Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Immigration


The legacy of Bidenomics is much clearer: surging public debt, feeble productivity growth, a degradation of the nation’s energy capacity, and a return to industrial policy based on the fantasy proposition that government can pick winners.
Bidenomics should be judged, not on the inflation and unemployment rate in a year’s time, but on the economy’s potential in a decade.--Baker

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From a paper: Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

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The Cato Institute’s recent 2023 national survey on central bank digital currency (CBDC) yielded troubling findings about younger Americans’ affinity for government surveillance within their own homes. Nearly a third (29 percent) of those age 18–29 support “‘the government installing surveillance cameras in every household’ in order to ‘reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,’” the Cato Institute reports. This figure is more than twice as large as that for the general population: 14 percent




Immigration

Conservatives lacking confidence in the nation’s capacity for assimilation should know that among the 11 million (down from 12.3 million in 2007) illegal immigrants, 62 percent have been here at least 10 years, 21 percent at least 20 years, only 15 percent for less than five years, and 35 percent own their homes. They have assimilated.

Immigration, “the sincerest form of flattery,” is an entrepreneurial act: Families who risk everything by walking from Guatemala to Texas will probably enhance American industriousness.

Immigrants are prolific at starting companies — [Tim] Kane says start-ups create 3 million jobs a year, and “there is no net job creation” without them. Ignore the “lump of labor” fallacy that there is a fixed amount of work, hence a fixed demand for workers. (Do you remember how the nation suffered when tractors displaced agricultural workers? No, you don’t.)--Will

As an aside, there is a high school in LA whose students are fifth-generation Hispanics and English is not spoken. Yet the point remains: to identify these deserving people and separate them from those that are a risk to the country. The country needs immigrants and should be able to determine which ones.

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