George Leef reviews Carol Swain’s The Adversity of Diversity. Two slices:
Swain’s book opens with a foreword by the famed Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who was a civil-rights activist back in the 1960s. He agrees with Swain that America has departed disastrously from the integrationist goals of the old civil-rights movement. Today, it employs force to disrupt our institutions and violate the rights of disfavored groups, while accomplishing little if any good for struggling blacks. It’s good to see a traditional white liberal voicing support for a black conservative who believes that America made a tragic mistake when it turned away from the goal of equal rights for all.
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Swain emphasizes the depth to which the DEI agenda has taken root in American higher education. At the University of Texas, for example, there were 171 positions for “diversity” administrators at the time of Swain’s writing, costing over $13 million per year. In her view, that expense is worse than useless, since the diversity message is anti-educational—disinformation intended to sow the seeds of social discord by making whites feel guilty and blacks angry at their supposed oppression.
Kevin Corcoran exposes some of Tucker Carlson’s jejune ignorance.
The state of New York spends a lot per pupil on education.
Bjorn Lomborg decries green ‘activists” inhumanity.
Here’s David Bier on the Immigration Act of 1924. A slice:
No law has so radically altered the demographics, economy, politics, and liberty of the United States and the world. It has massively reduced American population growth from immigrants and their descendants by hundreds of millions, diminishing economic growth and limiting the power and influence of this country. Post‐1924 Americans are not free to associate, contract, and trade with people born around the world as they were before.
Consider the 3.2 million increase in the foreign-born adult population in the U.S. in the 21 months since July 2022. We start at that date because it gives us a clean slate, free from the effects of the pandemic lockdown and reopening. And this period captures the full effect of the Biden administration’s loose border policies.
Over that period, foreign-born employment has increased 1.8 million—meaning that roughly 56% of the 3.2 million new foreign-born adult population became employed. Setting aside the political matter of how much of this employment is legal, the stereotype that immigrants don’t or can’t work appears to be false.
These numbers come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its monthly jobs report. They are collected in the Current Population Survey—the so-called household survey—which is used to calculate the national unemployment rate. It’s an old-fashioned door-to-door census of 60,000 households in which respondents are asked, among many questions, whether they are native-born or foreign-born. They aren’t asked if they are in the country illegally, and no doubt some are. But illegal aliens may be harder to find and less likely to answer a knock on the door, so the BLS probably undercounts them.
Even undercounted, the foreign-born represent 80% of the 4.1 million U.S. adult population increase since July 2022, and they account for 71% of the 2.5 million new jobs. All else equal, without the new foreign-born workers, total job growth in the economy would have been about 86,000 less every month—only 724,000 over the period, not 2.52 million.
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Yes, new immigrants put incremental demands on roads, hospitals, schools and other resources. But so do new native-born citizens. For either population, the question is what they produce as well as what they consume. The evidence shows that the foreign born are more likely to be producers than the native-born. In total, the foreign-born employment-to-population ratio is 63.4%. For the native-born, it is only 59.6%. By hook or by crook, legal or illegal, new immigrants are working.
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Such a policy is unsustainable in any case. Under capitalism, economic growth depends on trust—on the ability of economic participants to rely on others’ adherence to a set of defined and stable rules. The ad hoc lawlessness of the Biden border policy undermines that, and unless it can be stabilized it will be corrosive to long-term growth prospects. On the other hand, a border crackdown such as Donald Trump has proposed could end up leading to slower growth. Whoever is president in 2025 will need to take great care in balancing these urgent interests.
The voices of freedom in the Republic of Georgia (the former Soviet republic, not the home of the Bulldogs) will be substantially less audible thanks to a new law passed by Parliament. Organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from foreign sources must be designated as “agents of foreign influence.”
Nonprofits in Georgia that have advocated for freedom and free markets receive a substantial share of their funding through grants from foreign foundations. That is likely to come to an end.
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This law will mute the voices of freedom in Georgia and turn the country, which for two decades moved away from Russian influence toward the West, back toward heavy-handed Russian-style governance.
Why would Georgia’s political leadership turn their backs on the institutional reforms that have shown such success for two decades? The main goal of those who have political power is to maintain and increase their power. The well-being of the masses is, at best, a secondary consideration. We can hope for the sake of the Georgian people that this is not the first step that will turn Georgia into another Venezuela.
