Más de la Inmigración

De Ramiro por mail:

A propósito del fantástico artículo de Sowell que citaste ayer sobre el riesgo de actuar en base a preconceptos ideológicos sin tener en cuenta los hechos.

Cuántas veces escuchamos este disco:

"Estados Unidos es un país racista y su sistema capitalista, a diferencia del modelo social de los líderes de la comunidad europea, permite una división de clases que excluye a latinos y otras minorías, y que posibilita que se produzca una brecha moralmente reprochable entre ricos y pobres".

Siga la música, maestro.

La realidad, mientras tanto, baila a un ritmo diferente. Acá van dos artículos que pintan dos realidades contrapuestas.

Wall Street Journal
'Knallhart'
April 5, 2006

For years, discussing Germany's failing cultural integration policy (to the extent that one actually existed) was taboo. As Mariam Lau wrote on these pages yesterday, the conservatives refused to acknowledge that immigration is taking place, while the left embraced it but pretended there were no problems.

Now the country has been forced to face a rather unpleasant reality, first in fictional form. The movie "Knallhart," or "Brutally Tough," depicts the brutalization of a German teenager by a Turkish youth gang at a school in Neukölln, a district in Berlin with a high proportion of foreigners. Not so long ago, a plotline casting immigrants as the villains tormenting a (blond) German would have been unimaginable. But the filmmakers' impeccable liberal credentials and the film's raw flavor of authenticity helped the movie to become a success at February's Berlinale.

And that was even before Germans learned how authentic the movie really was. Last week it was reported that teachers at a school in Neukölln sent a letter to the city council asking for nothing less than their school to be shut down because of intolerable violence there. More than 83% of the students come from immigrant families, with 61% either from Arab or Turkish families.

"In many classrooms, the (students') behavior is characterized by a total rejection of the curriculum and contempt for humanity," the letter read. "Some colleagues only go with their cell phones into certain classes so that they can call for help."

The media is now awash with stories of beatings, stabbings, drug dealing, sexual assaults and other violent crimes at German schools -- to a disproportionate degree perpetrated by students with a migrant, mostly Turkish, background, according to official statistics.

To a certain extent, the problems with Germany's young immigrants just highlight the country's general problems with its ailing educational, welfare and judicial systems. Germany's three-class school system has been identified in OECD and U.N. studies as sub-par for an industrialized country and as limiting social mobility.

Successful integration of immigrants is all about social mobility. In no other Western country, it has been argued with some credibility, does the parents' social background determine a kid's future career as much as in Germany. At the age of ten, children are separated into different categories. They either attend a "Gymnasium," a school that allows them later to attend university, or a "Realschule" where they can later study only at a limited number of less-advanced colleges or -- in the worst case -- a "Hauptschule," whose diplomas qualify students only to learn a trade or craft.

Germany's overall unemployment rate is over 11%, more than twice that rate among foreigners and even higher among young migrants. Because relatively low-skill jobs are so scarce, the Hauptschule is often a dead end. Many graduates can often hardly read and write German.

While overall only 25% of students in Germany attend a Hauptschule, the ratio among foreigners is over 40%. And it at those schools where most of the violence occurs. The petitioning teachers asked in their letter: "What sense does it make to gather in one school all those students whom neither their parents nor the business community show a road to the future?"

"In most families," they continued, "our students are the only ones who get up in the morning," a not so subtle criticism of the country's generous welfare system that undermines traditional values such as hard work and individual responsibility.

Those are exactly the kind of values the teachers are supposed to instill. But how can they do that in an unrewarding social environment? German courts, notorious for handing out the most lenient punishments for the most violent crimes by minors, provide little support for social norms and values.

Those tempted to use this unusually frank discussion about immigration and crime to lash out against foreigners should be reminded that the immigrant and non-immigrant criminals have certain things in common. They are often unemployed young men with limited education springing from low-income households in big cities.

There is, though, a cultural element to the violence. Girls are often attacked as "prostitutes" for not adhering to Muslim dress codes. "Pork-eater" has apparently become a common slur for non-Muslim kids. Western and German values are often rejected. While Germans may have added to a certain alienation among the migrant community by making it too difficult to become German, these problems also derive from making it too easy to get away with misbehavior. Cultural relativism and misunderstood political correctness among Germans have limited the demands made on foreigners. Their unwillingness to integrate is met with tolerance.

Germany's aging population means that it will continue to draw in young immigrant labor, more than a stagnant economy can currently absorb. What is therefore needed is an overhaul of the country's school and social system, mandatory and free language classes for migrants, citizenship tests and an unashamed discussion and affirmation of German and Western values. If not, it's going to get much more Knallhart.


Los Angeles Times:
March 22, 2006

SMALL BUSINESS
Latino Businesses Outpace U.S. Rate
From the Associated Press


WASHINGTON — The number of Latino-owned businesses grew at three times the national rate for all companies from 1997 to 2002, the government said Tuesday.

Latinos owned nearly 1.6 million businesses in 2002, a 31% increase from five years earlier, the Census Bureau report said.

The overwhelming majority of the new businesses were one-person enterprises, according to the report. Only 13% of Latino-owned businesses had any employees other than the owner. About a fourth of all U.S. businesses had employees in 2002, the report said.

New businesses started by Latinos face many of the same problems as businesses started by non-Latinos, and the biggest hurdle usually is money to start and expand the business, said Louis Olivas, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Arizona State University.

"All start-up businesses face funding issues," Olivas said.

The report is based on administrative records and a survey of 2.4 million businesses. The Census Bureau defines Latino-owned businesses as private companies in which at least 51% of the owners are Latino. The report does not classify public companies, with publicly traded stock, because they can be owned by many shareholders of unknown ethnicities.

Latinos owned nearly 7% of all businesses in 2002, up from about 6% in 1997.

They made up a little more than 13% of the population in 2002, but they have accounted for half of the nation's population growth since the start of the decade, a recent report by the Brookings Institution found.

Among the report's findings:

• Los Angeles County had 188,472 Latino-owned businesses in 2002, more than any other county.

• Nearly 3 in 10 Latino-owned firms were in construction or other service-related industries in 2002.

• There were 29,184 Latino-owned firms with receipts of $1 million or more in 2002.