Many readers know Ron Unz as the publisher of the antiwar political magazine The American Conservative. (I discovered the publication in 2003, and found it to be the only mainstream organ on the American Right worth reading. Three years later, I had the opportunity to learn the journalist trade there, as an assistant editor.) Other readers, no doubt, remember Ron’s long essay on Hispanic crime from 2010, which was certainly outside-the-box and provocative, if not particularly cogent. (Jason Richwine critically examines Ron’s thesis here and here.)

Well, Ron Unz is back, with a new project that is a great service to us all. At Unz.org, he has made available, as free, downloadable PDFs, hundreds of important publications over the past century. These include magazines like The Smart Set (1900-1906) and The American Mercury (1924-1960). You can also find American Renaissance (1990-2011) and one of my favorite publications from the ‘90s, the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (1990-1998), which brought together the eponymous Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell as well Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, Michael Levin, and others.

It’s all well worth a look.

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...