From: Blasted Fools

The typical ‘immigrant’ family, this ain’t.

Barbara Bush shocked listeners when she made her now famous comment to Matt Lauer on the Today show regarding the prospects of another Bush in the White House that, “There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes.”

A speech given recently by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, underlined the foolishness of even considering such a possibility. At the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington D.C., the Jebster flatulated:

“Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans,” Bush said. “Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.”

Bush doesn’t specifically identify which ethnicity or racial origin of immigrants he is referring to here, so we’re forced to read between the lines and assume that he means Hispanics. This would make the most sense, because the Bush family is prone to conflate the generic category of immigrants (legal or otherwise) with Hispanics, due to their presence within the Bush clan – Jeb’s wife is from Mexico.

Jeb dredges up a thread bare narrative that is part of the stock in trade of open borders leaning political writers and journalists – that of the ‘family values and family ethics of Hispanics’. It’s actually one of the three basic conventional motifs upon which arguments for more Latino immigration is based. As those who have followed the musings of the Bush family are aware – the ‘Latinos are worthy immigrants’ theme is shared by both brothers.

Pedro Celis, Washington state chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly says,

“President Bush shares with the Hispanic community a strong sense of family values.” During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush announced that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande River.” Two years later, promoting amnesty for Mexican illegals whose relatives are here legally, Mr. Bush said, “I want to show our friends, the Mexicans, that we are compassionate … We believe in family values.”

So – what about Hispanic / Latino ‘Family Values’? He is obviously stating that immigrants (read Latinos) are superior in their family traits than American families. Are they as advertised or is Jeb Bush still in the I.Q. hunt, running neck and neck with a sack of nails? Or does he know differently and he is simply lying because he assumes we’re all gullible as the day is long?

Heather MacDonald, in the August 2006 edition of City Journal notes:

“Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.”

Teen Pregnancy Rates: Approximately 70.4 Latina teens became pregnant out of every 1,000 teenagers between ages of 15 and 17 from 1995-2004, compared to only 14.5 White teens. In New York City, 55.9% of all teen births were Latinos in 2007, more than seven times the number among White teens (7.4%).

National Percentage of births to mothers under 18:

Mexican 6.2

Puerto Rican 7.4

Cuban 2.7

Central / South American 3.1

Other / unknown Hispanic 6.8

White 2.3

Black 7.3

Percentage female householder, no spouse present:

Mexican 21.1

Puerto Rican 35.8

Cuban 18.3

Central / South American 24.6

Other / unknown Hispanic 27.4

White 13.9

Black 45.1

From: Hispanic Families in the United States: Family Structure and Process in an Era of Family Hispanics and the Future of America. National Research Council (US) Panel on Hispanics in the United States; Tienda M, Mitchell F, editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2006.

Juvenile Justice and the Hispanic family?

Admissions to Juvenile Facilities: 28% of youth admitted to New York City juvenile facilities in 2010 were Latinos, while Whites constituted only 4%. In New York State, 26.2% of the 1,632 youth admitted were Latino (428) in 2008, while only 9.6% were White (157).

Child Welfare?

Foster Care Placements: 28.7% of the children in foster care were Latino in New York City in 2008 compared to 4.1% White. In New York State, 20.5% children placed in foster care in 2008 were Latino compared to 18.5% White. (These statistics were compiled by the Committee for Hispanic Children and Families.)

Sexually Transmitted Diseases?

New Cases of HIV/ AIDS: In New York City, Latinos were 31.8% of persons living with HIV/AIDS in 2009, in contrast to the 20.9% that were Whites. In New York State, 30.5% (approx. 1,393) of all newly reported cases of HIV/AIDS in 2009 were Latinos, while White repre­sented 19% of the total of new cases.

Racial Crime?

A study of federal crime statistics by the New Century Foundation (2005) showed that:

• Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate.
• Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs.
• Hispanics are three times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites.

Lawrence Auster writes:

‘The claim that Hispanics have more cohesive and responsible families than white Americans turns out to be largely a myth. The truth emerged in an exchange a decade ago between the neoconservative scholar Francis Fukuyama and Michael Lind, who by then had become an immigration critic. Fukuyama had written an article for Commentary in which he celebrated Hispanic family values as a boon to America and urged continued non-European immigration.” Lind wrote in response:

“Hispanic immigrants, even in the second and third generation, are significantly more likely than white Americans (and East Asian immigrants) to drop out of school, go on welfare, and end up in jail, nowithstanding their (exaggerated) greater “family values” and the (equally exaggerated) moral rot “right in the heart of American’s well-established white, Anglo-Saxon community.”

The American value of education is in wide measure, not shared by Latinos. As an example of the national problem of youths dropping out of high school – a dropout rate of 47%, consider San Diego schools as representative. Vince Vasquez in San Diego Source, notes:

Where trends appear especially bleak is the drop out rate among Latino teens. Though they make up less than half of all students in San Diego County public schools (44 percent), Latinos composed more than half (56 percent) of all county dropouts in 2007-08, a rate which increased from the previous school year.

Is child abuse an admirable Latino family trait? Administrative data from Texas find that the share of Latin American immigrant children who had to be placed in protective custody because of sexual abuse committed against them was three times as high as the share of non-immigrants.

Substantiated Cases of Child Abuse and Neglect, by Race/Ethnicity: 2012 – California / Rate per 1,000:

African American/ Black 22.7

American Indian/Alaska Native 21.9

Asian / Pacific Islander 2.6

Latino / 9.2

White / 8.0

39.8% of substantiated abuse reports in New York City were Latino children in 2008, while 6.4% were White children. In 2008, Latino children comprised 24.2% of these reports in New York State.

How about Sexual assaults on male Latino children?

The Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, University of California, San Francisco concluded that Latino men are twice as likely to report a history of childhood sexual abuse than are non-Latino men. Given the association between childhood sexual abuse and increased risk for HIV and other negative health outcomes, health providers must remain vigilant to the possibility of childhood sexual abuse histories among their Latino patients.

How about domestic violence?

Raul Caetano and Craig Field of the University of Texas’s School of Public Health found that Hispanic (and black) couples exhibited three times the frequency of male-on-female violence and twice the frequency of female-on-male violence than did white couples. [Longitudinal model predicting mutual partner violence among White, Black, and Hispanic couples in the United States general population. Violence and victims 2005;20(5):499-511.]

In a separate study, Dr. Caetano, John Schafer of the University of Cincinnati and Carol Cunradi of the Prevention Research Center at Berkeley, California found that Black, Hispanic, and White couples reported violent incidents within the previous 12 months at respective levels of 23 percent, 17 percent and 11.5 percent. [Alcohol-Related Intimate Partner Violence among White, Black, and Hispanic Couples in the United States.]

In 2005, the University of South Carolina’s College of Nursing released the results of a survey of more than 300 Hispanic women across South Carolina. Fully 70 percent of the respondents had experienced domestic abuse during the previous year.

Tena Hunt, one of the study’s principal investigators, admitted that around 95 percent of the women surveyed were “undocumented” (PC-speak for illegal).

I’d ask Jeb if we really want to import more Hispanic family values with respect to spouse battery.

How about Elder abuse as a desirable family trait? According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, there are high rates of elder abuse in the Latino community, but it goes largely unreported. The study found that 40% of the Latino seniors studied had been abused in the past year, but fewer than 2% reported abuse to the authorities.

Then there’s the uncomfortable truth that contrasted with their numbers in the population, Latinos account for a drastically inordinate number of fatalities on our roads and highways due to Driving While Intoxicated. This is a well established cultural trait brought by Latino immigrants to this country. National Public Radio reported:

The influx of Hispanic immigrants to some parts of the U.S. has led to a problem on the highways. In many states, Hispanics account for a disproportionate number of drunk driving deaths. In North Carolina where the Latino population has grown by more than a third in this decade, alcohol-related crashes have become a leading killer of Latinos. And as NPR’s Adam Hochberg reports, community groups are trying to reverse that trend.

Nationwide, Latinos rank second only to Native Americans and their alcohol death rate on the highway. The extent of the problem varies from state to state, but community leaders say it seems worse in places where Latinos have newly immigrated. At Al Pueblo, a Hispanic advocacy group in North Carolina, safety director Tony Ascion(ph) says Latino drunk drivers tend to be young men in the U.S. without their families, people who have a lot of free time and a lot of what Ascion calls, machismo.”

Further, police records show arrest rates for drunkenness of 138 and 38 (per 100,000 population) among Hispanic and non-Hispanic youth, respectively (Maddahian, Newcomb, and Bentler, 1985). Such rates likely affect the greater concern expressed by Hispanic respondents, relative to non-Hispanic respondents, that teenage drinking is a major societal problem.

Let me be clear about the purpose behind this post and the data points I’ve placed in it. The purpose was not an anti-Latino screed. I do not look at people as statistics, I look at them as individuals. I don’t believe in ‘White Supremacy’, nor do I support Racial Identity Politics. I believe in the Melting Pot and real diversity, not the White liberal / progressive guilt ridden concept of diversity that threatens to divide Americans, not unite them. But, since Jeb Bush introduced a logical and a factual fallacy in his speech – one that we’ve heard repeated far too often, I had no choice but to offer objective statistics as a rejoinder.

Jeb Bush is either knowingly perpetrating a lie about the favorable and preferred characteristics of Latino families or he is frighteningly ignorant of the facts. Either one, it seems to me, disqualifies him from any consideration as presidential material. Barbara Bush is right.

Whatever justifications the GOP establishment, Corporate Capitalists and the Democrat Party have, to incent another influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America – superior family characteristics and virtues, is demonstrably not among them.