Re: Nicholas Stix’s column Amnesty Means Gang Nation And The Rule Of Crime (Except For The Rich)

From: Rick Drake [Email him]

In his piece on Amnesty and gangs, Nicholas Stix writes the following:

Gangs and Hispanics are inseparable. Hispanics seem to have a collectivist mentality, in which joining gangs is the norm.

This is the type of gratuitous racist garbage that hurts your website's credibility and the case for no amnesty for illegal immigrants. Some of your writers do it quite often and I can't understand why they shoot themselves (and your website) in the foot if they are indeed sincere about their ideas.

The vast majority of Hispanics do not belong to gangs and it's amazing that such an idiotic remark has to even be refuted.

Sure, allowing more illegals in the country through amnesty will indeed increase crime but there are many other ways in which you can show how that claim is accurate. There are no statistics or hard data, however, to confirm Stix's idiotic assertion.

James Fulford writes: The idea that “Hispanics seem to have a collectivist mentality” is a generalization or stereotype. You would be surprised at how accurate these are.

If you need evidence for the idea that Hispanics are more collectivist than regular Americans, you can look at the politics of Mexico, a largely socialist state, or look at Hispanic support for left-wing Democratic politics. Or you could look at standard texts on cultural differences.

For example, a handbook for ESL teachers says “Hispanics tend to be brought up to be cooperative, whereas the Anglo culture typically encourages students to be more competitive and individualistic.” (The writer uses this to excuse cheating on ESL tests.)

The other point— that “vast majority of Hispanics do not belong to gangs” is probably true, numerically, since the whole point of a gang is that it has exclusive membership. It wouldn’t be a gang if they let everybody join.

What “Gangs and Hispanics are inseparable” means is that where you have barrios and colonias full of poor illegal immigrants, you will have gangs.