The billions of dollars invested in the project probably have a lot to do with that renewed energy. Nobody in Detroit or Silicon Valley (or Japan or Germany or Red China) wants to lose out on a major industry of the future.
So self-driving cars are still coming, which threatens eventual job loss for millions of Americans.
Driving is a popular employment category for immigrants, so the automation of cars and trucks means we won’t need to import them for transportation jobs.
Furthermore, the CBS report was more interested in safety — which is important. Self-driving has been sold as being perfectly safe, unlike fallible humans who drink, blink and fall asleep. But the expert appearing on CBS This Morning, Kevin Delaney, said the current technology is only at Level Two out of five levels of autonomy.
Another point of interest is Delany’s mention of worsening “congestion” — which sounds a lot like population growth, now largely fueled by immigration of varying legalities.
]]>“We’re heading towards hell”: Expert shares concerns with self-driving cars, CBS News, August 31, 2019
The race to create the self-driving car continues at a feverish pace, with major players pumping billions into the effort. But Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief and co-CEO of Quartz, said that when it comes to autonomous vehicles, “we’re heading towards hell.”
“These cars are not safe yet,” Delaney said. “There are five levels of autonomous vehicle safety, according to the U.S. government’s certification, and right now, at best, we’re at level two. What this means is that people need to be keeping their hands on the wheel, they need to be keeping alert to avoid accidents.”
That’s not the only potential problem. “What researchers have found is that when people have access to cars driving that require less effort and money, they actually drive a lot more,” Delaney said. “So the traffic that we experience today is likely to get a lot worse.”
To avoid those problems and establish a “good path” for autonomous vehicles, Delaney said, there are a few solutions. One is to introduce autonomous vehicles in waves, starting with lower-risk innovations like low-speed buses. Platooning – having a human drive one truck, with an autonomous truck following close behind – is another option.
The other key is to encourage carpooling. “If you make it easier for people to drive, because they could sleep, or do whatever, while [their] car is driving, we need to make sure that it’s more like Uber Pool than Uber X,” he said. “Otherwise, the congestion is going to be atrocious.” (Continues)
Often the Times promotes hispanics as being superior to crass, meanie Americans who built the country that the world is invading by the thousands daily.
But on Saturday, the [...]]]>
Often the Times promotes hispanics as being superior to crass, meanie Americans who built the country that the world is invading by the thousands daily.
But on Saturday, the Tribe of the Day was Sikh who, according to the Times, are “transforming” the US trucking industry. Say, did American truckers ask to be replaced by foreigners and have their business transformed?
Below, immigrants now drive on the “Punjabi American highway” according to the LA Times.
The paper even included a video online with a kid for extra emotional effect.
For a little history, American truckers have been celebrated in music and film for decades. In 1978, Sam Peckinpah directed the popular film Convoy, starring Kris Kristopherson, back when long-haul truckers were in the news for using CB radios.
In 1974, Johnny Cash wrote and recorded “All I Do Is Drive,” a song dedicated to hard-working truckers:
Plus, America certainly doesn’t need to import diverse truck drivers when self-driving vehicles are high on industry’s to-do list of automation. Driverless big rigs have been tested on highways for the last couple years, and recently the state of Florida approved a plan where more advanced vehicles could be on the road next year. The Starsky company intends to have remote drivers logging on to computers in an office environment to handle its trucks during the first and last miles of their trips by the end of 2020.
But the Times prefers its diversity fairy tale rather than facing America’s automated future.
]]>Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway, Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2019
It’s 7:20 p.m. when he rolls into Spicy Bite, one of the newest restaurants here in rural northwest New Mexico.
Locals in Milan, a town of 3,321, have barely heard of it.
The building is small, single-story, built of corrugated metal sheets. There are seats for 20. The only advertising is spray-painted on concrete roadblocks in English and Punjabi. Next door is a diner and gas station; the county jail is across the road.
Palwinder Singh orders creamy black lentils, chicken curry and roti, finishing it off with chai and cardamom rice pudding. After 13 hours on and off the road in his semi truck, he leans back in a booth as a Bollywood music video plays on TV.
“This is like home,” says Pal, the name he uses on the road (said like “Paul”).
There are 3.5 million truckers in the United States. California has 138,000, the second-most after Texas. Nearly half of those in California are immigrants, most from Mexico or Central America. But as drivers age toward retirement — the average American trucker is 55 — and a shortage grows, Sikh immigrants and their kids are increasingly taking up the job.
Estimates of the number of Sikh truckers vary. In California alone, tens of thousands of truckers trace their heritage to India. The state is home to half of the Sikhs in the U.S. — members of a monotheistic faith with origins in 15th century India whose followers are best recognized by the uncut hair and turbans many men wear. At Sikh temples in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside, the majority of worshipers are truck drivers and their families.
Over the last decade, Indian Americans have launched trucking schools, truck companies, truck washes, trucker temples and no-frills Indian restaurants modeled after truck stops back home, where Sikhs from the state of Punjab dominate the industry.
“You used to see a guy with a turban and you would get excited,” says Pal, who is in his 15th year of trucking. “Today, you go to some stops and can convince yourself you are in India.”
Three interstates — the I-5, I-80 and I-10 — are dotted with Indian-American-owned businesses catering to truckers. They start to appear as you drive east from Los Angeles, Reno and Phoenix, and often have the words “Bombay,” “Indian” or “Punjabi” on their storefront signs. But many, with names like Jay Bros (in Overton, Neb.) and Antelope Truck Stop Pronghorn (in Burns, Wyo.) are anonymous dots on a map unless you’re one of the many Sikhs who have memorized them as a road map to America.
The best-known are along Interstate 40, which stretches from Barstow to North Carolina. The road, much of it alongside Historic Route 66, forms the backbone of the Sikh trucking world. (Continues)
Higher education has certainly changed in recent decades, in part because it is more desired and valuable than before, making the competition increasingly intense. Plus, there [...]]]>
Higher education has certainly changed in recent decades, in part because it is more desired and valuable than before, making the competition increasingly intense. Plus, there are many thousands of foreigners who pursue US educations as a useful doorway to residence, and they are appealing to college administrators because they pay full tuition.
Alan Dershowitz, a long-time professor at Harvard, recently discussed how things have changed on campus in light of the scandal:
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Look, at bottom, you know the fault for this lies in the fact that we’ve abolished grades at universities in many parts of the country. Nobody fails anymore. If we went back to the situation that occurred when I started teaching at Harvard, almost 60 years ago, this couldn’t work because these students would fail out. It didn’t pay for them to get into college because they wouldn’t make it through if they didn’t have the academic resources to make it.
But today, nobody fails. Today nobody gets bad grades. Nobody even gets Cs. In many universities they have abolished grades, so there is no way of testing whether they are qualified or competent. Once they get into college, they just sail through because of the way universities have decided to treat their students. I think we will see this as the tip of a very, very deep iceberg. I don’t believe there should be special slots for athletes. Colleges are not supposed to be about athletes. Athletics are supposed to be collateral. Today, kids who aren’t qualified or are minimally qualified get in because they are a good quarterback or a good soccer player. That’s the beginning of the problem. This involves overt cheating on the SATs. Bribery crosses the line. Once the investigation unfolds, we will see that there is more to this besides the really bad guys at one end of the spectrum. It’s a continuum.
Watch his remarks in the video below, with the quote starting at 2:50 in:
Professor Dershowitz is certainly correct in his observations, but there’s more to the picture — another aspect of university devolution is the institutional glorification of diversity as a top value. For example, I reported in 2012 about the Division of Equity & Inclusion at UC Berkeley which then had a budget of $17 million and a staff of 150.
Below, the University of Southern California is a featured player in the admissions scandal, where members of the coaching staff have been indicted for receiving bribes. USC does exhibit a liberal profligacy, such as spending $100 million on diversity in 2016.
The value given to individual academic excellence that many of us recall from education in the previous century is missing from today’s student experience, and has been replaced by values that foster a social design in accord with leftist models of idealized diversity and regimentation. Colleges apparently see their purpose as remolding young people into cogs in an obedient liberal society.
]]>In fact, a 2013 investigation by the Associated Press found that [...]]]>
In fact, a 2013 investigation by the Associated Press found that good jobs lost in the economic downturn aren’t coming back: AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs. Companies chose to become more efficient by laying human workers off and substituting automation and software for a range of employment from farm pickers to educated office workers.
We can therefore expect similar behavior in the next recession, as is forecast in a Washington Post article, reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, linked below.
The piece utilizes the recent Brookings report, Automation and Artificial Intelligence. It presents a reassuring tone, suggesting that robots “will bring neither an apocalypse nor utopia.”
So forget about those scary predictions like the shocker on a recent Sixty Minutes show that “in 15 years, [automation is] going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.”
All in all, the best course is probably to bet on the profit urge among business executives — and when machines become cheaper than workers to perform a task, the humans will go.
The Post article observes, “Hispanic workers are more exposed than any other race or ethnic group” to the automation threat, though without connecting the educational component or ability to speak English.
Immigrants are not mentioned at all in the Brookings report, although the recent batch of illegal aliens from Honduras won’t be suitable for any useful work before too long. Foreigners whose skills consist of Third-World farming techniques will not be employable even at menial labor when the cheap robots come galloping into the workplace.
The coming automation spurt will likely bring enormous welfare costs because of crazy liberal immigration of unskilled persons.
]]>When the next recession comes, the robots will be ready, By Andrew Van Dam, Washington Post, January 25, 2019
In this May 3, 2018, file photo a worker lifts a lunch bowl off the production line at Spyce, a restaurant which uses a robotic cooking process, in Boston. Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of today’s work, according to a new Brookings Institution report published Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019.
Robots’ infiltration of the workforce doesn’t happen gradually, at the pace of technology. It happens in surges, when companies are given strong incentives to tackle the difficult task of automation.
Typically, those incentives occur during recessions. Employers slash payrolls going into a downturn and, out of necessity, turn to software or machinery to take over the tasks once performed by their laid-off workers as business begins to recover.
As uncertainty soars, a shutdown drags on, and consumer confidence sputters, economists increasingly predict a recession this year or next. Whenever this long economic expansion ends, the robots will be ready. The human labor market is tight, with the unemployment rate at 3.9 percent, but there’s plenty of slack in the robot labor force.
This next wave of automation won’t just be sleek robotic arms on factory floors. It will be ordering kiosks, self-service apps and software smart enough to perfect schedules and cut down on the workers needed to cover a shift. Employers are already testing these systems. A recession will force them into the mainstream.
A new analysis from Mark Muro, Robert Maxim and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, finds much of the nation will be susceptible to the upheaval caused by automation in coming decades, particularly young people, minorities and Rust Belt workers.
The total number of jobs will rise in the long run, but many workers will be forced to adapt. Robots will continue to roil the long-suffering manufacturing sector, Brookings finds. They will also move into low-skill service jobs such as food services workers once considered too cheap or too difficult to automate.
Economists generally focus on workers performing repetitive tasks, including rote mental or clerical work in an office cubicle and rote manual labor on a factory floor, to measure the influence of technology.
Middle-income work has evaporated in recent decades. Americans are now divided between the high-paid employees who design machines, the low-paid workers who sweeps up after it, or the even lower-paid service workers who serves fast-casual sandwiches to the other two.
In an upcoming paper from Review of Economics and Statistics, economists Nir Jaimovich of the University of Zurich and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia found that 88 percent of job loss in routine occupations occurs within 12 months of a recession. In the 1990-1991, 2001 and 2008-2009 recessions, routine jobs accounted for “essentially all” of the jobs lost. They regained almost no ground during the subsequent recoveries.
Firms in cities hit hardest by the Great Recession raised their skill requirements for new employees and invested more in technology, according to economists Brad Hershbein of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Lisa Kahn of the University of Rochester.
Their 2018 American Economic Review analysis of almost 100 million online postings collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2007 and 2010-2015 found strong signs companies were replacing workers who performed routine tasks with a combination of technology and more skilled workers. The effect was especially pronounced for “cognitive” workers such as office clerks, office administrators and salespeople.
The economy is near full employment – the point at which everyone who wants a job has one. The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0 percent for 10 straight months.
But the labor market for robots has room to grow. As wages rise and human help gets pricey, companies have experimented with alternatives.
The Washington Post’s Peter Holley has tapped into a deep vein of corporate automation efforts in recent months. Cooler-sized robots deliver food for $1.99 at George Mason University in suburan Washington. Tall, slim robot assistants patrol Giant supermarkets in search of spills and hazards. Walmart planned to install 360 floor-cleaning robot zambonis by the end of January. A start-up called Robomart hopes to start running mobile supermarkets in robotic minivans in the Boston area in partnership with Stop & Shop.
But while many businesses dabble, few have gone all-in — yet. (Continues)
A look at the map suggests a more troublesome outcome — the threebie solution will lead to six Senators from the Californias rather [...]]]>
A look at the map suggests a more troublesome outcome — the threebie solution will lead to six Senators from the Californias rather than just two as we have now.
If the separation ran from north to south, creating a Western and Eastern California, then the more conservative valley would likely balance out the liberal coast zone in terms of political representation. But that is not what’s proposed.
The Cal3 website claims:
Californians deserve a more effective education system that isn’t failing our families, more reliable infrastructure that isn’t fracturing our communities, and more sensible taxes that aren’t stifling our opportunities.
Meanwhile back in the real world, California’s problems stem largely from being run entirely by Democrats at the state level and having the nation’s highest proportion of foreign-born residents (27 percent in 2016 according to PPIC), many of whom are poorly educated.
The California high school graduation rate for 2016 was only 77.4 percent, which belies the state’s reputation as a leading tech center. By comparison, agricultural Iowa had a 93 percent graduation rate.
In addition, excessive immigration leads to a permanent Democrat majority, something we should never forget.
Also, as an April 6, 2018 Orange County Register article noted, California faces a $1 trillion unfunded pension liability and lawmakers focus on foam and plastic straws. The Cal3 advocates say they want a “fresh start” but that pension bill is not going away, though none of the articles today about the initiative mentioned that cost directly.
Here’s the Fox News report on the proposed tripartite California:
And a newspaper article:
]]>Proposal to split California into three states will be on November ballot, Washington Times, June 12, 2018
The six-state solution failed to catch on in California, but voters will now have an opportunity to decide whether the Golden State should be split three ways.
The “Cal 3” initiative sponsored by Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper qualified Tuesday for the November ballot, securing the necessary 365,880 valid signatures based on the state’s final random sample, according to Secretary of State Alex Padilla.
The ambitious longshot effort comes a few years after Mr. Draper failed to qualify his much-discussed “six Californians” initiative for the 2016 state ballot despite spending more than $5 million.
“This fall on Election Day, voters will get the chance to say that the status quo of ineffective, inefficient, and insular state government is taking Californians in the wrong direction,” said a post on the Cal 3 website.
Under the proposed initiative, the state would be split into three jurisdictions: Southern California, Northern California, and just plain California, which would run along the coastline from Los Angeles to Monterey.
If approved, the initiative would direct the governor to ask Congress for approval within 12 months to carve the state into three jurisdictions, after which the state legislature would be instructed to divide the state’s “assets and liabilities” three ways.
The three-state approach would give Californians a “fresh start” on issues like education, infrastructure and taxes, according to Mr. Draper.
“Cal 3 empowers Californians to direct the state legislature and U.S. Congress to create three new states, which will lead to better decision making and real solutions closer to home — like a dramatically more effective education system, more sensible taxes and more reliable roads,” said the website.
The proposal comes with Californians increasingly calling for the state to do something as frustration builds over the $1.3 trillion debt, mounting social problems, sharp political divisions between coastal and inland communities, and Sacramento’s ongoing feud with the Trump administration.
(Continues)
The MIT car uses LIDAR and GPS to navigate country roads.
An estimated 3.8 million Americans drive for a living, and while many of those jobs are on city streets and well marked freeways, cabs and delivery vehicles travel country roads also. So the job loss from autonomous vehicles is looking to become more widespread.
A 2013 report from the Center for Immigration Studies, Are There Really Jobs Americans Won’t Do?, found that among taxi drivers and chauffeurs, 42 percent are foreign born. But with advanced autonomous cars coming on strong, low-skilled immigrants who are capable of only simple tasks like driving are fast becoming obsolete.
]]>MIT built a self-driving car that can navigate unmapped country roads, TheVerge.com, May 13, 2018
No 3D maps required
Taking the road less traveled is extremely difficult for self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles rely on highly visible lane markings, as well as detailed 3D maps in order to navigate their environment safely. Which is why most of the major companies have eschewed testing on unmapped rural roads in favor of suburbs and cities.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3D maps. Called MapLite, the system combines simple GPS data that you’d find on Google Maps with a series of sensors that observe the road conditions.
This allowed the team to autonomously drive on multiple unpaved country roads in Devens, Massachusetts, and reliably detect the road more than 100 feet in advance. (As part of a collaboration with the Toyota Research Institute, researchers used a Toyota Prius that they outfitted with a range of LIDAR and IMU sensors.)
“The cars use these maps to know where they are and what to do in the presence of new obstacles like pedestrians and other cars,” says Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s CSAIL, in a statement. “The need for dense 3D maps limits the places where self-driving cars can operate.”
MIT explains how its system operates without relying on 3D maps:
MapLite uses sensors for all aspects of navigation, relying on GPS data only to obtain a rough estimate of the car’s location. The system first sets both a final destination and what researchers call a “local navigation goal,” which has to be within view of the car. Its perception sensors then generate a path to get to that point, using LIDAR to estimate the location of the road’s edges. MapLite can do this without physical road markings by making basic assumptions about how the road will be relatively more flat than the surrounding areas.
If it ends up going commercial, MIT’s MapLite would go a long way in fulfilling one of the mandates from the Trump administration: that the safety benefits from autonomous driving be extended to residents in rural communities.
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Below, the cylinder-shaped robot wok spins slowly to keep the food from burning, then plunks the finished lunch into a bowl.
The young inventors have a similarly aged clientele in mind, where [...]]]>
Below, the cylinder-shaped robot wok spins slowly to keep the food from burning, then plunks the finished lunch into a bowl.
The young inventors have a similarly aged clientele in mind, where inexpensive food is the business model, and a healthy lunch costs only $8 as described in the video following.
Although human workers are still needed at the Spyce restaurant to chop and prepare the ingredients before cooking, the trend toward more automation in restaurants is clear, such as oven robots in pizza production. Plus, the use of kiosks for ordering and payment have become quite common.
In a CNBC interview in March 2017, Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed predicted robots would replace fast food workers by the mid-2020s.
So it makes no sense for Washington to continue admitting thousands of low-skilled immigrants as if there will be jobs for them in a few years — right?
]]>Robotic woks are the chefs in this Boston restaurant, Engadget.com, May 4, 2018
The restaurant was founded by four MIT students who wanted to make healthy meals more affordable.
Four MIT students who once built a soccer ball-kicking robot got together with a Michelin-starred chef to build a restaurant that’s not quite what you’re used to. How? Well, it’s staffed by robots, obviously. Spyce, a fast casual restaurant that has just opened its doors in Boston, has a mecha-kitchen with seven autonomous woks preparing its healthy offerings. A customer simply has to choose one of the bowl-based meals in its menu through a touchscreen kiosk, and the sprouts, kale, beans, grains and other components of the meal will automatically drop into one of the drum-like machines to start cooking.
Spyce’s mecha-woks use magnetic induction to heat the food and automatically rinse themselves after preparing every order. As cool as they sound, though, they aren’t quite capable of doing actual food prep and making bowls look presentable. The restaurant still employs human workers at a commissary kitchen where ingredients are chopped and prepared; on site, there are two garnish employees to add the finishing touch. So, although robots could eventually take all our jobs, Spyce’s founders didn’t conjure up a machine that can put all restaurant employees out of work right now.
Its Yelp reviews are pretty good, if you’re wondering how’s the food itself. To note, Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud serves as Spyce’s culinary director. But if you’re not quite the kale and beans kind of person, seeing the restaurant’s whirring, spinning robotic woks in action might be worth the visit. Spyce runs an open kitchen, and the show is definitely part of the experience. “It’s fun to see what’s going on behind the scenes,” co-founder Brady Knight said, “We didn’t want to hide anything because we think what we made is pretty cool.”
Below, the interior of GM’s new self-driving car looks rather sparse without a steering wheel and brake pedal.
In fact, a recent poll showed substantial suspicion among the public about self-driving cars in general:
But the CBS article below hinted that consumers may not be the main target when it mentioned Cruise Automation, a San-Francisco start-up purchased by GM in 2016, referring to it in connection with a “service.” So perhaps GM is planning to set up an Uber-style ride-sharing company rather than aiming at the general public for sales. GM’s 2016 purchase of Lyft also aligns with that direction for its automated future.
Still, the important point is that GM’s automated car shows the destruction of human driving jobs is getting closer. As of 2012, the total number of US taxi drivers was 233,900, so the eventual job loss will be significant.
Furthermore, it makes no sense to continue immigration of low-skill foreigners when jobs for them are disappearing fast, and cabbie is a popular gig for such people. A 2014 New York Times American-Born Cabbies Are a Vanishing Breed in New York reported, “Today, only 8 percent of New York City taxi and for-hire drivers were born in the United States.”
Immigrants replaced citizens and now self-driving cars are about to replace the immigrants. So we shouldn’t import more immigrants who will soon be unemployable.
]]>GM is dropping the steering wheel in autonomous cars, CBS News, January 12, 2018
General Motors (GM) says it is mass-producing autonomous cars that give complete control to the machine by taking away both the steering wheel and pedals.
The company says it has filed a petition with the federal government seeking permission to put the vehicles on the road sometime next year with no human backup drivers.
GM’s Cruise Automation unit has announced plans to carry passengers in self-driving cars that won’t have a backup driver in 2019. The location of the service has not been revealed. GM and other companies have tested autonomous cars on the road, yet the vehicles typically have an engineer behind the wheel, reading to take over in case the need arises.
“What’s really special about this is if you look back 20 years from now, it’s the first car without a steering wheel and pedals,” Kyle Vogt, chief executive officer of Cruise Automation, told Bloomberg News. Cruise Automation is developing the software for GM’s self-driving cars.
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The Center for Immigration Studies analyzed the numbers and found that the legal and illegal immigration for 2016 was a record 1.8 million persons.
Chain migration grew alarmingly during the last decade and added to the catastrophic numbers. Steve Camarota of CIS remarked, “Our generous legal immigration system allows in a huge number of immigrants and then permits them to sponsor their relatives causing a multiplier effect. This chain migration has contributed to nearly 14 million immigrants settling here between 2006 to 2016.”
Increasing immigration is not the direction America should be going today — quite the contrary for many reasons.
The enormous number of foreign people residing here (more than 43 million) makes it possible for immigrants and illegal aliens to get by without speaking English. America has historically been good at assimilating immigrants, but the excessive numbers of foreigners are defeating cultural incorporation.
And while the human economy is booming today, the smart machines are coming on strong over the next few years, making immigrant workers worse than obsolete. If indeed the Oxford scholars’ automation forecast is correct and nearly half of jobs will be done by smart machines by 2033, then the unskilled, non-English-speaking immigrants may well become an angry underclass, susceptible to engaging in anti-social behavior. The optimal number of immigrants for the automated future is ZERO.
Here in California, an extremely dry start to the winter rainy season has been disturbing. Last year saw record rainfall ending the severe five-year drought, so the possibility of a return to the bad old days looks all too real. While much of the water supply goes to agricultural uses, the state population of 40 million — with over 10 million, or 27 percent of residents being foreign-born — is far higher than can be sustainably supported by a region that suffers periodic drought. In fact, the west experienced a series of Medieval mega-droughts from 900 to 1400, which is recent climatically speaking. California is FULL, and then some.
Below, the drought-stricken Lake Oroville (which is also a reservoir) was nearly empty in September 2014.
Large numbers of poor immigrants threaten America’s founding principles of limited government. As Ann Coulter has emphasized repeatedly, we shouldn’t be legalizing undocumented Democrats because it increases the growing welfare-prone sector who vote for big government every time (Let’s Start by Deporting the DREAMers! Breitbart.com, Dec. 25)
Here’s a Fox News video report about the increased stream of foreigners:
WILLIAM LA JEUNESSE: I’ll tell you the findings will certainly be part of an upcoming debate in Congress over DACA and immigration reform. So the numbers include legal and illegal immigration, and it is based on the US Census: it shows 1.8 million new immigrants settling in the U.S. in 2016, highest level in US history and 53 percent higher than just five years ago, when the recession hit and many went home because they couldn’t find a job.
Now this is for 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, when there was virtually no interior enforcement or worksite enforcement, no visa overstay prosecutions, and the border saw that surge of Central American women, children, families. The increase was also driven by more guest workers, more foreign students and a change that allowed the spouses of visa holders to work, which of course encouraged more relatives to join green card holders here in the US.
The original CIS report is here: 1.8 Million Immigrants Likely Arrived in 2016, Matching Highest Level in U.S. History.
]]>
Democrats must be licking their chops at the prospect of a passel of future voters who think their legal immigrant status is now no longer safe. Where would the legal folks get such an idea? Perhaps the liberal media is confusing many with its reporting of deportations where it frequently calls the outgoers “immigrants” rather than “illegal aliens.”
It suits the left to muddy the definition of immigration to increase anxiety among its foreign base: it is advantageous for the Democrats when more of the legals become citizen voters, because the party is not convincing many homegrown Americans to vote D.
We see that failure in the Democrats’ loss of 1,042 state and federal positions, including congressional and state legislative seats, governorships and the presidency as of December 2016.
Interestingly, many immigrants come to America for the employment opportunities it offers, but then they vote for the socialist anti-business party. Dumb.
Most immigrants come from big government countries and therefore are culturally inclined to vote for the same approach in the US as illustrated in the Pew poll shown below.
It is definitely a plus for Democrats that so many legal immigrants are unclear on the laws that pertain to them.
]]>Citizenship Applications in the U.S. Surge as Immigration Talk Toughens, New York Times, October, 27, 2017
LOS ANGELES — For nearly a decade, Yonis Bernal felt perfectly secure carrying a green card that allowed him to live and work legally in the United States. Becoming a citizen was not a priority.
He changed his mind after Donald J. Trump clinched the presidency.
“All this tough talk about immigrants got me thinking I still could be deported,” said Mr. Bernal, 49, a truck driver who left El Salvador in 1990 and has two teenage children. “You never know.”
Last week, he was among 3,542 immigrants who raised their right hands to take the oath at a naturalization ceremony inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, joining a growing wave of new citizens across the country.
As Mr. Trump campaigned on promises of a border wall and strict crackdowns on immigration, 2016 became the busiest year in a decade for naturalization applications. But this year, the number of applications is on track to surpass that of last year’s, while a perennial backlog continues to pile up. It is the first time in 20 years that applications have not slipped after a presidential election, according to analysis by the National Partnership for New Americans, an immigrant rights coalition of 37 groups.
And with an unrelenting stream of hard-line rhetoric and enforcement in the news, as well as a swell of citizenship drives and advocacy, there are no signs the trend is abating.
In a year when the government has bolstered enforcement, backed curbing legal immigration and rescinded a program that protects undocumented youth from deportation, even a green card is not enough in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of immigrants applying for naturalization to protect themselves from removal and gain the right to vote.
“The draw of U.S. citizenship becomes more powerful when you have the political and policy environment that you have right now,” said Rosalind Gold, senior policy director at the Naleo Educational Fund, a national bipartisan Latino group.
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