Mr. Hume: Excellent post there. With such a universal desire for less immigration, one has to wonder why the borders are still wide open, visa over-stayers are not tracked, and illegals, far from being deported, are fawned over as a Protected Minority.
The answer, I suppose, is that people don’t care much. If a pollster comes up to me and asks whether I prefer chocolate mousse or caramel pudding, I’ll give him an opinion. Would I go to the barricades for that opinion? No. Would I give up one hour a week of my time for it? No.
It shouldn’t be beyond the ingenuity of polling firms to find out, not only whether people prefer A to B, but how much of a damn they give about the A/B business. It would surely add meaning to the polls.
I guess quantification is the problem. You need a common, universal scale of giving-a-damn, from “Might walk across the room for it” to “Would willingly give my life for it.”
The answer, I suppose, is that people don’t care much
yes. this is a broad but shallow opinion. also, people who may in the abstract express restrictionist opinions continue to employ day laborers in a pinch.
To be fair to the pollsters, we do get polls where people are asked to rank issues according to how much they care. That’s just relative, though. I want real quantification. “I care at the 93 percent level.” Something like that.
Though I think the great majority of sane people care more about quite trifling details of their personal lives than they do about any public issue at all. This must at least be true of the 45.5 percent of eligible voters who didn’t bother last November.
And overall, whatever your feelings about some particular issue, this is probably a good thing. Think about it: Would you really want to live in an intensely politicized nation? Most people who care deeply about politics are bores and cranks.
Often the people who are “bores and cranks” about a particular issue are those affected adversely by some aspect of the status quo; they may be quite satisfied with many other aspects. It’s the (self-assumed) job of politicians to identify the bores, the cranks, and other varieties of the disaffected and to meld them into voting blocs or coalitions to support them and the programs presumably designed to alleviate their discomforts.
With all due respect to Bradlaugh, such bores and cranks are directly responsible for your being here in the US instead of just another part of the UK.
Yeah, well. I was a member of a Tory Party constituency activist group for a while in the early 1980s, and in quite a tony area of central London. (Kings Cross.) I am sure that 20-25 percent of my fellow activists were clinically insane.
The rest of us just bores and cranks, you understand.
are fawned over as a Protected Minority
Well, I must say they certainly don’t appear to feel like one. I ride the bus in my town, and they are very easy to spot. All I see in their eyes is wariness and caution, and, the case of many of the women, outright chronic fear. They absolutely do not speak to each other, ever, in so public a place as a city bus,even when what are clearly two acquaintances get on together and sit together.
However much more money they make here than they make at home, they don’t really seem to be having a whole lot of fun doing it.
A minor point, but how do you know they’re illegal aliens if they don’t speak and identify themselves as such? Skin color? Shabby dress? Neither of those immediately suggest “illegal alien” to me. And “wariness and caution” might be an appropriate response to much public transportation nowadays.
Obviously, I profile. The people in question, both men and women, are significantly shorter than I am at 5’7″ [the national average across both genders] their ethnic phenotype is clearly native Meso-American native, and their body language [as well as their short stature] is quite distinct from any other ethnic group, such as Bosnians or Somalis, who have settled here in the past twenty years, and also quite distinct from the people who look very much like me in this town where I grew up in.
I’m quite distinct from the people who look like me, too. I learned observation, wariness, and attention from the inside, no matter why, and I don’t act [like so many of my fellow Americans] as if everybody else on the bus is a mere hologram.
Neither do the people I am observing.
Now I’m not privy to whatever Social Security Cards they may or may not be carrying, so I can’t say definitely that they are here illegally. But I know the effort required to get a green card, and I see an awful lot of them on the bus–far more so than the Bosnians or the Somalis who have received real “protected minority” treatment as political refugees.
The Meso-Americans thronging my local Walmart don’t look terribly frightenened; they actually appear pretty jolly. Then again, they may not be hiding from the INS.
I lived for seven years in a Mexican neighborhood in Chicago (this one, and not in the bohemian artist section either) and I’d say my experience was akin to Joseph Marshall’s. In the neighborhood they were comfortable, but on the buses they were quiet, deferential and often exhausted from the long hours spent commuting to the North Shore and western suburbs where they were housekeepers and gardeners. Perhaps these were all legal immigrants, but I suspect their illegal cohorts took cues from them on how to act.
It was a running joke that the demographics of River Forest depend greatly on what time of day you did the census. In the daytime, of course, it’s overwhelmingly Latino, while at night is lily-white, Carlos Zambrano perhaps being the token.
Mr. Derbyshire writes:
Isn’t that exactly what elections measure, pretty much by definition?