John Derbyshire Disgusts Me

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


creep.jpg I don’t normally troll conservative blogs to find and comment on the most outrageous things I find. But when it comes to immigration, National Review writer John Derbyshire really gets under my skin. Maybe it’s the thinly veiled argument that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, or maybe its the insistence that maintaining “ethnic balance” is a justification for limiting immigration, legal and illegal. (Or maybe it’s a leftover sense of nausea from when Derbyshire blamed the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting for their own deaths.)

No matter what the reason, Derbyshire isn’t in Coulter territory. He may be shrill, and there may be a sly knowingness in his inflammatory statements, but he writes for one of the leading intellectual journals of the right and must be taken seriously. So I had to point this blog post from The Corner:

Incidentally, while hobnobbing with those Midwesterners at Storm Lake, Iowa—their surnames mostly taken from the Stockholm, Oslo, and Berlin phone books—I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic. The remark was passed in a polite, diffident and non-condemnatory way—of course! this is Iowa—and when I tried to probe, people just retreated into niceness (“These Mexican restaurants are really great!”)

Still, I found it hard to believe, surrounded as I was by Lundqvists and Muellers. In an idle moment, however, I looked up the stats on GreatSchools.net. Sure enough, the “Student Stats” on GreatSchools for Storm Lake show percentages Hispanic as:

    High school: 32

  • Middle School: 43
  • Elementary schools: 53, 66, 63, 53.

Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?

Why are we letting WHAT happen? Why are we letting the racial demographics of the nation change, as they have for hundreds of years? There is no indication that the Hispanic students Derbyshire references are in this country illegally, though I’d bet Derbyshire assumes they are. He is, in essence, objecting to the presence of people of a different national origin (or a different race) in high numbers. That’s it.

This shouldn’t have to be said: As a nation we have agreed to let this happen. Through our laws, our attitudes, and the inscriptions we allow to be placed on our most famous national symbols, we have decided that we are a free nation that allows people from elsewhere to come and share in our success. That’s what makes America America, not the fact that a majority of our residents look like John Derbyshire.

But that’s not all.

What really gets me are three things:

(1) Derbyshire assumes that the Iowans he’s spoken with are hiding their distaste with the situation, when in reality, there’s no evidence to suggest this. He pushed them—repeatedly, from his description—to express some unhappiness with the high number of Hispanic students, and they never did. They obviously aren’t quite as anti-immigrant as Derbyshire.

(2) Derbyshire is himself an immigrant! He moved here from England and became a U.S. citizen in 2002. By his own admission, he was once an illegal immigrant! He, better than most, knows the opportunity life in America can afford, even when it is ill-begotten. Yet, he objects when that opportunity is given to anyone other than him (or anyone who doesn’t look like him), whether they are here legally or illegally.

(3) I went to a high school that was a majority-minority school. In his post, Derbyshire calls the Iowa schools “Aztlan North.” If you wanted (because you were a xenophobe), you could have called my high school “Beijing West.” The statistics on this site say that my high school was 72 percent Asian the year before I graduated, which sounds about right. And you know what? It was awesome. My experience was richer as a result. The presence of immigrants and the children of immigrants gave students of every race perspective and cultural understanding, and imbued the whole school with the work ethic that immigrants, grateful for the opportunity I mentioned above, often bring with them to this country.

So as a graduate from a school that mirrors the ones John Derbyshire is so horrified by, I’ll be the first to say I’m glad that, as a country, we let “this” happen.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate