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

[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.