Byron Roth’s The Perils of Diversity

3,788 words

^[1]Byron M. Roth
The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature ^[2]
Augusta, Ga.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2010

Incorporating all of the relevant knowledge about a subject into one volume can be a monumental task. It’s the author’s job to include only what is most important, to summarize appropriately, and to integrate disparate components to form a unified whole, a singular dissertation which can contribute to the evolution of ideas. Perhaps the work will serve as an introduction for those unfamiliar with the subject matter? Perhaps it’s more of a master’s thesis, offering technical information of interest only to a small number of highly qualified individuals? Perhaps the work can be used to persuade or proselytize or somehow make a meaningful difference?

The above paragraph begins to describe The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature by Byron M. Roth. A vast work of scholarship, The Perils of Diversity questions the soundness and efficacy of multi-racial societies, the product of Third World immigration into First World nations which has so far characterized the 21st century in the West. Roth tackles the issue from a variety of standpoints: anthropological, historical, economic, psychometric, genetic, evolutionary. His 36-page bibliography compiles nearly all of the pertinent texts that make up what I would call the Alt Right Library. An astonishing accomplishment, given his truly multidisciplinary approach to the pivotal, polarizing, and quite dangerous topic of immigration.

His conclusion, of course, should come as no surprise. If immigration and multicultural trends continue, then Western Civilization will soon be forced to fight for its very survival. As valuable as this is, however, The Perils of Diversity would still make an inestimable contribution to the causes of ethno-nationalism even if the last chapter and its conclusions were lopped off and never published. Roth’s methodology is so thorough, his argumentation so airtight and disciplined, and his prose so clear and direct that the disinterested reader has no choice but to reach Roth’s conclusion himself by the end of chapter two. After that, it’s the kind of grim, convincing reading that can only prompt one to action.

The first thing a reviewer must address is Roth’s comprehensive use of source material. He basically reads all the right books. From Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to Eward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology to Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique to David Fischer’s Albion’s Seed to Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve to J. Phillippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations to Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, it’s all there. And this is just a tiny fraction of what appears in The Perils of Diversity. But, in a sense, books are easy to track down. More impressive are the hundreds of articles and interviews which Roth compiles which are not easy for the layperson to track down.

Want to know the study which settled the debate over the heritability of intelligence? Look to “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns,” American Psychologist, Vol. 31, No. 2, (1996), pp 77-101 by Ulric Neissor et al. Want to know why geneticist Bruce Lahn gave up on his study of the genes which determine brain size? Check out “Head Examined: Scientist’s Study of Brain Genes Sparks a Backlash,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2006, A1 by Antonio Regalado. Want to know the source of the finding that there were three million Mexican illegal immigrants in the United States back in 1979, a figure which was increasing by 500,000 to 800,000 per year? Click to “The Desperate Ones,” Time Magazine, October 8, 1979 online.

A reader can be assured that nearly all of the scientific and academic underpinnings of the ideas behind ethno-nationalism can be found upon the pages of The Perils of Diversity. And this makes sense, given that the perils of diversity are what ethno-nationalism intends to protect its people from to begin with.

This is useful not only to bolster or propel Roth’s arguments, but also to guide the reader if he wishes to learn more about diversity and its perils. It doesn’t matter if you are a newly red-pilled normie looking for a place to start or a savvy student of the Alt Right looking to improve his library or a renegade political science professor doing highly specialized research. The Perils of Diversity, with its clear and direct prose, can only help elevate our understanding on this crucial matter of diversity. This book was meant to be read and internalized by anyone and everyone, not merely cited in obscure scholarly works. This makes the work the kind of study our Leftist, globalist enemies would prefer to ignore rather than refute.

Roth also deftly applies insights across studies to make Perils greater than the sum of its parts. He often applies his own as well. For example, in chapter four, he discusses A Farewell to Alms (2007) by Gregory Clark in which Clark famously described how economic forces since the Middle Ages caused the British people to evolve, thus enabling the Industrial Age to occur. As Clark put it, “economic success translated powerfully into reproductive success, with the richest individuals having more than twice the number of surviving children at death as the poorest.” Since most of these children had no choice but to descend the social ladder, their superior genetic stock improved the British middle class, giving them “greater human capital that, in turn, led to both the scientific and industrial revolutions.”

Roth first points out how this theory supports findings made by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending in 2006 (introduced in chapter three) which show how the high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews evolved relatively quickly due to unusual social and economic pressures placed upon them in Europe. In fact, Cochran et al. name specific genes which are found mostly among Ashkenazi Jews that are linked to both high intelligence and diseases (such as Tay-Sachs disease). Roth then posits that Clark could have improved his argument had he made the politically incorrect decision to discuss IQ differences among the British upper, middle, and lower classes. He does the same with Amy Chua’s World on Fire (2003), which fails to mention IQ differences in its discussion of “market-dominant minorities” in southeast Asian nations where Chinese minorities wield disproportionate economic influence. Indeed, if there is a common thread running through The Perils of Diversity it’s the author showing how past studies could have been more effective or consequential had they ventured into territory currently forbidden our leftist and globalist academic establishment. Of course, IQ, along with race, are two such forbidden topics.

Roth also asks the right questions. He constantly points out where our current knowledge ends and speculation begins. He raises questions which could provide answers consistent with the evidence and the conclusions he draws. In one instance, he cites western leaders’ fear of being labeled xenophobic and racist as impediments to criminology studies which could determine how crime fighting could be improved in multi-racial societies. In another, he laments how “ideological resistance” from these same leaders prevents studies which would determine how the MAOA-L gene—linked to antisocial behavior—is carried at different frequencies among all the races. In another, he asks a question I’m sure is on many of our minds: “At what point does cultural pluralism undermine the cultural and legal integrity of the host society?”

In fact, throughout the book, Roth speculates how the genetic quality of a population relates to its overall standard of living. In chapter eight, he writes:

The questions posed by the potential relations between intellectual competence and temperamental differences, and the social and political structure of societies, have not even begun to be studied. It is unlikely that any progress will be made in this area as long as the intellectual climate in the scientific community tends to suppress intensive and unhindered research in these topics. If and when a time arrives that such research can he carried out, it is safe to say that it will transform the social sciences, including political science and history, in revolutionary ways.

For a graduate student or independent researcher, The Perils of Diversity can serve as a repository for dissertation or book ideas which could hopefully reconcile our “cultural trendsetters” with scientific findings on race and immigration.

As for the arguments themselves, Roth has several themes running throughout. One is the gaping disconnect between Western elites and the people. He discusses in several places how mass immigration from the Third World has become extremely unpopular, yet increasingly championed by the West’s leftist, globalist elites. These leaders also take the form of scholars who forbid all talk of racial differences on campus, a kind of talk Bell Curve co-author Richard Herrnstein describes as a “modern form of blasphemy.”

Another theme is that race is real, and so are its correlates: IQ and temperament. All of it is genetic, and all of it can be quantified . . . if current-day researchers and scholars were brave enough to follow through. Thankfully, some are, and Roth takes us through the A-list. But he warns us that “while there has been a great deal of serious scientific work on group differences, the proponents of political correctness have managed to achieve a stranglehold over honest discussion of this research.” He covers Arthur Jensen and his groundbreaking 1969 study which argued for genetic explanations of black-white IQ differences. He dedicates a couple pages to J. Phillippe Rushton and his study linking climate conditions to racial characteristics and capabilities. Finnish social scientist Tatu Vanhanen receives even more exposure for his 2009 study The Limits of Democratization which links average national IQs with a nation’s capacity for democracy.

Roth also rolls up his sleeves and delves into genetics. In chapter three, he culls together a large number of scientific studies on the genetics of intelligence, antisocial behavior, and race. The COMT gene, which metabolizes the neurotransmitter dopamine, has been linked to memory function. The CHRM2 and DTNB1 correlate to IQ. Alleles from both of these genes showed much variation among races. For instance, one CHRM2 allele was found in 93% of the East Asian sample population, in 82% of the European sample, and in only 63% of the African sample. Roth also discusses epidemiologist Rod Lea and his famous “warrior gene” discovery. Lea found that among Maori men of New Zealand, there is a high frequency of what’s known as the “low activity” allele for the MAOA gene, which is linked to antisocial behavior. Roth notes that this frequency is almost twice that of European men. He also notes that while making up only 14% of the New Zealand population, the Maori are responsible for over 50% of New Zealand’s crimes. Therefore, according to Roth, it is perfectly reasonable to take genetics into account when judging the best course of action regarding the immigration and integration of disparate racial groups.

Anthropology is another tack Roth takes. In a section entitled “The Origin of Modern Human Races” in chapter three, Roth introduces Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s theory of “introgression” to describe how modern man came to be. The theory essentially suggests that:

. . . physically modern humans coming out of Africa intermingled with the existing archaic populations and acquired important genes from those individuals. In the process, they became better suited to their new environments and eventually replaced the archaic populations while retaining some of their archaic characteristics. Cochran and Harpending argue that an explosive growth in innovation including “cave painting, sculpture, jewelry, dramatically improved tools and weapons” appeared in Europe when migrating Africans came into contact with archaic Neanderthal types some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. They suggest that this innovative progress provides evidence that modern humans acquired important characteristics from Neanderthals, since such innovations are not evident among the artifacts of the modern humans who remained in Africa.

Roth later applies his own characteristic insight to the introgression theory by suggesting that

. . . those African migrants who traveled the southerly coastal route . . . may have mingled their genes with archaic people who had never faced the harsh conditions of the north. This may explain the differences which exist between northern Eurasians, such as the Europeans and Chinese, and the populations of southern Eurasia, such as the people of Southeast Asia, southern India, and the Pacific Islands.

As expected, Roth also includes the history of immigration to the West as one of his major themes. He dedicates three chapters to it, covering both pre- and post-1965 immigration patterns to the United States as well as immigration to Europe since World War II. Roth, completist that he is, starts with immigration prior to the American Revolution and ends with current trends. The transport of African slaves across the Atlantic is considered a form of immigration in this context, and Roth makes sure to underscore several points which, to some extent, exonerate whites and are therefore crucial to Alt Right white ethnocentrism. First, contrary to the Roots-inspired myth, whites never embarked on slave-raiding campaigns in Africa. They didn’t need to, considering that incessant tribal warfare in the African interior created an urgent need for money and firearms which could be purchased with a never-ending coffle of captured slaves. Second, the mortality rate for white immigrants crossing the Atlantic (10%) was not terribly far off from the black one (15%), and that whites and blacks died of disease at approximately the same rate once they reached the New World. Finally, black slaves were treated far better in the United States than they were in other places in the New World. For example, Roth quotes historian Robert Fogel, who estimates that the survival rate of black slaves in the United States was nearly five-and-a-half times that in the Caribbean.

Tables in this section help provide a comprehensive basis for understanding immigration trends. Data includes immigrants as a proportion of total population, immigration over time from various European ethnic groups, and major contributing countries over time. Roth also discusses the legal history of immigration so the reader can identify the causes and effects of such consequential acts as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1924, and the Immigration Act of 1965. Madison Grant and his seminal work The Passing of the Great Race (1916) receive in-depth coverage as well. Roth details the Darwinian nature of Grant’s thinking and shows how it embodied the social science zeitgeist of the interwar period.

After 1965, the details become all too familiar. Educational attainment, crime rates, fertility and marriage patterns, economic performances, assimilation . . . Roth does what the vast majority of scholars refuse to do: he breaks it down by race. Despite that there are few surprises here for a race-realist readership, this is perhaps where Roth does his best work. He utterly dismantles multiculturalism and points out that there are limits to the support a modern, civilized country can give to a gargantuan underclass brought on by mass immigration from the Third World. He points out how the racial dynamics of immigration have only increased strife and instability. He finally gets to the perils of diversity, which hang like huge, tattered warning signs on a rampart constructed from statistics.

Beyond this, Roth also skewers the political leadership of the United States for ignoring these signs, willfully or not. He vents much of his ire at the H-1B Visa program, which appeared after the 1990 Immigration Act and allowed thousands of foreign skilled workers to work stateside and then apply for immigration status. This program, convoluted and loopholed as it became, was wholly abused by a corrupt government and greedy plutocrats who were looking to keep wages down by replacing domestic workers with foreign ones. Roth spends six pages expounding upon the evils of the H-1B Visa program. Later, he makes his position on post-1965 immigration in language which could not be plainer:

The political leadership of the country has acted with gross incompetence, utter contempt for the public, and with monumental dishonesty. They have compounded their betrayal of the public by a cavalier attitude toward the threat of terrorist infiltration that is invited by undefended borders. Claims that the borders cannot be controlled are patently disingenuous, and truly absurd.

Finally, and as with many other studies on immigration, Roth’s most potent theme is prognostication. Roth predicts population bombs across the globe, the impending minority status of whites in the Western world, and the devastating impacts this will have on the United States and Europe. One particular angle Roth explores is how the average IQ in the United States will drop if immigration from Latin America continues unimpeded. If present trends continue, according to Roth, whites and Asians with an average IQ of 100 will make up 56% of the population. Blacks and Hispanics, on the other hand, will make up 42% of the population and have an average IQ between 85 and 90. By 2050 this will lead to a drop in the average IQ of the United States from 96 as it is today to 93.

With this future population, Roth weaves such dread-inducing, dystopic scenarios that for once his clear and straightforward prose becomes difficult to read. The number of talented, college-capable individuals will drop as the demand for such individuals increases. This will most likely increase the salaries of the higher-end professions and increase income disparity across the board. Further, American economic competitiveness will decline as less-capable people are placed in positions that more-capable people must occupy. Our standard of living will drop while interracial tensions and strife intensify. Our military will be less capable and poorly funded. Meanwhile, China, whose average IQ is not declining while its population continues to increase, will outnumber us 10-to-1 in college capable individuals. Meanwhile the Islamic population, whose religious laws have not changed in centuries, will have a similar, if even more violent, impact on Europe in about the same amount of time.

Roth includes towards the end of his work a truly terrifying scenario. When describing the possibility of more Muslim nations obtaining nuclear arms, he writes:

It is not inconceivable that sometime in the not too distant future, alliances of Muslim states, including a major state such Iran, Pakistan, or Turkey, could pose a very real threat to large areas of Europe. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, Iran is attempting to obtain them and Turkey could certainly do so if it wanted. All three countries have large and growing populations, and perhaps more important, large youthful populations. In addition, in any struggle between a Muslim country and a country in Europe, the huge populations of Muslim North Africa would be openly sympathetic with their Muslim brothers and many of their young men could be expected to volunteer in a holy war against the West. Against such a threat, an aging European population could not possibly match the manpower of Muslim armies, especially as the population gap between the Muslim and European civilization grows in the coming decades. In addition, the current overwhelming technological advantage of European armies over their Muslim counterparts cannot help but be eroded in the future. Already those armies are becoming increasingly effective, in large part through military assistance from China, which might see a benefit from a weakened Europe.

If that won’t alert someone to the perils of diversity, I don’t know what will.

As with any book, there is plenty of room for quibbling. It’s a little long, at 514 pages (468 if you remove the 46 pages of end-of-chapter notes). The chapters are quite long as well – only eight in the entire book. This makes each a bit of a slog to get through, despite the adroit prose. The Perils of Diversity is comprehensive, if anything, but perhaps Roth included snippets of research simply because he did the research and not because it was vital to his work as a whole. For example, descriptions of animal behavior which led to some of the theories behind the evolution of social behavior such as “reciprocal altruism” may not have needed so much attention in a book about human diversity. The historical exposition of US immigration in the 18th and 19th centuries could also have been cut or trimmed with little loss to the author’s final arguments.

Roth also moralizes from time to time. For example, he is far too harsh on Madison Grant. After giving Grant a reasonable and balanced summation, crediting him for theories “which might have some basis in fact,” and chiding him for making “no effort to determine whether the differences in traits he claimed existed could, in fact, be reliably measured . . .” Roth then criticizes Grant for holding pro-eugenics and anti-miscegenation positions, some of which, quite honestly, make sense from a race-realist and ethno-nationalist perspective.

Another curious aspect of The Perils of Diversity is that Roth has no interest in exploring Jewish complicity in lifting US restrictions to immigration. I have found no evidence that Roth identifies at all with the Alt Right, so it comes as no surprise that he ignores the Jewish Question per se. [Roth is Jewish — Ed.] On the other hand, he does have much to say in chapter five about the anti-Semitic (and anti-Catholic) nature of US immigration restriction from the 1920s to the 1960s. This is odd coming from an author who cites Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique in his bibliography and discusses this very work two chapters prior. I find it hard to believe that Roth was unaware of MacDonald’s research on the extensive Jewish efforts to open the United States to people of all races from all across the world. Neglecting this crucial information makes Roth’s work less complete than it could have been.

Quibbling aside, The Perils of Diversity gives us the alpha and omega of everything bad dealing with immigration and multiculturalism. It is so bad, and so powerfully presented in this volume, that it tempts the reader to activism. Perhaps that’s the point . . . to somehow get this book on the desks and nightstands of as many American lawmakers as possible. Sure, it’s great if it opens eyes and sparks discussion among citizens. But there is a time limit to all this. One day soon, the diversity problem we have in America will be too difficult to solve without mass bloodshed. So we really don’t have the luxury of letting Roth’s insights and conclusions simply percolate up through the populace. Every anti-immigration, anti-Islam, pro-white, pro-America, pro-cop, Alt Right, and conservative pundit, writer, blogger, activist, and organization should be making every effort to communicate Roth’s findings to our political leadership, especially now, since we will soon have a potentially sympathetic president in the White House and the Republicans enjoy gubernatorial and Congressional majorities. Despite the dire perils of diversity and the storm of opposition that fighting it will entail, there is still some room for hope. Byron Roth and others have waded into it before us, and they have given us this book, The Perils of Diversity, which will serve as sword and shield for those brave enough to follow.