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In How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure? I wondered if we could afford to have immigrants living in America.

Looking at the materials that we got in advance of a recent “town meeting” (non-anonymous mob democracy, New England-style), I’m wondering if Americans can afford to live in America.

Town elites want to spend $100 million on a new school (see Why wouldn’t a Massachusetts town set up a school for gifted and talented students? for the numbers; on a per-student basis, it is more than the endowment for most of America’s better colleges and universities). To show us that everyone else is doing it too, we are shown a $65 million elementary school in Lexington, Massachusetts for 423 students ($153,664 per student; $593 per square foot; the Hastings School).

What else are we supposed to approve? We need a new fire engine… $600,000. Our library needs a replacement air conditioner… for $305,000. How big is this library? About the size of two serious McMansions: 18,600 square feet. How can it possibly cost $305,000 if they don’t have to run any new ducts or power lines? Asking this question at the meeting would be about as socially acceptable as putting a TRUMP sign on one’s lawn or painting an 8′-wide Confederate flag on the street side of one’s house.

The town will spend $16,000 on an Internet firewall and $26,000 on “email migration to cloud”.

Thanks to the Millionaires for Obama preventing the placement of any cell towers in our bucolic hamlet, our heroic first responders cannot communicate via mobile telephone. They need five new portable radios for $13,785. What kind of radios should they buy? A “Radio Communications Consultant Public Safety” will help them shop… for $14,000 additional.

Circling back to the main topic… given that our buildings and other infrastructure don’t last forever, how can Americans afford to live in America? Consider a family that moves to Lexington and has three children. The town will eventually have to build or rebuild elementary, middle, and high school capacity for those three children. That will cost roughly 3 times $153,664 or roughly $460,992, well above the median price of a house in the U.S. (about $350,000). No doubt some other towns can build cheaper than Lexington can, but the trend is for higher cost everywhere.

 

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Beloved readers: I’m headed down to Philadelphia on Sunday. I’m hoping to visit the Barnes Foundation on Sunday afternoon in case anyone would like to meet there. I might be available for an after-dinner drink at the Sonesta hotel downtown, perhaps around 9 pm Sunday evening. Alternatively, coffee on Monday morning at 8. Please email philg@mit.edu to let me know if you’d like to get together!

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“Family’s Fatal Plunge Off Cliff May Have Been Intentional, Authorities Say” (nytimes):

The vehicle, carrying Jennifer and Sarah Hart and at least three of their six adopted children, had stopped on a dirt pullout off Highway 1 on March 26 before accelerating about 70 feet to the edge of the cliff, the California Highway Patrol said, citing an analysis of the vehicle’s onboard computer. Investigators also did not find skid marks at the scene that might have indicated a collision.

Given that plenty of American couples have been driven insane by just one or two kids in the house, why were two people able to adopt six children? The argument was that, because neither mom worked, they had plenty of time and energy to care for children? (In this article with 5 facts about the two adoptive moms there is no suggestion that either Mrs. Hart had a job.) So the standard was more like what you’d have in a daycare center in which there has to be one worker for every 8 children?

Maryland tries to limit adoptions to 6 children per household (source). Angelina Jolie collected 4 children via adoption before she had her own two kids (and then tried to collect $1.2 million per-year tax-free on the 6 kids total). Generally it seems that states may have limits on the number of foster children one may take in, but there are no statutory limits on adoption. It will be up to a social worker or non-profit agency employee in practice and those people get paid for every adoption so they have a financial incentive to approve extra children in a household?

“Cash Incentives for Adoptions Seen as Risk to Some Children” (nytimes, 2003):

In December 1995, Raymond and Vanessa Jackson, who had already adopted a young girl, formally adopted another child — Bruce, a foster child then age 11. Over the next 12 months, the parents adopted two more boys from the state, and in 1997 they scooped up a fourth. Yet another girl was made legally theirs in 2000.

And then, even as prosecutors say the four adopted boys in the family’s New Jersey home were being starved on a diet of peanut butter and plaster wallboard, the Jacksons were being evaluated by state officials for the adoption of a seventh child, a 10-year-old girl.

The Jacksons, with six adopted children and one foster child, received more than $30,000 in government payments last year.

[Compare to child support: Jessica Kosow, a plaintiff described in our chapter on Massachusetts family law, asked for $235,080 per year and received $93,808 per year (plus a free house; at least $3 million total through the child’s 23rd birthday) to care for a single healthy child on a half-time basis.]

Readers: Given that decisions on adoption are currently left up to people who profit from approval, does there need to be a hard and fast rule limiting the number of kids that one or two adults can “scoop up” (as the Times put it)?

Related:

• The happiest children in Spain live with two daddies (a survey found that the least happy children live with two moms)
• Table of cash payments available to foster parents, by state

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I wonder how much of this is because a lot of people who were high earners before going to business school are also high earners upon graduation, but it is tough to argue with $286,000 per year as a median first-year-out-of-MBA-school income (for MIT Sloan graduates). See Bloomberg for some more numbers.

[See Real World Divorce, though, for how an American resident or visitor doesn’t need to go to business school, or to work at all, to have this kind of after-tax spending power. The Massachusetts chapter has at least one concrete example.]

Readers: Is this rational behavior for employers? Why not hire smart folks fresh out of college for $100,000 per year, have a night school at the company where they go through the MBA textbooks and watch some YouTube videos, and promote the best of this group? Or back it up to high school graduates! Hire them for $50,000 per year, supervise their online bachelor’s degree in the evenings at the company’s office, and promote from that pool? Why let MIT and Harvard college huge $$ to do the filtering? You can argue that you’re investing money in training people who will quit, but most of the investment is a conference room that wouldn’t be used at night anyway. Also, if you hire an MBA at $286,000 per year and he or she gets some experience at your firm there is always a risk that the MBA will quit for a yet higher salary elsewhere (these are not teachers, certainly, who will just keep working despite being underpaid).

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I’m grateful to readers for sending me “I am tired of being a Jewish man’s rebellion” (Washington Post) in which readers learn that the motivation for two men to have sex with a blonde in her 20s was that they were rebelling against Judaism.

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Here’s a Facebook post has me wondering about biology and English:

***link to a younger male Facebook user*** 26 years ago on a mildly snowy night in NYC you made me a mom. You were such a smart, sweet, adorable and enthusiastic little guy! You are responsible for most of my knowledge of dinosaurs, volcanos, frogs and Pokémon’s. …

[over a collage of happy baby/toddler photos]

Is this a reasonable use of the English language? Does it comport with human biology?

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“Furious at YouTube, passionate about fitness and veganism: Shooter left warning signs, questions” (LA Times):

Aghdam entered the country as a refugee roughly two decades ago, a family member said. In one of her videos, she said she was born in Urmia, Iran — where she and other members of her Baha’i faith face discrimination — and that her family had spent a year and a half in Turkey.

Wikipedia on the Baha’i Faith:

• Backbiting and gossip are prohibited and denounced.
• Drinking or selling alcohol is forbidden.
• Sexual intercourse is only permitted between a husband and wife, and thus premarital, extramarital, or homosexual intercourse are forbidden.
• Abstaining from partisan politics is required.
• Begging as a profession is forbidden.

Let’s consider the interface between Nasim Najafi Aghdam’s Baha’i faith and U.S. culture.

• Gossip is prohibited and she finds that the front page of every newspaper is devoted to stories about which young Americans had sex with old rich guys 12+ years ago.
• Alcohol and premarital sex are forbidden and she is embedded in a culture where young people get drunk every weekend and have sex with strangers.
• Homosexual acts are prohibited by her religion and she lives in the country that invented the Gay Pride parade (see also frequent nytimes coverage of this topic)
• She is supposed to abstain from partisan politics and sees that the majority of Facebook content is people expressing outrage on political topics.
• Begging is prohibited by her faith and she is now in a country where roughly 74 million people are on welfare (see Medicaid and CHIP enrollment)

Clearly she had some kind of mental breakdown before shooting. But oftentimes people with mental issues do a lot better or worse depending on the environment (see “Environmental Connections: A Deeper Look into Mental Illness”). Wouldn’t she likely have been far less distressed if she had stayed in Turkey? Prevailing Turkish culture would seem to be much better aligned with the Baha’i rules than U.S. culture. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to use U.S. tax dollars to help Ms. Aghdam get established in Turkey than to bring her to the U.S.? Turkey has also experienced much stronger economic growth than the U.S. during the past 20 years so there should have been plenty of opportunity for someone with an Iranian education.

Readers: What do you think? Does it make sense to use tax dollars to bring someone who can’t practice the Baha’i religion in peace to the U.S., a country that seems to be specifically set up to drive crazy anyone who practices the Baha’i religion?

Related:

• How was the immigration of Akayed Ullah supposed to benefit native-born Americans?
• How was the immigration of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov supposed to benefit native-born Americans?
• Orlando shooting was in the 51st year of our immigration experiment
• Permanent Club Med actually is cheaper than current U.S. refugee settlement?
• How do you integrate migrants from traditional societies into the U.S.?

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A friend decided to purchase a more advanced avionics suite than a combination of what is in an Airbus A380, a Boeing 787, and a Gulfstream G650. In other words, he has a DJI drone.

We went around our local town asking the Millionaires Who Hate Trump if they would mind if we flew the drone near their property. One hundred percent of the people with whom we talked refused to permit the operation. The only people who were polite and accommodating were the Tower controllers at Hanscom Field, one of the busier airports in the U.S. (more than 300 operations per day). These are the folks who actually do own and control the airspace in question.

In addition to being awed by the DJI technology, I learned that folks in Massachusetts seem to hate drones!

Supposedly the FAA, not the states or local authorities, regulates airspace. I wonder if the fix will be to make it an illegal human activity (“no human is illegal,” of course, but humans may still engage in illegal activities?) to control a drone while standing on the ground. This will motivate folks to bring back Google Glass and control the drone without an obvious rig?

Readers: If you have a drone, what have you observed? As the U.S. population expands to densities formerly known only in China, will we have to give up our drones to keep Americans from killing each other? (Second Amendment guarantees that people will have guns, but drones are optional!)

Related:

• “Is Flying a Drone Illegal? A Comprehensive Guide to America’s Drone Laws”
• article on a North Carolina law outlawing flying drones near prisons (how can this be a valid law if the FAA has exclusive authority to regulate airspace? how is it consistent with the First Amendment? What if a news site wants to show a video of life in the American Gulag? The particular law is only for the last 250′ AGL, but it still seems to be in conflict with established doctrine regarding the FAA.)

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A virtuous Facebook friend highlighted “Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Why Aren’t American Jews Speaking Up?” (nytimes) He suggested “Rock the boat and fight back.” (where “fight back” in the article is “complain verbally,” not “pop a cap in the Jew-haters ass”)

A year ago we had a big Jew-hatred scare from the NYT and similar media. Donald Trump had caused dozens of Jew-haters to call in bomb threats to dozens of Jewish schools. It turned out to be an American Jew in Israel with an auto-dialer and an angry Hillary supporter in the U.S. (see Donald Trump is threatening Jews?).

Here’s the war-winning advice from the best minds at the New York Times:

If the vinyl banners proclaiming “Remember Darfur” that once graced the front of many American synagogues could give way in a wave to “We Stand With Israel,” why can’t they now give way en masse to “We Stand Against Hate”?

Suppose that there is someone in the U.S. who currently hates Jews (maybe Iron John, who commented on my Black Panther posting). Will this person hate Jews less because there is a “We Stand Against Hate” banner on the nearby synagogue? Because American Jews fill their Facebook feeds with posts about how they don’t like Jew-haters? Because they see a group of Jews marching in the streets waving signs reading “We are super-likable people”?

[Separately, why don’t they have “Remember Darfur” banners up anymore? They don’t want to remember Darfur? They don’t care anymore? Wikipedia says that the war continues.]

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My Facebook friends heaped derision on the calculations in “Cutting welfare to illegal aliens would pay for Trump’s wall” (New York Post):

If a wall stopped just 200,000 of those future crossings, Camarota says, it would pay for itself in fiscal savings from welfare, public education, refundable tax credits and other benefits currently given to low-income, illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Camarota explains that illegal border-crossers from Mexico and Central America — who account for more than 75 percent of the illegal immigrant population in the US — are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated and lack English language and other skills. In fact, the average Latino illegal immigrant has less than a 10th-grade education. That means if they work, they tend to make low wages; and as a result pay relatively little in taxes while using public services. And if they have children while in the US, they more often than not receive welfare benefits on behalf of those US-born children, who have the same welfare eligibility as any other citizen.

“A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households is received on behalf of their US-born children,” Camarota said. “This is especially true of households headed by illegal immigrants.”

Therefore, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of more than $72,000 during their lifetimes, Camarota says. Including costs for their US-born children, the fiscal drain jumps to more than $94,000.

I can’t see how these calculations can be right. There seems to be no allowance for the cost of building infrastructure to accommodate the new Americans that result from immigration. (See “How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?“)

Let’s just look at the school construction cost. Mexican immigrants to the U.S. have an average of 3.5 children per woman (source). So let’s assume that each adult immigrant therefore adds 1.75 children to the U.S. school population. Our town is about to spend $166,667 per student on a new K-8 school (previous posting). Let’s assume that these kids also need a place in high school at $166,667. That’s a maximum of $583,335 in construction costs for every person added to the U.S. school population (this is a maximum figure because the marginal cost of building extra classrooms, per square foot, is presumably lower than the average cost; it doesn’t cost quite 2X to build a school that is 2X larger).

Readers: What do you think? Is there any way that the $94,000 number can be correct for a low-skill immigrant coming across the border with Mexico? That’s about what the City of Cambridge spends, including capital costs, to educate a child for three years in the K-12 schools.

[Of course, one could argue that we will be better off in non-financial ways as a consequence of expanded undocumented overland immigration. Money isn’t everything. This post is really about whether my Facebook friends are right in that the border wall is a stupid idea purely on fiscal grounds.]

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