* Trump has caused everyone to openly state a lot of their unspoken assumptions about immigration. It’s fascinating stuff.
A lot of Americans are guilty about shutting the door to poor, uneducated immigrants because they feel like that’s what their immigrant ancestors were like. From what I can tell, all my immigrant ancestors were fairly well-off petite bourgeoisie types, so I’ve never felt that sort of guilt.
Maybe part of this is that people are basing their impressions of their immigrant ancestors based on movies and TV, and don’t realize that by 1880s standards, immigrants from Europe to the United States were pretty well-educated and pretty well-off materially.
* I’m growing on the radical notion of local community sponsorship. If the local community is responsible for integrating and assimilating the newcomers, let the local community decide:
1 Whom to invite and using what criteria to select
2 From where and which cultures can be integrated
3 How many to accept and how much concentration from a particular origin is manageable
4 How to manage risks of loss, criminality or other dangers
5 How to finance integration until the newcomers are self-sufficient tax-paying members of the community
If the local community decides they can handle inviting and integrating a certain number of newcomers, great. They have to live with them and all the risks and costs that it entails. If the invitation and residence permit is limited to the community that has invited them all the costs are on them. Instead of dumping the immigrants or refugees on unwilling or unenthusiastic communities, only communities that have the resources and willingness to welcome and integrate the newcomers will extend invitations. Also rather than immigration becoming an endless cost dumped on the feds, local communities will have to pay for the immigrants and refugees they invite. In other words, you can have in your neighborhood all the taco trucks you want, but not at the expense of the nation at large. You and your neighbors will have to cough up.
* The following words demonstrate a lack of argument when uttered by an egalitarian:
Decency
Immoral
Bigot
Sociopath
Inhumane
Selfish
Anti-social
And so on. These words are what ostensible adults use when they want to sound more than just a child going “you’re mean!” — Which is exactly what they are.
* Every time that I’m invited to a dinner party I take that invitation as an invitation for me to also extend an invitation for others to join me at the dinner party. The hosts always love it. Doesn’t everyone do this? Come to think of it, no one invites me to dinner parties any longer. I wonder what happened?
Idea of a commission to select "desirable" immigrants "with a high likelihood of success" is straight up alt-right push for Europeans only.
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) September 1, 2016
* This country is run like anybody can walk into Augusta’s locker room and have a locker and play for free and tear-up the course and none of the members are allowed say anything.
* The United States is a huge club. We don’t want our membership to be devalued and diluted by allowing in all kinds of noisy and worthless members with their stupid children who are going to drop turds in the swimming pool.
Taken collectively, US citizens are in the same situation as the Casino tribes who sure as heck are not admitting new members and are trying to eject tribal members who are not full enough Indian.
* Australia did a deal with Cambodia.
Of the five refugees transferred to Cambodia under resettlement deal, three have abandoned the country and risked returning home despite ‘well-founded fear of persecution.’
* Are Jews anti-Israeli for saying Israel has a right to choose which immigrants it wants?
* Took my two kids bowling the other day in a far flung suburb of a major Texas city. Of the groups on the 25 lanes, 25% were white or black. The balance was either from the subcontinent or Arab. The people next to me looked like a motley group of Muslims. The woman was wearing a burka and a hijab but looked Malaysian. The men and kids she was with looked like a mix of Muslims like from different background. Probably a youth group from the massive Saudi-funded mosque that just went up a couple of miles away. What was I saying? Oh yeah, we’re screwed.
* Jews often say they’re for open borders because, after all, their grandparents were allowed to come here. Lawrence Auster, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, suggested that such people be told that if we had known that letting Jews in would mean that in the future we would never be permitted to have a rational immigration policy, we wouldn’t have let Jews in.
* I live in a major West Coast city that has seen thousands of Chinese immigrants. They swamp the various “food banks” around town that hand out free food for the poor, to the point of effectively blocking access for most non-Chinese poor. Of course, due to cultural differences, the Chinese food bankers don’t actually want half the food they receive (boxes of cereal, canned goods, jars of peanut butter, etc.), so they go about selling them on the street. Very enterprising of them, but I don’t think that’s what the system intended.
