Steve Sailor writing in Taki's Magazine
* * *
The looting of Puerto Rico’s institutions by the rich and
the poor alike is depopulating the island.
Puerto Rico is being allowed to fall apart in order to
rig American presidential elections by tipping Florida’s electoral votes to the
Democrats.
Puerto Rico is a fascinating test case for what has
emerged as the central issue of 2016 politics: BORDERS.
Mrs. Clinton ranks with John McCain as the purest example
of current "invade-the-world-invite-the-world" Establishment
ideology.
In contrast, as Hillary fumed last week, Donald Trump has
fueled his surprise run by endorsing the “alternative” worldview that finds
borders prudent and valuable.
* GO, TRUMP, GO! GO, TRUMP, GO! GO, TRUMP, GO!
Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU politician who heads the
European Commission, enunciated this month the ascendant [Leftist] dogma:
“Borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians.”
Expressions of open-borders extremism such as this are
becoming ever more explicit and common. As far back as Sept. 10, 2001, Mrs.
Clinton’s husband affirmed “the ultimate wisdom of a borderless world” and
called for “open borders to all.”
Although The Wall Street Journal first called for the
constitutional amendment “There shall be open borders” in 1984, the world’s
elites have typically been more interested in denouncing "commoners"
for doubting their dream of "borderlessness" than in empirically
testing their idea.
(*SMIRK*)
Puerto Rico, therefore, is useful to study as a test of
the effects of anti-nationalism because it is a third-world nation with its own
Olympic team, yet it enjoys open borders with the United States.
But... open borders have also been a catastrophe for
Puerto Ricans, who have been abandoning their native land in droves.
[Puerto Rico's "separate yet not" commonwealth
status] increasingly turns out to be an expensive scam. Puerto Rico has run up
$110 billion in debt and unfunded pension liabilities.
In the West Side Story song “America,” Rita Moreno
snidely described life in Puerto Rico as:
"Always the hurricanes blowing...Always the population growing..."
But... Puerto Rico’s population has [actually] been
collapsing in recent years.
The Wall Street Journal reported two months ago:
"Puerto Rico has suffered a population slide that is steeper and more financially disastrous than in any U.S. state since the end of World War II."
In 2014 alone, a net of 1.8% of Puerto Rico’s population
left for the mainland.
The cumulative decline from its peak population in 2004
is now approaching 10%.
(*PAUSE*)
In contrast, the Puerto Rican population of the 50 states
grew about 50% from 2000 to 2013. About three-fifths of all Puerto Ricans now
live on the mainland.
That’s an important fraction to be aware of because we
are often told that only a small percentage of the 6.1 billion people who live
in the less developed nations would bother to decamp for the first world under
a policy of open borders. But the experience of Puerto Rico, which is hardly
poor (GPD per capita is near triple the world average), suggests that if
allowed, third-worlders will keep coming until life in America and Europe
declines to third-world conditions.
(*SHRUG*)
(*SILENCE*)
Puerto Rico’s slow depopulation due to corruption and
ineptitude is particularly interesting for what it shows us about how the Establishment’s
invade/invite philosophy undermines civic responsibility and moral
accountability.
While nationalism encourages stewardship... globalism
licenses Puerto Rican-style exploitation and shoddiness.
(*SHRUG*)
Benjamin Franklin famously replied to a lady inquiring
what the Framers of the Constitution had come up with: “A republic, if you can
keep it.”
But Puerto Rico is a by-product of America’s first spasm
of imperialism, the Spanish-American War of 1898.
While the urbane Cubans were quickly granted some degree
of independence, the impoverished, agricultural Puerto Ricans seemed too
backward for self-rule.
Moreover, master strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan argued
that the U.S. Navy needed a coaling station in the Caribbean to protect the
approaches to the future Isthmian Canal from the battle cruisers of the Queen
and Kaiser, just as the British colony of Malta guarded the Suez Canal.
When Puerto Ricans flooded into New York City after World
War II, helping wreck the South Bronx, the U.S. implemented a Trump-like
industrial policy to subsidize manufacturing jobs in Puerto Rico. This slowed
immigration to the U.S. for several decades. But when a major tax break expired
in 2006, the local economy immediately collapsed and the mass exodus began
again.
Besides the weak economy, crooked institutions plague
this island nation that’s not allowed to be a nation-state. It’s a banana
republic without even nominally ever having been a republic.
There’s little point in being a Puerto Rican patriot and
working to make Puerto Rico a better place because all the money is in conning
Uncle Sam.
Electoral politics within Puerto Rico are subservient to
the issue of the relationship to the imperial power: Should Puerto Rico stay a
commonwealth or become a state?
(Only a few patriots call for independence from the
Washington cash cow.)
Few politicians are interested in local issues of good
government.
Puerto Rico in the 21st century demonstrates the moral
debilitation caused by a lack of nationalism. Puerto Rico’s institutions have
become thoroughly corrupt. For example, Puerto Rico’s police department appears
to be violent, crooked, and ineffectual. A Mother Jones article entitled
“You’ve Probably Never Heard of America’s Worst Police Force” reported:
"Between 2005 and 2010, more than 1,700 Puerto Rico police officers were arrested for crimes including murder, assault, theft, domestic violence, and drug trafficking.That’s roughly 10% of the 17,000-person force and nearly three times the number of New York City police officers arrested in a comparable five-year period."
(By the way... the NYPD is about twice the size of the
PRPD.)
If you are an American criminal on the lam, though,
Puerto Rico is a good place to hole up from the law.
One of the more lurid recent murders in my neighborhood
was the 2009 Armenian-versus-Armenian killing in the parking lot of the local
Sears in North Hollywood, Calif. By analyzing social media, the victim’s father
tracked the affluent killer down to a beach town in Puerto Rico and federal
marshals arrested him. But to the outrage of the LAPD, a Puerto Rican judge let
the killer out on $50,000 bail, and he immediately disappeared.
Similarly, Puerto Rico’s public schools are amazingly
horrible.
(But press coverage in America of Puerto Rico’s miserable
test scores has been almost non-existent. After all, it’s not really our
country. And if you mention these "hate stats" you’ll probably get
called racist.)
So, who cares? Not Puerto Ricans, apparently.
On both the 2011 and 2013 federal National Assessments of
Educational Progress tests (in Spanish on tests carefully customized for Puerto
Rico after federal officials couldn’t believe how badly Puerto Rican students
were scoring), 95% of public school students in Puerto Rico performed at the
Below Basic (i.e., bottom) level, versus 38% of Hispanic students on the
mainland.
Among Puerto Rican eighth graders in 2015, the percentage
scoring Below Basic in math improved from 95% to... 94%.
(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
Puerto Rico’s terrible school achievement test scores are
no doubt partly the fault of its students.
Jason Malloy at Human Varieties has presented a
meta-analysis of over 70 IQ studies of Puerto Ricans on the island, the
mainland, and in Hawaii over the past 95 years. Their intelligence scores have
been consistently low, although trending upward. Among Puerto Ricans on the
mainland: The median IQ of 19 samples from the 1930s thru 1970s is 83.7. The median
IQ of 14 samples from the 1980s thru 2000s is 87.4.
(The rewards for being an intelligent Puerto Rican in the
United States are hardly to be sneezed at. The genuinely clever Lin-Manuel Miranda,
composer and star of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, may be the single most
popular person in New York City at present.)
But the NAEP scores in Puerto Rico are worse even than
for Puerto Ricans in the U.S., suggesting that Puerto Rico’s school system
deserves much blame.
(*SIGH*)
Total public school spending in Puerto Rico per student
is below the U.S. average, although higher than in Utah and Idaho.
Puerto Rico pays its schoolteachers little while
lavishing money on its school administrators, especially in the shifty-sounding
categories of “Other Support Services” and “General Administration.”
(Puerto Rico spends more per student on those categories
than any state, trailing only the notoriously gold-plated District of Columbia
school system.)
In short, what the Puerto Rican nation needs is
nationalism.
* WEPA...!!!
From the perspective of the Hillary Clinton campaign,
however, the emptying out of Puerto Rico into Orlando, which is now a “de facto
San Juan suburb,” is a feature, not a bug, since it helps tip Florida, the
Electoral College’s most important purple state, permanently blue.
* TURN THE WHOLE FRIGGIN' NATION INTO ONE BIG FAT PUERTO
RICO; WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?!
(*SNORT*)
As Al Gore painfully discovered in 2000, the path to 270
electoral votes is much easier with Florida in your column. And even a small
number of votes can determine who wins Florida’s 29 electoral votes and thus
the White House.
Although Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship
in 1917 (in time to be drafted into the Great War), the island isn’t a state;
therefore, it gets no electoral votes in presidential elections. But Puerto Ricans
enjoy open borders with the United States and they can vote as soon as they
settle in any state.
As Hillary Clinton recently reminded Puerto Ricans in a
speech in the Orlando area:
"If you live in Puerto Rico, you can’t vote for your president and Commander-in-Chief, right? ... But as an American citizen, if you move to Florida or New York, you can vote for the president and Commander-in-Chief."
The Democrats’ intensive ground game in Orlando to
register new arrivals from Puerto Rico isn’t controversial. After all, the
Democrats’ grand strategy in the 21st century is for the government to elect a
new People...
* YES. "THE GOVERNMENT TO ELECT A NEW PEOPLE."
AS IN "FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE." LOOK AROUND THE WORLD, FOLKS; LOOK AT
PUERTO RICO... MEXICO... CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA... SPAIN ITSELF...
* LOOK AT THE MIDDLE EAST... AFRICA...
* THE GLOBAL ELITES HAVE A VISION. THAT VISION IS FOR
THEM TO REMAIN THE ELITES. JUST AS IN THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES THERE ARE ELITES, AND LIKE THEIRS,
OUR ELITES EXPECT TO REMAIN SAFE, COMFORTABLE, WEALTHY AND POWERFUL EVEN AS
AMERICA ITSELF SINKS FURTHER INTO THE MIRE.
* A VIBRANT, FREEDOM-LOVING MIDDLE CLASS IS NOT IN THE
ELITE'S INTEREST; A PLIANT, DEPENDENT AND BEATEN DOWN "NEW AMERICA"
IS.
* WHAT LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC POLICIES HAVE DONE TO PUERTO
RICO... AND DETROIT... AND CHICAGO... AND NEWARK... THEIR VISION IS TO DO
LIKEWISE TO THE REST OF AMERICA.
...while demonizing as hateful racists any Americans who
dare object to politicians importing foreign ringers to win elections.
Within that context, Hillary’s Puerto Rican ploy is among
her less ethically challenged immigration stratagems.
A recent Pew Center poll found that Hillary Clinton
dominates among Hispanics — unless they’re English-speaking or American-born.
(*SIGH*)
Pew noted:
"Clinton holds an 80% (to 11%) lead among Hispanic voters who are bilingual or Spanish-dominant (those who are more proficient in Spanish than English). These voters make up about 57% of all Latino registered voters."
(*SILENCE*)
* THERE IS A BRIGHT SPOT THOUGH:
"Among the smaller group of Hispanic voters (43%) who are English-dominant — those who are more proficient in English than Spanish — just 48% back Clinton while 41% would vote for Trump."
Of course, these days, Hispanics who don’t speak English,
weren’t born in America, and might not, technically speaking, be legal voters
are widely felt to possess the moral high ground over Hispanic voters "tainted"
by being born here and speaking our national language.
(*DISGUSTED SNORT*)
Thus continues the transformation of Franklin’s American
Republic into Puerto Rico Grande.
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