...Trump's surge in the polls is being fueled by ordinary Americans. They are applauding or murmuring quiet approval because they probably live in areas that have gotten massive influxes of immigrants -- the majority from Mexico -- over the last decade or two. They know what the score is; that diversity has failed to provide the benefits that political elites said it would. They've seen public schools overwhelmed with non-English speakers, dumbed down, social problems increase, and crime go up -- and it all seems to have a Hispanic face as millions upon millions of immigrants have flooded over the border...
Trump says many Mexican immigrants are losers -- part of Mexico's social problems that the country's elites are glad to “dump” on America. “When Mexico sends it's people, they are not sending its best,” Trump said. True or false?
Short answer: True.
Most Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, are high school or grade-school dropouts, according to the data; and their offspring continue to be underachievers. On the later point, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington revealed some disquieting statistics in his must-read book, "
Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity."
Citing statistics from the 1990 census, Huntington noted that high percentages of Mexican-Americans, from one generation to the next, lack high school diplomas. The first generation without diplomas was 69.9%; the second generation, 51.5%; the third generation, 33.0%; and fourth generation, 41.9%.
That last figure, incidentally, isn't a typo. The fourth generation is less educated than the third. So much for assimilation. Those dropout rates are far higher than America's overall dropout rate: 23.5% for all Americans, except Mexican-Americans.
Mexico's Peasant Culture
...it's probably safe to say that millions of these underachieving immigrants are from Mexico's peasant culture. It's a backward culture -- one characterized by a "cycle of poverty" going from one generation to the next. It's a culture in which education is not value; a culture whose members even have trouble taking care of themselves...
Incidentally, one of the pathologies of this peasant culture is that education is held in low regard. This has drawn much social criticism from Mexican intellectuals, including Mexican journalist and social critic Carlos Monsivais who, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, wrote:
"Whether it is a byproduct of a traditional Catholicism that fears reading 'because it poisons the soul' or rooted in the popular belief that ‘licenciados’ (a professional with a degree) exist only to exploit people, it is quite common for Mexican families to harbor anti-intellectual attitudes, which, in turn, shape their responses toward education.”
Crime Statistics
In looking at crime statistics, you must tease out the figures on crime by illegal immigrants -- and that's just what Coulter did in
Adios, America, she wrote, “The available data suggest that the crime rate among immigrants is astronomical.” Among the alarming statistics Coulter revealed was that in 2006, “nearly a third of the 2 million prisoners in state and local facilities that year were foreign born. Piecing together state and federal reports, it appears that half the correctional population in California consists of illegal aliens.”...
Trump stirred particular outrage by stating that “rapists” are included among more than a few illegal immigrants from Mexico. True or false?
Probably true.
Again, statistics are hard to come by, but anybody living in a sanctuary city -- I live in Austin, Texas -- can't help but notice the Hispanic face of sexual assaults reported by news outlets. What might account for this? The answer, again, is probably rooted in Mexico's backward peasant culture. This culture was the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize winning article in the Washington Post --
“In Mexico, an Unpunished Crime” -- about how rape was a veritable courtship ritual in Mexico...
