The Los Angeles Times (Andrew Blankstein and Garrett Therolf, December 27, 2006) recently carried a major year-end news story which has finally forced me to completely admit the error of my ways with regard to immigration matters.
We all have personal ideological biases and beliefs, often deeply resistant to change. But facts are stubborn things, and the mark of a rational and reality-based individual is that such facts must eventually wear away even the most rigid ideological roadblock.
Throughout more than a decade, I have stood my ground on the pro- immigration side of the policy debate, often doing so when many others ran and hid. But I can no longer remain there in clear conscience.
As recounted in the Times article, serious crime rates of all types dropped in Los Angeles last year, the fifth consecutive year of this decline. In fact, a follow-up article revealed that crime in America’s second largest city has now fallen to a level not seen since 1956.
And despite my best efforts to avoid the glaring ethnic dimension to these stunning statistics, certain connections are just too obvious to ignore.
Is it purely coincidental that this huge drop in Los Angeles crime rates has occurred during exactly the same period of years in which a vast inflow of Northern European whites has so enormously transformed the LA population, with orderly Germans and stolid Swedes now
dominating a city once so heavily Latino?
Is it really so very mysterious that LA crime rates are now back to what they had been in 1956 when we consider that the entire city itself is now once again as overwhelmingly white European as it was in 1956?
Only the completely delusional would disregard this unmistakable pattern of reality.
And so, regarding immigration issues, I must say: “Mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.”