Steve Sailer: Integration and Immigration

By An Old Friend
Tue, Jul 23, 2019 11:17 p.m.

AOF: Quite a tour d'horizon ...

Integration and Immigration

By Steve Sailer
July 23, 2019

Respectable opinion is trending toward once again viewing "segregation" as the great problem afflicting America.

For example, Senator Kamala Harris is demanding another round of busing in order to use white children to integrate distant schools. (Amusingly, back during the 1970s busing fad, Kamala's husband, crack Los Angeles lawyer Douglas Emhoff, appears to have white-flighted to exurban Agoura High School out near Malibu Canyon.)

But one obvious problem is that America is running out of white students. While whites made up 84.5 percent of public school students in 1970, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center forecast America's public schools will be only 46.2 percent white in the coming school year.

Similarly, celebrity economist Raj Chetty's Big Data analyses of your tax returns have discovered that the best places to raise children are quite white cities like Salt Lake City and rural counties like Sioux County, Iowa. The worst places are Indian reservations like Pine Ridge and heavily black locales, often fast-growing Sunbelt cities like Charlotte.

Even though the top of Chetty's rankings for best counties in the U.S. are dominated by virtually all-white places in the northern Great Plains and Great Basin, he still blames "segregation" for bad outcomes. That leads him to call for more programs to move inner-city blacks to whiter neighborhoods.

For example, Chetty has tracked down what would be the last working-class white neighborhood within the city of Charlotte, East Forest, and is demanding slum blacks be moved there so he can find out if having white neighbors (at least until they flee) solves welfare blacks' problems.

Of course, there aren't many such white working-class refuges left in urban America to use in Chetty's integration experiments. For instance, Chetty's designated victim hood, East Forest, is today only 28 percent white.

One obvious policy response to The Establishment's need for more white people to use in integration schemes would be to reform the immigration system to bring in more of that much-demanded commodity: whites.

For example, the U.S. could recruit Boer families fleeing the high rate of racist violence tolerated by the South African regime.

Or the government could merely adopt objective Big Data measures for assessing the potential impact of immigration applicants, such as their likelihood of evading taxes, going on welfare, being entitled to affirmative action, committing violent crime, drunk driving, littering, and so forth. Rather than dream up ever more ingenious ways to ruin your neighborhood's property values, Professor Chetty could use his data-crunching skills to figure out how the U.S. could let in only the most beneficial would-be immigrants.

Many sensible immigration reforms would likely lead to a higher percentage of whites being allowed to immigrate, which would somewhat ameliorate Senator Harris' craving for white children to bus and Professor Chetty's hunger for white neighbors to absorb the dysfunctions of poor blacks.

And yet reforming the immigration system in a manner that would increase white immigration is considered unspeakable in today's intellectual world.

For example, there was a recent conference on "National Conservatism" in Washington where one of the speakers was the brilliant Penn law professor and neurologist Amy L. Wax.

As a legal scholar, Wax is well aware of the concept of disparate or adverse impact discrimination in which policies that inadvertently have a negative impact on a protected group can be ruled discriminatory even without disparate treatment by race.

Disparate impact originated in the Supreme Court's 1971 Griggs case in which a utility company giving an IQ test to job applicants was ruled to be discriminating because blacks average lower scores.

Griggs didn't outright ban the use of cognitive tests in employment, but did make them more difficult to justify to the EEOC without augmenting them with racial quotas. As Wax wrote in 2012:

Contrary to the Supreme Court's assumption in Griggs, the comparative power of IQ extends even to relatively uncomplicated positions requiring modest skills, such as clerical or retail work. What this means is that hiring on the basis of intelligence—as opposed to other, non-cognitive personal attributes or talents—will almost always produce better-performing workers…. The paucity of non-Asian minorities in competitive positions reflects real differences in human capital and skill.

[Read the rest here.]