Quotulatiousness

July 24, 2012

The racist history of gun control

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Brendan O’Neill wonders how gun control — traditionally a racist and xenophobic attempt to disarm blacks and foreigners — became a left-wing policy:

One of the great mysteries of modern politics is how gun control came to be seen as a natural Left-wing cause. Following the horrific shootings in Aurora, Denver, the usual lineup of Left-liberal activists and commentators have pleaded, for the ten thousandth time, for America to get rid of its stupid constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms and to clamp down on gun ownership. This is the default setting of virtually every observer who considers himself of the Left, particularly those outside of America, who love nothing more than to look down their long noses at the Wild West-style, gun-wielding, blood-spattered mess they believe modern America to be.

Which is all a bit weird, because for years — for two centuries, in fact — gun control was a largely Right-wing, reactionary campaign issue, not a Left-wing one. The fact that it has now been adopted by Leftists is very revealing indeed.

[. . .]

In the modern period, too, there was a hugely reactionary bent to gun-control campaigns. In the early 20th century new laws, such as the 1911 Sullivan Law in New York City, were passed to prevent the huge influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe from getting their hands on guns. As Gary Kleck puts it in his book Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, gun control was anything but a liberal cause: “In the 19th and early 20th century, gun-control laws were often targeted at blacks in the south and the foreign-born in the north.”

The Gun Control Act of 1968 was ostensibly passed in response to assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but its real targets were inner-city black communities where there had been violent riots for three summers running and where some black activists were beginning to arm themselves. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton, recognising that his liberal supporters were converting en masse to the cause of gun control, started to talk about the “evil” of assault rifles. Who tended to own assault rifles? “Drug dealers, street gang members and other violent criminals”, the Clinton adminstration said — long-recognised polite political codewords for blacks and Latinos.

Update: Dan Baum on the reduction in gun crime across the US by nearly half over the last two decades.

Among the many ways America differs from other countries when it comes to guns is that when a mass shooting happens in the United States, it’s a gun story. How an obviously sick man could buy a gun; how terrible it is that guns are abundant; how we must ban particular types of guns that are especially dangerous. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence responded to the news with a gun-control petition. Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times has weighed in with an online column saying that “Politicians are far too cowardly to address gun violence . . . which keeps us from taking practical measures to avoid senseless shootings.”

Compare that to the coverage and conversation after Anders Behring Breivik murdered sixty-nine people on the island of Utøya in Norway, a year ago next Sunday. Nobody focused on the gun. I had a hard time learning from the news reports what type of gun he used. Nobody asked, “How did he get a gun?” That seemed strange, because it’s much harder to get a gun in Europe than it is here. But everybody, even the American media, seemed to understand that the heart of the Utøya massacre story was a tragically deranged man, not the rifle he fired. Instead of wringing their hands over the gun Breivik used, Norwegians saw the tragedy as the opening to a conversation about the rise of right-wing extremism in their country.

Rosenthal is wrong, by the way, that politicians haven’t addressed gun violence. They have done so brilliantly, in a million different ways, which helps explain why the rate of violent crime is about half what it was twenty years ago. They simply haven’t used gun control to do it. Gun laws are far looser than they were twenty years ago, even while crime is plunging — a galling juxtaposition for those who place their faith in tougher gun laws. The drop in violence is one of our few unalloyed public-policy success stories, though perhaps not for those who bemoan an “epidemic of gun violence” that doesn’t exist anymore in order to make a political point.

June 16, 2012

Peter Oborne on Enoch Powell, a “monster” with integrity

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

In the Telegraph, Peter Oborne outlines the career of British parliamentarian Enoch Powell:

For years, Enoch Powell has been a monstrous figure in British politics. Even the mention of his name has been enough to invite damnation by association. Before the last election, David Cameron forced Nigel Hastilow to stand down as Conservative candidate for Halesowen after he praised Powell for being “right” about immigration.

[. . .]

With not one word changed, Powell’s speeches on Lords reform, some delivered half a century ago, could be delivered today. This is because his analysis was not dependent on day-to-day events and a transient national mood. His approach was based on first principles, extraordinary learning and a rigorous understanding of the British constitution.

It was this intellectual clarity which caused him to oppose British entry to what was then known as the Common Market. At the start of 1971, during the final stage of negotiations, Powell took himself round Europe speaking in Turin (in Italian), Frankfurt (in German) and Lyon (in French). As he remarked: “There is no more ignorant vulgarity than to treat language as an impediment to intercourse, which education, habit, travel, trade, abolish and then remove.” He used these speeches to warn his French, Italian and German audiences that the British tradition of national sovereignty and parliamentary democracy was incompatible with European economic and political union.

[. . .]

But now we must come to Enoch Powell’s notorious speeches on immigration, which have defined his posthumous reputation and established his pariah status. He challenged the culture of denial that surrounded the subject even then, predicting that the immigrant community would rise much faster than official statistics suggested. His claims were denounced as alarmist and irresponsible, even by The Daily Telegraph. As Tom Bower shows in a well-researched and fair-minded essay, Powell’s projections turned out to be much nearer the truth than the official ones.

[. . .]

The case for the defence goes like this: at the time immigration was surrounded by a culture of silence, and Powell was doing no more than bravely voicing the concerns (and using the language) of his constituents. He was no racist, as even opponents like Michael Foot acknowledged, and as his stance over the Hola Camp suggests. And let’s not forget that Powell, who had a brilliant war, risked his life for five years in the fight against fascism. But I am certain that the Conservative Party was right to drive him out for his remarks, which had the malign effect that no mainstream politician dared raise the issue of immigration for a generation.

For some, this single episode has been enough to damn his memory, and that can be understood. But Enoch Powell was a man of extraordinary integrity. He walked alone. To quote the late Daily Telegraph commentator TE Utley, doing his best to stand up for Powell in the wake of the notorious “rivers of blood” speech of April 1968: “He does not believe that politics is a hand-to-mouth affair, a succession of expedients to meet unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances.”

Update, 19 June: In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill points out that modern anti-racists actually have more in common with Powell than they may realize:

What was the key prejudice in Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech, which everyone is talking about again following Powell’s 100th birthday? It wasn’t actually hatred of immigrants, whom Powell believed to be ambitious, ferociously so. Rather it was fear of native Britons. It was fear of what white Brits, or what Powell referred to as the “ordinary working man”, might do if more and more foreigners turned up in their towns.

Indeed, Powell explicitly argued that “the sense of alarm and resentment lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come”. It was these people, he said, these “ordinary Englishmen”, who posed a threat to the social order, since their anti-immigrant anger had become so intense that to introduce more immigrants would be to “risk throwing a match in to gunpowder”. In short, “ordinary working men” were a powder-keg of unpredictable emotions whom the state should try its best not to antagonise. Or as Powell put it, “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils”, including the evil of “ordinary working men” having their “alarm and resentment” further stirred up.

Even Powell’s most notorious line — “like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood” — was a prediction not of immigrant behaviour but of native British violence against immigrants. Powell said native Brits, “for reasons which they could not comprehend” (presumably because they were a bit dim), were feeling dangerously like “strangers in their own country”.

May 26, 2012

Andrew Coyne on Harper’s real “hidden agenda”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

We’ve been hearing about Stephen Harper’s “hidden agenda” for nearly a decade and it’s about time for some of it to finally come to light — what’s the point of having a hidden agenda if you never actually implement any of it? Andrew Coyne thinks he’s detected the real thing:

It is becoming more difficult to accuse this government of having a hidden agenda. Not because it hasn’t tried, mind you. But while it remains as obtuse as ever about its intentions, the signs of an agenda are by now unmistakable. Where before it had attitudes, or at best stances, it is beginning to sprout what look remarkably like policies.

To be sure, they are modest, even piecemeal. They are often poorly communicated, where the Conservatives deign to communicate them at all. More often they are simply dropped on the unsuspecting public without consultation, or jammed through Parliament with little debate or scrutiny, quite apart from monstrosities like the omnibus bill.

But put them together and they have all the markings of an agenda:

  • Reform of Old Age Security, not only raising the age of eligibility by two years (starting in 2023, and phased in over six years) but offering higher benefits to those willing to keep working past the standard retirement age.
  • Free trade agreements, now being negotiated with virtually everything that moves: Europe, India, Japan, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the ASEAN group.
  • Reform of immigration policy, across every category: skilled immigrants, refugees, investors, entrepreneurs, with an emphasis on recruiting immigrants with demonstrable economic prospects.
  • Reform of employment insurance, announced this week, to give repeat users, in particular, fewer excuses to refuse available work.
  • Moreover, the government is at last beginning to implement the Red Wilson report on productivity, four years after it was delivered, with recent reforms opening the door to foreign takeovers in the telecommunications sector (for companies with less than 10% of the market), and raising the threshold asset value for automatic review of foreign takeovers to $1-billion.

April 14, 2012

The fall of the House of Bossi?

Filed under: Europe, Italy, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

BBC News has a profile of Umberto Bossi, who recently had to resign as head of the political party he founded, Italy’s Northern League:

… Mr Bossi made one of his charismatic, raucous and fiery speeches, declaring in essence that northern Italians were no longer going to kow-tow to Rome’s greedy politicians and to pay their taxes to enable lazy southern Italians to live on public welfare.

One of his famous phrases was “Roma ladrona” meaning “Thieving Romans!”

It was all pretty provocative stuff, and had strongly racist undertones.

The League mocks the accents and the origins of Southerners whom they derisively call “terroni”. I suppose “ignorant peasant” would be the nearest English translation.

[. . .]

Sixteen years later it turns out that Umberto Bossi has apparently been dipping into the public trough, even more deeply than the Roman politicians he was so critical of when he founded his separatist party, and set up the phantom north Italian state he dubbed “Padania” – meaning the country of the river Po.

In 2004 Mr Bossi suffered a stroke which left him with impaired speech, but failed to quench his political ambitions or his vulgar public manners.

He frequently uses swear words in public to smear anyone he does not like and often gives the finger in front of TV cameras to make his message even more clear.

[. . .]

According to court documents, Mr Bossi’s wife bought no fewer than 11 houses and apartments with Northern League party funds.

Mr Bossi himself had his own house done up with public money and his son Renzo — nicknamed by his father the Trout, who in fact does have a somewhat fish-like expression — also had access to apparently unlimited cash to indulge in his taste for fast cars.

The party even paid for the Trout’s speeding tickets, not to mention medical expenses. The 23-year-old has now been forced to resign from his sinecure as a regional government official, which brought him 12,000 euros (£10,000, $16,000) a month.

Recent immigrants didn’t come here because “Canada is diverse and signed the Kyoto Protocol”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

An interesting aside in this Toronto Star article by Rondi Adamson:

However, what is most interesting about these stories is what they reveal about immigrants and Canadian politics. There was a time when the Liberal party could count on immigrant votes. For years, many immigrants who came to Canada under a Liberal government — which would cover much of the last century — reflexively voted Liberal. Part of this was out of gratitude and part of it because the Conservatives (or Progressive Conservatives) never bothered to court the immigrant vote.

[. . .]

Anyone who thinks people choose Canada because of multiculturalism or bicycle lanes in big cities would do well to remember our last municipal election, when Rob Ford received over 50 per cent of the votes of Torontonians born outside Canada. I can tell you my own tale — a couple of summers ago I taught ESL in a Toronto suburb. My students were teenagers new to Canada. I asked them why their parents came here. Almost down to a kid they said, “Because we couldn’t get into the States.” They did not say, “Because Canada is diverse and signed the Kyoto Protocol.” They did not have a Panglossian view of this country. They saw it as they saw the United States — free and fair — though not as powerful a draw.

It is nice when politicians attend cultural celebrations and clumsily do ethnic dances and don hats that make them look goofy. But new and old Canadians respond positively to substance in the form of sensible policy, as opposed to making a show of being inclusive. It was Chen’s case that brought about support for Bill C-26, intended to expand the right to defend one’s home and property. I am pleased that, since the Maroli case, no politician has proposed a correlated Spice Registry, which may have been their wont a decade ago.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

April 4, 2012

QotD: Mike Riggs refutes Van Jones on “so-called Libertarians”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

I’m going to have to mic check you there, Mr. Jones. You’re not talking about so-called libertarians, but your former boss and current president. See, it’s Barack Obama who supports “traditional marriage”; Barack Obama who supports a drug war that sends an alarming number of black men to prison and destroys their employment prospects; Barack Obama who supports a foreign policy that kills children; Barack Obama who supports regulatory barriers that require the poorest of the poor to borrow their way into the workforce; Barack Obama who supports an immigration strategy that rips apart families and sees the children of undocumented workers put up for adoption.

Whether Obama’s support for those policies means he hates gays or brown folk is not for me to say. As the scriptures tell us, “For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?”

Libertarians, on the other hand, love brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings, and immigrants. Many of us, after all, fit rather neatly into those categories, and we show our affection for ourselves and our neighbors by supporting the right of all peoples to live free of state-sponsored violence, discrimination, undue imprisonment, and theft; as well as the entirely predictable consequences of both left-wing and right-wing social engineering.

Mike Riggs, “Van Jones on ‘so-called Libertarians’: ‘They say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings'”, Hit & Run, 2012-04-03

December 21, 2011

Redefining the term “isolationist”

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Jacob Sullum explains that mainstream journalists keep saying that word . . . but it doesn’t mean what they seem to think it means:

Reporters routinely describe Ron Paul’s foreign policy views as “isolationist” because he opposes the promiscuous use of military force. This is like calling him a recluse because he tries to avoid fistfights.

The implicit assumption that violence is the only way to interact with the world reflects the oddly circumscribed nature of foreign policy debates in mainstream American politics. It shows why Paul’s perspective is desperately needed in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

As the Texas congressman has patiently explained many times, he supports international trade, travel, migration, diplomacy, and cultural exchange. Furthermore, he supports military action when it is necessary for national defense — in response to the 9/11 attacks, for example.

The inaccurate “isolationist” label marks Paul as a fringe character whose views can be safely ignored. Given the dire consequences of reckless interventionism, that clearly is not the case.

Update: E.D. Kain at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen examines the historical baggage that Ron Paul brings along as he suddenly becomes a serious threat to the GOP establishment:

I wish Ron Paul didn’t have the newsletter baggage, because it does raise questions about his leadership and integrity. Nor do I see Ron Paul as himself a racist, but rather a participant in what was likely a very dodgy experiment in paleo-libertarianism by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. Paul may or may not have been aware of what was going out under his byline, but it’s certainly still his byline and his responsibility. And yet…

…I simply can’t shrug off these other issues. I’m not sure what to do (again) at this point, because the simple quantity of pushback I’ve gotten on this issue from people I respect has me seriously questioning — not my motives — but my wisdom.

And Gary Johnson, a candidate whose socially liberal views are far, far more palatable to me, has just announced he’ll seek the Libertarian Party nomination. Now the LP is a third party, and I’ve said before that I don’t do third parties, but Johnson represents all the good things that Paul does without the bad past. The thing I couldn’t do with a clean conscience is vote for Johnson and help ensure the election of say Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney over Obama. [. . .]

Long story short, y’all have me thinking hard on this one. Like Matt, I look forward to the coming months too. I hope that Paul can keep pushing these issues front and center in the debates and in the race ahead. But I can’t ignore the newsletters or other signs of affiliation with racists which, admittedly, appear to go much deeper than I realized. I was too quick to dismiss mistermix last time around. This is a serious issue and I will need more time to think about it before I can say whether or not I was wrong to endorse the candidate who I view as the most likely to prevent future war and to end or at least curtail the war on drugs and terror.

I don’t think Ron Paul himself is racist. I’m not sure why he would be so cavalier and consistent on so many unpopular issues, but never toss a bone to that crowd in any public appearance. But he has certainly been a poor judge of character.

Update, the second: The Ron Paul investment portfolio, by way of the Wall Street Journal: “This portfolio is a half-step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and nine-millimeter rounds”

September 28, 2011

Ed West: The utopian pipe dreams of the European project

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Ed West bids an unfond farewell to the Euro (and the European Union):

The diversity delusion and the euro delusion are both symptoms of a similar pseudo-religious mania. Both sprung from a noble attempt to ensure that the horrors of 1914-1945, inspired by nationalism and scientific racism, were never repeated. Both make them more likely to be repeated. Jean Monnet, architect and first president of the European Coal and Steel Community, conceived the idea of a United States of Europe in order to ensure such wars never happened again, through a new empire in which nationalism had been erased. Because Monnet was opposed by Charles de Gaulle, who favoured a Europe of nations, he therefore he developed the “Monnet method” of “integration by stealth”, a policy that ultimately led to the tragedy of economic union.

Perhaps more influential still was Alexandre Kojeve, who set up the embryonic European Union and influenced a generation of pro-EU thinkers in France. He came up with the “end of history” theme, whereby national boundaries and exclusive communities would wash away and a new world without borders would emerge. The EU’s vapid motto, United in diversity, reflects this neo-Christian utopianism.

Without exception the guilty men of Europe also shared, and still, share, the diversity delusion. The Liberal Democrats have entirely signed up, and most of the Labour Party too, although the Tories must share the blame too. Only one senior Tory spoke up against both mass immigration and the Common Market, Enoch Powell (who was also a voice in the wilderness in opposing Keynesian policies — only Paul the Octopus in recent years has been more right). Powell’s provocative language certainly helped his opponents, but as immigration is by its very nature a more toxic subject, so milder opponents have been silenced, leaving only the cranks, oddballs and extremists to represent opposition to this new utopia. This in turn makes it easier to present critics as extremists, just as even a couple of years ago opponents of the euro were labeled extremists and xenophobes. Contrary to what proponents of this delusion claim, it is not about xenophobia or racism; the issue, as Charles Moore wrote on Saturday, is one of sovereignty, and sovereignty relies on the legitimacy that only nations can provide.

Instead, as Roger Scruton noted, European intellectuals tried to “discard national loyalty and to replace it with the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment… The problem… is that cosmopolitan ideals are the property of an elite and will never be shared by the mass of human kind.”

The European project was a utopian idea, and I suspect that Britain’s peripheral part in the third great stupid, European idea of the last century will soon be over. National loyalty, whatever the elites feel, is here to stay. I guess we’re all extremists now.

August 19, 2011

Cage match: Jason Kenney against Amnesty International

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Paul Wells on the ongoing war of words between Canada’s immigration minister and the earnest folks at Amnesty International:

Some stories are so odd nobody knows how to handle them. I don’t know how else to explain why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s extraordinary public feud with Amnesty International has attracted so little coverage.

Here’s a senior Conservative minister departing from the Conservatives’ normal bland talking points and unleashing a written broadside against a critic. And Kenney’s sparring partner wasn’t a predictable target. It was the Canadian branch of Amnesty, one of the most revered human rights organizations in the world. But that didn’t stop the minister from calling Amnesty’s concerns “poppycock,” “sloppy and irresponsible” and “self-congratulatory moral preening.”

Here’s what the fuss was about: last month, Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews released the names and photos of 30 fugitives who’d evaded immigration authorities since being found inadmissible because they’re believed to be complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In short, the ministers were asking the public to help track down fleeing war crimes suspects. The public has stepped up: since the ministers’ announcements, six of the 30 men have been apprehended and three of those six deported.

July 19, 2011

Tax-wary millionaires flee to . . . Canada?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Jason Kirby is either smoking some really premium weed, or the world is changing even faster than we thought it was, in an article titled “The Great White tax haven”:

For decades, Canadians have been told this country is a high-tax, unwelcoming place for business people and the wealthy. It’s a reputation we came by honestly. But a shift has taken place both here and abroad, say experts. While Canada is reforming and lowering its taxes, politicians in other developed countries — those faced with crushing debt loads and economic stagnation — are turning a hungry eye to the bank accounts of their richest citizens. At the same time, instability in the Middle East and Asia means wealthy individuals are looking for a safe place to move their families. Where they might have flocked to the U.S. in the past, many now see Canada as the better option. Tax specialists even use terms like “the Great White tax haven” and “Switzerland of the North” when talking about Canada.

The world’s rich are restless, says Lesperance, whose clients are worth between $30 million and $1 billion. Most work in financial services, but in every sector and every country wealthy individuals are on the move. Lesperance calls these ultra-rich the Golden Geese, arguing that wherever they go, they generate economic benefits—they start companies, buy real estate, keep restaurants busy and spend money on big-ticket items. Along with Ian Angell, a professor at the London School of Economics, he’s writing a book entitled Flight of the Golden Geese, which argues that as countries squeeze wealthy taxpayers, they will pull up stakes and flee. “Canada has an unprecedented, once-in-several-generations opportunity to put up its hand and offer itself as an alternative,” he says.

The migration is well under way. Last year, nearly 12,000 people moved here under the federal government’s Immigrant Investor Program, up from 4,950 a decade ago, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. (The figure includes spouses and dependents.) To qualify, immigrants must have a minimum net worth of at least $1.6 million, and are required to “invest” $800,000 with the government, which is returned after five years. (Ottawa says the money is used to fund economic development programs, though critics call it a cash grab.)

July 17, 2011

In the aftermath of Georgia’s “victory” over illegal farm workers

Filed under: Americas, Food, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Last month, I linked to a story about Georgia’s attempt to crack down on illegal agricultural workers. It was, in terms of achieving its stated goals, a big success: illegal workers left in droves for other jurisdictions. It wasn’t quite as successful from the point of view of farmers:

To combat the shortage, Governor Nathan Deal has authorized using criminal offenders out on probation to replace the mostly Latino migrant workers. It’s not working out so well:

    The first batch of probationers started work last week at a farm owned by Dick Minor…So far, the experiment at Minor’s farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm.

    “Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, ‘Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”…

H/T to John Henke for the link.

June 29, 2011

“Yes, of course, there is racism in Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:24

Publius has a go at a silly speech by Senator Don Oliver on the idea that black Canadians need to “rise up and address the deep racism in this country that keeps them out of positions of power”:

Yes, of course, there is racism in Canada. As there is where ever different racial groups are present. Some portion of the humanity will always insist on thinking in tribal terms. Of all the countries in the world where such attitudes are least persistent it is in Canada. Senator Oliver then goes onto make this utterly absurd statement:

     Oliver blames Canada’s experience with slavery for much of the black community’s inability to support each other and for the stereotypes old-stock Canadians continue to show.

    “It really flows from the days of slavery . . . because of the slave mentality,” he explained, when someone got ahead, they would get dragged down by the group.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians don’t even know slavery existed in this country. The Senator even alludes to this in the interview. So you’re influenced by something you thought happened elsewhere? To say nothing of the risible notion that old-stock Canadians are more bigoted than newer group. Seriously? Groups that spent generations slaughtering each other over trivial differences in physical appearance, religious beliefs and language are suppose to show up in Canada and have no problem with blacks? Is the Senator aware of the Indian caste system? Is he aware of the prejudice shown in many Caribbean countries for darker blacks by lighter skinned blacks? There is likely more systematic racism, if we can call it that, in Jamaica than Canada.

[. . .]

The vast majority of Canadian blacks, or their parents, emigrated to Canada in the last forty years. They came here like most Canadians and there ancestors were never held as slaves on Canadian soil. Many of those who came to Canada before 1970 did so to escape the systematic racism of the American South. While this country was hardly a picture of tolerance by modern standards, it was far preferable to what else was on offer.

June 21, 2011

In unrelated news, Georgia now has farm issues

Filed under: Americas, Food, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

After a passing a hugely successful bill to exclude illegal immigrants from the state, politicians are astounded to find that actions do have consequences:

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

Driving out competing labour from illegal immigrants has created a lot of farm labour jobs for Georgia’s unemployed citizens, but for some unexpected reason, they’re not moving into those jobs:

According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that’s $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide “$12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.

In addition, few of the jobs include benefits — only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out — a highly unlikely event, to put it mildly — it wouldn’t fix the problem.

February 2, 2011

Thousands are sailing flying

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

Patricia Treble reports on the new wave of Irish emigration:

With their economy in a tailspin and bad financial news piling up, the Irish people are voting with their feet—they’re leaving the Emerald Isle at the rate of 1,000 a week. Last Thursday, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) published a grim forecast: net outward migration will reach 100,000 in the two years ending in April 2012.

Packing up and leaving in dire times is nothing new for Ireland. In the 1800s, millions fled the island’s famines and disease for the chance of a better life in countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia. Even recently, there have been waves of emigration. The last time the emigration numbers were as high as they are now was in 1989, when 44,000 fled the economically depressed nation. Soon after, Ireland cut taxes, attracted massive foreign investment and transformed itself into a Celtic Tiger. Property prices soared along with personal wealth.

It’s always a good time for some Pogues music:

February 1, 2011

A nasty bureaucratic trick

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link describing it as a “creative solution”:

An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.

He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is ‘not conducive to the public good’.

As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after travelling to the county to visit family.

The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects’ list during a vetting inquiry.

The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

Because these lists are easy to get added to, but nearly impossible to get removed from (and there’s little chance you get told why you’re on the list — or even if you’re on it), this little trick could have continued indefinitely until the perpetrator had to go through security screening for a higher position.

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