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Migration is a key component of the American story. Successive waves of migrants have reshaped the U.S. socially and politically from the 16th century to the present.

public opinion toward immigration has also polarized along partisan lines.

Respondents – including both Democrats and Republicans – who were randomly assigned to think about their family history before telling us their immigration preferences expressed more favorable feelings toward immigrants.

Negativity toward migrants, stoked by factually inaccurate threat narratives – that migrants steal jobs and overrun schools and hospitals – is the norm in many countries. But reminding people what they share with immigrants can help build support for more inclusive policies.

there is a plausible reading of Trump’s words that refers to the gang, or similar criminals, not to immigrants in general. But in light of Trump’s history, that surface reading isn’t enough.

the “animals” controversy illustrates a broader truth: It’s a common human failing to characterize outgroups by the worst examples we can find while dismissing our own bad apples as isolated minorities who have nothing to do with the rest of us.

in the succeeding days, he has seemed obsessed with repeating the word “animals” every time the social media storm threatened to die down.

He’s less careful when immigrants are involved. Immigrants actually have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans , yet Trump sure seems to spend an awful lot of time talking about the small fraction who are criminals.

It’s instructive to compare Trump’s harsh language about immigrant “animals” with his response to a direct question about a different group of people behaving badly. After white nationalists staged marches in Charlottesville, culminating in a death, Trump was at pains to distinguish the Nazis from the “people in that group that were there to innocently protest.”

Consider how conservatives feel, for example, when the left focuses disproportionate energy on the tiny portion of the population that belongs to the alt-right or to white-nationalist groups.

Or consider the lingering indignation over Barack Obama’s suggestion that in some small towns in the Midwest and Pennsylvania, where the economy has been devastated by de-industrialization, some people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Obama wasn’t making an abstract observation about human psychology; he was implying that while Democrats come to their views through thoughtful reflection, the Republican rubes simply react to environmental stimulus, like amoebas.

many who work in meatpacking, farm work and other front-line industries don’t have the option to work from home, and their employers don’t provide them with paid sick leave. 

Biden and Harris’ platform includes a commitment to work with Congress to pass legislation to create a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S.  

As the coronavirus surges, Latinx and Black people are around four times as likely to be hospitalized as white people, and nearly three times as likely to die,

Last month, France fast-tracked citizenship processes for hundreds of immigrant front-line workers, including health care workers, garbage collectors, housekeepers and cashiers. 

Undocumented immigrants are among those hardest hit by the pandemic since they are disproportionately represented among workers deemed “essential” — from farmworkers to building cleaners — who are risking their lives while millions of Americans stay home.

Patrice Lawrence, co-director of the immigrant group UndocuBlack Network, said legislation recognizing immigrants’ “humanity and our contributions to this country is long overdue” and that a bill protecting undocumented essential workers is “the bare minimum this country can do.”

Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.

Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”

Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.

Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.

Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?

The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.

There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”

Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.

Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.

The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.

Coulter’s deeper point is that for America to truly be America, it must stand apart

The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.

America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.

I wrote an essay entitled “The End of American Exceptionalism,” which argued that on subjects where the United States has long been seen as different, attitudes in America increasingly resemble those in Europe. Soccer is one of the best examples yet.

“Soccer,” Markovits and Hellerman argue, “was perceived by both native-born Americans and immigrants as a non-American activity at a time in American history when nativism and nationalism emerged to create a distinctly American self-image … if one liked soccer, one was viewed as at least resisting—if not outright rejecting—integration into America.”

The average age of Americans who call baseball their favorite sport is 53. Among Americans who like football best, it’s 46. Among Americans who prefer soccer, by contrast, the average age is only 37.

Old-stock Americans, in other words, were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.

why is interest in soccer rising now? Partly, because the United States is yet again witnessing mass immigration from soccer-mad nations.

the key shift is that America’s sports culture is less nativist. More native-born Americans now accept that a game invented overseas can become authentically American, and that the immigrants who love it can become authentically American too. Fewer believe that to have merit, something must be invented in the United States.

Americans today are less likely to insist that America’s way of doing things is always best. In 2002, 60 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that, “our culture is superior to others.” By 2011, it was down to 49 percent.

Americans over the age of 50 were 15 points more likely to say “our culture is superior” than were people over 50 in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France

Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to say “our culture is superior” than their counterparts in Germany, Spain, and Britain.

why didn’t soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. in the decades between the Civil War and World War I, when it was gaining dominance in Europe? Precisely because it was gaining dominance in Europe. The arbiters of taste in late 19th and early 20th century America wanted its national pastimes to be exceptional.

the third major pro-soccer constituency is liberals. They’re willing to embrace a European sport for the same reason they’re willing to embrace a European-style health care system: because they see no inherent value in America being an exception to the global rule

When the real-estate website Estately created a seven part index to determine a state’s love of soccer, it found that Washington State, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey—all bright blue—loved soccer best, while Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Mississippi and Montana—all bright red—liked it least.

the soccer coalition—immigrants, liberals and the young—looks a lot like the Obama coalition.

Sports-wise, therefore, Democrats constitute an alliance between soccer and basketball fans while Republicans disproportionately follow baseball, golf, and NASCAR. Football, by far America’s most popular sport, crosses the aisle.)

The willingness of growing numbers of Americans to embrace soccer bespeaks their willingness to imagine a different relationship with the world. Historically, conservative foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism and imperialism. America must either retreat from the world or master it. It cannot be one among equals, bound by the same rules as everyone else

Exceptionalists view sports the same way. Coulter likes football, baseball, and basketball because America either plays them by itself, or—when other countries play against us—we dominate them.

Embracing soccer, by contrast, means embracing America’s role as merely one nation among many, without special privileges. It’s no coincidence that young Americans, in addition to liking soccer, also like the United Nations. In 2013, Pew found that Americans under 30 were 24 points more favorable to the U.N. than Americans over 50.

Millennials were also 23 points more likely than the elderly to say America should take its allies’ opinion into account even if means compromising our desires.

In embracing soccer, Americans are learning to take something we neither invented nor control, and nonetheless make it our own. It’s a skill we’re going to need in the years to come.

In the mid-1800s, Chinese laborers made up the first significant wave of Asian immigration to the United States. Recruited during the Gold Rush and to build the Transcontinental Railroad, the men were described by employers like industrialist Leland Stanford as “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.”

The model-minority myth emerged later. In 1965 the Hart-Celler Act opened immigration quotas that had previously favored Western Europeans.

Out-earning all other racial groups, Asian Americans became the “model minority,” a term first coined by sociologist William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times article, “Success Story: Japanese American style.”

Without the same educational and professional sponsorships as my father had, many in these later waves founded mom-and-pop businesses and peer lending networks. They gravitated toward blue-collar industries and “pink-collar” jobs in salons, food service or child care.

The women who worked and died at Young’s Asian Massage, Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa lived in this Asian America – not my father’s or mine.

Such workers make up the other side of the high-earning “model minority” statistic. That data masks the fact that Asian Americans have the highest income inequality of any racial group, with the top 10% of this population earning more than 10 times what the bottom 10% earns.

When Asian Americans are so easily, and so often, stereotyped, they become categories, not people – not individuals who make lives, raise families and do the best they can in their adopted homeland.

“My mother didn’t do anything wrong,” the son of 63-year-old Yong Ae Yue, the fan of Korean soap operas and cooking, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And she deserves the recognition that she is a human.”

Our brains rarely absorb ideas and facts in one instance: they have to be repeatedly hammered to stick.

we are usually terrible at remembering numbers and facts.

we are much more likely to remember stories that invoke emotion or a personal connection.

one with an anecdote of an immigrant doing something terrible, versus an article on the positive economic impact of immigration, more people will remember the story than the economics. We also like stories that fit well with us and we cling to them.

"The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible."

when people are accused of not knowing facts, they become defensive and look for ways to justify their views.

we forget that attitudes towards immigration have already shifted vastly from previous decades.

The change happened not by pushing facts but through human contact with those people. That is far more powerful than any appeal to facts or reason.

The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.

the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.

"From a public health perspective, you cannot have an effective national response to a pandemic that excludes enormous segments of the population. That's both illogical and immoral," Sarmiento says.

"With one of the worst jobless reports in quite a few years, the primary focus right now should be on American workers and lawful immigrants," said Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of Numbers USA. "We should make sure that those people are taken care of first."

"This is a crisis moment for hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers and families that don't have any sort of a basic work protections, like sick leave, like unemployment insurance," says Sarmiento of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

A five-member conservative or liberal majority on the Supreme Court can impose a partisan political agenda on the country without too much difficulty, often with one key justice dictating the results. With eight justices equally divided among conservative and liberals, the court can only act decisively when at least one justice switches sides. This is a state of affairs to be celebrated, not lamented, and may be appreciated when the court is fully staffed again.

sociologists at City University of New York and the University of Michigan, wanted to try to find out why it exists. In a new paper in the journal PNAS, they looked at whether it could be explained by socio-demographic factors (such as family income and parental education), cognitive ability (were these children simply more intelligent?), or work ethic. 

socio-demographic factors could not explain the achievement gap between Asians and whites. This is because recently arrived Asian immigrants with little formal education and low incomes have children that do better in school than their white peers.

Being brainier isn't the answer either. When the pair looked at cognitive ability as measured by standardised tests, Asian-Americans were not different from their white peers

 Instead Dr Hsin and Dr Xie find that the achievement gap can be explained through harder work—as measured by teacher assessments of student work habits and motivation.

What might explain harder work? The authors point to the fact Asian-Americans are likely to be immigrants or children of immigrants who, as a group, tend to be more optimistic. These are people who have made a big move in search of better opportunities. Immigration is a "manifestation of that optimism through effort, that you can have a better life"

Added to this mix is a general cultural belief among Asian-Americans that achievement comes with effort. We know that children who believe ability is innate are more inclined to give up if something doesn't come naturally. An understanding that success requires hard work—not merely an aptitude—is therefore useful.

“Tiger” parenting clearly has its place, but it is not everything, according to this study. Dr Hsin says that Asian-Americans also have some unique social and ethnic capital, such as good access to tutors and social networks that offer information about schools and college-admission routes. They also benefit from positive stereotypes which lead to wider expectations of success.

Should Ms Chua’s approach to child-rearing replace the American standard, which seems to emphasise self-esteem over test scores? Not necessarily. The report’s researchers point out that Asian-American children also suffer from poorer self-images and more conflicted relationships with their parents. Dr Hsin wonders if this may be the result of pressure to meet narrowly defined and high standards for success. Children who fail to meet these expectations end up feeling like failures, while those who succeed fail to feel satisfied because they are simply achieving what is expected.

While the plan offers a short-term solution for protecting those most vulnerable to violence, it does not address the magnitude of the migration. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. border patrol apprehended 120,700 people from the Northern Triangle countries attempting to enter the U.S. Some of those who cross the border will apply for asylum, but the majority will be sent back to their countries of origin and the violence they were fleeing.

Costa Rica is a major destination for migrants and refugees in the region, and immigrants account for 9 percent of the country’s population of 4.8 million. Like the United States, Costa Rica has seen a dramatic increase in arrivals of refugees from Northern Triangle countries, particularly El Salvador, since 2012

Central Americans moving to Costa Rica today often already have established social networks in Costa Rica –

Immigration officials expect to continue to see around 500 Colombian refugees arriving each year, despite the newly signed peace accord. Costa Rica has also seen a large increase in Venezuelans fleeing economic crisis.

Costa Rica has become a popular destination and transit country because of its relatively open borders and policies, its reputation as a champion of human rights and its relatively low levels of crime, violence and poverty. I

Over the past 10 years, the country has increased restrictions on immigration, hoping to discourage low-income economic migrants from Nicaragua from entering. These restrictions echo the national security logic of U.S. policies.

It neither addresses the underlying conditions of violence that refugees seek to escape nor strengthens regional governments’ abilities to deal with the arrival of these vulnerable populations.

Over multiple years, family income fluctuates, and so the distribution of multiyear income is moderately more equal than the distribution of single-year income.

n one sense, the growth of inequality in the last part of the twentieth century comes as a surprise. In the 1950s, the bottom part of the income distribution contained large concentrations of two kinds of families: farm families whose in-kind income was not counted in Census data, and elderly families, many of whom were ineligible for the new Social Security program

Over subsequent decades, farm families declined as a proportion of the population while increased Social Security benefits and an expanding private pension system lifted elderly incomes. Both trends favored greater income equality but were outweighed by four main factors.

Family structure. Over time, the two-parent, one-earner family was increasingly replaced by low-income single-parent families and higher-income two-parent, two-earner families

Trade and technology increasingly shifted demand away from less-educated and less-skilled workers toward workers with higher education or particular skills. The result was a growing earnings gap between more- and less-educated/skilled workers.

With improved communications and transportation, people increasingly functioned in national, rather than local, markets. In these broader markets, persons with unique talents could command particularly high salaries.

In 2002, immigrants who had entered the country since 1980 constituted nearly 11 percent of the labor force (see immigration). A relatively high proportion of these immigrants had low levels of education and increased the number of workers competing for low-paid work.

A second offset to estimated inequality is economic mobility. Because most family incomes increase as people’s careers develop, long-run incomes are more equal than standard single-year statistics suggest

Is inequality of wages and incomes bad? The question seems ludicrous. Of course inequality is bad, isn’t it? Actually, no. What matters crucially is how the inequality came about.

Inequality of wages and incomes is clearly bad if it results from government privileges. Many people would find such an outcome unjust, but even more important to many economists is that such inequality sets up perverse incentives.

But inequality in wages and incomes in relatively free economies serves two important social functions.

has not been given final approval by DHS

violence that was a key factor in driving people to flee Central America last year has surged again

"It would be an outrage if the administration subjected Central American families to even more aggressive enforcement tactics,"

only the Republicans are carrying out a primary purification to fit their no-compromise dispositions.

polarization per se is not the current critical crisis – it’s a refusal to compromise, to reach out from one’s ideological end of the spectrum to meet in the middle (where most of us already are), and demanding that one’s representatives refuse to negotiate to get things done and better the country.

A consistently liberal position is fine if you’re prepared to meet the other side halfway – and vice-versa of course. In fact, sometimes a strong position can help facilitate a real deal.

it’s the GOP that is the outlier, and long has been.

Liberals and conservatives are coming to rely on different worldviews motivated by different interpretations of what “reality” is. The Republican party has clearly decided that the only path open to them is to further embrace the resentment exhibited in rural, displaced white voters – people whose concerns have been unconscionably ignored but who have directed their anger at an entirely inappropriate target. They see Obama as the enemy but they vote for the people who are their real enemies.

If you think about it point by point, it becomes even less sensible. The debt? That was a result of Bush’s unfunded wars, irresponsible tax cuts and his corporatist Medicare expansion (which was itself just a subsidy for drug companies). The recession? A logical endpoint of a decades-long abandonment of responsible financial regulation. Immigration? There have been no significant changes to our immigration law since 1986, when Saint Reagan pushed through a bill that provided legal status to many who were undocumented – and the right conveniently proceeded to forget that. Ditto with gun control, since Reagan supported the Brady Bill publicly, and that clearly must be erased from the record.

The left, by contrast, did not throw Democrats out of office for supporting the Bush tax cuts. It did not throw Democrats out of office for opposing cap-and-trade legislation, immigration reform, or for stonewalling Obamacare until the very last minute when Scott Brown’s surprise election made inaction untenable. The left complained about these realities but never pretended that the reality was any different than what it was; we had the best we could get and that while Obama has let us down on specific issues, he has been a wholly underappreciated president – and history will very likely vindicate him

He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.

Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign).

“ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,”

“He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ”

And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.

The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight.

“Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right — and necessary,

And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric.

“Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information.

He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies

This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan,

“His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,”

“If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”

“And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,”

Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals

Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about.

he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary

It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil