1. “Immigrants will take our jobs and lower our wages, especially hurting the poor.”
- The smallest estimates immigration surplus, as it is called, is equal to about 0.24 percent of GDP – which excludes the gains to immigrants and just focuses on those of native-born Americans.
2. “Immigrants abuse the welfare state.”
- Immigrants are less likely to use means-tested welfare benefits that similar native-born Americans.... it is far easier and cheaper to build a higher wall around the welfare state, instead of around the country.
3. “Immigrants are a net fiscal cost.”
- The empirics on this are fairly consistent – immigrants in the United States have a net-zero impact on government budgets
4. “Immigrants increase economic inequality.”
- I don’t see the problem if an immigrant quadruples his income by coming to the United States, barely affects the wages of native-born Americans here, and increases economic inequality as a result.
5. “Today’s immigrants don’t assimilate like previous immigrant groups did.”
- There is a large amount of research that indicates immigrants are assimilating as well as or better than previous immigrant groups – even Mexicans.
6. “Immigrants are especially crime prone.”
- Immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated for violent and property crimes and cities with more immigrants and their descendants are more peaceful.
7. “Immigrants pose a unique risk today because of terrorism.”
- For all foreign-born terrorists on U.S. soil, the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack is one in 3.6 million during the same period of time [from 1975 to 2015]. Almost 99 percent of those murders occurred on 9/11 and were committed by foreigners on tourist visas and one student visa, not immigrants.
8. “It’s easy to immigrate to America and we’re the most open country in the world.”
- The percentage of our population that is foreign-born is about 13 percent – below historical highs in the United States and less than half of what it is in modern New Zealand and Australia.
9. “Amnesty or failure to enforce our immigration laws will destroy the Rule of Law in the United States.”
- Enforcing laws that are inherently capricious and that are contrary to our traditions is inconsistent with a stable Rule of Law
10. “National sovereignty.”
- U.S. immigration laws are not primarily designed or intended to keep out foreign armies, spies, or insurgents. The main effect of our immigration laws is to keep out willing foreign workers from selling their labor to voluntary American purchasers.
11. “Immigrants won’t vote for the Republican Party – look at what happened to California.”
- Those who claim that changing demographics due to immigration is solely responsible for the shift in California’s politics have to explain the severe drop-off in support for the GOP at exactly the same time that the party was using anti-immigration propositions and arguments to win the 1994 election.
12. “Immigrants bring with them their bad cultures, ideas, or other factors that will undermine and destroy our economic and political institutions. The resultant weakening in economic growth means that immigrants will destroy more wealth than they will create.”
- This is the most intelligent anti-immigration argument and the one most likely to be correct, although the evidence currently doesn’t support it being true.
13. “The brain drain of smart immigrants to the United State impoverished other countries.”
- The flow of skilled workers from low-productivity countries to high-productivity nations increases the incomes of people in the destination country, enriches the immigrant, and helps (or at least doesn’t hurt) those left behind. Furthermore, remittances that immigrants send home are often large enough to offset any loss in home country productivity by emigration.... Economic development should be about increasing the incomes of people not the amount of economic activity in specific geographical regions.
14. “Immigrants will increase crowding, harm the environment, and [insert misanthropic statement here].”
- The late economist Julian Simon spent much of his career showing that people are an economic and environmental blessing, not a curse.
15. “Some races and ethnic groups are genetically inferior. They need to be prevented from coming here, breeding, and decreasing America’s good ethnic stock.”
That's not a nice thing to say.
People often find arguments to support their feelings and point of view. Immigration tends to mean cultural change; the introduction of new ways of doing things, and a challenge to the status quo. IMO conservatives are on the balance more anti-immigration than liberals simply because they are conservative and skeptical of change by nature. I wish it were simply a matter of holding beliefs that can be countered by data, but I think the goal posts tend to move to preserve the stance. -Not for all, but for conservatives as a voting block.
Ya after I moved out of the city I found the people here ( mainly conservative white people) just couldn't comprehend how they could possibly fit other cultures in. Mind you they have no problem stuffing their faces with sushi but I find people who don't grow up in a multicultural area have a much harder time making space for others. It's like only child syndrome but for cultures.
I think it might be an age thing, on both sides, and I've seen it both from smaller towns as well as cities. Younger people seem to be more receptive to immigrants and younger immigrants tend to be more open to American culture. Older people, both as American born citizens as well as immigrants, aren't hostile or anything. They just seem to prefer to not interact. I'm not a fan of city living, I bitch and moan about a lot of things. One of the things I do love about it though? The number of immigrants is pretty cool to see, and I love it when they open their own restaurants. One of my favorite places is this hole in the wall Greek place and every night I eat there, the kids are at the table doing their homework while mom and dad run their business. It's a cliche phrase at this point, but when I think of "The American Dream" I think that scenario fits in nicely.
Okay, I've been out here with the crickets half an hour and counted 15 meteors, and haven't been bored for a moment. It's amazing how much is visible to a dark adapted eye, even in the bright suburbs. I keep spotting the Pleiades and thinking there are far more than seven sisters, but when I look closely I can only count eight.
Too bad; I always enjoy your rambles. Can you even see the sky through the wet blanket covering the Eastern seaboard? Those "showers" never deliver, in my experience. Stare at the sky until your corneas dry out, on a good night you get one meteor every minute or two. Maybe I'll go up to the roof anyway, the peak is after midnight, right?
I'll put something together for you. As for the meteor shower, I say a good 50 or so at our site before the clouds finally rolled in and ended the night. We got very lucky and had a big ball of dry air sit on top of us until about 3AM. And yes, for all these showers, after midnight is better, and that begs the question.... why? The earth orbits the sun in the direction of sunrise, east. Since that is the side of the planet facing into the direction of travel, that is the side of the planet that plows, well, "head first" into the shower. When you go look at the fireball reports, they look constant all over the earth, but you will note that individual stations have more reports in the early morning than in the evening. Hope that helps anyone with that question.
I was watching from about 4:30 to 5:10. Most of the meteors I saw originated in the vicinity of Cassiopeia. They were also fairly short and brief; by the time I looked at them there was only a faint glowing trail that faded within a second. But I saw at least two that were far longer and maybe brighter that followed a different trajectory, one streaked toward Cassiopeia. Perhaps these were random events not related to the Perseids? Staring at the sky at night is a reliable way to see something incomprehensible and wondrous. Can these flashes of light really be the result of metal flecks the size of sand grains? Why are they usually nickel and iron? Are they really roughly parallel, like Crepuscular rays, despite apparently diverging?
The radiant is in the north-west part of Perseus, between Cassiopeia and the horizon from the Northern Hemisphere this time of year. So anything that seems to come from that area is a Perseid. We also saw a few coming from the "wrong way" and one of the guys in the club documented them and sent the report to the meteor tracking site. The ones that leave a trail are about a single millimeter is diameter. Most visible meteors are microscopic in size. Remember these things are hitting the top of the atmosphere at about 50-70 KM per hour; at that speed the air cannot get out of the way fast enough so you get a bubble of compressed air in front of the particle. This air gets compressed, which heats it. That air gets so hot that it vaporizes the surface of the object entering the air. For something very small, smaller than a pebble, the object literally vaporizes and becomes dust in the air somewhere about 30-50 miles above sea level. Yeap. The dust grains are impacting the atmosphere at a near 90° angle to the tangent of the top of the atmosphere. There are exceptions, but not many. Chelyabinsk entered at a shallow angle which is one reason it exploded in the air rather than on the ground.But I saw at least two that were far longer and maybe brighter that followed a different trajectory, one streaked toward Cassiopeia. Perhaps these were random events not related to the Perseids?
Staring at the sky at night is a reliable way to see something incomprehensible and wondrous. Can these flashes of light really be the result of metal flecks the size of sand grains? Why are they usually nickel and iron? Are they really roughly parallel, like Crepuscular rays, despite apparently diverging?
Are they really roughly parallel, like Crepuscular rays, despite apparently diverging?
I'm on mobile so in not going to write huge paragraph but my main issue with this article is that they lump educated net positive immigrants with uneducated net negative migrants. Uneducated migrants are a net negative for the livelihood of the existing community because they depress wages by introducing more competition. That being said they likely they produce as much or more as americans of similar education so when you measure net output you might get a positive values but sill get net negative quality of life outcomes for the existing residents. Educated legal immigrants are a huge net positive and allows us to poach the best and brightest in the world. The only thing wrong there is that the h1 process allows companies too much influence over the immigrants immigration status and allows companies to depress skilled wages. If the process was changed to allow immigrants to get visas for a set time like 5 years regardless off employment, companies wouldn't be able to depress skilled wages by hiring h1 workers and holding them hostage to immigration status. On a side note I find it funny that the same people that argue that uber is destroying living wages for taxi drivers can't see how the same would happen with immigrants.
Something about reality having a well-known liberal bias?