Sunday, August 20, 2006

The New York Times isn't totally moronic   posted by Razib @ 8/20/2006 10:09:00 PM
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Perhaps because the topic is so removed from the orthodoxies of the day, this article on Pakistani Americans isn't totally idiotic. Points to note....

Fewer than 0.1% of Americans are ethnically Pakistani. 1.3% of Britons are ethnically Pakistani. 50% of Muslims in the UK are Pakistani. Assuming a low bound of 1 million American Muslims, that means 20% of American Muslims are Pakistani, at most. No shit there aren't ghettos, there aren't enough of them in the US population. While Pakistani youth in the UK lag behind the median in academic performance, the immigration policies of the US have resulted in somewhat above-the-median educational qualifications for this community in the USA. Sometimes the numbers are so nakedly clear & obvious that words are pretty irrelevant.

On the other hand,"In the United States there have been a few cases of young Pakistani men being arrested or tried in terror plots, in Atlanta and in Lodi, Calif., for example." My understanding is that the community in Lodi is not as professional or educationally advanced as in the rest of the nation (basically, they are exactly the peasant farming stock which predominates in the UK). That being said, this maybe a function of the nature of the Ummah and its nutty centripetal pull. Modern communication can be a bitch.