Linda Chavez, Racist

After having denigrated her fellow conservatives (?) as bigots for opposing amnesty, Chavez returns to say maybe she went a bit too far -- she was just "blowing off steam" -- but then accuse Heather MacDonald and numerous others of anti-Latio hatred once again. Her piece is titled "The Company You Keep," an allusion to fellow-travelling with racists, and the subtitle is "In Search of Anti-Hispanic Hostility," a reference to William F. Buckley's (properly) accusatory essay "In Search of Anti-Semitism," which she herself notes in her article.

So she's saying she went too far -- right before re-accusing all who oppose her of anti-Hispanic animus anew.

Responses from NRO writers follow. Heather MacDonald's response starting on page 2 is the toughest and most interesting.

Also in line for a Chavez thrashing is the Centers for Disease Control, which reports that 48 percent of all Hispanic births in 2005 occurred outside of marriage, compared with 25 percent of white births and 16 percent of Asian births. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country — over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the CDC. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women.

Conservatives have long decried the steady rise in American illegitimacy as a bellwether of social breakdown. The national illegitimacy rate and the white illegitimacy rate — both considerably lower than the Hispanic rate — are considered a dangerous portent for the future. But when it comes to Hispanic illegitimacy, Chavez tells us not to worry, because “most Hispanic children are being raised by two parents.” But so are most white children and most American children on average, without that fact diminishing justified concern over out-of-wedlock child-rearing. And the percentage of children born to U.S.-born Hispanics who are being raised by their actual parents — 56 percent, according to the March 2003 Current Population Survey — is not exactly cause for celebration.

...

To deny a Hispanic gang and crime problem simply defies reality. Chavez focuses exclusively on first-generation Mexicans to try to rebut my writing on Hispanic crime. But I myself have pointed out “the relatively low crime rate among immigrants.” I added, however, that “unless we can prevent immigrants from having children, a high level of immigration translates to increased levels of crime. Between the foreign-born generation and their American children, the incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans jumps more than eightfold, resulting in an incarceration rate that is 3.45 times higher than that of whites, according to an analysis of 2000 census data by the pro-immigrant Migration Policy Institute.”

It is hardly surprising that one of a particular ethnic extraction would hold fellow members of that ethnicity in high esteem. It is not criminal that such a person would seek to champion their own. Nor is it particularly blameworthy.

But it's absurd for Linda Chavez, simply because she has a sort of racist -- or at least race-based -- blood-affinity for fellow Hispanics, to demand that we share in her exuberance for her fellow Hispanics and shrug off massive economic, cultural, security, and law-enforcement concerns in order to join the fiesta.

Tens of thousands of Chinese are waiting for US Visas. Hundreds of thousands more would apply if we opened the doors to Chinese immigration. Millions might come if we simply put out word that no formal legal process would be necessary for immigrating to America, but rather any Chinese immigrant who managed to sneak into the country would be welcomed as de facto American with a formal amnesty and legalization on the way.

Linda Chavez, one should note, is not pushing for greater allowances for Chinese immigrants. Is she racist? Does she have some anti-Chinese hostility in her? Why does she push only the agenda of her own "race" (some question whether this term is applicable here, but as Chavez uses the concept, let's go with it) much like the KKK only seems to care about European Prostestant Americans?

And this goes double for Africans, whose continent, it seems, plumbs new depths of misery, privation, and senseless violence every month. Certainly we could find 12 million Africans who would like to legally come to America on a "pathway to citizenship." Why should their aspirations be ignored? Does Linda Chavez just not have a "high negro tolerance level"?

Laotians, Vietnamese, Burmese... even caucasians from the poorer quarters of New Europe. If our mission is merely to improve the lot of desperate, prosperity-hungry foreigners, we could do so fairly easily.

We could throw open the doors of citizenship to any group of the word's poor and desperate. And yet Linda Chavez agitates only for extending such a boon to one "race" -- her own. And yet we're the racists, despite the fact that our objections stem not from a hostility to any particular race but from a general reluctance to take responsbility for several dozen million more of the world's poor, uneducated, and low-skilled, especially given we haven't yet really taken care of our current cadre of the poor, uneducated, and low-skilled yet.

To hell with her. I think Ramsh Ponuru had it right the first time when he suggested, more or less, that she should be shunned. We oughtn't truck with such racists.

People who live in ethinic identity-politics houses should cast racist stones, Linda.

posted by Ace at 11:04 PM

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