Richard Lamm on Snopes.

[unbibium]

I checked Snopes today, and found they had a new entry about Richard Lamm's instructions on how to destroy America through illegal immigration.

The most amusing part: he submitted a "revised version" of his speech... in all caps, with underlined words aplenty.

The argument wasn't that coherent to begin with. He tries to support his argument with some selective history, but he forgets that England, the nation that grew into an enormous empire, was among the most multicultural in Europe for much of its life. Northern England was, for a time, an English Quebec, due to the heavy Norse influence after that particular invasion over a thousand years ago. The Norman invasion a few centuries later turned the native people into the servant class, separated by both class and language, much in the way Mexicans are here in the Southwest. What eventually happened was that the Normans assimilated, not necessarily by becoming more Anglo-Saxon, but by being rejected by the new culture that was evolving in France.

The statement I disagree with the most is: "Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness." That's not quite accurate -- if there were really 100 languages competing on equal footing, immigrants would be learning English out of necessity to communicate with each other. Consider New York, which was where immigrants typically first landed while Ellis Island was still operating, and where immigrant communities thrive. What we actually have today, in most of the country, are only two competing languages. And the incoming Hispanics aren't very well-motivated to learn English, because everyone in their neighborhood speaks Spanish anyway. Hence, they are isolated from the English-speaking world, even when we start moving into each other's neighborhoods.

In general, I find this pattern of argument quite lazy: insisting that the list of things that piss you off is actually what someone would come up with, from scratch, if they wanted to spread misery. It turns the problem into a caricature, and ignores the root of any legitimate problem that might exist.

Comments

[jecook]

because everyone in their neighborhood speaks Spanish anyway. Hence, they are isolated from the English-speaking world, even when we start moving into each other's neighborhoods.

There is a term for this that originated from the black culture: the ghetto. Only it's term for Hispanics is bario.

Origin

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

"Ghetto" was actually originally neighborhoods where Jews were confined to.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, "barrio" literally means "neighborhood". I don't think it's meant to have any special isolating connotation.

Immigrants destroying America! Lithograph at 11!

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

And much of this same type of arguement was going on back when the US had a much higher proportion of non-English speaking immigrants 100 - 150 years ago.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

Hispanic immigration now is not any different than Irish/German/other European immigration was back in the 1800s-early 1900s. Those immigrants didn't have any reason to learn English, either, but eventually they did. Nowadays we have Asian and Hispanic areas of cities where English is not the predominant language, but I can't remember a time when America has not had isolated pockets of foreign/non-Americans living together.

Hey, wait. I think 75% of me is foreign, I'm only 25% Native American.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My grandpa was a Norwegian-speaking South Dakotan who got adopted by Danish-speaking immigrants during the flu epidemic. Then he spent most of his childhood in Canada. Oh no, what was his national identity?? I think people stopped caring when he was in the infantry at the Bulge.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Richard Lamm was a nutbar when he was governor of Colorado and he's still a nutbar.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...still, this is a masterpiece of nutbarrery even by his standards. He quotes Victor Davis Hanson and Noam Chomsky in successive paragraphs! That is awesome.

[jakesbrain.livejournal.com]

Indeed, it seems an apparent attempt to piss off both Hanson and Chomsky. Not to mention that they're arguably the two worst possible representatives of their respective schools of thought.