“New York City attack: Who is Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov?” (CBS News) says that the man who killed 8 people in New York City was an immigrant from Uzbekistan and arrived in the U.S. in 2010.
Plainly, at least from native-born Americans’ point of view, Mr. Saipov’s immigration did not work out as hoped and will likely punch a multi-billion dollar hole in the U.S. economy. There will be direct losses from deaths and injuries in the attack itself, costs of treating, prosecuting, and imprisoning Mr. Saipov, costs of providing welfare to his wife and two children (Mr. Saipov won’t be earning a lot in prison), etc. There will be indirect losses due to extra security measures that cities will put in place to try to prevent a repeat jihad.
Perhaps it is too soon to look at the dollars and cents, but how was Mr. Saipov’s immigration supposed to benefit native-born Americans in the best case? The CIA says that Uzbekistan has a per-capita GDP of roughly $6,600 per person, #159 out of 230 countries (ranking). Mr. Saipov was 29 years old and worked as a truck/Uber driver, a job that is expected to disappear within his working lifetime. He had two children and a wife with no reported job. The U.S. has an average per-capita GDP of $57,400 per person per year. So Mr. Saipov would have had to earn $229,600 per year in order to make the U.S. wealthier on a per-capita basis. Maybe somehow existing Americans can become better off if the population grows, but the GDP per-person shrinks? A Mr. Saipov will truck their goods around at a low price. But how can that make them better off overall given our traffic gridlock and skyrocketing housing prices? Mr. Saipov, his wife, and their children have to live somewhere and also get around.
There is more to life than having spending power, avoiding traffic jams, and being able to afford a house, right? So perhaps Mr. Saipov, in an ideal world, could have made the U.S. better even if he had made it poorer per capita and more crowded. But how? By introducing neighbors to Uzbek cuisine? By persuading neighbors to give up their sinful secular and/or infidel ways and live an Uzbek/Islamic lifestyle? What?
See also “From Truck Driver to Uber Driver to Terror Attack Suspect” (nytimes); “New York Terror Suspect Entered U.S. Under Visa Program Trump Wants to End” (Newsweek); and “Trump Blames New York Terrorist Attack on Schumer and Immigration Policies” (nytimes).
Related:
- How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?
- Tsarnaev case: more evidence that we think we are smarter than Russians
- Vetting immigrants for terrorism potential
- Death Penalty for Tsarnaev?
- Orlando shooting was in the 51st year of our immigration experiment
- Obama’s speech about San Bernardino
Diversity is our greatest strength.
>So Mr. Saipov would have had to earn
>$229,600 per year in order to make the
>U.S. wealthier on a per-capita basis
No. Over their lifetimes, Mr. Salpov and his family would need to contribute an average of more than $57,400 per (inflation adjusted) person per year to GDP. A person’s income is not a measure of their contribution to GDP.
This post is misleading because describes a number of adverse effects associated with immigration without identifying any of the offsetting benefits.
The analysis, which is centered around a single cherry picked data point, is interesting for what it reveals about the way that the author thinks about numbers. The link below provides philg’s thoughts about a NY Times article which used a similar approach to data analysis albeit about a different issue:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/07/03/silicon-valley-sexism-exposed-by-the-new-york-times/
Your point is well-taken with respect to Saipov in particular. But the policy that permitted him to live in the U.S. was not designed for him in particular. You are looking at too small a sample. The policy is to permit immigration. We shouldn’t judge that policy on the basis of the behavior of just one immigrant. We should consider the contributions of immigrants, in the aggregate. If we do that, I think we’ll agree that the U.S. is far better off because it has welcomed immigrants than it would have been if it didn’t. In fact, many native born Americans are the children or grandchildren of immigrants. So if their parents and grandparents had been excluded, they wouldn’t be native born Americans at all.
Yet another ridiculous “analysis”. By this reasoning, the best way to make Americans richer is to do as the Dead Kennedys suggested in 1980: Kill the Poor (https://goo.gl/Y9xJ1h) … or more generally, kill those with below average incomes. Children first — zero income, after all, and they take lots of resources.
Neal: Good point on the GDP number. If he had a W-2 job instead of working as an independent contractor (which Mr. Saipov was), he wouldn’t have to earn $229,600 per year, but an amount slightly lower to account for the fact that employers usually make at least a slight profit on each employee (otherwise, except for government employers, why hire the person?).
Lon: “we’ll agree that the U.S. is far better off because it has welcomed immigrants”; I think that this depends on the definition of “we”. Let’s consider members of the Cherokee Nation. They were native-born Americans. Have they been “far better off” because of European immigration? (see http://www.cherokee.org/About-The-Nation/History/Facts/Our-History ). Plainly if we had a population of 1 billion the country would have a larger GDP, produce more literature and art, etc. But would the 150 million people who lived in the U.S. in 1950 and their descendants actually be better off if the expansion were done via pulling in immigrants, without any kind of filtering for education or achievement, from countries with low per-capita GDP and low educational attainment?
Also, I think there is a different analysis for immigration that has occurred either before or after the establishment of the U.S. Welfare state (let’s date that to the mid-1960s when Medicaid started up). It wasn’t possible for an immigrant circa 1900 to get a house, health care, food, and mobile phone paid for by existing Americans (about 76 million at the time). One might also look at immigration differently depending on whether immigrants arrive during a time of perceived “affordable housing crisis” or during a time of perceived availability of housing for existing Americans. Finally, keep in mind that most immigrants in the old days came from countries with longer and superior educational and intellectual traditions compared to the U.S. (e.g., people were coming from England, France, Germany, China, Japan).
Mr. Saipov arrived into a comprehensive welfare state. He arrived into a country that already had long waiting periods for public housing an “unaffordable” private housing in the cities with jobs. He arrived into a country that was plagued with traffic congestion. He was educated in a country that is not known for running a high-quality school system nor for a multi-century track record of achievement in science, engineering, and/or literature. I don’t see how this can be compared to Henry Engelhard Steinweg (founder of Steinway) coming to the U.S. in 1853 with 30+ years of experience building pianos or Albert Einstein showing up in 1933 with a PhD from the University of Zurich. Which circles back to my original question… how was Mr. Saipov’s arrival supposed to benefit Americans who were already here in 2010?
Stavros: I wouldn’t advocate killing people, however low their income might be, but I think that I’ve pointed out that offering welfare families the opportunity to take their $60,000+/year in taxpayer spending and move to another country (perhaps their original home country) could make a lot of people better off. The welfare family might go from the bottom of the U.S. economic spectrum to the top of another country’s economic spectrum. People who are upset about income inequality would find that the statistic had been improved. (which reminds me to wonder why people who are upset by income and wealth inequality would have wanted Mr. Saipov to move to the U.S. where he was virtually guaranteed to make the numbers more upsetting)
See http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/24/news/economy/deported-mexico-immigrant/index.html for “If you ask Orlando Lopez, getting deported was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
The diversity lottery was devised by the late Ted Kennedy in 1990, presumably to get more Irish immigrants in this country:
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/25/us/40000-aliens-to-win-legal-status-in-lottery.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/02/straight-up-pork-barrel-politics-how-the-green-card-lottery-was-invented-to-help-the-irish/
A vibrant like Saipov might have been considered an unintended consequence of that original intent if what passes for “elites” in this country and even more so in Europe were not so hell-bent on importing dumb and hostile folks from all over the world. Cheap labor, what.
Canada used to have a merit based immigration system, but with the current Castro loving playboy at the helm, they’ve probably abandoned it.
“The diversity lottery was devised by the late Ted Kennedy in 1990, presumably to get more Irish immigrants in this country:”
I won this lottery in 1991, and not by chance!
First year had no restrictions on the number of entries.
Actually now that I think about it a little more, accepting immigrants at random from former Soviet republics such as Uzbekistan is guaranteed to bring in people with lower-than-average ability. Uzbekistan joined the Soviet Union in 1924. Thus for roughly 100 years the best and brightest folks from this part of the world were moving to Moscow and other big Russian cities (the migration continued even after the break-up of the Soviet Union). Uzbekistan is a bit like Liberal, Kansas and similar small towns within the U.S. (see http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2006/04/02/dumb-towns-getting-dumber-smart-towns-getting-smarter/ ).
If we agree that below-average Americans struggle to find any place within our society (e.g., they can’t get jobs and, if they’re men, can’t find wives), how is a non-English speaker from a country with an education system that is even worse than ours supposed to thrive?
And if we believe the research behind The Son Also Rises, an unsuccessful immigrant is likely to have unsuccessful children and grandchildren, thus saddling working taxpayers with generations of welfare payments (see http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/01/17/the-son-also-rises-policy-implications/ ).
Viking: Welcome to your new home! Since you have direct experience with this program… what is the rationale for continuing to bring in immigrants selected at random from countries with much weaker economies and educational systems than the U.S.? Do you support the program as it is currently operated?
Saipov would have had to make a lot more than $229,600 to make the USA wealthier, because he was taking a job away from an American. Without him coming, probably some American would have done that job instead of collecting welfare.
No, the diversity lottery was not to favor the Irish. Maybe a bunch of Irish were taken the first year in order to help sell the program, but the diversity lottery primarily benefits Africans.
“Finally, keep in mind that most immigrants in the old days came from countries with longer and superior educational and intellectual traditions compared to the U.S. (e.g., people were coming from England, France, Germany, China, Japan).”
I think Philip made an excellent point. That’s what has, in fact, made America have an edge over other countries.
And btw. these ‘high end’ immigrants came at a time when there was no welfare state – so to say & they didn’t come here either to live off on welfare. They had an overall positive impact socially and economically.
And as a non-American, I can clearly see that these people’s values aren’t compatible with western culture and civilization. Don’t you guys see having them in is inviting for trouble?
Immigration was never supposed to benefit native-born Americans.
Mass immigration benefits both the Left and the Right. The Right gets cheap labor for their Chamber of Commerce donors, and the Left gets more voters that will eventually lead to a permanent majority.
Average Americans get screwed
Philg, I agree rediculness of playing Russian roulette with US imigration but “The U.S. has an average per-capita GDP of $57,400 per person per year. So Mr. Saipov would have had to earn $229,600 per year in order to make the U.S. wealthier on a per-capita basis. ” does not imply that every two parent family with 2 children that has yearly income of less then $229,600 lowers US GDP. All workers produce surplus value, it is econ 101. Why I can not estimate added value provided by Saipov it is customary to estimate salary as 50% of total value created. So Saipov would have to earn $115,000 / year asuming his kids would not go in his footsteps, in this case he had to invest billions in US to make it appear even. I agree that he added hundreds of millions to US deficit by his actions and changed US society the the worst, in addition to non-measurable loss of life.
“what is the rationale for continuing to bring in immigrants selected at random from countries with much weaker economies and educational systems than the U.S.?”
I have no idea, but my recollection was that the first 3 years, the Irish got 40% of the visas, and the included countries were not particularly dysfunctional, but some were poor:
[ In 1990 the qualifying countries were as follows: Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Czech republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France (including Guadeloupe and New Caledonia), Germany, Great Britain and Northern Ireland (including Bermuda and Gibraltar), Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, San Marino, Sweden, Switzerland and Tunisia.[9] ] from : ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Diversity_Immigrant_Visas )
“Do you support the program as it is currently operated?”
I think the program as currently operated does the same demographically as family reunion immigration, and thus I am not a supporter.
REJECT DIVERSITY
I am not saying we should ban or prohibit it; this is after all a free society. But, we need to wake up and reject diversity as a goal or a requirement – in immigration policy, in employment, in education and in all aspects of American life. Diversity serves no useful purpose. In fact, DIVERSITY IS A PROBLEM. Diversity creates barriers to communication, to unity and to identity as a nation and as a people. We should not promote diversity. In fact, we should recognize the problems created by diversity and tackle it by promoting assimilation.
Before you jump on the progressive bandwagon and start worshiping diversity, let’s just say that historically it wasn’t diversity that got us to the moon or delivered victory in WWII. It wasn’t diversity that built the Great Wall of China or the Great Pyramids. It wasn’t diversity that gave mankind the Pythagoras theorem or Newtonian physics. In fact it was the lack of diversity and the presence of a dominant, unifying, culture along with a common language and effective communication that makes these achievements possible.
Why are we prioritizing immigrants likely to create cultural and ethics divergence? Why are we choosing people based on the color of their skin or their ethnic identity? Why are we intentionally importing potential discord? How is that not the very definition of stupidity and racism?
Uncontrolled immigration is untenable and ruinous to any country. Immigration control should be selective, lawful and enforced. Immigrants should be limited in numbers to what we can assimilate and should fulfill shortfalls in our economy not add to them. End the Green card Lottery and Refugee Programs entirely. Let’s pick only the best and the brightest with the sole goal of strengthening our nation. Let the underrepresented and displaced apply based on merit like everyone else! Let’s pay no heed to DIVERSITY or the lack thereof. Let’s focus on tackling and minimizing the problems of diversity and not encouraging them.
For the first time in over half a century, we have a President which makes sense on immigration. Let’s hope he does what he ran on and preaches.
I think notion of diversity has been subverted. Diversity of thought and ways to work or solve problems is important and has been important. Synthesis of different nurtured schools of thought has resulted in powerful combinations that advanced civilization. Newtonian physics is for sure based on long line of achievements culmiated in publishing of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and Newton himself mentioned that he was standing on shoulders of giants. Pythagoras was a genious and head of philosophical school for sure but the theorem most likely predates him and was used by other civilizations. Science, arts and phylosophy got huge push in Alexandria that sythesized Egyptian, Greek and Jewish experiences and produced Eucledian Geometry (summarization ordered by king Ptolemeus), library of Alexandria, first and very infuential translation of Jewish holy books in Greek and philiosphy of Philo, predecessor of Christinaity. Etc etc
The wife and children need to go to Uzbekistan. He needs to hang. Money saved all around.
We are a country of 330 mil give or take. We need no immigration. Ever. During my life we’ve gone from under 200 mil to over half again that. Do we really need to rival China and India for population.
It’s time to stop the flow and start reversing it. Build the wall.
Let me say this again, Diversity is a natural PROBLEM faced by free societies. It is as unavoidable as it is in need of tackling. But, to make Diversity a goal is retarded. It is like saying let’s make differences our goal or let’s celebrate misunderstandings.
And, no, nobody is talking about diversity of thought here. When we talk about the Diversity Visa Lottery we are not talking about diversity of thought or critical thinking. When we talk about diversity hiring we are not talking about diversity of thought or critical thinking. When we implement Affirmative Action quotas on college admissions we are not talking about diversity of thought or critical thinking. When progressives talk about Diversity, it is ALWAYS about ethnic and racial diversity.
As a matter of fact, the same hypocritical liberals who champion “Diversity” are also the same people who wants to riot and shut down conservative speakers on campus. The same people are the ones who wants Facebook to ban users who offend their sensibilities or demonetize content which they deem contrary to world view. The same people are the ones who fired a Google employee for expressing opinions critical of a politically correct monoculture.
Yes, diversity as it is understood and prosecuted in the modern American discourse is a perversion — just like modern Liberalism is as liberating as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is democratic.
In the 7 years Mr. Saipov has been in the US he has sponsored 23 more immigrants from Uzbekistan. Surely many native born social workers, immigration lawyers, welfare administrators, etc. will benefit from this for decades to come!
Source
Mr. Saipov’s immigration did not work out as hoped and will likely punch a multi-billion dollar hole in the U.S. economy. There will be direct losses from deaths and injuries in the attack itself, costs of treating, prosecuting, and imprisoning Mr. Saipov, costs of providing welfare to his wife and two children (Mr., Saipov won’t be earning a lot in prison), etc. There will be indirect losses due to extra security measures that cities will put in place to try to prevent a repeat jihad.
As #19 suggests: Mr. Saipov’s immigration has been a boom to the US economy – increasing demand for doctors, nurses, prosecutors, public defenders, jail guards, and security consultants.
Oh, and “After New York attack, Trump calls for ending ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program’,” USA Today, 11/01/17.
I would take a narrower point of view on your GDP per capita figures for immigrants. Due to the velocity of money and need for low productivity service jobs necessary to placate a giant population, an immigrant should be evaluated only on their ability to increase the productive capital of a given nation; a sort of prime GDP measure.
For example, if instead of driving an Uber Mr. Saipov became an immigration lawyer that solely provided a service to other Uzbeks into immigrating into the United States but made a big income doing it, isn’t he actually MORE damaging then simply being an Uber driver.
I don’t even necessarily care about educational attainment. Can the immigrant increase productive capital? For instance, if the immigrant starts a business that exports widgets that increases the net buying power of all Americans as the money brought back in circulates through the economy. Even if he just made $30k selling software he wrote in the United States back to Asians the net effect once that money was spent in the service economy would be way, way more then 57k.
Otherwise immigrants can F off.
It’s stupid and crazy to think that the USA or any other fully developed and settled country is the place to go to for the best opportunities. Everybody knows that the best economic opportunities are in the developing world, where growth is certain to be more substantial over the next century. Unless the idea is to get on the dole and be a leech on the system. In that case, then, yeah, the place to go to suck on the best teats would be the USA and Europe.
Someone needs to drastically revise whatever policy allows insane a-holes like that into the country. What was he possibly expected to add? We needed another Uber driver? Have we run out of civilized applicants?
Immigration is inviting bacteria into the host, on the theory that a few of them may be beneficial, while always mentioning the glories of penicillin, and silencing all mentions of plague.
I am surprised how many folks reading this blog are Marxists. I would have though people on the right/libertarian spectrum would agree history and social studies are not science. Using historical examples, or social explanations, to justify enmity towards immigration policies does strike me a suspiciously commie.
“suspiciously commie”
Apart from being bloodthirsty cannibals, Commies came to appreciate the importance of human capital eventually as opposed to their modern spiritual neo-Commie followers, the self-flagellating, self-hating and self-designated “progressives” ready to sacrifice the future of their own children on the altar of their religion, in part by bringing the likes of Saipov to this and other countries.
The Soviet Commies moved in a mere 18 years from the blank slater Lenin who claimed that every kitchenmaid must learn to govern the country (“каждая кухарка должна научиться управлять государством”, Trotsky referring to Lenin) to “the most precious and decisive capital are people” (“самым ценным и самым решающим капиталом являются люди”, Stalin, 1935).
When military push came to shove, the Soviet Commies had to extract Sergey Korolev, the man who was in charge of the Soviet space program later on, from a Gulag Kolyma gold mine and place him in a somewhat more comfortable slave labor camp along with other scientists (“sharashka”) to participate in a military research instead of the proverbial kitchenmaid who never learned much.
The modern progressives who follow the original Lenin blank slate recipe continue to believe that Saipov for example might have learned something and become a nuclear physicist, for example, if it were not for the unfortunate car accident in New York. Perhaps, the push has not come to shove just yet, or the religion is truly a powerful opiate for those folks.
Everyone is a Marxist! See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/karl-marx-is-the-worlds-most-influential-scholar-180947581/
(Marx was a failure as a prophet, but that doesn’t negate his success as a historian!)
Asking whether adding additional immigrants increase per capita GDP is a bit like asking whether selling one more copy of your software raises average revenue per unit… a bit beside the point – profit is profit!
A more relevant stat is that immigrants, on average, are actually less violent than native-born Americans (did you know your murder rate is a multiple of Canadas, while even Canada is at about 2X the murder rate of Western European nations like Germany or Ireland?) – so if you want to minimize murders, you need scissors, not walls – so you can sterilize the native-born and create new citizens exclusively through the green card program.
I think analzying one particular set of murders in New York rather obscures the big picture; you’ve had quite a bit of immigration since 1790, most of it relatively poor and unskilled (people don’t usually emigrate if things are going well in their home country) and yet somehow you’ve managed to eclipse in weatlh all the countries the emigrants came from. Would making America be more like Japan really be such a smart move?
“Everyone is a Marxist”
The fact that people tend to fail for pretentious intellectual scams like Marxism or oriental fool reflexology given the abundance of painful negative historical evidence, most recently from Venezuela, is not really surprising but rather sad . They just keep walking into the same wall again and again and again.
One might think that the well-known dysgenic factors are to blame for decline in general intelligence and people are simply unable to apply common sense any more, but examples similar to Samuelson the Nobelist ‘s show that relatively intelligent people fall for that scam quite easily and willingly.
It must be the religious parts of the human brain, therefore, responsible for shutting down the rational part of the mind, a safety switch as it were making one see the reality as it should morally be rather than as it is.
Ed: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/15/crime-rises-among-second-generation-immigrants-as-they-assimilate/ says that the children of immigrants are just as likely to be criminals as native-born Americans, so to reduce the U.S. crime rate via your method wouldn’t you need to deport all native-born people and have a population that was 100-percent actual immigrants?
Separately, while we have had a lot of growth since 1790, a lot of that came from stealing more land and resources from Native Americans (as noted above, I don’t know that they would be able to talk about how they benefited from European immigration). If you have some rich farmland that you just recently stole, the value of the first laborer to work on that farm is huge, right? The value of the 1000th laborer is less than that of the 999th whose value is less than that of the 998th (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_product_of_labor ). So I don’t know that it makes sense to look at the growth from a population of 4 million (1790) to 325 million (today) and say that therefore existing Americans will become better off if the population grows by another factor of 81.25 (to 26.4 billion residents) or by another 321 million (to 646 million). Finally, I am not sure that you’ve looked at the counterfactual. What if there had been no further immigration after 1790. The 4 million existing residents and their descendants would have had exclusive use of the land and other resources of U.S. territory. Is it obvious that the descendants of the 4 million 1790 residents are in fact better off than they would have been without immigration?
Ivan: Isn’t there a distinction between looking carefully at economic history (what Marx did successfully) and buying into the idea that socialism will inevitably supplant capitalism (the as-yet-unproven prophecy of “Marxism” per se)? [And, was Marx actually wrong? Every year a larger percentage of the U.S. economy is government-directed. I don’t know that Marx made a prediction for a specific timeline. Maybe even MarxISM will be proven correct in the long run.]
Ed,
You are making total sense:
According to your logic, the United States (4.88) should import Chinese (0.74) or Poles (0.74), and ban Russians (11), Mexicans(16), Colombians(26) and Venezuelans(56), basically ban all Latin America except perhaps Chile(3.6).
Build the wall and import Chinese (and Poles) ? Is that your suggestion ?
(the numbers in brackets are homicide rates : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate )
Philg, we still have expansive wilderness areas in our cities where all immigrants settle or froced into. For example Central Park in Manhattan. It is extremely unfair that newly arrived pioneers are not allowed to setup their tents or log cabins there.
Phil:
I am not entirely sure what specifically Marx contributed to economic history that goes beyond works of Smith, Ricardo and Aristotle (labor theory of value, often misattributed to Marx).
His theoretical elaboration of LTV is rather weak to the degree that simple math does not work(surplus value). There’s been as many attempts to fix the math (the paradox of profits) as failures to do so.
In my opinion, he was as much of an economic historian, as his pal Engels of an anthropologist (see the latter’s book, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”).
Saipov did benefit some people: the rent-seekers such as everyone in the immigration assistance economy, and the owners of rental property that with more people in the country each year, can count on greater than inflation rent increases. In Denver, CO, rent increases by about 5-10% annually I think, have been the norm for the last 5 years.
As well, supermarket chains love the increased density – every person means an increase of X% in sales, with no additional building (capex) expense.
Philg, do you think that post Civil War railroad magnates were all marxists since they were alligned with US government (thir chronies) and US railroad policy was hugely influenced by it? Mabe they were acting on Marx teachings (excluding Communist manifesto?), not sure. When do you think private property will be outlawed? What we see is opposite, more people became enterprenures, also this process slowed recently. Not sure why you think he was a great historian, he just analyzed mechanism of Engels’ business, and not perfectly. The fact that he noticed that worker produces more than he is paid worth a retroactive Nobel, who would guess that? Guess Dudley Square pizza missed Das Capital. History is not a science, it is imperfect record of past events, and it is huge advantage to have better historic record, all forecasts based on prior data, in banking, finance, trafic planning etc…
Social sciences are not science, it is politics that tries to protect itself from crticism and analysis by mislabaleing itself.
paddy, what you mention is covered by Saipov after tax income, not additonal benefits.
Anonymous: I am not an expert on Marx. Remember that it was Federico, above, who asserted that some of the other commenters are “Marxists”. Given that Marx wrote thousands of pages I am not even sure what it would mean to call someone a “Marxist.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/Marxism says that Marxism “originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program”. Does a person have to subscribe to all three in order to be considered a “Marxist”? Complicating matters is that we now have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Marxism
I think the fact that Marx keeps coming up in academic literature and in conversations shows that he was an innovative thinker and/or writer, even if a lot of what he wrote included older ideas. So even if Marx was wrong about everything that he pushed as his headline achievements (e.g., the Labor Theory of Value), he could still be influential in terms of how people think today.
#37, Marx is coming up in literature because socialist academia all around the word and ruling class in countries that struggle economically cite him a lot. His economics is not new (except forecast for economic cycle going global) and his politics failed and is failing. There are no growing marxist economies in the world. Probably the biggest Marx influence is through Russian revolution that took his name to label itself and influencing great upheavels of XX century. He definitely was a smart pundit and it is not clear how world would look now without his influence but present value of his work in modern peaceful world is nill.
philg & ed:
Pew is using obfuscation. If you omit blacks from the crime and homicide rates, then immigrants and their children have a far higher rate of crime than native-born Americans.
Immigrants are not being transplanted to high-crime urban ghettos, so that would mean immigrants and their children are increasing crime in all American neighborhoods.
This is one factor that creates segregation, not assimilation. It creates white flight and foreign enclaves sustained by welfare, ergo more crime and tension.
Wow. Some of you folks are way overthinking this thing.
Here are couple of easy things to keep in mind. 1. Think about how Switzerland manages with a restrictive immigration policy. 2. Why do we need to import (into our deficit-financed welfare state) a 22 yr.old uneducated unskilled male Uzbek who can’t speak English?