Tuesday’s New York Times front page includes an article titled “Immigration By Legal Path Begins to Fall” showing how President Trump’s efforts to reduce the foreign influx into America has begun to turn the tide.
Still, the future lies ahead, and it looks less American for us US citizens. The best thing to do would be to end immigration entirely for many reasons.
Having millions of foreign residents has no advantage other than perhaps restaurants, and that’s hardly a reason to continue immigration — I’d rather eat boiled potatoes and burnt hamburger.
Some areas have become Spanish-speaking zones where you might as well be in Mexico or Cuba. And language diversity is not a plus, it’s a danger when you don’t know what’s going on.
California seems headed for another drought, judging from a painfully dry winter, so we don’t need to import any more water-users here — 39 million is more than enough.
As Trump Barricades the Border, Legal Immigration Is Starting to Plunge, New York Times, February 24, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s immigration policies — from travel bans and visa restrictions to refugee caps and asylum changes — have begun to deliver on a longstanding goal: Legal immigration has fallen more than 11 percent and a steeper drop is looming.
While Mr. Trump highlights the construction of a border wall to stress his war on illegal immigration, it is through policy changes, not physical barriers, that his administration has been able to diminish the flow of migrants into the United States. Two more measures took effect Friday and Monday, an expansion of his travel ban and strict wealth tests on green card applicants.
“He’s really ticking off all the boxes. It’s kind of amazing,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. “In an administration that’s been perceived to be haphazard, on immigration they’ve been extremely consistent and barreling forward.”
The number of people who obtained lawful permanent residence, besides refugees who entered the United States in previous years, declined to 940,877 in the 2018 fiscal year from 1,063,289 in the 2016 fiscal year, according to an analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy. Four years ago, legal immigration was at its highest level since 2006, when 1,266,129 people obtained lawful permanent residence in the United States.
And immigration experts say new policies will accelerate the trend. A report released on Monday by the foundation projected a 30 percent plunge in legal immigration by 2021 and a 35 percent dip in average annual growth of the U.S. labor force.
Trump administration officials have said that immigration into the country should be based on merit and skills, not the family-based system that for decades has allowed immigrants to bring their spouses and children to live with them.
“President Trump continues to deliver on his promise to the American people to enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the acting secretary of homeland security, wrote in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, on Monday.
The rapid declines come as record-low unemployment has even the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, confiding to a gathering in Britain that “we are desperate, desperate for more people.”
But the doors have been blocked in multiple ways. Those fleeing violence or persecution have found asylum rules tightened and have been forced to wait in squalid camps in Mexico or sent to countries like Guatemala as their cases are adjudicated. People who have languished in displaced persons camps for years face an almost impossible refugee cap of 18,000 this year, down from the 110,000 that President Barack Obama set in 2016.
Family members hoping to travel legally from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia were blocked by the president’s travel ban.
Increased vetting and additional in-person interviews have further winnowed foreign travelers. The number of visas issued to foreigners abroad looking to immigrate to the United States has declined by about 25 percent, to 462,422 in the 2019 fiscal year from 617,752 in 2016.
And two more tough policies have now taken effect. The expansion of Mr. Trump’s travel ban to six additional countries, including Africa’s most populous, Nigeria, began on Friday, and the wealth test, which effectively sets a wealth floor for would-be immigrants, started on Monday. Those will reshape immigration in the years to come, according to experts.
The travel and visa bans, soon to cover 13 countries, are almost sure to be reflected in immigration numbers in the near future. Of the average of more than 537,000 people abroad granted permanent residency from 2014 to 2016, including through a diversity lottery system, nearly 28,000, or 5 percent, would be blocked under the administration’s newly expanded travel restrictions, according to an analysis of State Department data.
But the wealth test — or public charge rule — may prove the most consequential change yet. Around two-thirds of the immigrants who obtained permanent legal status from 2012 to 2016 could be blocked from doing so under the new rule, which denies green cards to those who are likely to need public assistance, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute. (Continues)
Before the Tea Party and Donald Trump, the elites of the Deep State had a pretty tight grip on the little citizens, or so they thought. But the rebelliousness in recent years against the globalist rulers has angered them, and the response has been a rather shocking level of contempt and outright hatred toward the citizens elites oversee.
One expression is the “New Way Forward” bill (HR 5383) which shows extreme favoritism to illegal aliens and disdain for actual Americans — the ones who obey the laws and built the country.
On Thursday, the longtime friend of American sovereignty Kris Kobach joined Tucker to discuss the threat of the New Way Forward legislation, starting at around 1:40 in the video below:
TUCKER CARLSON: Kris Kobach is a former Kansas Secretary of State. He’s running for Senate in that state. We’re happy to have him tonight — Kris, thanks so much for coming on.
So I can’t get past this talking point which I’ve heard again and again recently which is illegal aliens, undocumented immigrants, are more American than you are, Mr. and Mrs. American. What do you make of that?
KRIS KOBACH: It is really disturbing, Tucker, and it also echoes the New Way Forward bill, which you have laid out very clearly for viewers to see. Because the New Way Forward bill says that aliens have a, quote, right to come home, criminal aliens have a right to come home. Home.
And so if they’re as American as we are and they have a right to come home, this is a disturbing view of what they think it is to be an American. They think that America is just a place on a map, and if you stand on American soil ever so briefly, suddenly you’re an American.
But of course that’s contrary to centuries of American history. They reject assimilation, they reject an American creed that all immigrants come to adopt. And they want to break that down because the parts of the American creed, things like capitalism and the rule of law, are things that the Democrats no longer accept. So I found it really really shocking how they have adopted this mantra that illegal aliens are as American as we are.
CARLSON: Well, it sends a pretty clear message. If I said to my children, you know, the kid down the street, the one who’s always breaking into houses and never goes to school and gives us the finger when we drive to church, he’s every bit as much my child as you are. In fact, maybe even a little more. The message to the kids would be really clear, I hate you. Wouldn’t it be?
KOBACH: Yeah, yeah, exactly and the message sent by the New Way Forward bill, you mentioned many of the problems in it. On top of what you mentioned, Tucker, there’s another problem: it would turn every city in America into a Sanctuary City.
Local police would be forbidden from helping ICE in any way, and so just imagine, thousands of Americans would lose their lives, would be injured, and if you’re one of those victims of someone who’s been brought back into the United States, you’ve been injured by the illegal alien, and you’ve been betrayed by your country — in the name of what? It’s insane.
CARLSON: Yeah, in the name of what. Can they get elected on this? Is there popular support for these ideas?
KOBACH: Thank goodness, no. I don’t think so. Certainly not among Republicans and the vast majority of Independents don’t embrace this idea, and I think even a lot of Democrats too are rejecting how the leadership of their party has gone so far to the left. So much for embracing illegality in this country, and as you pointed out, embracing illegal alien criminals so much that they want to fly them back to the United States after they’ve been deported. I can’t see how that makes sense to most voters, and including Democrats.
CARLSON: It’s scary as hell. Kris Kobach, thanks so much for coming on. Good to see you.
Friday’s Los Angeles Times included a front-page article titled, “See Dick and Jane read poorly. See them win a lawsuit” that focused on the dysfunction of state schools that had worsened to the point that students had to sue the state to get attention. California did pony up $53 million which may help somewhat, but doesn’t solve the core problem of excessive immigration taking attention away from American kids.
The official California Department of Education page includes the rather challenging language statistics for Fall 2018:
● The 1,195,988 English learners constitute 19.3 percent of the total enrollment in California public schools.
● A total of 2,587,609 students (English Learners and Fluent English Proficient) speak a language other than English in their homes. This number represents about 41.8 percent of the state’s public school enrollment.
● The majority of English learners (70.2 percent) are enrolled in the elementary grades, kindergarten through grade six. The rest (29.8 percent) are enrolled in the secondary grades, seven through twelve, and in the ungraded category.
This is the larger background that contributes to the failure of California public education, driving students to sue the state. Citizen students stuck in diverse schools are really getting the short end of the stick in environments where diversity is more valued than excellence and achievement.
To give the Times its due, it did mention some of the diversity details which I’ve highlighted in the text following:
California students sued because they were such poor readers. They just won $53 million to help them, Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2020
LOS ANGELES — Two years ago, a group of students and their teachers sued the state of California for doing a poor job teaching kids how to read — 53% of California third-graders did not meet state test standards that year, and scores have increased only incrementally since. On Thursday they won $53 million so that the state’s lowest-performing schools have the resources to do better.
Under the settlement with the state, most of the funding will be awarded over three years to 75 public elementary schools, including charters, with the poorest third-grade reading scores in California over the last two years. The agreement comes after the novel lawsuit contended that the students’ low literacy levels violated California’s constitutional mandate to provide all children with equal access to an education, said attorney Mark Rosenbaum at the pro bono law firm Public Counsel.
“We shouldn’t have to be filing lawsuits to establish a right to read,” Rosenbaum said.
The plaintiffs included current or former students and educators at La Salle Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles; Van Buren Elementary School in Stockton; and the charter school Children of Promise Preparatory Academy in Inglewood. La Salle and Van Buren will be among the schools that receive funding, Rosenbaum said, but not all the recipient schools have been identified.
“We know that literacy is the foundation for all learning, and it’s an essential part of participating in democracy. People who can’t read and write are often uninformed, are more easily manipulated and less likely to vote,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. This settlement is “just a step, and I think we shouldn’t exaggerate how big a step.”
A Los Angeles Times analysis of the 75 lowest-performing schools on the state’s English language arts test, based on California’s Common Core standards, illustrates the depth of the reading problem. Seven out of 10 third-graders in these schools did not meet the standards, according to state data from 2018 and 2019. The schools have about double the Englishlearners of other elementary schools, and more than 90% of students at those schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — a poverty indicator.
The schools with the lowest test scores also tend to enroll higher percentages of homeless students and foster students, Noguera said.
The settlement money to improve learning will exclude hundreds of elementary schools whose students are also struggling to meet reading standards.
In more than 500 of the state’s approximately 6,000 elementary schools, the majority of third-grade students scored Level 1 — the lowest — in English tests, according to the Times analysis. About 80% of the schools’ population are black and Latino, higher than the state average of 60%.
The scenario is also troubling in the fourth grade, with California students lagging behind the national averages in reading on the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress, a standardized test taken across the country. (Continues)
Tuesday’s opening added details to that story, but more importantly, he explained the many ways that influential Americans have been bought off by the Chinese communists to serve their nefarious ends. It’s both shameful and dangerous.
The detailed report deserves your careful attention because the threat will be with us for a long time and needs to be understood in its complexity, in particular how thoroughly the Chinese have infiltrated our institutions.
I’ve added some links to the text below:
Spare audio:
TUCKER CARLSON: There are serious long-term problems facing America, as we’ve told you about for years on this show. Thanks to outsourcing, this country no longer has the same reserve of stable middle-class manufacturing jobs we did even 30 years ago.
In coastal cities, housing has become astronomically expensive. Prices are rising far quicker than wage growth. And most tragically, an opioid epidemic kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. One of the chief reasons for that is a synthetic opiate called fentanyl that is smuggled in from abroad.
Now, these might seem like unrelated problems, but they’re not. A single theme unites them — a systematic decision by many of our country’s most powerful leaders to sell out America to China.
Those jobs that were outsourced, they went to China. Those rising home prices, all-cash Chinese buyers are a major contributor to that, though it’s almost never said out loud. Fentanyl — made in China with the knowledge and tacit approval of the Chinese Communist Party.
China is no longer simply an economic rival of the United States; it’s becoming a dangerous enemy. But instead of protecting us from this threat, an existential one, our leadership class collaborates with the other side.
Why do they do that? Simple. They’re getting rich from it. This only became clear to many people a few months ago when the most American of all sports, professional basketball — a game literally invented in a gym in Springfield, Mass. — ripped off the mask and showed the world who really controls the league.
LeBRON JAMES: So many people could have been harmed, not only financially. but physically, emotionally, spiritually.
So just be careful what we tweet and we say, and what we do, even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech. But there can be a lot of negative that comes with that, too.
CARLSON: Yeah. Just be careful with what you tweet or say because the Chinese are watching, and they pay the bills.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, meanwhile, explained that there’s really no moral difference between America and communist China.
COACH STEVE KERR: It has not come up in terms of people asking me about it, people discussing it. No. Nor has our record of human rights abuses come up, either.
People in China didn’t ask me about, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall.
CARLSON: Yeah, so America has school shootings. China is on its third or fourth genocide since World War II. You know: Tomato, To-mah-to. Six dozen to one. Whatever.
Yeah, saying something like that out loud should be shocking, but it’s not really. It’s a taste of just how completely the people in charge identify with China over this country.
In some cases, they’ve literally joined China’s payroll. Former Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, for example is a registered foreign agent who lobbies for the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation. That’s a Chinese organization with ties to the Communist Party. A former senator.
Former Senator Joe Lieberman works for another Chinese company, ZTE. What’s ZTE? Well, ZTE is so dangerous to American interests that last August, the President signed a bill banning the federal government from using that company’s equipment because it’s too threatening. But Lieberman’s lobbying for them. Continue reading this article
Whenever Democrat 2020 candidates yap about America offering open borders to the world, it’s clear that they have never considered the environmental carrying capacity of our little space on the planet.
Unfortunately, California is a popular place for foreigners of varying legality to relocate which has given us more than 10 million foreigners as fellow residents.
There’s no question this state is overpopulated in an environmental sense, and water supply is the most immediate and vital issue in this regard. While much of the state’s water goes to agriculture, public service messages will likely be appearing soon on TV urging California residents to conserve water.
So I’m back to catching shower warm-up water in a five-gallon bucket and using it to keep the camellia bush alive.
Wednesday’s Sacramento Bee front-paged the bad news:
Democrats once claimed they supported the environment, but 2020 candidate Joe Biden recently asserted, “We should be able to increase to three million people the people who could come for family reunification” (Joe Biden: ‘Absolutely Bizarre’ to Suggest Limit on U.S. Capacity to Absorb Immigrants, Breitbart.com, February 18, 2020). And family unification is just one category of immigration.
Of course the whole reason foreigners come to America is to increase their income and consumption of consumer goods and physical resources generally. Only the favored phraseology is to “come for a better life.”
Sierra snowpack withering in California’s dry winter. New satellite image shows the bad news, Sacramento Bee, February 18, 2020
The image is disturbing and leaves little doubt about California’s growing predicament: The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is a sad whisper of it was a year ago, a withering testament to the lack of precipitation in the state’s increasingly dry winter.
The National Weather Service tweeted satellite images of the Sierra on Tuesday, showing the stark difference between this year and the above-average snowfall from 2019. The mountain snowpack — a crucial element in the state’s annual water supply — is 53 percent of normal for this time of year, according to the Department of Water Resources.
The immediate forecast isn’t promising. NWS meteorologist Emily Heller said there’s a chance of “some light mountain snow this weekend” — perhaps a couple of inches at elevations of 6,000 feet or above. Even that measly forecast is uncertain.
“It’s too early to get everybody’s hopes up,” Heller said.
Three years after former Gov. Jerry Brown declared the official end of the last drought, the lack of precipitation is putting the state on edge all over again.
California needs a healthy snowpack to replenish its water supply in summer and fall, when the precipitation disappears altogether and the state relies on water in its reservoirs. On average, the snowpack provides about 30 percent of the state’s water needs.
The state also needs moisture in the soil to tamp down the wildfire risk. The historic five-year drought killed tens of millions of trees, helping set the stage for the horrific fire seasons of 2017 and 2018. (Continues)
The latest in Red China ripoffs against America is quite a doozy. Apparently Beijing leaned on one of its people residing in this country to use his position as Chief Investment Officer of CalPERS to redirect billions of dollars toward investment in questionable businesses in China, including military affiliated and some blacklisted by the US government.
CalPERS is an agency of the state of California that manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.6 million California public employees, retirees, and their families.
You have to hand it to Red China for inventing ingenious ways to scam America.
Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana explained the situation to Tucker Carlson on Monday:
TUCKER CARLSON: As China becomes more powerful, the Chinese government finds it trivially easy to infiltrate and plunder America’s institutions, almost all of them.
American companies outsource their jobs and eventually their expertise to China in return for a quick profit. Universities and labs hire Chinese scientists who then send their research back to their masters in Mainland China.
But even our pension funds aren’t immune. A remarkable story tonight. CalPERS is California’s public pension system. It has $300 billion in assets under management.
Recently, a letter from Indiana Congressman Jim Banks revealed that CalPERS chief investment officer had been recruited by a Chinese espionage operation. It almost defies belief.
Congressman Banks joins us tonight. Congressman, thanks so much for coming on and for exposing this story, which is shocking and I don’t say that lightly. Tell us — just give us a quick summary of what happened?
REP. JIM BANKS (R-IN): Well, this is really one of the more incredible stories and examples of China’s infiltration into our systems as you talked about, Tucker.
But in this case, we learned that Yu Ben Meng, the Chief Investment Officer of CalPERS is a graduate of something called the Thousand Talents Program, which, Tucker, is a program that’s funded by the Chinese government controlled by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party that’s designed to recruit valuable individuals and place them in highly valuable places.
In this case, putting Yu Ben Meng in a place to oversee the largest state pension fund in America, where he has steered $3.1 billion to 172 different Chinese companies.
Now, what’s even worse than that, Tucker, is that I serve on the House Armed Services Committee in the Congress, and every day, I’ve been a part of working with President Trump to rebuild our military.
We’ve made the largest investment in American history in our military because we’re trying to keep up with the China threat militarily.
What we’ve learned in this case is that CalPERS is investing in Chinese military shipbuilding and naval bases through this investment fund and even worse than that, they’ve invested in a company called Hikvision, which is a company that has developed some technologies used to spy on and persecute the Uyghur Muslim population through different types of surveillance technologies.
That’s what the California public pension fund is being used for. I believe it’s a travesty. And I’ve called on Governor Newsom to do something about it.
CARLSON: So one of the biggest players in American finance which CalPERS is, is helping to build the military of our chief military rival. This is grotesque. Continue reading this article
Sunday’s front page of the StarTribune newspaper published from Minneapolis/St. Paul included a story about “new Americans” being taught how to navigate Minnesota’s culture as well as the cold and snow — so different from Rwanda and Burundi!
The accompanying photo showed newcomers learning the fine points of shoveling snow at an eight-week class presented by the International Institute of Minnesota:
The article gives limited information about the Institute, noting that it has “resettled nearly 25,000 refugees in its centurylong history.”
However a glance at the internet shows that the nonprofit is expanding substantially:
ST. PAUL — At a time when nursing homes and assisted living facilities are scrambling to find employees who can balance a strong work ethic with sensitivity to the needs of vulnerable adults, Jane Graupman believes she has just the solution.
In a word? Refugees. She wants more of them, and she wants to make more room for them and other immigrants in her crowded classrooms. . . .
Meanwhile, technology has a different idea for patient care in nursing homes, namely robots, which are becoming smarter and more capable all the time. So America won’t be needing low-skilled foreigners for that job either.
One gets the impression that refugee resettlement can be a profitable endeavor. The most recent 990 report for the Institute available is for the year ending September 30, 2018, and it shows Executive Director Graupman getting a salary of $106,769. That’s probably decent money in Minnesota. Also interesting is that “government grants” from the taxpayers amounted to $2,294,910.
So uneducated, culturally ignorant immigrants and refugees can be quite enriching for diversity-seeking nonprofits.
The eight-week cultural orientation class helps immigrants and temporary residents navigate myriad American systems — legal, education, health care — and more.
Dorcas Zirirane arrived at a “Life in Minnesota” class in St. Paul carrying her 1-year-old granddaughter on her back in a colorful cloth sling, speaking to her in Swahili. Zirirane was wearing a long skirt with a bold, vibrant pattern traditional to the Democratic Republic of Congo, from which she’d fled as a refugee.
But she’d already adapted her wardrobe to her new home. Zirirane raised the hem of her thin cotton skirt to reveal a pair of thick leggings.
Zirirane was one of about 20 students attending the International Institute of Minnesota’s eight-week cultural orientation class, which helps immigrants and temporary residents navigate myriad American systems — legal, education, health care — and more.
Instructor Sara Skinner also supplements the basic curriculum for refugees with skills specific to the state. Many are related to the cold: how to dress for winter, do the “penguin shuffle” when walking on ice, shovel snow correctly.
Others involve a more figurative cool: understanding Minnesotans’ reserve and interpreting the notorious “Minnesota Nice.”
This morning’s lesson was on health. Midway through it, Skinner stressed the importance of protecting your skin from the cold, dry air. “If you put Vaseline in your nose at night when you go to sleep that will help your nose not to bleed,” she offered.
The Swahili and Karenni interpreters did their best to translate a phrase that likely left those from warmer climes wondering what they were doing in this bone-chilling land of nasal-greasers.
Fear of freezing
The number of refugees coming to Minnesota has plummeted since President Donald Trump dramatically reduced the national cap on refugees (18,000 this year, down from 110,000 during Obama’s final year in office). Still, the state has a long tradition of welcoming newcomers and ranks high in its number of refugees resettled per capita.
Of the nearly 900 refugees who arrived in Minnesota in 2019, those from Myanmar were most numerous, followed by Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine. But a typical “Life in Minnesota” class includes students from countries all over the globe: China, Burundi, Rwanda and Portugal among them.
Helping new Americans achieve self-sufficiency remains a primary focus of the institute, which has resettled nearly 25,000 refugees in its centurylong history. It is one of five resettlement groups in the state. (Continues)
On Friday, Tucker Carlson reviewed the hazards of the truly scary House bill, the New Way Forward Act (HR 5383), which he first discussed on February 6.
The legislation, sponsored by 44 members of the House, is a shocking statement of what the Democrat party has become today with its support of open borders and hatred of America. Just for starters, known foreign criminals are better treated than US citizens, and a basic concern for public safety is missing entirely. An alien has to be practically an axe murderer to be deported, and the bill even requires citizens to pay to return deported aliens from their home countries to be reinstated as US residents.
So the bill is crazy dangerous.
Tucker discussed the bill with DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, who agreed that the New Way Forward is not the way to go at all.
Spare audio:
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, in this show, we’ve told you a lot about the New Way Forward Act. That’s a bill co-sponsored by more than 40 sitting House Democrats that would completely remake America’s immigration system and the country itself for the sake of protecting foreign born criminals.
Violent felons could not be deported back to their home countries unless they received at least a five-year sentence. Even then a judge could easily override that.
The government, meanwhile, meaning you would have to pay to fly deported criminals back into the United States to resume living here. So what would this means for America? Nobody has a clearer picture of that than Chad Wolf. He is Acting Secretary of Homeland Security. He joins us.
So you’ve read this legislation. You’re familiar with it. If it became law, what would happen to the country?
DHS ACTING SECRETARY CHAD WOLF: Well, it’s very dangerous, I would say it completely guts our immigration enforcement system that we have in place. It also is — just from a pure legality perspective, it just guts the rule of law.
So envision a world where individuals no longer have to wait in line for visas. They can come across the border. It’s no longer a criminality to do that. They can then come into the system, we can’t deport them. We can’t hold people. It essentially abolishes I.C.E. and then on top of all of that, going back 25 years, we then have to find folks, bring them back into the country, re-litigate their immigration proceedings.
So if you’re looking for a way to abolish our immigration system, abolish I.C.E. and just rewrite our immigration code completely, this would be the legislation for you. Continue reading this article
Here’s an update from California. It’s still overtaxed and diverse — two factors that are connected because foreigners like big government and newbies require special services like English classes in school designed for non-speakers.
Americans have largely quit moving to the state and citizens are leaving, but immigrants still are flooding in, shown by the 11 million foreign-born residents as of 2017.
Here’s an update from Fox News reporter William La Jeunesse:
WILLIAM LA JEUNESSE: California is growing wealthier, more liberal, more expensive — forcing 52 percent of residents to consider leaving, including 71 percent who identify as conservative. Many businesses already have — this company leaving LA for Texas which is set to add three Congressional seats; California is losing one. . .
CEO Magazine calls California America’s worst state for business; quality of life — the worst according to US News. Add taxes, traffic, housing, energy costs — almost 700 companies left in the last two years. . .
Yet California is growing, thanks to immigrants from abroad. Its diverse economy, among the world’s largest, attracts more college grads than any other state. . .
Some super-rich and retirees are leaving, but overall the state is gaining those that make over $125 grand, losing those that make under 75.
Yang is a tech guy who tried to bring attention to the coming problem of extensive automation which he mentioned during his remarks about ending the campaign:
ANDREW YANG: We highlighted the real problems in our communities as our economy is being transformed before our very eyes by technology and automation. Americans know now that when you go to a factory in Michigan, you do not find wall-to-wall immigrants doing work. You find wall-to-wall robot arms and machines doing the work that people used to do. We stood on the debate stage and shifted our national conversation to include the fourth industrial revolution, a topic no one wanted to touch until we made it happen here with this campaign.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Yang emphasized his free money cure for automation-caused job loss rather than alerting the public to the coming employment downturn. He calls it the “Freedom Dividend” aka Universal Basic Income on his website Yang2020.
One of Yang’s worst enemies in his political campaign was America’s excellent economy, so any warnings about robots taking jobs from humans must have seemed a distant threat to many voters.
But at least he brought the issue to a wider public. President Trump should hire him as the Under Secretary of Commerce in charge of American preparations for the automated future.
Trump can also severely decrease foreign entrants to this country, because
Sunday’s Washington Post had a front-page article reminding us of what a barbaric country lies to our south. The accompanying photo shows young boys holding rifles with the headline, “Amid gang peril, a Mexican village arms its children.”
What could possibly go wrong? Even proponents of armed self-defense (like me) see serious dangers with kids’ immature brains that cannot always judge what’s real and who exactly might be a real enemy.
Apart from the kiddie angle, we can see how completely Mexico is owned by criminal cartels.
As the article mentions, Mexico had a record 35,588 homicides in 2019, showing the nation next door is one of the more violent on earth.
President Trump should finish building the wall yesterday and reinforce it with armed troops. It’s crazy to have an insecure border with such a savage nation.
Amid gang peril, a Mexican village arms its children, by Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, February 8, 2020
AYAHUALTEMPA, Mexico - Before he picked up a rifle and joined a squad of armed children, Alex wanted to become a schoolteacher. He’d teach anything - “whatever the principal asks” - because spending his days in a classroom sounded pretty good.
He was 13, a B student with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bicycle who got nervous around the girls in his middle school.
Then, in November, as violence surged in the mountains of Guerrero state, the men of Ayahualtempa decided it was time for their sons to take up arms.
Alex was handed a hunting rifle and told to show up for daily training on the village basketball court. He and his young comrades, some as young as 6, marched and crawled with loaded guns almost as tall as they were. Their uniforms said “Community Police” in yellow letters.
When the photographers started coming, the boys were told to cover their faces with handkerchiefs. Arming children to defend the town against a violent gang wasn’t a media stunt, Alex’s commanders insisted. Yet if the images drew the government’s attention to a place Mexico’s security forces had forgotten, it would be a triumph of its own.
But were the boys training to defend their village, or were they being paraded in front of visiting photographers to send a message to the government, a plea for more resources? Sometimes even Alex wasn’t sure. What he knew was that the gun was heavy and loaded, and the training felt real enough to him.
Alex’s father, Santos Martínez, looked at his son’s face, trying to gauge whether Alex was mature enough to join the force.
“There was no fear in his eyes,” Martínez said. “That’s how I knew he was ready.”
Alex repeated the words of his commander: “I’m preparing to defend my village.”
Mexico suffered 35,588 homicides in 2019, a record. It was another data point in a trend borne out across Ayahualtempa and thousands of towns like it: Every year, no matter who is in power, this country becomes more violent.
But violence takes dramatically different forms across Mexico, a nation splintered by turf wars. In the northwestern capital of Culiacán, the Sinaloa cartel battles the country’s security forces with military-grade weapons. In Ayahualtempa, a village of 600 indigenous people, the community police carry aging hunting rifles in their own war against a powerful drug cartel called Los Ardillos, which controls the neighboring town.
For years, Ayahualtempa had maintained its own defense force, dozens of armed men who patrolled the village and manned checkpoints and held overwatch positions on the roofs of unfinished homes. Autodefensas, or self-defense forces, are legal in Guerrero state and recognized by the federal government.
But over the past year, the local autodefensa, known as the CRAC-PF, has been overwhelmed. Twenty-six people have been killed since the start of 2019 in the force’s territory, which includes Ayahualtempa and 15 other towns. Last month, 10 musicians from those towns traveling to a concert were shot and burned beyond recognition. One of them was 15 years old.
Alex’s middle school was in what was considered to be enemy territory. He stopped attending. (Continues)
It’s certainly the case that low-skilled immigrants will not be employable in the coming automated economy when robots can perform simple tasks cheaply 24/7 with no coffee breaks.
But it’s also true that higher skilled persons won’t be needed in many fields as artificial intelligence (AI) develops more capability. Immigration in general should be dialed down severely with the automated future in mind. When technology experts say 30 to 40 million American jobs are at risk of being eliminated, we should pay attention even though the employment economy is quite healthy today.
Young people planning careers and middle-aged persons considering a change should understand that some of today’s jobs may not exist in a decade or so.
But as a recent Time article notes, employment will certaInly not disappear entirely.
The story of automation in America has long been told in shuttered factories and declining Midwestern cities. But the latest wave of advancements in artificial intelligence may be bring the prospect of machine replacement beyond blue collar work. Developers are creating algorithms that promise to take over vast amounts of work in white collar fields like law and medicine, potentially upending traditionally high-status fields. For people in those once-secure positions, the questions are whose jobs may be changed, how soon, and what new opportunities may arise to take their place.
Knowledge work that involves repetitive tasks or large amounts of data, such as lawyers’ often arduous document discovery process, is particularly ripe for disruption from AI, experts say. Tasks that require human-to-human interaction or some element of creativity are likely to be safer. “Pattern recognition in general is something that these technologies seem good at,” says Mark Muro, one of the authors of a recent Brookings Institution report that suggests high-paid, educated workers will be highly exposed to new AI technology. “That is a contribution to a lot of white collar activities.”
MIT economics professor David Autor says middle management positions are particularly susceptible to this new wave of automation, particularly in fields like finance and inventory management, where humans are in charge of translating data into concrete business decisions. But he also argues that displacement from machine learning is likely to create new opportunities.
“Historically, tons of new work comes into existence as a result of automation,” Autor says. “The whole industrial revolution came about as a result of the automation of artisanal tasks, but it would have been impossible for anyone at the dawn of that period to foresee where that would go.”
That optimism may come as cold comfort for the artisans of 2020: the millions of paralegals, human resource managers, IT professionals and other knowledge industry workers whose positions are prime targets for a new wave of automation. McKinsey predicts across-the-board cuts in such fields over the next decade. Some fields, like office financial support personnel, are likely to lose more than one in four positions.
Some economists predict even more dramatic changes in the coming years, including a radical shift in top-tier white collar work. Richard Baldwin of the Graduate Institute in Geneva argues that AI, coupled with outsourcing enabled by new advances in telecommunications, will sharply reduce white collar employment. He believes those twin drivers could displace professionals in elite sectors from media and finance to architecture and law, at least until people find new ways to put themselves to work.
“What we have is displacement being driven at the pace of digital technology, but job creation being driven at the pace of human ingenuity,” Baldwin says. “What I’m worried about is that job displacement driven by digital will outstrip job creation driven by ingenuity.” (Continues)
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