Conservatives answer Linda Chavez’s 5,000-word non-apology apology for smearing immigration enforcement proponents as bigots. I call your attention especially to Heather Mac Donald’s withering response, which deserves wide attention and dissemination. Here’s an excerpt, but go read the whole thing:

Linda Chavez all but declares that my writings on immigration are driven by ethnic hatred. This kind of charge will be familiar to anyone who has taken a public position against affirmative action and found himself called a racist. As a debating tactic, it is low and — not to put too fine a point on it — disgusting. It is meant to bully and intimidate. What should be a spirited debate about facts and the effects of policy becomes an assault on character and motive. I do not question the character of those who favor wholesale legalization and more liberal immigration policies. I disagree with them. I would like to think that the American society that immigrants seek out — the one that new immigrants, we are told, will assimilate to — is one that values civility in debate and a mutual respect between opponents. As I say, I would like to think that…

…Chavez derides my City Journal article on Hispanic illegitimacy rates as “based largely on anecdotes gathered in a visit to Los Angeles, frequently supplied by Spanish surnamed social-service providers to lend authenticity, with a smattering of highly selective statistics.” This is called “reporting,” a practice with which Chavez is obviously unacquainted. (For the record, I grew up in Los Angeles, and spend a good part of every year working there.) It might do Chavez some good to get out of her elite Washington think tank existence and spend some time in the 70 percent Hispanic Los Angeles Unified School District, talking to students, parole officers, and anti-drop-out counselors, as I have done. Or perhaps she might do some ride-alongs with Mexican-American gang officers in Santa Ana, Ca., and Los Angeles, who could tell her about the increasing viciousness of Latino gang culture in southern California. But then, even if Chavez bestirred herself to do some hands-on research on Hispanic family values, she would be handicapped by her self-described lack of Spanish. She wouldn’t have understood a word at an anti-gang program at the Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles that I attended in July 2006, for example, for students who are showing signs of gang involvement and their single mothers. Nor would she be able to speak to the illegal alien unmarried mothers who peddle fruit on the streets of Santa Ana, which has the highest percentage of Spanish speakers of any city in the country. If Chavez has any interest in reporting on these topics, perhaps I could arrange Spanish lessons for her with my sister-in-law, a beloved and integral member of our family, who emigrated to this country legally from Mexico after meeting and marrying my brother in Mexico City…

I’ve greatly admired Linda’s heroic work fighting racial preferences and the bilingual education scam over the years. But on immigration, she has become the Geraldo Rivera of the Right–addled by open-borders narcissism, out of touch with reality, and entangled in emotion-laden identity politics of the most absurd and poisonous kind.

See also: George Borjas’s response.

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