* Towards the end of his oped, he mentions how important high skilled immigrants like medical doctors are. I live in a town the SF bay area, where a majority of Docs are from India.
The original idea behind allowing immigration of medical professionals was to infill poorly serviced rural areas. Somehow this too went off the rails, and was gamed by those who could effortlessly outmaneuver the system.
No the solution is to curtail ALL immigration, not just low skilled, until the system fixed.
* I hope Stephen Miller, who’s heading up the inaugural address preparation, will draw on the moral basis for national sovereignty presented in this essay. I’ve never seen the case made in a more compelling and concise way. It’s by Mark Amstutz, a political science professor at Wheaton College.
National sovereignty encourages solidarity, subsidiarity, and stewardship. “The communitarian view reminds us that human beings achieve their full humanity through social interaction in specific communities. We are ennobled by our sense of belonging within families, neighborhoods, and nations.”
* This is a good start. Others should begin to undermine the glowing U.S. Immigration narrative that has arisen in popular culture because it’s the reason that otherwise reasonable people are failing to see and appreciate the current problems. The survivorship bias (successful immigrants had families, so their great-grandchildren view immigration as an unmitigated good) needs to be tempered with stories of failed immigrants who returned home or lie alone and anonymous in potter’s fields. It’s a halo effect that has to be destroyed before we can talk about immigration and the national interest more openly.
I took every opportunity during political discussions between Thanksgiving and Christmas when talk about “how divided we are” arose to point out the near historical high level of foreign born in the U.S. and the propensity for children of most recent immigrants to retain their parents’ cultures and languages (and speak English fluently at a much diminished degree).
* I am in biotech and my wife is in dentistry in the Bay Area. Both of these industries have a tremendous imbalance of labor supply and demand fueled by legal immigration. And we’re not exactly uneducated bumpkins I have a PhD and she has a DDS.
* Carlos Slim, the owner of the NYT, has gotten rich from exploiting Mexican laborers living in the United States. This impacts what the NYT says about illegal and legal immigration. Also, the NYT’s writers and editors want more Latino immigrants because they’ll vote for the Democrats.
* Tom Cotton says he wants to reduce legal immigration in total while increasing highly skilled immigration? I say the only answer is a complete moratorium on all immigration combined with the immediate deportation of all illegal alien invaders.
Cotton seems to be playing some kind of bait-and-switch game. Cotton just wants a huge jump in the number of H-1B visa entrants into the United States. Cotton will fail to deliver reductions to legal immigration while massively increasing H-1B visa admissions.
Cotton should start a few brawls with Republicans and Democrats to make his case sound more honest. Cotton should challenge Richard Trumka and Martin O’Malley to a debate on immigration. After that Cotton could debate Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham.
Mass immigration increases income inequality. Mass immigration lowers wages. Mass immigration increases housing costs.
Immigration reductions will boost wages. Immigration reductions will lessen housing costs. Immigration reductions will make family formation more affordable.
* I am American and was visiting a friend in Canada. She pulled strings to get me in with her OB due to a pressing medical situation. Nice guy. I couldn’t place his accent and asked my friend. He was South African. Canada had a program where you practiced X number of years in an underserved area and you got to immigrate. He spent a number of years up in the Yukon, I believe, before he was free to move and work where he liked.
* Hallelujah! It’s about damn time somebody applied the law of supply and demand to the labor markets. White people can’t compete against hordes of Third Worlders for whom $7 an hour is a fortune.
* I rarely see women as hot as Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates working at McDonald’s. It’s mostly ugly Mexican and ugly Central American chicks.
The attractive female fast food employees work at Chick Fil-A.
* I met a dean of a Chicago area medical school last year who remarked that the US has a chronic shortage of doctors on purpose, contrived by the American Medical Association in order to keep the practice of medicine a highly paying profession.
* The AMA limits the number of U.S. medical school seats but does nothing to prevent foreign doctors from flooding in to meet demand? Something doesn’t add up. I don’t buy that the US market for medicine can somehow be bifurcated, with supply of foreign docs having no effect on the demand and price of domestic ones. How is that possible? Even if it were, why not just train US docs for the “lower-tier” market?
