So...Republicans have noticed that losing elections is no fun...and as they scramble wildly around to get votes, while simultaneously working as hard as they can to keep others from voting, they drag out the old saw "immigration reform". Of course, the real version of reform they would love to adopt involves internment camps and trails of tears, that might offend a whole new class of dupes they hope to drag to the polls....only to deny them the vote as soon as they get there. The cognitive dissonance hurts....
Anywho...here is a quite informative comment from a Huffpo article on the subject to rattle off when people start bitching about "the real problem is them damn Mexicuns!":
" Immigrants are 30 percent more likely to start a business in the United States than non-immigrants. 18 percent of all small business owners in the United States are immigrants.
Immigrants are also more likely to create their own jobs. 7.5 percent of the foreign born are self-employed compared to 6.6 percent among the native-born.
According to the National Venture Capital Association, immigrants have started 25 percent of public U.S. companies that were backed by venture capital investors. This list includes Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and Intel.
According to the Census Bureau, despite making up only 16 percent of the resident population holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, immigrants represent 33 percent of engineers, 27 percent of mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientist, and 24 percent of physical scientists. Additionally, foreign-born inventors were credited with contributing to more than 75 percent of patents issued to the top 10 patent-producing universities.
Increased immigration to the United States has increased the earnings of Americans with more than a high school degree.
Immigrants boost demand for local consumer goods.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, under the 2010 House-passed version of the DREAM Act, the federal deficit would be reduced by $2.2 billion over ten years because of increased tax revenues.
Comprehensive immigration reform could support and create up to 900,000 new jobs within three years of reform from the increase in consumer spending, according to the Center for American Progress."
... Obama only got 39% of the white vote, and the only time Obama has ever won the white vote ...was when he was running against another black candidate.
I am sure I already knew this stat, but the implications for what it says about the american voter at large are really kind of heartbreaking. Of course, the fact that a candidate as good as Obama is, ran this close to a caricature like Romney...ugghh...just depressing.
...In any case it made me think of the only two things Republicans said to me this season when asked why they were voting for Romney, actually only one vague idea, with different words: Welfare and diversity.
They see this country the way Romney described it in that video. They see a huge population of moochers (non white) as the core of our economic problems.
It is really a fairly amorphous vision too. When I pointed out that: welfare is an incredibly small component of federal expenditure (compared to say subsidies for oil companies, or farmers...ect) or that in fact, whites benefit far more from social programs than non-whites....it didn't really seem to make much difference to them, their eyes just sort of glazed over.
Which brings us to the realization: The core thing that I see, studying the history and politics of this country, as making it "exceptional" or "the greatest country on earth"
is the same thing they see as the source of all its problems and what will lead to its downfall: diversity.
I see diversity as the main strength of the country, much in the same way it acts in nature. Closed societies exhibit all the same problems that inbreeding produces in the natural world. They become isolated, paranoid, create rigid caste systems and are generally unhealthy. Inbreeding produces diseases like hemophilia, scale that up to societal level...it produces world wars.
I wont get in to just how dependent this country has been on immigrant or slave labor of one form or another to actually build and maintain itself. It is, however unintentional, the reason we are so diverse.
It just seems strange to me, that this fundamental truth...that diversity is what built this country, is what maintains it, is what makes it great, is not only lost on such a huge part of the population........but is actually misinterpreted as it's biggest problem.
You can almost take the one idea, and extrapolate it out, to encompass all of the problems we now face.
The irony cherry on top, as this election just showed: Diversity is what will eventually cure it.
