John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.

The meeting in the Capitol's Strom Thurmond Room on March 11 was a Republican effort led by Sens. McCain of Arizona, John Thune of South Dakota, and Mel Martinez of Florida to reach out to Hispanics. But two people who attended the session say they were taken aback by McCain's anger...

"He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."

McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people -- you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that."

In 2006 and 2007, McCain was a leader on immigration, but his efforts ran aground largely because his legislation included what many Republicans derisively characterized as "amnesty," a pathway to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants if they took a series of steps to earn legal status.

Nice to see Steve Sailer writing for CNN.  People are starting to finally recognize his genius.  

Washington (CNN) -- When Arizona police ask suspected illegal immigrants for IDs, they are protecting your grandchildren's economic future.

Three years ago, ETS -- the people who administer the SAT -- released an alarming study. It combined information on test scores with demographic trends to predict that the U.S. work force of 2030 would be less literate, less skilled and worse paid than the U.S. work force of 1990.

ETS reported: "[B]y 2030 the average levels of literacy and numeracy in the working-age population will have decreased by about 5 percent while inequality will have increased by about 7 percent. Put crudely, over the next 25 years or so, as better-educated individuals leave the work force they will be replaced by those who, on average, have lower levels of education and skill. Over this same period, nearly half of the projected job growth will be concentrated in occupations associated with higher education and skill levels. This means that tens of millions more of our students and adults will be less able to qualify for higher-paying jobs."

Why?

One word: Immigration.Since 1970, America's largest source of immigrants has been Latin America, especially Mexico. More than half of these Latino immigrants lack a high school diploma.

Compare the U.S. experience with Canada's. More than half of all immigrants to Canada possess a university degree. Half of all Canada's Ph.D.s are foreign-born.

Why does America choose poorly educated immigrants? The short answer: America does not choose them. They choose themselves.

In the last decade, half of all the immigrants to the United States arrived illegally...

By contrast, Canada (a country of 1/10 the U.S. population that takes proportionately many more immigrants than the United States) allows almost no illegal immigration.

The result: While immigration has enhanced the average skill level of the Canadian population, it has detracted from the average skill level of the U.S. population.

Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility...This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans.

Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their scholarly work, "Falling Behind or Moving Up?"

They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.

If these results continue to hold, the low skills of yesterday's illegal immigrant will negatively shape the U.S. work force into the 22nd century.

The failure to enforce the immigration laws in the 1990s and 2000s means that the U.S. today has more poorly skilled workers, more poverty and more workers without health insurance than it would have generated by itself.

And they let him touch on all his main points besides genetics: demographics is destiny, Mexicans don't assimilate no matter how long they're here, even the praise for Canada's system.

Actually, David Frum wrote that.   Whether he reads Steve or came up with these conclusions independently, give credit where credit is due.  

If you keep telling yourself you live in a Stalinist country that doesn't allow debate, you start to hate the world and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  A good lesson for some of us to learn.

The state has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants. But contrary to myth, they have not brought an epidemic of murder and mayhem with them. Surprise of surprises, the state has gotten safer.

Over the last decade, the violent crime rate has dropped by 19 percent, while property crime is down by 20 percent. Crime has also declined in the rest of the country, but not as fast as in Arizona.

Babeu's claim about police killings came as news to me. When I called his office to get a list of victims, I learned there has been only one since the beginning of 2008-deeply regrettable, but not exactly a trend.

Truth is, illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native Americans. Most come here to work, and in their desire to stay, they are generally afraid to do anything that might draw the attention of armed people wearing badges.

John McCain now believes in militarizing the border.  I wonder what changed his mind.

Does he know he's lying or does being a politician for a really long time make you able to convince yourself you believe something new whenever it's politically expedient?  

A great many pixels have bee spilt over Ron Unz's March cover story in The American Conservative, "Hispanic." The critiques that appeared at AltRight and VDARE can be found here, here, and here -- and Unz's response to them, here. If you'd like to follow the debate play-by-play, the best place to turn is this exhaustive catalogue on the Conservative Heritage Times's blog.

And just today, Jason Richwine has written another blog on the subject, this time over at AEI, and he includes this startling new revelation:

Though this is only one of many contentious issues, Unz suggested that a 2006 report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) could help resolve it. The PPIC report uses incarceration data from California’s government that Unz says could be among the most reliable available. The report gives an HDW of 1.48, which Unz claims as a victory. Once we control for age, he says, the HDW comes down to just about his 1.1 estimate.

But Unz missed something important in the report. The 1.48 number is already fully controlled for age. I exchanged emails with one of the PPIC report’s coauthors to confirm this fact.

Thanks to Ron Unz for his thoughtful (and prompt!) response to my critique. He said a handful of things that I would like to explore further, perhaps in a post at the Enterprise Blog. Here I want to correct a small but important error made originally by Ed Rubenstein and repeated by Unz in his response to me. In an otherwise insightful article, Rubenstein said:

"The Census lumps the prison population into a larger category -- people living in 'Group quarters'. But this category includes people in college dorms, nursing homes, and military bases."

This is not true. The Census has a subcategory within "group quarters" called institutionalization. Institutionalization includes only people in correctional facilities, mental hospitals, and nursing homes. It does not include anyone in college dorms or military bases, which are both part of a different subcategory. The point is important because I used institutionalization as a proxy for incarceration in my response to Unz, and he criticized my analysis by citing Rubenstein's inaccurate claim.

Of course, institutionalization is not a perfect measure of incarceration, but it's significantly better than as portrayed by Rubenstein and Unz. As I wrote in a footnote to my article:

"Given the pre-retirement age range I use, nursing homes should not be skewing the data. And if Hispanics disproportionately end up in mental hospitals, then frankly that's something we would want to know about anyway."

So much of the discussion of Hispanics in America is circumscribed by what one might call "The Immigrant Experience." Swirling around the minds of most journalists and academics who write about the subject are a set of Ellis Island clichés that go something like this: "Hispanics might commit crime at high rates now, and struggle with familial breakdown and the like, but just you wait! After a generation or two, they'll assimilate to the American Way, just like the Irish and Italians before them." We've all heard it.

The first problem with this view is that, by and large, Hispanics aren't immigrants. Two thirds of the population is native born.

The second problem is that, by and large, the third generation is worse off than the second on a host of issues, and sometimes worse off than first-generation immigrants. According to a recent Pew Center study, with respect to the second generation, third-generation Hispanics are...