Is the New York Times oh-so-subtly criticizing Mexican immigrants?

This is the quotation of the day in today’s Times:

“People are real casual here. If it’s not raining, someone says, ‘let’s get some string and tie the box spring to the roof rack.’ It’s carelessness and utter stupidity.”
PHIL LINHARES, a driver who recently dodged a dinette set, on the debris littering California highways.

The article describes a California where people casually pile their stuff unsecured on the back of their pickup trucks and let it fly off. People have been seriously injured and maimed Tough laws have been passed to punish offenders.

Now I don’t know. Maybe my thought that this phenomenon is due to California’s vast Mexican/Hispanic population is pure prejudice on my part. However, given the dirt and disorder that prevails in many Hispanic neighborhoods in the U.S., given Hispanics’ known predilection for careless and dangerous driving, given the fact that Hispanics due to immigration have ballooned from 19 percent of California’s population in 1980 to 35 percent today, and given that California did not have this problem in 1980, it is a reasonable assumption that California’s highway debris is a function of California’s Hispanicization. When the Times in its quotation of the day blames the problem on “carelessness and utter stupidity,” it is using polite code for a state that has been taken over by low IQ Hispanics.

By the way, note the interesting way that Wikipedia breaks down California’s ethnic/racial composition. You have to do a little figuring, but it all adds up:

According to the 2005 US Census Bureau California’s population is 60.9% White American, 6.1% Black or African American, 12.4% Asian American, 16.4% some other race, 0.7% American Indian, 3.1% mixed race. 35.5% are Hispanic or Latino (of any race). 43.3% of the population are non-Hispanic whites.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 11, 2007 06:35 AM | Send