Counterstereotypical Fact of the Day

Those men sitting in the park are mostly black. If Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama won’t stand up for black men, 1/3 of whom aren’t in the labor force, then somebody has to.

Disliking Hispanics because they take jobs from blacks is just as racist as those whites in the early twentieth century who complained about blacks taking jobs from whites. Racism in favor of an ethnic minority is just as bad as racism in favor of an ethnic majority.

People shouldn’t stand up for black men, people should stand up for all human beings, period. Colorblindness is every human beings’ absolute moral duty.

Also does anyone else think it’s hilarious that the person that VDare site was named for (Virginia Dare) was the daughter illegal immigrants?

Back to the original topic, this probably makes sense in light of Bryan’s earlier posts on personality and success. Since a lot of Hispanic men are immigrants they are probably self-selected to be driven and hard-working, whereas native-born blacks and whites are genetically random, so have a more even distribution of people incapable of holding jobs.

Evan,
VDare is tribal, not universalist, so there is no irony from their perspective.

Counterstereotypical? Hispanic men are famously hard workers — any typically have several jobs. At least, this is known to be true for immigrants and first generation Hispanics. Second and third, etc. generation Hispanics, who get sucked into the welfare mentality, unfortunately have a very different reputation. This is true among Hispanics as well (something about which I know, being married to a Mexican-American woman).

Evan wrote:

Disliking Hispanics because they take jobs from blacks is just as racist as those whites in the early twentieth century who complained about blacks taking jobs from whites.

And it doesn’t even matter. If immigrants come to work, racists will complain about them “stealing our jobs.” If not, racists will complain about them trying to get on welfare (despite the fact, as Jaap pointed out, that they can’t get welfare because they’re illegal).

I’m in favor of deporting a lot of people — starting with the ones who complain about immigration. I say, send ’em back to wherever *their* ancestors came from!

I have the same question a few others had- why is this counterstereotypical? Immigrants in the US are accused of taking jobs from citizens.

Age distros for whites and hispanics are here, slide 6, and yes, they differ quite a lot:

http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hispanic/ppl-165/slideshow/02show.ppt

I’d guess that whites almost certainly also retire earlier, because they are likely to make more money per annum for various reasons (for one, they are much more likely to go to college).

Hispanics are 3.7x times likelier than whites to be in jail, according to Sailer. Perhaps those are not accounted for. No doubt this population, if free, would have low labor participation.

A look at the paper linked from Caplan’s source shows that yes, being in college or grad school is counted as labor non-participation (p 34). Again, whites are much more likely to go to college, not to mention grad school.

Oops, I should have noticed the link in the original article. My bad.

The “lazy Mexican” stereotype does seem to be fading rapidly. I don’t think I’ve heard that one in years. My perception is that the prevailing stereotype these days is the opposite: Hispanic workers who will do damn near any job they can get.

Also, interesting point to consider: Hispanic is not synonymous with immigrant.

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Stephen Krueger, our immigration policy isn’t partial towards Mexico because people in power happen to like Mexicans, it’s partial to Mexico because the cost of travel between Mexico and the USA is cheap due to their geographical closeness. I’m sure we’d be picking from more colors of the rainbow if there were more countries with borders directly touching the USA, but alas, there are only 2. Injustices are only injustices if they are caused by other humans, not by continental drift.

“And how about Americans should stand up for Americans? Let’s acknowledge that the USA can’t possible right every wrong in the world, and some people will be left out because of it. So the debate is where do we stop?”

The reason the U.S. can’t right every wrong in the world is that it doesn’t have the resources. An unlimited immigration or unlimited guest worker policy would actually save resources since we’d no longer be wasting huge amounts of money on border patrols. All we’d have to do to do good is do nothing.

“A person isn’t “stand[ing] up for all human beings” if what they are proposing is shown to directly hurt another group of men. ”

I call for standing up to give everyone an equal right to try to prove themselves in our economy. As cliched as it is to say it, equal rights doesn’t mean equal results. Also, the whole “illegals are harming blacks by taking their jobs” is sort of rooted in the make-work bias. Work is not a scarce resource that needs to be conserved.

Moron, what I meant is that because whites and blacks have been here longer, they are more likely to be random because they have had more time to breed and have previously non-dominant genes come to the front. And while whites may be non-random I don’t know about blacks. I thought slave raiders just randomly kidnapped pretty much anyone they could find. The only real selection there I can think of is “able to survive an arduous ocean voyage,” which might explain why African Americans have slightly unusual kidneys compared to the rest of the population.

EVAN Said “Moron, what I meant is that because whites and blacks have been here longer, they are more likely to be random because they have had more time to breed and have previously non-dominant genes come to the front. And while whites may be non-random I don’t know about blacks. I thought slave raiders just randomly kidnapped pretty much anyone they could find. The only real selection there I can think of is “able to survive an arduous ocean voyage,” which might explain why African Americans have slightly unusual kidneys compared to the rest of the population.”

The Slave raiders did not “randomly kidnapped pretty much everyone they could find.” They bought stock of men and women in which they assumed had good abilities at taking orders and the hardiness to survive the N. American climate. That worked fine for the time period, but I think it is fairly obvious it did not work so well for a subgroup that inhabit all modern major US cities and have now been surpassed in every possible way by hispanic immigrants. But that being said the same argument could be made that long term importing a class of 3rd world laborers may not translate into a modern technical computer driven economy. Maybe it can, but is it worth a risk?

“Forget the question of whether the jobs in question are for blacks, whites, or whatever. Tell me why it is that economists are the ones who teach that the law of supply and demand is a law — until we start discussing immigration?”

You’re forgetting about the important complement to the law of supply and demand, Say’s Law. It basically goes like this: When demand of a commodity stays the same, but supply increases, prices of the commodity (labor in this case) go down (the law of supply and demand). Because the price is suddenly lower people who never even considered using that commodity before use it, so the demand goes up (Say’s law). This eventually returns the price to normal. Sometimes minimum wage laws and other such things screw this process up, but generally it works.

This is how the country was industrialized. Farm machines displaced farm workers by increasing the supply of labor. The law of supply and demand made the price of labor go down because humans now had to compete with machines. Since the price of labor was down, industrialists could now afford to hire new workers, so factories grew and the country was industrialized, thanks to Say’s Law.

Tell me, if you lived back then, would you have opposed mechanized farming? Because replacing human labor with mechanical labor is not really any different from replacing it with the labor of a different group of humans. It was hard for those farmers to lose their jobs to the McCormack Reaper and those other machines, but their quality of life generally improved in the long run, and the quality of life of the descendants definitely has.

I see bringing in large amounts of new laborers as identical to inventing a new labor-saving machine. In both cases the process will increase the amount of labor available, allowing us to do new things with it that we previously couldn’t imagine. I’m incredibly excited to see what new industries we’ll create.

“Unless you’re an anarchist who doesn’t think governments should exist, let alone enforce their own borders? In which case you and I aren’t even debating apples to apples.”

I think governments should exist, but I don’t think they should enforce their own borders. This is because I agree with Arnold Kling that “exit is more important than voice.” People should be able to travel from country to country as easily as they can travel from state to state today. That way governments with bad policies will be left with no citizens, while governments with good ones will have a huge tax base.

“The right, or the opportunity? I fail to see how this can be made into a “right” by any line of reasoning.”

Rights aren’t “made.” They’re something you’re born with. I suppose “right to participate in the economy” sounded too much like a positive right (which I agree are stupid) and that’s where the confusion arose. What I meant to say is that everyone has a right to not be stopped by other people’s use of force from trying to participate in the economy.

Stephen Krueger, I have one question for you. You probably already know this, but back in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl, a large amount of people from farms in Oklahoma and other devastated places tried to find jobs in California, where they were rather badly treated because the locals feared they’d take their jobs. Would you have supported the way the Californians treated the Ohkies if you’d lived in California back then, or opposed it? Would you have helped them try to stop native Californian workers from being displaced by the law of supply of demand, or is it okay if the people doing the displacing are from the same country?

“The Slave raiders did not “randomly kidnapped pretty much everyone they could find.” They bought stock of men and women in which they assumed had good abilities at taking orders and the hardiness to survive the N. American climate.”

Yes, I admit that slave raiding was probably less random than I initially thought.

Evan,

You’re forgetting about the important complement to the law of supply and demand, Say’s Law.

I admit I’m not an economist and had not heard of this (my undergrad economics class was an utter waste of time). Will give it some thought — and thanks, I learned something new.

I think governments should exist, but I don’t think they should enforce their own borders.

I’ve heard this theory before, but I somehow don’t see it working in practice. All the reasons why would make for a long story but here’s a couple.

For one thing, national security secrets do in fact exist. Protecting them has already been a problem, just with the level of open people movement we have now. Making people movement even easier would make that problem even worse. This is not a trivial issue, unless you think governments shouldn’t be able to defend their borders, which I don’t think you’re arguing. ?

For another, you may be right that dumping big loads of suddenly unemployed farmers on the job market isn’t a bad thing for the economy in the long run. But it’s a real problem for those unemployed farmers at the moment their families are starving.

Today I’m in the “white collar professional” class. If I got laid off it’d be bad news, but I wouldn’t be starving anytime soon. When I was growing up, that was not at all the case. I find it hard to justify putting those poor people we’ve already got, through this kind of misery, in the name of “helping the US economy in the long run”.

I argue still, those Mexican laborers do not in any sense have the “right” to bring such times upon the laborers who are already here. Though if it happened due to technological innovation I’d put it more in the category of “acts of God” for lack of a better term. But this is quite different from us as a nation, consciously deciding to suddenly allow a big wave of unskilled immigrants into the country.

Letting a big wave of unskilled Mexicans into the country at the same time technology was already displacing our existing unskilled labor base, would be a bad idea. There’s already major risk of social unrest, which has in past brought us some of our worst legislation. Immigrant waves would only add to it.

Common sense still tells me: at any given moment there is some real upper bound on how many immigrants a nation can absorb, a) in any given segment of its economy and b) in an overall sense.

For one thing, our infrastructure (roads etc) are of a fixed size at any given moment.

And socially all those immigrants need to be absorbed and “socialized”, if you will. They need to learn how we do business here. There’s got to be some limit as to how much you can dilute the American population base with immigrants, before you shift it’s basic social structure fundamentally. I’m talking about destruction of that nebulous thing I’ve heard called “social capital” (sorry but I fail to see how Mexicans have much good to offer in this category, have seen how their culture works).

Practically speaking, I don’t see how a nation can not put some kind of control the influx of immigrants.

Now, given all that — I’m open to the prospect that we’ve been choking off the flow more than we really needed to, much of the time. But this is quite different from saying we shouldn’t impose any control at all over the flow.