Posts Tagged ‘demographics’

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What Damon Linker Leaves Out About the Immigration Debate

Friday, August 28th, 2015

So Damon Linker has penned a one-eyed-liberal-in-the-land-of-the-blind piece on how cultural elites have brought opposition to immigration (and Donald Trump) upon themselves by their failure to enforce border controls.

These institutions have been sluggish to respond to this discontent because two (sometimes overlapping) factions of our political and economic elite strongly support high levels of immigration — or at least oppose doing very much to stop it.

One of the factions — the business class and its neoliberal champions in government, think tanks, and NGOs — believes in a free-flowing international labor market that treats borders as superfluous.

The other faction — liberal lawyers, activists, intellectuals, journalists, academics, members of the clergy, and (once again) NGO staffers — has a deep-seated moral suspicion of nations and political boundaries in general. Why should an American count for more than a Mexican who crosses the border into the United States? Shouldn’t a refugee fleeing violence in North Africa enjoy full political rights upon setting foot in the European Union? Don’t all human beings deserve to be treated equally under the law? Isn’t opposition to such equality an example of bald-faced racism?

He’s not entirely mistaken, as these things go, but he’s leaving out one important factor: crass self interest.

Univeralism is all well and good as an explanation, but it’s crass self-interest that underlies most of the opposition to enforcement of existing immigration laws. Yes, crass self interest from business lobbies who want cheaper labor, but also crass self interest from left wing parties to construct a new electorate more to their liking. Tony Blair’s Labour Party did precisely this in the UK.

The Democrats believe (probably correctly) that a legalizing a massive influx of illegal aliens from Mexico and points south can help make them a permanent majority party, which is why they continue to support Obama’s unconstitutional and deeply unpopular illegal alien amnesty. It is this crass self interest that is why the Obama Administration refuses to deport illegal aliens who are taking entry level unskilled and manual labor jobs from the poor black and white Americans that used to make up their base. Indeed, for the Democratic Party it’s a twofer: they get a new voter from Mexico and they make an American more dependent on the big government welfare statism that is the bread and butter of their business model.

Illegal aliens may be bad for America, but they’re good for the Democratic Party. And that’s why Democrats in general, and the Obama Administration in specific, refuse to enforce border controls.

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Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Obama Scandals | No Comments »

A Question for Mark Steyn

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

Mark Steyn is justly famous for many things: His stalwart opposition to Jihad, his grasp of demographics, his clever and eminently readable prose, and his once (and future?) gig on the last page of National Review (currently held by the also-formidable James Lileks). He’s also known for stating that China, thanks to its one-child-per-couple mandate, will get old before it gets rich.

However, on reading this Lawrence Solomon piece on China’s inevitable collapse, something occurred to me. Particular in response to this part:

Like the Soviet Union before it, much of China’s supposed boom is illusory — and just as likely to come crashing down

In 1975, while I was in Siberia on a two-month trip through the U.S.S.R., the illusion of the Soviet Union’s rise became self-evident. In the major cities, the downtowns seemed modern, comparable to what you might see in a North American city. But a 20-minute walk from the centre of downtown revealed another world — people filling water buckets at communal pumps at street corners. The U.S.S.R. could put a man in space and dazzle the world with scores of other accomplishments yet it could not satisfy the basic needs of its citizens. That economic system, though it would largely fool the West until its final collapse 15 years later, was bankrupt, and obviously so to anyone who saw the contradictions in Soviet society.

The Chinese economy today parallels that of the latter-day Soviet Union — immense accomplishments co-existing with immense failures. In some ways, China’s stability today is more precarious than was the Soviet Union’s before its fall. China’s poor are poorer than the Soviet Union’s poor, and they are much more numerous — about one billion in a country of 1.3 billion. Moreover, in the Soviet Union there was no sizeable middle class — just about everyone was poor and shared in the same hardships, avoiding resentments that might otherwise have arisen.

In China, the resentments are palpable. Many of the 300 million people who have risen out of poverty flaunt their new wealth, often egregiously so. This is especially so with the new class of rich, all but non-existent just a few years ago, which now includes some 500,000 millionaires and 200 billionaires. Worse, the gap between rich and poor has been increasing. Ominously, the bottom billion views as illegitimate the wealth of the top 300 million.

How did so many become so rich so quickly? For the most part, through corruption. Twenty years ago, the Communist Party decided that “getting rich is glorious,” giving the green light to lawless capitalism. The rulers in China started by awarding themselves and their families the lion’s share of the state’s resources in the guise of privatization, and by selling licences and other access to the economy to cronies in exchange for bribes. The system of corruption, and the public acceptance of corruption, is now pervasive — even minor officials in government backwaters are now able to enrich themselves handsomely.

In light of that: What if “one child per couple,” like paying taxes for members of the Obama administration, is just for the little people? What if the upper crust of China feels such rules don’t apply to them? Assume both that the Chinese ruling class can pop out offspring to their heart’s content and still manages, somehow, to avoid the explosion Solomon posits. (Dictatorships can run a whole lot longer than you think possible. Just ask Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Il.) Just how much cheating would it take for China to put off its demographic crash until they do get rich?

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Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | No Comments »

How the Washington Post Lies About Guns And Crime Through Omission

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Like many liberal publications, the Washington Post has a long history of promoting gun control. Today they published a lengthy, reasonably well researched article by David S. Fallis asserting that Realco, a gun shop in Forestville, Maryland, sold more “crime guns” (i.e., guns used in crimes) than any other dealer.

The relevant paragraphs:

86 guns sold by Realco [have] been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.

In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George’s County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. The rest were spread among other shops across the state.

Let us for the moment take these figures at face value. However, to my mind the biggest and most obvious problem with the story wasn’t what was in it, but what was missing, the elephant in the room Mr. Fellis failed to mention even once: race.

Not once do the words “African American” appear in the article, nor does the word “black” appear in reference to race.

But it is well know to anyone with even passing familiarity with Washington, D.C. that the whites in the District live overwhelmingly in the northwest “white pipeline” that runs from roughly Capitol Hill all the way up through Georgetown to the Virginia border, while blacks predominate in the rest of the city, but especially in the southeast.

Take a look at this map depicting the ethnic demography of the Washington, DC area created by Eric Fischer:

In Fisher’s map, white people are red dots, black people are blue, Hispanics are orange, and Asians are green.

Now take a look at Realco’s location in comparison to Washington DC:

Realco is not only the closest gun shop to D.C., it is smack dab in the middle of the most overwhelmingly black neighborhood in the greater D.C. area. Also, if I’m reading this map correctly, no less than three Metro bus lines (J11, J12, and J13) run right past the store at 6108 Marlboro Pike.

The reason this matters is that blacks in the United States commit a disproportionate share of violent crimes compared to the total population. Look at Table 43 of the FBI’s U.S. crime statistics for 2009. 49.3% of those arrested for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter were black, despite blacks making up only 12.4% of the U.S. population. (The reasons black crime rates are so high is are a source of endless debate (see nature vs. nurture, just for starters) and beyond the scope of this essay.)

So all other things being equal, Realco being the source of so many guns eventually used in crime makes sense, since it is the nearest gun store to the district, as well as the gun store situated most closely to a demographic group that suffers from demonstrably higher levels of violent crime than other demographic groups. Thus Occam’s Razor suggests that we look no further than the obvious for the real facts surrounding Realco.

It’s a pity David S. Fallis didn’t feel the need to share this most basic demographic context for crime with his readers.

I have to go off and walk my dog, but I’ll probably post another piece on this subject tomorrow to touch on some angles I don’t have time to address just right now.

(And if anyone has a better source for comprehensive crime statistics broken down by race specifically for D.C. and Prince George’s County, I’d love to take a look at them.)

Edited to add: Here’s my followup to this piece.

And here’s Dwight’s analysis.

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Posted in Crime, Guns, Media Watch | 6 Comments »

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