The general question as asked is straightforward and clear. Of course, I can’t force you to address it if you don’t want to.
But I should clarify that as applied to safety net programs, it goes far beyond whether they “will stop making efforts to increase their income/wealth such that they are no longer eligible for welfare”. It’s much more about whether they will make the sacrifices and deferred gratification - entry level menial jobs, small time start-up businesses, long hours of study, penny pinching and scrimping, and so on - that earlier waves of immigrants used to lift themselves and/or their children out of poverty. (More below.)
Well yeah, if you put it that way. You offer a guy a job making $100K versus a lower-middle class lifestyle on welfare, he’s going to take the job for $100K. But that’s not how things play out in real life. People aren’t faced with that type of choice. People are faced with the option of working hard with little or nothing to show for it at the outset. The payoffs don’t come until years down the line, after the business grows, or they rise up in the careers. But if you take the easier approach upfront, you never get that choice of “own a successful business/be a sucessful accountant” versus “stay on welfare” - by that point in your life it’s too late.
My model of human nature tells me that many people have a hard time deferring gratification now because of a potential payoff years down the line. Not everyone, and not completely, but a lot of people and to a large extent. And what keeps people in line and pushes them to do things that they’re not so motivated to do at the time is societal expectations. If your parents and everyone else’s parents are slaving away in sweatshops or peddling door to door, and they pound it into you that the only way to rise above it is to do well in school, or work your way up at some job, and the attitude of everyone all around you is that the only way to survive is to work hard etc. then you’ll be a lot more motivated to do it than if you see people all around you not making much effort along these lines and doing more-or-less OK. Similarly, if the subculture that someone is a part of regards people who primarily rely on social programs as losers and freeloaders and to a significant degree socially rewards people who are producers over people who are on the dole, that person will be a lot more motivated to make sure they find some way to be successful as a producer, like the people around them are doing, as compared to someone in whose subculture being on the dole is as common as being self-supporting.
Bottom line is that the earlier waves of immigrants, who started very much at the bottom of the economic scale and eventually rose above it were facing a very different dynamic in terms of the cost/benefits of the choices they made and the lifestyles they chose, and their situation and subsequent history can’t be compared to the situation with current immigrants. And - returning to the OP - this is not about whether the immigrants themselves are fundamentally any different than the earlier immigrants.
I wasn’t saying that it’s so much the ability to back-migrate, but rather that, combined with much greater transportation and communications technology contributes to a different mindset than in years past. I’m not blaming them- it’s more a matter of immersion; if you were say… a German immigrant to Texas in 1850, you might live in Galveston or San Antonio, or a little Hill Country town, and continue to speak German. But you’d be pressed on all sides by the prevailing American culture, and without constant replenishment from the old country, the culture would steadily become more American over time, as children were brought up in both cultures.
But with today’s technology, someone can come to the US, and they’re a phone call away, and probably a few hours by car away if things really go south. While it’s still a huge transition, I suspect it’s less than in years past.
I’d like to read more about your “model.” You indicate personal experience–have you published your findings? If not yet, which papers support your findings? (This is Great Debates, after all)
Today’s immigrants often have darker skins than those of past decades.
I’m not that interested in explaining why the standard conservative ideology concerning poverty is wrong. Suffice to say I disagree that the poor stay poor because they are lazy and undisciplined. I’m more interested in why you think immigrants are uniquely affected by the phenomenon you believe exists. Do you think the typical immigrant community is more insular than, say, a fifth generation Appalachian family? Or a fourth generation family on the Upper West Side?
Of course. You’re not interested in addressing the actual argument being made and would much prefer to briefly present a highly distorted and and caricatured version of it, which you can then righteously denounce. Unsurprising.
I addressed this issue at some length, in a couple of posts addressed to you (#58 & #68). You pretty much ignored those posts, of course, and there’s nothing I can do about that. But I don’t see any need to keep repeating myself either.
In my experience, any attempt to paraphrase your arguments is met with this kind of dismissal. So if we debate in the future, I will just plug in your actual text, like so:
I’m not that interested in explaining why the standard conservative ideology concerning poverty is wrong. Suffice to say I disagree that whether the poor stay poor turns on “whether they will make the sacrifices and defer gratification.”
I was asking follow-up questions, as one tends to do in reasonable discussions. As you are apparently fond of putting it, if you don’t want to answer them, of course there’s nothing I can do about that.
Actually, I think it works the other way, as well. This is tough to articulate, but I’ll give it a try.
Moving to another country can feel profoundly unreal. When you abruptly cut all of your social ties and throw yourself into a place you barely understand, it creates this sense of having slipped into an alternate universe, with a new and unformed identity. It’s an unsettling, exhilarating, lonely and surreal experience. And the only other people who can identify with this at all are…other expats.
Expat communities are full of random oddballs who would otherwise never even TALK to each other. But when you are all going through this intense experience together, it creates a strong bond. It’s like boot camp or boarding school or any other circumstance where people from different backgrounds are thrown together in strange and trying circumstances. And that bond can become so strong that the expat community quickly becomes your main support network, eclipsing any chance you had at integrating.
But when you have connections to home and continuity with your previous life, your move becomes more of a natural continuation of your life. You don’t get that same sense of being disconnected and set adrift. And this means you have the opportunity to integrate naturally, in bits and pieces, as you learn and grow in your new setting. Your new country feels more like “real” life, which makes it easier to make real friends within your new culture and have real, authentic social experiences that aren’t just based on desperation to talk to someone vaguely relatable.
The British government was happy to get rid of their problem groups like the Irish and Scots. Today Mexico basically tells its people “you want a job? You want an education? Move to America and get it from them. BUT, send money home”.
One problem though today, I dont think the US can handle too many more people. Every person here requires electricity, water, sewer, shelter, healthcare, education, and access to roads. All those are expensive to supply.
The most substantial difference is the situation into which they are immigrating.
A new(er) world, with lots of greenspace for expansion, is completely different from a more mature society. The more mature and developed a society, the greater the disruption from too-rapid an influx of outsiders.
That’s a step in the right direction. Changing from a system which encourages people to "make the sacrifices and defer[] gratification" to people being “lazy and undisciplined” was not an innocent “paraphrase”.
But it’s only a step. The next step is to refrain from taking things out of context. I’ve not said that whether the poor stay poor “turns on” whether they make the sacrifices etc. Only that this is one factor that can lift people out of poverty. And that as a result, a system which encourages this will tend to produce less enduring poverty, in aggregate, than a system which discourages it. And further, that the experience of a population which is subjected to a system which encourages this will not necessarily be replicated in another population subjected to a system which discourages it.
Are you able to take a position on this without clever “paraphrasing”? Do you really believe that making sacrifices and deferring gratification are not factors at all in later success?
You were not asking follow up questions. Follow up questions reflect the responses to the prior questions. You were just ignoring the prior responses.
Again, the answer to your questions in post #84 are contained in my prior posts #58 & #68.
Once again you’ve steered the conversation to a meta-debate about whether other posters are distorting or ignoring your posts. In addition to being annoying, it’s incredibly boring.
As to the substance of your position as you now present it–that self-discipline is a marginal factor in rising out of poverty–of course it is. It’s just not an especially important one, to say nothing of it being relevant to a “way of life” engendered by the availability of social programs. I’m sure you’ll tell me this is a distortion of your position, so feel free to save your keystrokes.
Don’t play games and you won’t get called on it. It’s just that simple.
OK, I’m fine to leave it at that.
My position is (and has been) that 1) it is an especially important one (though obviously not the sole determinant or the relevant factor in any individual instance), and 2) it is impacted by a) the availability of social programs, and b) the prevalence of their use in a given community.
But social programs also help keep the effects of temporary poverty from becoming long-term impediments.
My family received various types of assistance as a child. I am now well educated and middle class (as is my family). This is because my brain development was not hampered by malnutrition as a child. My education was not disrupted by homelessness and unstable living situations. My health was not endangered by untreated diseases. We were able to maintain a stable, basic living standard while getting back on our feet.
My family’s time in poverty became (like most welfare recipients) a short and limited part of our life that we were, thanks to our safety net, able to quickly transition out of without any permanent damage.
Plenty of countries don’t have social safety nets. It doesn’t make them magically more productive-- indeed, many of these countries are mired in poverty. Plenty of prosperous and thriving countries have strong social safety nets. Indeed, most prosperous countries do.
That’s all true and valid. There are plusses and minuses of social programs.
That’s also true - most welfare recipients are on the programs for short times.
But the point here is that this applies more to people who live in communities where the accepted standard is that if all possible you work. But in communities where social programs are more widespread this is less true. Which is relevant in the context of immigrant communities.
Let me see. I am Mexican. Born and raised in Guadalajara. I have a degree from the University of Guadalajara. Same goes for my wife. We paid no college tuition. Our 3 children graduated from private universities here in Guadalajara. My wife and I were never told to leave this country and we made a very decent life for ourselves. Our 3 children have all been successful and no one told them to leave the country.
So could you please tell me who exactly is encouraging my compatriots to leave to get an education and a job? Because that is something that I have never heard of here in México.