Donald Trump enjoyed a surge in the polls after his allegedly "racist" remarks about how all that diversity from South of the Border is not all it's cracked up to be.

The brash real-estate tycoon and TV star has struck a nerve, saying things that America's political elites would never publicly admit, with two notable exceptions being Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Both said Trump had made some good points, even if they were expressed in less than diplomatic terms.

Trump's surge in the polls is being fueled by ordinary Americans. They are applauding or murmuring quiet approval because they probably live in areas that have gotten massive influxes of immigrants -- the majority from Mexico -- over the last decade or two. They know what the score is; that diversity has failed to provide the benefits that political elites said it would. They've seen public schools overwhelmed with non-English speakers, dumbed down, social problems increase, and crime go up -- and it all seems to have a Hispanic face as millions upon millions of immigrants have flooded over the border. Now at long last, they see Trump telling it like it is -- even if his remarks were undiplomatic and, well, not all that presidential.

Trump says many Mexican immigrants are losers -- part of Mexico's social problems that the country's elites are glad to “dump” on America. “When Mexico sends it's people, they are not sending its best,” Trump said. True or false?

Short answer: True.

Most Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, are high school or grade-school dropouts, according to the data; and their offspring continue to be underachievers. On the later point, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington revealed some disquieting statistics in his must-read book, "Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity."

Citing statistics from the 1990 census, Huntington noted that high percentages of Mexican-Americans, from one generation to the next, lack high school diplomas. The first generation without diplomas was 69.9%; the second generation, 51.5%; the third generation, 33.0%; and fourth generation, 41.9%.

That last figure, incidentally, isn't a typo. The fourth generation is less educated than the third. So much for assimilation. Those dropout rates are far higher than America's overall dropout rate: 23.5% for all Americans, except Mexican-Americans.

Mexico's Peasant Culture

What accounts for such underachievement? Where do these losers come from in Mexico? Statistics are hard to come by (it seems nobody wants to back up claims that all that diversity is a plus); but it's probably safe to say that millions of these underachieving immigrants are from Mexico's peasant culture. It's a backward culture -- one characterized by a "cycle of poverty" going from one generation to the next. It's a culture in which education is not value; a culture whose members even have trouble taking care of themselves.

This culture has long vexed Mexico's development specialists, just as their counterparts in LBJ's “Great Society” programs were vexed by America's underclass. In Mexico, the social engineers have tried for years to bring Mexico's peasant culture forward. However, it has been a veritable quixotic effort, described in an in-depth report on PBS's NewsHour, which told how Mexico's development specialist were implementing innovative programs to encourage Mexico's peasant class to adopt middle-class values. Interestingly, NewsHour's report noted that economic incentives used for this purpose were given only to women -- not men -- for fear that the men would use the money to buy booze and tobacco, rather than taking care of their families. Yes, that was actually reported on the left-leaning NewsHour. Imagine the outrage if Trump had been so politically incorrect as to say that.

Incidentally, one of the pathologies of this peasant culture is that education is held in low regard. This has drawn much social criticism from Mexican intellectuals, including Mexican journalist and social critic Carlos Monsivais who, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, wrote:

"Whether it is a byproduct of a traditional Catholicism that fears reading 'because it poisons the soul' or rooted in the popular belief that ‘licenciados’ (a professional with a degree) exist only to exploit people, it is quite common for Mexican families to harbor anti-intellectual attitudes, which, in turn, shape their responses toward education.”

Well, no wonder that U.S. schools with high numbers of Hispanics are suffering high rates of truancy, teenage pregnancies, and low academic achievement.

Trump said that Mexico is sending many members of its criminal class to America. He declared, “They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”  True or False?

Short answer: True. 

Good statistics, to be sure, are unavailable on crime involving legal and illegal immigrants; the government seems not to be interested in such data, observed Ann Coulter in her book, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.

Even so, ordinary Americans in sanctuary cities across the country can't help but notice what seems to be an increasingly Hispanic face of crime, including by illegal immigrants. And recently, Americans were given a human face for this run-away crime, embodied in the lovely Kathryn Steinle, age 32, who was shot to death in a touristy part of San Francisco by an illegal Mexican immigrant with a long rap sheet. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, age 45, had been deported five times. He was wanted on drug charges. And not surprisingly, he sought refuge in San Francisco, a sanctuary city like some 200 other state and municipal jurisdictions across the country. Lopez-Sanchez had been detained and released by San Francisco authorities who, in line with San Francisco's sanctuary-city policy, refused to honor a federal “immigration detainer” against him

Crime Statistics

In looking at crime statistics, you must tease out the figures on crime by illegal immigrants -- and that's just what Coulter did in Adios, America, she wrote, “The available data suggest that the crime rate among immigrants is astronomical.” Among the alarming statistics Coulter revealed was that in 2006, “nearly a third of the 2 million prisoners in state and local facilities that year were foreign born. Piecing together state and federal reports, it appears that half the correctional population in California consists of illegal aliens.”

These statistics no doubt reflect what ordinary Americans have been seeing up-close or suspected when regularly seeing crime reports in local media outlets that, alas, seldom fully explain what's really going on. Trump is trading in snappy one liners that are commanding national attention; Coulter's book says the same thing and pulls together statistics to back up her claims that America is indeed being turned into a Third World dump thanks to its immigration policies. “The problems stemming from unchecked immigration are all over the news. You'll just never be told they are problems of immigration,” she writes.

Trump stirred particular outrage by stating that “rapists” are included among more than a few illegal immigrants from Mexico. True or false?

Probably true.

Again, statistics are hard to come by, but anybody living in a sanctuary city -- I live in Austin, Texas -- can't help but notice the Hispanic face of sexual assaults reported by news outlets. What might account for this? The answer, again, is probably rooted in Mexico's backward peasant culture. This culture was the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize winning article in the Washington Post --  “In Mexico, an Unpunished Crime” -- about how rape was a veritable courtship ritual in Mexico. Reporter Mary Jordan recalled a conversation with “elders” in a village in Guerrero state, during which she asked how they punish rape. She wrote, “The six men looked confused, as if they did not know what the term meant. When it was explained to them, they all laughed and said it sounded more like a courting ritual than a crime.” How ironic that liberals welcome such a culture with open arms when its members come illegally to “El Norte.”

Obtaining good statistics on crime by illegal immigrants also is complicated by another fact. Increasingly, law-enforcement authorities classify Hispanic criminals as “white.” This is reflected in the “Texas 10 Most Wanted” which is dominated by Hispanic men who are described as “white males.”

Texas 10 Most wanted

Texas Ten Most Wanted Sex Offenders

Recently, my car was stolen in Austin. Less than 24-hours later, Austin police recovered it and arrested three 20-year-old males and one juvenile. They had been using the car to commit burglaries. I pulled the police report: all three young men were obviously Hispanic -- an identity revealed by their names and mugshots. Yet the police report identified them as “white males.”

Austin, incidentally, has a drunk-driving problem with a Hispanic face -- a problem underscored by news stories that regularly report on the latest drunk-driving outrage.

Consider the case of Francisco Perez-Altamirano, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He racked up nine drunken driving arrests over 15 years and used multiple aliases before he was finally caught after an Austin news outlet called attention to how a revolving-door criminal justice system was enabling his criminal behavior. He had been deported on two previous occasions.

Several years ago, the Austin American-Statesman did a long piece on the Hispanic drunk driving problem, and it revealed these eye-popping statistics:

“Of 3,007 drunken driving arrests in 2002, 43 percent involved Hispanic men, even though they make up only about 11 percent of Austin's driving population. Hispanics made up 47 percent of the DWI arrests but only 21 percent of Austin drivers.”

Hit-and-run accidents also are a major problem in Austin and America's Southwest, as was noted in an American Thinker article: “Hit-and-Run: Death in a Sanctuary City.”

Jorge Ramos & Friends

It's amusing to watch the hypocrisy of some Trump haters -- and in particular the on-air talent of Spanish-speaking Univision and Fusion, sister television channels.

The Trump-basing antics by Univision anchor Jorge Ramos and Fusion correspondent Mariana Atencio must be put within a certain context. Both Ramos and Atencio have fled to America from failed countries: Ramos is from Mexico, Atencio from Venezuela.

In their native lands, they were the fair-skinned elites. You can be sure that they enjoyed that status, too. But of course, neither their privileges nor good looks counted for much after Mexico and Venezuela become violent and corruption-ridden basket cases.

So now Ramos and Atencio are in America, and they have claimed minority status as high-minded Hispanics. And they are beating the drum for open-borders, cheerleading for the Hispanic and illegal-immigrant cause that is, ironically, remaking America into the sort of Third World dump that they fled. How ironic that this pair has taken refuge in a country whose political and economic systems were created by middle-aged white guys who were Protestants.

Some amusing hypocrisy has emerged about this pair and their colleagues; this is the interesting fact that there is a dearth of on-air black talent at Univision and Fusion: only fair-skinned Latinos need apply. Interestingly, the on-air talent on these Latino channels look nothing like the people pouring over America's southern border: people who no doubt don't live in the upscale neighborhoods were Ramos and Atencio reside. 

Univision Noticiero logo

The dearth of black on-air talent at Univision was pointed out by “Marco Report,” an insightful Facebook commentator who observed that Univision should ease up on its Trump's-a-racist narrative -- and instead “concentrate on why black or dark-skinned Latinos don't exist as on-air talent on their network...Organized racism within Latino corporations is a mainstay,” and this is underscored, he explained, by “how Univision promotes attractive white Latinos as on-air news personalities.”

Beyond this hypocrisy, there's the interesting fact that Venezuela traditionally has had an “anything goes” immigration policy. This and left-leaning populist policies, turned oil-rich "Saudi Venezuela" into a failed state -- dotted by slums populated by millions of illegal immigrants who are unskilled and uneducated. How ironic that Atencio now supports the sort of open-borders policies that helped destroy her native Venezuela. Illegal immigrants, she has declared, are the “backbone and future" of America.

Marco Report also highlighted a certain hypocrisy among Latinos who are bashing Trump, writing:

“Very impressive to see Latinos coming together to boycott Trump, but what really would be impressive is if Latinos stopped murdering each other in their islands or countries. You can bring down Trump, but you can't bring down the murder rate in places like Puerto Rico or Mexico? Puerto Rico's murder numbers are worse than any other U.S. city per capita. Other Latin countries have staggering murder rates also. This Latino pride can't be taken seriously if you're killing each other at high rates. Trump may be an egomaniac loudmouth but he's just sharing his opinion -- an opinion that's hard to argue easily against if you reference data. The coming together to rally against Trump by Latin countries that are very, very far away from each other is silly. What bond other than speaking Spanish does a country like Argentina have in common with Mexico? If you are against Trump it shouldn't be because you are Latino. You should pick your battles against people because they violated human decency – not because you speak Spanish.”

Trump is losing money by speaking uncomfortable truths, but he told CNN he doesn't care: he's rich. He may be brash and over-the-top. But he also is a patriot, a profile in political courage

The public discussion Trump has started is long overdue.