Archive for March 2010

A family of Bedouins in Syria

Worldfocus: How would you characterize the demographic situation in the Arab world?

Patrick Gerland: Compared to other regions, the Arab world has been experiencing one of the fastest population growth rates (over 2% per year), which has led to more than its doubling within the last 30 years. This growth is exacerbated by early and intense nuptiality and very high marital fertility.

But since the 1980’s, age at marriage has been increasing by about 5 years on average, and fertility has been declining fast. On average, women today have about 3 children, while a generation ago their mothers had 6 or more.

While this progress is remarkable, the Arab world’s fertility in 2010 still remains substantially higher than in Asia (2.4), Latin America (2.3) — and the world average of 2.6 children per woman.

The region has experienced substantial health improvements, and life expectancy at birth has increased by more than 10 years since the 1980s, reaching about 65 years in 2005-10.

The region as a whole has been getting closer to the world average (68 years), but still remains below Asia (69 years). In demographic terms, the most similar region is South-Central Asia, where fertility is slightly lower, mortality is somewhat higher and growth is less rapid (1.5% versus 2.1%).

Worldfocus: What are the regional demographic differences within the Middle East?

Gerland: While in the 1970s the demographic situation was somewhat similar across the region (relatively high fertility and mortality), the demographic changes that have occurred within the last 30 years have not been uniform and have not occurred at the same pace everywhere. These unequal changes have led to a much more diverse demographic situation today than ever before.

At one hand, we find the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates), followed by the Maghreb (Algeria, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara), which have achieved remarkable reductions in infant/child mortality, and substantial improvements in adult health — leading to average life expectancy at birth over 69 years.

On the other hand, the Mashreq countries (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syrian Arab Republic) are lagging behind by about 3 years of life expectancy.

And the group of Arab Least-Developed Countries (Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen) is struggling to catch up. Life expectancy at birth is still only about 55 years (just above the rest of Africa).
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[See also Without An Immigration Moratorium, How Long Can The GOP Hold Texas?]

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

From “A Tale of Two Cities,” Sydney Carton’s words, as he rode the tumbrel to the guillotine, came to mind on reading the latest statistics on what open borders has done to a Republican Party that altruistically embraced it.

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that, since 1980, some 25.2 million immigrants have entered legally and been granted permanent status with “green cards” to work and become citizens.

“Immigration, Political Realignment and the Demise of Republican Political Prospects“ (PDF)is the title of the CIS report, which understates the crisis. Bottom line: The more immigrants in an electoral district, the more grim the GOP prospects. Consider a few of the largest counties in the nation.

Between 1980 and 2008, Los Angeles, No. 1, grew by 2.5 million to 10 million people. The immigrant share went from 22 percent to 41 percent. Over those decades, the GOP share of the presidential vote fell from 52 percent in Ronald Reagan’s rout of Jimmy Carter to 29 percent for John McCain.

Orange County, the bastion of Barry Goldwater conservatism, saw its population rise from 1.9 million in 1980 to 3.2 million in 2008, with the immigrant share rising from 13 percent to 34 percent. Reagan swept Orange County with 68 percent. McCain got 50 percent.

Consider Cook County, the nation’s second largest. While Cook grew by 350,000 from 1980 to 2008, the character of Chicago changed, with the immigrant share of the population rising from 12 percent to 25 percent. In those 28 years, the GOP share of the presidential vote fell from 40 percent to 23 percent.

In Kings County (Brooklyn), the immigrant share of the population rose from 24 percent to 44 percent and the Republican share of the presidential vote plummeted from 38 percent to 20 percent.

Richard Nixon and Reagan carried California seven times on presidential tickets. Both carried New York and Illinois in their greatest victories. Yet the GOP has not won one of those three pivotal states even once in the last five elections.

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The Washington Post’s story of a the German-American Heritage Museum brought back an event I attended for students of high-school German years ago. It was in the neo-Baroque ballroom of Chicago’s almost century-old Germania Club–on Goethe Street, of course. The building has been sold twice since the 1980s and is now considered endangered despite its standing in the National Register of Historic Places. A better photo is here. Starbucks has replaced the Bierstube, appropriately enough, since it was the German chemist Friedrich Runge who identified caffeine as the stimulant in coffee. (Yes, the Germans later invented decaf, too.) This scholarly article on German-Americans, Lincoln, and the Germania shows the origins of identity in memorializing the slain President, and its tenacity despite the two world wars.

German influence did not persist only in Chicago. A 2004 press release of the Census Bureau begins:

Even now, despite budget cuts and increased competition from other languages, German is still taught in 14 percent of all American high schools — a significant decline but still impressive, all things considered.

Is the German-American museum a sign of splintering of American identity? The Post reviewer, Marc Fisher, thinks so: “[W]hen each ethnic group creates its own museum, visitors are left without the tools to put each ethnicity’s take on history in any useful context.” That’s a valid point. But it’s also true that ethnic-sponsored museums are not so new. The Pennsylvania German Society dates from 1891. Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger was founded as the Germanic Museum in 1903; though it focused on Old World high culture rather than German Americana, it was a flagship of cultural pride, endowed in part by the flamboyant Gilded Age master brewer Adolphus Busch. Stocked mainly with replicas of Central European art treasures, it was a citadel of ethnic pride.
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Obama’s recorded message for Sunday’s immigration rally was very clear: “I pledge to do everything in my power to forge a bipartisan consensus on this issue this year.”

But for many immigrants that have been following the immigration debate, Obama’s promise sounds all too familiar.

“Presidente Obama, you promised Univision’s Jorge Ramos that you would pass immigration reform your first year in office. We’re waiting and the clock is ticking,” said political analyst Juan Hernandez.

According to Assemblyman Hector de la Torre (D- CA) Obama doesn’t have all year for immigration reform. “Immigration reform needs to happen before summer. We’re going to start to see election campaigns this summer and we’re going to start seeing a lot of division of attitudes among Republicans and Democrats” Torre said.
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What is Aztlan?

San Diego, CA — San Diego State University launched its new campus, Aztlan Island, in the online virtual world of Second Life®.

Aztlan Island is 16 acres of 3D virtual space for students to imagine, create, collaborate and experience 3D virtual worlds.

Both students and the public can create avatars that can walk, drive or fly around the island.

The avatars can socialize in real time by instant message or through voice chat.

The island has its own economy and is even designed by its residents, who can buy land then build on it.

“In Second Life right now, I’m actually reproducing the art building which I take my classes in,” said Julius Santos, a fifth year student at SDSU.

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Millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party, and it appears increasingly likely that they’ll take the election in November with them. Their departure could well lead to a GOP landslide on a scale not seen since 1994.

For more than three decades before the 2008 election, no Democratic president had won a majority of the electorate. In part, that was because of low support — never more than 38% — among white male voters. Things changed with Obama, who not only won a majority of all people voting but also pulled in 41% of white male voters. Suddenly, there were millions more white men voting the Democratic ticket.

Polling suggests that the shift was not because of Obama but rather because of the financial meltdown that preceded the election. It was only after the economic collapse that Obama’s white male support climbed above the 38% ceiling. It was also at that point that Obama first sustained a clear majority among all registered voters, according to the Gallup tracking poll.

It looked for a moment as though Democrats had finally reached the men of Bruce Springsteen’s music, bringing them around to the progressive values Springsteen himself has long endorsed. But liberal analysts failed to understand that these new Democrats were still firmly rooted in American moderation.

Pollsters regularly ask voters whether they would rather see a Democrat or Republican win their district. By February, support for Democrats among white people (male and female) was three points lower than in February 1994, the year of the last Republican landslide.

Today, among whites, only 35% of men and 43% of women say they will back Democrats in the fall election. Women’s preferences have remained steady since July 2009. But over that same period, white men’s support for a Democratic Congress has fallen eight points, according to Gallup.

White men have moved away from Obama as well. The same proportion of white women approve of him — 46%, according to Gallup — as voted for him in 2008. But only 38% of white men approve of the president, which means that millions of white men who voted for Obama have now lost faith in him.
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The prison in Lancaster, Calif., has 4,600 inmates, twice the intended number. Some 150 prisoners are held in the gymnasium.

LANCASTER, Calif. — The California budget crisis has forced the state to address a problem that expert panels and judges have wrangled over for decades: how to reduce prison overcrowding.

The state has begun in recent weeks the most significant changes since the 1970s to reduce overcrowding — and chip away at an astonishing 70 percent recidivism rate, the highest in the country — as the prison population becomes a major drag on the state’s crippled finances.

Many in the state still advocate a tough approach, with long sentences served in full, and some early problems with released inmates have given critics reason to complain. But fiscal reality, coupled with a court-ordered reduction in the prison population, is pouring cold water on old solutions like building more prisons.

About 11 percent of the state budget, or roughly $8 billion, goes to the penal system, putting it ahead of expenditures like higher education, an imbalance Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to fix.

The strains on the system are evident inside the state prison here, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles, where 4,600 inmates fill buildings intended for half as many. A stuffy, cacophonous gymnasium houses nearly 150 people in triple-bunked beds stretching wall to wall.

The new effort this year is intended to remove from prisons criminals who are considered less threatening and divide them into two categories: those who pose little or no risk outside the prison walls, and those who need regular supervision.

The goal is to reduce the number of inmates in the state’s 33 prisons next year by 6,500 — more than the entire state prison population in 2009 of Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah or West Virginia. In all, there are 167,000 prisoners in California.
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Today: Discussion in class on why limits on immigration were historically racist. My son, who had been briefed, pointed out that the restrictions followed a huge wave of immigration which needed to be absorbed and that there was fear of massive unemployment. But the teacher said that it was racist because the figures for Africa and Asia were low.

It’s quite true that in the 1920s there was a racialist aspect to the restrictions but of course there had never been much immigration from Africa. As for Asia, there was a major issue with the fear of cheap labor. Trade unions were major supporters of immigration restriction.

At any rate, what’s at issue here is not a historical argument but the message being given constantly to the kids that any restrictions on immigration today would be racist, the basic idea that countries have no right to restrict immigration or to preserve a national ethos.

That’s not the main item, though. Each student was assigned to draw a picture. My son told me that his assignment was to draw something on the “mistreatment of the Chinese.”

You should know that given the teacher’s constant emphasis on the internment of Japanese by the US during World War Two, he had constantly pointed out that this was not racist since the US did not intern any other Asians and was very pro-Chinese and pro-Filipino. He then talked about how the Japanese government had been far more oppressive than the US, killing millions of Chinese civilians and looking on the Chinese as racially inferior.

I thought: OK he talked so much about it, he was assigned (I only later found out he pulled a slip from the pile) to draw a picture of Japanese soldiers killing Chinese civilians. And I was going to help him research things like the “rape of Nanking,” one of the worst such atrocities.