What’s In A (Sur)Name? Plenty, If You’re Planning An Amnesty

A number of years back, before I was up to speed on the National Question, I read an article dealing with registration problems in the U.S. Social Security system.

It reported that one of the problems in keeping individual’s names straight was the difference between the surname systems of various cultures. The problem, according to a bellyacher quoted in the article, was that our Social Security database was set up in "an Anglo format", with a system of surnames, with a surname being defined as a family name passed from generation to generation. [Name Error Can Cost You Money—Report: Social Security May Not Compute Non-Anglo Names, By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1996] [VDARE.COM note: There's some gloating about this from Linda Chavez's Center For Equal Opportunity here—they looked on this confusion as one of the many factors that make interior enforcement "impossible".]

To the bellyacher, the fact that the database was in an “Anglo formatâ€