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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
Could the moderator explain how my statement violates the CoC?
In addition to this, I think the research show that they tend to live in sort of problematic clusters when they lack agency, due to lack of skills or a (one way or another) stagnant economic local.
Before I have to leave for the day, I’d like to explain my position. Islam is not a race; it’s a religious and political ideology of conquest. The political can be separated neither from the religious, nor the conquest. That is why I don’t want it in my country. Redact away, but please don’t redact the context of my statement.
Islam is inherently political. Acting otherwise is not ideal. JMO.
Wait, what?
I need the concrete repoured in my backyard.
OK. So only immigrants can build things?
How do they build in Japan, Switzerland and Australia, all of which have very limited immigration.
Sure we do. Theoretically. Practically? Not so much.
I think it would be a good idea to take the word of the guy whose business revolves around construction if you want to understand what the labor pool for that kind of work looks like in 2018.
Taking the word of the Chamber of Commerce is how we ended up in this mess to begin with.
Yeah, ok.
Yeah. Exactly.
Or maybe you meant to say Meh?
I could say that Doctors are the problem with medicine and have just as much of a valid “argument”.
If doctors are actively working to subvert the law and privatize profit while socializing costs I would agree with you.
If we actually had an immigration policy with enforcement and border protection, then we could allow for companies such as @concretevol ‘s to apply for workers with special work permits to perform those jobs which he can not adequately fill with US citizen labor. That is a rational policy, What we have now is suicidal. However, when Concretovol says he needs that labor to build his projects or pour his foundations or whatever…well, I believe him.
No it’s not that only immigrants can build things however if you look at the history of this country, manual labor type jobs have often been supplemented by 1st generation immigrant workers as an entry point to the job market. Chinese on the rail road, German and Irish etc in the building trades, Eastern Europeans currently. Also our country’s encouragement of younger generations to attend college and/or avoid the building trades along with social services that allow for people to get by without working at all have added up to a sizable deficit in workers.
Any opinions I would have about Japan, Switzerland and Australia would purely be conjecture on my part since I’ve never worked or ran a business there. I do know their populations are all smaller than ours and I would imagine have much less construction going on in general.
@AltarGirl What did I say that was insulting? I will admit my initial comment was a little flippant but I didn’t mean to insult anyone. Also, who are you saying doesn’t “know how to build squat”? lol
If they would fix the damn health insurance system and otherwise libertarian-up the economy I’m convinced we could be a lot less discriminate about immigration policy. This will never happen, of course.
OK. But lots of employers have been crying about the need for H1B visa workers, and manipulating the jobs to ensure they can’t be filled by US workers.
“Our goal is, clearly, not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker,” the lawyer in the video says. He later adds, “We’re going to find a place where … we’re complying with the law and hoping — and likely — not to find qualified and interested worker applicants.”
Immigration law firms do this all the time: They show employers how to recruit Americans without actually having to hire them.
Everything is cartel-ized like that or whatever you want to call it. There is too much government and Fed pushing everything around. Too much K Street. That’s the issue.
FWIW, this is pretty interesting.
It is the same trope of “jobs Americans won’t do” that I found offensive.
Why won’t Americans do them, but immigrants do? Is their a cost differential between immigrants and natives? Not on how much you pay or can afford to pay, but can THEY afford to work for that amount?
I was unaware of your work.
My family likes to do our own work as much as possible. My brother built my parents’ patio.
My yard service guy is a white man whose mother is an admin at my kid’s schools. He has white guys working for him.
Americans would work. But why are we not entitled to jobs, but you are entitled to employees? Maybe if you did sit around and not do anything, new businesses might figure out how to do it without immigrants just to do the work that isn’t getting done anymore.
Pregnant with important questions and issues.
#VoteHayek
This really is happening? This is a public forum? This is 100% complete Bull Sh….Manure!
Yes
Some Tech Companies Find Ways Not To Hire Americans
(sorry about the large font, not shouting)
Perfect example of the issue @kozak. I’d add to that for readers to consider how time crunched physicians and nurses are on typical hospital and office visits (guessing 10 to 15 minutes average with physician is about the norm/mean of time allotted/allowed for reimbursement) now consider how much additional time (effort/money) the examples Kozak stated further stresses the system.
Everyone should be on direct primary care + catastrophic insurance. What we are doing now is lunacy. The whole thing needed to be wiped out decades ago.
I am also more than just a bit confused here myself.
FIFY
me too