Reconquista (contd.): Arvin, CA's City Council Converts To Spanish [James Fulford] - 10/15/04

In Arvin, California, recently the city council head about half of its council meeting in the Spanish language.

Mayor Juan Olivares said the council decided to conduct the meeting partly in Spanish when an unusually large number of residents who spoke only Spanish showed up…

Between 80 and 100 people came to the small town's meeting, and well more than half spoke only Spanish. Council member and mayoral hopeful Tim Tarver estimated that Spanish speakers outnumbered English-speakers three to one.

"At the end when they were doing their comments, that was pretty confusing," said meeting regular and English speaker Ange McNeill. "Especially when the mayor was doing his comments because we could hardly hear the interpreter."

McNeill estimated that about half the meeting was conducted in Spanish, but said that the official agenda items were actually discussed in English.

McNeill thinks it's no coincidence that the Spanish-speaking turnout shot up so dramatically so close to the election. She thinks the mayor asked them to come as part of an election strategy.

"What John (Olivares) tries to do is keep lines drawn and tensions going between everybody," McNeill said.

Tarver, the only council member who does not speak fluent Spanish, agrees with McNeill.

"You're sending a clear message to the rest of the county that out here in Arvin we believe in separation in race and language," Tarver said.

Tarver said that Olivares brought out dozens of Spanish speakers as a political move…

Tarver believes Olivares' focus on race will hurt the agricultural community.

"If he continues on this race separation, this language separation, he's going to put this 95 percent Hispanic community back in the past 50 years," Tarver said.

Olivares said he's too busy to worry about what Tarver thinks.

"If Mr. Tarver doesn't speak Spanish, he needs to go back to school and learn Spanish," Olivares said.

[Arvin mayor in eye of language storm By CHRISTINA SOSA, Bakersfield Californian, October 7th, 2004]

Here's a little table that may explain how some of this came about. It shows that almost 50 percent of Arvin's population was born outside the United States, and that two-fifths of those have arrived since 1990.

Nearly all of those came from "Latin America." So the problem isn't that Arvin is a "95 percent Hispanic community"—but that it's become a colony of the Estados Unidos de Mexico.

US Census figures, Arvin, CA

Mark Krikorian In NRO on Illegals and the Electoral College [James Fulford] - 10/15/04

THE ILLEGAL-ALIEN PRESIDENT? [Mark Krikorian ]
Illegals could decide the presidential election. No, not because of fraudulent voting, but because of the reapportionment of House seats that takes place after each census. As a report we did last year points out, four House seats were redistributed by the 2000 census as a result of illegal immigration, because the Census Bureau counts everyone, including illegals (the reapportionment of seats didn t happen until after the 2000 election).

There's more, but this is an issue I raised here on VDARE.COM in February, 2001, only my second appearance on Vdare.Com. (See here and here, too.)

But why is Mark Krikorian telling the NRO people? Didn't they support a constitutional amendment allowing aliens to be actually elected President? (With, as I warned at the time, possible unintended consequences.)

Mickey Kaus see the Light…Again [James Fulford] - 10/15/04

In our last episode of neoliberal naiveté, Mickey Kaus explained that he discovered, in 1986, the "welfare queens" Reagan was talking about while he was still Governor, and here he reports that Norman Podhoretz had to tell him that broken homes cause poverty, and finally…wait for it, wait for it…that immigration means importing poverty.

A couple of decades ago I read an article—by Norman Podhoretz, I think—that clued me in to the overriding importance of broken families when it came to explaining poverty statistics. Years later, Podhoretz's thesis became conventional wisdom. Now Robert Samuelson has written a similar column explaining that "the increase in poverty in recent decades stems mainly from immigration."

All right, so he's a little late to this party. But once he arrives there, he gets it:

Don't expect the left—which likes to cite with horror rising poverty numbers—to explain that the rise is largely due to the continuing influx of poor Hispanics from abroad. Don't expect the Bush administration to point this out either, at least while it's engaged in Karl Rove's Great Hispander Project.