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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
*eyeroll* :)
Luv ya, ST.
Yeah I’m in agreement with you here. I’m totally in favor of border enforcement etc….also maybe we could think about keeping track of people once they enter the country. Right now what we have is a political mess, but I don’t think a lot will change. Everyone has stakes in the extreme positions instead of something like what you describe above.
I’m sorry if I offended you, that was not my intent. What you call “trope” is pretty much reality but you can choose not to believe it.
Some Americans will do them, some won’t. It’s an entire post to describe the many motivations for some American citizens would rather work lower paying jobs or not at all. All I can tell you is pay isn’t one of them.
Yeah I build a lot of stuff….that’s why I didn’t understand your comment.
That’s awesome, good for them!
I have white guys working for me too….and black guys, and mexican guys, and panamanian guys, and one Iraqi guy. Several women too actually!
Some Americans won’t work, that’s their right. Some will and that’s awesome. No I’m not “entitled” to employees and I’m not sure what that even means. Since I’m not entitled to them I shouldn’t try to hire any more?? One thing that definitely will happen if I sit around and don’t do anything, my current employees will lose their jobs, not be able to pay their bills and take care of their families so I guess I won’t try your idea yet.
When people (business owners here) say we aren’t entitled to a job, they mean we need to compete for the work. We have to make ourselves more attractive. (I don’t disagree)
That’s what I was commenting on.
The implication that they should be allowed to hire from a global workforce rather than compete for labor is that they are more entitled to labor than workers are to a job. They don’t have to compete for local labor. I do know welfare is a hard thing to compete against.
Most American workers can’t compete in a global market, even if they wanted to. Most places aren’t quite so open to immigration as America is. My brother, in Australia, couldn’t get a work permit when he moved there to get married.
The whole thing is a mess. I know it’s not just business owners’ fault. I do think people with the money to lobby for change lack the same incentives that people on welfare lack – there is a quick fix available, so why rock the boat?
But I think it is not emotionally or mentally healthy for people to not be productive and the current status quo needs to change.
The Fed and every level of government is making this way worse than it has to be.
Your comment has been on my mind since I read it. What a terrible fix to be in.
In my town in Massachusetts, taxpayers can file for reduced property taxes or rebates for “hardship.” It’s pretty easy to do. You might be able to get that bill reduced considerably.
Part of the difference is this one: earlier generations of immigrants did not come to the country, walk into a Social Services office of the local county Health and Human Services then leave said office with food stamps, housing vouchers, AFDC checks and more. And everyone telling them “No need to learn English – that would inconvenience you and hurt your brain. Far better that we learn Spanish.”
In 1987, Calif voters took to the polling booths, stipulating according to Prop 187 that such practices were not good. Yet one of Jerry Brown’s buddies in the Calif Supreme Court overturned the voters’ decision. So the state has something like a one trillion dollar amount of red ink. (Which is only thought about by those depending on CalPers for their retirement monies.) Our schools here are in the toilet. The job situation is dire also. To get a job with County of Marin, my spouse had his Masters’ degree, to out-compete latinas with one year of college. If you go to work feeling sluggish, some hispanic co-worker reports you for the “dirty looks” you passed her way. Ask @annefy about her son the soccer coach and how the Left ate him over his “racism.”
USA’s legal acceptance is around 1.1 million a year. (the number of people who each year are naturalized as citizens.) Far more than other nations take in. Two million plus undocumented hispanics live in Calif. Although the Left promotes: Trump is Hitler! – that is hardly true. Anyone who wishes to sponsor an immigrant family to be their back up, so they don’t hit the welfare rolls, would be given Trump’s blessing. But tens of 1,000’s of people now are marching in the streets, signalling virtue. Their demand is that the public pay all the expenses that are commensurate with the new arrivals. They love to march, but could care less about paying the taxes.
And they are always wrong to think so?
Absolutes are almost never true. Just most of the time.
So your insight on absolutes cuts both ways. The absolute now in existence in Calif is that accepting any and all immigrants is the only way to prove you as an individual are for “diversity” and not a White Supremacist certainly is not a helpful situation, nor does it uphold truth.
Nor is the reverse true either. However the US has proven over and over again that it has no ability to find a working strategy that is somewhere in the middle. The pendulum swings only totally one way or totally the other.