Immigration
Redesigning California
Update: our local public radio station broadcast the two minute version of this post. Listen to it here. Most clichés about California are true: we are both America’s most urban state and its most agricultural. We are home to more national parks, more immigrants, and a better public university than any other state. We have [...]
Oaklandish
Plump, grey-haired Punjabi matrons in bright saris ululate like teenagers. Hot Indian grad students grab dates or mates who are Russian, Vietnamese, black, and white. Amritsari fried fish mixes with tamales; nan sits next to sopas. Women line up for Henna tattoos as kids run around and the music gets louder. A few overweight middle [...]
Obama: Break Away from Hillary on Immigration
To me, the biggest surprise of the 2008 election is that the most wide open election in three generations is not that wide open. The electorate is leaning heavily to early favorites Giuliani and Clinton, the two most centrist candidates. A Democratic Hawk vs. a Republican social liberal? My kind of election. The biggest disappointment [...]
UC Berkeley and The Meaning of Diversity
Columbia University announced this week that they were opening up the campus to for visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There was no reason to invite this guy — who is, after all, one of the most dangerous people on the planet. He is a deeply anti-Semitic holocaust-denier who funds terrorism throughout the Middle East. He [...]
Poverty in the US is increasingly associated with immigration
Robert Samuelson confirms what a number of people have quietly started to suspect: poverty in the US has been dropping steadily, except for impoverished folks who move here. Writing in today’s Washington Post, he notes that The government last week released its annual statistical report on poverty and household income. As usual, we — meaning [...]
The Washington Post: "We Don't Joke about Islam"
Berkeley Breathed writes the often funny and sometimes touching "Opus" comic strip featuring a bewildered penguin, an all-American chauvinist named Steve Dallas, and Lola Granola, whose search for enlightenment has led her recently to embrace the Prophet and don the Burqua. Click below to see Sunday’s strip. Like most comics, Opus pokes fun at the [...]
Mother's Day
Mother’s Day began in Greece — and it may end there, too. To the ancient Greeks, fertility was life. They worshiped mothers with a festival to Cybele, the mother of all gods. Modern Greeks worship motherhood, but they also avoid it. The average woman in Greece gives birth to 1.3 children. Over a generation or [...]
Protect Income, not Industries, Companies, or Jobs
Suppose we tried to improve our economic security and well-being by making it illegal for any employer to fire any employee for any reason. Over time, our strategy would backfire. We would become less secure because we would be less competitive as our companies lost out to foreign businesses with more flexible cost structures. As [...]
How the US Absorbs Unskilled Immigrants — Make Them Customers as Well as Workers
The New York Times ran an excellent article answering this question last weekend. They framed the article as a debate between Harvard’s Cuban born Economist George Borjas and Berkeley’s Canadian-born David Card. Pretty much all economists support skilled worker immigration — and very few argue that unskilled immigration helps the earnings of unskilled native workers. [...]
Zinedine Zidane: Ending on a Low Note
He is widely held to be the most complete soccer player alive. For the past two decades, many argue that he has been the greatest player of the world’s most popular sport. He inspires crowds, he inspires his team mates, and he inspires his countrymen, who call him "Zizou". He is Zinedine Zidane, a soccer [...]
Who's the Leader of the Club That's Made for You and Me?
THE MICKEY KAUS CLUB On the immigration debates, one blogger has been more provocative, more contrarian, more feisty, more original than all others. If you
have not indulged the wonders of Mickey Kaus on the topic
Silicon Valley Bank: We Need a Million More Immigrants Each Year
Jim Anderson, Chief Economist at Silicon Valley Bank, (disclosure: SVB banks Alibris) reveals
