Tuesday, July 24, 2018

GAVIN NEWSOM'S SHITHOLE SAN FRANCISCO.... "AMERICA'S BIGGEST PUBLIC TOILET"

SAN FRANCISCO IS A SH*THOLE

America's biggest public toilet.




SAN FRANCISCO IS A SH*THOLE

America's biggest public toilet.

July 24, 2018

Frontpagemag.com
In this new video, Paul Joseph Watson discusses San Francisco is a Sh*thole, unveiling America's biggest public toilet. The video serves as a frightening reminder of what Democrats have done with every city they've run. Will yours be next?


Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California  
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 
                                                                                                                
BLOG: MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.

Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.

Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.



If Immigration Creates Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?




California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class.  Today, it is America's poverty capital.  What went wrong?  In a word: immigration.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure, California's poverty rate hovers around 15 percent.  But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn't account for differences in living costs between states – the cost of taxes, housing, and health care are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for example.  Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

Likewise, income inequality in California is the second-highest in America, behind only New York.  In fact, if California were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala.  Mexico is slightly more egalitarian.  California is far more unequal than the "social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176 countries).  In terms of income inequality, California has more in common with banana republics than other "social democracies."

More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations, and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for California's poverty epidemic.  They have some merit.  For example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.

Not only are California's taxes high, but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a sea of red tape.  Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and retard economic growth.  Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government regulation hurts California's poor.  He writes in a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor.  By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average.  Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income."
Some government regulation is necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not.  There is virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the state.  The Orange Country Register reports that California's social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in Romania.  The California benefits package is higher than in well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality is messy.  There are three main problems with the welfare state.  First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government handouts that are often far more valuable than a job.  This can be ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed.  Second, welfare states are expensive.  This means higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets for the poor.  Whether through domestic migration or foreign immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare states.  This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it makes little sense from the taxpayer's.  This fact is why socialism and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.

Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million people.  The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many people came from other states, but the majority came from abroad.  The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million immigrants currently reside in California.  This works out to 26 percent of the state's population.

BLOG: COME TO MEXIFORNIA! HALF OF LOS ANGELES 15 MILLION ARE ILLEGALS!
This figure includes 2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the true number of aliens is at least double that.  Modifying the initial figure implies that nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant.  This is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and economy.

Importantly, immigrants vote Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies.  In California, immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5 million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican voters.  Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories, but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left.  This means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.

REALITIES OF A STATE IN MELTDOWN:


THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA

De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton


Bruce Thornton
Reprinted from Hoover.org.
In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York, the customs agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with a Bronx sneer, “Bruce Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time that California is as much an idea as a place. There were few regions in America more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched. Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley was invisible.
 BLOG: FEINSTEIN & BOXER THREE TIMES ATTEMPTED TO INSERT IN VARIOUS BILLS AN AMNESTY FOR FARM WORKERS TO REPAY THEIR BIG AG BIG DONORS.
ONE-THIRD OF ALL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE AS SOON AS THE ANCHOR BABIES START COMING
Coastal Californians are sometimes just as blind to the world on the other side of the Coast Range, even though its farms, orchards, vineyards, dairies, and ranches comprise more than half the state’s $46 billion agriculture industry, which grows over 400 commodities, including over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts.
Granted, Silicon Valley is an economic colossus compared to the ag industry, but agriculture’s importance can’t be measured just in dollars and cents. Tech, movies, and every other industry tends to forget that their lives and businesses, indeed civilization itself, all rest on the shoulders of those who produce the food. You can live without your iPhone or your Mac or the latest Marvel Studios blockbuster. But you can’t live without the food grown by the one out of a 100 people who work to feed the other 99.
A Politically Invisible Valley
Living in the most conservative counties in the deepest-blue state, Valley residents constantly see their concerns, beliefs, and needs seldom taken into account at the state or federal level.
Registered Democrats in California outnumber registered Republicans by over 19%, and the State Legislature seats about twice as many Democrats as Republicans (California’s one of only eight states nationwide with a trifecta of a Democratic and two Democratic controlled legislative bodies).
California’s Congressional delegation is even more unbalanced: in the House of Representatives, currently there are fourteen Republicans compared to thirty-nine House Democrats (at least half of those GOP districts are in danger of turning blue this fall); half the Republicans represent Central Valley districts, none bordering the Pacific Ocean. The last elected Republican US Senator left office in 1991. The last Republican governor was the politically light-pink action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose second term ended in 2011.
This progressive dominance of the state has led to policies and priorities that has damaged its agricultural economy and seriously degraded the quality of life in the Valley.
Despite a long drought that has diminished the run-off of snow from the Sierra Nevada, projects for dams and reservoirs are on hold, seriously impacting the ag industry that relies on the snowmelt for most of its water. Worse yet, since 2008, a period including the height of the drought, 1.4 trillion gallons of water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish. Thousands of agricultural jobs have been lost and farmland left uncultivated, all to satisfy the sensibilities of affluent urban environmentalists. And even after a few years of abundant rain, Valley farmers this year are receiving just 20% of their South-of-the-Delta water allocation.
Or take California’s high-speed rail project, currently moribund and $10 billion over budget just for construction of the easiest section, through the flat center of the Valley. Meanwhile, State Highway 99, which bisects the Valley from north to south for 500 miles, is pot-holed, inefficient, and crammed with 18-wheel semis. It is the bloodiest highway in the country, in dire need of widening and repair. Yet to gratify our Democratic governor’s high-tech green obsession, billions of dollars are being squandered to create an unnecessary link between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. That’s $10 billion that could have been spent building more reservoirs instead of dumping water into the ocean because there’s no place to store it.
The common thread of these two examples of mismanagement and waste is the romantic environmentalism of the well-heeled coastal left. They serially support government projects and regulations that impact the poor and the aged, whoare left to bear their costs.
The same idealized nature-love has led to regulations and taxes on energy that have made California home of the third-worst energy poverty in the country. In sweltering San Joaquin Valley counties like Madera and Tulare, energy poverty rates are 15% compared to 3–4% in cool, deep-blue coastal enclaves. Impoverished Kings County averages over $500 a month in electric bills, while tony Marin Country, with an average income twice that of Kings County, averages $200. Again, it’s the poor, aged, and working class who bear the brunt of these costs, especially in the Valley where temperatures regularly reach triple digits in the summer; unlike the coast, where the clement climate makes expensive air-conditioning unnecessary.
Deteriorating Quality of Life
It’s no wonder then that Fresno, in the heart of the Valley, is the second most impoverished city in the poorest region of a state that has the highest poverty levels in the country and one of the highest rates of income inequality. Over one-fifth of its residents live below the poverty line, and it has the worst child poverty in California.
from underdeveloped regions of Mexico and Latin
America that have different social and cultural 
mores and attitudes to the law and civic 
responsibility.
The consequences of these feckless policies are 
found throughout the state. But they are 
especially noticeable in rural California. There 
high levels of crime and daily disorder—from 
murders, assaults, and drug trafficking, to 
driving without insurance, DUIs, hit-and-runs, 
and ignoring building and sanitation codes—
have degraded or, in some cases, destroyed the 
once-orderly farming towns that used to be 
populated by earlier immigrants, including 
many legal immigrants from Mexico, who over 
a few generations of sometimes rocky 
coexistence assimilated to American culture 
and society.
Marginalized Cultural Minorities
More broadly, the dominant cultures and mores of the dot.com north and the Hollywood south are inimical to those of the Valley. Whether it is gun-ownership, hunting, church-going, or military service, many people in the San Joaquin Valley of all races are quickly becoming cultural minorities marginalized by the increasingly radical positions on issues such as abortion, guns, and religion.
Despite the liberal assumption that all Hispanics favor progressive policies, many Latino immigrants and their children find more in common with Valley farmers and natives with whom they live and work than they do with distant urban elites.
Indeed, as a vocal conservative professor in the local university (Fresno State), I have survived mainly because my students, now more than half Latino and Mexican immigrants or children of immigrants, are traditional and practical in a way that makes them impatient with the patronizing victim-politics of more affluent professors. They have more experience with physical labor, they are more religious and, like me, they are often the first in their families to graduate from college. As I did with the rural Mexican Americans I grew up with, I usually have more in common with my students than I do with many of my colleagues.
And this is the great irony of the invisibility of the “other” California: the blue-coast policies that suit the prejudices and sensibilities of the affluent have damaged the prospects of the “others of color” they claim they want to help. Over-
represented on the poverty and welfare rolls, many
migrants both legal and illegal have seen water 
policies that destroy agricultural jobs, building 
restrictions that drive up the cost of housing, 
energy policies that increase their cost of living, “sanctuary city” policies that put back on the 
streets thugs and criminals who prey mainly on 
their ethnic fellows, and economic policies that 
favor the redistribution rather than the creation of wealth and jobs.
Meanwhile, the coastal liberals who tout a cosmetic diversity live in a de facto apartheid world, surrounded by those of similar income, taste, and politics. Many look down on the people whom they view as racists and xenophobes at worst, and intellectually challenged rubes at best. This disdain has been evident in the way the media regularly sneer that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is a “former dairy-farmer” from Tulare County, an origin that makes “the match between his backstory and his prominence” seem “wholly incongruous,” per Roll Call's David Hawkings.
Finally, those of us who grew up and live in the rural Valley did so among a genuine diversity, one that reflected the more complex identities beyond the crude categories of “white” or “black” or “Hispanic.”
Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Volga Germans, Scotch-Irish Dust Bowl migrants—all migrated to the Valley to work the fields and better their lives. Their children and grandchildren went to the same schools, danced together and drank together, helped round up each other’s animals when they got loose, were best friends or deadly enemies, dated and intermarried, got drafted into the Army or joined the Marines—all of them Americans who managed to honor their diverse heritages and faiths, but still be a community. Their most important distinctions were not so much between races and ethnicities, though those of course often collided, but between the respectable people––those who obeyed the law, went to church, and raised their kids right––­ and those we all called “no damned good.” Skin-color or accents couldn’t sort one from the other.  
What most of us learned from living in real diversity in the Valley is that being an American means taking people one at a time.
That world still exists, but it is slowly fading away—in part because of the policies and politics of those to our west, who can see nothing on the other side of the Coast Range.

ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.


Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/


The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.

In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.

But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, 

they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While 

Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights 

advocates launched protests against the administration’s 

deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, 

in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days 

later, the administration announced that it would defer the 

deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in 

the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. 

Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing 

pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that 

because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was 

lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race 

for re-election.”

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”

The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.

One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?

A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.

What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to  be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.

Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.

Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.

In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”

In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.

The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)