9 Responses to Side Trip!

1. PRCalDude
   June 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 pm

   Dan,

   I’d like to hear your take on this:
   http://vdare.com/sailer/080601_barone.htm

2. Dan tdaxp
   June 5th, 2008 at 1:50 am

   PRCalDude,

   Thanks for the question.

   The VDare article mixes a substantive complaing with what I believe is a statistical confusion.

   Substantively, the complaint that:

   First, three or four generations is a long time to wait for the problems caused by today’s illegal immigration to abate.

   Is fair. The benefits of immigration are well known and often stated (Everything from greater economic growth to more labor in the country’s laborXcapitalXland power equation). The side effect, that you have a delay until you reform an integrated society, is also well known. Whether you want one or the other is the sort of trade-off that politics is made for.

   Statistically, they conclusion that:

   Their multiple regression analyses show that the key factor, driving all the others, is education. They conclude:

   “Throughout this book, our statistical models have shown that the low education levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of assimilation, thus reinforcing a range of ethnic boundaries between them and white Americans.”

   Is interesting, but I think expected. The study finds that holding everything else equal, low-education is a chronic problem. Which is another way of saying that if you factor out everything that can help you overcome poor education, you won’t overcome poor education.

   The summary notes that education is a key factor. This is a way of saying that

   Education affects income more than income affects education
   Education affects family size more than family size affects education
   Education affects life expectency more than life expectency affects education
   & so on.

   The solution for this is obvious: improve education, and a lot of things get better.

   The VDare article interprets this as saying that one should not import low-education immigrants, but it doesn’t address whether low-education immigrants do worse or better than low-education natives. You’d need a comparison between immigrants and natives to do that.

3. PRCalDude
   June 7th, 2008 at 9:24 pm

   Dan,

   Much is made of improving education for blacks and hispanics. The NCLB act was supposed to do that, and there have been several other initiatives. The thing about education is, it requires parent cooperation. The parent has to ensure that the kid goes to school, pays attention, stays out of trouble, and does their homework. If a culture or race or whatever doesn’t have these family values, little can be done by the government. The government can’t force good parenting. If anything, nanny-statism has a worse effect on parenting just leaving it alone, because it provides welfare to people who are in a certain situation, thereby incentivizing that situation.

   I’ve got anecdotal evidence that Mexican parents are horrible in following through on their children’s education as I know several teachers in LA Unified, which is almost entirely Mexican. Perhaps the first step is to convince Mexicans to stop shooting one another and indulging in other unsafe behavior, but as we’ve seen with the blacks, there doesn’t seem to be any way to accomplish that. The group must decide to change itself.

4. Dan tdaxp
   June 7th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

   PRCalDude,

   NCLB introduces standardized metrics into public schools. It is not a solution to anything, but the first stage of applying scientific quality control (of which Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and the rest are buzzword implementations). Scientific management allows you to apply mass production to education, letting you get away with a low-cost, low-quality labor force. So NCLB is a rational first step in industrializing education, but it’s nothing in itself.

   Do you have any data on the generational assimilation of latinos and Mexicans?

5. PRCalDude
   June 9th, 2008 at 8:05 am

   Dan,

   There’s plenty of data in this report. Linda Chavez wrote a book also, but I haven’t read it and any positive claims in it would certainly not correspond to reality, as I’m a staunch believer in the correspondence theory of truth. Then there was the City Journal article on Hispanic illegitimacy, which one of my commenters can vouch for because he works in a hospital in Chicago.

   Lastly, you can’t educate Mexicans if they won’t even go to school.

6. Dan tdaxp
   June 9th, 2008 at 3:13 pm

   PRCalDude,

   Thanks for the links.

   The statistics mentioned are to be expected. We are importing large numbers of uneducated hispanics as manual laborers. Statistics that thus imply hispanics are disproportionately uneducated manual laborerers are thus not a surprise.

   The same could be said for immigrants from the mezzogiorno a century ago.

   Opponents of the large-scale uneducated immigration should demonstrate that immigrants are not assimilating within three generations as previous similar groups have.

7. PRCalDude
   June 11th, 2008 at 9:00 am

   Opponents of the large-scale uneducated immigration should demonstrate that immigrants are not assimilating within three generations as previous similar groups have.

   Uh, that’s what Telles and Ortiz’ data shows.

8. Dan tdaxp
   June 11th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

   PRCalDude,

   Recall my previous discussion of factor analysis. Telles & Ortiz shows that, among immigrants, the central impediment to assimilation is education. I didn’t see anything about a general failure to assimilate. If that finding is in their study, can you point me to it?

9. PRCalDude
   June 11th, 2008 at 4:44 pm

   Here’s the Amazon reviews that summarize some of the findings.

   I’ve gone to well-funded schools that had a large amount of Mexicans my entire life. All of the high schools in Huntington Beach, where I went to high school, were well funded. Same thing at the junior high I went to in Santa Barbara, which is a fantastically wealthy area where there are no underfunded schools The Mexicans did poorly in class and didn’t go on to college. I saw almost none at UCLA in any of the technical majors and very few overall at the school, despite their composition of the total population of California. School funding is not the issue. It can’t possibly correspond to reality. What is the issue is that they don’t value education and no teachers with half a brain want to work at a Mexican school because of the crime.

   My colleague’s wife is a teacher in LA Unified and she reports that it was only this year that her student’s parents started showing up for parent-teacher meetings. My wife’s friend’s husband reports identical apathy in his school district.

   I’ll tell you what, we should split the cost of this book and read it. I think we’re headed towards a two-tiered system, but that’s what the American elite want.

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