Posted on 09/23/2014 6:32:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
What should we do about immigration policy? It’s a question many are asking, and some useful perspective comes from an article in Foreign Affairs by British-born, California-based historian Gregory Clark, unhelpfully titled, “The American Dream Is an Illusion.”
The dream to which Clark refers is the idea, promoted by Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty, that this is “a country of opportunity for all, a country that invites in the world’s tired, its poor and its huddled masses.”
The problem, says Clark, is that upward mobility is something of a myth, in America and elsewhere. In his recent book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, he shows that advantages that some families have over others — in social position, genetic endowment, traditions of literacy and numeracy — tend to be passed on, not inevitably from parent to child, but persistently and to a considerable extent to descendants for seven and ten generations.
Clark charts the prevalence of last names in high-status occupations and positions over generations. After the 1066 Conquest, Englishmen with Norman surnames appeared disproportionately to population at Oxford and Cambridge in 1170 and in Parliament in 1259. They continue to do so, to a lesser extent, today.
He finds the same phenomenon in Sweden, Chile, Japan, China, and (especially) caste-bound India. Upward and downward mobility exist, but usually at a glacial pace.
An exception, as he notes, is America in the period from 1892, when the Ellis Island immigration station opened, until mass immigration was ended by World War I in 1914 and restrictive legislation in 1924. Ellis Islanders and their descendants rose rapidly up the educational and economic ladder.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
That in today’s reality of no borders they just now come across with no inspection and welcomed with open arms.
Your link about importing democrat voters through Ellis island, doesn’t work.
It may not be a problem with your link, I just clicked on another National Review link elsewhere, and commodo blocked it also.
Try this, it worked for me:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/388614/path-forward-immigration-michael-barone
No, commodo blocked it, I will have to open it up and fix something, it looks like.
Barone is such an amnesty tool. Sad. Used to respect him a lot. But just like John Stossel, when it comes to immigration, he just gets stupid.
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