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 proimmigration 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.”It's a good question. You can read their answer, and think about it for yourselves.
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama....
“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?
Immigration Has No Downsides
A reflection in the Atlantic.
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9 comments:
I have dealt with the downside to illegal immigration ever since the 70's. For me, there was never any part of it that helped. There was nothing that made my life better, richer or more enjoyable.
Illegal change damages a community. It hurts people.
Decades ago my wife was driving alone to pick up the children. An illegal immigrant, driving illegally drove through a intersection and smashed into her car. It was totaled. She was hurt, but eventually physically recovered. For the rest of her life she stiffened up and held her breath anytime she heard screeching tires. Now I am probably the only person left on the planet who remembers that day from her perspective.
The illegal immigrant driver who hurt her was never found. All the police had was the fake ID he left at the scene.
Washington D.C. does not care about her, or me, or our children.
In addition to your proper and valid concerns about illegality in immigration, there are some downsides to immigration even when it's legal. Whole communities near where I grew up ceased to be as property taxes rose from perfectly legal immigration from the American north. They did bring increased wealth (which also has both good and bad effects on a community), but they destroyed stable communities quite completely.
These were communities not much mourned by American society, which would have regarded them as backwards Southerners. But they were communities in which people went to the same church as their grandfathers, worked in the business he or their father or uncle had founded, and had the means to get by both economically and morally. They didn't have trouble finding a place in the world.
Well, all gone now.
Well, that's all nice and intellectual, with a whole bundle of pragmatic excuses, but it leaves out the (forgive the expression) elephant in the room, which is the massive propaganda machine funded by George Soros, Carlos Slim, and other astoundingly wealthy people and actuated through the only two major political "news" vendors, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
This mess is further buttressed by the successors to the Journolist, David Brock's online faux supporters, Correct the Record, Media Matters, and the luridly flappable CNN. The Atlantic is a satellite publisher in this universe. Its succession of articles speaks for itself.
Those of us who notice TV and online activity have caught and documented evidence of co-ordination among the captive Democratic Party media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5vv8wv/media_collusion_the_picture_says_a_thousand_words/
It's real, but not guided by any philosophy or principle, and as a result, is philosophically incoherent.
Co-ordination was a joke on Conan O'Brien in 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o9x-yDyN78
This has led to a lot of jokes about Fake News, as well as jokes about how leftists are being forced to flip-flop ("WTF? I love/hate _______ now") as David Brock's sock puppets engage in dramatic, incoherent reversals.
I believe this last item explains the Atlantic article. It is a paid attempt to justify what really amounts to a large number of policy reversals by leftists that make no sense, unless they are unprincipled responses to demands by donors.
Valerie
I would say that there's more than responses to donors at work: I think there's been a real shift in the intellectual culture, too. The left really believes that it's going to permanently transform America by flooding it with immigrants who will have the good sense to vote for a more left, more socialist politics than the Americans who were born here tend to do.
That leads to a reframing of the discussion to eliminate any negatives, and to talk about immigration as always positive and something we need more of regardless of current levels. They don't need to be paid to say that; it's in their interests to say it, given what they believe.
Of course, many are also paid -- and not just by a few billionaires, but also by major corporations that want to drive down wages inside the United States. That's also in their interests to say; you might say that they're paying themselves by saying it.
Ask that the policeman at the Flint airport if immigration has a downside.
Flint, Michigan: Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” stabs police officer in “possible act of terrorism”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/06/flint-michigan-muslim-screaming-allahu-akbar-stabs-police-officer-in-possible-act-of-terrorism
For that matter, ask Nabra Hassanen, herself a Muslim. She was killed by an illegal immigrant who got mad at her group for riding bikes along a roadside in the dark.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4619826/Man-accused-killing-Muslim-girl-illegally.html?ito=social-facebook
Politicians treat us as part of a herd, and as long as the herd grows in numbers, and votes the way the politicians want, the politicians are happy. My community used to have a lot of people who spoke English. When my daughter went to Open School night for my grandson she was the only person in the English room. Everyone else was in the Spanish room. If politicians wanted "diversity", they failed.
Grim, Immigration sucks for Native Americans and Native American Computer science grads.
Vox day points out that immigration has many downsides in this timely post .
The cloud people strike again! Tribalism is alive and well apparently.
"Infosys maintains [more than 20,000] employees working in the United States," Green's suit said. While less than 5 percent of the U. S. population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93 percent to 94 percent of Infosys's United States workforce "is of the South Asian national origin, (primarily Indian)."
Link to two articles.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/06/those-talented-immigrants.html
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/06/21/white-ex-employee-infosys-plano-filessuit-claims-company-favored-workersfrom-india
-Mississippi
clarification....
by Native American, I mean American born in the historical view of the 1950 demographics, not the pre American born before 1492 era........
-Mississippi
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