Vin Suprynowicz

My May 10 essay described the frustrations of Las Vegas entrepreneur Raj Patel in trying to “do it by the book” and bring two Indian chefs here to help him expand his restaurant enterprises in Las Vegas.

Although the Labor Department agreed the work visas would help create American jobs, and the Immigration Service OK’d them, the two men were turned down after brief, 10-minute interviews at our embassy in New Delhi.

India is considered a “high-fraud” station; it appears as many as 95 percent of such applicants are routinely rejected.

A nationally noted immigration attorney told me the two men were essentially “doomed when they walked in the door” in New Delhi; nothing but political influence would be likely to reverse the outcome.

I’m happy to report U.S. Sen. Dean Heller on May 15 wrote an official letter to our ambassador to India, Nancy J. Powell, stating in part:

“During this time of economic stress, Mr. Patel’s restaurant would create jobs and contribute to our community. I trust that when Mr. Raj and Mr. Rana come before the embassy for further interviews, you will give full consideration to their applications and documentation.”

Barbara Cegavske, who is Raj Patel’s state senator and is also running to become the first congresscritter from Nevada’s newest congressional district, the Fourth, also wrote to Ambassador Powell on May 18:

“Mr. Patel assures me that the two (chefs Tilak Raj and Anand Singh Rana) will fly back home and not overstay their visas. He states his willingness to sign any forms, documents, or other paperwork, taking responsibility for their actions in this regard. … Thank you for considering this important matter.”

Mr. Patel says Judy Fleischman at Rep. Shelley Berkley’s office reports a similar letter from Mr. Patel’s congresswoman is also in the works.

As this column goes to press, the two men have been scheduled for follow-up interviews at the New Delhi embassy on May 25. Sen. Heller’s office tells Mr. Patel that Ambassador Powell has responded to Sen. Heller, assuring him that a supervisor will conduct those interviews and that in their efforts to overcome the presumption that they mean to overstay their work visas, the two men will be allowed to present all their documentation as to their homes and family ties in India.

Gratified by the political attention, Raj Patel expresses “cautious optimism” that his expansion plans may soon move ahead.

If it works out that way, that’s good news for one Las Vegas businessman.

Of course, thousands of other American small business owners have not been able to mobilize that kind of political help. A system that gives this much trouble to those who try to play by the rules — while doing little or nothing to grab those who simply flout our immigration laws — is still in need of massive reform.

But we continue to nudge the behemoth, a little at a time.

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Most of the comments on my original May 13 piece on Mr. Patel‘s problems were sympathetic. A small minority, however, were of the “throw them all out” variety.

Racism is ugly, because it judges people on outward characteristics as a substitute for examining their characters.

That shouldn’t mean we’re not allowed to judge people based on their actual actions. A culture war on a global scale may indeed be underway. But let’s identify the “us” and the “them” a little more carefully.

For purposes of this discussion, divide the world’s cultures into two categories: the Culture of Wealth, and — what shall we call the opposite? — perhaps the Culture of Fertility.

Thousands of years ago, fertility and wealth were one. More sons to farm the land or give your tribe more warriors, more daughters to be sold off for dowries.

For whatever reason, half the world then discovered capitalism, and the cultures have been diverging for 700 years.

Europeans and Americans tend to have fewer children. This allows women to gain some education and work outside the home, at least part-time. Some enter the professions.

The new focus on education allows for higher earnings, greater technological sophistication, greater accrual of wealth and property. This greater wealth can then be focused on the smaller number of children. Nations grow wealthier.

The Culture of Fertility is less likely to practice birth control, for whatever reason. Women who bear and raise children full-time are less likely to be educated or work outside the home. Family wealth and education are both lower.

There are pockets of the Culture of Fertility in this nation, make no mistake, encouraged and facilitated by the redistributionist welfare state. They tend to be marked by fatherless families, welfare dependency, and an absence of complex literacy curiously immune to the efforts of the government schools.

Skin colors or national origin are only temporary markers. A century and half ago, Americans would have identified the troublesome members of the Culture of Fertility among them as “the Irish.” No more. Today, as well, many Asian cultures are entrepreneurial, stressing education and investment: They’re firmly aboard the Culture of Wealth.

These two cultures can share the world in relative peace providing the nations of Wealth admit peoples from the Third World only at a rate at which the newcomers can be assimilated.

Up till now, another factor has also helped hold this equation in balance. The technological superiority of the Nations of Wealth also extends to military technology. In traditional warfare, the smaller armies deployed by the wealthier and more sophisticated nations tend to clean the clocks of Third World armies. See the European colonial expansion. See the Mexican-American War of 1846. See our recent conquest of Iraq. See every attempt by the swarming Arab masses to defeat tiny Israel.

But now, a perfect storm is brewing. Three factors put the Culture of Wealth in danger:

First: Third worlders jealous of our success — but loathe to mimic the culture that fosters it — have given up trying to win traditional set-piece battles. Instead, they infiltrate Europe and America with massive illegal and quasi-legal “guest worker” immigration. These masses may yet assimilate. But for now they seek to establish island communities, demanding to be allowed to maintain their cultures and even their backward systems of law and education, if you can call it that.

Second: The welfare state plays a massive role in feeding the growing crisis. Starting with the introduction of the income tax, greatly accelerated by the burgeoning redistributionist leviathan under FDR, Lyndon Johnson, et al., the Culture of Wealth has been vastly undercut by the notion that “The wealthy can never pay their fair share,” that it’s the role of the state to seize ever more of the assets of those who work and invest, that it’s somehow “unfair” for those who sacrifice to be allowed to focus their greater retained earnings on a smaller number of children in order to enhance the chances of long-term success for their families.

This has reached the point where the parasite classes have managed to elect an actual United States president who forthrightly admits he’s willing to adopt policies detrimental to the nation’s long-term economic health in order to serve his higher goal — learned at the knee of Communist Frank Marshal Davis — of “spreading the wealth around.”

If I raise two kids on 10 acres, and my neighbor raises eight kids on his 10 acres, does “spreading the wealth around” mean he has a right to seize six of my acres to “make things come out even”? What else can it mean?

For the third nail in the coffin is “one-person-one-vote” democracy.

If the nations which adhere to the Culture of Wealth allow the beggar classes to multiply within their borders, and still cling to the notion that everything can be determined by majority vote, it’s inevitable that the mendicant majority will eventually elect and empower an armed state to seize and redistribute from those who have invested to develop our technological society all their “excess wealth,” meaning everything but the shirt on your back.

The Founding Fathers never intended for this to be a “democracy.” America was supposed to be a representative republic, with only limited matters decided by a majority vote of taxpayers, and with courts to protect property rights.

A Culture of Wealth cannot survive in the presence of 1) unlimited immigration by peoples with no respect for property rights, 2) a powerful redistributive welfare state, and 3) “one-man-one-vote” to determine tax policies.

So one of three things must now happen. a) The Culture of Wealth will sink beneath the flood — the world will come to more closely resemble the teeming hellholes of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The ululating mobs will realize too late there are no longer any wealthy technological nations from which to acquire their CDs and their cell phones.

b) Illegal immigration will again be sharply controlled, the welfare state rolled back, the income tax and the property and capital gains and death taxes eliminated. The accrual and investment of wealth over multiple generations — in short, the pre-1913 economic system that made America the greatest and wealthiest nation in the world — will be restored.

Or, finally, c) War.