MAGA vs. Big Tech

Richard Hanania, a grouchy libertarian I read on Twitter/X sometimes, has landed in the middle of an angry internet fight that he thinks has important implications. He wrote:

The right wing civil war is going to be over Indians.

The populists hate all immigration. The Tech Right will go along with them on Latin America and Africa because of the skills issue. They'll go along with Muslims because of cultural concerns.

High-skilled Indians is the one group where racism is the only explanation for wanting to restrict numbers.

He got thousands of responses to this and other, similar tweets that generally go like this:

Why should Americans not prioritize other Americans over Indians?

I want my kin to get into American schools and companies before foreigners do. Is that irrational? Is that a problem?

I would rather the USA slide down into an economic/technological backwater than deal with this preponderance of third world genius/saints. Our native stock is only overlooked because we are too expensive for the corporate/academic world and much harder to coerce.

Hanania responded by reaching deep into his bag to throw the worst insult in his lexicon at MAGA:

Again, this is the exact same logic and worldview of the wokes. Merit, talent, and economics don't exist. Every group could succeed as well as every other. If one gets ahead, it's because it practiced racism. You can get the demographic balance you want through will power. . . . I told you nationalists had the same resentment-fueled collectivist ideology as the wokes.

White nationalists are just like the woke! Come to think of it, he has a point; Imbram X. Kendi and Steve Bannon do agree on one thing, that if their people are not getting ahead it is because they are being blocked by nefarious forces.

Hanania thinks the alliance between MAGA and right-wing types will be short-lived because the tech world needs high-skilled immigrants:

This is one of the biggest splits between MAGA and the Tech Right. MAGA doesn’t want foreigners around no matter how talented they are. Tech people know that’s crazy. They’ll try to argue to MAGA that it is about letting in people with high skills but that won’t convince them.

I loved this exchange:

Commenter - I could invite smart strangers to live in my house too, but I don't for mostly the same reasons I don't want mass meritocratic brown foreigner importation. Why would I want infinite Indians in my home country just because they can do mid-tier IT work? I care about more than GDP.

Hanania: Right, you're also driven by hate and a sense of inferiority.

As a side effect of all this, Hanania started to hear from dozens of Indian tech workers thrilled that a white conservative is standing up for them in such strong terms. Several even donated to his Patreon. He wrote to them directly:

To all Indians out there. I know it’s been a tough day. You have seen the face of racism. But know that you belong, and together we will defeat the bigots. They do not represent who we are.

I wonder if this is right. Is the "tech right" going to split from Trump and MAGA over H1-B visas and Indian immigration? If so, who will win?

The Logic of Land Acknowledgements

Thijs Niks on Twitter/X:

Once the logic of land acknowledgements and "decolonisation" is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice, it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.

Ronald Reagan on Immigration

"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or a Turk or a Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American."

Video here. 

As I have said, I am willing to debate the practicalities of immigration, what number and what sort of people we should accept, but fundamentally I love this about my country.

Border Theater

Via Kevin Drum, a great article by Jack Herrera in Texas Monthly about the US southern border and why current policies will never stop the flow of migrants:

The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.

One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.

Of course the construction industry could raise wages and hope to recruit more of the native born, but that would not be a simple fix. They have gotten used to relying on cheap migrant labor and have been setting their prices accordingly; having to raise wages suddenly would pinch them hard when they are often tied into multi-year contracts. Also, fewer and fewer native born Americans are going into construction. I remember discussing this with my sons. My brother and I both did some construction in our youths, but none of my sons have. When I asked them about it, they waved off the idea; they simply don't regard it as work people like them do. Herrera says that across the rich nations of the world, "the children of accountants and schoolteachers don’t seem to want to lay bricks, even if laying bricks were to pay better than accounting and teaching." So for the construction industry,

Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings. So an inviolable relationship has developed between new construction and migrants: If you build, they will come.

Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

The Texas economy is booming largely because of affordable housing, and new housing is being built in Texas at a remarkable rate thanks largely to the state's 1.6 million undocumented workers; one recent survey of construction sites in the state found that 50 percent of workers were undocumented.

So the measures that would really end illegal migration – nationwide eVerify, and real penalties for employers who hire the undocumented – will never be put in place, and the migrant flows will continue, despite all the sound and fury of "border theater."

Haitians in Ohio and the Immigrant Economy

Right now the debate over immigration in America is so stupid it makes my head hurt.

Anti-immigrant Americans want to complain about crime and violence and cat-eating and what-all. But this is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes, sure, but every number I have seen, whether from the FBI or individual states, shows that they commit fewer crimes than the native born. No doubt there are towns out there where immigrants commit most of the crimes, because those are places where most of the young men are immigrants. Some immigrants do drugs, but, again, not as much as the native born. When people point this out on Twitter/X, the usual response is just to say "You're Lying!" Sigh.

Immigrants do have a high rate of severe mental health problems, but I've never seen anyone cite this in opposition to immigration and anyway the rate of schizophrenia isn't high enough to be a real economic or social problem.

That doesn't mean there are no reasons to oppose immigration. Pro-immigration (or anti-Trump) people have been passing around this interview (summary here) with one of the Ohio factory owners responsible for drawing a lot of Haitains to Springfield:

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So from a factory-owners's perspective, immigration is great. They get people who will do repetitive drudge work all day for mediocre wages. Because however bad working in a factory in Ohio might be, it beats the heck out of being shot by gangsters in Haiti. So, win-win for the factory owners and the Haitians.

But you could ask a different question: is there any way we could convert those dreary factory jobs that upstanding native born Americans don't want into something better? Is it, maybe, that the manufacturers can get away with offering low wages and drudgery because they are competing, not just against whatever US-born workers might be doing instead, but against conditions in Haiti and Venezuela and Vietnam?

(Pro-Trump Republicans like to say that Harris supporters are communists, but imagine a real communist sharing a video casting a factory owner as the hero and the lazy workers as the bad guys.)

A more rational case against immigration would go like this: life in the US is better than life in most places because we limit how many people we take in. If we take in too many that will drag life here down toward conditions in the rest of the world. So long as there are immigrant workers desperate for any kind of job, companies have no incentive to change their work practices toward something better for workers. Step one toward making life in America better for working people, therefore, is to limit the number of immigrants. And maybe the social pathologies of the working class might actually be reduced if we focused on this, and people who could get less miserable, better-paying jobs might be more likely to stay sober and get married and so on.

I think this is wrong, but at least it makes sense. Alas, I've been reading takes on the Haitians in Ohio story for two days and I have not seen this argument made even once. All the anti-immigrant people are fulminating against crime and disorder and community breakdown, which manifestly are not happening.

I believe that immigration is great for the US economy. I believe that the only reason it is still thriving is that immigrants study harder in school than the native born, get more education, work harder, found more companies, and generally do more to make the country thrive than the native born. I have never seen a single credible number that refutes this. That does not mean all immigration is good, or that we couldn't come up with a better system for deciding whom to admit, or that the current number is the best one, or anything like that; just that on net, immigration is a plus. I would like to see companies work harder to recruit workers and change their processes to make them less onerous. I have a feeling, though, that this is not going to happen. I imagine that if we tried to force (say) chicken processors to improve conditions the jobs would just all move to Mexico. (Or, if they didn't, the price of chicken would soar.) Any given level of technology seems to come with its own forms of drudgery.

But this is America in our era: if you want a good life, in economic terms, you have to get a lot of education and put it to use, or else throw yourself into some kind of blue-collar work and get ahead by working hard. You must live a life of bourgeois discipline: getting up every day, getting dressed, going to work, making your numbers, etc. If you fall off that path via depression, drug use, chronic injury, or what have you, your life is going to be hard. Some people fantasize that ending immigration would reduce this pressure, that it would lessen the competition and mean everybody gets more for working less. I think the opposite is true, that in fact hard-working immigrants sustain the rest of us. 

But at least this is an argument worth having. Who is eating cats is not.

Immigration and Economic Growth in the USA

New Congressional Budget Office annual report on the economy and the budget:

In calendar year 2023, the U.S. economy grew faster than it did in 2022, even as inflation slowed. Economic growth is projected to slow in 2024 amid increased unemployment and lower inflation. CBO expects the Federal Reserve to respond by reducing interest rates, starting in the middle of the year. In CBO’s projections, economic growth rebounds in 2025 and then moderates in later years. A surge in immigration that began in 2022 continues through 2026, expanding the labor force and increasing economic output. . . .

In CBO’s current projections, the number of people who are working or actively seeking employment continues to expand at a moderate pace through 2026. Higher population growth in those years, mainly from increased immigration, more than offsets a decline in labor force participation due to slowing demand for workers and the rising average age of the population. A large proportion of recent and projected immigrants are expected to be 25 to 54 years old—adults in their prime working years. . . .

CBO also projects that high rates of net immigration through 2026 will support economic growth, adding an average of about 0.2 percentage points to the annual growth rate of real GDP over the 2024–2034 period. . . .

The downward revision to economic growth resulting from higher projected interest rates is partly offset by an increase in economic activity over the 2024–2027 period stemming from greater projected net immigration. . . .

That greater immigration is projected to boost the growth rate of the nation’s real gross domestic product (GDP) by an average of 0.2 percentage points a year from 2024 to 2034, leaving real GDP roughly 2 percent larger in 2034 than it would be otherwise. . . .

The US is not suffering economically from its aging population and low birth rates because immigrants of working age are taking up the slack; this is so important that even a small adjustment to the expected number of immigrants (from last year's projection to this year's, a difference of less than 5%) yields measurably increased economic growth. For the forseeable future, this makes our aging population sustainable.

Immigration to Japan

Immigration to Japan is gradually increasing. There are now 2.76 million foreigners living in Japan, about 2.3% of the population. The biggest source countries are China (745,000), Vietnam (476,000), South Korea (412,000), and the Philippines (291,000). The government hasn't said much about this, but the policy of admitting more foreigners must be a response to the crashing birth rate.

One thing I was curious about was how much of this is Japanese men marrying foreign wives, which I remember hearing was a big thing. But wikipedia has this:

International marriage migration used to represent as much as 25% of permanent migration flows to Japan, but this trend has been in decline since a peak in 2006. . . . In 2006, according to data released by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 44,701 marriages, or 6.11% of all marriages registered in Japan were to a foreign national. In 2013, this number had fallen to 21,488 marriages or 3.25%.

So not as much of a big thing as it used to be.

Junot Diaz, "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

A month or so ago I came across a description of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) that read much like this, from wikipedia: 

The book chronicles the life of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, as well as a curse that has plagued his family for generations.

I wondered, reading this, why I did not know this book, and why I had not read it. It sounds like exactly my kind of thing. My long-contemplated, likely never-to-be-realized project for a more realistic novel would focus on a would-be fantasy writer who spends most of his time in worlds of his own imagining, and I thought maybe this would be such a book.

It is not. 

It is, basically, yet another multi-generation chronicle of an immigrant family, the kind of book that the American literary establishment loves so much. The main character is actually not Oscar Wao, but the special energy of the Dominican community that divides its time between the Old Country and Paterson, New Jersey. The remarkable thing about the book, as the more astute critics noted, is the language Diaz uses to capture this energy. The characters "code switch" between a high-energy patois full of Spanish and Spanglish words and a more conventional, almost literary English, and the flow of both is regularly interrupted by references to science fiction, fantasy, and comic books. It is unlike anything else I have ever read, and sometimes it is quite powerful.

For me, though, the book had a couple of serious problems. First, the special energy of the Dominicans turns out to be almost entirely about sex. Diaz portrays Dominicans as utterly sex-obsessed; from the Dominican standpoint the thing that makes Oscar a weirdo is not his sci-fi obsessions or constant references to Dungeons & Dragons, but his virginity. 

Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we're talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands.

Dominicans are, we are led to believe, a people of great passion:

To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericano to cinders.

Dominicans never get enough sex; after getting dumped by his girlfriend because she caught him cheating with one of her friends, the narrator says:

What I should have done was check myself into Bootie-Rehab. But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don't know Dominican men.

There are so many references to the huge breasts and cocks of Dominicans that it really started to bother me, and I kept thinking that if an Anglo writer had penned any of this he would have been cancelled for racism.

The story seems to have an interesting, meta-fictional component. It eventually turns out that the semi-omniscient narrator of most of the book is a friend of Oscar's named Yunior. Yunior is a much more conventional Dominican man, restless, sex-obsessed, a great dancer and wildly successful lover. Most observers think that Oscar is based on Diaz himself, but rather than telling the story from his own perspective he imagined a Dominican man who was everything he was not and had him describe Oscar's troubled existence. It was an interesting choice, and one could spend way too much time pondering the psychology that lies behind it; at any rate it suggests some serious complications in Diaz's relationship to the sexuality he attributes to his fellow Dominicans.

The other thing that puzzled me was the strange narrowness of the characters' world. They live in the multi-ethinic stew of Paterson and the main characters eventually attend a state university, but the Anglo and African-American worlds hardly make an appearance. The only other ethnic group that gets more than a brief mention is Puertoricans, always written as one word, and they appear mostly when somebody compares the hotness of puertorican chicas to that of Dominicanas. Where is the rest of the universe?

Oscar is supposed to be a big-time nerd, but he seems to have no concept of the actual fascinating history of Paterson; you're telling me that a kid this nerdy has no idea that the buildings around him used to make railroad locomotives and the original Colt revolver? The characters live a town that has been home to generations of immigrants going back to its founding in the 1790s, but they neither know nor care. 

To me, the characters' ignorance about Patterson's history is not a minor, pedantic note, but a symbol of what bothers me about books like this: the insistence on the specialness of their characters' history. I have enjoyed books by Jewish writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer about Jewish immigrants, but I eventually got tired of all the self-back-patting about how special and wonderful they were. Junot Diaz portrays Dominican immigrants as special and wonderful in their own way, using such charged language that you almost believe him.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an impressive book, the sort of high-wire writing performance that makes you marvel when it doesn't collapse. But I didn't like it very much. 

Immigration, 1907

A friend sent me this, from an article about a copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula:

Here is a large community peopled by foreigners who are alleged to be pouring into this country faster than we can absorb them. They are called a menace to our institutions, and agitators declare that Americanism will be submerged by this swelling tide. The Calumet and Hecla company has worked out its own solution of the immigration problem. Its miners and their families are treated as human beings, and they are good enough Americans to put to shame the spirit and achievements of many a community which brags of its native stock. This company has no complaint to make on the score of lack of efficiency among its employees because they are given a fair show to live decently and make their communities clean and prosperous. It has gone about the business of assimilating a foreign population by methods which do not seem to have occurred to the Chicago packers.

Costica Bradatan on Romanian Failure

Costica Bradatan grew up in a peasant family in late Soviet Romania, a home with no books and not even many spoken words, yet somehow managed to end up as a humanities professor in the US. (So much for enrichment.) I was fascinated by his NY Times essay about Romania as a place devoted to failure:

At the time I was born, in the 1970s, the country was in the middle of an intense affair with utopia. Nothing breeds more failure than an obsessive quest for purity. The closer you get to perfection, the more abject the failure. We were supposed to reach the communist paradise any day, even as people’s lives were becoming progressively more hellish. The state was supposed to wither away, per Friedrich Engels’s prophecy; yet it was becoming more and more oppressive. Everything was owned in common, even though there was nothing much to be owned. For good measure, the utopian experiment was run largely by a gang of thugs. That strikes me now as a logical arrangement. You had to be either an incurable idealist or rotten to the core to believe in utopia, and idealism was never a plant to grow roots in that part of the world.

The Romanian state did everything — from the repression and surveillance to the police beatings and windows broken in the middle of the night — in the name of the working class. The regime was called “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” but that must have been a grammatical error: It was most obviously a dictatorship over the proletariat. The workers were kept deep in misery, ignorance and poverty. They were treated like beasts of burden and told that they were lucky, that under capitalism their lives would be so much worse. In school, many subjects were covered, but the discipline most widely taught was the art of cognitive dissonance: how to look at all of this and pretend to see none of it. If you mastered the craft, you could survive, even though you were left seriously broken inside. I lived in “1984,” knew it like the back of my hand, long before I discovered the book. . . .

By the late 1980s, some of the thugs got bored with the communist experiment and realized that it would be more fun if they turned capitalist. That’s how the regime collapsed, under the weight of its own absurdity, catching us, the children of utopia, amid its ruins. Not that this hurt us (by that point, we were too damaged to be hurt by anything), but it left us with a privileged relationship to failure, an affinity for it, even a special flair for it. Once in utopia, you are doomed; you carry its nothingness in your bones wherever you go.

Bradatan ends by saying that he is doing well in America because despite all our talk about success what really motivates us is fear of failure, something that scares Romanians not at all.

Wesley So's American Dream

Chess star Wesley So, born in the Philippines, became an American citizen this year. He represented the Philippines in international tournaments for years, and he became increasingly frustrated with the way he was treated. So now he represents the US. In the US, he said:

You are not held back by your color, lack of connections or the amount of money you have. If you work hard, you have a better chance of making it here than anywhere else in the world. I came here ready to work hard, and it turned out just as I dreamed.

I think it is worth pointing out that despite our ongoing struggles with inequality and race, many immigrants feel this way. Some immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean feel that whatever barriers they face as black Americans are much more manageable than those they faced in the black majority countries where they grew up. The Times published a lot of material about Korean immigrants in the aftermath of the Georgia shootings, and many of the immigrants seemed to be saying that while racism is a fact of life here –some of them mocked their born-in-America children for thinking it wouldn't be– things are still a lot better than in Korea.

Incidentally when Wesley So became a Super Grand Master he was the youngest person ever to do so, breaking the record set by current world champion Magnus Carlsen. But that record has been broken three more times in the past 15 years. This is probably because 7-year-old chess prodigies can now train against superhuman opponents on their computers, or against each other online, so they can get a lot more high-level experience than they could in the days when they had to find human opponents.

The Last Immigrant Panic

Interesting story by Adam Hochschild in The New Yorker about the last great anti-immigrant blow-up in America, in 1919-1920. At that time the surge of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, the Bolshevik Revolution, and resurgent nationalism combined to create a public furor about the sort of people coming to America and their politics. After all, quite a few European immigrants were political radicals, and a few joined anarchist or communist cells. Lenin published a “letter to the American working man” that added more fuel to the fire.

Anti-immigrant, anti-communist rhetoric reached a crescendo in 1919. A string of more than 50 mail bombs targeted Americans leaders, including Attorney General A. Mitchel Palmer. Palmer responded by working with a young J. Edgar Hoover to organize what came to be called the Palmer Raids, mass round-ups of politically dubious immigrants. In December, 1919, 249 alleged radicals were loaded on an old troopship called the Buford and sent to the Soviet Union, an event best remembered because feminist gadfly Emma Goldman was among them.

Palmer and Hoover intended this to the first of many such voyages, but it was the only one. Further attempts were blocked by increasing opposition across the country, led by an official of the same administration: Labor Secretary Louis Post. Post, a former muckraking journalist and advocate for the rights of blacks and workers, used a series of bureaucratic maneuvers to delay and eventually kill more deportations. He knew that Palmer's mass raids swept up many of the innocent along with the guilty, so he zeroed in on the mistakes and violations of basic rights to undermine the whole operation. In particular he showed that many of the arrest warrants were fraudulently obtained, sometimes after the arrest, and got judges to invalidate them by the hundreds.

Meanwhile the “Red Scare” was abating, and more and more Americans realized that a Bolshevik revolution in the US was a bit far-fetched. Several anti-immigrant, anti-communist loud-mouths ran for President in 1920, but all of them eventually faded, leaving the field to a man who wanted no part of the hysteria. One of the claims made loudly was that the communists were planning an uprising for May Day, 1920:

May Day came and went. Nothing happened. Yet the silence turned out to be an event in itself. It deflated the national hysteria about arresting and deporting “Reds,” and helped kill Palmer’s campaign for the Presidency. Nor did any of the three Republicans who had thundered about deportation become his party’s choice. The eventual candidate and victor was Warren Harding, a Republican who declared that “too much has been said about bolshevism in America,” and campaigned for a “return to normalcy.” The Republican Party platform that year rebuked the “vigorous malpractice of the Departments of Justice and Labor.”

I confess it never occurred to me until now that “return to normalcy” included an end to hysterical anti-communism, but Hochschild has convinced me that it did.

Although the Red Scare abated and there was no more talk of mass deportations, anti-immigrant fervor did not disappear. It eventually led to the passage of a strict immigration law in 1924, which banned immigration from Asia and set quotas for European countries based on the proportion of their descendants in the US of 1890, before the wave of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe  got under way.

Cordelia Scaife May, Environmentalist to Nativist

The most stridently anti-immigrant person I ever met was an activist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, who at the time was working to restore sea grass in the Nansemond River. She told me that we should have a register of all the families in the country, and nobody should be allowed to breed unless somebody else in their family had died, and nobody allowed to enter the country until somebody else left. The places she cared about were being destroyed by population growth, and the only way she could imagine to save those places was to wall the people out.

I was reminded of her by this Times story about Cordelia Scaife May, a millionaire heiress who went from birth control activist to environmentalist to the world's biggest funder of anti-immigrant groups. This trajectory feels predictable to me, and honestly I am surprised that more people have not moved along it.

Listening to people like Trump talk about immigrants, the main emotion I hear is disgust: disgust at  unwashed masses of nonwhite people dirtying up the world. This revulsion at the dirtiness of humanity is an old sentiment, common among medieval monks. Cordelia Scaife May for a while made it her cause to prevent, not just unwanted births, but all births:

The unwanted child is not the problem, but, rather, the wanted one that society, for diverse cultural reasons, demands.

Ever since steamships and world wars began moving masses of people around the globe this disgust has commonly been attached to immigrants and perhaps especially to refugees, who arrive damaged and forlorn from someplace that didn't want them.

Pondering why more people have not made these connections, I come up with two thoughts. The environmental movement has become more global, more concerned about deforestation in southeast Asia than about sea grass in the local river. This renders immigration irrelevant or even positive, since people who move from poor nations to rich ones see their birth rates fall. And, over the past thirty years the dominant strain of thought on the left has become anti-racism. To avoid seeming racist or colonialist, environmentalists have mostly stopped talking about population growth, leaving those who still obsess over the sheer number of humans to drift toward the right.

A Map of the Internet in 1973

David Newbury found this among the papers of his father, an engineer who helped construct ARPANET. Each oval is one computer, each square a router. That's the whole thing. Via Kottke.

Refugees Radicalize Voters

A new study:

Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives’ attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging a targeted survey of 2,070 island residents and distance to Turkey as an instrument, we find that direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies. Since refugees only passed through these islands, our findings challenge both standard economic and cultural explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment and show that mere exposure suffices in generating lasting increases in hostility.

Asian Immigrants Outpacing Latinos

Brookings:

While Latin Americans, especially Mexicans, played a large role in U.S. immigration gains for the decades leading up to 2010, this is not the case now. Past Latin American domination of foreign-born growth has made an imprint on the total foreign-born population, where 51 percent claim Latin American origins (including 26 percent from Mexico), compared with only 31 percent from Asia. However, among net foreign-born gains that the nation experienced over 2010-2016, fully 58 percent come from Asia, compared with 28 percent from Latin America.

Moreover, while Mexico is still the largest origin nation of the nation’s foreign-born population at 11.5 million, this population sustained a loss of over 135,000 between 2010 and 2016. China, India, and the Philippines, together comprising 53 percent of the Asian origin foreign-born population, gained a net of 1.3 million immigrants over the 2010-2016 period, which accounted for 63 percent of all Asian immigrant growth.

The other noteworthy shift in foreign born demographics is the higher education attainment associated with recent immigrant gains. Again, a comparison between the total foreign-born and 2010-2016 migrant gains is instructive. Among all 2016 foreign-born adults, ages 25 and older, three in ten hold college degrees and 51 percent have no more than a high school diploma. This nearly reverses for 2010-2016 net migrant gains, for which 52 percent hold college degrees and only 29 percent have not proceeded beyond high school (Comparable numbers for the 2016 U.S. native-born population are 32 percent and 37 percent, respectively).

So instead of fighting about the impact of poor immigrants from Mexico – note that the number of Mexican-born people in the US has declined since 2010 – we are now going to fight about the impact of educated immigrants from Asia. You can already see this happening in the admissions brouhaha at Harvard. I mean, who wants to compete against a million children of ambitious Asian immigrants?

One model of how the US will develop over the next twenty years would be that continued inflows of ambitious people from Asia, west Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere will swell the internationalist elite and lead to ever greater success for big American firms in the global economy. Meanwhile native-born white and black Americans may see their share of leadership slots shrink while housing costs in thriving cities rise out of their reach. Their political representatives may shout even louder for better treatment. Look for things like setting aside university slots for working class people or military veterans to be big flash points.

Matthew 25:35

I Was a Stranger and You Took Me In, otherwise Monument to Strangers and Refugees, by Nigerian-American artist Olu Oguibe. Currently in Kassel, Germany. Text is from the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Jesus is speaking:

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink? And when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? And when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.

More on Immigration and the World Cup

Besides all the children of immigrants who play for European teams, there area also about fifty players in the World Cup who were born in Europe but play for the teams where their parents were born. Thirty-four players for other countries were born in France: 13 play for Morocco, 12 for Senegal, 7 for Tunisia and 2 for Portugal. The Africans at least probably grew up in the same rough Paris suburbs that produced so many French national players. Meanwhile two people born in England play for Nigeria and two born in Belgium play for Morocco. Of Morocco's 23 players, 17 were born in Europe.

One long-term result of recent immigration may be a strengthening of these old colonial ties, as people who have moved back and forth keep up business relationships and friendships.

Immigration and the World Cup

One nice thing about World Cup soccer is that it's the one time millions of people in Western Europe are happy about immigration. Consider the line-up of the French national team, which includes:

Kylian Mbappé, Paul Pogba, N’Golo Kanté, Blaise Matuidi, Benjamin Mendy, Djibril Sidibe, Samuel Umtiti, Presnel Kimpembe, Steven N'Zonzi, Ousmane Dembele, and Nabil Fekir.

These men mostly hail from the concrete banlieues in the outer suburbs of Paris, places usually in the news for terrorism or riots but also one of the world's great hotbeds of soccer talent.

No other country has a team so dominated by the children of immigrants as France, but Belgium will play Mousa Dembele and Romelu Lukaku, England's 23-man squad has Dele Alli and ten Afro-Carribbean players, and Mesut Ozil is by far the most popular Turk in Germany.

Immigration, Dynamism, and the Sort of Country We Want to Be

David Brooks has put all his talents to work in crafting the strongest possible case for immigration. He has, he says, tried several times to write a moderate essay on immigration, because it is his general belief that in any major political dispute there is something to be said for both sides. But in the case of immigration he has been unable to do it:

That’s because when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.

You don’t have to rely on pointy-headed academics. Get in your car. If you start in rural New England and drive down into Appalachia or across into the Upper Midwest you will be driving through county after county with few immigrants. These rural places are often 95 percent white. These places lack the diversity restrictionists say is straining the social fabric.

Are these counties marked by high social cohesion, economic dynamism, surging wages and healthy family values? No. Quite the opposite. They are often marked by economic stagnation, social isolation, family breakdown and high opioid addiction. Charles Murray wrote a whole book, Coming Apart, on the social breakdown among working-class whites, many of whom live in these low immigrant areas.

One of Murray’s points is that “the feasibility of the American project has historically been based on industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity.” It is a blunt fact of life that, these days, immigrants show more of these virtues than the native-born. It’s not genetic. The process of immigration demands and nurtures these virtues.

Over all, America is suffering from a loss of dynamism. New business formation is down. Interstate mobility is down. Americans switch jobs less frequently and more Americans go through the day without ever leaving the house.

But these trends are largely within the native population. Immigrants provide the antidote. They start new businesses at twice the rate of nonimmigrants. Roughly 70 percent of immigrants express confidence in the American dream, compared with only 50 percent of the native-born.

Immigrants have much more traditional views on family structure than the native-born and much lower rates of out-of-wedlock births. They commit much less crime than the native-born. Roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males between 18 and 39 wind up incarcerated compared with 3.3 percent of the native-born.

I consider this argument irrefutable. If what you want is a dynamic, exciting, economically thriving nation, you should support more immigration.

What Brooks misses is that not everybody wants to live in a fast-paced, fast-changing country. Some people mainly want things to be the way they always have, even at the price of being poorer and having less cool stuff. Some people think it's great that we move less than we used to, because they think being home with your family and the other people you grew up with is much better than going to the city and getting rich among strangers. Some people think not changing jobs is also great, and mourn for the days when men could work all their lives in the same factories where their fathers worked. Some people don't want to work twelve hours a day and scrimp and save like immigrant shopkeepers, but want ease and comfort. They think that all the hard-working immigrants are just bidding down the price of labor, making it impossible to earn a decent living at a regular old job. And they suspect that the surge of immigrants and the troubles of the white working class are related, maybe even two sides of the same coin.

Me, I'm on the side of dynamism. I have a miserable daily commute down to Washington, but I have never tried to get out of it. I get a charge of coming down into the Metropolis where a hundred kinds of people are doing a thousand different things, where the person you chat with in the line at an ethnic food truck might be a coder from Serbia or a truck driver from Somalia or a lawyer from Rochester. It feels exciting and alive, and we all have to work a little harder to share in that dynamism, that seems to me a price worth paying.

But I do understand that not everybody wants this, so I have never been able to feel any anger against immigration restrictionists. They want what they want, and it is what half or so of humanity has always wanted. There is nothing inherently evil or racist in wanting to stay home in a place that feels familiar. Brooks' argument does not even touch this whole side of politics, of life. He could write that moderate column if he would glance away form the economic statistics and ask himself instead what it is that people really want, and what really makes them happy.