[Bret L]

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Abolish The Hispanics!

By Steve Sailer

"Dick The Butcher: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry VI, part II, act IV, scene ii, lines 83–84.

As Peter Brimelow and Edwin S. Rubenstein pointed out in their 1997
National Review cover story Electing a New People, the demographic
changes ushered in by the 1965 Immigration Act and the simultaneous
collapse of immigration controls portend major trouble for the
Republican Party (if anyone cares) and, more seriously, for America.

I will be writing a number of VDARE.COM columns on this fundamental
topic in coming weeks.

First, though, Republicans/ Americans need to grasp that the
conventional wisdom that they must never speak out on demography—race
and ethnicity—was invented by their enemies to defeat them.

John McCain, for instance, followed the Main Stream Media’s advice on
these topics slavishly. How’d that work out for him?
Conversely, the decline in Barack Obama’s political fortunes over the
last three months has been the result of the President’s reflexive
reactions undermining David Axelrod’s carefully-constructed campaign
image of him as the post-racial transcender. (I deconstructed this
myth in my America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story Of Race
And Inheritance")

Obama chose to interject race back into politics—first by his
nomination of Affirmative Action beneficiary Sonia Sotomayor of Ricci
case notoriety; then by his obviously heartfelt but disastrous
intervention in the ludicrous Skip Gates affair, and finally by his
announcement in Guadalajara of his timetable for illegal immigrant
amnesty.

Obama shot himself in the foot by raising the fundamental question of
all politics—Whose side are you on?—just as he was asking voters to
trust him on the infinitely complex health bill.

Moral: a key for the Republicans is to get Obama, and the Democrats in
general, talking about race and ethnicity at every opportunity.

Like we do at VDARE.COM!

OK, now I’ll make my first modest proposal for dealing with
demographic doom:

Let’s abolish the Hispanics!

Not literally, of course. I mean the “ethnicity”. I am suggesting a
fairly novel policy for halting the Hispanic ethnic political
juggernaut that we hear so much about: a national campaign for Ethnic
Equality.

Although we are constantly instructed in the teeth of all the evidence
that race is “just a social construct”, the reality is that “Hispanic”
ethnicity is certainly less of a natural inevitability. Instead, it’s
just a bureaucratic construct of the Nixon Administration’s Office of
Management and Budget.

While the government allows all individuals to self-identify as a
member of a wide selection of races (including “Guamanian or Chamorro”
on the 2000 Census short form), it only recognizes a single ethnicity:
Hispanic. Nobody else is allowed an ethnicity. All others get lumped
together as a nullity: merely Non-Hispanics.

As the Census Bureau says in Racial and Ethnic Classifications Used in
Census 2000 and Beyond: “There are also two minimum categories for
ethnicity: Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino”.

The Bureau tried to explain its system in 2003:

Race and Hispanic origin are two separate concepts in the federal
statistical system.

*

People who are Hispanic may be of any race.
*

People in each race group may be either Hispanic or Not
Hispanic.
*

Each person has two attributes, their race (or races) and
whether or not they are Hispanic.

The Census Bureau’s arcane delineation of ethnicity turns out to be
crucially important, both in the job market and in politics, because
numbers count. Most quotas today are the result of the threat of
discrimination lawsuits over statistical disparities in performance
rather than lawsuits over actual discrimination. That can only be done
if numbers are collected.

Ethnicity may seem like race’s seemingly boring little brother. But
those granted an ethnicity are blessed with privileges, such as the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s presumption that they are
being illegally discriminated against when their hiring rate is less
than “Four-Fifths” as high as that of any other legally recognized
group. This leads to covert hiring quotas, weakened standards, and
other gimmicks that benefit members of the One True Ethnicity at the
expense of the unprotected.

Simple fairness demands that the state instead acknowledge either
everybody’s ethnicity (just as the government counts virtually
everybody’s race) or nobody’s ethnicity (just as it counts nobody’s
religion).

In particular, with the 2010 Census approaching, Americans’ attention
should be focused upon ethnicity. The federal government’s
indefensible definition of ethnicity is a very weak link in the chain
holding together Obama’s divisive Diversity Coalition. Ethnicity
should be a timely issue to raise in time for the November 2010
elections.

How is this unequal treatment of Hispanic vs. “other” ethnicities
morally or politically defensible?

It’s not.

Especially because the beneficiaries of this bureaucratic construct
and the concomitant quota spoils system are primarily post-1965
immigrants (many of them illegal) or their descendents—people who
chose America, warts and all.

Because it’s indefensible, almost nobody ever defends the federal
government’s ethnicity system.

Unfortunately, almost nobody ever attacks the current ethnicity system
either.

For decades, opponents of racial and ethnic preferences have mostly
ignored ethnic preferences for Hispanics while obstinately butting
their heads against preferences’ emotional bastion: special breaks for
blacks.

To be frank, preferences for the descendants of slaves are more or
less the Slavery Tax, a drawn-out form of reparations that white
Americans could very well wind up paying forever.

But when the Nixon Administration formalized racial preferences for
blacks in 1969, there was roughly one potential beneficiary for every
eight white benefactors—a costly burden, but not an unbearable one.

What America can’t afford in the long run, however, are ethnic
preferences for fast-growing immigrant groups. The Census Bureau
projects that Hispanics will increase by 97 million from 2000 to 2050.
Among 15 to 19 year olds in 2050, there would be 99 Hispanic legal
beneficiaries of ethnic preferences for every 100 non-Hispanic white
benefactors.

How is that supposed to work?

Answer: it won’t. It’s nuts. But almost nobody has stopped to think
about it. It’s just been assumed that “ethnic” preferences
automatically tag along with their big brother, racial preferences.

Yet why should that be? After all, there are no religious preferences
in American law. Yet, for example, as Pat Buchanan among others has
pointed out, Catholics are seriously underrepresented in the Ivy
League. [Our Self-Selecting Elite, by Patrick J. Buchanan, January 1,
1999]

Thus Robert Weissberg’s excellent August 23, 2009 VDARE.com column—Is
The Affirmative Action Frankenstein On Its Last Legs?—makes a powerful
case against racial and ethnic preferences, but most of his examples
attack racial quotas for blacks, even though ethnic preferences for
immigrants rest on much shakier political grounds.

Granted, in the past, ethnic preferences have been less economically
debilitating than racial preferences, for three reasons:

* Latinos don’t need quite as much of a thumb on the scale as
blacks do. (For example, in the latest average SAT scores released
today, Hispanics trailed whites by 75 points on the Math SAT, which is
68 percent as large as the white-black gap of 110 points.
* Latinos have been less aggressive than blacks about pushing into
sit-down jobs and about filing disparate impact lawsuits. (But
Hispanic activists are strenuously laboring to assimilate Latinos
toward African-American norms.)
* Until earlier in this decade, African-Americans outnumbered
Latinos.

Still, the tide is turning. The California mortgage meltdown, in which
Hispanic homebuyers played the largest role in defaults, indicates
this clearly. By 2050, according to the Census Bureau, there will be
about three times as many Hispanics in America as there were blacks in
America in 2000, so the cost of Hispanic preferences will be enormous.

Moreover, the political costs of assaulting racial preferences
directly are much greater than taking on ethnic preferences. The
media, for example, finds blacks fascinating but Mexicans boring.

Moreover, the implications of the legal existence of this pan-Hispanic
ethnicity are as dire in politics as in economics.

For instance, earlier this month, we were told over and over that the
Republican Party had permanently sealed its fate when 31 of the 40 GOP
Senators voted against Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina (wise or
otherwise) Supreme Court justice.

Hispanics will never forget, thundered reporters’ sources (who were,
typically, Hispanic politicians, political consultants, marketers and
others who make their livings out of being Hispanic).

It’s not clear, though, that many Mexicans even noticed.

Sotomayor is a “Nuyorican”, a Puerto Rican born in New York. (Her self-
identification, all by itself, is an example of the failure of the
post-1965 American assimilative mechanism).

A high school teacher in Nevada tells me that he brought up
Sotomayor’s nomination a half-dozen times to his mostly Mexican
students:

“Normally, the students instantly seize every opportunity to get me
off task and onto what teachers call a “bird walk.” But each time I
mentioned Sotomayor, I was greeted with blank stares. One boy did say
that he heard she was from Cuba, but that was about it for a response.
The students even seemed happy when I went back to drawing diagrams on
the blackboard.”

These Mexican kids’ reaction is perfectly natural. None of them have
any Puerto Rican relatives.

The Hispanic electoral tidal wave you always hear about actually
consists of an artificial agglomeration of people who don’t share the
elemental ties of race, looks, national origin, cuisine—or even
language (Linda Chavez's son was placed in “bilingual” i.e. Spanish-
language classes by public school bureaucrats simply because his first
name was Pablo. Chavez’ family have not spoken Spanish for
generations.)

In fact, many “Hispanics” dislike each other due to national, racial
and class divides. Honduras, for example, was invaded by El Salvador
in 1967 after a World Cup qualifying soccer game. Thousands died. And,
as the recent coup in Honduras showed once again, Latin Americans are
sorely divided along overlapping lines of race and class. Just ask
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—he’ll tell you!

What “Hispanics” do share now is legal privilege. By granting
Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Paraguayans etc. etc. preferences for
being “Hispanic”, Nixon and the federal bureaucracy conjured up a pan-
Hispanic political class dedicated to uniting together to defend this
special treatment. As Peter Brimelow wrote in Alien Nation back in
1995:

"Symptomatic of the American anti-idea: the emergence of a strange
anti-nation inside the United States—the so-called "Hispanics". [Page
218]

As long as Hispanic preferences exist, this Hispanic elite will side
overwhelmingly with the party more favorable to affirmative action,
the Democrats.

Thus, while Republicans typically lose about 2 to 1 among Latino
voters, they are outnumbered 12 to 1 among Latino elected officials.

From the perspective of the long-term health of the Republican Party,
the only solution is to abolish “ethnic” preferences—and the sooner
the better.

Of course, as Christopher Caldwell has noted in his recent book
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the
West:

"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative
action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a
world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too
strong."

Nevertheless, decisive action can declaw and defund a seemingly
powerful lobby. For example, for 30 years “bilingual” educators grew
more numerous and better organized off the taxpayers’ money.
Essentially no politicians, least of all the hapless California GOP,
dared take on this ever-growing lobby. In 1998, though, Ron Unz’s
Proposition 227 put the abolition of bilingual education directly to
the voters of California. And they agreed with Unz 61-39.

With the bilingual Ed lobby’s myth of inevitable triumph punctured,
the Bush Administration’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act—otherwise so
softheaded—cut back on bilingualism’s federal mandates. Today,
bilingual Ed is far from dead, but Unz’s well-placed blow has left it
close to dead in the water politically.

How should we offer Ethnic Equality?

· Either—everybody should be allowed to choose an ethnicity—
Italian, Okinawan, German, Guatemalan, Barbadian, Navajo, or whatever—
and all laws and regulations, including the Four-Fifths Rule should
apply equally to all ethnicities.

(Administratively, data collection would be simple: the Census Bureau
currently asks about “ancestry”, which could simply be renamed
“ethnicity”.)

· OR—nobody should have a legally recognized ethnicity.
Ethnicity would be treated by the government like religion, rather
than like race.

You can win a discrimination lawsuit over disparate treatment due to
your religion, but you can’t win one based on disparate statistical
impact on your co-religionists. Hence, there are no religious quotas.

Note that the public doesn’t have to understand the concept of
“disparate impact”. (How many New York Times columnists do you think
understand it?) All that voters need is to have an opinion on the
unfairness of one ethnicity being more equal than all other
ethnicities.

And unfairness is something that people can’t help having feelings
about.

Which form of Ethnic Equality should we have: Ethnicity for Everybody
or for Nobody?

Well, in the spirit of bipartisanship upon which Barack Obama ran for
President, I think we should let him should make the choice between
Everybody and Nobody.

What could be more just than that? It’s like when you have to divide
one desert between two children. The fairest way is to announce that
one will cut and the other will pick which piece he wants.

To make the deal even better, I’d go so far as to offer the President
a historic compromise: permanent racial preferences for the
descendants of American slaves (and for tribally registered American
Indians, while we’re at it) in return for Ethnic Equality.

Mr. Obama, you can achieve a historic victory for the black race, you
can fulfill the “dreams from your father”, just by choosing either
Ethnicity for Everybody or Ethnicity for Nobody.

Take your time, Mr. President. Talk it over with the public! Let’s
have a national conversation on ethnic preferences!

After all, as an old discrimination lawyer, that’s your field of
professional expertise.

Seriously…taking preferences away from Hispanics in return for
preserving them for blacks is the last thing David Axelrod wants Obama
to talk about—an “alliance of the diverse” always threatens to
dissolve into an oxymoron (which is exactly why making him talk about
it should be a GOP priority).

The Republicans are never going to win a majority of Latinos. But they
can definitely point out dispiriting reasons for Hispanics to not
trust black Democratic politicians.

For years, the Main Stream Media promoted the assumption that the GOP
must increase its share of minority votes to survive.

But achieving that’s unlikely (which is why the MSM recommends it). A
more plausible strategy is for the GOP to mobilize a higher white
turnout and get a greater share of the white vote, while diluting
minority voting through a divide and conquer strategy emphasizing
issues that spotlight minorities’ conflicting interests.

Of course, in 2008, McCain managed to do the exact opposite by running
away from all racial and ethnic issues, thus deflating the white
turnout rate, while Obama excited a broad increase in turnout among
nonwhites.

Question: What if Obama picks the “Ethnicity for Everybody” option?
Then the EEOC’s idiotic Four-Fifths Rule for determining disparate
impact would have to be applied to scores of different ethnicities—
which we couldn’t possibly afford?

My answer: Of course you’re right. We couldn’t afford it.

Still, you have to admit, the unaffordability of disparate impact is
an excellent topic for public discussion. If applying disparate impact
law to a majority of Americans would bankrupt the country now,
wouldn’t it also bankrupt the country in the future when whites are a
minority?

Don’t worry, though. Obama can’t pick the “Ethnicity for Everybody”
option.

Why not?

Because Jewish groups would figure out that, if “Everybody” gets an
ethnicity legally protected from disparate impact, that would squeeze
Jews very badly.

Jewish neoconservatives took the lead in fighting racial quotas in the
1970s. They saw them as posing the same threat to Jewish success as
did the quotas limiting Jewish admissions to the Ivy League in the
1920s. Moreover, many Jews back in the 1970s had lower-level civil
service jobs, such as the public school teachers who were threatened
by black political empowerment—witness the ferocious late 1960s Ocean
Hill-Brownsville black-Jewish showdown in which black politicians in
Brooklyn tried to fire hundreds of Jewish teachers.

About a decade or so ago, however, neocon flagship Commentary Magazine
largely lost enthusiasm for decrying racial quotas. (Search
“Affirmative Action” on Commentary’s website here). Perhaps that was
because the editors realized that Jews have largely moved on to higher
level jobs where preferences typically aren’t yet sizable enough to
threaten Jewish primacy. Or perhaps they figured out that nobody would
dare propose applying quotas to Jews, even if there was a quota on
whites overall. (Ask Commentary).

But this is exactly what the “Everybody” Option, applying the Four-
Fifths Rule to white ethnicities, would do.

Emphatically, it would not be good for the Jews.

These calculations would therefore drive Jewish opinion toward what is
actually the best solution: the “Nobody” option, in which ethnicity is
treated like religion, not race.

Instructive parallel: in 1956, when the Census Bureau announced it
would ask Americans about their religion in its next survey, it was
Jewish organizations who objected so strongly that the plan was
scrapped.

Revitalizing Jewish opposition to preferences and quotas would be
decisive.

Deconstructing Nixon’s legal concoction of Hispanic ethnicity
certainly won’t eliminate all the problems caused by mass immigration
from south of the border.

But it would be a start.

Abolishing the “Hispanic” ethnicity from government purview would be
good for America, good for the GOP—and bad for Barack Obama.

What’s not to like?"

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090826_hispanics.htm