Immigration

Last week, the Bradley Project on America's National Identity released a report, entitled E Pluribus Unum, warning of "mounting confusion about the meaning of American national identity and a loss of commitment to its promotion."

The Bradley report, which draws on public opinion data and conversations with dozens of academics, scholars and journalists (full disclosure: I attended one such meeting), argues that Americans' sense of national identity is weakening, and that the American leadership class ought to do something about it. Citing declining civic and historical literacy, an education system that emphasizes ethnic identities over a shared Americanism, and a rising emphasis on "global citizenship" rather than national loyalty among the nation's political and business elites, the report offers a list of recommendations ranging from the broad ("a renewed focus on the teaching of American history" in America's schools, say, or a new "initiative to ensure immigrants learn English, understand democratic institutions, and participate fully in the American way of life") to the highly specific (the return of ROTC to elite universities; the creation of an annual Presidential medal to reward "commitment to American ideals and institutions").

The killing of a black high school student by a Hispanic illegal immigrant has revived Southern California's racially fraught debate about how police should treat illegal immigrants.

Outsiders can be forgiven for imagining that LA's touchiest racial controversies follow the black versus white narrative of the Watts riots, the Rodney King beating or the O.J. Simpson trial. But locals know better -- ask the Korean grocers whose stores were torched in 1992 (a year after Ice Cube’s racist harangues against them), or the South Central blacks who federal prosecutors say were targeted by a Latino street gang bent on “cleansing” the neighborhood.

A paper in The Lancet argued that developed countries' recruitment of health-care workers from Africa constitutes an international crime.

Sub-Saharan Africa has it bad. The Lancet notes that it "carries 25% of the world's disease burden yet has only 3% of the world's health workers." The doctors tend not to get paid on time, and they often have to fight the world's ghastliest diseases with the medical equivalent of bows and arrows. A tropical disease specialist in London once advised his patient to save airfare: rather than visit the Congo, he said, just open your mouth and leap into a cesspool. MORE