
How Ponnuru thinks this is a response to the accusation that he values Mexicans’ lives lowly, I can’t imagine. His response is, literally, that he does not value their economic interests at 1/5 those of natives, but rather he values their economic interests fully and everything else about them at a level so low it outweighs the economic one! He actually says, quite openly, that his “non-narrow terms” of analysis come out against immigration even though the economic analysis is so heavily weighted in favor of it. What can those terms be other than “culture” and being a stickler for paperwork? And what can his argument mean but that he thinks those things are important enough to sweep away the vast and disproportionate benefits immigrants derive on economic grounds?
The supposed virtue of the economic argument against immigration was that it was simply cold, factual analysis - not driven by racism or mere animosity. Its weakness, of course, is that it is false. So Ponnuru calmly (though implicitly) invokes racism and animosity as factors even stronger than economics, as his proof that he doesn’t devalue economics. Nice going, Ramesh. You’re not good for much, but you can be counted on to say what you think without embarrassment. It’s helpful.
June 12th, 2007
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Economics, Culture, News & Current Events, Immigration, Race |
7 comments
The He-Man Woman Haters’ Club members were falling over themselves to display their anti-gay credentials Sunday night. Now, entering the third US presidential term of the 21st Century, only 70% of the GOP presidential candidates are creationists, but a solid 100% of them are homophobes, and fiercely proud of it. Which leads me to speculate on the bizarre fact that conservatism is not yet dead, despite being continuously moribund from birth.
Liberalism has actually been a tremendous boon to conservatives. While liberals do the heavy lifting, conservatives carp and obstruct and play their childish towel-snapping games, then unapologetically move into the new house that liberals have built and claim it as their own. Within the same generation, the conservatives who had been murdering people to block the 1964 Civil Rights Act were loudly proclaiming the “colorblind society” (mostly as a barrier to efforts to roll back entrenched racial privilege, but still). The ones who sneered at and mocked “women’s lib” now trumpet the (almost entirely illusory) “liberation” of women in Afghanistan and Iraq. They get to treat themselves to an orgy of open racism on immigration policy, every 10 years or so, knowing full well that the Democrats will give the GOP’s business backers what they want while the GOP claims credit for it. On issue after issue, they get to have it both ways: aggressively protecting the worst elements of society until the tide turns so far they can’t keep up the charade any longer, then simply declaring that the liberal policies they themselves opposed are really conservative policies that they support; on issues they can’t or don’t dare block, they put up a show of opposition to entertain their base, in the knowledge that reasonable people will work out a solution without them and then they can go along.
The gays-in-military issue is more of the same: it’s obvious that policy has to stop - not even the military wants it any more, and the direct, material impact it has had on Bush’s Endless War is obvious and measurable. But the people whose war is threatened by the lack of skilled staff caused by their own policy cannot bring themselves to change their own minds. (John Maynard Keynes once responded to the criticism that he had changed his position on some issue by saying “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” We know what conservatives do: keep repeating the same old nonsense while the water rises around them.) The GOP is letting the Democrats force them to change the anti-gay policy, and when it happens, they’ll be glad to have gotten off the hook and within a couple-three years they’ll be saying they were for it all along.
The reason they get away with this is that they are never held accountable for their positions. In that respect, gay marriage and the segregated military could be policies that, for once, eventually come back to haunt them: they fought so hard for those forms of discrimination, and went so far out on the highest limb of the crazy tree (”Man on dog action!”), that maybe, in a few years when those absurdities are done away with and the world fails to explode, somebody will remember. But maybe not. Gays are certainly less socially accepted than blacks were, even at the height of Jim Crow, and conservatives haven’t paid a price for their opposition to racial integration and civil rights. Unless we finally insist that we know they mean what they say about gays, women, immigrants, and all the rest, and refuse to allow them to sweep it under the rug when history leaves them behind again, on those issues as on so many others, and refuse to allow them to claim credit for progress that others made and they opposed while it was happening, they’ll continue to float on the current of history, never doing any work and always given a free ride into a future they fear but are happy to profit from.
June 6th, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Privacy, News & Current Events, Immigration, Race |
13 comments
Michael Barone, in the Wall Street Journal online column, goes to a huge amount of effort to ignore the obvious. Apparently jumping on the Tom Friedman “Make Up Names and Call It a Trend” bandwagon, he scours US Census statistics for the 50 largest metropolitan regions and lumps them into 4 categories: Coastal Megalopolises, Interior Boomtowns, the Rust Belt, and Static Cities. Each has a different demographic trend (which he insists on breaking down into inflows and outflows of immigrants and “Americans”): the large coastal cities are gaining immigrants and losing long-term residents to the South and Midwest; the Interior Boomtowns are gaining the outflow from the coasts; the rest is dwindling or stagnating. The reasons he adduces are entirely economic economics and fear of immigrants - it’s simply getting too expensive for the middle class to live in the major destination cities. And this he thinks is good for the Republicans:
May 8th, 2007
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General, Politics, Culture, News & Current Events, Immigration |
9 comments
I voted yesterday, early, something I am generally loathe to do. I am afraid that I will find out something between early voting and Election Day that will make me regret my vote. Indeed, Harold Ford did something today that might — though probably not; I will deal with that in a later post — have changed what I did in the voting booth. So why vote early? Because my voting place is split between city and county voters, but the city is only allocated two machines there, despite the split in voters appearing to be even. In 2004, it took almost two hours to vote and I just don’t want to go through that if I don’t have to. Yesterday was convenient so I took the opportunity. Besides, it was raining, and I like to vote in the rain. It seems appropriate.
I won’t bore you with the school board or state senate seat races, other than to say the state senator in my district was running unopposed so I wrote my name in. No one should get elected unanimously. Onto the votes.
First, the state constitutional amendments.
- Amendment One
This is the anti-equality amendment. Since I approve of equality, I voted NO. HELL NO was not an option, unfortunately, but I did press the NO button extra hard.
- Amendment Two
This is an oddly worded amendment that appears to allow the state legislature to force local communities to freeze the property tax rates form people over 65 on their “primary residence”. They don’t define primary residence, however, and I don’t understand why the state legislature should be micro-managing those kinds of decisions for local governments. The whole thing felt like another “all taxes are evil, screw the schools, cops, and firefighters” law so I voted NO.
Next, the federal elections:
- US House, TN-7: I already wrote about my reasons for voting as I did in this race here. The short version is that Marsha Blackburn sucks and Bill Morrison doesn’t, so I voted for Morrison.
- US Senate: I have hated this race from the beginning. I don’t like family dynasties, so I am temperamentally opposed to Ford from the start. He is much too conservative for me, having voted for the Iraq war, for the Military Commission Act, and for the anti-Gay Marriage Amendment. Corker actually looked interesting to me, despite the fact that he would have voted the same on those issues. He beat two real out there wingnuts in the primary, and he appeared at least reasonably moderate, something that the GOP desperately needs more of. But it turns out that appearance was actually a cover for being an empty-suit hack. He used illegal immigration to lower his business costs, he enriched himself questionably as mayor and, worse, he allowed the city’s 911 system to continue its slide into tragic uselessness. I don’t think a man who cannot manage a 911 system is fit to sit in the Senate and help decide how to manage homeland security and natural disasters. Finally, in the last few weeks his campaign has turned to trying to get out the white sheet and burning cross crowd. Corker doesn’t belong in the Senate.
Not voting for this race, then, was an option. I don’t think the Senate is going to turn over this year — the playing field is just tilted too much to the red states in this Senate cycle. Even if the Democrats do get the six seats they need, Lieberman will almost certainly switch parties and hand control right back. Besides, I would prefer a more progressive Democratic caucus, and Ford is definitively not progressive in a lot of areas. But he is fairly progressive economically, and he is, aside form marriage, pretty good on equal rights.
Voting for Ford came down to two issues, in the end: the war on terrorism and intelligence. Ford, unlike Corker, realizes that “stay the course” is a disaster making things worse. He recognizes the need for change. And he appears bright enough to deal with the hard question of what that change should be. The one overwhelming impression I have gotten form the debates and from Ford’s position papers and appearances is one of strong, above average intelligence. To be charitable, you cannot say that about Corker. Ford seems to be a very bright man, and we are going to need that in the years ahead. The country is in for some rough times, and we are going to need smart people in place to help handle it. Since the choice is between an intellect like Ford, who is good on some issues, and an empty suit hack like Corker, I will take Ford every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
So, perhaps a bit reluctantly, I voted for Ford.
And, finally, the one statewide office on my ballot:
- Tennessee Governor: I did not vote. I hardly ever do that, unless it’s a race I know nothing about. But if you are going to vote, I think, you should make a decision. It is very rare for two candidates to be so close on issues as to not matter. So I stood in front of the machine for a long time before I moved on. Maybe things would be different if the polls didn’t show this race to be a blowout, but as things stand now, I just could not bring myself to vote for Bredesen or Bryson. Bryson is a bit of a joke. He says interesting things, like reforming TennCare enough to bring the terminally back online or ending the sales tax on food. But he doesn’t seem to have any actual plans or details to chew over, just peppy sounding slogans. And, yes, Bryson is anti-choice and creepily obsessed with illegal immigrants and Bredesen is neither of those things. But abortion is already very much restricted in Tennessee and I doubt that Bredesen will veto more restrictions short of an outright ban, or that he would veto any punitive anti-immigrant measures. I doubt that because when Bredesen has had opportunities to stand up, he has always backed down.
The tax system of Tennessee is a regressive, brittle, third world worthy joke. If the state is ever going to become anything other than an economic backwater, that needs to change. But Bredesen has refused to touch the tax issues so far, and he shows no signs of doing so in the future. He is afraid of the backlash.
Even, worse, though, was how Bredesen killed TennCare. If TennCare had died because all the remedies had been tried but failed, I could have lived with that. If TennCare had died because Bredesen lost his fight with the legislature over needed reforms. But Bredesen didn’t even try. He left options on the table that could very well have saved TennCare and just went straight to gutting it. He took the easy, cowardly way out. And now, because of his political cowardice, people go without life saving medicine, emergency rooms are once against the doctor of first resort for our working poor, and people are almost certainly going to die who would have lived if he had just shown an ounce of political courage.
Maybe I will regret this, but standing in front of the voting machine, knowing that Bredesen was almost certainly going to win in a walk, knowing that he killed TennCare without even the hint of a fight, knowing that he would almost certainly never stand up to the GOP controlled legislature on anything important, I just couldn’t push the button for him. So I left the ballot blank and hoped that in four years, we would have a better class of politician running.
October 26th, 2006
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Politics, Legal Issues, I do too have a life, Economics, Iraq, Katrina, Immigration, Torture |
6 comments
Molly Ivins reports on a tragic and shocking political crime in the town of Lajitas, TX:
[T]he mayor of Lajitas is an alcoholic goat named Clay Henry.
. . . If you give the mayor a longneck bottle of beer, he’ll swig it — just like most of his constituents. The Sober Party ran a canine against him in the last election, but it didn’t have a dog’s chance.
So first thing one morning just a few months ago, Steve Houston, the county attorney, gets a call from Richard Hill, constable in Lajitas, announcing they’re dealing with a serious situation: Someone castrated the mayor. A vet is en route at high speed from Alpine, but it’s unclear whether the goat will live or not. Local feelings were running high against the perps. Some felt there was danger of a possible lynch mob. Constable Hill got right on it.
As it happened, there was a Mexican maid cleaning one of those houses in Lajitas owned by some rich guy who lives in Houston, and while cleaning the fridge, she finds a bag containing what looks like a pair of huevos. Thinking nothing of it, she puts the evidence in the garbage, which goes to the dumpster. But after hearing of the dastardly attack on the mayor, she reports the suspicious occurrence to the constable, who then heroically goes through the garbage in the dumpster until he finds the smoking goat gonads. . . .
The main alleged perp is from a nearby town with a bad reputation (not Terlingua), and this is where a certain class element enters the story, giving it Dreiserian overtones.
[T]his rich guy asks the perps if he can get a beer from their stash, and they oblige. Then he takes their perfectly good green-bottle beer and gives it to the goat, which the alleged perp feels is an insult. Why he decided to take his revenge on the goat is unclear, except they were all pretty drunked up, according to several sources.
The perp is charged with torturing an animal and possession of a deadly weapon. County Attorney Houston and District Attorney Frank Brown tried to figure out a way to charge the guy with injury to a public official, . . . but they couldn’t get Clay Henry fit the legal definition of “person.”
Of course, she manages to see the big picture as well:
We now pause for a point of border law enforcement that needs to be made more forcefully to the nincompoops at the Department of Justice in Washington. There is some pressure from up there for the local laws to get involved in immigration enforcement. The reason this is a terrible idea is because if calling 911 is the same as calling La Migra, illegal workers won’t call to report crimes, leaving them even more vulnerable to human predators than they already are. The case of this upstanding non-citizen who found the mayor’s privates is but one example of what wouldn’t happen if the fools in Washington had their way.
“Dreiserian overtones” . . . God, I love Molly Ivins.
UPDATE:
After a day and a half of deliberations, a 12-member jury of Brewster County residents deadlocked today in the trial of a Del Rio man charged with performing a drunken castration of the honorary mayor of Lajitas, a goat known as Clay Henry III.
Officials with the 394th District Clerk’s office in Alpine announced the deadlock today in the trial of Jim Bob Hargrove, who was charged with the castration of the goat last fall, after a beer he had been drinking was reportedly given to movie actress Anne Archer to feed to Clay Henry at the Lajitas Mercantile Store.
Hargrove will have to be re-tried, since the three-day trial ended up with a “hung jury” according to a spokesperson in the District Clerk’s office. . . .
District Attorney Frank Brown, who is prosecuting the case, said Lajitas resort owner Steve Smith got a beer from Hargrove . . . . Archer then reportedly fed the beer to the goat.
Hargrove was said to have gotten mad at the transfer of suds and “stewed all day” over the insult, only to return later with a paring knife.
“He want to damage Smith,” said Brown in his closing comments to the jury. “It was like a cat bringing home a bird and leaving it on the back porch.”
“It was done to hurt Clay Henry, the icon and mascot of Lajitas,” said Brown.
These charges were supported by Eleanor Webb, an employee for the Lajitas Mercantile, who said she overheard Hargrove say the “goat ought to be castrated.”
In an effort to clear his client from the animal cruelty charge, Comstock attorney Martin Underwood . . . painted Smith as vindictive schemer intent on driving Hargrove out of the resort community, which is located along the Rio Grande west of Big Bend National Park. The defense sought to establish that Hargrove was framed by Smith and that Smith’s operatives castrated the goat and attempted to implicate Hargrove by means of circumstantial evidence.
Ah . . . Texas.
April 25th, 2006
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, Immigration |
2 comments
The first person to die in the service of this country in Operation Iraqi Freedom was an illegal alien:
Jose Gutierrez left war-torn Guatemala for a new life in the United States – and become one of his adopted country’s first two casualties in Iraq.
An orphan who grew up on the streets while Guatemala was enmeshed in civil war, he found a new family when at age 14 he traveled to the United States by train, foot and bus. He enlisted partly to thank the United States for his new life, his foster brother said.
“He joined the Marines to pay back a little of what he’d gotten from the U.S.,” Max Mosquera said. “For him it was a question of honor.”
Lance Cpl. Gutierrez, 22, was killed in ground combat Friday. On Monday, a flag hung outside the Mosqueras’ home in Lomita, 25 miles south of Los Angeles. The front porch was lined with pots of geraniums, each with a flag and a sign that read “United We Stand.”
His foster mother, Nora Mosquera, 56, displayed Gutierrez’s school and Marine certificates as she wavered between tears and happy memories. Gutierrez never forgot the sister he left behind in Guatemala and always hoped to bring her to the United States, she said.
My mom was an immigrant. She left her family and her home in Poland when she was a teenager. She spent some time with family in the Netherlands then came to the United States. At some point, I believe, she was technically illegal, having not correctly handled all of her paperwork. But she married, had two children, raised those two children despite two divorces, working bad jobs until she could earn the first of her two college degrees. She built the typical American Dream for herself — home, family, security – from nothing but her own heart and intelligence in a strange land with unfamiliar customs and a language that refuses to make any sense. Anyone who thinks that she isn’t fit to be an American, and that must include all agitate to turn others against immigrants, can go f*ck themselves.
Not terribly refined sentiments, I admit, but there is nothing but ugliness at the heart of this debate. There is no real problem with immigration, just the spin of people who should know better. The notion that immigrants represent some vanguard of a re-conquest of former Mexican territory is an idiot and worse. It is like arguing that the Irish were coming to reclaim the colonies. The only people who take those kinds of arguments seriously wear sheets on their heads, even if they are only metaphorical. It is true that immigrants do drive down wages to some small extent, but the problem is not with the people who are willing to risk their lives in order to work hard; the problem is the scum that hire them for below minimum wage in terrible conditions. Cart those people off to jail, and that problem goes away. Then there is the silly notion that they will overwhelm our culture. It is as if no one has noticed that American culture has been continuously shaped by immigrants. We take the good and mixe with what we already have to make something better. And that process has given American culture a strength and vitality that has allowed it to dominate the culture of the rest of the world.
No, immigration and immigrants are not problems. They shouldn’t go “back where they belong” because they have proven through their sacrifice, their courage, and their hard work that this is where they belong.
April 12th, 2006
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Politics, Economics, Culture, Immigration |
6 comments
