Response to Unz
Cause can’t you see
You’re torturing me
Torturing me.
—“Torture” by Kris Jensen, 1962
While reading “His-Panic” by Ron Unz in the March issue of The American Conservative, Kris Jensen’s moderately successful 1962 recording of “Torture” kept running through my brain. Please, Ron, you’re torturing me with the most convoluted arguments imaginable; simply admit that you love the cheap labor that illegal aliens provide to employers—but costs taxpayers billions of dollars. Let me also guess that you love the H-1B visa program. This piece by Unz is nothing new. I’ve seen various versions of his theme—that despite all appearances to the contrary illegal aliens are actually a benefit to us—for the last 35 years in California. Forty or fifty years ago, for example, the San Fernando Valley was a paradise for the middle-class white family. Houses were relatively inexpensive, schools were good, and crime was so low that cops stationed at one or the other of the valley divisions called it retirement on the job. Today, most whites have fled the valley floor and live on the foothill fringes. The schools are abysmal, trash and graffiti mark most neighborhoods, and Mexican and Salvadorian gangs roam the streets. The blessings of an illegal-alien invasion!
It would take several thousand words or more to address all of Unz’s arguments adequately, which is not possible in this forum. I’ll touch on a few of his arguments and leave other writers to address the rest. Unz claims that a “perception has taken root in the minds of the American public and many elected leaders that the greatest threat posed by mass immigration is crime.” Notice that Unz uses the term “mass immigration” and ignores any difference between legal and illegal immigration. More importantly, though, while crime is a significant concern among anti-illegal-alien activists, the crushing burden on our social services, especially education and medical care, and the general deterioration of neighborhoods and even entire towns, is of greater concern. With or without any additional crime, the California I grew up in has been radically altered by a flood of illegal immigrants.
Focusing only on crime, though, still leaves Unz with a problem. Hispanic crime rates are far higher than those for whites, and their incarceration rates 150-170 percent higher than for whites since 2000, according to the data that Unz himself uses. Now the real torture begins. Unz tells us to disregard federal incarceration rates because some Hispanics in federal prisons are there only for immigration-related offensives. Evidently, for Unz, immigration-related offensives, which include a wide variety of crimes, are not real crimes. He wants us to believe that there are large numbers—enough to distort the data—“of illegal nannies convicted of illegal nannying.”
By excluding federal incarcerations and using only data from the states, Unz says the Hispanic rate is now only 80 percent above the white rate. Unz further argues that since young males are the most crime-prone segment of the population, adjustment of the data for the disproportionate number of young Hispanic males brings the incarceration rate for Hispanics down to 13-31 percent more than the white rate. Now I feel much better. If there were more young white males, Hispanics would be committing—at least convicted and incarcerated for—only 13-31 percent more crime proportionally. This may be a reasonable extrapolation from the data for use in a theoretical model, but it is nothing more than that. The reality—on the ground, in the streets—is a Hispanic incarceration rate, and presumably crime rate, that is, for whatever reasons, 80 percent higher than that for whites.
Equally torturous is Unz’s comparison of cities, which is meaningless without identifying who is committing the crime in those cities. He uses Indianapolis as one of “the five whitest” cities in America, with a population of more than a half million, to contrast with a Hispanic city of comparable size. Yet, Indianapolis is 26 percent black, and blacks commit more than 75 percent of the murders in the city. Some white city!
Unz concludes his article by declaring, “Conservatives have traditionally prided themselves on being realists, dealing with the world as it is rather than attempting to force it to conform to a pre-existing ideological framework. But . . . some have also accepted the myth that Hispanic immigrants and their children have high crime rates.” It seems to me that Unz has spent an entire article attempting to twist, pound, manipulate, and torture data to convince us that what we see daily is an illusion. In honor of realism I’d like to note that in California, home to Ron Unz and to me, Hispanics are incarcerated at a rate two and a half times greater than that for whites. That’s not myth but simple statistics from the bureau of prisons.
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Mr. Unz says nothing he hasn't said before. see his article in Policy Review, Fall 1994 by Unz, Ron. I have heard the only position he has changed since defending open borders, is to a more secure, gated community in Southern California.
Fine article. Could a Roger McGrath version of Victor David Hanson's Mexifornia be in the offing?
State capitalism---private ownership and profit with public subsidy, has been the American way and especially the Republican way since Honest Abe.
Thank you Mr. McGrath. I hope to see more form you on this subject.
Does anyone here still subscribe to AmCon and out of curiosity, why? I can't wait for the next issue featuring another Unz article on how White crime causes Black poverty and the new offering from Bill Kaufmann entitled, Shirley Chisholm: Southern Agrarian.
"Does anyone here still subscribe to AmCon and out of curiosity, why?"
No. I subcribed when Taki and Buchanan first started the magazine. After Scott McConell asked the eminent historian,John Lucaks, to blast away at Pat Buchanan's popularization refuting the Manichean view of WWII, I gave it up as operating under suspicious circumstances. Not that Lucaks wasn't right, but just the dirty feeling that comes from plotting and planning a division among friends. I think it was Good Friday several years back, but I have never missed the miserable rag since.
robert, please think again. Professor Lukacs is a very intelligent man and Old Right conservative although he is famous for his anti-anti-communism. When I disagree with Dr. Lukacs, I know to question my own analysis for flaws. I am sorry I have never met the man; family constaints keep me from attending events I wish I could. I believe he spoke at the last John Randolph Club.
As for The American Conservative, it needed money. Magazines are expensive to run(ask Misters Richert and Wolf and Dr. Fleming). The US Postage Service has been very unhelpful in their extreme raises in postage rates for magazines over the past few years(NOTE: reply to Chris Check and Thomas Fleming's pleas for funds for Chronicles- they need it, we need it) and TAC needed Unz's money. I read The American Conservative despite Ron Unz's longwinded and often dishonest essay and not because he is publisher.
Derek,
Yes, I have great respect for Professor Lucaks as an eminent historian -- And for Pat Buchanan as a courageous journalist. I have no respect for an editor who would cut and paste journalism with the intellectual life for the detriment of both. Thank you for your kind note. Chronicles is the only magazine I read and at my age, the last one I will support. You younger fellows need to make your own decisions on who and how much. God Bless
It was very strange seeing Mr. Unz's article in a magazine founded by Taki Theodoracopolus and Patrick Buchanan. It was even stranger seeing it as the cover story. There were much better articles in the same issue. Justin Raimondo's review of Russell Kirk and James McClellan's newly re-released "The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft" is a good example. Dr. McGrath has done an excellent job in responding to the remarkably twisted logic in Mr. Unz's article.
Thank you Dr.McGrath for your excellent article. I have enjoyed
your articles over the years, especially the one that appeared about
six months ago about Pacific Palisades. I grew up in the Palisades
myself though our family moved away in 1967. I think you and my
older brother Chris knew each other. Anyhow thanks again
Perfectly logical by Mr. Unz's standards.
An oldie, but I can't resist it for the Unz article. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I agree with poster robert. The Lucaks article was the straw that broke the camel's back for me; regardless what Lucak's beliefs are on other issues, the whole review was so mean-spirited that it reminded me of a neocon style hit piece that the New Republic or David Frum would write.
I was stunned to hear about the Unz article, much less that it was on the cover. Even National Review wouldnt deviate that far from conservative orthodoxy. This was Pat Buchanan's magazine ? What happened?
Over the past year or so, I get the feeling, while reading T.A.C., that I'm reading articles rejected by The New Republic, Mother Jones, and The Nation!
Has the "big tent" mentality captured the conservative intelligentsia?
My TAC subscription has been put on double secret probation. At renewal time if it's more Unz and less Pat then TAC will be expelled from this campus.
I accidentally deleted KZ's thanks to Roger. Please resend.
Dr. McGrath,
In January or February, 1968, while at Pendleton awaiting orders, I accepted an invitation to spend a weekend at a fellow jarhead's home in the San Fernando Valley. I can well remember how amazed I was at the beauty of his parent's modest home and garden. Coming from flat, bleak Chicago, having grown up surrounded by concrete and brick as far as the eye could see, to stand on his little patio/carport and look out over a gently sloping garden of orange, palm, and various other fragrant and exotic plants, and beyond them to a ring of hills, while luxuriating in 60 degree weather in January, stretched the limits of what an 18 year-old could comprehend. In fact, it was the occasion for the only moment of hesitation this eager-for-war kid had. For an instant, a spirit of peace crept up and hovered near me, and I had the thought that staying right there would be as good as anything else I could ever do.
So sad to hear what has become of all that.
I feel bad for some of the good people associated with TAC - Daniel McCarthy, Jack Hunter, Sean Scallon, etc. You know they had to know the Unz article would cause problems, but Unz stepped up with some money when they needed it, so now he gets to write what he wants I guess.
What we need is more rich paleos who are willing to fund magazines.
I think it's only fair to point out, in view of what has been said above by some people, that Patrick Buchanan's work is still published in The American Conservative. For instance, he has a column on page 21 of the latest issue.
@ 18
True, but I do not believe he hasnt written an original piece for them in several years. They merely carry his columns.
I was very surprised to see Unz's article in a "paleocon" journal--even if it is one that he happens to publish. Thanks to Roger McGrath for his timely rebuttal.
(I am going by this moniker from now on because my last name is very uncommon, and I don't like it when all of my comments appear under my name when it is Googled--for reasons of privacy and also because the comments crowd out--have already crowded out, alas--my more substantive stuff.)