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

Chasing the Vote

I feel like the most damaging thing about Donald Trump’s rise to power is how none of us can seem to stop talking about him. Every new outrageous thing he does just fuels the fire and gives him yet another round of free publicity. Goodness knows I’ve tried to keep from continually posting about him week after week, and if not about Trump directly then about the fears his rhetoric have stirred up in the American immigrant community, legal or otherwise, but I have found it to be virtually impossible. Here, at least, is something worthwhile that has come out of all this kerfluffle.

I found too many articles to count dealing with the number of legal residents in the US who have decided to naturalize in order to gain a voice against Trump—and a measure of safety from him, too, it must be said. I decided this was the best as it was from a very credible source, but I am a little saddened that I couldn’t share the one which featured an ad from an online naturalization service. It featured a featureless drawing of a little orange man with flyaway yellow hair and the caption: Scared? Don’t Be. 

Immigrants Naturalize to Vote

Stop-Gap

We talked about this in class, gosh, I don't even know how long ago, how the welcoming of immigrants actually improves the economy of the United States, contrary to popular belief. I'm just really pleased to have found such a great example of it in this article.

The biggest factor that was a surprise to me is the impact of immigrants on the changing demographics of America. I’ve been hearing for years that the Baby Boomers are retiring, that our population is getting older on the average, and that sooner or later we’ll have a lot more retirees than we have work force to replace them. Reading this article, which touts immigrants as a potential solution to this problem, was like a huge aha moment. Of course immigrants are good for our economy—they’re filling a gap.

This is an issue that’s close to my heart as I, too, hope to fill a gap in the near future. I’m going to a foreign medical school as the American schools are too full to take me. But the American schools also aren’t producing enough doctors to care for our aging population, so us American graduates of foreign medical schools are going to fill the gap—just like immigrants are doing elsewhere.

Welcoming Immigrants

"Edumacation"

edumacation

Noun. Used to refer to an education that someone received at a bad school, or a lack of education all together.

(First off, apologies for lateness, I've succumbed to the dorm-flu that's going around and so wasn't very prepared, and then the campus internet stopped working)

When Donald Trump was boasting about his latest victory, he made a very exuberant speech about how much he "love[d] the poorly educated". This stands to reason, as we've known for years that education is the biggest stumbling block to Republican agendas. The more highly educated a voter is, the more likely they are to be liberal (and I also apologize for not finding the sources for these--I read them somewhere once, I promise). This is part of the reason No Child Left Behind was pushed through by a Republican administration and torn down by a Democrat--teaching to the bottom third of the class will under educate the rest. For immigrants facing language and culture hurdles and for illegal immigrants especially, this issue is even more critical, as education is also the path to the American Dream, such as it still exists, of immigrant's children rising above their parents. For the half of the Los Angeles school-going population who are Latinx and the 10% who are undocumented, this new move on the part of the school board will make an enormous difference. The world outside of school might still be dangerous, but at least those cares can be put on hold at the classroom door.

Los Angeles School Safe Zone

Mexico

Here is a nice little article that I found from our good friends at Pew Research Center which debunks some common myths about Mexican Immigration. Quite a bit of it was news to me, though it fits in with the way I’ve been thinking lately. For example, according to the article, only about 30% of Mexican adults would move to the US if they had the chance, which is a vastly smaller number than most Americans would estimate. I think our perceptions are skewed by our border’s close proximity to some of the poorest regions of Mexico, and we tend to forget that the fabulous and luxurious tourist destinations of Cabo San Lucas and Ensenada are even part of the same world much less the same country. Americans have a conception of Mexico as sort of vaguely second-or-third-world, when in fact many parts of the country are very well developed. We also tend to forget that there are parts of America which are not super-fabulous modernity embodied.

Mexico and Immigration to US

'White' People

I talked in my Ben Franklin reflection paper about the annoyance some white people feel (myself included, I confess) when they have to check the 'white' box on race and ethnicity forms. I know we don't really have space to complain in the face of the extreme white privilege being evidenced virtually every night on national television, but all the same there's no denying the fact that the 'white' box does erase the ethnic diversity within whiteness. Worse still is the moniker 'Caucasian', which, taken literally, is an demonym referring to people who live in/hail from the Caucasus Mountains, which straddle the Europe-Asia continental divide. I'm not Caucasian; I'm half  'American mutt', admittedly, but I'm also a quarter Czechslovak and a quarter German. I speak German at home and bake koláče for Easter, and those sorts of cultural differences used to be more acknowledged when they were the biggest differences between immigrants. Now with something as insurmountable as skin color and visible 'race' in the way, they are being forgotten. That's a tragedy, I think. We're lumping in Chinese, Tibetans, and Japanese under the banner of 'Asian' when those groups have had enmity for years. We're losing sight of the differences between Argentinian and Bolivian, losing languages and foods and cultural traditions that once made life so much more colorful. But we can't forget that we're also losing dirndles and Tyrolian hats and presents opened by candle-light on Christmas Eve. Its sad what we're doing to diversity by recognizing only 'all the colors of the world': red, yellow, black, white, as in the song, and also brown, and Middle Eastern and Latinx? Seven little categories, one for each billion of us.

The article below isn't much more than we've been talking about in class, really, I just thought it was an excellent graphical representation of that discussion. It shows the transition from a nation made up of white immigrants from different places to a nation made up of white 'natives' and PoC 'interlopers' rather well. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the change in views I've been thinking about matched up with that sudden shift from Germany to Mexico.

A Shift From Germany to Mexico

Legal Language

Jumping off Megan's post from last week, which dealt with issues of race as they relate to the current Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and my own post from last week, which dealt with the fear of authority undocumented immigrants live with on a day to day basis, I have found an article which combines these two issues. In an effort to prevent non-Flint residents from accessing the water support which had been pouring (ha) in from around the country, local authorities have been asking to see identification before they release clean water. For those without identification, this can be hugely damaging as these people are then forced to purchase their water or go without. Even more troubling is the fact that no effort has been made to reach out to those in the community who do not understand English well enough to understand what is going on. There is a story in this article about a woman who just kept drinking the tap water until only 3 weeks ago, though the crisis has been well known and talked about for much, much longer than that.

Emergency Water in Flint is Not Reaching Undocumented Immigrants

Illegality

For all the talk that always goes on about illegal immigration, it is extremely rare that we ever hear any voices speaking from within that experience. This is largely due to the extreme danger that undocumented immigrants experience when they allow their status as such to become known. This tenuous state of being is highlighted in item #3 of this article, wherein the author describes his childhood as an undocumented immigrant as having “all the secrecy of being a superspy, but none of the attendant casual sex with hilariously-named women”.

The tongue-in-cheek style of this article invites the reader to really relate to this subset of the American experience which is so often discussed but hardly ever understood. By allowing themselves to relate, the reader is opened to empathy. Once empathy with a maligned group has been achieved, judgement and prejudice begin to recede, and true community can be fostered. The immigration may be illegal, but the people who are immigrating are not. People cannot be illegal, and if the issue of illegal immigration is to be solved in a humanitarian way, that philosophy must be at the heart of the effort. For the average person, this article and others like it, which open our awareness to the realities of these undocumented individuals, may be a good starting point. 

5 Weird Realities of Growing Up with 'Illegal' Parents

The Best of Times, etc

Times are bad. Donald Trump’s campaign ad sounds half like a Saturday Night Live sketch and half like it came straight from a dystopian vision of a dark future. It is scary because it is real, and because we should have history to warn us. Even leaving aside the comparisons to Hitler which have been making the rounds on the internet since Trump’s off handed comment about giving Muslims special ID cards, history has already showed us what bad things come of racial/ethnic intolerance and closing borders to arbitrarily defined segments of humanity. Dark periods such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese internment remain disfiguring blots on the history of a nation that continues to tout itself as accepting and open to the “tired… poor… huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (thank you, Emma Lazarus).

To paraphrase an angry internet rant I read the other day, the Republican debates consist of the sons of immigrants arguing over which of them is going to keep the most immigrants out of our country. This combined with the refusal of many American cities to allow Syrian refugees, the continued persecution of Muslim Americans, and, indeed, the continued persecution of all non-white Americans, really makes a poor showing for the “Mother of Exiles”, the country with the “golden door”. It seems to me that we’re not treating the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” any better than  wretched refuse ourselves.

And in light of all that, it just really made me smile to read about immigrants being delighted by fireflies and clean streets and not having to bribe people to get your driving license. Living in America, we are too used to all the good here, and see the bad so starkly. It’s not to say that we aren’t doing (or contemplating) bad and scary things, but it was a nice perspective, seeing our country through their eyes.

The Best Things About America