This Week’s Show
Contents
- 01m28s America First, Americans First
- 06m50s End guest-worker visas
- 13m48s Does Trump remember his first term?
- 21m27s Importing an overclass (cont.)
- 29m18s Mass deportations are under way!
- 31m48s California makes theft a crime
- 33m13s Britain’s Blairite ambassador
- 36m22s Trump and Cleveland in sync on death penalty
- 38m30s Mangione hybristophilia
- 40m27s The Gaetz Report
- 42m02s goes AWOL, how could they tell?
- 43m04s The quick key to Congressional spending
- 45m54s Signoff with Peter Dawson
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Transcript
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. I hope you have all recovered from your Christmas hangovers and surfeits of fruitcake, turkey, and plum pudding. This is of course your abstemiously genial host John Derbyshire with my last podcast of 2024.
That puts me under the usual temptation to make the show a back-glancing survey of the year. This year, though, I shall resist that temptation. The topic of legal immigration has been all over social media — at any rate, all over X, the only social medium I actually sign on to.
That topic is close to my heart. I’ve been commenting on in the past two weeks. I shall therefore continue my commentary here, leaving unrelated topics to later in the podcast.
Here we go.
02 — America First, Americans First. Just to remind you: two weeks ago I foresaw major tensions in the Trump 47 administration between, on the one side, Trump and Elon Musk, who are globalists on legal immigration, and on the other side Stephen Miller, who — like me — takes a nationalist view of the issue.
Then last week, commenting on some remarks by Steve Bannon — another immigration nationalist — I made the case against student visas. Quote:
Higher education is, like agricultural land, a key national resource. Foreigners should not be permitted to purchase it. It should be for Americans. And no — sorry, Steve — not particularly for black and Hispanic Americans but for all Americans, selected strictly by merit.
End quote.
This week’s social media commentary has been mainly about guest-worker visas: foreigners brought in as indentured labor to fill job openings for which no qualified Americans can be found.
That prompts the questions: Are jobs a limited, finite national resource, like arable land or higher education? If they are, should foreigners be barred from taking them? To which my answers are of course yes and yes.
Voices to the contrary, like Elon Musk’s, tell us that we have lots of jobs in cutting-edge hi-tech that no Americans are capable of doing. I call b-s on that.
Ours is a nation of a third of a billion people. Included in those teeming multitudes are big sub-populations from races with the highest mean-IQ: East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews. Musk is telling me there are jobs so intellectually demanding that no American citizens can be found to do them? Nonsense!
There is, I’ll allow, a qualification to be made there. Driven by a false and poisonous ideology, our educators have in recent years enstupidated much of the curriculum in our schools and colleges. Young people graduating from those schools and colleges are probably less capable of serious intellectual effort than their parents were.
Their parents are still with us, though; and plenty of bright youngsters defy the enstupidators and learn to perform matrix multiplication for the sheer pleasure of it.
“We can’t find any Americans capable of doing this work,” moans Elon Musk. Fiddlesticks, says Radio Derb; you didn’t look hard enough.
With the great Donald Trump comeback of recent months, the old slogan “America First” is being heard again. I’m glad to hear it. Of course we should put our own national interests ahead of those of any other nation.
I do think, though, that as a slogan, “America First” is incomplete. It needs a supplement. To “America First” I’d add a comma, or perhaps a semicolon, followed by the words “Americans First!”
Whatever finite national resources we have — land, education, jobs — are for our own people, Americans, to partake of. There might, under exceptional circumstances, be a case for gifting from them to foreigners; but that should be unusual enough to make headline news.
So there’s my proposal for a new, more complete slogan to put on the National Conservative banner: “America First, Americans First!”
03 — End guest-worker visas. All the cant and posturing about legal immigration would be easier to bear if I didn’t know that at least two of the main components of our legal-immigration policy are cynical money rackets benefiting special-interest groups, some of them foreign special-interest groups.
Student visas come under this heading, of course. Paying full tuition, foreign students contribute mightily to the administrative bloat that has turned our colleges and universities into Employment Heaven for Grievance Studies graduates with heads full of fashionable nonsense.
That bloat is bad enough by itself; but the domination of our campuses by Deputy Assistant Secretaries to the Chief Secretary to the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has surely contributed to the afore-mentioned enstupidation of curriculums, creating a vicious circle of nonsense and ignorance. End student visas!
The guest-worker racket is far worse. The principal racketeers here are: one, AILA, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and two, the so-called “body shops” — staffing agencies like Tata Consulting, Infosys, Cognizant, and Accenture. The two biggest body shops there, Tata and Infosys, are Indian. Cognizant, although it started out Indian, is now headquartered in the U.S.A., while Accenture HQ is in Ireland.
Indian or otherwise, these body shops rely on help from AILA to place their foreign applicants into American jobs that might otherwise — Heaven forbid! — go to American citizens.
Before an American company can hire in a foreign guest worker as a permanent employee — and the word “permanent” here just means for an indefinite period, usually with a green card for permanent residence at the end of it — before a company can hire in a foreign worker on those terms they must get a labor certification issued from the Department of Labor (DOL) proving that they were unable to find a suitable American citizen to fill the vacancy. On receipt of that labor certification the DOL will then certify to the immigration authorities that, quote:
there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified, and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment and that employment of the foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
End quote.
Don’t American employers need help jumping these bureaucratic fences? They certainly do. That’s where AILA comes in. Attorneys from immigration law firms supply advice on gaming the system.
Whoa … is that just me being cynical? No, we have an audio clip of an immigration lawyer giving just that advice to a seminar of businessfolk. Sample clip of the attorney’s actual voice.
[Clip: Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. And you know, in a sense that may sound funny, but it’s what we are trying to do here. We are complying with the law, fully, but our objective is to get this person a greencard.]
The speaker there was Lawrence Lebowitz, V.P. of Marketing at Cohen and Grigsby, a law firm in Pittsburgh specializing in employment law. The clip dates from 2007, when it created quite a stir.
In the seventeen and a half years since that video appeared, immigration-law firms have become much more discreet about their goals and methods, but there is no doubt the scam continues, to the mutual profit of AILA member firms and the body shops. Some very fine mansions have been built and furnished in Bombay and Martha’s Vineyard during those seventeen and a half years.
Does the U.S.A. need more people? I don’t think so. When I first arrived here in 1973 the population was around 210 million — sixty percent of today’s, and only five percent of it foreign-born. I thought it was a lovely country, full of vigor and interest, not at all underpopulated, and still basking in the glory of having landed men on the Moon.
If Americans do collectively believe we need more people, let’s work out a rational way to achieve that goal, perhaps by enlisting the help of Mother Nature. Knowing that the future demographics of my country — the country my children and grandchildren will live their lives in — knowing that America’s future demographics is being determined in quite large part by a sleazy money racket, fills me with disgust.
04 — Does Trump remember his first term? I would like to boast that all this noise on social media about legal immigration was inspired by my own postings on the topic these past two weeks here at Radio Derb. I’d like to, but in good conscience I can’t.
The actual spark that ignited this little brushfire of commentary was the hiring of Sriram Krishnan and David Sacks to senior advisory positions in the Trump 47 White House. Krishnan is to be Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence; Sacks is Czar for A.I. and Crypto.
Among those made unhappy by the appointments was wildcard nationalist Laura Loomer. Edited quote from her on X:
Deeply disturbing to see the appointment of Sriram Krishnan as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
It’s alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump’s admin when they share views that are in direct opposition to Trump’s America First agenda.
How will we control immigration in our country and promote America First innovation when Trump appointed this guy who wants to REMOVE all restrictions on green card caps in the United States so that foreign students (which makes up 78 percent of the employees in Silicon Valley) can come to the US and take jobs that should be given to American STEM students?
End quote.
“Career leftist” is not a fair description of either Krishnan or Sacks. “Techie libertarians” would be a better fit. These are guys who are smart enough to know that traditional left-liberalism is a heap of dog poop, yet too detached by wealth and absorption in their globalist enterprises to understand the concerns of working and middle-class Americans.
On legal immigration, for example, their views are the techie-libertarian equivalent of Open Borders. Krishnan, for example, has said that he wants to remove country caps on green cards (that is, permanent residence cards).
Every country is currently assigned the same annual limit on green cards. Because those India-based body shops have been so busy all through the 21st century, though, there’s a huge backlong of Indian applications — eleven years’ worth, according to David Sacks. So removing the country caps would unleash a mighty flood of new permanent residents from India.
Did I mention that Krishnan is a native of India? Yes, he is. Is he aware of the dominance of Indian body-shops in the IT employment rackets? Probably; and I assume that he’s just as keen as the next businessman to hire in an Indian at 60,000 a year rather than an American at 100,000.
Was he paying attention when, four years ago, Trump 45 fired two members from the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority for seeking to outsource American jobs to foreign workers? Does he remember the lead-up fuss to that, and the rancor and resentment it generated, when it came out that big corporations like AT&T, Disney, and Southern California Edison were using guest-worker visas for cheaper labor, sometimes forcing Americans to first train their foreign replacements?
Possibly Sriram Krishnan and David Sacks missed all that; or perhaps they caught the news stories in passing but, in the busyness of their working lives, have since forgotten it. Millions of middle-class American IT workers have not forgotten it: check the comment threads.
Our President-elect has a busy working life, too. He might be forgiven for having forgotten the firing of those Tennessee Valley Authority board members, and the great credit it won him from ordinary Americans for standing up to the cheap-labor rackets.
He surely does seem to have forgotten. During the campaign in June this year Trump declared his support for stapling a green card to the degree certificates of foreign students. “A stab to the back to his middle-class supporters,” the Center for Immigration Studies called it, correctly of course.
Is there any hope that Trump 47 will take on the guest-worker rackets? Not much; but a little. Stephen Miller, a fierce defender of American workers, will occasionally have the President’s ear.
J.D. Vance has also taken a stand on behalf of American workers, most recently in October this year, when he told Breitbart News that, quote:
The question when we allow a new person to come to America should be, [inner quote] “Is this in the interests of the people who live here? Or is this in the interests of some narrow, multinational corporate interests?” [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Whether J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller will be able to prevail against Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s wandering attention span, and the Prince of Darkness Jared Kushner himself, we shall see.
05 — Importing an overclass (cont.). Indians are getting to be a social issue, above and beyond just the cheap-labor rackets.
Vivek Ramaswamy is the most prominent case in the new administration. Less significantly, but none the less worth noting, J.D. Vance’s wife Usha is American-born to Indian parents. Nikki Haley is still active somewhere, I presume. Now we have Sriram Krishnan in a senior advisory position, fresh from advocating for a tsunami of cheap tech hires from India.
Vivek Ramaswamy posted a somewhat weird venture into sociology on X. Executive summary: The U.S.A. has to hire foreign techies because we aren’t nerdy enough. Sample quote.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
End quote.
Ramaswamy kind of has a point, but it’s not well-stated. One commenter tweeted that, quote: “This is a peculiar way to end your political career.” That commenter could be right.
Ramaswamy has a point none the less. Some time late in the last century we stopped being the can-do nation where teenage boys spent Saturday morning tinkering with their cars in the driveway and became the incubator nation for crackpot ideologies, our teenage boys spending Saturday morning in their bedrooms scrolling dating sites on their cellphones. There has been a cultural shift and it hasn’t benefited our tech sector.
Bringing in Indians en masse to redress the balance is a simply terrible idea, though. India has a national culture, too, much longer-established than ours: a clannish culture prone to favoritism and corruption, entirely at odds with the individualist Northwest European social habits the U.S.A. was founded on.
A former IT grunt myself, I’ve been noticing for twenty years in comment threads and social-media posts the grumbles about Indians taking over entire departments, Indian managers hiring only their own. They’ve done well from it: Indians are Number One in every list I’ve seen of median household income by ancestry group, with nearly twice the figure for white Americans.
Sorry, but that’s not good for social harmony. It leads to resentment and discord. Importing an overclass is always a bad idea: but as I have noted elsewhere, quoting myelf, quote: “While any overclass is resented, a racially distinctive overclass is resented more than one that barely looks any different from the resenters.” End quote.
Going back to Ramaswamy’s essay, it might be instructive to try reading it in parallel with the Congressional debates and public commentary on the 1924 Immigration Act, most particularly the remarks about the Japanese Exclusion Clause therein.
Although notions of racial inferiority and superiority were commonplace in 1924, they weren’t the main drivers of the Japanese Exclusion Clause. The main driver was sheer numbers, with the Japanese usually being lumped together with Chinese and “Hindus” in these discussions. Our legislators feared major demographic instability. So should we. Current populations: U.S.A. 335 million, India 1,430 million. Ratio: 1 to 4.27.
Also in play was fear of Japanese military power following her defeat of Russia in 1904. The Yellow Peril, people were beginning to say, was not just a matter of numbers.
Where straightforward racial prejudice was in play it most often took the form of fear that a people as numerous, smart, and enterprising as the Japanese might reduce America’s legacy European population to serfdom. Supporters of the Exclusion Clause would have nodded along with Vivek Ramaswamy’s observation, although taking a different conclusion from it.
Can we please, please just have a moratorium on all immigration? Yes, our national culture needs attention; but we could give it the attention it needs faster and more effectively in conditions of demographic stability.
And what joy it would bring to the hearts of us longtime immigration critics to see AILA and the body shops put out of business!
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Mass deportations are well under way. Foreigners not lawfully present are being rounded up, packed into wagons, and shipped out across the border.
No, not here. This news item I’m reading on Bloomberg is about the Dominican Republic. That nation, you probably know, occupies the eastern 64 percent of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The western 36 percent of the island is Haiti.
So the DR has a 224-mile border with Haiti. The two countries’ populations are more or less equal, but that’s the only equality in play here. The DR is a constitutional republic with free and fair elections, a healthy diversified economy, a well-educated and orderly population. Haiti is a horrific slum run by gangsters and otherwise populated by illiterate peasants in various stages of starvation.
The non-gangster non-peasant portion of the population have all left. Many of course have left by the shortest route, across the border into the DR, putting a lot of stress on services there. Almost 40 percent of hospital delivery beds in the country, for example, are occupied by Haitians, says Bloomberg.
Quote from the DR Secretary of State: “National resentment has risen to the point that the government’s responsibility is first to the Dominican population. We are not responsible for the situation in Haiti.” End quote.
Hence the mass deportations. Oh, and a border wall — the DR has just started building one.
I hope Tom Homan’s read this news item. He might pick up some pointers.
Item: Ten years ago the voters of California passed Proposition 47, which, among other things, changed shoplifting of items worth $950 or less from felony to misdemeanor.
To universal astonishment, rates of shoplifting soared to the degree that many retail outlets shut down. November 5th this year voters of the Golden State changed key parts of Proposition 47 by passing Proposition 36. Shoplifting is now a felony if the shoplifter has two or more past convictions for theft, with penalties of up to three years in county jail or state prison.
This is of course a great step backwards socially, not least for those poor souls who have to steal in order to feed their children.
Not to worry, though. Ten years from now Californians will have forgotten the lesson they just learned. They will make crime legal again.
Item: When American friends ask me what the hell happened to the once-great nation of Britain to turn it from the self-confident prosperity and demographic stability of the Margaret Thatcher years to the poor, broken-spirited polyglot boarding house of today, I answer with a number: 1997.
That was the year the lackluster government of Mrs Thatcher’s successor lost a general election to Tony Blair’s Labor Party.
Blair was, I believe it is now generally understood, a demon sent from Hell by Satan to destroy his country. To the degree he possessed any agency of his own, it was all directed towards what nowadays we call wokeness, most particularly to wide-open borders. One of his advisors famously admitted that Blair threw the borders open to, quote: “rub the Right’s nose in diversity,” end quote.
A key figure in Blair’s campaign of national self-destruction was Peter Mandelson. He was elevated to the peerage in 2008, so he is now properly Lord Mandelson.
His Lordship is a quintessential Blairite, a far-left-liberal nation-wrecker down to his well-pedicured toenails. In various public statements going back to the Trump 45 administration he described Trump as, quotes, “Reckless and a danger to the world,” “little short of a white nationalist and racist,” and “a bully.” End quotes. Trumpwise, Mandelson is located ideologically somewhere between Rachel Maddow and Ryan Routh.
So guess what: British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has picked Lord Mandelson to be Britain’s Ambassador to Trump 47’s U.S.A.
I so wish I could be in the room when this crazy commie from a nation no longer of any importance at all presents his ambassadorial credentials to the Donald. Please, someone, record the event for posterity.
Item: I’m braced to be as disappointed by Trump 47 as I was by Trump 45, but now and then I read something that stirs hope in my breast. So it was the other day as I was reading this story about Joe Biden commuting 37 out of 40 federal death penalties.
The Biden commutations themselves were of course just another act of spite, like Biden’s order to sell off border-wall construction materials. He wants to leave the U.S.A. as he tried to remake it: as the World of Null-T. Ptui, I spit.
So it wasn’t the commutations themselves that got my attention but some statistics in this story from the Clinton Herald. Edited quotes:
There were 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term, more than under any president in modern history …
Those were the first federal executions since 2003. The final three occurred after Election Day in November 2020 but before Trump left office the following January, the first time federal prisoners were put to death by a lame-duck president since Grover Cleveland in 1889.
End quote.
That’s my man, that’s the Trump I voted for. And look at the symmetry there: Trump came back four years later, just like Grover Cleveland did!
There is order in the universe, there truly is.
Item: I mentioned back there my opinion that our national culture is in need of attention. Nothing that’s happened recently illustrates this better than the wave of admiration for Luigi Mangione, who murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4th in midtown Manhattan.
The really weird thing is that Mangione’s fan club is majority female. We’re all aware of the phenomenon called hybristophilia — lonely women writing love letters to convicted killers in jail. Ted Bundy got sacks-full of admiring letters before he went to the chair in 1989. Still, I can’t recall hybristophilia ever being as rampant and open as this.
For a deep dive into the cultural significance and consequences of this Mangione hybristophilia I recommend two essays, both by women. The longer and deeper one is by Heather Mac Donald at City Journal, December 23rd, title: “Luigi Mangione and the American Abyss.” The shorter one, but well worth reading, is by Rikki Schlott in the New York Post, December 26th, title: “Ultra-progressive women fetishize Luigi Mangione because they’ve spent years shaming masculinity.”
Whatever your opinion about Mangione hybristophilia, it’ll be sharper after you’ve read those two.
Item: Two stories here from Halitosis Hall, a.k.a. the federal House of Representatives.
First story: the House Ethics Committee has finally brought forth its report on allegations relating to Representative Matt Gaetz. There were five findings. Gaetz, the Committee found:
- violated state laws relating to sexual conduct
- used illegal drugs
- violated the House gift rule
- dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship
- sought to obstruct its investigation of his conduct
I make that two illegalities, two charges of being free with favors, and one procedural grumble.
If either of those alleged illegalities gets prosecuted leading to a conviction, I’ll take this document seriously. Until then I’ll assume what everyone I know assumes: that this whole inquiry is payback for Gaetz having called out Nancy Pelosi et al for insider trading on the securities markets.
Item: Second story from our noble House of Representatives. One of its members, perhaps woken from sleep when a rat scurried across his lap, suddenly noticed that a colleague who normally sat next to him had not shown up for six months.
After inquiries it turned out that the colleague, 81-year-old Representative Kay Granger of Texas, was dwelling in a facility for dementia sufferers after having been found wandering lost and confused through her neighborhood.
This story for some reason reminded me of a story about the great, but famously taciturn, President Calvin Coolidge. Told that Coolidge had died, Dorothy Parker is said to have responded with: “How could they tell?”
Item: This one’s peripheral to Congress but I’ll record it anyway. It concerns federal spending, in the news recently as Congress fails yet again to deliver a budget on time.
I’ve been grumbling about this for so many years now I can’t be bothered to read the news stories any more. They’re always the same: “debt ceiling” … “Continuing Resolution” … zzzzzzz.
In a properly empirical spirit, though, I do like to confirm that nothing changes. My way of doing this is to look up the appropriation for Head Start, a federal program that I tossed and gored in my 2009 book We Are Doomed.
Head Start, which began in 1965, is an education program for preschoolers, supposed to make them better prepared for grade school. Coming up to sixty years on, repeated careful studies have been able to identify no benefits at all from the program.
So is Congress still funding it? Of course they are!
Here’s a report from NHSA, the National Head Start Association, dated March 11th this year. Quote:
President Biden released his proposed FY 2025 budget on Monday, March 11, 2024, including $12,540,519,000 for Head Start and Early Head Start — an increase of $544 million over FY 23.
End quote.
So the NHSA’s happy over that half-billion-dollar increase, right? Wrong! They’re peeved that last year the Administration had proposed a topline of just over $13.1 billion. And all they’re getting is a lousy 12.54 billion!
You want to know about federal spending, just check in on Head Start. It tells you all you need to know.
07 — Signoff. That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for yet another year of your attention and support. As usual around Christmas time, I am far behind in responding to cards and emails, so please bear with me.
As usual, I won’t sign off without a reminder that there are numerous ways to support what I do, all listed on the home page of my personal website. Thank you!
Here is Peter Dawson to sing us out. Happy New Year!
