Joe DiMaggio was remarkably assimilated. As Life magazine wrote:
Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now 24, speaks English without an accent, and is otherwise well adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.
Other Italian-Americans should aspire to his level of American life
“Not being a Christian white nationalist”, typically. There’s a reason why actually specifying the desired values is almost always carefully avoided in favor of talking about evil brown people bringing in scary un-Christian religions, attacking “our women”, and destroying our (mostly imaginary) freedoms and democracy.
It’s standard xenophobic rhetoric, right out of the playbook.
It’s really funny that the folks we’re trying the hardest to keep out are, almost certainly, of partial European ancestry and Catholic, which makes them White Christians . . . I guess anti-papism is more popular than I presumed and the one drop rule hasn’t been totally abandoned.
I mean, they can’t be White, they eat tacos and
Key Taco Consumption Trends
Mexico: As the origin of the dish, Mexico holds the top spot, where they are a staple food.
Norway: Frequently described as having the highest consumption outside of Mexico. This is fueled by the cultural phenomenon of Taco Fredag.
United States: Americans consume over 4.5 billion tacos each year.
Sweden: Known for Fredagsmys (“Cozy Friday”), a similar tradition to Norway where families eat Tex-Mex-style tacos.
. . . wait a minute!
“We”? Hardly anyone on the SDMB. The current administration is, but they do not represent me or my views.
I worked with Migrant Farm workers- and never have I seen more hard working and honest workers.
Definitely. From what I’ve been reading the Right’s grudging (official) tolerance of Catholics has been fraying badly the last few years for various reasons.
Yes, we, the United States of America.
Personally, I wouldn’t care if you doubled or halved immigration quotas. But once you set foot on US soil, I say you should have human rights. As for morality, that’s a relative thing. Some people like monarchy or communism or arson or fascism for example. I don’t.
I oppose open borders. There are no advocates for it in US Congress. The Economist magazine editorialized for it some years back. There’s not a country in the world that doesn’t police its borders in some way, and I think they have a right to do so.
Q: Is immigration in our best interest? A: How much are we talking about? There’s a very good case for having non-zero immigration. There’s an economic case for having somewhat higher immigration at current US levels: it would make the US a richer country, or at least that’s what the empirical literature indicates. That’s not a general result: it’s a result specific to the US at a given time.
There is one general result from economics: the effects on native wages are, to a first approximation, a wash. Why is that? Let’s look at this in slow motion. Foreign worker arrives on US shore and takes a US job. Boo-hiss. Then pay day comes and they spend money, adding to demand for labor. Rah-rah. To a first approximation, these effects wash out.
To a 2nd approximation, whether domestic workers win depends upon the extent to which foreign labor is a complement or substitute for US labor. It turns out that the answer is, “Mostly complement”, probably connected with foreign workers lower language skills on average.
So more immigration would make the US richer, and less makes it poorer, not that I care because bigots gotta bigot. But once you are here you should be treated with humanity, by people with humanity. As opposed to the other kind. You do that by beefing up eVerify and enforcing illegal working at the employer level.
More:
The Constitution guaranties certain human rights to both citizens and non-citizens so you’re in good company.
(In particular, the right to Due Process, a thing that cannot be striped from non-citizens without also stripping it from citizens.)
60% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants’ It aint no “we”- it is the MAGA right and current administration.
AFAIK, no nation has Open Borders, not even the USA during the era of Ellis island.
Forten worker arrives in the USA, does job that US born workers neither want or can do. Result is cheaper produce for everyone. Or in some cases does work that US workers do not care to do- result- cleaner toilets. Etc.
Other than the H1b visa, which i am against, which really does take work away from qualified citizens.
True, not less because undocumented workers pay into Social Security, and dont get benefits.
One H1B visa takes away work from one qualified citizen. Then the H1B visa holder spends money and expands the employment pool. There are not a fixed number of jobs to divvy up. That’s not how it works.
There are complications as I noted above. But to a first approximation, immigration doesn’t hurt or help US citizen workers. Though as you noted, undocumented workers help keep the Social Security Trust Fund solvent, something noted in each annual report. I’d be sympathetic to offering a pathway for some immigrants to get permission to work in the US in exchange for eg a tax of 15% on their wages. Soc security is now 12.4%, not too different.
There’s also the fact that not many US citizens want to work back-breaking farm laborer jobs at existing wages. There’s also not a lot of support for vastly higher food prices (with vastly higher farm wages and loss of farm income to Mexico etc).
I’m also pro-Constitution.
For one thing, without due process there’s no chance to prove you’re a citizen. Even if all your great grandparents were.
That’s not the only reason for due process, of course. But it’s a major one that a lot of the ICE backers are missing.
More than anyone wants to know about H1B visa policy in the US:
Don’t click this link unless you have clicked the Noah Smith link I provided above. Research is the study of more and more about less and less, and we’re getting deeper into the weeds now.
OK, so to sum up, the common fear that American workers will see lower wages from competing with essentially indentured foreign colleagues seems logical, but it doesn’t have support in the data. In fact, the effect seems to be the opposite — more H-1bs means higher wages and more employment for skilled American-born workers. Furthermore, when we’ve cut H-1b numbers in the past, it didn’t lead to more Americans getting jobs in the tech sector — it just led to more outsourcing.
Remember, any beneficial effects of H-1Bs on tech wages, if they indeed exist, are 2nd order: to a first approximation it doesn’t matter. For consumers of technology, it’s likely a win.
Sure, but wouldnt the citizen also spend money? And the dirty little secret about H1B visas is that employers love them as they get to pay less and they have a captive worker.
It is an opinion piece and i dont entirely agree with all his points, but he does make his points well.
the idea that H-1b tethers employees to their employers is a legitimate concern. If some employees can’t change jobs, they won’t have much leverage to negotiate for raises. H-1b visas are not hard to transfer, but if a worker is in the process of applying for a green card, that transfer (which is really a cancellation and reapplication) can be a lot more difficult. And if visa workers desperately fear losing their jobs — an H-1b worker who gets laid off has to leave the country if they can’t find work in 60 days — they’ll accept lower wages.
This i agree with. Now his conclusion that that doesnt necessarily mean overall lower wages for US workers is a decent one.
So there are plenty of logical reasons to think that H-1b workers aren’t doing much, if anything, to hold down the wages of their American compatriots via brutal competition.
But for that ONE US worker that the H1B visa worker got that one job instead- that worker gets a raw deal. Other workers? Okay, maybe not so much. But it is not a great deal for the H1B workers either, for the points he made- and others.
I already agree with that.
Citizen is already in the country spending money, and employers don’t ordinarily replace native workers with foreign one 1:1. (It might be different if H1B was a larger program, but totals are capped at 85,000 workers per year - employers have to enter a lottery that they have about 20% chance of winning.) Der Trihs posted this earlier:
Things get complicated when you have a shortage of aggregate demand (aka a recession), a situation that would have to be studied directly, rather than relying on statistical studies of experiences during ordinary economic expansions.
As Noah Smith points out, that’s an entirely plausible story that’s not supported by… well, not supported by one study.
As I said, I don’t get excited either way, mostly because I think there would be political hell to pay if wages were affected egregiously. I do think this is mostly a phony issue, to the extent that Republicans never take substantial steps to toughen eVerify, because big business (and small business, and the farm lobby, and the restaurant lobby, and…) like immigration while non-citizens don’t vote.
But then again these ICE abuses are starting to curtail immigrant labor in a serious way; the business class has shown poor judgment in backing Trump, as did consumers who wanted lower inflation.
He agrees on the captive worker point, but yeah he had one study that showed that H1b workers might earn more- but with caveats.
Not if he doesnt have a job. Here is the thing- what i am talking about it that one US worker that loses out on a job as they hire a H1B worker instead. And there are tons of studies showing the abuses of the H1b visa program, and even Smith agrees there are needed improvments.
Ranchers and farmers are starting to think they backed the wrong horse. Higher prices at the grocery store is not a happy thing either for the consumer. There’s a 3.1% increase- at least.
and now “Hegseth faced scrutiny for hosting a Protestant-only Good Friday service”. What’s curious is that the Klan also hated Catholics.
i mean, don’t the Protestants and Catholics celebrate Good Friday the same way?
I thought we were discussing immigration? or have we gone off on a tangent? Hey this is IMHO, so whatever.
Almost but not quite, Catholics, etc could come, but there was no separate Catholic Mass.
No; the religion of the immigrants has always been a major factor in the immigration debate. Especially when somebody starts talking about how important the carefully-not-specified “values” of the immigrants are.
I get a little uncomfortable around my liberal friends who claim to be all for immigration, but really only as long as they can be kept as a semi-perminant servant or hard-labor class and exploited for economic gain.
These conversations often include phrases like “they are needed to do the hard work real Americans don’t want to do” and what not. They are spoken of as beasts of burden rather than humans.
I don’t want the US to become Abu Dabi.