A Good Article in The Atlantic

Hey, folks, the article in The Atlantic somebody linked earlier today did turn out to be very good. It’s long, so here are some quotes:

Like the country receiving them, immigrants to the United States are cleaved by class. Approximately one quarter of immigrants arrive with high formal educational qualifications: a college degree or more. Their record and that of their children is one of outstanding assimilation to the new American meritocratic elite, in many ways outperforming the native-born. By contrast, about one-third of immigrants arrive with less than a high-school education. They too assimilate to American life, but to the increasingly disorderly life of the American non-elite. Their children make educational progress as compared to the parents, but—worryingly—educational progress then stagnates or retrogresses in the third generation.

The underlined bit is mostly about Latin American immigrants, and my personal observations confirm this.

When children of immigrants grow up poor, they assimilate to the culture of poorer America. While Mexicans in Mexico are slightly less likely to be obese than Americans, U.S. Latinos are considerably more likely to be obese than their non-Latino counterparts. The disparity is starkest among children: While 28 percent of whites under 19 are obese or overweight, 38 percent of Latino children are. American-born Latinos likewise are more likely to have children outside marriage than foreign-born Latinos.

Note that obesity, not emaciation is now a standard measure of poverty.

While Mexican immigrants are less likely to be sent to prison than the native-born, U.S.-born Hispanics are incarcerated at rates 50 percent higher than their parents and grandparents.

That’s what I’ve been saying: children of immigrants bear the brunt of their parents’ untreated emigration trauma.

Americans talk a lot about the social difficulties caused by large-scale, low-skill immigration, but usually in a very elliptical way. Giant foundations—Pew, Ford—spend lavishly to study the problems of the new low-skill immigrant communities. Public policy desperately seeks to respond to the challenges presented by large-scale low-skill immigration. But the fundamental question—“should we be doing this at all?”—goes unvoiced by anyone in a position of responsibility. Even as the evidence accumulates that the policy was a terrible mistake from the point of view of the pre-existing American population, elites insist that the policy is unquestionable … more than unquestionable, that the only possible revision of the policy is to accelerate future flows of low-skill immigration even faster, whether as migrants or as refugees or in some other way.

And then everybody goes, ‘Oh Lordy, why on Earth would Trump be so popular?’ Yes, really, what a mystery.

And my favorite part:

Also disquieting is the way in which refugee advocates toggle back and forth between reassuring the West that there is nothing to fear—and warning of terrorist violence if the refugees are refused.

That’s so true. Don’t fear the refugees, they are just poor, innocent widows and orphans. Remember, though, that upsetting the refugees in any way will make them start exploding buildings and shooting into the crowd. Yet the ridiculous argument that “We are doing ISIS’s recruitment work for it” is being advanced with the insistence of unhinged parrots.