JustOneMinute

Monday Evening

OK, another lost day. This article on divisions based on racial ideology rather than race itself is interesting. Apparently, it is white progressives driving the debate and screaming that the rest of white America are racist haters. If this sounds vaguely familiar it may be because it came from the same "Hidden Tribes" study indicating that most Americans are fed up with the PC Police.

The Red Guard Gets Results! Also, Wins Some, Lose Some

Social justice warriors scored a big win yesterday, forcing an apology from the late Maya Angelou over a transgression of hers from 1990.

Her outrage? Asking a fourteen year old to address her as "Ms. Angelou" rather than the overly familiar "Maya".

And how disdshe apologize from beyond the grave? Is it time to go long Ouija boards?

First, waddya mean you don't already have a Ouija board? Second, she apologized ten minutes later in the same venue to the young lady still in the audience.

So there. We're still waiting to hear an apology from The Duke.

And on the "Lose Some" side, SJWs will bemoan the news that the once-abhorrent James Gunn will be back at the helm of Guardians of the Galaxy III despite some indescribable and instantly forgettable outrage eight months ago. We have a hint that the firing was a bit of kabuki:

In the weeks after firing Gunn, there was speculation around town about who could replace the filmmaker, with agents lining up clients but by mid-fall, any perceived search seemed to have petered out, with many thinking that the project was on the back burner. What almost no one knew was that Marvel and Disney had never undertaken a search and had gone back to Gunn and made a deal ... in secret, according to insiders.

Hope for Roseanne Barr?

Horror In New Zealand

I'm just not ready to read about this right now.

Although right now my news boycotts encompasses college admission, Boeing crashes, and Trump's border emergency. Basically the NY Times front page. There's probably a story in the sports section I am also boycotting but I don't have the heart to look.

This, OTOH, I am emphatically NOT boycotting: Yankees 14, Red Sox 1. That's going to be the result pre-season, regular season, and post-season (if the Sox make it...). All Rise!

No Brexit No Peace, or, The Wall Will Stall

British Parliament votes to Keep Chaos Alive by requesting an extension of the March 29 Brexit deadline. 

To what end? From here in the cheap seats I see a second referendum focused on "Remain" versus the specific twice-repudiated Theresa May deal on the table, with the hope that this time the Remain faction can pull the country together.

Lawmakers rebuff the idea of another referendum

The British Parliament on Thursday rejected a measure calling for a second referendum on Brexit, dashing — for now — some activists’ hopes that Britons would reverse themselves and vote to remain in the European Union.

The amendment seemed doomed from the beginning, as the notion of a second referendum has never commanded a majority in Parliament. It was dealt a staggering blow earlier in the day, when the biggest campaigners for a public vote urged members of Parliament to vote against the measure, saying that Thursday’s focus should be solely on delaying Brexit.

The Labour Party, always leery of a second referendum, quickly announced its opposition, too, though individual lawmakers walked a careful line in trying to maintain they supported a second referendum in other circumstances.

“Today is not about the Labour Party saying it wouldn’t support such an amendment,” Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, said in Parliament Thursday afternoon. “It’s about saying today’s about extension.”

The measure failed on a vote of 334 to 85, with more than 200 lawmakers not voting.

Meanwhile the US Senate made its own bid for the front page, rejecting Trump's wall emergency with an impressive number of Republican defections (12). But 59 votes are not enough to overturn a Presidential veto.

The Senate really ought to amend the emergencies act that gave the President this sort of power.

Varsity Blues

The college admissions process is even more corrupt than we realized:

College Admissions Scandal: Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged

A teenage girl who did not play soccer magically became a star soccer recruit at Yale. Cost to her parents: $1.2 million.

A high school boy eager to enroll at the University of Southern California was falsely deemed to have a learning disability so he could take his standardized test with a complicit proctor who would make sure he got the right score. Cost to his parents: at least $50,000.

A student with no experience rowing won a spot on the U.S.C. crew team after a photograph of another person in a boat was submitted as evidence of her prowess. Her parents wired $200,000 into a special account.

In a major college admissions scandal that laid bare the elaborate lengths some wealthy parents will go to get their children into competitive American universities, federal prosecutors charged 50 people on Tuesday in a brazen scheme to buy spots in the freshman classes at Yale, Stanford and other big-name schools.

Brazen indeed - this goes well beyond the tutoring, application coaching and resume-building "study abroad" programs available to those with financial resources.

I'm intrigued to see that coaches of non-revenue sports are monetizing their ability to wave in recruits. No big-time basketball or football coach would need to do that, since they already have the TV and radio deals, sneaker deals, big contract and so on.

Ross zDouthat had a good twitter thread noting that parents are buying social status, not a lifetime of higher earnings.

The Ivy League earnings myth is discussed here. The conclusion: Ivy-qualified kids do as well as their Ivy-accepted peers.

In the pair's newest study, the findings are even more amazing. Applicants, who shared similar high SAT scores with Ivy League applicants could have been rejected from the elite schools that they applied to and yet they still enjoyed similar average salaries as the graduates from elite schools. In the study, the better predictor of earnings was the average SAT scores of the most selective school a teenager applied to and not the typical scores of the institution the student attended.

The researchers originally looked at students who started college in 1976, and in the new study they revisited what happened to these graduates. With the passing time, the salary advantage for the now middle-aged graduates, who attended elite schools, as well as those who gained admission, but passed on the chance, remained. The new study also looked at students who entered college in 1989.

My quibble - this looks at grads from the early 90's. MAYBE the hiring market has changed. Did McKinsey and Goldman Sachs cut back on the schools from which they hired in the last twenty years? Possibly.

Brexit: Endgame!

As the British Parliament strings out the Brexit drama they will be competing with Avengers: Endgame and the final season of Game of Thrones. So much drama!

In the lemons/lemonade department, it seems as if PM May managed to hold her most recent margin of defeat under 200 votes, so she has made progress since her first proposal was crushed. At a guess this is the second most lopsided loss in their Parliamentary history (bills doomed to fail normally get pulled), but there are more votes ahead and records are made to be broken.

Run Beto Run!

Run, Beto! Or stroll. Ambling is fine. Whatever he does he'll look Kennedyesque doing it.

His fans compare him to Mr. Obama or the Kennedys — a font of rangy inspiration — rarely dwelling on his record. But Mr. O’Rourke would enter the race without a signal achievement over six years as an El Paso congressman, nor an obvious big-ticket policy idea that might animate his bid.

So not just Kennedyesque, Obamaesque?

In public settings of late, Mr. O’Rourke has placed immigration, education and especially climate change at the center of his remarks, which tend to focus most on a high-minded-but-vague message of uniting a divided nation. 

Is his slogan "Hope and Change"? Might work again!

Sunday Afternoon

Spring forward. Carefully.

In Memoriam

JOM Regular "daddy" was at a JOM meet-up in the Greatest City in the World last Saturday. As folks here know, he passed away last week. His final post:

Good Evening! Great meet-up yesterday with Peter and the 2 Jim's. Met Peter first at the Strand and really had a ball prowling the stacks with him. I picked up 2 hard to find VDH Military History books, then a third book on DNA that Peter recommended. It's fun prowling bookstores with a friend like Peter as there are so many topics of mutual interest that catch ones eye while prowling, and each leads off into fun discussions of what we studied in college or traveled to before or have current interests in.

He's off to visit northern Italy shortly so he hit the guidebook section, then we got lost in the Aussie History section, then the Civil War section, then struck-out looking for Custer's My Life In The Plains, but hit pay dirt over in the Science/Astronomy section with another Martin Gardner book, since Gardner was a topic on JOM just last week.

Then JimmyK showed up and we had a nice walk over to the small Ukrainian Museum, which I thought was plenty fun since JimmyK's family is from the Ukraine and that gave opportunity to ask him interesting questions about that. Then of course we hit the Barnacle Bar with Scottish barmaid Jody, and then Jim nj showed up and fun jabbering ensued for hours and hours, and after Peter and JimmyK left Jody kept getting better and better looking, so somewhere along the line I explained to her that a "Jody" was a military chant and I was belting out "C-130 rolling down the strip" by the time Barmaid Jody had had enough of us and threw us out, but she ordered us both to go eat pizza across the street to soak up the beer that was making us both crazy, so we did, and we then cabbed back to the hotel and both passed out hard in about 5 minutes.

This morning, while JimmyK was not going to School due to snow cancellation, and while Peter was not going to Jury Duty due to snow cancellation, Jim nj and I gradually dragged ourselves out of bed and pounded tea and coffee to wake up. Then we cabbed down to the Staten Island Fairy and jumped on a Ferryboat. Jim nj is great on history and pulled out an atlas of New York, and did a great job explaining the history of what I was looking at, both on the Jersey shore and in Yankee-land.

Sped by Miss Liberty, then Governors island, and on return did Battery Park and learned a ton there. Who knew that 8 million immigrants arrived at Battery Park for Immigration screening in the years before the construction of Ellis Island to take over that job---not me. Next we hit the Custom's House, a gorgeous building Jim's Grandfather worked at back during WW1, and then we toured that building since it has now been turned into The American Indian Museum and had some really interesting displays.

We followed that by strolling up Broadway, past Trinity Church, and then a visit to the 2 Towers Memorial Plaza, but since Jim nj had worked there we did not dwell on it. Then further on up past the great architecture of the Woolworth Building, and a few other neat places like City Hall and the National Archives, and then to finish it off we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge out to the first support structure. By then we were beat and our feet hurt so we stopped for more Pizza since we both thought barmaid Jody would approve, and then he headed home to Jersey and I cabbed back to the Hotel to try to see if my co-pilot is interested in heading out for a brew, so if you'll excuse me...

Remember the good times.

All Hate Matters

As an alternative to denouncing the anti-Semitism in front of them The Democratic Clown Car Convoy denounces all sorts of hateful hate. This dilution of a denunciation of anti-Semitism drew bi-partisan criticism:

The resolution states that “whether from the political right, center or left, bigotry, discrimination, oppression, racism and imputations of dual loyalty threaten American democracy and have no place in American political discourse.” It also evokes white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Va., Charleston, S.C., and Pittsburgh as well as numerous attacks on Muslims and mosques.

Republicans mocked its all-inclusive approach. “We left out the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we left out Wiccans, we left out Jehovah’s Witnesses, we left out disabled people!” Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, exclaimed shortly before the measure came to a vote, adding, “What makes you feel good doesn’t always heal you.”

Some veteran Jewish Democrats, who had pushed for a measure that would solely condemn anti-Semitism, were equally dismayed.

“We are having this debate because of the language of one of our colleagues, language that suggests Jews like me who serve in the United States in Congress and whose father earned a purple heart fighting the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge, that we are not loyal Americans,” Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida, said Thursday morning in an emotional speech on the House floor.

“Why are we unable to singularly condemn anti-Semitism?” Mr. Deutch asked. “Why can’t we call it anti-Semitism and show we’ve learned the lessons of history?”

Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, one of two Jewish Republicans in the House, voted no, calling the final resolution “spineless and disgusting,” adding, “If a Republican member was pushing the anti-Semitism that Representative Omar keeps peddling, this resolution would name names.”

But Ms. Pelosi told reporters that the resolution was not aimed at Ms. Omar.

“It’s not about her; it’s about these forms of hatred,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Well then.

In order to stay on-brand Paul Krugman joined in with a bold "You're side is more poopy-headed than my side" tweet:

There are three things in life that are certain: death, taxes (unless you're Donald Trump), and persistence of anti-Semitism. But only one brand of antisemitism scares me – and it's not on the left

He's The Man Without Fear! Also, he's the man who doesn't read the NY Times, which had this way back in February:

Anti-Semitic Attacks Fuel Continuing Rise in Hate Crimes in New York

Hmm, NYC is MAGA country? Maybe! But if so the police and community leaders seem to be looking in some unlikely places.

One video showed a 51-year-old Jewish man being beaten to the ground by three young men, who seemed to select him at random. Another showed an Orthodox Jewish man being chased across the street by a man wielding a tree branch. A third showed an Orthodox Jewish man hanging on to a fence as an assailant jumped and choked him.

The three incidents, all of which took place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the past year, have raised alarms in the neighborhood and in the city’s large Orthodox Jewish community as a whole. Hate crimes are up citywide, but in Crown Heights, they have taken a particularly violent turn.

The Times uses their time-honored dodge of letting pictures and video part the curtain on the underlying racial tensions. Folks familiar with the Crown Heights riots, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan or the young Al Sharpton really don't need a decoding ring, although it is possible some youngsters do. 

Back to the Times:

But in Crown Heights, the increase in hate crimes has been more shocking because it has been marked by violent, seemingly unprovoked attacks on men and women in Jewish garb, many of which have been caught on surveillance video, and then widely viewed online. In many cases, there is no robbery, only the random attack.

Since October, there have been 15 violent, anti-Semitic incidents directed against ultra-Orthodox Jews in the neighborhood, according to an Israeli organization that tracks anti-Semitic incidents. Devorah Halberstam, the community liaison to the 71st Precinct, which covers Crown Heights, said she believes there have been even more than that.

Being visibly Jewish is part of the situation, which may be why the Professor Without Fear feels safe on the mean streets of New York. Hey, those Orthodox Jews aren't even pro-life, so whatever, amirite Paulie?

The police have made arrests in many of these attacks, much to the relief of residents. Still, they wonder what is provoking this wave of violence.

Rabbi Eli Cohen, the executive director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, has begun visiting nearby public schools with Geoffrey Davis, an African-American community leader, to try to understand what may be driving the attacks, as many of the assailants arrested by the police have been young men of color.

Wait, what? "[M]any of the assailants arrested by the police have been young men of color." Bold talk from the Times. Not quite bold enough to give us a racial mix of black, Hispanic, Asian and white but bold.

The Times also took a look last November:

Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?

Well, just don't look Jewish, I guess. Avoid synagogues. Delis are probably still safe since many are not Jewish.

And yet, at the same time, New York has become an increasingly unsettling place to be Jewish. The first inkling of this emerged several days after the 2016 presidential election when swastikas and the phrase “Go Trump” showed up on playground equipment in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights.

But, in fact, anti-Semitism was already quietly on the rise. For several years now, expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have made up the preponderance of hate crime complaints in the city.

 

Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.

 

The crime just doesn't fit any narrative with which the Times might be comfortable:

 

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

 

“I almost wish it was sometimes more clear cut,’’ he said. “It’s every identity targeting every identity.”

 

Oh, come on: Orange Man Bad doesn't cover it?

 

As to why the Democrats can't single out a black Muslim for her anti-Semitism, well, it's an ongoing mystery.

All Hate Matters

Democrats condemning anti-semitism? It's complicated!

This generational divide has been a slow train wreck coming. My guess? I will say that old-timers like me grew up with the Six Day war, the 1973 war, and the 1972 Munich Olympics. Distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys was pretty easy and Israel also benefited from an underdog status

My kids have grown up with two decades of Intifadas, Jewish settlements, and images of an unassailable Israel beating down hapless Palestinians. Arguments about the two-state solution and the right of return get pushed to one side - the Palestinians look like the sympathetic underdogs to them.

For a bit of flavor, this is from a guest piece in Vox by a Palestinian activist:

For her, this means speaking up for victims of the Saudi war on Yemen and citizens living under the brutal Saudi regime. It also means speaking up for the Palestinians. Just as it is becoming clearer to many Americans that a progressive agenda in the United States includes solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and equality, Omar’s support for Palestinians is part of her core belief system. As such, she and other new members of Congress are creating the space for others to speak up on this issue without fear.

Omar was elected in 2018, a remarkably deadly year for Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli military. According to a United Nations Human Rights Council Report, the Israeli military killed 138 protesters and injured more than 9,000 others between March and December of that year. They protested to demand an end to 70 years of refugeehood, while also demanding an end to Israel’s cruel and illegal siege of Gaza during weekly protests known as the Great March of Return.

I give that an eye-roll. I suspect Nancy Pelosi does too, but she has to herd these people and good luck to her.

EXCELLENT: Jonathan Chait goes all around on this.

 

KIDS WILL BE KIDS, OR SOMETHING DARKER?: Hard to know what to make of swastikas at Sidwell. Fortunately there were no MAGA hats!

Breaking Bad

The NY Times runs a shocking headline:

Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month

The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly doubling what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States.

More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without authorization in February, an 11-year high and a strong sign that stepped-up prosecutions, new controls on asylum and harsher detention policies have not reversed what remains a powerful lure for thousands of families fleeing violence and poverty.

The nature of the problem can be confusing and the Times quickly switches over to playing dumb:

President Trump has used the escalating numbers to justify his plan to build an expanded wall along the 1,900-mile border with Mexico. But a wall would do little to slow migration, most immigration analysts say. While the exact numbers are not known, many of those apprehended along the southern border, including the thousands who present themselves at legal ports of entry, surrender voluntarily to Border Patrol agents and eventually submit legal asylum claims.

The main problem is not one of uncontrolled masses scaling the fences, but a humanitarian challenge created as thousands of migrant families surge into remote areas where the administration has so far failed to devote sufficient resources to care for them, as is required under the law.

Well. We are seeing a surge in immigrant families claiming asylum because if children are involved the family won't be detained for more than three weeks:

Families with children can be held in detention for no longer than 20 days, under a much-debated court ruling, and since there are a limited number of detention centers certified to hold families, the practical effect is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. The courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all.

As to the idea that a wall wouldn't help, the Times reports within this story (and more here) that the wall at the legal crossing in Tijuana let Trump enforce the new policy of keeping asylum applicants in Mexico while their claim was processed. Hence the re-routing by would-be immigrants away from areas that have a wall and into the wild.

The Times also had fun with numbers last summer and we see it in some charts today: total apprehensions were much higher in the late 90's and early 2000's. But that was mostly single men who could be turned back to Mexico the same day. (Consequently those single men did not cross and promptly surrender). Now we are "apprehending" families as they surrender and claim asylum. Shortages of detention facilities, medical facilities, judges to process claims - all a problem.

From the Times:

Central American families have become the new face of undocumented immigration.

In the first five months of the fiscal year that began in October, the Border Patrol detained 136,150 people traveling in families with children, compared with 107,212 during all of fiscal 2018.

A trend toward family migration from Central America that began when Barack Obama was president has endured, after temporarily dipping during Mr. Trump’s first year in office.

A picture being worth a thousand words...

Pew Research has a similar chart with commentary.

If Congress won't fund a wall that could change our asylum laws. As if Democrats don't want this crisis.

FUN WITH NUMBERS AND PICTURES:

Here is a very misleading graph showing the huge illegal influx twenty years ago (mostly single men) with a picture of what looks to my cis-normative eyes to be a family.

The Center-Left Flees The Field

Ross Douthat on the collapse of the center left. He makes a good point: The Rubinomics "center-left" focused on economics issues, such as trade, tax reform and health care but unlike Bill Clinton were silent on cultural issues.

Ross barely mentions the great trainwreck of the day, which has also been the trainwreck in Europe, to wit, immigration, especially illegal immigration. He does say this:

But then consider a third distillation, a third narrative, in which the center-left’s signal political failure was that it never really sought to preserve a cultural centrism, which meant over time that its party’s approach to social issues has been dictated more and more completely by the left. In this story the political success of Bill Clinton reflected not only his compromises with Republicans on taxes and spending, his tacit nods to Reaganomics, but also his ability to infuse a centrist liberalism with reassuring nods to various kinds of moderate cultural conservatism — the school uniform and v-chip business and the rhetoric of “safe, legal and rare” on abortion, the easy Baptist religiosity, the tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage.

If Clinton had matched this cultural conservatism with decency in his private life, Al Gore would have won re-election as his heir and the larger story of the center-left might have been entirely different. But instead, from the mid-2000s onward, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party looked at the country’s changing demographics and growing social liberalism and decided that Clinton’s compromises with cultural conservatism weren’t as politically necessary as they had been (which was true), and that therefore they were free to become increasingly ideologically maximalist on everything touching gender or race or sexuality or immigration (which was … not true).

Team Rubinomics fled the field on immigration, which has clear economic and cultural components. As an example, in 2006 Krugman briefly touched the third rail and acknowledged, citing Borjas, that unskilled immigrants (legal or otherwise) depress the wages of the native unskilled.

By 2017 Krugman had more comforting studies and realized that such a conclusion was "wrong", although the once-admired Borjas continues to push it. Thank heaven for the liberal take-over of academia!

So what happened? Please. Peter Beinart explains the obvious - faith in their emerging Democacratic majority and rising political correctness pushed the Democrats to their current "Stop hating, hater" position on illegal immigration.

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

Let's not overlook Big Business, which had sway with both Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans:

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

The experience of unreconstructed socialist Bernie Sanders was instructive:

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Say what?!? Americans first?

Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

 "Proven incorerect"! Yet as a political theory it worked for Trump and here we are. Beinart goes on:

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.

There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Wow. How could so many be so wrong? Beinart mentions that some academics are funded by, eg, Microsoft. But his second point will surprise no one:

Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

Beinart goes on to float all sorts of proposals that would address the conflicting concerns of two groups the Democrats claim to care about, unskilled natives and immigrants. That is a conversation a center-left could lead, but it won't be happening. Lest you trail off before what seems to be his punchline I will put it here:

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

As if. Beinart goes on:

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

Uh huh.

Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. 

Oh, "English spoken here". That will happen.

And if you have made it this far:

Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.

n 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

He may be right about Clinton winning but obviously she didn't and couldn't say those things within her party today.

Kind of grim - when the proposed solutions are this far from possible for the Democrats one wonders where we are headed.

 

 

Sunday Morning

The traditional Sunday morning cop-out.

ASIDE: I have enjoyed Jonah Goldberg's colorful commentary for years, but are these the ones we were waiting for? Over to Frank J. Fleming:

It sounds like Jonah Goldberg’s new media venture will be aimed at people who think Trump is kind of an abhorrent idiot but don’t constantly have our freak out meter set to 11, but will he be able to attract all four of us to his site?