CNN Richard Quest and the economy after the shithole

[Dalia]

There i saw him on CNN yesterday with the sigh write on Shithole.

After the story of the shithole we saw the result it was everything up up in green...

Just so great to see Cnn go down in surprise after *Trump did Something here we have the shithole story

In French ; les pays de merde it is everywhere on French Tv.

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - it ain't nothin' new...

President Trump's Idea Of Good And Bad Immigrant Countries Has A Historical Precedent
January 13, 2018 • In part, Trump's recent vulgar slur appeared to be favoring the revival of a discriminatory immigration policy abolished by the U.S. Congress more than 50 years ago.

In a White House meeting with members of Congress this week, President Trump is said to have suggested that the United States accepts too many immigrants from "shithole countries" in Africa and too few from countries like Norway. Those comments, relayed to NPR by people in attendance at the meeting, set off an immediate firestorm, in part because Trump appeared to be favoring the revival of a discriminatory immigration policy abolished by the U.S. Congress more than 50 years ago. From 1924 to 1965, the United States allocated immigrant visas on the basis of a candidate's national origin. People coming from Northern and Western European countries were heavily favored over those from countries like those Trump now derides. More than 50,000 immigrant visas were reserved for Germany each year. The United Kingdom had the next biggest share, with about 34,000.

Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay around 1900. In 1924, the U.S. would restrict immigration based on national origin. Forty years after that, it eliminated those restrictions.​

Ireland, with 28,000 slots, and Norway, with 6,400, had the highest quotas as a share of their population. Each country in Asia, meanwhile, had a quota of just 100, while Africans wishing to move to America had to compete for one of just 1,200 visas set aside for the entire continent. The blatantly discriminatory quota policy was enacted on the basis of recommendations from a congressional commission set up in 1907 to determine who precisely was coming to the United States, which countries they were coming from and what capacities they were bringing with them. Under the leadership of Republican Sen. William Dillingham of Vermont, the commission prepared a report consisting of more than 40 volumes distinguishing desirable ethnicities from those the commission considered less desirable.

"Dictionary of Races or Peoples"

In a "Dictionary of Races or Peoples," the commission reported that Slavic people demonstrated "fanaticism in religion, carelessness as to the business virtues of punctuality and often honesty." Southern Italians were found to be "excitable, impulsive, highly imaginative" but also "impracticable." Foreshadowing Trump's own assessment, the commission concluded that Scandinavians represented "the purest type." The main sponsor of the 1924 law enacting the national origins quotas was Rep. Albert Johnson, R-Wash., chairman of the House Committee on Immigration. Among Johnson's immigration advisers were John Trevor, the founder of the far-right American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, and Madison Grant, an amateur eugenicist whose writings gave racism a veneer of intellectual legitimacy. In his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, Grant separated the human species into Caucasoids, Mongoloids and Negroids, and argued that Caucasoids and Negroids needed to be separated.

Sen. John McClellan, D-Ark., asked whether opening the United States to immigrants from Africa would lead to "still more ghettos and thus more and more acts of violence and riots?"​

The national origin quota system remained in effect for more than 40 years, despite increasing opposition from moderates and liberals. Minor adjustments were made under the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which passed over the vigorous objections of President Harry S. Truman. In a fiery veto message, Truman argued that the national origin quota policy "discriminates, deliberately and intentionally, against many peoples of the world." After Congress dismissed his criticism and overrode his veto, Truman ordered the establishment of a presidential Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. In its report, the commission concluded that U.S. immigration policy marginalized "the non-white people of the world who constitute between two-thirds and three-fourths of the world's population." The report was titled Whom We Shall Welcome, referring to a speech President George Washington delivered to a group of Irish immigrants in 1783.

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Trump Wishes We Had More Immigrants From Norway. Turns Out We Once Did
January 12, 2018 • Back in the 19th century, Norwegians began coming to the United States in droves. And they were among the poorest of the poor.

In the Thursday meeting in which President Trump complained about "having all these people from shithole countries come here" — and singled out Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as examples — he also added that, "we should have more people from Norway." In fact there was a time when we did. From 1870 to 1910 a quarter of Norway's working-age population emigrated, mostly to the United States. You read that right — one-fourth of its workers left the country. Back then Norway was quite poor. Wages were less than a third of what they were in the United States. And the wave of emigration out of the country quickly benefited those who remained. That's because it reduced the supply of workers in Norway, so those left behind could demand higher wages. And this helped narrow Norway's wage gap with the U.S. by 25 percent over that same 40-year period, putting Norway on the path toward its status today as one of world's most prosperous nations.

Those are the findings of a paper published in European Review of Economic History back in 1997 by two economists. It's considered a seminal work because the authors — Alan Taylor of the University of California Davis and Jeffrey Williamson — then of Harvard University, now professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison — combed through paper archives to piece together the first truly comprehensive picture of wage differentials across European countries and the United States during that time. "They were the pioneers really — the first to do that," says Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a D.C. thinktank, who specializes on the role of migration in reducing poverty. Then in 2008 a wealth of new data became available about Norway that added yet another twist to the picture: It turns out that the immigrants that Norway sent to the U.S. during that great migration wave of the 1870s were its poorest and least educated citizens. Researchers were able to determine this thanks to newly digitized census data from Norway. (Other European countries have embarked on similar efforts but Norway, with only around 2 million residents in its early census data, finished the task first. That has made Norway the go-to nation for researchers of historical economics.)

Norwegian immigrants on their way to America on the SS Hero in 1870.​

Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton University, and several collaborators have done some of the most ground-breaking work of this kind. "We created direct name matches between people who appear in the 1865 Norway census as children," Boustan explains, "and then we looked at the 1900 census in Norway and the 1900 census in the United States. If we found you in the 1900 U.S. census we knew you had migrated." From this information they determined that those who left Norway came from "some of the lowest skilled families. They are coming from either rural areas or they are [the product of fathers holding] lower skilled laborer positions in cities," she says.

And on arrival in the United States these Norwegian immigrants remained at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Compared to immigrants from the 15 other European nations that contributed to this great wave of arrivals, "the Norwegians held the lowest paid occupations in the U.S.," says Boustan. "They tended to be farm laborers. They were also fishermen. If they were in cities they were just sort of in the manual labor category — what today you would think of as a day laborer." "So when you look at the people leaving Norway you do pick up quite a bit of evidence of the poor, huddled masses," she says, referring to the famous Emma Lazarus poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. And although their descendants would eventually catch up to the rest of the U.S. population, it took a while. Twenty years after their arrival in the United States, the Norwegian immigrants were still making 14 percent less than native-born workers. In other words, they shared a lot in common with many of today's immigrants from ... El Salvador, Haiti and Africa.

Trump Wishes We Had More Immigrants From Norway. Turns Out We Once Did

 

[blastoff]

Damn it! I'm still trying to find where the line forms for those wanting to immigrate to the most popular shithole countries, but I can't find it among all these tangled lines of shitholers trying to come into the land of American exceptionalism instead.