Inductivist

I've known Hillary Clinton for 25 years, and I've liked her for a total of 30 seconds. Even liars accidentally say the truth once in a while.

According to Gallup data, more than half--56 percent--of Mexicans say they have gangs where they live. It's an ever-present aspect of Mexican life, and Mexican immigrants have brought the tradition with them to the United States. The number of Hispanic street and prison gang members in this country might total 500,000. Territorial competition is a common way for young males to show everyone they are men, not boys. In his own mind, a gang member thinks he is protecting the neighborhood from outsiders, protecting the ladies from those who would do them harm, and defending his honor through violence when another gang does something offensive. To a subset of Mexicans, this is a noble lifestyle lived by real men who take nothing from no one, but the truth is that it is a barbarism not tolerated in a civilized society. The country needs to select its immigrants more carefully.  


UPDATE: By the way, one of the main reasons that teenage boys form gangs in the first place is to defend themselves against existing gangs. The Bloods, for example, organized to protect themselves against Crips. Numerous gangs in the Hispanic community are sociological evidence that their neighborhoods are dangerous (not that they're safe as some have recently argued). You don't see white gangs because white neighborhoods are generally safe.  

In his American Conservative article "His-Panic" (the same title used in Geraldo Rivera's recent book), Ron Unz suggests that criminal justice officials have invented the Hispanic gang problem in order to secure federal anti-gang dollars.

As was shown in the last post, the best approach to such questions is to seek out the best data. I found two studies in which researchers surveyed adolescents about membership in a gang. Descriptions of each are found here. In the Esbensen and Winfree study (1998) of a large sample of eighth graders in 41 schools in 11 cities, the percent in gangs was as follows:

Percent in a gang

Blacks 12.3
Hispanics 12.3
Whites 6.4


Results are similar in the main study (2001) of 15,292 teens (from 313 secondary schools across the country).  The following lists the percentages who admitted they were in a gang:


Percent in a gang

Males 
Blacks 13.4
Hispanics, 10.4 
Whites 5.7
Asians 4.7 

Females
Blacks 6.8
Hispanics 7.2
Whites 2.2 
Asians 1.2

Gang membership prevalence among Hispanic males approaches that of blacks, and is roughly double that of whites. Compared to white females, Latino girls are more than three times as likely to belong to a gang.

Affiliation with a gang ranges all the way from a wannabe to a hardcore thug, and these surveys certainly include plenty of the former. But they are consistent with media and criminal justice depictions of violent gangs--both on the streets and in the prisons--being dominated by blacks and Hispanics. It is not imaginary.

The gang nightmare: VDare.com just posted a piece by Steve Sailer on the growing Hispanic gang problem. Among many items, he describes how California has been exporting gangs to the rest of country. A few months ago I was talking to a professor who had participated in a study of gangs in Denver. Now, Denver would not be the first city to come to mind as a gang capital. Chicago, yes, but when I think of Denver, hip ski bums come to mind. According to the study, FIFTY PERCENT of adolescent male Hispanics belong to a gang. Folks, gangbanging is becoming NORMATIVE behavior for these kids. Estimates put gang members nationwide at close to 1 million, and more than half of that is Latino. Their latest strategy is to spread their crews to Indian reservations. In the past, gangs were basically limited to big cities, but now they've even made it to the reservation--a place most whites can't find with a map. This is a tidal wave, I'm telling you.

In my own classes, Hispanic students clearly feel some kind of weird identification with these gangs. Many seem to be saying: the life is cool, but I don't want to end up dead or in prison (or dead in prison), as if the only reason not to join is the impracticality of it.

I'm sure people passing through this website think that I have some irrational dislike of Latinos, but my criticisms are intellectual. My personal interactions with Hispanics have been 98% positive, but you begin to wonder about policy when your country goes from 100,000 gang members to one million in 20 years, and most of the growth is driven by immigration and Hispanic communities.

Let me say the words again, if you missed it before: FIFTY PERCENT. I'll use Will Ferrell's words from Talledega Nights: "What does that do? Does that blow your mind? That just happened."