Many Mexicans today, on the other hand, seem far less intent on adapting an American identity. We’ve also lost the cultural confidence that helped make integration possible. Now the only American identity we’re willing to push is a hollow multi-culturalism.

Also, don’t forget, that there were significant pauses in immigration in our history. These were very important in integrating immigrants.

A polyglot society would be better than the highly fractious and acrimonious alternative we’re building these days – duo-glot. Besides, if we stopped privileging isthmian Mexican peasants) often non-Spanish-spakers from Oaxaca) over professionals and entrepreneuers from Macau and Mongolia to Monaco and Montenegro, that’s what we would get. If we just imported less of them, a at least less lative to other immigrants who would generally ahve strong incentives to learn english innorder to compete with them, they wouldn’t be such a problem, and we’ve had worse immigration problems in the past … the violent, besotted, promiscuous, clannish and politically apt Irish of yesteryear leap to mind – but even they were assimilated reasonably well within three generations. Mexicans are assimilating a we bit faster from a worse base, but the in-flows are increasing beyond the increases in our country’s remarkable assimilative engines.

I do have something to say about the psot though, at least NCLB establishes SOME standards, and the lousiest schools are exhibiting some fairly remarkable improvement because of the threat of real punishments. Bureaucracies, even ones as dysfunctional as our public schools, can back-fill pretty darn well.
Now to have competent and advanced tracks … other than whatever has taken the place of SATs these days, that is. There will always be AP testing, thank God.

On a side note, the illustration atop your bog is of someone expiring from yersinia pestis, no? Either that or Cicero opening his veins. Either way, it seems a very crabbed-European conservatism. Those guys pretty much lost all the way around, did they not?

I don’t see set-asides expanding lately. if anything, they’re getting tossed ou of court with welcome alacrity, and I say that as someone who has a financial interest in litigating such jobbist nonsense.

A guestworker program isn’t going to solve ANYTHING. 1) We have birthright citizenship. 2) They have guestworkers in Germany and guess what, they aren’t going anywhere.

WE MUST LEARN TO DO OUR OWN DIRTYWORK.

WE MUST LEARN TO DO OUR OWN BRAINWORK.

“Finally, our national myth of equality is now enshrined in the No Child Left Behind Act, and equality movement from aspirational goal to practical mandate is creating real, impossible problems in schools. By affecting all students,”

Is that ever the truth. A friend of mind has a Ph.D. in mathematics. She is teaching (essentially) remedial math (really, arithmetic) skills in a supposedly “good” school district in outer exurbia. Everyone nowadays is on the academic track. But not everyone has academic aptitude. So, instead of teaching these kids to be good carpenters or plumbers – which some of them are capable of being – they are forced into taking academic-track math. Which they cannot do, no matter how well they are taught. This is a national nightmare.

If we could have that kind of national willpower to have a true-blue nationalist, guest worker program, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now with legal and illegal immigration.

Affirmative action and a polyglot society with a white minority is not a formula for harmony. Blacks used to be 12% of the population and everyone else was insignificant; now we’re looking at 50/50 set aside/real job ratios. These p.c. stupidities are expanding to every field, particularly low room for error fields like engineering, medicine, piloting, etc.

Also, I think Plyler v. Doe was wrongly decided, and if you could get rid of it, you could import the third worlders, but not bear any of the public welfare burden.

I always find the dysjunction of our talk of domestic education and foreign immigration pretty amusing. If low skill workers were such a good thing, we should be encouraging more drop outs and McJobs, no?