Posted on 09/23/2014 4:56:01 AM PDT by Kaslin
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 10 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.
The opening of Ellis Island coincided with a shift of immigration from Northwestern Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe. These people were not just seeking economic opportunity. Rather, as I argued in my 2013 book, "Shaping Our Nation," they were second-caste residents of multi-ethnic states -- Jews from the Czarist and Austro-Hungarian empires, Poles from those nations and Germany, Czechs and Slovaks, Slovenes and Serbs from Austria-Hungary and the Balkans, Southern Italians from a recently unified northern-dominated Kingdom of Italy.
For these second-caste citizens, America's prime attraction was the principle of equal citizenship. As George Washington told the elders of the Touro Synagogue, toleration in America was not a favor from the majority, but a recognition that "all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship."
As Clark notes, there was a lot of upward mobility among these groups -- most spectacularly among Jews, but also among Italians, Poles and other minorities who exceeded national income averages by the 1950s. It was matched during these years also by the cumulative but slower upward mobility of Irish Catholics who arrived between the 1840s and 1890s.
The Ellis Islanders, blocked from upward mobility at home, brought to America advantages of genetic endowment and cultural tradition -- nature and nurture -- which enabled them to move upward unusually rapidly.
Asian immigrants seem to be moving upward similarly today. But not the group the Census Bureau calls Hispanics. In my 2001 book, "The New Americans," I predicted that Hispanics would move upward, much as Italians had a century before. That was overoptimistic. There has been little or no upward mobility among third- and fourth-generation Hispanics.
Why the difference? One reason is that current Hispanic immigrants seem to be characterized by economic need rather than second-class status. Immigrants from Mexico and illegal immigrants (mostly from Mexico) are particularly downscale.
The second reason is that the America that welcomes them is no longer a nation with equal citizenship for all, but a nation that shunts them into a special supposedly privileged but also stigmatized minority group. Anomalously, racial quotas and preferences benefit those never discriminated against in the United States.
Some preferences have hurt more than helped. Steering mortgages to non-creditworthy Hispanics produced foreclosures and personal tragedies -- and a financial crisis. As author Michael Gonzalez notes, Hispanic advancement has been minimal in California with its high welfare spending and taxes. Hispanics have done better in low-welfare, low-tax, high-economic-growth Texas.
There's an obvious lesson here for immigration policy. Immigration can promote social mobility, but not always. The United States got high-skill immigrants in the Ellis Island period largely by happenstance. Today, Canada and Australia profit from upward mobility because their immigration laws admit only those with high skills. If we want similar results, we should follow their lead.
The cost of caring for this massive influx of illegals is devastating the economy of the USA.
This should be the Republican message to Hispanics!
Is he talking in this report about LEGAL immigrants?
Those that are here illegally are looking for a handout from the government, not a legitimate job where you pay taxes. This, of course, would keep them in a “second class” status because they want to be taken care of and not improve themselves by assimilating into the culture. I’m guessing that they also aren’t pursuing college as much as other immigrants.
One word: Obola.
I expected to hate this article. In the end, I didn’t.
How about 2 words....Obola and GOP. Theyre both up to their ears in this and neither is interested in enforcing the current laws. Its should be clear that neither party is interested in the welfare of the country. So, lets give credit where credit is due.
US history is being scrubbed from curricula. The WH ding-a-ling's obsession w/ emptying out the Third World into the US is turning US schools into refugeecamps........w/ big plans to inculcate the savage illiterates w/ hate-America, anti-American ideology....IOW reliable Democrat voters.
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REFERENCE--Subversive Texas Textbooks---distributed nationwide--- vilify conservative groups;
Breitbart Texas | 09/10/2014 | Merrill Hope / FR Posted by Rusty0604
In 2006, uber-liberal "Texas Rising" stated its mission: "developing an emerging generation of social justice-minded, informed and engaged leaders is essential to the long-term health of our communities and the development of progressive public policy in Texas."
...a sneak peak at the preliminary Social Studies textbook found including distortions, omissions and half- truths all passing for accurate high school US history...
And there's this gem: "The radical right consists of groups that sometimes gather under the flag of militant anticommunism. Often known as reactionaries, they denounce most forms of government regulation, including progressive taxation and restrictions and industry.Examples of political groups on the radical right are the John Birch Society, the National States & Rights party, The Christian Crusade, and the Tea Party movement."
Strangely enough, these cream puff radicals who abhor police power would not hesitate to use government police power to enforce the changes they desire.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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THIRD WORLD INFILTRATION College Board exams changed history answers... revisionist historians developed different answers to the question of what America’s story is about. From their perspective, at the heart of our country’s history—like the history of any other powerful nation—lies the pursuit of empire, of dominion over others. At its core, say the revisionists, America’s history is about our capacity for self-delusion, our endless attempts to justify raw power grabs with pretty fairy-tales about democracy. ....
NOTE WELL: This terrifying Third World revisionism is straight out of Third World textbooks---emphasizing the T/W effort to undermine US ntl security for the coming armed takeover.
The conniving T/W uses an ancient formula going back to Greco-Roman times---where savages, barbarians and thieves overrun a bountiful country lusting after its power and riches.
REFERENCE Some 10 years back, Texas schools started used Mexican textbooks for their backward illiterate Spanish-speaking students. Textbooks advocated the Mexican perspective including:
<><> anti-white, anti-capitalist anti-USA viewpoints;
<><> Mexican textbooks falsified US history,
<><> proselytized blood-thirsty La Raza savagery;
<><> using teaching as brainwashing;
<><> inculcating violent separatist, latino supremacy idealogy.
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REALITY CHECK A primetime network news segment focused on an "impoverished" latino mother who paid big bucks to get her son coached to take the College Boards---but he was so stupid, he still couldn't pass them. So the C/B summarily "changed" the tests so that Pedro could pass using subversive Third World hate-filled US history.
And this immigration was overwhelmingly European. Now we have just the opposite with both legal and illegal immigration being largely Hispanic and very ethnically/racially different. In addition we have a political system that is specifically anti-white and enforces these racial differences.
What has changed over the years is that the U.S. has become an economy built on personal consumption rather than production. What this means is that it is now in our best interests to flood the place with as many immigrants as possible no matter how well they assimilate — or even if they assimilate at all. All that matters is that they buy a lot of crap and keep the wheels of American businesses churning. And if they aren’t even capable of earning a living themselves then we’ll just add to our $17T national debt and get Asian holders of U.S. bonds to finance their consumption.
NOT so the Mexicans and others from south of the US border.
THEY hate the US and American values, traditions, laws...etc. They waste no opportunity to emphasize how much they are NOT and never will BE American. LA RAZA ring a bell?
They will NEVER assimilate and cannot be compared to immigrants who came here in the past with every interest in becoming AMERICAN!!!
I disagree. Hispanics today are not held down by economic need. They, like the vast majority of blacks, are held down by refusing to assimilate into American culture. They refuse to, as the blacks say, act white, and thus they block themselves off from advancement.
We in these United States have developed a culture where everyone can succeed. It is perhaps the only culture in the world that empowers people this way.
Refusing to participate fully in that culture keeps people trapped in the culture they came from. Blacks remain trapped as economic slaves because they refuse to give up the slave culture. Hispanics remain trapped as mexican peasants because they refuse to give up the peasant culture.
With the exception of the poverty pimps, drug dealers, rappers and professional athletes, every successful black or hispanic has embraced the greater American culture.
Bill Cosby, Allen West, Ben Carson, Thomas Sowell etc etc etc are not “black” as we normally think of black. They are “us” with really good tans.
The same is true for the successful blacks I know in my own real life. These are hard-working, church-going, family people. For the most part they have the same culture that I do. I am as comfortable in their living room as I am in my own, why? Because we share the same culture. They are me with good really tans.
(And alternately the (admittedly few) unsuccessful blacks I know are still mired in the slave culture)
Of course Canada and Australia still buy into the whole notion of HAVING immigration laws...
“This should be the Republican message to Hispanics!”
It should be but one, they don’t get it and two, they are
already conditioned to jackleg tyranny. And the ones that
are capable of understanding it are afraid of the responsibility
of being a sovereign individual citizen.
In other words, we are importing permanent welfare recipients.
I’m currently in Miami and the Cubans here seem to be happy to live like they’re still in Havana. They relieve themselves on the street and refuse to speak english. You should of seen what it took to try to order a sandwich in a local Subway...
Isn’t this a new revelation for Barone? I thought he was one of those ‘come one come all the more the merrier types’?
There is a fundamentally different mind set between a legal and illegal..
legal immigrates come here to be part of the county to move up to grow.. to be Americans
Illegals come to to get what the can and sent back..
Truth is i grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood.
The legal Hispanic immigrants moved up fast.. there want to be Americans and were some the best you could ask for.. funny I think most Americans find the true legal immigrants make some of the best Americans because they know what they're here for and they know what this country is about
The illegals. . Not so. to the illegal, America is just something to take advantage of and exploit ..they have no respect for it and its peoples.. they shown it by their very first act by the way they came here... America is not something to be respected but be exploited.
And the truth was the legals Hispanic immigrants detested the illegals ..
Why are Hispanic failing to move up?.. because the majority (the illegals) have no respect for the country the USA and it people are just somthing to exploit.
There is a fundamentally different mind set between a legal and illegal..
legal immigrates come here to be part of the county to move up to grow.. to be Americans
Illegals come to to get what the can and sent back..
Truth is i grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood.
The legal hispanic moved up fast.. there want to be Americans and were some the best you could ask for.
The illegals. . Not so..
And the truth was the legals hispanic immigrants detested the lllegals ..
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