Dystopia 2018

I hate to keep harping on this, I really do, but the new information coming out in rebuttal to Donald Trump—and the Republican party in general as they lean ever more in his direction—is just so fascinating to me. This article puts cold hard numbers to Republican claims (because Cruz is saying it too now, dear Lord help us all) that they will deport all undocumented immigrants in the nation by 2018. Even if such a thing were possible, which I doubt, this study finds that it would cost the nation upwards of four hundred billion dollars, and even that assuming that 20% of the undocumented population leaves the country voluntarily. And if that weren’t enough like the Twilight Zone, this is a study put out by conservatives against their own candidates. If the implications weren’t so completely terrifying, this would be the most enjoyable election season I’ve ever had the pleasure to witness, simply because of the completely incredible nature of some of the issues being raised here.

Deporting All Undocumented Immigrants

Multinational America

I already have next weeks blog post written and scheduled so I won't write anything much on this one, but golly this map is COOL I just had to share it. It basically shows everything I've ever thought about our country's different cultures on a map! I always knew I was culturally immigrating driving between home in El Norte and school in The Left Coast, but now it's all there in a lovely little graphic for everyone to enjoy.

The 11 nations of the United States

Modeled Minorities

"Only at an economics conference will people talk for two hours about immigration and never mention Donald Trump."

So opens this article, a look at a recent San Francisco economics conference at which a paper was presented on the modeled effects of an influx of low-skill immigrant workers on native low-skill workers in a given trade. While the researchers found that this situation leads to an increase in trade, it also leads to wage stagnation as the supply of workers grows to meet the demand. However, in this situation, they also found that the native low-skilled workers are more likely to seek after more job training to become mid-skilled workers, thereby bettering their circumstances by lifting themselves out of competition from the new immigrant populations. Though these results are just modeled and there is some question of whether real live people would follow these patterns, they are an interesting rebuttal to the kind of rhetoric usually thrown around when jobs and immigrants are mentioned in the same sentence.

Immigrants might be holding your salary down--and making you better off anyway

Trickle-down Amnesty

This article is really just a blurb, and I feel a little guilty about posting it when its so small, but golly what a wonderful thing it is. It describes the recent changes New York, California, and a few other states have made to their policy regarding the granting of certain professional licenses to undocumented workers. This is the first I’ve heard of such a change, and I think it’s absolutely wonderful. The implications of such a policy are incredible. First, there would have to be a certain level of amnesty for those undocumented people receiving the new professional licenses, which can only improve their lives and the lives of their families. Second, many of these licenses would be given out in areas of shortage in our communities, such as nursing and elementary school teaching. This has a four-fold advantage: first, this helps take the burden off the other members of those professions by helping bear some of the load with newly qualified workers, second, the immigrants being given these licenses are able to work at the level at which they are qualified, which means that, third, they do not have to accept unskilled labor positions which then, fourth, frees those positions for other immigrants who may not have the qualifications for any other position. 

Changes to Immigrant Work Licenses

A Cartographer's Holiday

I’ve really got a great amount of enjoyment out of the interesting immigration maps that people keep posting as parts of their blogs, so I’ve gone out and found an article made up of 37 of them. There is so much here that it’s really hard to write up a summary for it. Included in this article are maps for almost every kind of immigration data you could wish for, maps by county, maps by state, maps by nation; it deals with slavery, past and present, immigrants sorted by impetus, location, time, and even has a mention for the most famous metal immigrant of all, Lady Liberty herself. My favorite I think is number eleven, listed as ‘An insanely detailed map of immigrants in America from 1903’ which features ethnic groups as obscure as Teutonic (my people!), Iberic, and Mongolic, and then turns right around and racially stereotypes the latter two groups as having ‘poorer mental and physical equipment’ than some others listed. Just enjoy this one, it’s truly an exploration into all the differing ways immigrants and immigration can be depicted in cartographic form.

37 American Immigration Maps

Strangers in a Familiar Land

A few weeks ago, the comment was made in class that people might be better off if our poor were refugees of hunger in each other’s countries. This article makes the case not precisely for this circumstance, but for the opening of all borders, everywhere. The potentials of this as laid out in the article are mouth-watering: a doubled world GDP, incredible amounts of anti-poverty aid happening naturally as border disparities normalize, and freedom from expensive vigilance of borders and those that cross them. It seems that we have everything to gain and nothing to lose, except perhaps for some fragile, internal perception of ourselves. While this article is written very broadly and the opening of all borders is by no means yet a thing which could happen practically in the near future, it does raise many interesting questions. What would be threatened by such an action? Our culture, our ‘way-of-life’? Surely not. More likely our homogeneity, our us-versus-them mentality, our racism, our xenophobia. We could be forced to become, as in the final words of the article, “a world unafraid of itself”. 

The Case for Getting Rid of Borders

Status: It's Complicated

It seems unimaginable even to me, a dial-up child of punch-card parents, that Cuba got its first experience of WiFi just last fall. It’s unimaginable for a lot of reasons, not greatest that Fidel ‘Just-to-darn-mean-to-die’ Castro really does have that tight a grip on his island nation, and not least that the rest of the world let their fear of him prevent them from reaching out to the people under his thumb for so long. The normalization of relations with Cuba was a long time coming; too long, if I am any judge. I know America as a nation can hold a long grudge, but I think better of the American people than I do of our country.

At least in this I have not been disappointed. Less than a year after Cuba was ushered into the wire-free echelons of the information age, our peoples have reached out to each other and made a new path out of Cuba, not by boat or by air but by friendly connections and a ring of satellites. At the incredible speed of social media, Cubans are finding their way north. Let’s hope this is only the first of many new things for our two nations. We may not be friends in the traditional sense of the word, but we are on Facebook.

Social Media to the US