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What Tomi Lahren Gets Wrong on Immigration
In a widely shared clip from a Fox News appearance over the weekend, Tomi Lahren showcased just how little she understands how this country was built:
.@TomiLahren: "You don't just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That's not what this country is based on." @WattersWorld pic.twitter.com/Dux0cABHar
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 13, 2018
My friend Brooke had exactly the right take:
https://twitter.com/bkerogers/status/995806378043367424
Lahren’s statement doesn’t just display an ignorance of American history, but also a total disregard for the work previous generations have done with genealogy. Thanks to the power of the Internet, it’s easier than ever before to do genealogical research. A subscription to Ancestry.com opens up a trove of documents from all over the world; painstakingly scanned and transcribed.
Over the years, I’ve delved into this world, and unfortunately find that I am the youngest person in the room at genealogy events by about two generations. As with many trades and skills, genealogy is one of those hobbies that millennials have no interest in taking up.
When I began researching my own family, I only knew my grandparents’ names on both sides of my family, and the name of one great-grandmother. Thanks to Ancestry and a few hundred dollars spent ordering death and marriage certificates from the archives in New York City, I’ve learned an incredible amount about my family’s origins.
The investigation has come with some fascinating discoveries: after a great aunt died, her widower married his sister-in-law. These second cousins saw their aunt turn into their step-mother overnight. Also uncovered was an infant brother of my grandmother’s, buried in the family plot without a headstone or marker of any kind. That discovery was made a few weeks after the birth of my second child, and we discovered this long-lost great uncle who never saw past his first week had the same name as our new son.
What has been most personally enriching is really understanding how much the history I already knew affected my family personally. It’s one thing to intellectually know that the graves and documents belonging to European Jewry was destroyed; it’s quite another to run into a brick wall because of it. While on my mother’s side I was able to easily reach back as far as eight generations thanks to the documents on Ancestry and the work done on the site by long-lost distant cousins; I was barely able to reach back two generations on my father’s. I was able to learn the names of the relatives who made it to America, and sometimes those of their parents if their names were listed on death certificates, but nothing else.
The most humbling part of doing this research has been seeing just how little my family had in terms of money, education, and expertise upon their arrival here. The first relative of mine to arrive here did so 12 years before he died, and managed to bring over all of his adult children before dying. What I know of him is from the 1900 census: he was a tailor from Austria, spoke no English, and could not read or write. His children would be able to learn how to read and write according to later censuses, but they too would work in menial jobs and live in rented homes, bouncing around New York City over the course of their lifetimes. It doesn’t seem as though my great-grandparents were even able to afford to be buried together in the same cemetery (I’ve been thus far unable to locate my great-grandmother, though I am reasonably certain she is buried in the same location as her husband).
Published in General
Our family joke is that our ancestors were the “worthy poor” that Oglethorpe brought over from England’s debtors’ prisons.
Immigration isn’t really the issue so much as assimilation, though, is it? (Not to mention education and literacy.) My swamp dwelling ancestors were generationally poor until my great grandfather and his siblings, the first literate generation in my family. One of his sons became a Florida State senator, another an author and horticulturist, and the two other boys (one of whom was my grandfather) insurance and real-estate brokers.
It’s interesting how each wave of immigrants are viewed as the death nell of liberty and the American way, and in hindsight they are viewed as good and worthwhile, and yet, every new generation seems to succumb to the same affliction.
“This time it’s obviously different.”
I’m sure that’s exactly what people thought during those previous waves, yet, it doesn’t seem to give anyone pause…
First, she used present/future tense. The future is not restricted to repeating the past. Second, historically, immigrants came to the country with typical skills. A strong back was the standard work requirement for 150 years. Now we have a knowledge economy. Every kid expected to become a college graduate, so that they can contribute to society. Why should immigrants have a lower education expectation than native born? It seems unfair to expect a person without language or technical skills to compete. Should MIT/Harvard/Stanford have an open admissions policy?
Every generation wants to protect what it has at the expense of “outsiders”.
1900, 1900. Does @bethanymandel mean the 1900 that was 13 years before the 16th Amendment was passed and an income tax was permanently instituted in the US? The tax regarding which its supporters called its opponents crazy alarmists for worrying during the debates before its ratification that the tax might (gasp) exceed 10% of income? That 1900?
The 1900 that was 35 years before the Social Security Act passed? (The Act where it was expected that most people would die before becoming eligible to receive benefits?)
The 1900 in which to pass out of 8th grade you had to pass a test like this one in which this was the first hour of a five hour test?
Snopes would have it that much is missing (arts, U.S. politics, etc.) I note that in the comprehensive human anatomy exams I have been given, there may have been a core subject matter that was tested in most years, but not every region or system was necessarily covered in detail on every year’s examination; you couldn’t adequately prepare merely by looking at the previous year’s final exam. While we were told that certain things were not going to be on the exam, everything else from many dozens of hours of lecture and hundreds of hours in the lab was fair game. That may not be standard testing practice now, but I believe that it was for many years.
I submit that the country with no income tax, no safety net, and assimilation aggressively pursued in the schools to which her ancestors and mine came in the late 19th and early 20th century came to meet the hunger for cheap industrial labor is not the country to which today’s illegal immigrants come.
America was built not by immigrants, but by settlers.
Or, as they were seen by the ones whose ancestors mostly came via the Bering Straits land bridge, “invaders.”
Border security matters.
I think you need to stay with Victor Davis Hanson sometime.
…
One of his most recent podcasts here mentions…
1.2 million ID thefts
immigrants fleeing car wrecks
$100 million California traffic fines forgiven
burdens placed upon citizens as non-citizens are never arrested for the same trivial things
horrible schools (California public schools have recently ranks about 48th in some categories)
25% of healthy California now has diabetes
about 85% of the immigrants have no English or money
waking up to gunfire and cockfighting
littering of dead dogs
wounded dogs and dog fights
and lots and lots and lots of trash.
…
Conservatives have to keep their heads. Pretending that problems do not exist only makes things worse.
Conservatives typically rely upon the fight-and-flight part of their brains, not the self-awareness part of their brains.
As Thomas Sowell would say, conservatives believe in constrained view, not the unconstrained view.
As Jonathan Haidt would say, conservatives make decisions based upon things other than compassion and “Marxist-type” fairness ideas.
VDH gets it. He has lived the grimy reality of uncontrolled immigration rather than the flowery rhetoric.
Echoing others here, I don’t think the immigrants have changed as much as we have changed.
What I’ve seen referred to as “economic refugees” will have a much more difficult time finding jobs and housing here than was true for earlier generations. And the barriers to starting a business today are steep. The Italians who settled in the North End of Boston could open up small shops and make a living that way. Today the startup costs would be prohibitive because of regulations.
The way people react to immigrants is mostly about numbers. Ten or twenty people at a time moving into a little town would probably be greeted warmly. It would be a whole different story if a thousand people moved into that small town all at once.
I don’t recall that the government (s) printed ballots in languages other than English. Nor did government agencies have signs or literature in languages other than English. Nor did they have paid translators for customers who did not speak English. All of those are provided today. People can come here from any country and rarely be required to speak English. We now help immigrants NOT to assimilate.
All those people that flowed through Ellis Island beg to differ.
Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892. America was already well-established by then.
They flowed in from shortly after immigration policy was transferred from the states to the federal government, and the flow lasted about 30 years until for political reasons the 1924 Immigration Act:
Have things changed?
[Despite aggressive attempts in the schools to assimilate them promoted by the Progressives of the day,]
That seems to be a critical question: Even if they did in the early 20th century, does the average long term immigrant today arrive with skills similar to those of U.S natives?
I suggest that the first 30 years or so of federal control of immigration policy were an attempt to meet the needs for industrial labor in a radically different economic, legal, and social climate from that of today.
Lahren isn’t very knowledgeable about immigration, but she is dead right that we shouldn’t let someone “come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice” which is one of the common rationales for open borders today.
Ellis Island opened shortly after the federal government took over immigration policy. That was a qualitative change. Also: who expects the feds to get a key policy like that right the first time around?
And America had no income tax, no social safety net, much less geographical mobility, and a much smaller regulatory state in 1892. Why on earth should immigration policy for that America be a paradigm for much of anything today?
The paper I linked to in #15
Many U.S. natives are innumerate, semi-literate in English, lifelong social assistance clients and/or criminals and essentially unemployable. Our schools turn out many hundreds of thousands of them every year.
We are importing long term immigrants who have similar skills: they are semi-literate (if that) in their native languages, illiterate in English, and probably innumerate. Many experience “identical rates of occupational upgrading” to their native counterparts: they become long term social assistance clients and/or criminals.
Willy Nilly Imigration policy with people to meet them and get them signed up for benefits equals collapse eventuality. Also, an America Bethany’s ancestors would curse her for. Don’t forget the La Raza progressives telling them there is more where that came from if we keep those evil Republicans out of office.
Why do you wish to transform the country Bethany ?
Why do you dispise the already economically challenged and wish to depress their wages further ?
Perhaps Tomi is not up to speed on imigration. However, she has what you are lacking in this post. Common sense.
Shaking head.
You beat me to this point. You can have either a generous social welfare state or generous immigration, but not both. At least not for long. You can have generous immigration of the unskilled and barely literate, or a minimum wage but not both. If you try both, you end up with a large class of immigrants living illegally in the shadows of the law, since they cannot be employed at a (legal) rate commensurate with their skills.
You and your snarky friend merely proved Lahren’s point. Let’s start by breaking down this passage:
Was that your great-grandfather? You don’t clearly say. But for purposes of discussion I’ll assume so. Was he actually illiterate in Yiddish? That would be an extreme rarity, but there always has to be a low-end to the distribution. At least he had skills from an economy that was roughly at the same state of development as the US.
Really, then, your grandparents were adult immigrants (not even DACA-eligible) and your parents were the analogue to today’s anchor babies. Contrast those two generations with current immigrants and their first generation offspring.
Instead of encountering a world of affirmative action preferences, those Jewish immigrants and their offspring encountered systemic discrimination that persists to this day. That was because their abilities and efforts made them a threat to the status quo. Nevertheless those who got into the system did things like dominating the hard Nobel prizes for the next 70 years or so. Those who did not get into the system built entire new industries such as Hollywood or dominated relatively open industries such as songwriting.
Contrast that success with what we have seen from generations of third world immigrants.
Now we get to Lahren’s point. We observe this about many secularized Jews (and also secularized WASPs). Without confidence in your religion (for Jews one that does not let them proselytize even if religious), you need something to establish your moral position in the world, particularly relative to religious Christians. One way of doing it is to use cognitive dissonance to create analogy between your ancestors and current third world immigrants. By taking your pro-immigration position, you are establishing yourself as the moral superior to the anti-immigration Christians of your immigrant ancestors’ days (and, by implication, your superiority over modern Christians).
Prior to most of the 20th century we didn’t have welfare and it wasn’t easy to get here or get in and once one made it they had to assimilate learn English, perish or leave and they did. That is a huge and obvious difference. Then there are the indigenous Americans who walk across the border whom we call hispanics. They aren’t hispanics and they aren’t immigrants, they’re reoccupying land they believe we, an alien tribe, took from them. These folks are a problem but it’s not an immigration problem. It’s a border and cultural problem.
I’ve written many times before about this. The phrase “nation of immigrants” should be banned, along with “a better life”, “in the shadows” and their ilk. Especially since we are no longer allowed to call ourselves the “Land of Opportunity”.
We are not a “nation of immigrants” any more than any other modern nation is; it just depends on what period you want to focus.
As is true the world over, everyone here probably has some person in her ancestry who fits the “wretched refuse” cliché . But so what? That’s a tiny, mythologized part of national, and individual, history. We were a penal colony, too, like Australia, before 1776. Does Australia call itself the “Nation of Criminals” or the “Nation of Slave Labourers”?
Those sobriquets applied to persons who arrived a couple generations ago. They do NOT apply to present-day inhabitants. So your grandpa was hanged as a horse thief –does that make you one?
None of our Founding Fathers were immigrants.
There’s only one other instance where people whose forbears re-located before the present generations were born are considered still to be immigrant “refugees”, and that’s “the Palestinians”. Much good has it done ’em.
Oh, it’s easy to make fun of anybody’s soundbite, especially when it emanates from such a pretty blonde head!
But Ms. Lahren is broadly correct. Romanticized history is no justification for a present day national policy of bringing in random lottery winners, persons with no skills or employment prospects, and the disabled, permanently unemployable family members of the foregoing. She’s “woke”–and so should we all be.
All of them were expected to learn English. There were no provisions for voting, signs or any other service in foreign languages ( my parents arrived in 1950. Had to learn English immediately). They had to be self supporting. Could not be a burden on the local or national government, or they were expelled. ( My dad who was a chemist immediately took a job pushing a hand cart in a sausage plant). There was no welfare, social security, food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers etc etc etc. You can’t have open borders and an open wallet. Either we control immigration, and at this point I would want a 5 year moratorium so we can determine exactly how many are here, and how many we need, not want to come, how many we need, or we end all welfare and transfer payments immediately.
@ctlaw, your brilliant comment #19 here should be a post in itself. A million “Likes”!
If you think there was no criteria for entering the US in the 19th century, you are simply wrong. You had to be at least healthy. If you weren’t you were sent packing at the expense of the steam ship company. That’s why the steamship companies made thorough medical checkups of those who boarded their ships and turned many away. People in steerage still got sick in the cramped conditions with tuberculosis often reappearing and would not be allowed to enter the US.
Women also could not be pregnant when they got aboard the ship.
There were also unaccompanied minor restrictions.
These are three criteria we don’t enforce now.
And all of your relatives would have been on the dole. Today it affords those who come here a higher standard of living than they had back in their homeland. It’s a true magnet and a drain on the economy – but then you neocon nevertrumpers never care about that.
The 21st century is not the 19th century and I can see that you are clueless enough to see that you think they are the same.
We are historical levels of immigration, and for the first time it’s mostly non European.
Note that even at the educational level of a Bachelors degree significant numbers are using welfare.
Note that even after 20 year nearly half the households still get welfare.
By the way is there a vast empty area of the country that needs populating like in the 19th century? I must be missing something.
some tribes are just not down with that whole assimilation vibe. their book tells them to convert, abuse or kill those already ‘settled’
Do you believe that “someone says it makes them feel nice” provides good and sufficient reason to allow people with low skills, low education, and not understanding the language to come into this country? Or do you agree with Lahren’s statement?
settlers bring their wives and families with them. invading armies take their booty where they can grab it. no need to believe me, just ask the fräuleins
Learn English, or find a job where it wasn’t necessary, or be supported by relatives.
In Isaac Don Levine’s engaging memoir, Eyewitness to History, he relates the story of how his father came to the U.S. Levine himself was already here; he himself came in his late teens, finished high school, and scuffled his way into the political machine in (I think, it’s been a long time since I read it) Kansas City. Anyway, Levine’s father was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, quarantined and was going to be sent back to Russia. Levine contacted the ward heeler he was in with, arrangements were made, and his father stayed and lived another twenty or thirty years – outliving (with great relish) the physician who wanted him sent back.
Levine was one of the first American journalists on the ground in Russia to cover the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. He went on to be a committed anticommunist libertarian.
He was not a Darzee liberal.
In Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi, Darzee the tailor bird