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His Name Is Aylan
His name is Aylan and he is Kurdish, the small child I see lying face down on a European shore. He died as his family tried to escape Syria, and the images of his tiny lifeless body has sparked an understandable anger across the world.
I feel the same outrage in me, and I know where I want to place that pain and condemnation – at the feet of President Barack Obama.
For the better (or worse) part of six years, Obama has tilted the world to this point, where children float up on foreign shores and families place their fate and belongings in a broken vessel to go anywhere other than where they’ve been.
An hour or so before I saw this picture, I found out that Senator Barbara Mikulski became the deciding vote needed to secure Obama’s Iran deal in Congress. Because the president has been single-mindedly focused on that deal — because he’s been willing to subordinate every other concern in the Middle East to cementing his legacy — we see floods of Arab refugees seeking shelter on European soil. Those who cannot flee are either displaced within the region or become unwilling stars of one of the many horror videos touted by that group with many names and little sovereignty.
There was a time not that long ago when ISIS did not exist and when I had never seen a man beheaded or burnt alive for the world to see. Now images of Yazidi girls sold in slavery pass by my feed alongside memes and selfies. I had gotten so desensitized that I almost forgot that this brutality hasn’t always been part of my existence.
Then I saw that boy, like trash on the beach, with no one to claim him, and I remembered. I remembered how Obama chose to empower Assad, partner with Iran, forgo red lines and destabilize the Middle East.
This is supposed to be the President of humane ideals and progressive values. Yet on his watch young girls are systematically raped in the Levant while the White House spends its time fretting about hookups on college campuses? This commander-in-chief says all options are on the table — yet when Americans are beheaded on screen his response consists of offering PR advice to the terrorists responsible? Not only can’t I make sense of it, but I cannot fathom where the world will be in the 505 days we have left until this man leaves office.
His name is Aylan. He was three years old and he lost his life because his family decided that the unknown on the other side of that dark ocean was safer than the hellhole their country had become. To me, that is, and will forever be, President Obama’s legacy: That child with his face in the water, and the growing evil that placed him there.
His name is Aylan. And his life matters too.
Published in General
Thank you so so much!
Agreed. Now we have to figure out how to accomplish this.
I’ve started a thread, above, where we can work on just that.
Sarcasm or no, I was being serious. I meant it. As for whether it’s a good idea, I think:
People that really care about this stuff will be personally engaged, and spending their time and money, and using their property. Not “ours”.
The people that think “humanitarian” means “oh, that’s the government’s job” will shut their yaps when they realize it would disrupt their Stuff-White-People-Like lifestyle.
The people that come over would more likely be the honest sort and not just “Oooh, lets move over there and get their welfare!”.
Being sponsored and supported by private citizens means they’ll be spread out among the population and not creating a refugee ghetto.
Related to the last point, a private home sponsorship means that the government won’t be moving these people en masse to a neighborhood near you, recreating the Paris “youth” situation right here.
Last, the people that don’t care won’t be troubled or have to pay for it via taxes
But the government is never going to let you do any of this. They’ll want mass government resettlement, or nothing at all.
And more is coming. We will not have the luxury of addressing problems onesie-twosie.
Driving a wave of human misery before an invading army turns the hungry and desperate people into shock troops weakening the targeted countries. You would have to be [a remarkably gullible person] to think that ISIS is not thinking ahead and operating for effect. You know what comes behind a wave of empty-handed refugees? Bad guys with guns, and there you are, with your hands full of misery.
Some would be willing but not many. Most households are having trouble making ends meet and are neck-deep in debt.
Especially the children. Reminds me of a documentary I saw recently called Nicky’s Family showing how Nicholas Winton brought together British families and Jewish refugee children from Czechoslovakia, saving them from Nazi death camps. If you haven’t seen this BBC film I highly recommend it.
Considering that “immigrant” and “settler” often appear as synonyms, it appears that the definitions you use may not be widely known. Is it that people start out as immigrants and then become later settlers?
For example, Scandinavian immigrants settled parts of the northern Midwest, and built up a particular way of life there that, while American, is still different from other American ways of life. Some of it really different, like lutefisk.
Settlers may have built some part of the country. But the country my ancestors immigrated to a century ago has been built way beyond the imagination of the early settlers.
I think the distinction, if one is necessary, is that settlers come to a new place intending to make their own community separate from any that are already there (e.g., Whites and Indians). Immigrants as such can be settlers, but not if they intend to become part of the already existing community. So as the waves of immigrants came from Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s most expected to become part of the existing community.
But they contributed as much as anyone who came earlier to the building of the country.
Who says they have to let them stay for free? If the migrants were allowed to get jobs, they could stay in their homes and pay rent. Win-win.
I did the same for my oldest last year. Congratulations on the upcoming Bar Mitzvah. Nothing can prepare you for the overwhelming pride. It was one of the best days of my life.
Thank you! I can’t even think about it too much, as I tear up immediately :) I’m sure I will embarrass him thoroughly.
This may not be popular, but I want to sound a note of caution here.
There are a lot of places in the world not named “The United States of America” where these people could go.
Our country already allows more people to immigrate than could possibly be healthy for it. Enough already. Are there no other Muslim countries who would be willing to take these people in?
I’m sorry that these children are dead. It’s heartbreaking.
President Obama’s precipitous withdrawal from the Middle East is at least partially responsible for the general collapse of civil order in the region. However, that doesn’t mean that these people automatically become our responsibility.
Are Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the other countries in the region stacking people up like cord-wood? If we wanted to do anything, we ought to pay some of these nations to take in these refugees.
I just don’t think that it’s a good idea for them to settle here.
Isn’t that a requirement from The Handbook of Moms. Secretly, he’ll appreciate it even if he won’t admit it. When he gets older, he’ll appreciate it even more.
By what metric?
The United States is actually really good at assimilating immigrants.
We’ve allowed 20 million legal immigrants to enter our country over the past 20 years – that doesn’t even get to illegal immigration.
As a matter of historical comparison, no nation that I can think of has allowed so many immigrants to come to its shores as a function of absolute numbers or percentages. You have to go back as far as the early 20th century influx of immigration to the US to find a comparable situation, but even that doesn’t exactly compare because there were a lot of low-skilled jobs for people to perform at that point in history.
We as a nation have the ability to be choosy about who we invite in to our nation and we should. We should be inviting doctors, computer engineers and other technical professionals to come to our country, not third-worlders with no relevant skills who are guaranteed to be net tax receivers in our advanced welfare state for the forseeable future.
That’s how nations work. We have borders. We have a cohesive culture and we select people whom we think will adopt that culture AND add to it constructively.
I should also point out that I don’t think this nation will be remarkably better with half a billion people than it is now – especially given that recent patterns indicate that the next 150 million or so immigrants aren’t going to be as easy to assimilate as the previous 40 million or have been.
That’s my little way of pointing out that they haven’t assimilated yet, and the only way that they’re going to is if we cut off the flow and start to actually allow them to do so rather than allowing them to simply continue to import their whole country into ours, which quashes their need to assimilate.
I tend to favor the view taken by Julian Simon that immigration is likely to increase the wealth of a society.
But to use a bit of simple logic, it’s clear (to me at least) that we shouldn’t accept all the people who want to come here. Just to pick a number out of my hat (I said, “Hat”) let’s say 3 billion people would come here if we had open borders. But though I’m not going to try to prove it, I’m going to assert that at some point between zero and 3 billion we will reach the point where the marginal value of one more immigrant becomes negative. At this point we should stop allowing more immigration.
We are arguing over where that point is.
Moreover, immigrants are not fungible. Some will contribute much more to society than others. Some will be much easier to assimilate than others. Hence, they should be ranked and each tranche of immigrants that will clearly contribute more than they would cost should be admitted. Then, less valuable tranches would either be rejected or some (low) number accepted for other reasons, such as being refugees from repression.
How do you define wealth? Large-scale unskilled immigration will increase overall GDP but lower GDP per capita.
China will be soon the biggest economy in the world with a GDP per capita much lower than the US. Does that make China a “wealthier” country than the US? Not in my book.
I would rather have the highest GDP per capita in the world than the largest economy. Allowing a large number of unskilled illiterate immigrants will necessarily lower GDP per capita, making us a less wealthy country in my estimation, even if it increases overall GDP.
To politicians, increasing gross GDP is good for them, making the slice government takes bigger and make more people reliant on government handouts, both of which increase the power of government, which is what politicians want. Politicians are quite happy to make their constituents poorer if it makes them richer.
Right, but almost everyone’s personal income and wealth will go up. There would be (slight, 5-10% of income) losers, but they would be a small minority.
You say GDP per capita will go up when you say “almost everyone’s personal income and wealth will go up,” how do you figure this? If we massively increase the supply of unskilled and low-skilled labor, there are a number of countervailing dynamics that take place. Demand for some things will increase (rents, for example will increase because housing supply is relatively static in the short run) while the supply of labor will increase. Some people argue that the demand increase will more than offset the impact of wages of the increase in supply. This is possible, but it seems to me that this conclusion is far from certain.
For example, plenty of American citizens will face lower wages as a result of increased competition (while they are facing hire rents). Some other goods might be cheaper, but it is very hard to conclude that almost everyone will be better off.
It is clear that land-owners would benefit from increase demand for a limited supply of land, but the only other clear winners are politicians, CEOs and many business owners. It is not clear that “almost everyone” will be better off.
Basically, the top 80%ish of the population would see an income increase (one day I will finally track down that link!!!). The least skilled individuals would experience an income decrease of 5-10%, I believe. That could easily be offset by a small refundable credit to those affected.
The reason you get a drop in GDP/capita is because the denominator is increased so much, but almost all those people have seen massive increases in their incomes by being freed from their economic Antarctica of country origin.
And you’re right that owning land is an important thing in case we ever get open borders or a cheep technological replacement for human labor. Land values become astronomically high in the latter scenario.
Would like to see the link (and the underlying assumptions). It doesn’t quite seem plausible to me, especially given the portion of American citizens that marginally attached to the labor force.
If we lower wages for low-skilled workers, many American citizens will be pushed onto welfare. It’s also not clear to me how this influx of unskilled workers would function properly in a country with a high minimum wage (like the US).
Add to this the fact that we have around 90 million people who are currently not participating in the labor force.
Stopping the flood of labor coming into the nation will also allow the economy to re-absorb some of this slack in the labor force, rather than doubling down on bringing people in whose skills are not in huge demand and whose jobs are likely to be replaced by robots in the near future.
This might be true in a mathematical sense, but that doesn’t mean that everyone won’t be (or can’t be made to be) better off.
Suppose one laborer from Mexico enters the country. He was making $1,000 per year in Mexico. In the US he makes $10,000 per year. He is enormously better off. He increases the supply of labor in the US by one worker, but he also increases the demand for goods and services by one consumer. It’s not clear to me that this is overall bad for anyone, especially given that there are many jobs that are going undone, and that there are many sectors of the economy where good workers are hard to find.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you are wrong about a large influx of unskilled immigrants from Mexico or Guatemala all arriving at once. My point, as I expressed in #109, is that we are doing the wrong thing economically to allow too few workers in just as it is wrong economically to allow too many.
Of course the right number may take some trial and error to identify, and it will change based on how generous our welfare system is and what demands we make on the new immigrants. And I am not saying anything here about illegal immigrants. I believe in the rule of law.
I think this is simply inaccurate. One laborer from mexico rarely comes alone, and frequently brings with him his wife, child and then has more children while being here. He becomes eligible for EITC, Section 8, SCHIP, SNAP and a panoply of other welfare programs. His children enter our schools at an average cost of about $7,000 per student – but frequently his children have to be enrolled in a more expensive ESL program AND remediation because the child wasn’t in school in Mexico.
By the time you add up all of the costs associated with what “one laborer from mexico” adds to the bottom line, he’d have to be earning $50,000/yr to get to the break-even point. More, if he has more than one child.
We can’t afford this sort of prosperity.
That is a function of our welfare programs, not of the labor market. I mentioned this in #116. If the benefits are too generous for new immigrants that could theoretically move the efficient number of immigrants (those who produce more than they consume) to zero.
But I don’t think the number is quite that low. Those children are a cost today, but will be supporting programs for the aging population in the future, and providing manpower for the armed services.
The immigrants of years past also brought their families to Ellis Island. Many were unskilled peasant farmers. My own grandfather was a teenager without skills who had to escape the authorities in his native country or be killed. He became an auto mechanic and the father of 5 children and a passel of grandchildren, all of whom are (or were, till they died) productive members of society. There are various business people, professionals, truck drivers, factory workers, massage therapists, and many others among the progeny of that unskilled teenager.
As Rick Santorum said not so long ago, the only “benefit” those earlier immigrants expected on arrival here was freedom.
I might add that if a Mexican immigrant can support his family on what he can earn from his own labor than he is most likely producing more than he is consuming, and is a net benefit to society.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible to have liberal immigration policies and generous welfare programs at the same time. Better in my mind to have liberal immigration and severely restrict welfare for immigrants and the native born as well.
Immigration makes natives more skeptical of welfare. Our diversity is likely one of the reasons we have less of a welfare state than Europe.