One of the storylines that emerged following Donald Trump’s victory on November 8 was that President-elect Trump outperformed Mitt Romney’ s 2012 showing with Hispanic voters. Trump also approached the 31 percent of Hispanic vote that Senator John McCain received in 2008, after McCain had spent the three years prior to the election pushing a massive amnesty bill in the Senate.
Saying America is “a nation of immigrants” is a tautology, an axiomatic statement that should not prevent us from formulating an immigration policy that best serves our needs today. When politicians or opponents of immigration reduction blithely say America is a nation of immigrants, most often they are making the argument that history precludes any reduction in immigration at present, even though the current immigration level is more than double the historical average.
According to the Times, 161,000 new jobs created in October, and the unemployment rate dipping down to 4.9 percent, “suggest[s] a healthy outlook for the months ahead.” No, it suggests something much different. In effect, the unemployment rate went down in October because 425,000 people (in just one month!) were moved from the “unemployed” column to the “not in the labor force” column on a government spreadsheet. In 2000, the number of 18- to 64-year-olds not in the labor force was 38.1 million; today that number is 49 million.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly unemployment figures this morning. The headline of the press release read: “Payroll employment increases by 156,000 in September; unemployment rate little changed”
Julia Preston wrote an article for The New York Times with the headline “Immigrants Aren’t Taking Americans’ Jobs, New Study Finds.”
President Obama’s proposed refugee admissions for FY2017, which he submitted to Congress for approval, requests that refugee admissions be increased 30 percent from FY2016, from 85,000 to 110,000. The requested budget to administer the program in FY2017 is $1.54 billion, which only includes the costs of resettlement, not the cost of benefits refugees receive after they come to the United States.
Salon published an op-ed comparing the speech First Lady Michelle Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention last week to the one given by former Congresswoman and Civil Rights activist Barbara Jordan in 1976 – the first DNC keynote address delivered by an African-American woman.
The result of the June 23 Brexit vote continues to cause much gnashing of teeth on both sides of the Atlantic from those who expected the United Kingdom would remain in the European Union; many of who arrogantly dismissed the notion that the citizens of Britain might actually want to regain control of their own affairs.
Paul Ryan continues to roll out his “Vision for a Confident America.” We discussed earlier the section outlining how the GOP leadership plans to alleviate poverty, though what that plan is or how they would implement it is unclear.
Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan launched the GOP’s plan to fight poverty and enable the upward mobility of Americans.