A suggestion.......................

 

• In the short term, I would love to see the Feds and sanctuary cities negotiating local agreements to avoid the Minnesota chaos.  The Feds could agree that if the city cooperates on immigrants who have committed crimes on an agreed list, they will not take enforcement actions against others in the city.  In other words, the Feds agree that if the city will hand over their violent and repeat offenders, the Feds will leave the day laborers at the Home Depot alone.  Then if the city still objects, the Feds can publicly proclaim that they only wanted to deport criminals and the city wanted to keep them.  The PR battle they are losing now could go the other way.

-Warren Meyer, from this post, with a P.S.

 about an hour after I hit publish, the Trump Administration began signaling that looks very close to the first two suggestions above.  We shall see, though this Administration tends to stick to a policy position about as long as a 5-year-old who has mainlined 3 Hershey Bars stays on task.

Crack my head  up...........

A legal immigrant......................

...........has many questions and a few observations:

 Here’s a common-sense proposition: Since we can’t invite the whole world inside our borders, let’s consider the matter as one of optimal limits. Once the need to restrain immigration is acknowledged, the next step should be to seek consensus on the practicalities—the maximum number the country can absorb each year, the skills we most urgently need to import, and, of course, the most transparent and fair process for those arriving, as I once did, on the shores of this fortunate land.

In other words, our attention must turn fully to legality, not illegality. That should be the content of the politics of immigration: devising rules and procedures for legal entry that are intuitive to Americans as well as to potential migrants. The current system, we should accept, is a soul-devouring labyrinth that deserves to be demolished in its entirety.

-Martin Gurri

On immigration........................

 

Two things can be true at once (and yes, I should get this phrase tattooed on my person): The Trump administration can embrace a more eugenic immigration philosophy genuinely at odds with Episcopalian beliefs (all souls being equal and such) and the Afrikaners can be legitimate refugees who are in danger. We’ve grown so accustomed to refugee applying only to “young men seeking economic opportunity” that we forgot that not all refugees are ambitious 23-year-old Moroccans looking to enjoy the greatness of capitalism! Me, I’m balanced: pro-immigration but neither racist nor anti-racist. I don’t care if you’re a Dutchman or a Moroccan. I just believe our border entry should be determined by a combination IQ and physical fitness test, a quick grade on baby-rocking ability, see how long it takes you to down a Triple Dipper, then Jordan Peterson personally deciding if you’re too neurotic, and boom—welcome to America. 

-Nellie Bowles, from this episode

the missing ladder......................

      Unlike earlier newcomers, today's immigrants find it difficult, in rapidly deindustrializing economies with slow growth, to secure the kind of work that might provide a ladder to the middle class.  Mass migration has not created the vibrant multicultural future expected by some, but instead has created much of the poverty and social disorder that characterized large European cities in the nineteenth century. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Highly recommended.............

      Lincoln shook hands with the bedraggled Irishmen, offering encouragement.  Bull Run was just one battle, not the war.  Next time would be better, and there was certainly a place in the vast new American force for the immigrants.  More than a nod to ethnic tolerance, Lincoln needed the nearly two million Irish in the country to fight for a splintered nation.  Northern factory owners, businessmen and Main Street merchants weren't about to give up their livelihoods to risk death in the South.  The farmers, from whose ranks the American revolutionists had drawn some of their best marksmen, were seasoned soldiers—available mainly in the winter, when fields were dormant but fighting was a logistical nightmare.  The urban poor, the immigrants without trades, might have to form the backbone of the new Union Army.  Whether then would die for this country was still an open question.  To Lincoln's kind words, the Irish 69th gave a president they would never vote for a Gaelic cheer.  He was moved, a crooked smile breaking the untertaker's face—"I confess I rather like it."  Was there anything he could do for them?  Be honest, he told the men.  Meagher stepped forward.  Since being thrown from his horse, and losing friends to combat, the shine of the orator was gone.  He looked haggard, with lips tight, eyes clouded, a full half foot shorter than Lincoln.

     "Mr. President, I have a cause of grievance."

      "Yes."

       "The morning I went to Colonel Sherman and he threatened to shoot me."

        Lincoln tipped his head, puzzled.  Unwilling to get in the middle of a spat between officers, he threw off a joke, with some truth to it.  "If I were you," he said, "and he threatened to shoot, I would trust him."  For one of the few times in his life Meagher was speechless.  Still, the 69th was mustered out of duty for a few days leave to return home, as the Irish captain had requested.  Lincoln would remember Thomas Francis Meagher.

The year was 1901............................

     Roosevelt could see little relief for the rural unemployed in the immediate future.  A place like York,  Pennsylvania . . . was the typical country town grown too big.  There were more than a thousand such cities across the nation.  For its new poor, York offered only more poverty.  A laborer might trade his hoe for a hammer, but a few extra dollars a week, the increment was meaningless, given urban costs.  His children would still run barefoot through November, and in midwinter their breath would be ice on their bedsheets.  Even more wretched than these migrants were the immigrants from unsalubrious parts of Europe further crowding American cities.  Since January, nearly have a million had poured in.  With their greasy kerchiefs and swollen cheekbones, they seemed content to live in any slum and do any work, for pig's wages.  Not surprisingly, the native-born Americans they had supplanted felt rage and ethnic contempt.  Roosevelt's journalist friend William Allen White spoke for many in his syndicated diatribes against "Hunkies and Italians, the very scum of European civilization."

-Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex

Spengler makes a point on..............

.....................historical immigration, and suggests some new lines for the President's Senior Advisor.   History is a complicated thing.  Probably why we don't think too much about it these days.

Acosta repeatedly interrupted Miller, chanting "Give me your tired, your poor...," a line from Emma Lazarus' 1883 sonnet The New Colossus which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. If anything, Miller handled the CNN journalist too gently. He might have said: America had no restrictions to immigration in 1883, and millions of white European immigrants poured into the American heartland. To accommodate them we drove out the Native Americans. By 1890 there were only 250,000 Native Americans left in the United States, compared to 2 million or more before European settlers arrived. In other words, we gave privileges to white people and killed or displaced people of color. You can argue the merits of this policy, but we don't want to return to a situation in which immigration occurs at the expense of people who were here first."

Forging............................

      But America as a whole, once its early Puritan settlement had been diluted by those who followed or those already there, became too much of a mongrel nation to enjoy the simpler organic benefits of union.  Lacking the communal simplicities afforded in some other countries - Japan, say, or Norway - by the existence of one race, one ethnic group, or a single class or a dominant intellectual or spiritual tendency,  the great experiment that is America has had to make a union for itself, not wish it to grow in the dark out of time and nothing.  It has done so purposefully by the deliberate acts of its own people.  Man has had to do the hard work in bringing America together, forging something that in other, less complex places has been accomplished much more simply.

Simon Winchester,  The Men Who United The States:  America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation. Indivisible

Winchester, born in London, England chose to become a naturalized American citizen in 2011.  He is the author of more than a dozen books, most of which are highly interesting, instructive, and readable.

As a matter of history.........................

......................all of us Americans are immigrants (or, our forebears were).  This very cool map gives you a real sense of both from whence all those who arrived by choice came, as well as, starting in 1820, the timing and volume of said arrivals.  Must be something here that attracts people.

Ouch.......................................Part 3

"Our immigration system is a mess... apparently. If you want open borders, it is terrible that so many people who could be working legally instead have to be here illegally. If you want tighter controls, it is terrible that so many people our law should have excluded instead are here, with apparently no intention of doing anything about it. So from both sides of the debate, the situation looks terrible...

"But what if there is a third side? What if there is a side that wants lots and lots of immigrants in the country, but wants them here with as little legal standing as possible, so they are always fearful of being turned in and deported? So they will work lots of hours for low pay and no benefits and not complain?

"When you have an apparent mess on your hands that won't clear up, year after year after year, it is often useful to ask, "Is there someone for whom this is not a mess at all, but the ideal situation?"

"Our screwy tax code is another case where this applies."

-Gene Callahan, this post titled Why Can't Immigration Be "Fixed"?

Lest we forget......................

     Between 1901 and 1910, 8,795,386 immigrants were admitted to the United States, 70 percent were from Southern and Eastern Europe, principally Catholics and Jews.  Between 1911  and 1920, another 5,735,811 people were admitted from abroad, 59 percent of whom came from Southern and Eastern Europe.  By 1910, 40 percent of the population of New York City was foreign-born.

-Louis Menand,  The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America

Just wondering if....................................

.....................................the newest migration patterns will lead to the re-naming of some cities?

Below is a map showing the European places with the word "Saint" in them.  Think it might be different fifty years from now?

via

Marinating.............................

"It took me years of writing on the Internet to learn what is nearly an iron law of commentary: The better your message makes you feel about yourself, the less likely it is that you are convincing anyone else. The messages that make you feel great about yourself (and of course, your like-minded friends) are the ones that suggest you’re a moral giant striding boldly across the landscape, wielding your inescapable ethical logic.  The messages that work are the ones that try to understand what the other side is thinking, on the assumption that they are no better or worse than you. So if you are actually trying to help the Syrian refugees, rather than marinate in your own sensation of overwhelming virtue, you should avoid these tactics." 
-Megan McArdle, as excerpted from this post on "refugee policy"

Am I the only one who thinks .................

........that more than a few emperors are walking around naked today?

What does it say about your policies when it takes a figure like Orban to finally acknowledge that the Emperor is naked?

-As extracted from here.

Only in America.......................................

      There was no incentive, then, to move higher.  And perhaps the office of governor of New York was high enough for one lifetime.  It already marked an extraordinary rise for a boy born in Queens, behind a shop, to immigrants from Italy who spoke no English;  for the son of a grocer in a stained overall who saved crusts for those even needier than he was.  The boy Mario had soared through baseball, law and politics, but to them he was still the lucky scamp, and he would test out his policy ideas on Momma later to get her earthy, tart reaction.  His ideal America was just this, a bickering, diverse family in which each member nonetheless worked for the enterprise and all were in it together;  and where almost no one, certainly not he, so indulged the sin of pride as to think themselves worthy of the very highest place.

-excerpted from this The Economist obituary for Mario Cuomo

On the advantage of "the melting pot"............

One of the amazing historical benefits that have accrued to the United States of America is the high degree to which immigrants of all different ethnic origin have chosen to surrender their ethnicity and become, simply, Americans.  While this is not uniformly true, and while many have sought to make a career out of hyphenated politics, it is true enough to make America different, and stronger, than much of the world.  Perhaps this occurred because people have flocked to these shores by choice, rather than being made part of a "country" designed by foreign powers.  Better historians than me can, and probably already have, sort this out.  Regardless, it certainly can be messy when ethnicity remains a priority and ethnicity does not align with national borders.  For the latest case in point, consider the Kurdish question.

wiki here

Trying (hard) to make sense of it all..............

Victor Davis Hanson rambles on a bit about the state of agriculture, land values, real estate cycles, cynicism vs optimism, immigration, and California.  The man always has an interesting point of view and can cover a lot of ground in a hurry. VDH asks the question, "Does anyone still believe in the old idea of labor laboris gratia?"  I'd say he does.  A few excerpts:

Central California is also a magnet for very rich Punjabis. Their three-story gated castles of 6,000 square feet are suddenly commonplace. For every copper-wire thief, there is an immigrant agribusiness man who smiles and says: “No problem. I just got more barbed wire, more video cameras, more lights” — such an impressive confidence so characteristic of the immigrants who have always energized America.

The Sikh community arrives with capital, English, and education — and wishes to become even richer, better spoken, more highly educated, and more successful. In this nexus, land is not just a wise investment, but immediate proof of visible, tangible success, in the manner of the old idea of a landed aristocracy.

So California is both more poorly managed than any time in its past, more divided between rich and poor, more fragmented by opportunistic ethnic identity politics, more impoverished by massive illegal immigration — and never more naturally wealthy. The other day I drove through the verdant Central Valley on Manning Avenue. Each acre I zoomed by is producing thousands of dollars in global profits. At I-5, I looked out at fracking country, before descending into the land of Facebook, Google, and Apple — all on mostly poor roads, with terrible drivers and third-world public rest stops, and now and then passing inferior schools.

California may be in awful financial, social, civic, and political shape — but it is far, far from broke.