O Tempora, O Mores! (February, 2000)
American Renaissance, February 2000
Just when we thought the Soviet Union was gone for good, it reappears in the United States. Atlanta Braves relief pitcher, John Rocker, will undergo a psychological evaluation because he told Sports Illustrated that New York City is so full of foreigners it makes him feel like a stranger. He also said he doesn’t like to share the subway with AIDS carriers and unwed mothers. After the shrink’s report comes in, baseball commissioner Bud Selig will choose an appropriate punishment. It doesn’t matter that Mr. Rocker, 25, has groveled piteously and insisted he is not “racist.” He is now a dissident, and like Soviets who doubted Communist orthodoxy, the only sane player in baseball has to have his head examined. (Ronald Blum, Baseball Orders Rocker to Undergo Psychological Tests, AP, Jan. 6, 2000.)
Professional sports are full of rapists, robbers, and all manner of thugs. Many players leave a trail of illegitimate children from coast to coast. But no one can remember anyone being ordered to have his head examined. George W. Bush is all for it for Mr. Rocker, of course. “The fellow said some incredibly offensive things,” he explained. “He is a public person. And I appreciate them [the baseball authorities] trying to get the man help.” (Bush Agrees With Rocker Decision, AP, Jan. 10, 2000)
No Nonsense in Lusaka
Dawson Lupunga is the Community Development Minister for the African nation of Zambia. He has vowed to rid the capital city Lusaka of blind beggars because they give visitors the “wrong impression.” Mr. Lupunga singled out blind beggars as “work-shy.” “Begging is easy,” he says. “They don’t sweat when they ask for money. They don’t want to till the land. That is why they beg.” He complains that the blind have been given too much freedom under what he calls the current regime of democratic rule. Mr. Lupunga, a wealthy farmer, says Zambians should not expect government handouts and that everyone, including the disabled, must work for a living. In October, police drove 200 blind people out of the city and many are now said to be in a resettlement camp in the north of the country. Thousands more are reportedly in hiding in the townships around the capital, fearing forcible removal. (Ishbel Matheson, Destitute Blind Are Thrown Out of Lusaka, Telegraph (London), November 16, 1999.)
Corrupting the Japanese
Japan is a homogeneous country whose population is only one percent non-Japanese, and every year only about 20 people meet its strict definition of a “refugee.” It has no racial or ethnic anti-discrimination laws, and foreigners are sometimes barred from bars, clubs, public baths, and anywhere else Japanese feel like being among themselves. A recent court case may have breached this freedom of association.
Ana Bortz is a commentator for Brazilian television who came to Japan six years ago. Recently she was escorted out of a jewelry store because the proprietors didn’t like the way she was acting and because they thought Brazilians are more likely to commit robberies than Japanese. Miss Bortz sued the owners under, of all things, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Japan stupidly signed in 1996. A Shizuoka District Court judge ruled that the jewelry store owner violated Japan’s treaty obligations, and awarded Miss Bortz $47,000 in damages. The New York Times heralds Miss Bortz as someone who may go down in history as the Rosa Parks of Japan. (Howard French, Japan’s Cultural Bias Against Foreigners Comes Under Attack, New York Times, Nov. 15, 1999.)
Making Waves
AR editor Jared Taylor has been a guest on about 20 radio programs to discuss an opinion poll commissioned by the New Century Foundation. Mr. Taylor noted that many whites express support for diversity in the abstract but oppose it when asked about its specific consequences. Because the NCF press release simply reported the poll results and invited further inquiry, some very liberal hosts invited Mr. Taylor to speak. A number of Public Radio stations, for example, expected him to join in hand-wringing over lingering white “racism,” but were disappointed. A typical exchange:
Q: So what can we do to help whites overcome their fears about becoming a minority?
A: Those fears are legitimate and any attempt to downplay or pooh-pooh them is simply an expression of the anti-white desire to see whites displaced by non-whites. We encourage whites not just to express these fears but to act on them.
It is easy to imagine the astonished gibbering this provoked.
On December 27th, the Washington Times published an article called “Poll Finds Ambivalence About Diversity,” and Mr. Taylor was interviewed about the poll by a reporter for The Trentonian (NJ) newspaper.
Be Tolerant or Else!
New Hazelton is a town in British Columbia in an area where about half the people are Gitksan Indians. According to school board policy, elementary school students must be “sensitized” to “native cultures” by attending courses taught by Gitksan Indians. Predictably, the Indians started telling the students how much finer and nobler than whites they were. They also started teaching Indian religion.
One father pulled a seventh-grade boy out of class when he came home saying that Indians were superior to whites because they love nature. Another boy’s parents did the same thing when he reported that God had saved the Gitksan Indians with a clam shell and an eagle feather. The parents thought this was too close to religious instruction, and asked for more work on reading and arithmetic instead. The school has suspended the students who would not attend the sessions, and has banned them from school property. Sharon Beedle, the acting school superintendent, says sensitivity classes correct a curriculum that is “Euro-centric,” and that skipping them is like refusing to go to science class. (Stewart Bell, B.C. School Ejects Boys for Refusing Indian Class, National Post (Canada), Nov. 11, 1999.)
Boston Herald columnist Don Feder has written a column on diversity that could have appeared in AR. Here are excerpts:
Of the many myths of liberalism, perhaps the most improbable is the notion that diversity makes us stronger. As immigrants arrived, the native-born fled. New York [City]’s non-Hispanic white population has plummeted from 63 percent in 1970 to 35 percent today. Due to immigration, nationally, whites will constitute a minority by 2050.
In New York City, the fastest growing immigrant groups are from Ghana, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Egypt. These countries are all impoverished, backward and far removed from our culture.
Many of us in the great, overburdened middle class understand what the elite does not: That due to unrestrained immigration and multiculturalism, America is losing it’s identity.
Has a country ever grown stronger through disunity? Our differences may make us interesting; they do not unite us. What happens when a growing portion of the population feels no allegiance to our national ideals, disdains our heroes and clings to its separateness?
The elite celebrates diversity; others have to live with it. (Don Feder, Divided, We Do Not Stand For Anything, Boston Herald, November 15, 1999.)
Doesn’t Look Jewish
National Catholic Reporter is one of the best-known Catholic papers in the country. It recently held a contest to update the image of Christ for the new millennium, and drew 1,700 entries from 19 countries. The winner was Janet McKenzie, a 51-year-old from Island Pond, Vermont who entered a painting called “Jesus of the People.” Miss McKenzie, a self-described “devout agnostic,” will collect $2,000 for showing Jesus as a black and with an Asian Yin-Yang and a feather symbolizing American Indian spirituality. The background is pink. Jesus of the People was featured on the cover of a special millennium issue of National Catholic Reporter.
Editor Michael Farrell writes, “We got a strong impression that the era of the blond, blue-eyed Jesus is over. When the church was overwhelmingly a Western institution, we made Jesus in our likeness . . . This work of art may be prophetic of where and how Christianity will flourish in the next millennium or two.” (David Crary, Updated Jesus Has Dark Skin, AP, December 13, 1999.)
Mr. Farrell has a point; today, whites are a minority of the world’s Christians. Fifty-eight percent of Protestants live in Latin America. So do two thirds of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians — whose churches began relatively recently in the United States. Last year, at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglicans, only 316 of the 736 bishops were from Europe or the U.S. Africa sent 224 and Asia sent 95. One in three Roman Catholics is a Third-Worlder, and both Asia and Africa have more Cardinals than the United States (15 and 14, as opposed to 12).
Christianity particularly appeals to non-white women. Seventy percent of members of African churches are women as are 70 percent of Latin American Pentecostals. In China, 80 percent of church members are women, as are most of the leaders of Korean church cell groups. “Jesus of the People” might as well be a woman. (Gayle White, Mission Fields Come Full Circle, Washington Times, Jan. 10, 2000, p. A10.)
The Usual Story
Last April, Omobonike Odegbami, a graduate student at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, said she was getting threatening, racially-charged e-mail. The campus newspaper ran a front-page story about her and the FBI started investigating classmates and instructors. Miss Odegbami eventually admitted she sent the e-mail to herself and in December was sentenced to 200 hours of community service, mental health counseling at her own expense, and to write a letter of apology in the campus newspaper. She gave no explanation for her behavior and apparently none was asked. (Jennifer Freehan, Woman Sentenced in Racist E-Mail Hoax, Toledo Blade, December 24, 1999.)
Not a Bias Crime
In Manhattan, a white, 25-year-old television producer was walking home from work early one December morning when a black man grabbed her and jabbed something hard into her back. He reportedly threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate and forced the woman into a stairwell, where he raped, sodomized and beat her. According to news reports: “During the attack, the assailant, who is black, also berated his white victim with racial curses, police sources say. But cops did not classify it as a bias crime.” (Murray Weiss, Don Kaplan, Paula Doneman and Cathy Burke, Cops Fume Over Lousy Video of 6th Ave. Rapist, New York Post, December 22, 1999.)
NBC Surrenders
Last summer non-whites threatened to boycott television networks because there aren’t enough minority characters on new network programs. NBC has now worked out a deal with the NAACP. Next fall, it will hire at least one new non-white writer for all its second-year programs, and will encourage producers to hire non-whites for free-lance writing. NBC will also increase job-training and internship positions for non-whites and has promised to spend an additional $10 million on purchases from minority-owned businesses over the next 18 months. ABC, CBS and Fox are all expected to announce similar programs; somehow there is no word on whether Black Entertainment Television or the Hispanic networks Univision and Telemundo are planning similar diversity efforts. (NBC to Hire More Minorities As Part of Deal With NAACP, Washington Times, January 6, 2000, p. A2.)
A day after NBC threw in the towel, the minority coalition that had pressed for more non-whites splintered over the deal. Hispanics, Asians and American Indians complained that NAACP head, Kweisi Mfume, did not consider or consult them. Esteban Torres, a spokesman for Hispanics in the coalition, said Mr. Mfume “agreed to join this coalition, and before we knew it he holds a press conference announcing this deal. Not good.” Norman Mineta, who represents the Asians, says Mr. Mfume failed to get promises of a vice president of diversity in each network. “The three remaining coalitions will continue to act as one,” says Mr. Torres. “The first die was cast, of course, by the NAACP going on its own.”
Just how badly are non-whites excluded from television? Sixty-six percent of the members of the Screen Actors Guild are white, eight percent are black, Hispanics are four percent, Asians are just over two percent, and twelve percent decline to list their race. The minority coalition does not seem too concerned that whites are actually under-represented given that they account for 72 percent of the population. (Dana Calvo and Greg Baxter, NBC-NAACP Diversity Plan Irks Coalition, Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2000.)
‘Unique Humanness’
A 60-year-old black man who dressed up as a woman to rob a bank near Pittsburgh has a novel defense. Brian Gamble of Philadelphia says white racism gave him post-traumatic stress disorder, which led him to pull a gun on tellers last year. Both judge and prosecutor said he is welcome to attempt such a defense. Mr. Gamble wants to be examined by a black psychologist and hopes the results will show he is insane and therefore innocent. He says a white psychologist would not have, “the empathy, moral courage and responsibility, as well as the intellectual depth or the peculiar understanding . . . of the African-American’s unique humanness, sensitivity, and the traumatically acquired psychological aberrations . . . (of) White Racism.” (AP, PA Robbery Suspect Blames Racism, December 23, 1999.)
Fighting Integration in Malaysia
Malaysia’s 22 million people are 58 percent Malay, 26 percent Chinese and 7 percent Indian. There is little social interaction among the different groups and the country’s University of Science would like to change that. It has started by integrating the dormitories, but students are resisting. Chinese complain that Malays, who are Muslims, wake them up with early-morning prayers. They are also uncomfortable eating pork around Muslim roommates. Many students have left the dorms and have moved into apartments with members of their own race.
Those who stayed don’t mix. Students sit with their own groups in the cafeteria and eat different foods. The Malays play soccer while the Chinese swim and play badminton. Passive resistance is giving way to agitation, and hundreds of students of all races have marched against integration. “Sooner or later, they’ll have to listen to us,” says chairman of the Students Council, Fairaz Mat Yusof. Other universities are thinking twice about their own integration plans. “Leave us with our freedom to choose the people we want to stay with,” says a student at the University of Malaya. (Sean Yoong, Students Resent Mandated Integration of Dormitories, Washington Times, November 26, 1999, p. A24.)
Skilled South African whites are clearing out as racial preferences get worse, and many are going to Australia. “Youngsters are saying they can’t get a job unless they’re black,” says a Perth employment agent. “Unfortunately it [affirmative action] seems to be creating a new generation of racists.” Initially it was mostly Anglo-South Africans who made the “chicken run” (escaping black rule) but now Afrikaners and even Indians are leaving. In the year ending June, 1999, Australia granted 5,704 “skill stream” visas to South Africans who were let in to improve the workforce. It also admitted 850 South African entrepreneurs who must invest between three and eight million rand ($500,00 to $1.33 million) in new businesses. Many South Africans who have stayed are hedging their bets by sending their children to college in Australia. (Lindsey Arkley, Affirmative Action Behind Chicken Run, The Sunday Independent (South Africa), December 11, 1999.)
Because so many young whites are leaving, old people face their final years alone. “It is horrible here at Christmas,” says retired school principal Dawn Darby. Mrs. Darby was upset when her children left but now realizes it is for the best. “This is no place to bring up children. The standard of schooling is definitely dropping . . . I think it’s going to get worse here.” (Anton La-Guardia, Elderly Whites Face Life Alone, Washington Times, December 30, 1999, p. A16.)
All-Purpose Invective
Al Gore’s campaign manager, black woman Donna Brazile, has riled black Republicans by saying they don’t care about helping blacks. “They [Colin Powell and J.C. Watts] would rather take pictures with black children than feed them,” she says. Congressman Watts let fly with a furious letter to Mr. Gore, in which he called Miss Brazile’s remarks . . . “racist.” (Inside Politics, Washington Times, Jan. 5, 2000, p. A6. J.C. Watts Lashes Out at Gore Over Campaign Manager’s Race Remarks, Drudge Report, Jan. 5, 2000.)
“Social promotion” is the practice of promoting students to the next grade even though they have not mastered the material. In the Los Angeles school district about half of the students have failed to learn enough to advance and should be held back a grade. Two-thirds of eighth-graders do not deserve to enter ninth grade. In 1999 the school district had hoped to end “social promotion” but does not have the stomach to hold back 50 percent of the students. It will end social promotion in the second and eighth grades only, in the hope of phasing it out in other grades over the next four years. The district has decided to blame superintendent Ruben Zacarias for all this, and is buying out his contract. (Louis Shahagun, 50% of Pupils Not Ready to Pass, L.A. District Says, L.A. Times, Dec. 1, 1999, p. A1.)
We note in passing that 70 percent of the students in the district are Hispanic. Fifty-seven percent are classified as having “limited English proficiency.” About half of California’s Hispanics fail to graduate from high school.
Mexico, New and Old
District Judge Robert Robles of New Mexico has ruled that the state’s Dona Ana county must let people serve on juries even if they don’t speak English. The county has a population of 167,500 of which 58 percent is Hispanic, and 18 percent say they speak little or no English. The October ruling threw the county’s court system into chaos, and 15 trials had to be delayed while judges dismissed and reconvened jury pools. There is some question about how non-English speakers are going to do their jobs, but interpreters anticipate boom times.
All of New Mexico is now awaiting a state Supreme Court ruling on whether every county will have to hire interpreters. Judge Robles based his decision on a passage from the 1911 New Mexico constitution that says no person may be kept off a jury because of an “inability to speak, read or write the English or Spanish languages.” It sounds as though Twee- and Tagalog-speakers could soon be serving on New Mexico juries, too. (In New Mexico County, Jurors Need Not Speak English, Washington Post, Dec. 16, 1999, p. G9.)
Ford Cleans House
Ford Motor Company has announced it will grade its 20,000 executives on the curve. Ten percent will get an A, 80 percent will get a B and ten percent a C. The Cs will see their bonuses and stock options go to As and some Bs. Anyone who gets Cs two years in a row could be demoted or fired. There has been some speculation that this will cover an attempt to clear out white men and promote women and non-whites. In August, Vice President Richard Parry-Jones started tongues wagging when he wrote, “we are trapped in a monocultural environment that is dominated by old white males. We need to change. We need more employees who are more reflective of our customer base.” (AP, Ford Ties Executives Perks Pay to Merit, Dec. 24, 1999.)
Diminishing Returns
According to religious law, only someone whose mother is a Jew can claim to be a Jew. However, under what is called the Law of Return, anyone with a single Jewish grandparent is eligible to immigrate to Israel and many non-Jews have begun to arrive. In the first three months of 1999, non-Jewish immigrants outnumbered Jews, 55 percent to 45 percent, and the 225,000 gentiles who have come from the former Soviet Union are beginning to show political strength. Rabbis complain there are now plenty of butcher shops that openly sell pork.
Religious Jews, in particular, want to change the Law of Return. Rahamim Malul, a Knesset member from the religious Shas party, says “The loopholes in the law must be closed so that the state will not turn into a country where a large percentage of its citizens are gentiles.” Officials in the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption have drawn up proposals for restricting non-Jewish immigration. (Mark Lavie, Israelis Debate Immigration Laws, AP, Nov. 29, 1999.) Initially, the Law of Return applied only to Jews as defined by religious law. Israel later broadened its scope to include people with one Jewish grandparent so as to match the Nazi definition of a Jew.
Brainless
The teacher of the year at Walton Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, is under investigation for racial insensitivity. Gloria Nelson, who is black, may be temporarily suspended because she told black third-graders that some people think blacks have smaller brains than whites and are less intelligent. Miss Nelson does not deny saying this, but explains that she was trying to motivate the children by telling them ignorant people might doubt their abilities. School authorities accept her explanation, but must investigate her because at least one child was psychologically wounded when he thought she was saying blacks really do have small brains. (Martha Deller, Honored Walton Elementary Teacher Facing Suspension Over Racial Remarks, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dec. 14, 1999.)
Satchmo Speaks
Oxford University Press is bringing out a new collection of the writings of legendary trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, which shows him to have been insufficiently “black” in his thinking. Louis Armstrong in His Own Words traces the showman from his humble birth in 1901 and finds that he decided early that the way to get ahead was to make friends with whites rather than fight them. He once wrote, with his peculiar punctuation, that a fellow musician had advised him, “always have a White Man (who like you) and can + will put his Hand on your shoulder and say — “This is ‘My’ Nigger” and, Can’t Nobody Harm’ Ya.” Armstrong did not have a racial chip on his shoulder and once proudly dressed up as “King of the Zulus” for a Mardi Gras float, despite criticism from militants. He was also candid about his own people, complaining of the poor blacks with whom he grew up in Louisiana:
It seemed as they were Jealous of each other, especially if one Negro had a little more than the other, no matter how hard he saved and got it. They always wanted somebody to give them something but too Lazy to work for it.
By the time Armstrong died in 1971, his racial attitudes were very unfashionable, and his letters suggest that he felt shut out by blacks. Currently there are plans to turn his last home, in a working-class neighborhood in Corona, Queens, into a museum. (Timothy Gardner, Louis Armstrong, Just Getting to Know Ya, Reuters, Dec. 21, 1999.)
No Cause For Alarm
When Silvio Izquierdo-Leyva shot four co-workers and one stranger to death at the Tampa Radisson Hotel last December it briefly became national news. Only in Florida did the man’s background and interests get any coverage — and they were, to say the least, multicultural. Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva, 36, is a legal immigrant from Cuba who had just returned from a visit to his homeland, where he had begun a year-long apprenticeship to become a baba lao or Santeria priest. Santeria is a primitive, African amalgam of animism and Catholicism that originated among Cuban blacks and has immigrated to the United States. One of its most colorful rituals is animal sacrifice, which the Supreme Court has found to be a religious practice protected under the First Amendment.
Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva’s family say that since his decision to seek the priesthood he had been a changed man. All his clothes — even his shoes — had to be white, the color of Santeria purity. He filled a backyard shed with holy fetishes and came every day to offer them luncheon meat. He did not, however, lose his taste for horror movies.
Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva showed no emotion or agitation when he was arrested. “When I arrived on the scene, it was just like someone having been stopped for a traffic violation,” said Tampa police chief Bennie Holder. “He was not upset, he was very calm. He’s upstairs sleeping; he’s obviously not too concerned about it.” Santeria experts say Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva was probably in a spiritual trance when he started blazing away. (Kathryn Wexler, Suspect Devoted to Santeria, St. Petersburg Times, Dec. 31, 1999. George Pawlaszyk, The Suspect, Tampa Tribune, Jan. 1, 2000. Kathryn Wexler, Trouble Lay Hidden in Shooting Suspect’s Past, St. Petersburg Times, Jan. 1, 2000.)
Curiously, there seems to have been no move to connect these killings with the shooter’s unusual interests, an omission that would be unthinkable had Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva’s passions been, for example, the Doctrine of Enumerated Powers or the Constitutionality of anti-discrimination law.
Scales Fall From Eyes
Charles Francis Adams III (1866-1954) was the great-grandson of John Quincy Adams, sixth President (1825-1829) and Secretary of the Navy from 1929 to 1933 (under Herbert Hoover). In the May 1906 issue of Century magazine, he described a trip to the Sudan and how he came to realize that American thinking about race was a snare and a delusion:
Looking about me among Africans in Africa far removed from that American environment to which I have been accustomed the scales fell from my eyes. I found myself most impressed by a realizing sense of the appalling amount of error and cant in which we of the United States have indulged on this topic. We have actually wallowed in a bog of self-sufficient ignorance — especially we philanthropists and theorists of New England. We do so still. Having eyes, we will not see. Even now we not infrequently hear the successor to the abolitionist and humanitarian of the ante-Civil War period — the ‘Uncle Tom’ period — announce that the difference between the white man and the black man is much less considerable than is ordinarily supposed, and that the only real obstacle in the negro’s way is that ‘he has never been given a chance.’
For myself, after visiting the black man in his own house, I come back with a decided impression that this is the sheerest of delusions, due to pure ignorance of rudimentary facts; yet we built upon it in Reconstruction days as upon a foundation-stone — a self-evident truth . . .
. . . Baker, writing in 1865, closes his long enumeration of conditions [in the Sudan] with a startling clarity: ‘So long as it is generally considered that the negro and the white man are to be governed by the same laws and guided by the same management, so long will the former remain a thorn in the side of every community to which he may unhappily belong.’
If true, this strikes at the very root of the American polity — the equality of man before the law. We cannot conform to it. If the fact must be conceded, so much the worse for the fact. By all good Americans, at least, the theory will none the less be maintained, the principle confidently asserted.
What, then is to be our American outcome? The negro squats at our hearthstone; we can neither assimilate nor expel him . . .
Meanwhile, one thing is clear — the work done by those who were in political control at the close of our Civil War was work done in utter ignorance of ethnologic law and total disregard of unalterable fact. Starting the movement wrong, it will be yet productive of incalculable injury to us.
The negro after Emancipation should have been dealt with not as a political equal, much less forced into a position of superiority; he should have been treated as a ward and dependent — firmly, but in a spirit of kindness and absolute justice. Practically impossible as a policy then, this is not less so now. At best it is something which can only be slowly and tentatively approximated.
. . . [W]e will in America make small progress toward a solution of our race problem until we approach it in less of a theoretic and humanitarian and more of a scientific spirit.
Equality results not from law, but exists because things are in essentials alike; and a political system which works admirably when applied to homogeneous equals, results only in chaos when generalized into a nostrum to be administered universally. It has been markedly so of late with us. (Quoted in Reflex Light From the Negroes of the Nile, The Scrap Book, Nov. 1906, p. 333.)
Remember the Alamo?
Hispanics are nearly 65 percent of the population of San Antonio, Texas, and are starting to remake the city. Local businessmen, in conjunction with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, have announced a plan to make the city completely bilingual. Called “Imagine San Antonio,” it calls for a five-year effort to integrate Spanish into local businesses and the school system. Public officials will have to be bilingual and a new school will be established to teach Spanish to anyone who doesn’t speak it.
Rita Elizondo, president of the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says bilingualism will help tourism and commerce: “We are trying to take advantage of the area’s natural resources such as its proximity and historic ties to Mexico. Many people realize that our relationship with Mexico is important and professionals should be bilingual to be better prepared to face the new millennium.” To promote the plan the group will run television commercials of students talking about the joys of being bilingual. (Plan Proposes That San Antonio Become Totally Bilingual, EFE (Spain) News Service, January 10, 2000.)
Protecting Illegals
In October, the Hispanic woman who chairs the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Ida Castro, expanded its jurisdiction to cover illegal aliens. One of its first test cases involves Quality Art, a lithograph distribution company in Gilbert, Arizona. A four-month investigation concluded that managers used racial slurs and groped 25 women who were illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala.
The women say the company also strip-searched them to uncover a suspected theft. The women resigned en masse last August after a sympathetic supervisor was fired. Quality Art denies discrimination and says it fired the women when it learned they were illegals. Under the new EEOC policy, illegals cannot get their jobs back but can collect damages and back pay. (Jim Walsh, U.S. Finds Race Bias at Company, Arizona Republic, December 30, 1999.)
Europe is suffering a severe population decline. A forthcoming United Nations report says the European Union could lose five million people by 2025 and 40 million by 2050. Italy and Germany have the lowest fertility rates, with populations falling by 0.9 and 0.8 percent a year. Italy’s current low birth rate means its population could go from 57 million today to 41 million in 2050, a decline that would be faster than the collapse of the Roman Empire. Populations are predicted to age as well as decline. If current trends continue, by 2050 Italy’s workforce could fall by half while its number of pensioners doubles, which would play havoc with the pension system. Only Britain appears to have a growing population but the UN does not expect that to last long. Naturally, the UN thinks Third-World immigration is the solution. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, EU ‘Will Need Immigrants’ as Working Population Falls, London Daily Telegraph, January 11, 2000.)
