IMBG--You must be mistaking american television entertainment with american culture. I can assure you, the two are extremely different. I would take the time to demonstrate this to you, but if you have made it through 12 to 16 years of formal schooling and think that television is american culture, and not just entertainment, and mostly crappy entertainment at that, your parents should ask for their money back. There's really no excuse for making such a statement. I can't believe anyone here would take it seriously.

In many cases, american consumers do not benefit from cheap labor. That's a sneaky lie too. I don't see new house prices falling, even though many are built by illegals. What about all the Nike shoes, Levi's jeans, and on and on? McDonalds hamburgers are the same price in the rural places I've gone to staffed entirely by citizens where they pay the minimum wage, and at the big city McD's where the staff barely knows english. Don't try to fool us by having us believe the savings are always passed on to us regular american citizens. But the welfare costs are!

A true free lunch for the average american would be where we get something for nothing. Please indicate how this operates in the illegal immigration. What do we get that we don't pay for once at the market, and again when we pay taxes? Lower priced tomatoes, for example? So lets say Jose illegal makes $2 an hour rather than $7 an hour. And lets say that you, the consumer, pockets the whole $5 (which is ridiculous, or what incentive would an employer have for breaking the law?). You pay for the illegal's health care, schooling, lost tax revenue in social security, income, medicare, and unemployment taxes, state and local taxes. If the govt. doesn't have the money, it borrows it, and you pay for both principal and interest. And you also have the pleasure of living in a society with higher crime rates, both street and white collar crime, and increased corruption. You are really paying more than the extra $5. Its just that the pea has moved to another shell. Those hustlers are tricky! Please spare us the tale of the noble Mexican. People who break so many laws are not noble, but crooks. I'll stand in judgement if I want. Its my country. I make it work. I pay the taxes. Send the crooks home.

Tim--if IQ doesn't matter, and its such crap, then why do you disprove your thesis in your own commentary? IQ tests would be crap if the jews you spoke of did very well academically and otherwise, yet scored consistently POORLY on the tests. If the IQ tests indicate that smart people do indeed have high scores, and thus high IQ, then it has marvelously done its job. Of detecting who is smart and who is not. Blacks have been in America for many generations now, and their IQ scores as a group are still rather low. It seems they haven't moved up and on too much, at least without quotas. All longitudinal studies I have seen on the Mexican horde shows consistently lower scores and dropout rates, even 3 or 4 generations after immigration. The average IQ for the world is 90. the average for whites and north asians usually runs from the high 90's to 105 or so. European jews about 110-115. African blacks 70, Latinos 85-90, Indian indians, 80, and southern asians 80-90. Arabs come in at around 80. There is a pretty high correlation between average national IQ and income. There are some notable exceptions, such as resource rich countries (think OPEC), and countries with segregated ethnic minorities (South Africa, for example). But the correlation is HIGH.

The real question for the IQ doesn't matter crowd is to explain how isolated human populations can evolve different physical features, sometimes markedly so, yet somehow they would not also vary in terms of intellectual evolution. Forget about humans for a bit. Just show me some examples of different types in a species that developed in along different lines, yet somehow managed to be perfectly equivalent. For instance, horses and zebras. Heck, people even know that some dog species are more intelligent than others! Take your misleading idea that because people of a type vary more than people do between types, these IQ points are irrelevant. What kind of overlap do you think the ashkenazi jewish population of 115 IQ average has with your average african, averaging a 70 IQ? Very very little.

I would never advocate treating less intelligent people more poorly. But I will tell you what will happen, and what has happened, not just here, but everywhere around the world, where different racial types with significant IQ differences are together in the same society. The smarter ones will be more successful, occupy the top positions, and become roundly despised by the less successful group. Never will the differences in outcome be related to differences in ability. Since success will seem to break down along racial lines, the cause of it all will be most surely--hang on to your hats!--RACISM! And the less intelligent group will demand a wealth transfer and/or outright attack the more successful group violently. This is true ALL OVER THE WORLD, THROUGHOUT HISTORY! Heck, this even happens with a population composed of only one racial group. Its the Cain and Abel and Tower of Babel stories writ large.

I guarantee you that we are importing a serious racial conflict. The subgroup (Latinos) is now too large for that not to happen. This is truly mass insanity, at least for the average american. The only people who could be happy about this are the new welfare recipients and those who hate their own group, for whatever reason. Or those crooks making tons of money hiring illegal crooks.

Posted by: BTM on March 31, 2006 12:21 AM

Tim Worstall,

The IQ average for the human race is 90, not 100.

Yes, group average IQ differences matter a great deal. The empirical evidence is overwhelming and I strongly urge you to study it.

From psychometrician Linda Gottfredson's paper Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (PDF).

Evidence on the causal power of IQ/g. IQ cannot be a good conduit for transmitting purely social (non-genetic) privileges across generations, because IQ cannot transfer family privileges that leave no lasting imprint on it. But does IQ/g level really cause differences in mastery of important tasks in daily life? The following set of facts answers “yes.”

First, much civilian and military research has detailed how brighter individuals are more
educable and trainable, often learning 2-5 times faster than their less able peers when exposed to
the same instruction. They cost less to train per unit of skill or knowledge acquired. They can
also learn difficult material that less able individuals cannot, even when the latter are given more time and assistance. This is a major reason why the military and some large civilian employers in the United States test all applicants for mental ability. Intelligence has little value unless conscientiously applied, to be sure, but motivation cannot substitute for mental competence. Coming from a higher status family is of no value because trainees must do their own learning.

Second, IQ predicts later job performance but family background does not. Supervisors are often swayed by factors other than actual performance when they rate workers, but the correlations between IQ and performance on a job increase when performance is assessed in a more objective manner. This is the opposite of what social privilege theory predicts. Studies by industrial psychologists, particularly John Hunter and Frank Schmidt, show that higher g workers perform better partly because they have learned more about their jobs but also because workers must continue to learn and reason once on the job. No training program can ever prepare workers for all contingencies, especially in a changing world. Workers must continue to learn on their own, apply old knowledge to new situations, plan, spot problems, and use their judgment. Higher levels of g enhance job performance because they provide greater capacity for continued self instruction and independent problem solving once on the job. Researchers have not found anything—not family wealth, long experience, or a favorable personality—that can substitute for this capacity in getting the work done.

Third, other evidence confirms that higher-level jobs really do require workers to perform more mentally demanding tasks. It comes from job analysis studies, which catalog the various tasks that specific jobs require workers to perform to get the job done in a competent manner. These studies, which are used to design training and compensation systems, consistently show that the major distinction among jobs lies in the overall complexity of the duties they require workers to carry out. Recall that complexity of information processing is the very same ingredient that draws forth g in IQ tests.

Read her full paper and you can also read all her published papers from her web site.

Also, see La Griffe Du Lion's Smart Fraction Theory of IQ and the Wealth of Nations and his follow-up Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag.

Also, read about Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's book IQ and the Wealth Of Nations.

It is a myth that research ever found Central European immigrants to be dumb. This myth was promoted by skilled Marxist propagandist Stephen Jay Gould in his Mismeasure of Man.

Gould's most inflammatory allegation consists of blaming IQ testers for magnifying the toll of those lost in the Holocaust (p. 263). Here he has followed the lead of Leon Kamin's (1974) The Science and Politics of IQ. The Kamin-Gould thesis is that early IQ testers claimed their research proved that Jews as a group scored low on their tests and that this finding was then conveniently used to support passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 which then denied entry to hapless Jewish refugees in the 1930s. Gould goes so far as to claim (1996, pp. 195-198; 255-258) that Henry H. Goddard (in 1917) and Carl C. Brigham (in 1923) labeled four-fifths of Jewish immigrants as "feeble-minded ... morons".

The facts are very different. Goddard wanted to find out if the Binet test was as effective at identifying 'high-grade defectives' (the term then used for those with mental ages between eight and twelve) among immigrants as it was among native-born Americans. By 1913, Goddard had translated the Binet test into English and arranged, over a two-and-a-half-month period, for it to be given to a subset of Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian immigrants "preselected as being neither 'obviously feeble-minded' nor 'obviously normal'" (Goddard, 1917, p. 244, emphasis added). Among this "unrepresentative" group (178 subjects in all), the tests successfully categorized 83% of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the Russians. Goddard (1917) explicitly did not assert that 80% of Russians, Jews, or any immigrant group in general were feeble minded nor that the figures were representative of all immigrants from those nations. Nor did he claim that the feeblemindedness he was measuring was due to heredity. The vast majority of the many immigrants going through Ellis Island were never given mental tests. Nor was a random sample of any national group of immigrants ever tested. The only study by Goddard involving the testing of immigrants begins with the following sentence: "This is not a study of immigrants in general but of six small highly selected groups... "(1917, p. 243).

My post is too long already and so I'll avoid responding to all your points.

Posted by: Randall Parker on April 1, 2006 10:42 AM

I worked for Iowa Beef / Armand Hammer in the 1980s. Many of the workers at that packing plant were specifically recruited from East Asia. They made up about 1/3 of the work force. About 1/3 were hispanic. And 1/3 were working class white. These were definitely jobs American people would do -- at least at the wages paid in the 1980s. I've heard that wages today are down sharply in the industry.

The work week was 52 hrs. -- six days a week -- which meant 12 hrs. of overtime a week. I didn't see that much turn over. But again, wages and the work force have changed significantly since the 80s.

Posted by: PrestoPundit on April 3, 2006 1:59 AM

Let's make Mexico the 51st state. We get the oil and the beaches and the tequila and they get the non-forged ID cards. When 11 million of anything passes from Sphere A to Spere B, say,raindrops, grains of sand, illegal immigrants, well, hell, that's a lot of not caring by a lot of powerful folks (and non-powerful folks as well).

Posted by: das on April 6, 2006 3:33 AM

I'm with you brother, let's make Mexico the 51st state.

Posted by: christian on April 18, 2006 2:37 AM






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