Wes Vernon
Tuesday, June 12, 2001

Forget the bleeding hearts and the Marxist-minded demagogues. They’re still around preaching the politics of ethnic identity. But their influence has dwindled, according to Silicon Valley high-tech mogul Ron Unz.

No, the real obstruction comes from the teachers, the textbook writers and the textbook manufacturers. Their industry has grown. They like making a living, and they’re not about to give it up without a fight.

And a fight is just what Unz has encountered everywhere he moved to eliminate bilingual education, whether in his own state of California, or in Arizona, Colorado, New York or wherever.

This is a cottage industry that has provided a decent living for some folks who have made a career out of it. When you move to put someone out to pasture because you’re telling him that what he’s doing is no longer useful, of course he’ll fight back.

So they continue to support its promotion in education schools, along with other fashionable nonsense such as "fuzzy math” and "whole language.”

In California, Unz successfully led the move in 1998 to secure overwhelming voter approval.

It would be difficult to pin the "nativist” or "anti-immigrant” label on Unz. For one thing, he says the immigrants themselves support his movement. They want to learn English. Teaching them in their native tongue just postpones the day in which they can do what they want to do: become assimilated into our society and "reach for the stars” just as every other kid wants to do.

Secondly, Unz was just as vigorous in 1994 in his opposition to California’s Proposition 187, which stipulated that children of illegal aliens would be deprived of benefits, including taxpayer-supplied schooling, because their very presence in the U.S. was illegal and thus an unfair drag on the public.

That measure was also overwhelmingly approved by California voters, but then it went into a legal tailspin thereafter, with opponents tying it up in the courts.

In an interview with NewsMax.com, Unz said robbers and other criminals have kids in school, and the taxpayers support them.

When it was pointed out that kids of U.S. criminals, whatever their parents did, were legal citizens and entitled to the benefits because they are legally here, he said lots of immigrant kids should not be punished for what their parents did either.

Unz says the Republicans, led by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, have paid a political price for their active role in promoting Prop 187. The once-proud California Republican party of Ronald Reagan is now a shadow of what it was just a few short years ago.

Now, he says, the GOP has learned the wrong lesson, and is going to the other extreme. The Republicans in the U.S. Senate have quadrupled money for bilingual education. So they end up with the worst of both worlds. Taking a hit for an issue they never should have championed, in his opinion, and trying to atone for that by keeping alive a program that has long outlived whatever usefulness it may have once had.

So what does Unz think about illegal immigration? It makes people "more excitable” than they need to be, he believes.

Unz points out that until the Kennedy-Rodino Immigration law of 1965, the U.S. had no restrictions on immigration from Mexico or Latin America in general.

That’s right. The much-maligned McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952-1965 - the law that was assaulted for being "racist” (a criticism that was propagated in no small part by the Communist Party, U.S.A.) - actually was more generous to immigrants from south of the border than the legislation that resulted from the lopsided liberal congressional majorities elected in the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964.

You can’t pigeonhole people in this whole immigration issue, says Unz. Right after Prop 187’s success at the California polls, some New York conservatives thought they might try it there. New York City, after all, has its share of illegals. Then someone reminded them that naturalized Italian and Irish immigrants in New York vote heavily Republican. They might take offense. The matter was then dropped.

Rather than teach kids reading, writing and arithmetic in their native language, Unz would teach them English in school, and the more quickly the better.

During the interview with Unz, a NewsMax.com reader, obviously from California, e-mailed a message that there were about 200,000 children in state schools were in bilingual ed, compared to 350,000 before Unz’s 1998 Prop 227.

Unz disputed the figures, saying his own reading of figures indicates that bilingual ed in California is down by 80 to 90 percent.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Immigration/Borders
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