I’ve recently finished Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America by James and Deborah Fallows. James is a Cirrus pilot and the couple traveled around via light airplane so I thought that there would be some interesting material for pilots (presumably reflecting the general public’s lack of interest in the details of flying, not too much ink is spilled on the subject of flying per se).
The authors describe a country where nearly every corner is packed with immigrants of all types, including asylum-seekers and refugees:
Like Sioux Falls, Burlington[, Vermont] has been a resettlement city for refugees for decades. It, too, has refugees from all over the world, and it, too, has embraced the sense of becoming a richer, better city for having them. During our first days in Burlington, I sat in on a workshop at the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP) in Burlington, where nearly twenty very newly arrived Bhutanese were learning the cultural ropes for their new jobs. Get to work on time. Check bus schedules on holidays. Call your boss if you are sick. Be friendly to your colleagues. Smile. Sit with workmates at lunch, even if language is a barrier. Wear deodorant and clean clothes every day.
The authors are enthusiastic about the potential of a planned economy (“public-private partnerhip”), especially when applied to the challenge of bringing in low-skill immigrants:
Miro Weinberger, mayor at the time we visited, is himself an example of Burlington’s draw for its particular kind of human capital. Weinberger’s parents, from Long Island, moved north during the Vietnam War “to opt out and find a different value system,” Weinberger told us. He is one of many forty-something children of that migration who stayed in Vermont. “You’ll hear a lot about public-private partnerships,” he told us on our first visit. “This is a place where it’s really true.” In Vermont, these efforts—to teach nutrition and sustainability courses in the schools, to find work for some of the Burmese and Bhutanese refugees being resettled in the area, to foster tech start-ups—are often called “social responsibility” efforts, a part of the brand we came to think of as being classically Burlington.
What is hard to understand is why people from Bhutan qualify as refugees. (Or at least did in 2013 when the authors visited.)
The U.S. Department of State says that Bhutan is as safe as anywhere on Planet Earth (travel page). Lonely Planet says “Bhutan is a remarkably safe destination, almost completely devoid of the scams, begging and theft that affects its neighbours.”
The described Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program is part of a larger organization that is funded about 90 percent by tax dollars. The public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, and Obamaphones consumed by the Bhutanese in Burlington are funded by tax dollars. Why are taxpayers funding refugees from a country that they would otherwise be dreaming of being wealthy enough to visit (Bhutan charges a minimum of $200-250 per tourist per day, depending on the season, plus airfare from the U.S. isn’t cheap!).
[If the public-private partnership yields the Bhutanese only a low-wage job or if demand for workers who don’t speak English proves weak, the folks described will be lifetime dependents on U.S. taxpayer-funded welfare (means-tested public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps, for example).]
Maybe there is an argument for filling the U.S. with immigrants from Bhutan, but why are they “refugees”?
Readers: Are there other luxury tourist destinations from which a person can come to the U.S. as a “refugee”?
Related:
- “In Bhutan, Happiness Index as Gauge for Social Ills” (nytimes): “In 2015, his staff members released a study that showed 91.2 percent of Bhutanese reporting that they were narrowly, extensively or deeply happy, with a 1.8 percent increase in aggregate happiness between 2010 and 2015.”
- “Vermont job creation lagging nation’s by considerable margin” (Burlington Free Press, October 31, 2018): “Unlike in Vermont, the U.S. economy has been adding jobs at a very respectable rate. To show how far Vermont is lagging the nation, consider that Vermont now has the same number of jobs it had in early 2015.” (not too many employers required fluency in Dzongkha, as it happened?)
The planned economy provided us with the Internet, which has the answers to your question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutanese_refugees
Vince: Thanks for that link. I’m not sure if the Nepali language-speaking folks in the camps in Nepal are the “Bhutanese” referred to in the book. Regarding the folks who are mentioned in Wikipedia… if they speak a Nepalese language and are of Nepalese ethnic origin and were resident in Nepal, why did someone think it made sense to drag them to Burlington, Vermont? If immigrants boost a country’s economy, why did we depive Nepal of the economic boost from immigrants who already spoke the local language? (Alternatively, if immigrants do make a country wealthier, why does the Wikipedia article say “For many years the government of Nepal did not allow resettlement for Bhutanese refugees”?)
[Separately, that Wikipedia page links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Bhutan , which says that “the government also banned further immigration in 1958”. It seems as though folks in this part of the world need to be educated on the merits of low-skill immigration!]
[Also, I don’t think it was a planned civilian economy that gave us the Internet. Development of packet-switching and a lot of other computer technology was funded and accelerated by the U.S. military. I’m not sure that the Internet provides a compelling argument for spending close to $1 trillion per year (active duty plus veterans) on our war machine. The U.S. could have gotten packet switching at zero cost and on roughly the same date from England (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching#History and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPL_network ).]
The authors are supported by Albert Einstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
“Einstein asserts that a planned economy that adjusts to production would guarantee a livelihood to every member of society … the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.”
Interesting – according to the official travel page it’s safer than Germany.
Bhutan: Level 1: Exercise Normal Precautions
Federal Republic of Germany: Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution
if they speak a Nepalese language and are of Nepalese ethnic origin and were resident in Nepal, why did someone think it made sense to drag them to Burlington, Vermont? If immigrants boost a country’s economy, why wouldn’t immigrants who already speak the language boost the economy of Nepal enough to make the current Nepalese want to take them in?
You answered your own question there. The governments of Bhutan and Nepal refused to allow the people in question to settle in their countries. Thus, they were refugees and were settled in other countries, with some of them ending up in Vermont.
The Wikipedia article doesn’t explain why Nepal didn’t allow the refugees to live and work in Nepal. One strong possibility is that Nepal is too poor to provide housing, jobs and so forth to tens of thousands of refugees.
The details of the way that the government invested taxpayer funds to help develop the computer industry and then hand it all over to private business for free don’t matter much. Most of the money may have passed through DAPRA or Navy accounts before it made its way to places like RLE and CSAIL at MIT, but the results wouldn’t be much different if they flowed through NSF accounts.
Vince: I don’t think that it is accurate to say “the government invested taxpayer funds to help develop the computer industry and then hand it all over to private business for free”. The military had some needs and they paid contractors to deliver hardware and software meeting those needs. The vendors to the military ended up also finding some civilian markets.
The military pays for stuff that they think they are going to use, either in the short-term or the long-run. With packet-switched networking, they were paying for a military communication system that they did in fact use (and, of course, they still do use).
This is a completely different situation from NSF funding.
I think the Bhutanese refugees mentioned by the Fallowses are indeed the Nepalese speaking people that were evicted out of their country in early 1990s.
About 7-8 thousand of them will remain in Nepal (https://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/nation/Bhutanese-refugees-resettlement-program-ending-in-2018,4121). They were very nice and hardworking people who contributed positively to the Nepalese economy and society. So I think a lot of Nepalese in the eastern part of the country where they had been living for 25 years were sad to see them leave. In all these years, I do not remember any part of the Nepalese society complaining about them.
Why did they want to leave if the Nepalese people gladly welcomed them for the last 25 years? Apparently, speaking the same language does not necessarily imply a shared sense of nationality. Most of them did not want to stay in Nepal (like many Nepalese who do not want to stay in the country).
P.S. When can we hear your commentary on the new Canon EOS R?
A Nepalese Guy: Thanks for the on-the-ground perspective.
It is odd that the guy who invented the “Gross National Happiness” idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigme_Singye_Wangchuck ) thought that one way to boost his country’s happiness level was to boot out a bunch of long-resident immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Here in the U.S. we are constantly told that the path to happiness lies in a larger and more ethnically diverse population, yet this king expelled roughly 1/6th of his subjects (i.e., cut the country’s population by 16 percent) so as to reduce ethnic diversity.
The king seems to have been running four wives simultaneously.
Thus we have a polygamist immigrant-expeller who was beloved by the West and, just a few years after filling refugee camps in Nepal with Nepali-speaking former Bhutan residents, was essentially knighted by the Swedish government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Order_of_the_Seraphim
Which PR firm did this king hire?
The EOS R? Sony has walked away with it all. See https://petapixel.com/2018/10/18/sony-beats-canon-eos-r-and-nikon-z7-in-dynamic-range/ for “At ISO 100, the Sony a7R III has a Photographic Dynamic Range (PDR) of 11.64, the Nikon Z7 is 10.98, and the Canon EOS R is in last with 10.6. … At base ISO, Canon’s EOS R (10.6) is closer in dynamic range performance to the APS-C Sony a6500 (10.31) than to the full-frame Sony a7R III (11.64).”
Perhaps these quasi-Nepalese contributed negative National Happiness. Of course they had to go.
Would a PDR of 11.6 vs 10.6 be noticeable in typical real world conditions or is this just bragging rights?
Jack: If PDR is in f-stops, a 1-stop difference is huge for practicality. The big challenge in photography is that the real world has much more contrast than film or a sensor can represent. There is always a risk of blown-out highlights or black-with-no-detail shadows. Extra dynamic range is the reason that Sony has stomped all over Canon.
Three U.S. Senators effusive in their praise for Bhutan’s “sophistication” and “quality of leadership”: https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/12/mccain-bhutan.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Bhutan says that “Abortion in Bhutan is only legal when the abortion is a result of rape, incest, to preserve the woman’s mental health, or to save her life.”
The virtuous folks at the nytimes love this abortion-banning, immigrant-expelling guy: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/t-magazine/bhutan-bicycle-gross-national-happiness.html says “The fourth king is the most beloved figure in modern Bhutanese history, with a biography that has the flavor of myth. … Under his leadership, electricity and modern medical care reached Bhutan’s remotest areas; the country established a hydropower industry and navigated the perilous geopolitics that come with its geography … But the king’s most celebrated contribution is in the realm of what might be called political philosophy. It was he who formulated Bhutan’s signature quality of life indicator, Gross National Happiness, an ethos of environmental sustainability, cultural preservation and “holistic” civic contentment that has made Bhutan a fashionable name to drop in international development circles and among New Age enlightenment seekers.” The negatives are buried so deep in this article that they’re almost a footnote: “In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Bhutan expelled nearly 100,000 of its citizens, almost all of them Hindus of Nepalese origin … Homosexuality is illegal. Gender equality is a work in progress; fewer than 9 percent of the country’s nationally elected officials are women.”
My friends in Cambridge love Bhutan! I had no idea that abortion and homosexuality, the twin pillars of our local faith, were both illegal there. They’ve never mentioned the fact.
Fun fact: $92,200 is the threshold for incomes that pay more into govt than they receive in benefits. I wonder how many “public-private partnership jobs” for refugees pay that or greater (ie: are net contributors).
That is an interesting fact, it’s close to 1/2 of married couples, but less than 1/3 of all households (including singles).
Vince: I dug around a little more and learned that Nepal has a population of nearly 30 million. They decided that it didn’t make sense to try to absorb a comparative handful of immigrants who were native speakers of their language. Maybe you should offer to go over there and educate them regarding how easy and inexpensive it is to add immigrants to a society!
@philg:
“The virtuous folks at the nytimes love this abortion-banning, immigrant-expelling guy: ” The NYT sets a different bar for different people. According to them, white people are supposed to be civilized by the NYT standards, brown people get a pass, cannot be held responsible for their actions and prejudices.
It is almost like NYT does not consider non whites adults in possession of moral agency!
I’m not sure why you would suggest me for this mission. Even though I did some research for you, I haven’t developed much of an interest in the issue. It appears that you care a lot about this. Of course, we can’t be certain about that because pose questions about the issue instead of making statements.
The U. S. need not range the world to find people who need relief. By day I am trying at age 80 to rebuild the roof over our heads in Panama City/Lynn Haven FL. In six hours on October 10 Hurricane Michael transformed these modest Florida towns into third-world shitholes (to quote the nation’s foremost politician). The Weather Channel frolicked at the beach while these towns and Tyndall AFB were going through a meat grinder. The utility engineer who came to evaluate moving my meter from the tree-damaged end of the house (still no power after almost a month) had an anecdote: at the initial meeting after surveying a grid of utility plant, his assistant reported four poles; the team leader acknowledged “four poles down”. The assistant said “No, four poles standing.” An assault team of 7,200 linemen literally rebuilt the plant in a few days, but thousands of drops cannot be restored because of damage or the structure just doesn’t exist any more. It is like the damage just beyond the vaporization zone of a nuclear blast, and it goes for fifty miles. The schools are beginning to stagger open and they need new shoes and clothes for their halved student population. FEMA has apparently expended all its trailers and rv’s on the recent floods so housing is critical. Somehow I don’t think a dude who showed up in his own 757 with gold-plated faucets is the answer, although the locals voted for him 75-25. The news cycle lasted one day; this place will take a generation to recover. The Weather Channel and Verizon are swear words here. I saw a couple of Hispanic rapists and criminals or maybe good people working dawn to dark re-stringing telecom cables on the new poles; they were unbelievably productive, obviously not taking their cues from Fox News. Enough 3 AM rant, we are the fortunate with insurance and an honest contractor.