President Trump’s latest obloquy—calling a number of
countries “shitholes” and asking why we are expected to accept their
immigrants—is offensive for all the reasons you’ve probably heard: it’s
insulting, racially divisive, callous, and so on. The United States has
welcomed immigrants from various “shithole” countries for much of its
history. Those schleppers worked, sweated, and saved, started
businesses, paid taxes, and asked God to bless America.
If only that was all there was to it. As is so often case in this president’s administration, noxious wording is distracting from a serious public-policy debate. The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors.
During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.
Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/truth-behind-trump-storm-15676.html
If only that was all there was to it. As is so often case in this president’s administration, noxious wording is distracting from a serious public-policy debate. The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors.
During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.
Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/truth-behind-trump-storm-15676.html
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