A Pew report released yesterday suggests that concerns about an end to assimilation are still misplaced.
The central fact:
The surveys show that fewer than one-in-four (23%) Latino immigrants report being able to speak English very well. However, fully 88% of their U.S.-born adult children report that they speak English very well. Among later generations of Hispanic adults, the figure rises to 94%.
Addressing this post about immigration and the environment, Brishen Hoff comments:
Canada’s environmental integrity is inversely correlated with its population growth. Canada is grossly overpopulated based on what we believe to be a healthy balance between human numbers and biodiversity. Canada’s natural environment is being damaged at an unprecedented rate. Since immigration is main agent of Canada’s population growth, we advocate a complete moratorium on immigration to Canada. We also support an end to: child birthing incentives, natural resource exportation and economic growth.
Curtailing immigration and reducing Canada’s already-low birthrate further will intensify Canada’s future demography-driven problems. However, some of these problems — reduced economic growth, more constrained consumption — Hoff would seemingly view instead as solutions. This is a values-driven question that cannot be resolved rationally, as it depends on the arbitrary weight given to humans or the rest of nature.
Such policies are also at odds with Canadian opinion: most Canadians favor immigration.
An alternative approach might acknowledge that richer countries are better able to protect the environment than poorer ones. Canada is projected to be a great deal wealthier in a few decades: if that were the case, it could dedicate much more money to preserving and restoring the environment while maintaining standards of living.
Recent articles highlight a potentially dangerous combination.
US cities and states are increasingly pursuing anti-immigrant measures, enforcing federal laws and checking immigration status in the course of other police business.
These measures are targeted against growing Hispanic immigrant populations, and are clearly motivated in part by a basic hostility toward difference.
Widespread adoption of these policies might in fact discourage immigration, but also heightens the danger of creating a separate and hostile foreign population on American soil.
That danger could be made more acute by another development, now in its early stages: Hispanics are turning to Islam in growing numbers. The Muslim Hispanic population is estimated to be 200,000 now.
More alienated Hispanics could find the extreme ends of Islamic fundamentalism attractive, and serve as an American vector for terrorism.
Though still a low-probability outcome, the two trends might achieve a dangerous synergy.
A recent poll indicates that Canada is unusually receptive to immigration.
Three-quarters of Canadians see immigration as having a positive effect on their country. This is far more positive than the nearly equal split seen in the United States and Western Europe on the issue.
A continued influx of immigrants will aid Canada in staving off demographic aging.
The Ford Foundation is attempting to address Africa’s preeminent problem, governance.
As reported by the NYT, it is funding a new Group, Trust Africa, that will support “an expanding network of nonprofit groups across the continent that seek to hold governments accountable.”
Thomas O. Melia, deputy director of Freedom House, […] said efforts like those of Trust Africa represent the next frontier in deepening democracy in Africa and elsewhere. “What has been missing, even in places establishing electoral democracy, is independent voices — think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, university centers — able to monitor government performance.”
The Senegal-based group will also seek support from African emigrants abroad, hoping that their interest in their homelands will translate to engagement in pan-African issues.
The NYT reports on a pattern of harassment and mistreatment of American Muslims at airports and borders. For instance:
Taleb Salhab and his wife say they too were dragged away in handcuffs at the border crossing in Port Huron, Mich., as their two preschool daughters wailed in the back seat of their car. The Salhabs were discharged after four hours of questioning, with no explanation from customs officers.
A significant problem is the watch list of suspicious names: bizarrely, it is merely a list of names, not a list of people, and so innocent citizens and travelers are continually flagged as being “on the list.” For Muslims, who have a relatively small pool of names, the problem is particularly acute.
Most of those wrongly placed on the watch list seethe with frustration and anger, finding it unbelievable that a technologically advanced country like the United States has been unable to develop a list that can distinguish between a lurking terrorist and a harmless citizen with a Muslim name.
Treating Muslim immigrants like they are potential enemies, and abusing them in the process, is an excellent recipe for ending up in the situation of France or Britain: threatened by a hostile group of Islamic extremists embedded in the society which could have embraced them.
(In a different sphere, the same principle applies to the larger immigration debate. It is mostly about Hispanic immigration, and the anti-immigrant forces who would personalize the policy problem — harassing or arresting individual immigrants — risk bringing about the very situation they fear: an alienated and numerous minority adjacent to an alternate homeland. This would be a long time developing, but is not unimaginable.)
The CSM examines a collision of issues that many find disturbing: high rates of immigration to the United States are at odds with many aspects of environmental preservation.
As an environmentalist puts it, “Immigration is one of the leading contributors to population growth. All we’re saying is, those numbers should be reduced to achieve population stabilization.”
The article also reports some intriguing findings that suggest that immigrant women’s fertility actually rises when they come the US, further amplifying the impact of their increased wealth on the world’s environment.
How a society balances immigration and the environment is a matter of priorities and values, but environmentalists should at least take note that reducing immigrant inflows might prevent a lot more pollution and sprawl than most other “green” policies.
A Syrian-American psychiatrist has provoked anger and discussion in the Arab world with her harsh assessments of the current state of Islam, and unfavorable comparison of Muslims to Jews, in appearances on Al Jazeera satellite TV.
Two aspects of this story are salient: