NRO's Derbyshire on percentages of Hispanics enrolled in school in Iowa town: "[T]ruly an invasion"
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
In an October 18 entry -- titled "Aztlan North" -- on National Review Online's blog The Corner, NRO columnist John Derbyshire cited the percentage of Hispanic students in the schools of Storm Lake, Iowa, and then wrote: “Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?”
From The Corner:
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Aztlan North [John Derbyshire]
Incidentally, while hobnobbing with those Midwesterners at Storm Lake, Iowa -- their surnames mostly taken from the Stockholm, Oslo, and Berlin phone books -- I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic. The remark was passed in a polite, diffident and non-condemnatory way -- of course! this is Iowa -- and when I tried to probe, people just retreated into niceness (“These Mexican restaurants are really great!”)
Still, I found it hard to believe, surrounded as I was by Lundqvists and Muellers. In an idle moment, however, I looked up the stats on GreatSchools.net. Sure enough, the “Student Stats” on GreatSchools for Storm Lake show percentages Hispanic as:
- High school: 32
- Middle School: 43
- Elementary schools: 53, 66, 63, 53.
Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?
Responding to Derbyshire's post on The Corner, NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote: “Um, Derb .... I have no idea the situation as to their immigration status, but if that population consists of legal immigrants who speak English ... I'm not moved to invasion outrage” (ellipses in original). Derbyshire replied: “I can't agree, Kathryn. Legal or illegal, this is asking for trouble,” later adding, “If we must have mass immigration, can we please return to the fine old American tradition of taking people from (A) lots of different places, none of which are (B1) contiguous to our territory and (B2) make historical claims -- propagated, for instance, in their school textbooks -- on that territory?”
As Media Matters for America noted, in a September 20 column headlined “Islamophobophobia,” Derbyshire wrote that it would be wise to “deny entry to foreign Muslims” and “to expel ... resident foreign Muslims.”
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