But now, tribalism has risen to such a fever pitch among leftists that such basics are now [...]]]>
But now, tribalism has risen to such a fever pitch among leftists that such basics are now considered an affront to foreigners who expect to live here with no attitude adjustment from say, hostile Mexico or jihadist Pakistan. In fact, we citizens are expected to receive diverse unfriendlies with no complaint — like Obama’s wholesale import of unscreened Syrian muslims — otherwise we are meanie racists.
Leftists expect America to be a passive welfare office for the poor billions of the planet — and how can depressed poverty-stricken people be expected to assimilate??
Tucker Carlson had some remarks about the media smackdown of Tom Brokaw a couple days back.
Interestingly, one sub-topic of assimilation is the place of English in this country, and it polls strongly: a Rasmussen/ProEnglish survey from last April determined that 81 percent of Americans believe that English should be the official language of the United States. A Frank Luntz poll from July found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believe immigrants should be able to hold a basic conversation in English.
Of course, immigrants who don’t speak English are crippling their potential for economic success.
A 2017 Rasmussen poll found most voters still think immigrants should adopt American culture.
Here’s Tucker discussing the general issue of assimilation with Federalist writer John Daniel Davidson:
Here’s an audio version, just in case…
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Tom Brokaw was long one of the most respected men in America. He anchored the “NBC Nightly News” for 22 years. He’s 78 years old now. He ought to be enjoying a happy retirement, fly-fishing every morning. Instead, Tom Brokaw just made a terrible mistake. He expressed an unauthorized opinion in public. Can’t do that.
During a live television show, Brokaw said that assimilation is good and that immigrants should try to learn English.
TOM BROKAW: I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, that they ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all of their kids are learning to speak English and that they feel comfortable in their communities.
CARLSON: Well, not so long ago, those words would have passed pretty much unnoticed. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barbara Jordan said it all the time and if you don’t believe it, go to Google right now and look up Barbara Jordan on immigration. Whoa.
And they said it for a pretty simple reason, English unites the country, obviously, and now around the world, it is also the language of business and science and culture. It’s clearly a good thing for everyone in America — immigrant or not — to learn English as quickly as possible, but no, you’re not allowed to have that opinion anymore even if you’re Tom Brokaw.
So the activist group Latino Victory, whatever that is, accused Brokaw of quote unquote “white supremacist ideology.” An NYU journalism professor called Carolina Moreno announced that actually, it’s Americans job to quote “try harder to assimilate into a global society.” And then some kid at Vox called Dylan Matthews suggested that Brokaw with sympathetic to quote “pure racial animus.”
Even after Brokaw apologize profusely, the cowards on his old show over at NBC denounced him for his thought crime. Watch this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A former long-time anchor of this broadcast is in the news tonight for comments he made Sunday on “Meet The Press.” The criticism was widespread and almost immediate.
NBC NEWS ANCHOR STEPHANIE GOST: Lester, tonight an NBC News spokesman tells me quote, “Tom’s comments were inaccurate and inappropriate. And we’re glad he apologized.”
CARLSON: Well, he’ll be getting paid a lot at NBC to say stuff like this. John Daniel Davidson is a senior correspondent at “The Federalist,” and he joins us tonight. So John, look, my bottom line hope is that you could live in a country where you could have a conversation about assimilation and English and whether or not they’re important.
The response to Tom Brokaw makes it absolutely impossible for any decent person to have any opinion on this at all, and it makes it impossible to solve our problems if we can’t have a conversation about it.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Well, exactly. It’s like you say, it used to be an unremarkable thing to talk about the melting pot as an American ideal. The idea that from many, we are one and we come together from all different countries, all different backgrounds and we become Americans.
And of course, language is one of the things that binds us together as Americans. But there are other things that bind us together as Americans, too. And that’s not to say that because we have a melting pot that you have to abandon all aspects of your own culture. Those cultural aspects feed into the American life and the American culture that we have and make it richer and make it better and that shouldn’t be controversial, and it shouldn’t be scandalous to suggest that learning English is part of assimilating and it’s part of what immigrants should strive for.
There’s nothing controversial about that and there should have been nothing controversial about what Tom Brokaw said.
CARLSON: Of course not and you’d think Brokaw out who is a liberal by the way would be given the benefit of the doubt, but he was ceremonially slayed instead. But I wonder if the people pushing this — and by the way, nobody is pushing for anyone to give up their own culture or their identity. That’s insane. Only to participate in a common identity, which is not a racial category. It’s a culture that binds us together as Americans from different backgrounds and races and religions. But what do we have in common is the question. Why is there such an organized caucus against having anything in common? What is that?
DAVIDSON: Well, for the left, the whole idea of assimilation cuts against the idea of identity politics. Identity politics necessitates that everybody’s kind of stay in their lane and keep their racial or ethnic identity as the number one most important thing about them.
And to the extent that you view assimilation as a positive thing, as a good thing, as something that helps immigrant communities get ahead economically or achieve more in terms of education, it’s to be viewed as a negative thing. They want to hold on to discrete identities and not assimilate and this is the opposite for example of what we see in Europe, where you have massive numbers of unassimilated immigrant communities, especially Muslim communities that have fared very poorly in European countries partly because they don’t adopt the cultural norms, they don’t adopt languages. They don’t achieve highly in education and in business in Europe, and they stay in these sort of segregated enclaves.
That is the opposite of what we want for this country, but that seems to be what the left would like in terms of what their identity politics dictates for us.
CARLSON: Maybe keeping people poor and helpless and atomized helps them rule more efficiently. Just a thought, just kind of throwing that out there, John.
The initial subject is Mexican Lupe Avalos who joined up with the local volunteer fire department in a Oklahoma panhandle town. Guymon (population 11,545) has been rapidly [...]]]>
The initial subject is Mexican Lupe Avalos who joined up with the local volunteer fire department in a Oklahoma panhandle town. Guymon (population 11,545) has been rapidly hispanicized since the opening of a meat-packing plant in 1996. Avalos’ friends can’t understand why he wants to spend time with white Americans at the firehouse, so it seems the principle of assimilation to the values and culture of the United States looks pretty much dead.
As usual, the great majority of foreigners come for the money and free stuff, period.
The American town has flipped to become majority hispanic in just two decades, and not all of the foreign residents are legal. The Post thinks the locals are not sufficiently embracing the secular religion of Diversity, and the paper characterized the cultural shift as “fraught.”
Fire chiefs look to growing Latino population to rescue the languishing small-town firehouse, Herald-News (Joliet, Illinois), By Tim Craig, The Washington Post, June 6, 2018
GUYMON, Okla. – Three months into the job, Lupe Avalos still hears from the skeptics.
His twin brother and Latino friends wonder why a 20-year-old man born in Mexico decided to volunteer for one of the oldest, clubbiest small-town traditions – the American firehouse.
“They are like, ‘Oh, you are over there being white again with your firefighter friends,’ ” said Avalos, who was born in Mexico and brought to the United States by his parents when he was 4 years old. “But I like it, and I’m learning a lot of new things by getting involved in the community.”
This town in the center of Oklahoma’s panhandle has seen a huge demographic shift, flipping from majority-white to majority-Hispanic in the span of two decades. It’s a transformation reflected across many parts of America, one that is reshaping core community institutions, including those that provide the most critical services.
The traditional firehouse is feeling particularly pressured as the population of young white men it typically relied on for staffing declines and it struggles to connect with a burgeoning immigrant community. The dynamic has left firehouses short-staffed and Latino communities underserved.
From 1984 through 2015, the number of volunteer firefighters dipped nearly 10 percent to about 815,000, even as calls to fire departments nearly tripled, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
Now, community leaders across the country are rethinking firehouse cultures as they try to recruit more first- and second-generation immigrants.
“Communities that need help, they are reaching out to their neighbors, and their neighbors are changing,” said Rob Leonard of the Firemen’s Association of the State of New York.
The cultural shift has been fraught at times.
Following is a little story of illegal alien values: the mother of an unlawful family died when she received no medical attention after a heart attack because the family feared being deported.
Wait, weren’t we told that Mexicans have family values in abundance? Apparently not, which brings into question whether admitting millions of Third Worlder aliens is good idea, when some won’t even protect a mother.
]]>Jesus Uribe, a career firefighter in Guymon of Mexican descent, recalls when a Hispanic neighbor knocked on his door late one September night.
“Can you come help? My wife died,” the man said.
Uribe rushed next door and discovered the woman had suffered an apparent heart attack hours earlier. Her four children – two of whom were teenagers with cellphones – had been home at the time but never called for help. They worried it would trigger a response from immigration officials, Uribe said.
“He came to me,” said Uribe, 29, “but only because . . . if someone found his wife dead at his house, he feared he was going to get deported and all of his kids were going to be in the system.”
Below, shooting victims Grace Eunhae Kim, 23 (left) and Lydia Sim, 21 (right), with killer [...]]]>
Below, shooting victims Grace Eunhae Kim, 23 (left) and Lydia Sim, 21 (right), with killer One Goh (center).
Goh is exactly the sort of person who rightly gives mass immigration a bad name. His difficulty in cultural adjustment added to his financial and personal problems, as I wrote in Korean Mass Murderer (Oakland): Failure to Assimilate. Immigration is a very stressful project even in the best of circumstances, and immigrants with psychological problems who face setbacks may act out violently.
Goh’s extreme anger and hostility made him look like a likely candidate for an insanity plea, and he did disappear for a while into the world of psychiatry. But now he’s back and deemed competent to be punished. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue the death penalty, and so the killer will be housed and fed in state prison by California taxpayers for the rest of his life. One Goh is yet another example of why immigration diversity is not the apex value liberals promote.
]]>One Goh: Man facing 7 life terms for Oikos University shootings, KTVU, May 2 2017
OAKLAND (KTVU) — The man accused of killing seven people and injuring three others at Oikos University in Oakland four years ago was expected to plead no contest Tuesday to the charges.
One Goh, 48, who had indicated that he wanted the death penalty in connection with the April 2, 2012 shootings is expected to receive seven life terms after entering the no contest plea. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner is expected to sentence Goh on July 14, 2017.
During court proceedings Tuesday, Goh’s hands were shackled to his waist. His hair now has gray streaks.
Goh was also expected to plead no contest to two special circumstances: murder in the course of a kidnapping and multiple murder as well as three counts of attempted murder for wounding three victims.
Alameda County prosecutor Stacie Pettigrew told Judge Horner of Goh’s plea and said prosecutors do not plan to seek the death penalty against him.
Goh will be sentenced to seven consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 271 years to life, Pettigrew told the judge.
Prosecutors said Goh had dropped out of Oikos several months before the shooting and wanted his tuition refunded and targeted an administrator who wasn’t present on the day of the shooting.
Criminal proceedings against him were suspended after his lawyers doubted his mental competency to stand trial, but he was recently deemed by court-appointed doctors to be restored to competency.
Goh was a former student at Oikos who had told Oakland police that he entered the school that morning and opened fire, killing six students and a staff member.
Tuesday’s Lost Angeles Times headlined the psychic trauma endured [...]]]>
Tuesday’s Lost Angeles Times headlined the psychic trauma endured by a DACA illegal as she struggles with identity while attending a US-taxpayer-subsidized California state university in a slot she stole from a citizen: the Mexican citizen complains, “Sometimes I fell like I don’t belong anywhere.” (Hint: as an illegal alien moocher, she does not belong in the United States.)
Did none of the diverse residents (legal and illegal) ever think about the enormous stress generated by the adjustment required to manage in a new-to-them society? Big life changes cause major anxiety, even if the move is seen as being a positive. Some foreigners protect their cultural identity by restricting themselves to separatist barrios that seem just like home only with dollar bills.
But if larger success is desired, then some degree of assimilation — like speaking English — is needed, even while they clutch their homeland identity (shown by Pew polling to be durable among hispanics). At that point, normal human tribalism steps in, and immigrants discover they are neither fish nor fowl, but rather exist in an in-between space that many of a tender persuasion find uncomfortable. Sometimes the cultural alienation leads to gang formation and/or crime.
So mere whining about cultural discomfort, central to the Times article, is probably a lesser problem in the big picture. Let the sensitive snowflake tears flow down like a mighty river!
]]>Trump wants immigrants to ‘share our values.’ They say assimilation is much more complex, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2017
Growing up in La Puente in the 1980s, Alex Espinoza was a typical child of the Reagan era. He collected “Star Wars” action figures and played with Rubik’s Cube.
But Espinoza was Mexican, born in Tijuana and brought to the United States by his mother when he was about 2 years old. He downplayed his Mexican roots to fit in. At the time, it seemed the worst thing in the world for a boy to be labeled as “a TJ” — literally someone from Tijuana, but also shorthand for an unassimilated Mexican.
“I grew up preferring the taste of a Big Mac over a burrito. I grew up preferring the taste of tuna noodle casserole over menudo,” he said. “Until I went to Mexico as a grad student, Mexico was this kind of static in the background.”
Three decades later, President Trump has sparked a new debate over immigration and assimilation that has Espinoza and many others reflecting on what it means to blend into American culture.
While much has been made about Trump’s harsh talk of deporting those here illegally, the president’s comments about the need for immigrants to fully embrace American culture has renewed a long-running debate that dates back generations.
“Not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate,” President Trump said in a campaign-trail speech in which he called for new immigrants to pass an “ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people.”
In one Republican debate, Trump declared that “we have a country where, to assimilate, you have to speak English … This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
Though Espinoza and others might disagree with Trump’s policies on immigration, they say discussions about assimilation get to the heart of a balancing act all immigrants face: being American while preserving a strong sense of where they came from.
“Have I been assimilated? I don’t know,” said the 45-year-old director of the graduate creative writing and literary arts program at Cal State Los Angeles. “Some people will probably say yes — look at how I dress and speak and where I’m educated. And some people will say no — he speaks Spanish and has a Mexican passport.”
When he went to Mexico for the first time as an adult, the way he spoke, tripping over some Spanish words, instantly pegged him as American. Espinoza is a permanent legal resident but believes that even if he became a U.S. citizen he would never be considered “fully American” by some people.
“Even if I started right now speaking in a Southern drawl and listening to country music, I’m still going to be Mexican,” he said. “My skin is still going to be a certain shade. Assimilation is not this thing where it’s like, OK, I’m one of you.”
Though people often define assimilation in starkly different ways, a Pew Research Center survey released in February showed that 92% of Americans say it’s at least somewhat important for a person to speak English to be considered “truly American,” with 70% saying it’s “very” important.
More than 80% of the survey’s respondents believed that sharing American culture and traditions is at least somewhat important to national identity.
“We at least have absorbed and believe this national narrative that we are a nation of immigrants,” said Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew. “But … it’s not so easy once you get into some of the details of diversity. People are saying, ‘This is good for the country, but it’s not good for me,’ and that ‘Diversity is good, but I actually I don’t like the fact that someone speaks Spanish in the store I go to.’”
These questions have dominated immigrant communities dating back to the 19th century, when the Italians, Irish, Germans, Chinese and other groups faced questions about whether they were true Americans.
The foreign-born share of the U.S. population has quadrupled in the five decades since the establishment of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended a quota system based on national origin that favored white European immigrants. In 1960, 9.7 million foreign-born residents were living in the U.S. In 2014, there were 42.2 million, according to census data and the Pew Research Center.
Kevin Solis, who works for the immigration advocacy group Dream Team LA, said politicians’ statements about assimilation just add fuel to an already sensitive subject.
“When you say, ‘They need to assimilate,’ you’re already beginning with the false notion that they don’t want to, that they’re coming here as an invading force,” he said. “It’s coded in the sense that these are ‘other’ people, foreigners who want to do harm to our nation, and that’s not the case.”
Jim Chang, an information systems specialist from Irvine, recalled meeting with one of his son’s teacher; she kept repeating what he was saying.
“I know he was repeating, you know, saying it more than once because she was worried I didn’t understand,” Chang, 53, said.
Though he spoke English fairly well and understood it even better, Chang said his Korean accent meant he would always stick out.
“It doesn’t matter if you have 12 years or 20 years in the U.S. If they hear us sound a little different, they judge,” he said.
That’s something he said he believes his son, a fifth-grader, shouldn’t have to face. Chang speaks Korean to him, but his son, Jimmy, responds in English.
“I realize that we don’t plan to return to live in Korea. We belong in California now,” Chang said.
But Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College, said that everyone has an accent regardless of how well they speak English. Whether it’s the Cajun or so-called “Minnesota nice” or “Bronx” or other accent not quite on the radar of American pop culture, everyone in the U.S. speaks with an accent, she said.
Not all accents, however, are perceived as equally American.
“A way of speaking that’s associated with a group that’s stigmatized is also going to be stigmatized,” Fought said. “There’s also going to be racism and prejudice against that way of speaking.”
Karen, a 24-year-old honor student at Cal State Fullerton, is an aspiring certified public accountant. She volunteers for the IRS — where her ability to speak Spanish is a major asset — helping low-income people fill out their taxes.
The night Trump was elected, Karen — a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipient who asked that her last name not be used because she fears deportation — suddenly felt as if she stood out even though she was an infant sleeping in the back seat of a car when she was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico.
Karen hasn’t been back to Mexico since then but grew up in the overwhelmingly Latino community of Huntington Park, watching Spanish-language television with her grandmother and working in a Mexican restaurant.
Moving to Orange County for college was like moving to a different world, Karen said. At least until Trump’s election, she felt that she was safer as a college student than her parents, who have labor-oriented jobs.
Her younger brother is a DACA recipient also, and she had him move in with her so they could remove their parents’ address from their federal forms.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t belong anywhere,” she said. “In Mexico, I would be seen very differently because of my accent. It’s like, god, what do I do? If I were to go back, I wouldn’t have anything back there.”
“On the one side, the Hispanics tell you, ‘You’re way too American.’ On the other, you’ll have the Americans telling you you’re too Hispanic. It’s hard to be in the middle.”
“What makes me American? It’s not only the 24 years of my life,” she said. “It’s that this is all I know.”
One place where they have pitched their tents is Yosemite, one of the jewels of America’s national park system.
For Young Muslim Men, Yosemite Retreat Strengthens Sense of Identity, KQED, June 4, 2016
There’s the Merced River running in the background and bird songs here or there. But the most compelling sound in Yosemite’s Lower Pines campground is the voice of 20-year-old Sohaib Awan.
He’s singing the Muslim call to prayer.
Awan is one of about 500 young Muslims here for the 48th Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Retreat. It’s the first time it’s ever been held on the West Coast. . .
If I were camping nearby, the Muslim call to prayer would be the last thing I would want to hear in Yosemite. Did the park consider the experience of American campers? Most nature lovers come to hear birds chirping and mountain streams gurgling, not hundreds of Islamics making their religious sounds.
Back east, Muslim kiddies pray and swim at Camp Ramadan, where activities keep their minds off the fasting of the Islam holiday. The Washington Post put a story about the campers on its front page the other day and went out of its way to make Islam in America appear normal — despite the many attacks by Muslims on Americans, recently in Orlando and San Bernardino. Peaceful Islam is a big lie, but loony libs like the Post insist upon their religious belief that all cultures are equal. Hey, let’s vacation in Islamabad!
In the Post video below, which includes lots of anti-Trump chatter from the kids, the voice-over concludes, “This Muslim community hopes that Boy Scouts will make their children America’s next generation of leaders.”
Well, that’s ambitious.
The Post can’t wait to bash Donald Trump in the text — it starts in the first paragraph in a story supposedly about diverse Islamic camping. Perhaps the anti-Trump ramp is part of the program to “actually strengthen their Muslim identity.”
]]>Muslim camps are spreading in the U.S. to help kids ‘be proud of who they are’, By Abigail Hauslohner, Washington Post, July 6 2016
It was the last day of Camp Ramadan, and a sea of smiling parents had their arms outstretched, holding up more than a dozen cellphones to capture all of the song and dance and children’s humor contained in the end-of-camp assembly. And onstage, a normally polite and bookish 11-year-old was channeling Donald Trump.
“As a leader, who do you wish to serve?” a child, playing the role of debate interviewer, asked the boy’s character — a certain political candidate with the alias of Ronald McDonald.
“I wish to serve my very fantastic self,” answered Amir-Abbas, 11, provoking peals of laughter from the parents. Money, he told the interviewer, is the key to great leadership — and he had lots of it.
“I’m trying to make America great again by kicking out Mexicans, Muslims and African Americans,” he added.
“By the way,” he said, sweeping a hand over his dark, cropped hair. “This hair is real.”
When Mona Eldadah started this camp four years ago, the idea was mainly about getting fasting Muslim kids off the couch during the holy month of Ramadan, and into activities that were both creatively stimulating and unifying.
“I felt like kids were having this isolated experience fasting at home, and felt like, ‘Ugh, I’m the only one doing this,’” explained Eldadah, an interior designer and mother of four. And so began Camp Ramadan — a week-long camp at the end of the month, where kids can fast together while also doing activities that are more enriching than watching Netflix.
Now, the camp has reached its largest number of campers to date at 101, and has acquired the reputation as a place where D.C.-area Muslim kids can learn about and practice a core Muslim tradition, while making friends, creating art and talking freely about current affairs — like Trump.
This year, the Next Wave Muslim Initiative, which Eldadah helped found, rented the Washington Waldorf School in Bethesda for the week of camp.
“You think this age group is young,” she said, taking the stage at the end of the leadership skit featuring the Trump character. “But [they’re] also very mature, thoughtful children.”
Fasting during the daytime hours of Ramadan is one of the core religious obligations of observant Muslims, and is meant to foster a greater connection to God. The practice typically starts around puberty. For many preteens and teens, it serves as an informal rite of passage into Muslim adulthood around the same time that Jewish kids are having bar or bat mitzvahs and some Christian kids are receiving their first Communion.
Fasting is hard; especially when it’s hot outside and you’re new at it. “But when they come here, they kind of struggle together,” said Eldadah. When they arrive in the morning, “they’re kind of sleepy. But by the end, they’re so excited.”
For a week this year, the campers practiced paper marbling, created watercolor sunsets with a foreground of a domed mosque and minarets and took pictures of one another with rented cameras on the school’s playground.
The 6- and 7-year-olds went on a hike to a nearby cave to learn about how the prophet Muhammad visited a cave outside of Mecca, where Islam teaches that he received the word of God. And the 8- and 9-year-olds decided to make their end-of-camp skit about the animated characters from the movie “Minions” observing Ramadan. (The Minions are tempted to break their fast when they see a banana, the characters’ main food obsession in the popular 2015 children’s film.)
The youngest children, ages 3 to 5, learned about the animals of the Koran. (“Old Mustafa had a farm,” they sang at the last day’s assembly in a muddle of high-pitched, off-tempo toddler voices. “And on that farm he had some bees — with the blessing of Allaaaaah.”)
And the 12- to 16-year-olds met the Afghan American author Nadia Hashimi, who read them a passage from her new book, “One Half from the East,” about an Afghan girl whose parents disguise her as a boy so that she can help provide for the family in a restrictive Afghan society.
“How do you think that makes girls feel?” Hashimi asked the adolescents, prompting a discussion about gender equality, followed by an exercise in storytelling.
Each day at about noon — when most other Montgomery County campers would be breaking for lunch — the kids at Camp Ramadan troop into the school’s auditorium, stand shoulder to shoulder and then kneel in unison for prayer.
“The best of America” and a Muslim identity
The kids at Camp Ramadan come from a mix of Muslim families, Eldadah says. Some of the girls wear headscarves; others wear shorts and T-shirts. Some of their families attend the mosque regularly; others don’t go at all. But nearly every single one of the 12- to 16-year-olds this year is fasting.Coming here makes a difference, said Aziza, 12, who knelt on the floor with five of her best girlfriends on a recent day, packing up goody bags for the younger kids to mark the end of Ramadan. “At home you just get super lazy, like, ‘Ehh, the bathroom is sooo far!’”
The others giggled in agreement. At home they’d be sleeping through the fast, or watching TV, they said. Now the fun of camp distracts them — sort of — from the fasting, and they still get to have sleepovers and watch Netflix at night.
Ramadan, which shifts each year with a lunar calendar, started while the kids were still in school this summer. It ended Tuesday night with the start of the festival of Eid.
“Guys, how was your sleep schedule at school?” asked Fatima, a 13-year-old with braces, as the girls stuffed plastic bags full of lollipops, play dough, balloons and slapstick bracelets. “I was fasting during finals.”
“My last day of school, I was so mad because we had a party and got catering from Chipotle and an ice cream bar,” said Aziza. “I love Chipotle.”
Another girl mumbled something about the greatness of tacos. “I love tacos,” Aziza agreed.
Muslim camp directors say Muslim summer camps are taking off in the United States and Canada, as North America’s Muslim population grows, and first- or second-generation parents look for ways to keep the faith among children who — obsessing over Instagram, tween slang and Harry Potter — are often far more immersed in America than they are in the original cultures of their parents.
Camp Tawheed in Michigan offers jet ski tubing, soccer, tennis and Koranic study. At the weekend summer camp offered by the Qalam Institute in Dallas, campers can play dodgeball, roast s’mores and participate in group prayer. And at Camp Deen, a week-long sleep-away camp in Ontario that was founded in 1972, campers learn how to hike, fish and avoid bears, while slumbering each night beneath the pines in cabins named after the famous men and women of Islam.
“It allows them really to meld the best of America, the things that are more uniquely American, but at the same time keep and actually strengthen their Muslim identity,” said Chad Jones, a public affairs officer at U.S. Army Fort Meade and an administrator at the camp, where all three of his kids are all campers.
“One of the biggest challenges for Muslim kids growing up in North America is finding social settings where they can be themselves, without having to feel judged or restricted,” the camp’s website explains. “At Camp Deen, our priority is making kids proud of who they are.”
It’s a concept that an older American minority group has used for the past 120 years of existence. Now a diverse assortment of Jewish summer camps in North America serve more than 200,000 campers annually, according to the Foundation for Jewish Camp.
Sam Perlin, who heads Camp Solomon Schechter in the woods outside Olympia, Wash., said Jewish camp helps kids to form and maintain “a strong Jewish identity” through traditions that they might not necessarily keep at home, like the Sabbath and keeping kosher.
“The campers live Jewishly, and they don’t have that opportunity in greater America, especially here in Washington state,” he said.
At Camp Ramadan, the final day’s assembly came to a close with the teenagers’ unveiling of an “Eid Mubarak” — a blessed holiday — mural that they painted with the blended styles of traditional Arabic calligraphy and spray paint graffiti. The kids ooh-ed and aah-ed and cheered wildly for their friends during a camp slideshow set to a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” And then it was time to say goodbye.
Children hugged. Parents thanked Eldadah. Families collected the posterboards, paintings and photos created by their children.
“Turning Islam back to talking about leadership qualities, going back to morality and ethics — I think that’s something they really value,” Eldadah said of the families as they left the school. “There are people who aren’t very religious at all, and they come to camp and they live Muslim.”
Up to this point, Germany has been taking it on the chin by allowing the influx of more than a million Muslims over the past year who bring [...]]]>
Up to this point, Germany has been taking it on the chin by allowing the influx of more than a million Muslims over the past year who bring a violent culture, one which also permits polygamy. As a result of multiple wives, some “families” have more than a dozen children whose upkeep often falls upon the citizen taxpayers.
Below, Islam permits child marriage because Mohammed took nine-year-old Aisha as his wife, so very young girls like the six-year-old shown are acceptable brides.
Now the justice minister says that German law will apply equally to all residents. We will see how that stands up to the inevitable Muslim and liberal pushback.
]]>Germany warns refugees against polygamy, child brides, AFP, June 15, 2016
BERLIN: Germany will not recognize polygamy or marriages involving minors, its justice minister said on Tuesday, as concern rises over such cases amid a record influx of refugees, many from Muslim countries.
“No one who comes here has the right to put his cultural values or religious beliefs above our law,” said justice minister Heiko Maas in an interview with Bild daily. “Therefore no polygamous marriages will be recognized in Germany.”
Under Islamic law, men are allowed to take up to four wives.
In Germany, however, polygamy is banned although the law provides latitude in some cases for migrants who had wedded abroad. For instance, if a man dies leaving two wives, a court could take into account their de facto relationship, which is bigamous under common law, when distributing the inheritance.
But Maas wants to end the ambiguity, saying: “Everybody must abide by the law, no matter whether he has grown up here or has only just arrived. The law applies equally to all.”
Likewise, the justice minister said cases of marriages involving a minor should also be outlawed, for fear that the underaged individual has been forced into marrying. “We cannot tolerate forced marriages, above all, if they affect under-aged girls,” Maas said.
According to Unicef, child marriages — where at least one spouse is under 18 — account for 40 per cent of all marriages in Afghanistan, from where one of the biggest groups of recent refugees to Germany come.
Bild reported that the southern state of Bavaria has recorded 161 cases of asylum seekers with spouses who are under 16, and 550 cases of marriages involving under-18s. In neighbouring Baden-Wuerttemberg, 117 cases of child marriages were registered among newly arrived migrants, while in the populous state of North-Rhine Westphalia, at least 188 such cases with under-aged girls had been recorded.
The state of Hessen meanwhile reported that in 2015 and 2016, it had recorded an increasing number of cases of “refugees from Arab countries who are married with minors”.
A justice ministry spokeswoman said on Monday she did not have nationwide data, but stressed that “child marriages are not accepted in Germany, and they will not be recognized”.
Germany opened its doors to 1.1 million asylum seekers in 2015, and is facing the daunting challenge of integrating the newcomers into society.
The topic of the troubled second generation, particularly in Islamic families, is one that I’ve examined over time, recently in Government Screening Won’t Stop Second Generation Jihad. In that case, a Silicon Valley executive Sal Shafi contacted authorities because [...]]]>
The topic of the troubled second generation, particularly in Islamic families, is one that I’ve examined over time, recently in Government Screening Won’t Stop Second Generation Jihad. In that case, a Silicon Valley executive Sal Shafi contacted authorities because he feared his son, Adam (pictured), had turned jihad and was about to leave to join ISIS. Legal difficulties ensued.
The case was an extreme version of teen development where rejection of the parents’ values is felt as the right way forward to become an individual. Of course, the human brain is not fully developed until age 25 or thereabouts, so some adolescent choices can turn out to be bad ones.
Immigrant teens experience extra stress in the construction of who they believe themselves to be. Immigrant kids are not completely American nor entirely their parents’ tribe. As a result, many associate with others of the same demographic and form gangs based on ethnicity.
Muslim youth face a more consequential choice. The ISIS beheading gang claims to offer “true” Islam, not the watered-down or assimilated version of the parents, which provides a welcoming identity clubhouse to searchy young people.
Below, thousands of young Muslim men from around the world have traveled to the Middle East to join ISIS.
The Washington Times article names a couple recent examples of second generation assimilation failures; I have reported on others in addition to the Shafi family. One was the son of Albanian immigrants Betim Kaziu was sentenced in 2012 to 27 years in the slammer for plotting to murder US soldiers overseas. Another was Mohamed Mohamud, a young Somali who plotted to bomb a Portland Oregon Christmas celebration, whose father (an engineer at Intel) contacted authorities with worries that his son was becoming radicalized.
The problem of second generation radicalization shows that immigration screening of the first generation does not protect America from danger. Islam can act like a recessive gene, becoming active in later generations to kill. Understanding this point means the prudent policy for American national security should be Zero Muslim immigration, period.
The online version of the Washington Times story was headlined somewhat differently:
]]>American-born children of immigrants proving fruitful recruiting ground for jihad in U.S., By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, June 13, 2016
While immigrants draw much of the attention, it’s their children who are proving to be the most fruitful recruiting ground for radical jihad in the U.S., accounting for at least half of the deadly attacks over the past decade.
The latest instance of the second-generation terrorist syndrome played out in Orlando, Florida, over the weekend when Omar Mateen, son of immigrants from Afghanistan, went on a jihad-inspired rampage, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
Authorities said Mateen had flirted with other terrorist groups but declared his allegiance to the Islamic State on Sunday morning as he began his horrific spree.He follows in the footsteps of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino, California, terrorists who was the son of Pakistanis; Nadir Soofi, one of two men who attacked a drawing competition in Garland, Texas, last year and whose father was from Pakistan; and then-Maj. Nidal Hassan, the child of Palestinian immigrants whose shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 set off the modern round of deadly lone-wolf attacks.
In other cases, attackers were immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children. They grew up in the U.S. but were besieged by questions of identity.
“Historically, the ‘high stress’ generation for American immigrants has been second generation,” said former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “Mom and Pop can rely on the culture of where they came from. Their grandchildren will be (more or less) thoroughly American. The generation in between, though, is anchored neither in the old or in the new. They often are searching for self or identity beyond self.”
The Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were all foreigners who gained entry to the U.S. on visas, sparking a heated and still-running debate over the role of borders in trying to keep out would-be attackers.
But the second-generation killers pose a different issue: how to keep children of immigrants from abandoning the precepts of their adopted home.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Monday that the issues are one and the same.
“The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about,” Mr. Trump said in a speech in New Hampshire.
He revised his call for a temporary ban on admitting Muslims to the U.S., saying it would apply only to travelers from regions connected to terrorism. He said the ban would end once the U.S. has a better idea of who is coming and what values they hold.
Mr. Trump said immigrants from Afghanistan — the home of Mateen’s parents — overwhelmingly “support oppressive Sharia law,” which he said is anathema to American values of diversity. Indeed, Mateen’s father suggested that the killer may have been set off by having seen two men kissing. Mateen’s massacre targeted a gay nightclub.
But some researchers suggest the link to religion is less important than the marginalization immigrants and first-generation Americans may feel. In a study last year funded by the Homeland Security Department, researchers said those who felt instances of discrimination, personal shame or humiliation had higher propensity toward radicalization.
Some policymakers bristle at connecting terrorist attacks to immigration, and it’s difficult to know the outlines of the connection.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, and Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, have repeatedly asked the Homeland Security Department for immigration information on those implicated in recent terrorist plots, but they said they have yet to get a “substantive” response.
That leaves the public blind, Mr. Sessions said in a statement Monday.
“While the vast majority of Muslims are law-abiding and peaceful, we must face the uncomfortable reality that not only are immigrants from Muslim-majority countries coming to the United States, radicalizing, and attempting to engage in acts of terrorism, such as in Boston and Chattanooga; but also, their first-generation American children are susceptible to the toxic radicalization of terrorist organizations,” Mr. Sessions said.
Alejandro Beutel, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said many first-generation Americans face identity issues and often that’s healthy, spurring a desire for greater civic involvement. But some people — particularly those from Muslim-majority societies — can have deeper struggles, caught between seeing themselves as fully American or as part of their parents’ home cultures.
Mr. Beutel said the recruits’ ages play a role. They are typically younger and use the social media platforms that the Islamic State has proved so adept at using to spread its message, fostering a sense of community among those struggling with identity.
“Social media platforms are not only a means to disseminate their propaganda; they’re a way to directly communicate, one on one, with potential recruits,” he said.
The same identity struggles affect other first-generation Americans, but Asian and Hispanic immigrants, for example, don’t have al Qaeda or Islamic State recruiters interested in them, Mr. Beutel said. Instead, they are typically targeted for recruitment by criminal gangs.
Hedieh Mirahmadi, president of the World Organization for Resource Development and Education and an authority on countering violent extremism, said part of the struggle is “religious literacy,” and a saying in Muslim communities that “if you don’t teach your child Islam someone else will.”
Parents are often culturally Muslim but their children are more religiously devoted and seek out instruction online, where they are ripe for recruitment.
“There’s a responsibility for immigrant families to realize that their children may be learning religion online and there may be deviant interpretations online they may be subjected to,” she said.
That’s true not just for Muslim families — one-third of those implicated in terrorist plots are converts, she said.
A rare expression of this wrenching culture clash is a short film created by Sanjay Patel telling his own childhood struggle to fit in. As a boy, Sanjay felt “embarrassed and mortified by how different my family was” and producing the film brought up many of the issues all young immigrants face about assimilation. Here’s a snip of the film, Sanjay’s Super Team:
Now 41, Patel sounds well adjusted and he certainly is successful to have Pixar produce his film as an opener for the feature “The Good Dinosaur.” Monday’s San Jose Mercury celebrated his success with a front-page story, noting the Oakland-residing filmmaker’s work has been nominated for an Oscar.
Patel’s apparent assimilation is all the more admirable because India’s traditional culture is hardly acceptable by the standard of American values. In my 2007 Vdare article, “Dogs, Frogs and Dalits — the Indian Model Minority Has a Dark Side”, I outlined the objectionable items of caste (from light-skinned Brahmins to darker untouchables), dowry murder, widespread sex-selection abortion (against females of course), child labor, slavery and belief in witchcraft. Also included was the case of immigrant Lakireddy Bali Reddy, convicted of human trafficking connected with the death of a teenaged girl he bought in his hometown who died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty heater in Berkeley.
Back to the present: Sanjay’s Super Team looks to be a good bet for an Oscar because of the ongoing race kerfuffle within the Academy, despite Pixar’s denial of having a “diversity agenda.”
]]>Oscars 2016: ‘Sanjay’s Super Team’ creator finally feels comfortable in his own skin, San Jose Mercury News, February 21, 2016
When Sanjay Patel was a boy, he and his dad had a ritual every morning and evening. They sat side by side on the floor of the motel the family ran in San Bernardino. The father prayed to his gods in his daily meditation. The son often worshipped his own gods, cartoon superheroes, in front of his own shrine, the television.
Patel, a longtime animator at Pixar Studios who lives in Oakland, tapped into that childhood memory for his Oscar-nominated animated short film “Sanjay’s Super Team.” He’s spent a lifetime trying to bridge the gap between his American attitude and his cultural roots and parents’ Hindu traditions.
“I was always embarrassed and mortified by how different my family was,” says Patel, 41, who has worked on animated hits such as “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 3,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “The Incredibles.” “It took me a long time to feel comfortable in my skin.”
Amid the discontent over the all-white roster of acting nominees for this year’s Oscar, “Sanjay’s Super Team,” a seven-minute short that played in theaters before “The Good Dinosaur,” comes as a relief for those who wish Hollywood reflected the diversity of America today. Critics have been raving about the raw emotional power of the autobiographical film as well as its animated flash. Patel’s honesty about his childhood struggles gives this “Super Team” its special powers.
“ ‘Sanjay’ will go down as one of the studio’s best,” wrote Wired magazine, hailing it as “Pixar’s most achingly personal film.”
Indeed, this movie marks a milestone for Pixar, which has never before had a movie directed by someone of Indian descent.
“Pixar certainly didn’t greenlight the film out of some diversity agenda,” says “Sanjay” producer Nicole Grindle, “but we think it is very important to seek out and tell new stories. This is wonderful story.”
In the cheeky film, little Sanjay just can’t wrap his mind around the point of meditation. In fact, he’s bored stiff by sitting still, so he begins to dream of an epic superhero battle, only the warriors are not Batman or Wonder Woman but instead Vishnu, Hanuman and Durga, three formidable Hindu deities. These ancient gods became the ultimate “Super Team.” It’s a whimsical and sweet mashup of the sacred and the pixelated that eventually creates a bridge between father and son.
“I lost a lot of sleep over that. How can you sum up 3,000 years of philosophy in five minutes of animation?” Patel says. “I was scared to put that part of my culture and identity on display out there. The team at Pixar really helped with that, and now I couldn’t be more proud.”
Making the film has been a therapeutic experience for him, a way to heal the scars of the past, as well as honor his parents and their struggles to stay tethered to their culture. He now also confesses to stealing the gifts his father left on the shrine when no one was looking.
“In a way I think the gods got their revenge on me,” says Patel, who has also published children’s books mining the Hindu mythology, such as “The Little Book of Hindu Deities.” “As a child I thought they meant nothing to me, and now they have become a huge part of my life and my work.”
Patel remembers all too well how alienated he felt as a child growing up in the ’80s, when the television he revered never showed him faces that looked like his own. Like many children of immigrants, he was walking a tightrope between trying to respect his heritage and trying desperately to fit in with his peers.
“I would have felt less afraid if I had been able to see characters who were South Asian out there,” he explains. “It felt scary to be who I am, to be brown, and there was no way of hiding it.”
That’s part of the reason he wanted to make this film — so that the next generation feels included in the mainstream of American culture.
“What I really wanted to do was normalize this experience,” he says. “I wanted to create something my nieces and nephews could be proud of. The message is it’s OK to be you. You don’t have to be exotic; you can just be authentic to yourself.”
But Patel is most proud of the reaction of one viewer in particular, his usually reserved father, who loved the movie so much he teared up.
As it happens, Patel’s breakthrough comes at a time when Indian-Americans have at long last begun to emerge in pop culture, from Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari to “Silicon Valley” star Kumail Nanjiani.
“I’m so excited by what I see starting to happen out there,” Patel says. “Part of what I wanted to do with this movie was show the decision-makers that there is a hunger for these stories.”
In addition, the story includes photos of hills near existing suburbs being prepared for more housing to be built, with no mention of the severe drought that has plagued California for years.
Below, East Bay development. Chronicle caption: “Development continues in the Tri-Valley with grading along Tassajara Road for more homes in East Dublin near San Ramon. The region is now a booming suburb that’s home to thousands of new Asian residents.”
The Chronicle has had plenty of drought coverage, but the paper seems incapable of connecting the dots between immigration-fueled population growth and a diminishing water supply. More people means more water users. In fact, it was a big story in the past week that state residents had cut their water use by 31 percent in July.
Have citizens been convinced by government to let their lawns die so developers can get rich by importing thousands of immigrants during a historic drought? That’s what it looks like.
And there are quite a number of new water-using cricket fans from India, as we learn in lower paragraphs: San Ramon’s Indian population increased 600 percent from 2000 to 2013, reaching 9,720 in the latter year.
Local citizens have tried to limit development through the initiative process, with some successes. Still, there’s plenty of agricultural land that remains unpaved, and developers intend to change that by constructing some nice expensive $uburb$ for immigrant$. Cha-ching!
]]>A California first? Tri-Valley middle schools plan cricket match, By Joaquin Palomino, San Francisco Chronicle, August 30, 2015
On one end of a 22-yard strip of green carpet stretched across a ball field in San Ramon, a boy gets a running start and heaves a tennis ball as hard as he can.
It bounces a few times before a boy on the other end smashes it with paddle. A third boy nearly snags the ball, barehand, but it fumbles out.
Clint Copeland, who has coached cricket in the Bay Area for four years and played for “too many,” can’t contain his joy. “Nice shot, great bowl, good effort,” he yells. “I enjoy it more than they do. How can you not enjoy it when you see a kid do that?”
Cricket is growing in California, especially in the Tri-Valley, which encompasses the cities of San Ramon, Pleasanton, Dublin, Danville and Livermore.
The sport is so popular at Fallon Middle School in Dublin and Harvest Park Middle School in Pleasanton that both plan to field cricket clubs this year, making them among the first schools in the Bay Area — possibly the state — to offer the sport.
“People are playing in Fremont, Cupertino, San Jose and Milpitas,” Copeland said. “But not in the schools.”
After Labor Day, the Tri-Valley could make history: Fallon and Harvest Park are preparing for what Copeland calls California’s first interschool cricket match. Other schools may also join, elevating it from a game to a tournament.
The proliferation of the sport, which was born in Britain and became hugely popular in South Asia in the colonial era, is just one indicator of changing times — and changing demographics — in the Tri-Valley. Once a collection of small, rural and largely white towns, the region is now a booming suburb that’s home to thousands of new Asian residents.
Between 2000 and 2013, San Ramon’s Indian population increased 600 percent — from 1,390 to 9,720 residents. The small suburban city now has a higher percentage of Asians living in it than San Francisco or San Jose — 39.5 percent.
Since 1980, the percentage of Asians living in Pleasanton more or less doubled every decade — from 2.5 to 5.6 to 11.7 to 23.1 percent of the population in 2010. Proportionally, Pleasanton’s Asian community was almost twice as large as that of Los Angeles in 2013.
A growing community
While most of the new residents were born abroad, the influx into the East Bay suburb bucks past trends, in which immigrants typically landed in homogeneous, urban enclaves. Drawn to jobs in tech, many have advanced degrees and solid salaries. “We’re not talking about a Chinatown or Japantown type of segregation,” said David Woo, an associate professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. “These are English speakers who move into white neighborhoods and integrate.”The changing populations have altered the fabric of the community. Patel Groceries, an Indian grocery store, opened in San Ramon in 2011 and has been packed ever since, and the small city is home to the Indian Community Church of the Valley, one of the Bay Area’s few Christian houses of worship catering specifically to South Asians.
Though not as avid cricket players, immigrants from East Asia are also moving in.
On most Sundays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., the Chinese American Cooperation Council sets up in Pleasanton’s Amador Valley High School, where hundreds of families converge to study Chinese language, play badminton and learn calligraphy. The small school went from less than 300 registered students to 1,200 since 2003, according to Jun Xue, president of the council.
New businesses are also popping up. Next spring construction is scheduled to begin on a new shopping center in Pleasanton that will house an Asian food court. Two 99 Ranch supermarkets, a chain of Asian grocers, have opened since 2007 — one replacing an old Ralph’s.
One of the more symbolic cultural shifts has been the onset of cricket and, to a certain extent, the waning interest in baseball — long a staple of suburban America. San Ramon’s two cricket pitches are busier than the city’s many baseball diamonds.
Residents are so passionate about cricket that when the City Council considered limiting playing hours at Monarch Park in 2010, nearly 300 people signed an online petition in protest. One man even told the council that he moved to the small city partially because of the cricket field, a rarity in the region, news website Patch reported.
A few years after the heated debate, the city decided to erect a second pitch for players.
“There are probably more cricket fields here than in any other Bay Area community,” said San Ramon Mayor Bill Clarkson. “The city has gone to a great extent to make them feel welcome.”
Cricket in the schools
While the sport has been popular among adults for a few years, it recently started catching on with kids.“Kids don’t play baseball in elementary or high school at lunchtime, they play cricket,” said Noman Munif, president of the San Ramon Valley Islamic Center and longtime Tri-Valley resident. “That’s a big difference from 20, 30 years ago.”
On a warm summer afternoon in mid-August, about 100 people convened at Windemere Ranch Middle School. A group of adults played on the main pitch, while dozens of kids ran around with food and trophies in hand — some trickled onto a nearby basketball court and set up an ad-hoc cricket game.
It was the last day of the youth summer league, and families from all over the Tri-Valley came to support the sport.
“It’s bringing my childhood memories back,” said Sathya Raghavendran, an avid cricket fan whose son played in the league. “We were born in India, and we came here to work, but these kids were born here. If you don’t get them involved in cricket, that excitement is going to die with us.”
The closing ceremony marked the end of summer league, but due to the school programs the sport will continue in the fall and winter.
Harvest Park Middle School is still working out the details of its cricket club. Fallon Middle School started a club last spring, which grew from three students to 45 over the course of the year. Due to that uptick, all students will spend three weeks playing the sport this year in gym class, according to Chandu Krishna Giri, Fallon’s coach.
“We didn’t do any marketing, we didn’t put out any flyers, we didn’t put up any banners; all we did was play,” he said. “And every week a child would come and ask if they could try.”
Vivek Krishna Giri, 11, Chandu’s son, will represent Fallon in the interschool competition in September. He plays in cricket tournaments across the globe — Dallas, New Jersey and the Caribbean — but is most excited about spreading the game in the Tri-Valley.
“I want to promote cricket so more people can see the sport I love,” he said.
But how different is she from Jeb Bush, the newest Republican President candidate? He hasn’t gone all the way into total delusion — being a public figure is a helpful reality reminder — but Jeb has devolved pretty far in the direction of cultural transformation. One curious behavior was his checking the Hispanic box on a voter registration form in 2009.
He is married to a Mexican woman, Columba, and they speak Spanish at home. Interestingly, households where English is not normally spoken are often used an an indicator of non-assimilation. Jeb wants to amnesty millions of illegal aliens, but his wife is hardly a good model of what Americans expect of foreigners who want to live here.
Jeb and Columba have been married for 41 years, yet Mrs. Bush remains uncomfortable about speaking English. But Jeb has no such shyness about speaking Spanish, the invaders’ language. The three Bush children learned to speak Spanish before they learned English.
So his use of Spanish in his Presidential roll-out speech on Monday was not a surprise.
Jeb also converted to Catholicism, the hispanic religion, so he really is all in.
A few months ago, Jeb opined, “The fact that I’m bilingual, bicultural can’t hurt.”
Actually, it can hurt quite a bit. Many traditional Americans don’t want to be forced by immigration to become bilingual or multicultural or diverse. In areas of high hispanic penetration, Americans need to speak Spanish to apply for many jobs.
Rachel Dolezal has denied her race, her background and her family, which must be very painful for the parents. Jeb comes from one of America’s leading political families, yet has repudiated this nation’s language and traditions to adopt hispanic culture. Do the Bushes feel the rejection personally? They don’t show any outward signs. Anyway, the family has had Mexican connections for a while, but nobody else has taken on the cultural trappings.
On Monday, NPR went into a multicultural swoon over the hispanic attributes of “Jebcito,” noting “he has made his home by completely embracing Latino culture,” — so post-American!
]]>He Was Born Republican Royalty, But ‘Jebcito’ Is From Miami, NPR.org, By Mara Liasson, June 15, 2015
There are three Republican candidates who ran Spanish-language ads when they announced their presidential intentions — but only one was an Anglo.
Jeb Bush not only speaks fluent Spanish, he has made his home by completely embracing Latino culture and putting down roots in South Florida.
Ana Navarro, his former aide, tells a little story that shows just how much he’s adopted the culture: One day, she suggested something to Bush that he rejected because it was too expensive. Then, she said, he touched his elbow with his hand.
“That’s a very Hispanic gesture for meaning: ‘Because I’m cheap, because I’m frugal,’ ” Navarro said. “It means ‘I walk with my elbows so as not to wear out my shoes.’ In Spanish, it would say, Yo camino con los codos. And it’s that kind of nuance that he fully understands.”
To understand why Bush only half-jokingly adopted the Twitter hashtag #honorarylatino, you have to understand the path he took to his current home in South Florida. Bush grew up in Midland, Texas, he summered in Maine and went to prep school in Andover, Mass. And it was in high school that his path home really began. He met his wife, Columba, on a high school exchange trip to Mexico. In college, he majored in Latin American Studies. He converted to Catholicism, and he worked briefly in Venezuala. But the place he chose to put down roots was Miami.
“It certainly did shape him,” said Tom Fiedler, the former political editor of theMiami Herald. “The story of Miami since the Cuban exiles began coming has been one of being the new immigrant city.”

Bush first came to Florida to organize his father’s campaign in the state for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. Then he and Columba decided to stay. Jeb went into business — real estate — and the family business, party politics. At the same time, the Mariel boatlift brought thousands of new Cuban immigrants to Florida. As Fiedler remembers, the leaders of the Cuban community in Miami decided they needed to become active in U.S. politics — and the Republican party was their natural home “because of the passion for President Reagan,” he said. “They flocked to the Republican party, and Jeb was there to take advantage of that.”By then, Bush had three children — whom his father, George H.W. Bush, once referred to as “little brown ones.” The young family settled into their new home near Miami, and in 1983 he became the chairman of the Dade County Republican Party. At that time, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in Dade County 3 to 2. Bush set out to change that, and he started with the Cubans.
Local Cuban radio host Ninoska Perez watched as Bush became deeply connected to the Cuban community. Perez is a host at Radio Mambi in Coral Gables, where the Bushes now live. She met Bush early on and has interviewed him many times on her show.
“The problems of the Cuban community were like part of his own problems,” Perez says. “If we were protesting for something, he was there.”
By the mid-1980s, newspaper profiles in Miami referred to Bush as one of the most prominent members of the Hispanic community. So Perez isn’t surprised that Bush once mistakenly listed his ethnicity as Hispanic on a Florida voter registration form.

“Probably in his mind he’s thinking, ‘Yes, I am,’ ” she says, “because that’s how he was perceived. A lot of people were calling him ‘Jebcito,’ like someone that was dear to them.”And it wasn’t just Cubans. Miami in the ’80s was also receiving waves of Nicaraguans fleeing upheaval in Central America. Navarro said that’s another way the melting pot of South Florida shaped Bush. It made him understand pan-Hispanic culture.
“Jeb knows what chilaquiles is the same way he knows what Cuban picadillo is and can move effortlessly through the different Hispanic nationalities because of living in Miami,” Navarro said.
Just a mile away from Radio Mambi’s offices in Coral Gables is Talavera, an upscale Mexican restaurant where Bush and his family like to eat. That’s where I meet Marina de la Milera. She was on the executive committee of the Dade County Republican Party when Jeb was the chairman.
“He had a plan for the party, and he carried it,” she said.
Back when de la Milera met him, Jeb Bush was Republican royalty — the son of the man who rode on Air Force Two. but what impressed her most about Bush was his drive and work ethic. Bush has said that his father saw politics as public service, but he sees it as a mission, like a religion. Milera remembers that Bush’s goal as the Dade County GOP chairman was to register every newly naturalized Hispanic as a Republican.
“We did in one year 54,000 applications. We filled out 54,000 applications for citizens,” she said.
As Bush and his family found their place in South Florida — with its vibrant mix of Latin American immigrants — Bush was building the vehicle for his own political ambitions. It paid off. Bush won the Hispanic vote twice in his races for governor. He once called himself the first “Latino governor of the state of Florida.”
Al Cardenas, who was the state GOP chairman in the ’80s, says that Bush’s connection to the Hispanic community is now his biggest asset as a presidential candidate.
“In our party, no one else seems to give the community the time share in their schedule that Democrats do,” he said. “And so here comes Jeb Bush — his schedule is representative of the Hispanic community’s role in our country. That should be the rule, except that our party’s been slow to learn it.”
Bush’s schedule has put him before Hispanic audiences in Puerto Rico and Texas, neither of which play much of a role in the GOP primary. But Bush has his sights firmly fixed on the general election, which he knows Republicans must do much better with Hispanics to win.
“I live in Miami. Trust me, I know the power of the immigrant experience, because I live it each and every day,” Bush said earlier this year on a trip to Puerto Rico. “I know the immigrant experience, because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico. My children are bicultural and bilingual.”
Bush even manages to slip in a reference to his hometown in South Florida when he campaigned in New Hampshire recently and answered a question about country of origin labeling for food imports.
“When I go to Publix in Coral Gables,” he said, “after church to go prepare for Sunday Funday in my house … and I’ll probably make a really good guacamole and I want to know where that avocado is from and I want to know where the onions are from and the cilantro and all the secret stuff I put in it.”
John Ellis Bush — son and brother of U.S. presidents, grandson of Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush — can make a mean guacamole, if he does say so himself.