Immigrants Are Better Than Us! Series #14,897
02/25/2014
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A couple of weeks ago I described pundit Naomi Schaefer Riley in my Taki’s Magazine column as “a pretty good egg as center-right columnists go,” mainly on the grounds that Ms. Riley, like me, had been dropped from one of her journalistic outlets for noticing hatefacts about black people.

No good deed goes unpunished.  Ms. Schaefer Riley has responded to my generous and brotherly endorsement by writing a quite exceptionally stupid column about education.

 The main theme is the well-worn one, much ridiculed by the likes of me but still apparently irresistible to immigration romantics, that immigrants are morally superior to—ugh!—Americans.

 Tamar Jacoby, the president of ImmigrationWorks (a group that lobbies for immigration reform), says she was speaking recently with a Kuwaiti young man studying engineering at a Midwestern university. He loved it, he told her, but, “What’s shocking to me is that my American peers are out partying every night. They don’t have a sense of purpose. I’m there to learn.”

 Ms. Schaefer Riley leaves no anti-nativist fallacy unturned.

 Among students with engineering degrees, a full third are foreign-born—and it’s more than a quarter of those with degrees in computers, math and statistics.

Yes:  Americans are no longer much inclined to study for jobs that have been foreignized by the H-1B rackets and wage-depressed by outsourcing.  Why would they be?

Immigrants are twice as likely as native-born citizens to start a business in the United States.

Which immigrants, Ma’am?  Which immigrants?

I’ll give the lady a smidgeon of credit.  At the very end of the piece she shows a momentary glimmer of awareness that the children of immigrants will be—oh no!—Americans, with all the regrettable shortcomings thereof.

Not to worry, though.  We’ll just import another hundred million to keep our dynamism going… until, I suppose, it’s standing-room only on our inhabitable land, and the rest of the world is totally depopulated.

Not such a good egg, then; only a curate’s egg.

 

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