The immigration problem Steve Sailer points to this Washington Post article about the difficulties of children born to immigrants (those that are born in this country) who can't speak their "native" tongue or English very well. As Steve says, it's depressing. I feel some empathy for these children, when I entered Kindergarten I knew very little English-I'd been in the US for only a year and my father was always in the lab and my mother was getting over severe postpartum depression after having my younger brother. I didn't play with any of the neighborhood children (my parents wouldn't let me out), so my communication skills were rudimentary at best. It took me about two years to finally get the idiosyncrasies out of my English (Bengali doesn't have gendered pronouns, so I kept using "he" for both males and females, which would of course give the girls an excuse to try and beat me up). But I can't really understand why immersion isn't working for any of these kids. But then I read this:

"This is not like how it was when I grew up, where kids just crawled around on the dirt floor, and if they put something dirty in their mouths, it was okay," she said through a translator. "I'm realizing kids don't just raise themselves."

The woman that spoke this is a semi-literate menial worker-I mean that with all the negative connotations it conveys. She's likely raising her children the same way she herself was raised-and those that favor the cultural/environmental explanation for difficulties in assimilation can point to this as a prime example. My brother and I, and many of our acquaintances as young children, were the sons and daughters of graduate students. We might have had a hard time getting our bearings, but there were certain expectations and certain values that certainly helped us out, and actually gave us an advantage over a typical native-born child. Almost all of us were from the middle to upper classes of our native countries (usually generally destitute countries like India, Bangladesh or China), and the seemingly r-selected strategy that the above woman employed wasn't something that we were burdened with. Of course, I'm still a little perplexed as to why these children have difficulties communicating after 5 years or so. One could of course wonder-perhaps their genetic intellectual endowments simply aren't that great. Judging by their parent's socioeconomic status in their native countries, this might be a valid observation (see Steve Sailer's Mexico's caste system for a detailed elucidation). Then again, the native educational system isn't helping when it assumes that they have to be literate in Spanish to ever learn English (say what? I'm illiterate in Bengali and I can read and write English. Please, no snickers).