Even “brainier” than Medved

It’s one thing to argue, as Michael Medved does, that Republicans must for their electoral survival strive with all their might to satisfy people who regard the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws and the securing of the U.S. border to be an expression of ethnic hostility against themselves, meaning that to convince such people that you don’t hate them, you must open America’s borders to their co-ethnics. It’s another thing to argue, as Clint Bolick does, that people who entertain such attitudes are “conservative.” But Bolick hesitates not, he rushes into the breach:

Hispanic Americans are conservative on most social issues, including immigration, making them a natural constituency, or at least open to voting, for Republicans. [Italics added.] But what Hispanics saw in Republicans who made the 2006 elections a referendum on deporting illegal immigrants was a face of hostility.

That last sentence goes beyond the merely brainy to true genius. Bolick, who apparently is associated with the Republican party since he presumes to give it advice and is also the director of the Goldwater Institute Center for Constitutional Litigation, has fantasized a world in which the Republican party in 2006 election ran on a platform calling for the deportation of illegals. (My personal feeling on this is, “Would it were true,” but of course nothing remotely like it was the case.)

But Bolick’s brilliance, which truly leaves the brain of Medved in the dust,—after all, Bolick was the recipient of the Bradley Prize in 2006, worth a couple of hundred thousand bucks—is seen here:

Most Hispanics walk the walk: deeply religious, family values (fewer than 8 percent of Hispanic adults are divorced), hard work, entrepreneurship and the quest for betterment of future generations through education.

Ahh, family values, that shibboleth of conservatives who give not a damn for America but think that if you can attach the phrase “family values” to something it automatically becomes good. In her article, “Hispanic Family Values?” in the August 2006 City Journal, Heather Mac Donald, a journalist who who also won the Bradley Price but who unlike Bolick actually possesses a brain, explains what Bolick’s vaunted “Hispanic family values” mean in the real world:

Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future….

But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades….

Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city of Orange, California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. A recent patient just had her second baby at age 17; the baby’s father is in jail. But what is “most alarming,” Sanchez says, is that the “teens’ parents view having babies outside of marriage as normal, too. A lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married, or they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her daughter that it’s okay to have children out of wedlock.”

Sanchez feels almost personally involved in the problem: “I’m Hispanic myself. I wish I could find out what the Asians are doing right.” She guesses that Asian parents’ passion for education inoculates their children against teen pregnancy and the underclass trap. “Hispanics are not picking that up like the Asian kids,” she sighs.

Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking “Hispanic family values” as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have survived—not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. One of them is the importance of having children early and often. “It’s considered almost a badge of honor for a young girl to have a baby,” says Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House, an adoption agency in Fresno. (Fresno has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in California, typical of the state’s heavily Hispanic farm districts.) It is almost impossible to persuade young single Hispanic mothers to give up their children for adoption, Schulze says. “The attitude is: ‘How could you give away your baby?’ I don’t know how to break through.”

The most powerful Hispanic family value—the tight-knit extended family—facilitates unwed child rearing. A single mother’s relatives often step in to make up for the absence of the baby’s father. I asked Mona, a 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church in Santa Ana, California, if she knew any single mothers. She laughed: “There are so many I can’t even name them.” Two of her cousins, aged 25 and 19, have children without having husbands. The situation didn’t seem to trouble this churchgoer too much. “They’ll be strong enough to raise them. It’s totally okay with us,” she said. “We’re very close; we’re there to support them. They’ll do just fine.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 20, 2007 01:45 AM | Send