Re your comment: Nursing homes could absolutely address their staffing issues by offering higher pay. But they’d need to charge more.
You forget the third option: They could lower their profit margins, which have been astonishingly high. But that would slow the mass movement of wealth to the top 1/10th of 1%, so it won’t happen. But you could mention it, Matt.
I hope this also will be extended to Russian political refugees. I know Russians opposed to Putin who have fled to the US and are now stranded here with no clear immigration path. If we opened the doors to Russian dissidents and high skilled Russians, the brain drain would accelerate their decline. It is scary to be opposed to Putin in Russia and we should be welcoming Westernized and anti-Putin Russians with open arms.
Maybe we should pass a law that says anyone who gets jailed in Russia for protesting the war is eligible for a visa. (Might have to massage the precise language, but that would be the general idea.)
Probably no...because then Russia decides that all the people in jail for murder are there for protesting the war and grants them the ability to take our offered visas. Then bad stuff happens when you get a bunch of murders coming over and the backlash impacts all the refugees.
Some of those murderers would find a fresh start, and become law abiding citizens. As for the rest…well, that sounds like yet another good reason to fund the police, no?
Let's run the counterfactual to the "everyone cares about Ukraine because Ukrainians are white Christians" BS and swap the populations of Afghanistan and Ukraine. Does anyone really think that Europe would look at an invasion at its Eastern border and say "Wait, hold on, it's just a bunch of a Muslims, we don't have to do anything." The reason that everyone is freaking out over Ukraine is because a nuclear-armed (former) superpower run by an authoritarian quasi-dictator invaded an Eastern European country, full stop.
Oh, but there are ongoing conflicts in Africa that didn't get this much attention! There has been a hot war in Eastern Ukraine since 2014 between Russian-backed separatists and regular old Ukrainians who want no part of it. Many people have been killed. Schools have been attacked. And yet it was not on the front page until Russia actually invaded. Oh, but what about Syrian refugees! Germany took in what, over a million? And that was an internal conflict, not an invasion, regardless of what countries backed which sides of the civil war. Oh, but... no, shut up, there is no parallel to this situation! Even the historical analogies are a stretch because nothing like this has happened in the nuclear or information ages.
This is not a situation where peer nations are threatening each other. It is not a civil war. It is not sectarian violence. It is not the US "promoting democracy" with bombs. Russia, a giant country with piles of nuclear weapons and a massive army, is trying to capture and occupy a peaceful country without provocation for the purpose of expanding its borders. Anyone who tires to flatten that down to crude binaries and make some stupid point about white supremacy is an amoral zealot who should not be taken seriously.
"And beyond that, I think most people draw a distinction between fleeing a war to a directly adjacent country in hopes of returning soon after military victory and fleeing endemic violence, skipping past Mexico, and then making an asylum claim in the United States"
People tend to gloss over the fact that Mexicans seem to really not like illegal immigrants staying in Mexico, more than US disapproval in fact. Have to find the Pew Survey.....
"The current situation is more or less exactly what Poland’s foreign policy has long wanted" - as a Polish-born U.S. citizen, I have to say, that's cold. Really cold. I mean, I get what MattY is saying, but pregnant women being killed by Russian bombs is not what anyone in Poland has "long wanted."
Also, I'm sure that racism plays a role in Poland's differential response to Ukrainian vs. Middle Eastern refugees. But I want to signal-boost a point made by many other commenters: there's a huge difference between "we're accepting a bunch of women, children, and elderly while the men are back in their homeland, bravely fighting off an invasion" and "we're accepting a bunch of people, including a lot of young men."
Stereotype alert: Young men, especially unemployed and unmarried ones, are the major demographic that gives rise to crime and social unrest in any society. See Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" for details. You can bet that if the Ukrainian refugees included many men along with women and children, the host countries' response would be very different.
Surely what most Ukrainians want, and what they are fighting for, is to defeat the Russians and regain control of their country so all those women and children can come back asap?
“ The current situation is more or less exactly what Poland’s foreign policy has long wanted: the Russian military is bogged down in a country that is not Poland,”
I laughed out loud. I like Matty’s dry whit.
As for: “ you can’t generate prosperity for anyone by pushing up nominal wages in labor-intensive sectors of the economy.”
You can if the result is a redistribution of income from capital to labor. All across American companies are saying, “A ton of people have quit, the customers are furious, we need to increase wages in order to fill those positions.” That puts pressure on prices, sure. But it also puts pressure on earnings as a going concern making less is still more valuable than one that holds the line on wages and as a result has no one to do the work.
This is only tangentially related to the issue here, but I wonder how much of American immigration politics is based on false assumptions about how the legal immigration system actually works. Like, I strongly suspect that a lot of people have it in their heads that an honest, hardworking person from anywhere who speaks or is willing to learn English and is willing to adapt to American customs can find a way in if they're just patient, when in fact this is not the case.* Hence the apparently greater salience of "border security" vs. TPS for people who are already here--if you think anyone who "deserves" to come here already can, everyone trying to circumvent that system is "undeserving" and therefore rightly excluded.
------
* An exercise to illustrate this problem: Imagine Carlos. Carlos is a journeyman baker at a panadería in Juárez. He speaks halfway-decent English and has some distant relations across the border in El Paso (his grandfather's brother moved there in less-restrictive times). He genuinely appreciates certain aspects of American culture (big football fan) and occasionally sees his American relations at holidays.
One Christmas, he's talking to his second cousin Sam, a bit of a whiz-kid who got a scholarship to the Wharton School of Business. Sam was complaining about how the Mexican food in Philly kinda sucks (it does), and also commenting about how good the pan dulce Carlos brought was. Carlos mentioned that he'd baked it himself.
At this, Sam had a business idea: bring Carlos over to bake pan dulce in Philadelphia. There's an opening in the market because one of the two decent panaderías in town had closed (COVID casualty). Plus Carlos's pan dulce, while merely very good by Juárez standards, would absolutely blow anything else available in Philly out of the water. For Carlos's part, he'd be interested because at this relatively early stage of his career, he's not really making great money and he's nowhere near running his own kitchen.
Prompt: Identify which visa, if any, Carlos is eligible for. (Please do not assume he will meet/marry an American citizen for the purposes of this exercise. Note also his American relations are strictly those descended from his grandfather's brother, and Carlos has no formal education past high school.)
I have not. My fiancee and I keep hearing about the Mexican-food scene in Norristown, but for various reasons never make it out that way. I'll put a pin in that one to try when we do get out there. (I have been to Norristown exactly once, 2+ years ago, for an early-morning appointment with the Department of Environmental Protection to peruse their records in relation to a case. We got done around 11. My colleague didn't want to have Mexican food for lunch/was afraid we'd end up waiting too long and miss our train. We got Popeye's and missed our train anyway, so took the NHSL-->El back to the office .)
Lol it's mostly that full-time work and near-full-time student mean my fiancee has basically no time to do any exploring--she steals just enough "free time" to visit family and friends. And Heaven forbid I eat any Mexican food without her there to approve or disapprove lol.
Racism exists and its a problem. The handful of cases on the Polish border where people were racist is wrong and awful, and those people should be held to account, but a couple observations:
First, it is natural for humans to empathize more with people who are like them. To use a banal example we feel it and care more when someone in our family has cancer than when a random stranger has cancer. In real terms: both cases of suffering are (all else being equal) the same, but the family member gets more empathy. The same is true for broader tribes.
Of course Europeans are more empathetic to Ukrainians than they are for Syrians. First Ukrainians look and speak a lot more like most Europeans, so they feel the pain more. Second, Ukraine is a country being invaded by an historic imperialistic power which, in living memory, brutally dominated much of Eastern Europe. This means that this is familiar to many in Europe (they have literally felt Ukraine's pain), AND there is an additional incentive to be welcoming to Ukrainians: other parts of Europe might be next.
Americans, I think, due to our historical and cultural ties to Europe feel many of the same impulses. A war in Europe, where millions of Americans came from AND where historically America has spent hundreds of thousands of soldiers off to die, means more than, say Afghanistan, a country with few ties with the US.
So is it racist for the Ukraine war to matter more to Americans? I do not think so: I think the stakes (for understandable and obvious reasons when you think about it for more than 10 seconds) are higher in Ukraine than they were in Syria, than they are in Ethiopia, or in Chad, or (pick another country currently in conflict). This is before we get into the geopolitical implications of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Let's take Syria. Syria is a mess, which has upended millions of lives. The humanitarian concerns in Syria are almost as bad as Ukraine (Syria is, IIRC, about half the size of Ukraine but was hurt worse). But what are the geopolitical implications if Syria is in shambles? To the US? Not much. Syria is not nuclear armed, turmoil in Syria is not going to cause one of its neighbors to become more hostile to the US. Overall, to the average American, the Syrian conflict won't matter much.
Ukraine, bluntly, is different. America is in a military alliance with nearly all of Ukraine's neighbors, who are now tensely fearful of Russian invasion. Russia is an historic adversary to the US, is making demands of America in exchange for peace, and has more nukes than any country on earth. The Ukrainian conflict has serious security implications to the US.
Second, like all foreign policy issues, Americans LOVE to make FP revolve around our own domestic squabbles. Hence the debate on NATO. This may come to shock most Americans but NATO really is not the driving force behind this conflict: this war is about Ukraine and Russia, and basically that's it. Our focus on NATO is detrimental to understanding the conflict in my view. If we want to learn more about this conflict, we should learn more about Russia and Ukraine, not about our won foibles in Europe since 1991.
I think the main point is that it does not matter whether or how racist it is. The time to dwell on that question is the next time there's a refugee crisis in a nonwhite country. Dwelling on it now can only have the effect of punishing Ukrainians, who are not at fault.
I think that’s fair, I’m pointing out there are multiple reasons why people can care more and emphatically concluding something’s racism when other explanations exist is lazy analysis and assumes the worst unfairly.
Come on down, Ukrainian refugees! I'm pretty sure that my super-red state (Oklahoma) would take some. We just resettled 1800 Afghan refugees through Catholic Charities with strong public support. Plenty of churches and synagogues stepped forward to join our local mosques to find these refugees permanent housing, furniture and household goods, and jobs.
This is in a state where our governor takes highly-publicized trips to the Mexican border to posture about Biden's open-border policies. Of course, Oklahoma is also home to two major military bases and lots of veterans, so that was helpful for the Afghans, who provided our military with support. However, Oklahoma is also a Bible Belt state, and -- as David French notes -- there are strong ties between evangelicals in the U.S. and evangelicals in Ukraine. So, bring them on!
I’m hopeful that something like this proposal comes to pass, but the way I see it, we have another handful of weeks before public sentiment toward Ukraine cools. We have plenty of evidence that knock-down, drag-out conflicts wear people thin, so better to strike while the iron is still (relatively) hot.
I'd say just accept Russian immigrants 18-35, period. Each person working here is someone not getting conscripted, and makes Russia's own dependency ratio that much more difficult.
If better enforcement at the southern border could help politically build case for more legal immigration, then Dems should be "pro-wall". Which also would help mitigate the party's toxic brand in small town and rural Midwest.
Agreed.
Re your comment: Nursing homes could absolutely address their staffing issues by offering higher pay. But they’d need to charge more.
You forget the third option: They could lower their profit margins, which have been astonishingly high. But that would slow the mass movement of wealth to the top 1/10th of 1%, so it won’t happen. But you could mention it, Matt.
Can anyone tell me why Poland and Ukraine share essentially the same first line in their respective national anthems?
I hope this also will be extended to Russian political refugees. I know Russians opposed to Putin who have fled to the US and are now stranded here with no clear immigration path. If we opened the doors to Russian dissidents and high skilled Russians, the brain drain would accelerate their decline. It is scary to be opposed to Putin in Russia and we should be welcoming Westernized and anti-Putin Russians with open arms.
Maybe we should pass a law that says anyone who gets jailed in Russia for protesting the war is eligible for a visa. (Might have to massage the precise language, but that would be the general idea.)
Probably no...because then Russia decides that all the people in jail for murder are there for protesting the war and grants them the ability to take our offered visas. Then bad stuff happens when you get a bunch of murders coming over and the backlash impacts all the refugees.
Some of those murderers would find a fresh start, and become law abiding citizens. As for the rest…well, that sounds like yet another good reason to fund the police, no?
Like I said, you might have to massage it a little.
Let's run the counterfactual to the "everyone cares about Ukraine because Ukrainians are white Christians" BS and swap the populations of Afghanistan and Ukraine. Does anyone really think that Europe would look at an invasion at its Eastern border and say "Wait, hold on, it's just a bunch of a Muslims, we don't have to do anything." The reason that everyone is freaking out over Ukraine is because a nuclear-armed (former) superpower run by an authoritarian quasi-dictator invaded an Eastern European country, full stop.
Oh, but there are ongoing conflicts in Africa that didn't get this much attention! There has been a hot war in Eastern Ukraine since 2014 between Russian-backed separatists and regular old Ukrainians who want no part of it. Many people have been killed. Schools have been attacked. And yet it was not on the front page until Russia actually invaded. Oh, but what about Syrian refugees! Germany took in what, over a million? And that was an internal conflict, not an invasion, regardless of what countries backed which sides of the civil war. Oh, but... no, shut up, there is no parallel to this situation! Even the historical analogies are a stretch because nothing like this has happened in the nuclear or information ages.
This is not a situation where peer nations are threatening each other. It is not a civil war. It is not sectarian violence. It is not the US "promoting democracy" with bombs. Russia, a giant country with piles of nuclear weapons and a massive army, is trying to capture and occupy a peaceful country without provocation for the purpose of expanding its borders. Anyone who tires to flatten that down to crude binaries and make some stupid point about white supremacy is an amoral zealot who should not be taken seriously.
"And beyond that, I think most people draw a distinction between fleeing a war to a directly adjacent country in hopes of returning soon after military victory and fleeing endemic violence, skipping past Mexico, and then making an asylum claim in the United States"
People tend to gloss over the fact that Mexicans seem to really not like illegal immigrants staying in Mexico, more than US disapproval in fact. Have to find the Pew Survey.....
"The current situation is more or less exactly what Poland’s foreign policy has long wanted" - as a Polish-born U.S. citizen, I have to say, that's cold. Really cold. I mean, I get what MattY is saying, but pregnant women being killed by Russian bombs is not what anyone in Poland has "long wanted."
Also, I'm sure that racism plays a role in Poland's differential response to Ukrainian vs. Middle Eastern refugees. But I want to signal-boost a point made by many other commenters: there's a huge difference between "we're accepting a bunch of women, children, and elderly while the men are back in their homeland, bravely fighting off an invasion" and "we're accepting a bunch of people, including a lot of young men."
Stereotype alert: Young men, especially unemployed and unmarried ones, are the major demographic that gives rise to crime and social unrest in any society. See Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" for details. You can bet that if the Ukrainian refugees included many men along with women and children, the host countries' response would be very different.
To make another cold point, native-born young men tend not to object so much to influxes of unmarried young women.
Perhaps the new S. Korea president would welcome refugees?
Surely what most Ukrainians want, and what they are fighting for, is to defeat the Russians and regain control of their country so all those women and children can come back asap?
ctnd...
Most are NOT using this crisis as a good excuse to become immigrant migrants.
And that is a crucial difference which explains why these refugees are being welcomed by their neighbours in a way the Syrians were not...
“ The current situation is more or less exactly what Poland’s foreign policy has long wanted: the Russian military is bogged down in a country that is not Poland,”
I laughed out loud. I like Matty’s dry whit.
As for: “ you can’t generate prosperity for anyone by pushing up nominal wages in labor-intensive sectors of the economy.”
You can if the result is a redistribution of income from capital to labor. All across American companies are saying, “A ton of people have quit, the customers are furious, we need to increase wages in order to fill those positions.” That puts pressure on prices, sure. But it also puts pressure on earnings as a going concern making less is still more valuable than one that holds the line on wages and as a result has no one to do the work.
Double plus like.
This is only tangentially related to the issue here, but I wonder how much of American immigration politics is based on false assumptions about how the legal immigration system actually works. Like, I strongly suspect that a lot of people have it in their heads that an honest, hardworking person from anywhere who speaks or is willing to learn English and is willing to adapt to American customs can find a way in if they're just patient, when in fact this is not the case.* Hence the apparently greater salience of "border security" vs. TPS for people who are already here--if you think anyone who "deserves" to come here already can, everyone trying to circumvent that system is "undeserving" and therefore rightly excluded.
------
* An exercise to illustrate this problem: Imagine Carlos. Carlos is a journeyman baker at a panadería in Juárez. He speaks halfway-decent English and has some distant relations across the border in El Paso (his grandfather's brother moved there in less-restrictive times). He genuinely appreciates certain aspects of American culture (big football fan) and occasionally sees his American relations at holidays.
One Christmas, he's talking to his second cousin Sam, a bit of a whiz-kid who got a scholarship to the Wharton School of Business. Sam was complaining about how the Mexican food in Philly kinda sucks (it does), and also commenting about how good the pan dulce Carlos brought was. Carlos mentioned that he'd baked it himself.
At this, Sam had a business idea: bring Carlos over to bake pan dulce in Philadelphia. There's an opening in the market because one of the two decent panaderías in town had closed (COVID casualty). Plus Carlos's pan dulce, while merely very good by Juárez standards, would absolutely blow anything else available in Philly out of the water. For Carlos's part, he'd be interested because at this relatively early stage of his career, he's not really making great money and he's nowhere near running his own kitchen.
Prompt: Identify which visa, if any, Carlos is eligible for. (Please do not assume he will meet/marry an American citizen for the purposes of this exercise. Note also his American relations are strictly those descended from his grandfather's brother, and Carlos has no formal education past high school.)
I have not. My fiancee and I keep hearing about the Mexican-food scene in Norristown, but for various reasons never make it out that way. I'll put a pin in that one to try when we do get out there. (I have been to Norristown exactly once, 2+ years ago, for an early-morning appointment with the Department of Environmental Protection to peruse their records in relation to a case. We got done around 11. My colleague didn't want to have Mexican food for lunch/was afraid we'd end up waiting too long and miss our train. We got Popeye's and missed our train anyway, so took the NHSL-->El back to the office .)
Lol it's mostly that full-time work and near-full-time student mean my fiancee has basically no time to do any exploring--she steals just enough "free time" to visit family and friends. And Heaven forbid I eat any Mexican food without her there to approve or disapprove lol.
Racism exists and its a problem. The handful of cases on the Polish border where people were racist is wrong and awful, and those people should be held to account, but a couple observations:
First, it is natural for humans to empathize more with people who are like them. To use a banal example we feel it and care more when someone in our family has cancer than when a random stranger has cancer. In real terms: both cases of suffering are (all else being equal) the same, but the family member gets more empathy. The same is true for broader tribes.
Of course Europeans are more empathetic to Ukrainians than they are for Syrians. First Ukrainians look and speak a lot more like most Europeans, so they feel the pain more. Second, Ukraine is a country being invaded by an historic imperialistic power which, in living memory, brutally dominated much of Eastern Europe. This means that this is familiar to many in Europe (they have literally felt Ukraine's pain), AND there is an additional incentive to be welcoming to Ukrainians: other parts of Europe might be next.
Americans, I think, due to our historical and cultural ties to Europe feel many of the same impulses. A war in Europe, where millions of Americans came from AND where historically America has spent hundreds of thousands of soldiers off to die, means more than, say Afghanistan, a country with few ties with the US.
So is it racist for the Ukraine war to matter more to Americans? I do not think so: I think the stakes (for understandable and obvious reasons when you think about it for more than 10 seconds) are higher in Ukraine than they were in Syria, than they are in Ethiopia, or in Chad, or (pick another country currently in conflict). This is before we get into the geopolitical implications of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
Let's take Syria. Syria is a mess, which has upended millions of lives. The humanitarian concerns in Syria are almost as bad as Ukraine (Syria is, IIRC, about half the size of Ukraine but was hurt worse). But what are the geopolitical implications if Syria is in shambles? To the US? Not much. Syria is not nuclear armed, turmoil in Syria is not going to cause one of its neighbors to become more hostile to the US. Overall, to the average American, the Syrian conflict won't matter much.
Ukraine, bluntly, is different. America is in a military alliance with nearly all of Ukraine's neighbors, who are now tensely fearful of Russian invasion. Russia is an historic adversary to the US, is making demands of America in exchange for peace, and has more nukes than any country on earth. The Ukrainian conflict has serious security implications to the US.
Second, like all foreign policy issues, Americans LOVE to make FP revolve around our own domestic squabbles. Hence the debate on NATO. This may come to shock most Americans but NATO really is not the driving force behind this conflict: this war is about Ukraine and Russia, and basically that's it. Our focus on NATO is detrimental to understanding the conflict in my view. If we want to learn more about this conflict, we should learn more about Russia and Ukraine, not about our won foibles in Europe since 1991.
I think the main point is that it does not matter whether or how racist it is. The time to dwell on that question is the next time there's a refugee crisis in a nonwhite country. Dwelling on it now can only have the effect of punishing Ukrainians, who are not at fault.
I think that’s fair, I’m pointing out there are multiple reasons why people can care more and emphatically concluding something’s racism when other explanations exist is lazy analysis and assumes the worst unfairly.
Come on down, Ukrainian refugees! I'm pretty sure that my super-red state (Oklahoma) would take some. We just resettled 1800 Afghan refugees through Catholic Charities with strong public support. Plenty of churches and synagogues stepped forward to join our local mosques to find these refugees permanent housing, furniture and household goods, and jobs.
This is in a state where our governor takes highly-publicized trips to the Mexican border to posture about Biden's open-border policies. Of course, Oklahoma is also home to two major military bases and lots of veterans, so that was helpful for the Afghans, who provided our military with support. However, Oklahoma is also a Bible Belt state, and -- as David French notes -- there are strong ties between evangelicals in the U.S. and evangelicals in Ukraine. So, bring them on!
Own the libs by accepting Ukrainian refugees!
Geez,
Can the race essentialist left not make any crisis and especially a humanitarian one about themselves?
They are so myopic and clueless about the world outside a neat little morality play they have written for this country.
I’m hopeful that something like this proposal comes to pass, but the way I see it, we have another handful of weeks before public sentiment toward Ukraine cools. We have plenty of evidence that knock-down, drag-out conflicts wear people thin, so better to strike while the iron is still (relatively) hot.
Another war-related immigration idea: accept lots of anti-war skilled Russian immigrants.
I really like that idea. It’s also very American in a good way.
I'd say just accept Russian immigrants 18-35, period. Each person working here is someone not getting conscripted, and makes Russia's own dependency ratio that much more difficult.
If better enforcement at the southern border could help politically build case for more legal immigration, then Dems should be "pro-wall". Which also would help mitigate the party's toxic brand in small town and rural Midwest.
Deportations is not literally the same thing as building more fencing.