What exactly is Bush’s immigration reform plan, removing all obstacles to immigration?

I guess Bush may be trying to give the rest of us a strong signal on immigration:

http://i.xanga.com/dissidentfrogman/bush2french.gif

Look for Bush to meet with “his good friend” President Fox of Mexico in the near future so they can come up with a plan to “solve” the immigration problem in a way that will surely continue to send the United States down the path to overpopulation, cultural/linguistic balkanization, skyrocketing crime, increasing welfare dependence and general all-around dispossession of U.S. citizens. Bush must be a member of La Raza.

If Bush considers Fox, that arch-enemy of the United States, his friend then Bush must also be the enemy of every citizen in this country. Is Bush a cynical importer of indentured labor or a coward too afraid to do what needs to be done to stop the third-world invasion? It doesn’t matter which he is, the result is the same.

We should stop all immigration and deport all illegal aliens. If Mexico doesn”t want to accept all of the wretched people it has sent to us, then we should use the military to force them to. Mexico has always been our enemy, even though we have bailed out their corrupt oligarchy time and time again. They have never been a worse enemy than now and Bush allows himself to be sodomized by their president every chance he gets. My contempt for Bush is boundless. Oh well, I voted for Peroutka.

This took, what, less than one week ! GBW is very serious about this issue. Forget Karl Rove and his talking points. This is not politics, it’s personal for Abrusto; and that is indeed very troubling. I don’t think you can reason with Bush on the Mexican question.

Viva Jorge W. Caldaraplata! Neuvo Caudillo de Mexiamerica!

The business owners who insist on this, alomg with their poltical toadies who’ve shoved this policy down the throats of a native populace who are overwhelmingly opposed, are the moral equivalent of slaveowners.

Mr. Sutherland’s take on the election is looking more and more accurate all the time. First Specter, and now this! Here we go! Time to Mambo, as Matt would remind us.

We cannot reason with President Bush about immigration. He is a true believer in the Proposition Nation/Nation of Immigrants propaganda that he has been imbibing for years, even though his own ancestral history contradicts those big lies. In addition it is personal and familial with respect to Mexicans. A rich (transplant) Texan, he has been huntin’ and fishin’ with Mexico’s Spaniard oligarchs for decades, and finds them much like himself. The mestizos and Indians are charming and (seemingly) submissive, and in their brown-ness more inherently virtuous than the white Americans who actually vote for him. He has Mexican relatives of his own, and dynastic ambitions for the clan that seem to rest heavily on young, half-Mexican and militantly hispanic George P. Bush. Bush both believes his proposals are virtuous and, better yet, good politics for his family if not his party. The Bushes are as serious about defending their political stature as the Kennedys ever were, and must believe that a steady flow of Mexican voters will help preserve them in power. Indeed, Americans would see the Bush family more clearly if we got into the habit of seeing them as the GOP’s Kennedys.

Nothing shows more clearly than his Mexican obsessions and his repeated return to incalculably destructive amnesty ideas (what’s that about dogs and their vomit?) that President Bush is a liberal, period. No need to qualify it. He is a perfectly indoctrinated white American liberal, utterly incapable of seeing his country’s (or his people’s) best interests and acting on them. He has become totally disconnected from his family’s and his country’s roots, and is totally unconcerned about what the devastating demographic transformation he abets would do to both.

More than anything, this is why I wanted Bush to lose. Senator Kerry would have made an egregiously bad president, but he is at least free of Bush’s fixation on Mexico and Mexicans. Of the many strains undermining the United States, the Mexican invasion is the most immediate threat. I don’t believe Kerry would have assisted it as willingly and emotionally as Bush does.

I wish I could believe that a GOP Congress will spike Bush’s amnesty/guest worker proposals, but I am not at all sure. In an intra-party knife between the president’s partisans and Tom Tancredo’s over immigration, the GOP’s thoroughly establishment leadership is very unlikely to turn on the president. The fight over HR.10 was small beer compared to the fight to come over full amnesty. When their own president accuses them of racism, they’ll roll over. Mr. Auster hints at one of our biggest problems in fighting the Bush national destruction plan: it is so insanely beyond comprehension that in attempting to describe it to those who don’t get it (most Americans, that is) we sound like loony alarmists ourselves.

As for Colin Powell, I wouldn’t look for much of a defense of traditional America from the black son of Jamaican immigrants, frankly. HRS

My gut tells me that Bush feels amicably towards Mexicans because his brother married a Mexican.

Whatever the reason, I will become politically active if necessary to defeat any immigration measures he proposes that do anything less than tighten our enforcement. I have never written a letter to a congressman or anything like that before…but this issue would get me to do that. I voted for Bush and I can approve of or at least tolerate everything else he’s said he’s for, except this. ABSOLUTELY NO MORE AMNESTIES.

Mr. Sutherland understands, better than most, that GWB and his family have a deep emotional investment in Mexico, and all things Mexican. I have often joked that Abrusto dreams in Mexican…..but the joke is on us. Many folks have thought that GWB’s Hispanic pandering was just that…..pandering, something Karl Rove dreamed up. The Hispanic part may be; but the Mexican part is dead serious. This is a Bush family project. Bush was so clueless; that his amnesty last year was just for, you guessed it, MEXICANS. Until the Democrats spoke up and said what about the rest of Latin America ? That seemed to give the Bush team some pause.

Mr. Sutherland has hit the nail on the head. You will never, ever reason with Bush on immigration. My best guess is he is fuzzyheaded liberal who has no clue he is being treasonous.

The outcome, as in most cases, will be decided by hard work. The Jewish People exist in large part to their industry and are a shining example. We must use every nonviolent opportunity to oppose Bush’s treasonous behavior. This includes supporting candidates for immigration reform, tirelessly writing letters and making phone calls (the squeaky wheel always gets the most grease), and learning the counterarguments to Bush’s policies (by tuning in here, for example). These are important steps but defensive, reactionary.

Most importantly, people must work to create an organization that will take the offensive; we all know one usually can’t win based on only a defense. One must counterattack or take preemptive action at some point.

Yes Bush is arguably treasonous. “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in…or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” U.S. Const., art. III, sec. 3. Mexico is an enemy. Its leaders, citizens, and its children living in the U.S. want to retake the Southwest, at least. Bush adheres or sticks by his Mexicans through thick or thin despite outrage by a huge majority of United States citizens. He wants to aid them by giving them jobs and benefits for invading us. It is one of Bush’s first priorities he declared. Poor Colonel Travis; where did his sacrifice get him? Any bizarre Bushian reasoning—“we are all Americans”—is not a defense to the CRIME. How easily it would be to avoid a crime such as theft because one had the intent of saving oneself from starvation; Benedict Arnold could have escaped the gallows with such a specious defense.

Thanks for everyone’s indulgement.

I really can’t overstate the importance of working hard in the ways I mentioned above. As a speaker, I perhaps could get it across (or so I would like to believe), but I have no talent as a writer. Would it be there was a book that reached people emotionally on this issue such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or To Kill a Mockingbird.

Just remember the story of the tortoise and the hare. You need not do everything in one day. Today say you will do something. Tomorrow start looking for your Congressman’s address. Next week take out a piece of paper. Next day write the first word. Action precedes motivation; take it from a pathological procrastinator. For example, tonight I had the intention of merely beginning a comment, but I got motivated after starting.

I’ll shut up now.

This is truly sad. However, Kerry would be no better. Both of these guys (Bush or Kerry) are out for the buck and they don’t take prisoners.

As H.L. Mencken once said, “Nobody every lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the average American.”

The other great quote I just recently read somewhere was “When the legislature controls buying and selling, the first things to be bought and sold will be the legislators.”

The average American watches what, 2-4 hours of television a day? Maybe when we all lose our jobs and can’t afford cable we’ll start paying attention to that “great sucking sound to south” as Ross Perot used to say. (And people called Perot a quack! Ha!)

Regarding Mr.Henri’s comment:I thought that Samuel Huntington’s book, Who Are We? would galvanize the illegal immigrant argument and make it a nightly topic on the cable shows. It seems to me that it barely caused a ripple outside of the intelligentsia. I concur with what Mr. Sutherland said about appearing alarmist when trying to explicate Bush’s amnesty plan. If you asked the average citizen to give a one line definition of America I’d be willing to bet Nation of Immigrants would show up among the most popular answers along with Land of the Free or Home of the Brave. My own preference would be Nation of Citizens. Somehow, the concept of citizenship has to be reawakened if not reestablished. Georgie Anne Geyer is one of the few consistent, syndicated voices striving to remind of this now nearly forgotten yet precious notion. I believe that Tom Tancredo will have to be the sacrificial lamb to bring citizenship back into the national spotlight. It would be a bold move for him to declare his candidacy for president from a House seat but it would force the media to cover him as he is,after all, an elected member of the Republican party with some national notoriety. Mr.Tancredo could also force the opposition to take up a concrete counter position to his own stance, thereby creating a true national debate on the issue.It would,in all likelihood, spell the end of Tancredo’s career as the Rove-Kemp alliance would crush him as a prodigal son. Books, essays, pamphlets, two minute interviews on Lou Dobbs with Victor Davis Hanson or Pat Buchanan certainly have had some effect but let’s face it—the immigration reform movement needs a likable individual with a telegenic personality who is able to convey a sense of history,urgency and most importantly,pain to the broad spectrum of voters who remain unmoved by the issue. Otherwise, the reform movement, while up and flying will remain too low to enter the political radar screen at the national level.

Of course the claim that 45% of the Hispanics voted for Bush doesn’t hold up:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/041107_election.htm

I agree with DS.

Mr. Auster contemplates a revolution. I wonder if he is thinking along the lines of a Reagan Revolution or a Shootout at the O.K. Corral type thing.

I mean a widespread, mad-as-hell political uprising against his immigration proposal. There was quite an uprising last January. This time, if he seriously pushes this insane scheme (rather than just letting it go to some committee and die as it did last year), the uprising will be bigger.

However, it’s not yet clear from reports I’ve read whether he’s just pushing the amnesty part, which is bad enough, or the much more radical part, to open America to every person on earth who can underbid an American for a job.

To judge from President Bush’s first two significant actions since his re-election, Bush is spoiling to have the fight Mr. Auster calls for, and is determined to mexicanize America as much as he can in the time he has left.

In addition to sending Colin Powell to Mexico City to grovel to the Mexican government and take dictation from Vicente Fox and Luis Ernesto Derbez about America’s immigration policy, he is about to announce that he wants his liberal, Mexican-American sidekick Alberto Gonzales to be his next Attorney-General.

Bush is intolerant of dissent (he gets on better with Democrats than he does with truly conservative Republicans), and he knows there is opposition to his hispandering among Republicans. He is determined to bring the Congress to heel and stuff this down reluctant Republicans’ throats. The White House urinals probably have pictures of Tom Tancredo in them as targets, but if Bush succeeds we all get rained on.

Immigration reformers are going to need stronger allies than Congressional Republicans if we are to defeat Bush’s plans. HRS

What the *&%#!@% is wrong with GWB? what can he POSSIBLY be thinking? I cannot fathom how far removed he must be from middle america. I bet he has no clue what is really happening to this country. Bush should put on a Bush mask and visit any larger city in the U.S. Walk down a street. Maybe at night. Go buy some groceries. Stop at a gas station. Take public transportation somewhere etc.

I have seen some of these mexican families - all overweight and with a litter of kids - walking down the side of the street pushing shopping carts with their deranged cousin it tow. Half the kids in the cart. Half the kids out of the cart. Cars honking and trying to get around. This is in Chicago. This country is really falling apart.

Ok, but let’s keep this in perspective. I don’t think there was any doubt in anyone’s mind that Bush if re-elected would re-introduce his immigration scheme or at least key parts of it. Perhaps what is shocking is his quickness to do so right after the election. It’s sort of analogous to Clinton and the homosexuals in the military issue. Clinton had favored the idea as a candidate, though he hadn’t pushed it front and center. So when he made it virtually the first and most important initiative in his administration, conservatives were shocked. They acted as though this had come out of the blue, as though Clinton had deceived them about his “moderate” stance. Not true. He had been clear about his position on this. They just didn’t think he would make it top priority the way he did.

It’s the same with Bush and amnesty. The only thing to be surprised at is the speed with which he’s proposing it (which makes it seem like a slap in the face to his conservative supporters), not the fact that he’s proposing it.

Howard Sutherland put it beautifully when he described the Bush’s as the Republicans’ Kennedys. I am not quite sure that his precise analysis of Bush 43’s ideas is correct — I am not sure that Bush 43 has ideas as we understand them — but he senses that his family’s dynastic aspirations are tied up with the Mexican interest and he simply has no interest in or sympathy for those not of his own social class. He is ye compleat Country Club Republican.
While not defending Colin Powell, I suspect Mr. Sutherland gravely underestimates the hostility of blacks — at least native-born American blacks — to immigrants, especially but not only Hispanics.

GWB has done a great flim-flam job with vast numbers of conservatives - especially Evangelical Christians. He’s familiar with the jargon - picked up from his upbringing in Midland, Texas. Papa Bush was a transplant from Connecticut, and liberalism has been the family’s true faith for at least two generations.

Bush attends the United Methodist Church, a mainline Protestant demonination that has a large number of leftists alongside Evangelicals. The UMC is seriouslly infected with liberalism, but the conservatives don’t have the strength to purge the liberals (as with the Southern Baptists) or the will to split (as with the Presbyterians). Anti-racism has made powerful inroads in many otherwise conservative churches. There are few within Evangelical circles who recognize the fact that anti-Racism is atually a form of racism intended to advance the agenda of the multiculturalist left.

Since Bush has pulled off the mask, he is now open to full attack. Conservatives should declare war on him. It remains to be seen if anyone will have the courage.

Mr. Levine says that Bush “simply has no interest in or sympathy for those not of his own social class. He is ye compleat Country Club Republican.”

I think that’s completely wrong. If there’s one thing we know about Bush, it is that he has empathy for, is comfortable with, and gets along with, all kinds of Americans. He’s nothing if not a regular guy. He clearly has the ability to touch people, as attested by many stories about him from wounded soldiers, from people who have lost family members, and so on.

Also, the description of Bush as the “compleat Country Club Republican” is cartoonish. If that’s all that Bush was, he wouldn’t have had the political career he’s had, he wouldn’t have been elected president, and he certainly wouldn’t be adored the way he is by millions of his (regular American) supporters.

We’ve got to beware this sort of anger or resentment that denies any good or human qualities in people we oppose politically. Mr. Levine’s past descriptions of John F. Kennedy as some sort of unique monster are in that class.

I may have overstated things a bit about Bush, although I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that he does not understand the problems or attitudes of those beneath him in the social scale. I would not take the things that convince Mr. Auster that Bush is a “regular guy” too seriously, because that is the stock in trade of the politicians, good or bad.
I would not however, alter my description of JFK as a monstrous character. He really was uniquely bad among American presidents — neither candidate in the last election was in that awful.

I don’t think Bush is crazy; I think he may be a subscriber to the “Mexicans are like the Italians immigrants in 1900 theory.” A lot of people are die hard believers in it. I think everyone here understands the problems with this theory.

Here is what really fascinates me: Why is only the far right demonstrating against this plan? Immigration is hurting blue collar workers more than anyone. My jaw drops at the silence from Ralph Nader, Inc., Big Labor, etc. If someone can explain this to me, please do!!!

The “Hispanics are like Italians” theory is always used by pro-immigration conservatives to quiet the concerns of other conservatives that Hispanics are not assimilating. It has never been used as a positive argument _for_ immigration. And it could certainly not explain Bush’s religious devotion to open borders.

Good point. But you never know for sure. Despite his being very intelligent (a nuclear engineer?), President Carter was so foolish as to believe the Soviets were *really* serious about arms control!

If I may propose a theory:

What does America since FDR really represent? A Ponzi scheme.

Think about it. We keep promising things that everyone with a room temperature IQ knows we can’t pay for. The desire to do this means we need more and more people at the bottom of the pyramid. The US has already dragged the European talent over here.

My brother is in a science lab getting his Ph.D. He’s one of the only white students there. The universities love to hire the Chinese because they work like dogs and don’t complain about anything. Now (surprise, surprise) we’re dipping south of the border for more cheap labor.

It’s a beautiful thing for gov’t and business. You privatize your profits and socialize your losses on the taxpayer. And who cares! The politician knows he’ll be out of office when the **** will hit the fan.

To this day old people think FDR is some sort of Christ figure! Charles Ponzi went to prison, and FDR has a monument built for him. Isn’t life strange!

Mark’s description of the American economic system since FDR is very close to Robert Locke’s model of corporatism. As Mark mentioned, this way the large players are able to destroy their competition by privatizing their profits and socializing their losses.

Wal-Mart is a great example. A hugely profitable enterprise, it can keep its labor cost down by hiring illegals, who are happy to work at low wages because they are able to access all manner of welfare benefits and free medical care at taxpayer expense. To top it off, it keeps leftist lawyers off their backs because they are big boosters of “diversity.”

High tech firms benefit from the open borders ideology as well, through the notorious H1B and L1 visas - which are basically vehicles to import skilled indentued servants (typically drawn from Asian countries). The indentured programmers never complain, for the sole purpose for the VISA is that the company allegedly needs them due to lack of competent Americans. They are well aware that any complaints will result in their visa being pulled - and a fast trip back home to China or India.

Mark also asks about the lack of union resistance to the open borders jihadis. Union workers are now overwhelmingly in the public sector, and the few remaining in the private sector are steadlily being phased out by relocating plants to China, etc. The legions of bureaucrats, public school teachers, etc., don’t have to worry about job comepitition from illegal aliens - so it’s not on the union radar screen.

It is heartening to find so many folk trying to answer the unanswerable question. The dynastic motive is interesting. But would a US President really return the southwest to the Amerindian nations - not Hispanic who are my caucasian brothers? It is fantastic, perhaps too fantastic to believe.

One must surely look for a more subtle medley of explanations. Dynasty yes, but also the interests of corporate America, the influence in domestic terms of all those close advisors who have so ruled the President’s foreign policy, even the conflation of religious faith with “great-hearted” liberal universalism. It’s the strangest, darned thing.

I greatly admire Howard’s approach. But I don’t think he’s got the whole story yet.

DS hopes or speculates (I’m not sure which) that Rep. Tancredo will announce an early run for President for ‘08 and will be “a sacrificial lamb to bring citizenship back into the national spotlight”. I work closely with someone who works closely with Rep. Tancredo, and I can tell you that he has no aspirations to be president. He is a pretty humble guy and an intellectual—the Congressional version of the brilliant Robert Bork. While he’s a hero to many of us, he’s already been “borked”/marginalized by Rove et al. Mr. Sutherland is right—we need string anti-immigration leaders OUTSIDE of Congress. Chuck Hagel’s replacement as Senator, Sen.-elect Thune, looks like a bright, young potential leader. Don’t know how strongly against illegal immigration Thune is, however.

What seems so silly to me is, here are our good friends in AZ and elsewhere (who supported Prop 200 and won) celebrating like kids in the streets when Bush suddenly “blindsides” them with his Federal amnesty move! It was so predictable.

Prior to the election, I warned my conservative colleagues (who held their collective noses and voted for Bush) that this would happen (his push for amnesty). Acting as though he has been given a mandate, he is obviously trying to get it done before the new, more conservative House comes in. FAIR (Dan Stein’s), the americanresistance.com (D.A. King’s) and other important anti-illegal immigration groups are going to bat for us. Lou Dobbs at CNN is a huge plus on our side, too. Will Bush’s timely amnesty push squash that Prop. 200 “celebration” so that it doesn’t spread to Northern, more populous states? I believe it was Carl who said (perhaps in another thread) that only when the loss of American jobs and the degradation of American neighborhoods (gangs) are tied to the Invasion by illegals will the population rise up and force the Government to ge tough on illegal immigration.

Guessedworker raises good questions. I stand by my theory of why President Bush is so determined to advance Mexicans in America through immigration and affirmative action. Nevertheless, Bush’s urges are powerfully reinforced by the anti-white multiculturalism of American liberalism (Bush is a sincere, if thoughtless, liberal multiculturalist) and by the desires of the GOP’s corporatist clientele for an endless supply of cheap workers. So it is true that Bush’s mexi-obsession is not the whole story. But it is the necessary precondition to his willingness to gamble with his country’s future.

As for whether a president would hand the Southwest back to American Indians, I agree that that would be unlikely indeed (not enough Indian votes around to hunt for, for one thing). What Bush pushes is far worse. The Mexicans and Central Americans invading the United States are not displaced American Indians returning home, they are mestizos and Indians from Mexico’s interior and farther south, people who have never had roots in what is now the United States. They have no claim whatever on U.S. territory, no matter what the Mechistas and other hispanic irredentists may say. When Texas became independent and later a state, and when the United States annexed the Southwest after the Mexican War, there were very few Mexicans living in those territories. Before Americans started moving in, there were only strings of recently established missions along the Caminos Reales in each of Texas and California (Spanish priests and friars ministering to Indians) and a scattering of ranches (mostly owned by proprietors who had come directly from Spain and the Canaries). Cortés had conquered Mexico in 1521; the first Texas missions date only from about 1720, the first California missions from about 1770. The exception was the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico, which had (not terribly numerous) Spanish settlement from the end of the 17th century. Even there, most settlers were Spaniards, not creoles from New Spain (Mexico, that is) and certainly not Mexican Indians or mestizos. While Mexicans had been drifting into the Southwest for several decades before, the mass-Mexican presence there is a post-1970 phenomenon. The surge of Mexicans into the rest of the country is a post-1990 phenomenon.

Something else to keep in mind is that Bush is truly a post-modern liberal. He has no sense of racial differences as being meaningful (other than, of course, for the general oppressiveness of Europeans v. the general innocence of everyone else), and certainly has no sense whatever that his own race might be worth supporting or even preserving. If the result of his policies is that California becomes Mexican and Oriental and the rest of the Southwest simply Mexican, that is fine with him. As long as the Stars and Stripes fly over the mess, it’s still America, no matter who the inhabitants are. HRS

Howard Sutherland as usual is right. I would add a few points: the Mexican presence in the Southwest does predate 1970, but most Mexican-Americans arrived after 1900, and many were fleeing the Revolution. Second, Mexico’s record in treating Indians — that is tribal Indians, not the Hispanicized mestizos — is if anything WORSE than that of the US. In fact, 19th century Mexican governments got rid of some of their northern Amerindians by driving them into the US. I do not however attach as much importance to the “Indian” background of the Mexican and Central American immigrants as Mr. Sutherland and others do.
Culture, not race, is the main culprit here. Even those Latin-American countries which are overwhelminglh white, and have large minorities of Northern Europeans, like Argentina, are basket cases. It is the Spanish, not the Amerind component of Latin culture that is the main problem.

Can someone please explain the term “Hispanic” to me?

Mr. Levin’s comments are appreciated. I am indeed only hoping that Tom Tancredo would declare a run for the presidency. And I do realize that he has been marginalized already. Jack Kemp’s recent article on Townhall is enough to dispel any thoughts to the contrary. In the current issue of The American Conservative, Peter Hitchens describes some of the reasons conservatives across the pond are being swept into the dustbin. He notes that Blair, whose own party lacks telegenic and coherent men, has the top job “because he looks and sounds better on TV.” The problem with true immigration reform is that, despite the cover story by Time, despite books such as Who Are We? and Mexifornia most people see illegal immigration as a regional or a fringe issue. Ask people here in Ohio, what’s riding on AZ Prop 200 for them and they would answer-nothing. This is because most people still don’t feel any pain from immigration.
We need someone to enlighten them of their pain.

It seems to me that the immigration reform movement has a playbook thousands of pages deep but it lacks the Blair figure who says to himself “I can win with that.” My despair stems from the fact that I can’t figure out why this is so. Someone has to have the courage to actually run a campaign on these issues. The cry for a national debate on immigration has been echoing for decades now. At some point,(now!), a national debate will have to coalesce around a figurehead, like it or not. There were dozens of reasons, and well thought out ideas, as to why one should not have voted for George Bush. Unfortunately, there were no candidates to carry them forward on the November 2nd ballot.

The term “hispanic” is a poser. Reasonably it should mean someone from the Roman provinces of Hispania or a Spaniard, but we know it doesn’t. I think it is a term the feds invented and ethnic agitators embraced (or maybe the other way around) for anyone from Latin America who manages to get into the United States and such people’s progeny. Oddly, I think (may be wrong) that as used by the feds, Spaniards are excluded (because they are white Europeans), while Brazilians - whose Iberian links are to Portugal, not Spain - are included. It is not racial, and has nothing to do with whether assorted Latin Americans actually have much in common. A white Argentine with a German or Italian surname is a hispanic, as is a Maya Indian from Guatemala whose only language is Quechua, as is a black Dominican ballplayer. Its only purpose is to provide another category of people to prefer over white native Americans.

I agree with Mr. Levine that the Spanish system of colonialism, which denied creoles any say in their political affairs, contributed to the irresponsibility and caudillismo that plague Latin American politics (and will increasingly plague ours - look at Anaheim and Santa Ana). I also believe that the ethnic component matters. Latin American Indians have shown little aptitude for Western civilization, to be blunt. Mr. Levine is right to say that Argentina and other mostly white Latin American countries are basket cases. True enough, but not all baskets are alike. Argentina, Uruguay and especially Chile are in much better shape than more mestizo and Indian countries like Peru, Colombia and - of course - Mexico.

If it is the fate of the United States to be overrun by Latin Americans, I think it would be less disruptive if the intruders were white Argentines and Chileans rather than mestizo Mexicans and Salvadorans. Geography dictates otherwise. If President Bush gets his way, however, the distinction will be academic, as they will all be coming, until the United States becomes indistinguishable from (the rest of) Latin America. HRS

I disagree with what Mr. Sutherland said about “Hispanic.” Its original meaning is not political but descriptive and straightforward: Spanish-based cultures and peoples of South America. It’s like Hellenistic, cultures derived from Greece, but not Greek themselves.

There is a Museum of Hispanic culture in Mexico City. The term did not originate in the United States.

Mr. Auster is right about “hispanic” as an adjective describing a culture: that of Spain and her former colonies. There is a Spanish adjective, hispanidad, to characterize good style in the Spanish language and the slightly melancholy pride of the Spaniards (and presumably those of their Latin American cousins who retain an affinity for their mother country). In the Mexican context it means what is Spanish about Mexico as opposed to what is American (i.e., Indian), as it does at the museum Mr. Auster writes of. Modern Mexicans are taught their history as three clearly demarcated eras: (i) Ancient Mexico (don’t dare say Pre-Columbian any more!) which is Good, Idyllic and Pure; (ii) Spanish Colonial, which is Evil, Oppressive and Superstition-ridden (i.e., Catholic); and (iii) Modern Mexico, revolutionary and striving to be the happy home of La Raza, but which is stymied and abused by the evil Anglo-Saxon (i.e., cold and heartless) imperialists immediately to Mexico’s north. Inconvenient facts are not allowed to interfere with the national mythology.

My comments were about the misuse of hispanic as a term describing people, which (at least as used by the U.S. government) is a gross, misleading and politically distorted generalization. That is what I thought Andrew was asking about. HRS