illegal immigration

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pages: 196 words: 53,627

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Hanson’s paper, however, is narrowly focused on whether our economic welfare is helped or harmed by porous borders. He looks at the fiscal costs and benefits of illegal immigrants and how they compare with those newcomers who use the front door. “This analysis concludes that there is little evidence that legal immigration is economically preferable to illegal immigration,” writes Hanson. “In fact, illegal immigration responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not.” How’s that? To begin with, illegal immigrants are more sensitive to the U.S. business cycle. They tend to come when the economy is expanding, and they can more easily migrate to those areas of the country where job growth is fastest because they’re not bound to a single employer.

Medicaid enrollment, by contrast, has since increased—as of 2004, it was up by more than 30 percent since 1994—mainly because states have elected to exercise their option to continue coverage and even expand immigrant eligibility. Some immigration detractors, such as Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation, claim that even though illegal immigrants themselves don’t qualify for federal welfare benefits, their U.S.-born children, who are citizens, do. Therefore, according to Rector, illegal immigration is indirectly driving welfare caseloads. Sounds plausible, but is it true? Between 1995 and 2004, America’s illegal immigration population is estimated to have doubled to around 12 million. Yet Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin report in the December 2007 issue of Commentary magazine that welfare caseloads over that period are not just down but down dramatically.

In that year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service spent $4.2 billion (or 0.04 percent of GDP) on border and interior enforcement, including the detention and removal of illegal aliens, in a year in which half a million net new illegal immigrants entered the country. The $13 billion in proposed border security spending for next year [2008] is already two-and-a half times that figure at 0.10 percent of GDP. In other words, the amount of money we spend to keep illegal immigrants out of the country now exceeds the amount of economic “damage” they supposedly cause. Remember that the next time you’re told that we need to spend more money to beef up the border. Reasonable people agree that illegal immigration should be reduced. The question isn’t whether it’s a problem but how to solve it.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Soon over 550 sanctuary jurisdictions arose to protect those illegal immigrants formerly subject to federal arrest and apprehension.16 The Republicans, for the most part in fear, muted their resistance to illegal immigration—although in 2012, for example, they might have made class inroads with the old Democratic white, Latino, and black working classes, whose wages were being driven down by imported cheap labor. As the number of illegal immigrants grew, Republicans grew terrified both of accusations of racism, xenophobia, and nativism and of refusal by big-donor employers, eager for inexpensive labor, to contribute to Republican campaigns. Almost everyone who had once railed against illegal immigration now either supported or tolerated it. They assumed most US citizens, who still opposed illegal immigration, did not regard it as a high-priority issue or could be shamed into silence by insinuations of illiberality and intolerance. When economic data revealed that illegal immigration had cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars—namely, that despite a variety of complex federal eligibility regulations, each illegal immigrant required far more in social services than he paid in taxes—the messengers of such unwelcome facts were attacked as heretics and worse.

In the early 2000s, influential Democratic congressional leaders such as Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Harry Reid (D-NV), and Charles Schumer (D-NY), as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), were on record opposing illegal immigration. Indeed, the Democratic Party, during its 1996 convention, formalized its tough opposition to open borders and illegal immigration: Today’s Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.

On American public opinion: Robert Draper, “The Democrats Have an Immigration Problem,” New York Times, October 10, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/the-democrats-have-an-immigration-problem.html; “comprehensive immigration confusion”: Peter Skerry, “Comprehensive Immigration Confusion,” National Affairs, 2016, www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/comprehensive-immigration-confusion. 15. On the changing and politicized language of illegal immigration, see, e.g., Alex Nowrasteh, “‘Illegal Alien’ Is One of Many Correct Legal Terms for ‘Illegal Immigrant,’” Cato Institute, October 14, 2019, www.cato.org/blog/illegal-alien-one-many-correct-legal-terms-illegal-immigrant; Jon Feere, “Language in the Immigration Debate,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 26, 2012, https://cis.org/Language-Immigration-Debate. 16. For the Democrats’ new acceptance of illegal immigration, see a synopsis of recent polls: Craig Kafura and Bettina Hammer, “Republicans and Democrats in Different Worlds on Immigration,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October 8, 2019, www.thechicagocouncil.org/publication/lcc/republicans-and-democrats-different-worlds-immigration. 17.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Many thanks to Shuya Ohno at MIRA (Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition) for connecting me to Gayatri Patnaik, who really deserves much of the credit for this book coming into existence at all; she and her colleagues at Beacon Press have all been a pleasure to work with. NOTES A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY 1. Paul Colford, “‘Illegal Immigrant’ No More,” Associated Press, April 2, 2013, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/illegal-immigrant-no-more; Rui Kaneya, “‘Illegal,’ ‘Undocumented,’ or Something Else? No Clear Consensus Yet,” Columbia Journalism Review, December 23, 2014, http://archives.cjr.org/united_states_project/illegal_immigrant_or_undocumented.php. INTRODUCTION, 2018 1. See Muzaffar Chishti, Sarah Pierce, and Jessica Bolter, “The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not?

Brent Haydamack and Daniel Flaming, “Hopeful Workers, Marginal Jobs: LA’s Off-the-Books Labor Force,” Economic Roundtable, with Pascale Joassart, December 2005, synopsis available at www.economicrt.org/summaries/hopeful_workers_marginal_jobs_synopsis.html. 3. Eduardo Porter, “Illegal Immigrants are Bolstering Social Security with Billions,” New York Times, April 5, 2005. 4. Porter, “Illegal Immigrants are Bolstering Social Security.” MYTH 5: IMMIGRANTS ARE A DRAIN ON THE ECONOMY 1. Steven A. Camarota, “The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget,” Center for Immigration Studies, August 2004, 7, www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.pdf. 2. Camarota, “High Cost of Cheap Labor.” 3. Sarah Beth Coffey, “Undocumented Immigrants in Georgia: Tax Contributions and Fiscal Concerns,” Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, January 2006, www.gbpi.org/pubs/garevenue/20060119.pdf. 4.

Instead of a basically open border and welcoming attitude toward immigrants—including Mexicans, who were considered nominally “white” and therefore eligible for citizenship—the 1924 law closed the border and demanded that every potential immigrant be scrutinized. It created two new things that now seem to be a natural part of our immigration policy: the Border Patrol and deportation. In the process, it also created the category of the “illegal immigrant.” Prior to 1924, immigrants could be deported for committing certain crimes, but with an open border there was no such thing as illegal entry or an “illegal” immigrant. The 1924 law made “unlawful entry” a crime and created a new police force, the Border Patrol, to prevent and punish it. Suddenly, there was a new legal category of people in the country: not citizens, not immigrants.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

In addition to the above and in the period since 1996 a number of additional laws relating to immigration have been passed: the Immigration Act (1999), which sets out the grounds for deportations; the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act (2000), which creates offences offenses in relation to facilitating illegal immigration; the Immigration Act (2003), which stipulates the sanctions for carriers of illegal immigrants, and introduces an obligation on state departments to share information on nonnationals for the purpose of administering immigration law, the Ireland 213 Table 14-4. Work Permits Issued by Nationality. 1999–2001 Nationality 1999 2000 2001 Total Australia Belarus Bangladesh Brazil Bulgaria Canada China Czech Republic Estonia India Latvia Lithuania Malaysia Moldova New Zealand Pakistan Philippines Poland Romania Russian Fed.

Other nations, such as France and Spain, also write of ‘‘border controls,’’ some suggest methods of deporting/repatriating illegal immigrants (Ireland, Israel, South Africa, United States), and yet others have a means to amnesty and citizenship (Greece and Thailand). Others merely speak of policies that ‘‘regulate’’ illegal immigration (China, Brazil, Spain). Several of these measures are short-term minimal resolutions to the dilemma of this population. France and the UK indicate stringent approaches and punitive policies for the control of illegal immigration and residence. Russia recognizes the presence of a large undocumented population and a shadow economy and is also aware that this group is often protected by criminal organizations as it receives no support from Russian law enforcement.

Until 2007 the ‘‘50:50 balance’’ between the totality of the exUSSR countries and ‘‘old’’ foreign states that might seem surprising was mainly the result of widespread practices of unregistered employment of labor migrants from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Illegality is in fact one of the major characteristics of migration inflows to Russia. Illegal Immigration The dominant type of immigration to Russia, illegal immigration is very diversified. It consists of the following major inflows (Krasinets et al., 2000:80–82): (1) The citizens of the ex-USSR countries who come to Russia in quest of jobs and/or residence. Visa-free regimes based on bilateral and multilateral agreements between most post-Soviet countries allow them to cross the boundaries legally.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

In 1990, recognizing reality, a new immigration act raised the official immigration cap from 270,000 to 675,000 per year while more than doubling employment-related visas and creating the H-1B programme for high-skilled immigrants.31 The IRCA amnesty may or may not have acted as an incentive for others to try their luck crossing the border. Alternatively, it may be that lofty legislation made little difference to the inflow, since apprehensions of illegal immigrants on the southern border continued at around 1 million per year.32 Against the backdrop of rising illegal immigration and legal admissions, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) was founded in 1978. The organization sought to ‘end illegal immigration’ and to ‘set legal immigration at the lowest feasible levels consistent with the demographic, economic, and social realities of the present’. It eschewed ethnic quotas in favour of numerical limits, calling for a temporary moratorium on immigration to facilitate assimilation.

Despite the anti-immigration sentiment which rapid immigration usually produces, the rising liberalism of the Boomers was able to exert a countervailing influence on immigration attitudes. Later in the book, and in the online blog, I consider more rigorous evidence for this claim. IMMIGRATION POLITICS IN THE POST-1965 PERIOD Legal and illegal immigration rose steadily from 300,000 per year in 1965 to 500,000 in the 1970s and 750,000 in the 1980s. This spurred anti-immigration organizing by the 1980s, but produced only a modest public response. In legislative terms, discussion focused only on illegal immigration. Some legislators pushed for employer sanctions to punish those who knowingly hired unauthorized workers. Liberals argued that regularizing the status of the undocumented was necessary for them to become productive citizens but this had not become a partisan issue.

However, no ballot initiative had ever been held on immigration, which was deemed to be a federal matter. In 1994 FAIR helped coordinate grassroots organizations like Voice of Citizens Together (VCT) and Americans Against Illegal Immigration (AAII) to gather the necessary signatures to support the initiative they dubbed ‘Save Our State’ (SOS). As a state ballot, Proposition 187 was not about border enforcement, a federal matter. Rather, its stated goal was to deny public services to illegal immigrants. In addition to acting as a deterrent, the measure would serve as a powerful symbol of local opposition to undocumented immigration. Despite its security and economic rationale, there was an important streak of white ethno-traditionalism among grassroots 187 activists.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Denying employers the ability to pit different groups of workers against one another also makes it necessary to enact amnesties for illegal immigrants in countries like the US where large numbers of unauthorized foreign nationals, allowed to settle in the country by corrupt politicians in the interest of economic elites, are de facto citizens. Rewarding foreign nationals for violating immigration laws is an evil. But it is the lesser of two evils, compared to allowing employers to have continuing access to large pools of illegal immigrant workers who can be mistreated and intimidated. Like legal immigrants, amnestied illegal immigrants without criminal records should be made citizens as rapidly as possible to deny employers access to workers who cannot vote.

While denouncing bigotry against immigrants, the commission called for reducing legal immigration, shifting the basis of immigration away from family relationships toward skills, and promoting the integration of immigrants.7 In the words of the chair of the commission, Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman from the South to be elected to Congress, “The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.”8 Jordan also rejected efforts to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration: “To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree, also, with those who label our efforts to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is unacceptable.”9 A generation later, most of the policies proposed by the Jordan Commission are supported by the populist Republican right and denounced by growing numbers of self-described “progressive” Democrats for whom any enforcement of immigration laws is inherently unjust.

The incompatibility of the welfare state with mass immigration was noted by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman: “If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimum level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then [free immigration] really is an impossible thing.” Friedman callously welcomed illegal immigration—but only as long as illegal immigrants were ineligible for welfare: “But it’s only good so long as it’s illegal. . . . Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits.”16 His ideological opposite, the progressive economist Paul Krugman, agrees with Friedman’s political point.


pages: 316 words: 91,969

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

In a mid-2009 panel discussion, Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Research Center estimated that nearly one million illegal immigrants enter America annually, but the Times has used the figure of 400,000 and doesn’t acknowledge the discrepancy, much less explain it. While minimizing the numbers of illegal immigrants, the Times plays down the social costs they impose as well. According to William Bratton, former police chief of Los Angeles, gang violence is “the emerging monster of crime in America.” At least 90 percent of all the outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal immigrant criminals, most of them gangbangers. Because of their social marginality, immigrant children are particularly likely to be seduced by the gang culture.

The victim played dead, and later crawled to a nearby house for help. Despite the heinousness of the crime, the Times chose not to cover it, even though it routinely covers other developments in New Haven, including the controversies over granting identity cards to illegal immigrants, and the immigrant community’s fears over federal raids on illegal immigrants with outstanding arrest warrants. • The Times did a piece on how happy immigrant parents were with ethnically themed public charter schools, dismissing concerns about assimilation by quoting ethnic studies professors saying that these parents were being “as American as apple pie.”

The second driver is an intellectual and journalistic framework that romanticizes “the Other” and shrugs off the question of a Latinization or Islamization of American culture as if it were meaningless. Like other liberal institutions, the Times puts the “human rights” of illegal immigrants ahead of the collective right of ordinary American citizens to decide who should be allowed to immigrate and who should not—thereby essentially voiding one of the most fundamental aspects of any country’s sovereignty. At the Times, pressure has steadily increased to erase the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. As Randal Archibold wrote in April 2006, there is “the awkward question of who is legal and how much it should matter.” Officially, the paper’s style guide says a distinction should be made, but the newsroom reflects a calculated confusion.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

In his 2011 book, he wrote, “Illegal immigration is a wrecking ball aimed at U.S. taxpayers. Washington needs to get tough and fight for ‘We the People,’ not for the special interests who want cheap labor and a minority voting bloc.” In the 2016 campaign, he not only opposed illegal immigration, but favored deportation. His case against illegal immigration was partly economic—they drove down wages and raised social costs—but also socio-cultural—they were a cause of crime. He proposed that Mexico finance a wall with its trade surplus from the United States to stop illegal immigration. Trump’s views on immigration displayed a special animus toward Mexican Americans.

Emily Ekins, who did extensive interviews with Tea Party members, writes that the Tea Partiers “tended to view the ACA as a redistributive transfer program that they would be disproportionately responsible for funding.” Tea Partiers viewed illegal immigration the same way. In their interviews, Skocpol and Williamson report, “the major concern was the illegitimate and costly use of government funds and services by illegal immigrants.” Many of the local Tea Party groups were part of the tradition of American populism and reflected opposition from the right to the neoliberal consensus. They objected to the residual elements of New Deal liberalism that neoliberalism had retained, even those popular among Republicans.

The populists express these neglected concerns and frame them in a politics that pits the people against an intransigent elite. By doing so, they become catalysts for political change. On both sides of the Atlantic, the major parties favored increased immigration, only to find that in the United States voters were up in arms about illegal immigration and in Europe about immigrant communities that became seedbeds of crime and later terror. The populist candidates and parties gave voice to these concerns. In Europe, the major parties on the continent embraced the idea of a common currency only to find it fall into disfavor during the Great Recession.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

Countless American companies, big and small, employ huge numbers of illegal immigrants, pay them little, give them no legal rights, and hide their presence from the authorities. The government could begin to arrest lots of American management teams that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. How popular this move would be with companies that rely on cheap labour for construction contracts and fruit picking is another matter. Ultimately, very few barriers are impenetrable. People are resourceful, and those desperate enough will find a way around, under or over them. Extra barriers simply push would-be illegal immigrants further and further into unguarded, unpopulated areas.

Many supporters of the BJP government take a robust view of what is required and demand policies that might appear harsh to some people. These include criminal proceedings against anyone harbouring an illegal immigrant, and banning illegal immigrants from working if they do not voluntarily register themselves with the authorities. In the 2014 national election campaign Narendra Modi, the BJP leader, repeatedly promised that he would tighten border controls and warned illegal immigrants from Bangladesh that they needed to have their ‘bags packed’. He went on to become prime minister. In 2017 the BJP president, Amit Shah, accused politicians in the opposition Congress Party, who are against deportations, of wanting to make Assam state a part of Bangladesh.

They began by separating Greece and Macedonia, Macedonia and Serbia, and Serbia and Hungary, and, as we became less shocked by each stretch of barbed wire, others followed suit – Slovenia began building on the Croatian border, the Austrians fenced off Slovenia, Sweden put up barriers to prevent illegal immigrants crossing from Denmark, while Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have all started defensive fortifications on their borders with Russia. Europe is certainly not alone: the United Arab Emirates has built a fence along the border with Oman, Kuwait likewise with Iraq. Iraq and Iran maintain a physical divide, as do Iran and Pakistan – all 435 miles of it.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

We would import the asparagus and the strawberries instead. Illegal immigrants do affect prices in the United States. One study calculated that the surge in immigration experienced between 1980 and 2000 reduced the average price of services such as housekeeping or gardening by more than 9 percent, mainly by undercutting wages. Still, it had a negligible impact on natives’ wages because poor illegal immigrants compete in the job market with other poor illegal immigrants. Immigration policy has always been determined by who bears its costs and who draws its benefits. Illegal immigrants are tolerated by the political system because their cheap labor is useful for agribusiness and other industries.

To bring his children into the United States through a checkpoint, he would have to work longer to earn the price of passage. But it would lower the risk that his children would perish along the way. The debate among Americans about illegal immigration is itself a discussion about prices. Critics charge that illegal immigrants lower the price of natives’ labor by offering to do the job for less. They argue that immigrants impose a burden on natives when they consume public services, like education for their children and emergency medical care. These arguments are weaker than they seem. Most illegal immigrants work on the books using false IDs, and have taxes withheld from their paychecks like any other worker. They can’t draw benefits from most government programs.

Illegal immigrants are tolerated by the political system because their cheap labor is useful for agribusiness and other industries. It provides affordable nannies to middle-class Americans. This suggests that despite presidential lip service to the need to reform immigration law, nothing much is likely to be done. Creating a legal path for illegal immigrants to work in the United States would be politically risky and could provide a big incentive for more illegal flows. By contrast, cutting illegal immigration entirely would be prohibitively costly. The status quo is too comfortable to bear tinkering like that. The ebb and flow of immigration will continue to be determined by potential immigrants’ measuring the prospect of a minimum-wage job—perhaps a first step up the ladder of prosperity—against the costs imposed by the harsh border.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

Rule Three Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy In the illegal immigration debate, an expression of “compassion” was the best way to establish instant credibility. WORDS THAT WORK “Compassion is the component lacking in much of the Republican messaging on illegal immigration thus far. You are quick to condemn the problem, as you should be, but no one hears your sympathy for ALL of the innocent victims.” “A child brought here by an illegal immigrant is a victim, but so are the children of legal immigrants and citizens who pay for it in taxes and fewer services themselves. We cannot deny care to an illegal immigrant, but it is unfair for the rest of us to pick up the tab.

We cannot deny care to an illegal immigrant, but it is unfair for the rest of us to pick up the tab. The best way to show compassion for illegal immigration is to END illegal immigration.” Notice the use of the word “victim” and how it is tied to the children of illegal immigrants. It directly acknowledges the arguments put forward by the opponents of stricter immigration laws. But by accepting what we all know to be true, it earns the speaker credibility that can then be applied to the principle of fairness and eventually to ending illegal immigration altogether. Rule Four Consistency Matters Rules aren’t just for kids and books. To keep members of Congress focused, consistent, and repetitive, you have to tell them that there are specific rules to follow.

Otherwise, they won’t follow them. In the immigration debate, the public opinion research uncovered five specific rules: 1. Always differentiate LEGAL from illegal immigration; 2. Always refer to people crossing the border illegally as “illegal immigrants”—NOT as “illegals”; 3. Always focus on those who are hurt most by illegal immigration—American citizens and immigrants who came here legally and played by the rules; 4. Don’t argue whether illegal immigration is a crisis, a major problem, or a national challenge. Describe the problem, quantify it, but don’t measure it; and 5. If it sounds like amnesty, it will fail.


pages: 350 words: 109,521

Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America by Howard G. Buffett

airport security, clean water, collective bargaining, defense in depth, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, immigration reform, linked data, low skilled workers, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

., and Cohn, D. (2017, April 27). 5 Facts about Illegal Immigration in the U.S. Pew Research. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s. 3 Yee, V., Davis, K., and Patel, J. (2017, March 6). Here’s the Reality about Illegal Immigrants in the United States. New York Times. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/06/us/politics/undocumented-illegal-immigrants.html. 4 Gonzalez-Barrera, A., and Krogstad, J. M. (2017, March 2). What We Know about Illegal Immigration from Mexico. Pew Research. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/. 5 Krogstad, J.

, and Haberman, M. (2017, August 25). Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio, Who Became Face of Crackdown on Illegal Immigration. New York Times. Retrieved October 13, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/us/politics/joe-arpaio-trump-pardon-sheriff-arizona.html. 12 Krogstad, J. M., Passel, J. S., and Cohn, D. (2017, April 27). 5 Facts about Illegal Immigration in the U.S. Pew Research Center. Retrieved October 4, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s. 13 Mejia, B., Carcamo, C., and Knoll, C. (2017, February 9). L.A., Orange Counties Are Home to 1 Million Immigrants Who Are in the Country Illegally, Analysis Shows.

Wilmot, Yuma County Sheriff, Arizona, before the House Committee on Homeland Security Hearing “Ending the Crisis: America’s Borders and the Path to Security” on February 7, 2017. 9 Yuma County Chamber of Commerce. Agriculture. Retrieved October 5, 2017, from http://www.yumachamber.org/agriculture.html. 10 Partlow, J. (2014, February 10). Under Operation Streamline, Fast-Track Proceedings for Illegal Immigrants. Washington Post. Retrieved October 14, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/under-operation-streamline-fast-track-proceedings-for-illegal-immigrants/2014/02/10/87529d24-919d-11e3-97d3-f7da321f6f33_story.html. Chapter 10. Red Shoes in Honduras 1 Colibri Center. (n.d.). About Us. Retrieved October 16, 2017, from http://www.colibricenter.org/about-us. 2 Beatrice, J.


pages: 278 words: 93,540

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos

bank run, Berlin Wall, centre right, death of newspapers, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, income inequality, moral hazard, plutocrats, urban planning

When he was campaigning for the premiership in the spring of 2012, Antonis Samaras, the leader of New Democracy, vowed to abolish the law, which he called a “magnet for illegal immigrants.” A lot of people seemed to approve of this thinking. At a Samaras campaign rally I attended in Athens, his repeated calls for growth-oriented economic policies were not met with nearly as much enthusiasm as his vow to “remove from this place illegal immigrants, who have now become tyrants of the society.” Samaras, around this time, also called the influx of illegal immigrants an “unarmed invasion” and said his election would mean the end of a state that took care of foreigners and forsook its own citizens.

The invader illegal immigrants are within Athens. Brothers! Keep well inside your souls the spirit of freedom. The invaders entered without resistance with the help of ethnic nihilists of our terrorized city. Hellenes! Your hearts high!” The time had come for a “counterattack,” declared the third edition, calling for “EVERYONE IN THE STREETS to defeat the tyrants of our people.” Underneath another picture of an overcrowded boat of migrants, it said: “They aren’t illegal immigrants. They are the fifth column. Among them are found trained commando-saboteurs that impersonate poor illegal immigrants, and at the right moment, they will take an order from the globalizers for enemy actions against our country.”

It was therefore curious that, with such pressing issues at hand, the citizenship law and illegal immigration played such a prominent role in the election campaigning. This no doubt had to do with the rise of Golden Dawn, which gained a great deal of political traction almost solely due to its anti-immigration rhetoric. Other parties felt the need to compete. The tough talk was not limited to the right wing. In the run-up to the elections, the PASOK minister overseeing the police, Michalis Chrisochoidis, vowed to round up 30,000 illegal immigrants and place them in old military bases. He also announced plans to construct a barbwire fence along several miles of the Evros River Valley border, an idea European officials referred to as “pointless,” arguing that migrants would simply find another way in.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Nevertheless, with the huge continuing influx of illegal workers in the United States and other advanced economies, exploitation of migrant workers remains a pressing issue. Illegal immigration is a cash-intensive process, and the existence of cash makes it far harder for countries to control their borders. First, migrants typically pay smugglers in cash to bring them across the border: $1,000–$3,500 per individual to cross from Mexico to the United States, and $3,000–$10,000 to go from Central Asia to Western Europe, according to a 2011 Financial Action Task Force Report.49 Second and far more important, businesses that choose to rely on illegal immigrant workers can pay them in cash to reduce the risk of detection.

First, migrants typically pay smugglers in cash to bring them across the border: $1,000–$3,500 per individual to cross from Mexico to the United States, and $3,000–$10,000 to go from Central Asia to Western Europe, according to a 2011 Financial Action Task Force Report.49 Second and far more important, businesses that choose to rely on illegal immigrant workers can pay them in cash to reduce the risk of detection. It is this final demand from employers that ultimately fuels a large part of illegal immigration.50 The extent of illegal immigration varies tremendously across countries; for one thing, it is much more difficult for immigrants to blend into some countries than into others. In a melting pot like the United States, unauthorized immigrants (residents without legal status) constitute more than 11 million people, or 3.5% of the population.51 The range of estimates for Europe are lower, between 0.25% and 0.60% of the total population in France and Germany, 0.02% and 0.09% for Denmark, and 1.5% and 1.9% in Greece.52 Nevertheless, the issue is almost as contentious across Europe as it is in the United States.

Controlling borders is likely to become an ever-increasing problem in the future, and improved control has to be listed as a major potential benefit of phasing out cash or restricting its use. That said, any plan to fully phase out cash will need to address the problem of providing amnesty to the existing illegal immigrants. Allowing time to deal with illegal immigration is one of many reasons the proposal in chapter 7 leaves smaller notes in circulation for an indefinite period. To be clear, I strongly favor allowing increased legal migration into advanced economies. Any economist who takes income and wealth inequality seriously realizes that, despite the enormous progress of the past three decades, differences across countries simply swamp the within-country inequality that Thomas Piketty and others worry about.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

He had first been brought into Trump’s orbit years earlier by David Bossie, the veteran Republican operative, to provide informal counsel on a potential presidential bid. At the time, Bannon hadn’t thought much of Trump’s chances and regarded these visits as an adventure and a lark. He doubted that Trump would run. But this hadn’t prevented him from imparting his nationalist worldview—particularly his hostility to illegal immigration—and long before Trump declared his candidacy, the billionaire was reading Breitbart News articles flagged by Bannon and then printed out on paper (Trump’s preferred medium for reading) and delivered to him in a manila folder by his staff. It was no accident that Trump’s formal declaration of his candidacy, on June 16, 2015, took the form of a bitter paean to American nationalism that quickly veered into an attack on Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

Although neither of them could have had any inkling of where they would end up, Bannon would provide Trump with two great services in the years ahead—services without which Trump probably wouldn’t be president. First, he supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed “America first” nationalism. One aspect in particular that preoccupied Bannon—the menace of illegal immigration—was something Trump would use to galvanize his supporters from the moment he descended the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to declare his candidacy. By then, Bannon had left banking and Hollywood to take over the combative right-wing populist website Breitbart News after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012.

But where Breitbart’s “hatred” of his enemies often had a twinkle, Bannon took a more literal view of his role in the opposition. Over the next several years, as Barack Obama was elected and the Tea Party backlash arrived, Bannon continued making and producing documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and martial imagery: Border Wars: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration (2006), on clashes at the U.S.–Mexico border; Battle for America (2010), celebrating the rise of the Tea Party; and Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown. By then he had become a full-blown populist critic of Wall Street. “Here’s what changed,” said Bannon. “What Goldman represented in the 1980s was that they were principal providers of capital formation.


pages: 303 words: 83,564

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

But smugglers who offer such deals must build mechanisms for enforcing the obligation: in effect, illegal immigrants become temporary slaves to their smugglers. Among the limited options for profitable and enforceable slavery, the most obvious is prostitution: illegal immigrants who dreamed of becoming secretaries end up as sex slaves. Once smugglers have such a mechanism of enforcement, why should they stop merely at recovering the notional debt? Slaves are likely to remain slaves until they escape or perish. Once arrived, even if illegal immigrants escape dependence upon people-smugglers, they have few options. To survive they need an income that they cannot legally earn.

Legalizing Illegal Immigration All controls inevitably induce evasion. Currently, those who successfully evade migration controls become illegal residents, and this illegality gives rise to serious problems such as crime and the black economy. Debates on what to do about illegal immigrants have been as damagingly polarized as the larger migration debate. Social liberals want a one-off granting of full legal status; social conservatives oppose this on the grounds that rewarding evasion would encourage more of it. The result has been deadlock: nothing has been done and meanwhile illegal immigrants have accumulated: in America twelve million of them, in Britain nobody even knows.

To meet the reasonable concerns of social liberals, it recognizes that evasion is unavoidably a continuing process, so that future flows of illegal immigrants need to be addressed as well as the accumulated stocks. Any granting of rights that claims to be once-and-for-all is a piece of political deception. The package also recognizes that once border controls have been evaded, so that people have succeeded in entering the country illegally, all such migrants must be granted sufficient legal status to be able to work within the official economy. Otherwise, illegal immigrants are a source of further illegality. To meet the reasonable concerns of social conservatives, it involves a penalty for evasion relative to legal entry, does not increase overall migration, and tightens the process for dealing with migrants who choose to remain illegal.


pages: 399 words: 120,226

Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas by John S. Burnett

British Empire, cable laying ship, Dava Sobel, defense in depth, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, North Sea oil, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

They were a formidable team and became experts in tracing smuggling routes of illegal immigrants aboard phantom ships.43 If not used in cargo fraud, phantom ships are often used to transport human cargo into the U.S., Middle East, Europe, or Australia. “Once in the United States those [immigrants] on board ask for political asylum,” Ellen says. “The crews of the phantom ships, including the captain, are not sent to prison, they are simply sent back home to do it over and over again.” Indeed, smuggling people is as lucrative as smuggling drugs, and safer. There is not the worldwide concern for the transportation of illegal immigrants as there is for shipping narcotics, and in the unlikely event the organizers are caught, the penalties are much lighter.

She-tou, the Snakeheads, so called because of the creative smuggling routes that snake from country to country before entering the United States, have bases in Hong Kong, Fujian Province on the southern Chinese mainland, Europe, the U.S., and Canada. They have successfully smuggled several hundred thousand illegal immigrants into the United States and Canada over the past ten years, either by air or by sea aboard previously pirated ships. Many of the illegal immigrants pay the Snakehead organizations in Hong Kong and Fujian up to $35,000 for the passage. If a vessel founders or is arrested, it is of little concern to the syndicates; money for the passage already has been collected or pledged by the families who remain back in China.

Vibro cholerae, the bacterium responsible for cholera, was found in the ballast water of all ships tested after entering the Chesapeake Bay from foreign ports. Chapter 11 34 There are 2 million illegal immigrants in Malaysia of a population of 23 million. Most of these have been spirited across the Malacca Straits from Indonesia during the past ten years. There is no other practical way to get into Malaysia except through Thailand and that is rarely done; Thais are a different people with different religion, language, and appearance. In January 2002 two police boats, pursuing an Indonesian longboat carrying fifty-four illegal immigrants including several women, were bombarded with firebombs. When police attempted to board, they were attacked by the desperate immigrants armed with parangs and axes. 35 These boats exchange cut timber, copra, and palm oil from Indonesia for cartons of soft drinks, live chickens, and kerosene in Malaysia, an age-old tradition of commerce between the two nations. 36 Article 105 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) allows the seizure of a pirate ship or aircraft: On the high seas, or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any State, every State may seize a pirate ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates and arrest the persons and seize the property on board.


pages: 208 words: 51,277

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food by Steve Striffler

clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, longitudinal study, market design, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

I don’t know, maybe the Getting Here 107 INS will pick me up one day, but I don’t think about it. I have almost ten years [in poultry]. Really, there is nothing in Mexico for me. But still, I would like to return.26 Tighter border control, which began in the mid-s, has done little to stop illegal immigration. Between , when the Immigration Reform and Control Act was enacted, and , INS funding increased eightfold and Border Patrol funding sixfold. Yet, the number of illegal immigrants doubled during the same period and is growing by an estimated , a year. What tighter border control did do was make the passage more expensive and more dangerous for immigrants. As a result, once immigrants finally arrive in the United States they stay longer.

These figures are notoriously difficult to calculate, in part because fake documents are relatively easy to acquire. Percentages of course vary depending on region and even plant. But somewhere between one-quarter and one-third is considered likely. . Sherri Day,“Jury Clears Tyson Foods in Use of Illegal Immigrants,” New York Times, Mar. , . . Bill Poovey, “Tyson Indictments Leave Some Illegal Immigrants Stranded,” Associated Press (), www.imdiversity.com/villages/hispanic/ Article_ Detail.asp?Article_ID=. . As David Griffith points out, many companies encourage workers (often with financial incentives) to recruit their family and friends.

By transforming poultry-processing plants and other workplaces, immigrants have also changed much of America’s heartland in the South and Midwest during the past quarter century. The influence of industrial poultry extends into our communities, schools, and churches. Chapter  focuses on a legal case—well covered in the media—in which Tyson Foods was indicted by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for smuggling illegal immigrants into the country in order to work in its processing plants. This admittedly extreme example is perhaps most significant because it highlights the complexity, and hypocrisy, of the relationship between food and immigration, suggesting that chicken depends on often exploitative sets of social relations.


pages: 250 words: 83,367

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

Lori Arnold’s description of the reality of many illegal immigrants at the Excel plant—using fake identification, moving from town to town and packing plant to packing plant—sounded a lot like meth’s trajectory around the country as I tried to trace it back in 1999: there, but never quite visible. According to a Pew Hispanic Center report in 2005, there are twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States. Eight hundred and fifty thousand more arrive every year, the report found, along with the fact that 25 percent of all agricultural jobs in the United States are done by illegal immigrants. The link between the agricultural business, meatpacking, and illegal immigration would appear to be self-evident.

The link between the agricultural business, meatpacking, and illegal immigration would appear to be self-evident. As University of Missouri sociologist William Heffernan says, “Cracking down on illegal immigration would cripple the [food production] system.” What also appears to be true is that the DTOs employ a miniscule percentage of the illegal immigrants in this country. Ironically, that fractional number is harder still to police within an ever-expanding multitude of people that is overwhelmingly law-abiding. But there’s also a more subtle connection between meth, immigration, and the food industry. That relationship is driven by the conceit that drugs, like viruses, attack weak hosts.

And when that happens, we’re not only going to lose the six-dollar jobs; we’ll lose the twelve-dollar and the quarter-million-dollar jobs, too. That’s just reality.” When I suggested the often-repeated potential solution of fining companies that employ illegal immigrants while heavily taxing the products of those that move offshore, Souder ignored my suggestion. He instead recited from memory the statistics that had become the pivot points of 2005’s national debate on immigration: three hundred thousand illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border each year; at least one million undocumented people living in the United States (according to the Pew study, the number is twelve million); rampant identity theft; overburdened hospitals going bankrupt by treating people who can’t pay their medical bills.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

I can only imagine how hard it would be for an illegal immigrant who doesn’t speak the language. Immigration was a huge issue in the Brexit campaign, not least when it was announced just before the vote that net migration had hit a record level of 333,000 in 2015. Prime Minister David Cameron had pledged to get that number down to under 100,000. Feelings are very strong in the United States about immigration and refugees. Donald Trump promised to build a wall along the Mexican border, that Mexico would pay for the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants, and that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States.

63 65 52 63 79 87 80 14 According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted just before Election Day on October 25– November 8, about eight in ten Trump supporters who cast ballots or were planning to (79%) said illegal immigration was a “very big” problem in the United States.41 (Twenty percent of Clinton voters responded affirmatively to the same question.) Even more Trump supporters (86%) said the immigration situation in the United States had “gotten worse” since 2008. In the same Pew survey, voters were asked whether they thought particular issues were a “very big problem” in the United States. The chart below lists the percentages of those who responded affirmatively. Illegal immigration Terrorism Job opportunities for working-class Americans Crime Job opportunities for all Americans Conditions of roads, bridges, infrastructure Affordability of a college education Racism Gap between rich and poor Gun violence Climate change Clinton supporters 20 42 45 38 43 46 66 53 72 73 66 Trump supporters 79 74 63 55 58 36 38 21 33 31 14 A CBS News poll taken in March 2018 asked registered voters, “Do you favor or oppose building a wall along the U.S.

“Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” Washington Post, June 16, 2015. 5. Lewis and Peri 2014. 6. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Population Estimates,” November 2016. 7. Jens Manuel Kronstad, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’Vera Cohn, “5 Facts about Illegal Immigration in the US,” November 3, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/. 8. Jeffrey S. Passel, D’Vera Cohn, and John Gramlich, “Number of U.S.-Born Babies with Unauthorized Immigrant Parents Has Fallen since 2007,” Pew Research Center, FactTank, November 1, 2018. 9. “CBP Border Security Report: Fiscal Year 2017,” December 5, 2017, U.S.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

The issue of what to do about illegal immigrants poses a huge challenge for the five-member Gwinnett County Commission. This governmental body seems in a way to be an anachronism. All five members are conservative white Republicans; no Democrat or member of any minority group has been elected to countywide office in Gwinnett in the past twenty-five years. And all the current members are facing decisions that their careers and background have not really prepared them for. Some of these, of course, concern illegal immigration. Georgia has one of the toughest laws against illegal immigrants anywhere in the country, providing in certain cases for their deportation, but it has not been strictly enforced so far.

But if it sticks too close to the Chamber of Commerce line, it risks stoking up resentment against illegal immigrants that continues to exist among white middle-class residents. There are regular protests from activists such as Bob Griggs, publisher of the Gwinnett Gazette, who told his readers in 2009 that “illegal immigration costs cities, counties, and the state government an estimated $1.6 billion annually.” The commissioners can’t be sure at any moment how far they might be from a full-fledged populist revolt. In early 2011, the state of Georgia passed one of the nation’s strictest laws targeting illegal immigrants. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on politics in Gwinnett County.

The countywide incidence of crime is still lower than the national average, but in the past several years, the influx of illegal immigrants has created an underclass that has raised the crime rate and brought the previously unknown presence of loitering day laborers into several of the small cities. Whenever there is even a small amount of construction work to be had, day laborers cluster outside strip malls in Gwinnett just as they do in other parts of the country. In 2008, one Norcross resident wrote an angry letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution lamenting what he felt had happened to his town. “Illegal immigrants have already broken several laws to get to my neighborhood,” he said, “and I can attest that their penchant for lawbreaking did not stop at our borders.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 266. 2. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Clinton Now Against Licenses for Illegal Immigrants,” Caucus (blog), New York Times, November 14, 2007, https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/clinton-now-against-licenses-for-illegal-immigrants/. 3. Jack Crowe, “Every Dem on Debate Stage Endorses Publicly Funded Health Care for Illegal Immigrants,” National Review Online, June 28, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/every-dem-on-debate-stage-endorses-publicly-funded-health-care-for-illegal-immigrants/. 4. Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, June 27, 2019, 9:37 p.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1144419410729242625. 5.

The belligerent talk continued after Trump’s election. He threatened to incinerate North Korea: “Fire and fury like the world has never seen.”26 He growled nuclear menace at Iran too: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.”27 He threatened to close the border with Mexico. “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States through our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING . . . the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week.”28 He vowed to stop all foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.29 He warned he might reimpose a “full and complete embargo” on Cuba.30 The candidate whom New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd hailed as “Donald the Dove” back in 201631 in 2019 ordered the assassination of Iran’s terror commander, General Qassem Soleimani.

Trump accepted no responsibility, however. He instead accused news media who reported on the pro-Trump motive for Sayoc’s bombs of attempting to “score political points against me and the Republican Party.”16 The Pittsburgh synagogue killer fantasized that a global Jewish conspiracy headed by George Soros was masterminding illegal immigration to the United States and Europe. Even after the synagogue shooting, Trump still repeated on November 1, 2018, that “he wouldn’t be surprised” and “a lot of people are saying” that George Soros paid for the caravans.17 Yet Trump and his supporters reserved the right to be affronted and offended if anyone noted the similarity between Trump’s rhetoric and the Pittsburgh shooter’s.


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The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

Macron argues that such hardheaded pragmatism does not reflect capitulation to the nationalists but rather a political imperative to restore faith in the European Union by tacking to the demands of voters, even if doing so looks like an acceptance of populist themes. Merkel and Macron have demonstrated a new willingness to accelerate the deportation of illegal immigrants and those foreigners whose requests for political asylum have been rejected. In his 2018 New Year’s address to the French people, Macron promised that forced expulsions of illegal immigrants would be increased. Soon the number of deportations from France rose by 10 percent, to more than fifteen thousand. “We can’t take in everybody,” Macron declared. “There must be rules. It’s indispensable that we check the identities of everyone.

PART TWO EUROPE CHAPTER 4 THE POPULIST MENACE As the operatic aria “Nessun dorma” (None shall sleep) from Puccini’s Turandot wafted over the heads of ten thousand people gathered in Milan’s cathedral square, Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini climbed to the stage on a soggy Saturday in May along with ten other right-wing nationalist leaders from every corner of Europe. Riding high in opinion polls as Italy’s powerful interior minister and its most influential politician, Salvini convened the gathering just days ahead of European Parliament elections to celebrate a populist alliance that he said would “protect European civilization” from being overrun by illegal immigrants and radical Islamists. One by one, xenophobic politicians railed against Emmanuel Macron for defending open borders and the idea of a European superstate. Under Salvini’s orchestration, they endorsed his pan-European coalition behind the slogan “Towards a Common Sense Europe: Peoples Rise Up.”

Orbán, who calls Salvini “my hero and my comrade in destiny,” claims that all of Europe’s far-right parties are aligned in their singular disdain for Macron and his vision of a liberal, democratic, and more unified Europe. “There are two camps in Europe,” Orbán said after seeing Salvini in Milan for one of their regular strategy sessions. “One is headed by Macron. He is at the head of the political forces supporting immigration. On the other hand, we all want to stop illegal immigration.”3 There had been earlier suggestions that Salvini and his allies would seek to drop out of Europe’s single currency or leave the European Union altogether once they gained power, but they have abandoned these positions in order to broaden the far right’s appeal. The chaos surrounding Britain’s efforts to negotiate its departure from the EU has inoculated much of the continent against following London out of the Union.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Opponents of mass immigration were inclined to see IRCA as an outright fraud perpetrated on the public. The truth was more complicated. It had to do with a change in the country’s constitutional culture. The changing spirit of civil rights To do away with illegal immigration, Americans would have had to send a strong message, not just in their statutes but in their enforcement practices and their day-to-day behavior, to the effect that illegal immigration, and therefore illegal immigrants, were not welcome. Every poll from the time tells us that Americans intended to convey just such a message. In June 1986, those who wanted less immigration outnumbered those who wanted more of it by 7 to 1 (49 to 7 percent).

Collectively, American Baby Boomers cashed out of the economy their forebears had built, shifting the costs of running it not just to different generations but to different parts of the world, through outsourcing and immigration. These, too, are a form of borrowing. Low-wage immigrants subsidize the rich countries they migrate to, and this is especially true of illegal immigrants. They are low-wage precisely because they are outside the legal system. Ultimately, natives pay some kind of “bill” for such labor. Either they invite the laborers into their society, and the costs to natives take the form of overburdened institutions, rapid cultural change, and diluted political power; or they exclude the laborers, and the costs take the form of exploitation, government repression, and bad conscience.

From that perspective, the migration problem that confronted Reagan early in his presidency was still relatively minor. An unintended consequence of the 1965 law was to favor disorderly over orderly immigration. Low-volume European migration had not required a vast rural and border enforcement apparatus, but by the mid-1970s a new kind of immigration was under way. Roughly 3 million illegal immigrants, most of them Latin American agricultural workers in the Southwest, were overburdening public services and making natives uncomfortable. Even after the Reagan “revolution,” the political parties differed little on immigration. That is how Ted Kennedy, a driving force behind the Hart-Celler law, ended up playing a powerful role in Reagan’s attempts to fix it.


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Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

The Conversation, January 18, 2018. theconversation.com/ahead-of-government-shutdown-congress-sets-its-sights-on-not-so-comprehensive-immigration-reform-89998. 4. Krogstad, Jens Manuel, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’Vera Cohn. “5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.” Pew Research Center, April 27, 2017. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/. 5. Cox and Posner. 6. Skerry, Peter. “Splitting the Differences on Illegal Immigration.” National Affairs 35 (Spring 2018). www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/splitting-the-difference-on-illegal-immigration. 7. Martin, David A. “Resolute Enforcement Is Not Just for Restrictionists: Building a Stable and Efficient Immigration Enforcement System.”

Reconciling these two camps might seem impossible, not least because amnesty opponents are deeply skeptical that a new large-scale amnesty would be accompanied by resolute enforcement to ensure that there aren’t calls for yet another amnesty in the years to come.4 And I’m sympathetic to this point of view, as it really is true that the last large-scale amnesty—the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which ultimately granted legal status to three million unauthorized immigrants—was followed by further surges in unauthorized immigration. Nevertheless, I believe there is a way forward. First, we have to acknowledge that the growth of America’s unauthorized immigrant population did not happen by accident. Several years ago, the legal scholars Eric Posner and Adam Cox observed that the United States had a de facto “illegal immigration system,” stemming from “the deliberate underenforcement of immigration law plus periodic amnesties.”5 The idea, in essence, is that by mostly turning a blind eye to unauthorized entries and to visa overstays, and allowing unauthorized immigrants to work without much in the way of interference, the United States put out the welcome mat, and it is hardly surprising that millions of people took their chances, especially since the only unauthorized immigrants who were targeted for deportation seemed to be those who had committed serious non-immigration crimes.

Several years ago, the legal scholars Eric Posner and Adam Cox observed that the United States had a de facto “illegal immigration system,” stemming from “the deliberate underenforcement of immigration law plus periodic amnesties.”5 The idea, in essence, is that by mostly turning a blind eye to unauthorized entries and to visa overstays, and allowing unauthorized immigrants to work without much in the way of interference, the United States put out the welcome mat, and it is hardly surprising that millions of people took their chances, especially since the only unauthorized immigrants who were targeted for deportation seemed to be those who had committed serious non-immigration crimes. As Boston College political scientist Peter Skerry, writing in National Affairs in 2013, put it, “just as the circumstances faced by illegal immigrants in our country are simultaneously threatening and encouraging, so the nation’s attitude toward illegals has long been at once hostile and welcoming.”6 It’s no wonder why amnesty advocates find the thought of mass deportation so horrifying, and why they’ve been so vigorously opposed to the Trump administration’s efforts to deport long-resident unauthorized immigrants who’ve led entirely peaceful lives: it strikes them as a profoundly unfair change in the rules of the game.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Within six years of funneling migration toward the more dangerous Sonoran Desert, Arizona uplands, and southern Texas brush, border deaths from hypothermia, dehydration, drowning, and heat stroke increased by 509 percent.67 As the Coalición de Derechos Humanos describes it, “Border crossers now enter the US through remote rural areas, fanning out across the backcountry region north of the border and carving a complex web of trail systems through mountain passes, rolling hills, desolate plains, and dense brushlands.”68 Since 1996, the total number of border deaths—what could more accurately be labeled as premeditated border killings—is estimated at eight thousand, with thousands more disappeared.69 The Clinton years normalized the most severe consequences of border militarization and mass detention, evident in border operations targeting “illegal” immigrants, alongside laws expanding the category of “criminal alien.” Rhetoric of “productive” and “legal” immigrants with the simultaneous demonization of “criminal” and “illegal” immigrants became the cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s immigration platform for the next two decades. Building on Reagan’s legislation, Clinton passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of the same year. These acts expanded the category of aggravated felony convictions and widened the net for detention and deportation of legal permanent residents with minor convictions stemming from stop-and-frisk policing and the war on drugs.

Then the Maltese government clandestinely and illegally paid private vessel operators to forcibly return the boat to Libya.17 Similarly, Italy blocked ships carrying refugees rescued in the Mediterranean from entering its ports, Bangladesh and Malaysia refused to dock trawlers with five hundred Rohingya refugees stranded at sea for months, and Hungary indefinitely suspended admission of all migrants and refugees along its border with Serbia by alleging a connection between the virus and “illegal immigration.”18 The global health crisis also provides a pretext for further internalization of the border, with policing of the pandemic escalating the carceral containment and immobilization of migrants and refugees within states. Governments continue to incarcerate migrants and refugees in horribly overcrowded and filthy detention centers, and refugee camps and housing centers are locked down with orders imposing severe restrictions on movement.

This happened shortly after Crees and Chippewas from Canada and Yaquis from Mexico crossed into the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and launched political battles for federal tribal recognition to challenge the US state’s subjugation of them as “foreign Indians” and deportable “illegal immigrants.”26 The normalization of settler colonialism evades settler occupation as a method of imperialism and, instead, tries to produce Indigenous people as domesticated citizens of the US. Theories of domestication and claims to Indigenous lands, explains Dunbar-Ortiz, “obliterate the present and presence of Indigenous nations struggling for their liberation from states of colonialism.”27 The characterization of Indigenous people as a domesticated US “racial and ethnic minority group” not only omits the inherently anti-imperialist nature of Indigenous struggles, but also homogenizes a multiplicity of Indigenous nations into a pan-Indigenous identity and undermines Indigenous understandings of treaties as international diplomacy.


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A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, business cycle, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the market place, éminence grise

Given equal opportunity to go to Palestine or to the States, 50 per cent would join the unfortunate Galut Jews in America.† Illegal immigration had never ceased altogether and Hagana began to organise it after the end of the war on a much bigger scale than before. Refugee ships appeared regularly off the shores of Palestine. A few succeeded in breaking the blockade, but most were apprehended and their passengers detained - first in Palestine, and from summer 1946 on in camps in Cyprus. The story of illegal immigration culminated in the case of the President Garfield, an old 4,000-ton Chesepeake Bay steamer which, acquired by Hagana and renamed Exodus 1947, carried some 4,200 illegal immigrants. To discourage any further exploits London decided to turn the ship back to Port de Bove near Marseilles.

But after 1937, with tens of thousands of prospective immigrants impatiently waiting for their entry permits, with the clouds of war gathering on the European horizon, and with no change in sight in the attitude of the mandatory government, illegal immigration was resumed on a massive scale. Small, ancient, unseaworthy ships, hardly bigger than motor launches and designed to carry a few dozen passengers only, arrived with many hundreds on board, in conditions the like of which had not been seen anywhere in modern times. Some of them successfully ran the blockade, others were detected and apprehended. About 11,000 illegal immigrants came in 1939, and even after the outbreak of war some ships continued to arrive; 3,900 men, women and children in 1940, and 2,135 in 1941.

There was support for a campaign of civil disobedience in the Indian style, including the systematic violation of those laws designed to prevent the further development of the national home. Illegal immigration was to be intensified, new settlements founded, and stronger emphasis placed on military training for young people. For the first time Hagana carried out several acts of sabotage directed against the mandatory authorities, including the destruction of a patrol boat used to combat illegal immigration. But these activities were uncoordinated and on a small scale and were discontinued even before the outbreak of war. There was no unanimity as to the strategy to be adopted.


pages: 393 words: 102,801

Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System by Colin Yeo;

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, G4S, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, lump of labour, open immigration, post-war consensus, self-driving car, Shamima Begum, Skype, Socratic dialogue

A number of homeless charities, alleged to include St Mungo’s, Change, Grow, Live and Thames Reach, were drawn into running joint ‘sweep’ operations with immigration and local government officials and passing location information on rough sleepers to the Home Office.25 European nationals were specifically targeted in one operation, which was later ruled to be unlawful by the High Court,26 and hundreds of thousands of pounds in funding was provided to various religious and community groups to promote ‘self-deportation’ by destitute migrants.27 The general public was also encouraged to get involved. ‘I want everyone in the country to help with this,’ David Cameron said in a major speech on immigration in October 2011, ‘including by reporting suspected illegal immigrants to our Border Agency through the Crimestoppers phone line or the Border Agency website. Together I do believe we can reclaim our borders and send illegal immigrants home.’28 And now there is indeed an Immigration Enforcement Hotline, as well as an online reporting form that concerned citizens can use if they want to shop a neighbour, colleague, tenant or former lover. Citizen denunciations were once a feature of Soviet societies, but there are now around 50,000 such reports made every year by members of the public here in the UK.

This sorry episode concerned those who had arrived in the United Kingdom from Commonwealth countries in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s but who, in recent years, were denied access to jobs, accommodation and services because of their lack of documents. The label ‘irregular migrants’ is also sometimes used, particularly in academic literature, but the meaning of the word ‘irregular’ is not sufficiently clear to my mind. Other labels include ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘illegals’, but there are two major problems with that terminology. Firstly, no person is inherently illegal; actions might be so but people themselves are not. Secondly, there are many migrants who do not currently possess lawful status but who are eligible for it or who will become so in due course.

The system encourages race discrimination; the financial costs of the red tape needed to set it up have been huge; the wrong people have been catastrophically affected; there has been no discernible decrease in unlawful immigration; and even where the ‘right’ people have been punished, the public have baulked at the dire consequences. COLLATERAL DAMAGE The intended victims of the hostile environment are publicly referred to as ‘illegal immigrants’. The reality is that all citizens and UK residents have been affected, albeit some more than others. The impact has been hardest felt by ethnic minorities, who have suffered additional racial discrimination as a result. If you are white, male, middle-aged and middle-class then you are less likely to be getting married, opening a bank account for the first time, seeking NHS treatment, moving between jobs or buying your first home.


pages: 632 words: 171,827

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

. © 2014 The Bank of Israel Eliezer Ben-Yehuda surrounded by books. Central Zionist Archives Hayim Nachman Bialik at his desk. Central Zionist Archives ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION Illegal immigration—in defiance of British restrictions—was critical in the early years, both to save Jews fleeing Europe as well as to amass a population sufficient for creating a viable state. British soldiers carefully watch a ship approaching with illegal immigrants. Central Zionist Archives Pulling an immigrant boat into shore. Central Zionist Archives Immigrants arrive on boat. Central Zionist Archives This Zionist poster shows a “new” muscular Jew helping European Jewish survivors reach shore.

Subsequently, they attacked strategic elements of the British infrastructure, including electric facilities and radio and phone communication lines. They opposed the Haganah’s restraint, and to make their case to the people, they also established an underground newspaper and radio system. Even the leadership of the Yishuv sensed that it needed to alter its strategy. It began to endorse illegal immigration and exerted more effort in helping Jews to enter Palestine. The Yishuv was now losing any real hope that the British would fulfill the promise they had made in the Balfour Declaration. Twenty-two years earlier, Lord Balfour had called for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, but without immigration, no Jewish national home was going to be possible.

The Mandate refused to let them enter Palestine and ordered them onto another ship, the Patria, which would take them to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. Members of the Jewish military resistance placed explosives on the Patria in order to delay its departure. But the plan backfired; as the first group of illegal immigrants was being escorted to the Patria the following morning, the explosives did significantly more damage than had been intended; the ship blew up and sank. More than 250 of the detainees drowned. The British sent the remaining immigrants who had arrived on the Atlantic to an internment camp in Atlit, not far from Haifa.


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Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

William Robinson, “Globalization and the Struggle for Immigrant Rights in the United States,” ZNet, March 2007, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/1864 (accessed July 6, 2012). 17. Quoted in Carolina Morena, “Border Crossing Deaths More Common as Illegal Immigration Declines,” Huffington Post, August 17, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/border-crossing-deaths-illegal-immigration_n_1783912.html (accessed October 12, 2012). 18. American Civil Liberties Union, “U.S.-Mexico Border Crossing Deaths Are a Humanitarian Crisis,” September 30, 2009, http://www.aclu.org/immigrants-rights/us-mexico-border-crossing-deaths-are-humanitarian-crisis-according-report-aclu-and (accessed July 6, 2012). 19.

If the ‘overdeveloped’ world refuses to trade with the underdeveloped world on fair terms, to forgive debt, to extend loans, to lift trade barriers against food and basic manufactured goods, then there can only be an increase in the flow of people.”(21) Border imperialism also illuminates the management of these migrations. Political geographer Reece Jones documents how, under the guise of fighting “illegal immigration” and “terrorism,” three countries alone—United States, India, and Israel—have built over 3,500 miles of walls on their borders.(22) Border controls are used to deter those for who migration is the only option to the plundering of their communities and economies due to the free license granted to capital and militaries.

So I would say that’s positive.”(54) Corporations that run private prisons and detention centers made over five billion dollars in combined annual profits in the United States over the past decade. According to Detention Watch Network, five prison corporations that hold contracts with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have poured twenty million dollars into lobbying efforts.(55) Arizona’s controversial SB 1070, which legalizes racial profiling based on “suspicion of being an illegal immigrant,” was drafted during a meeting between state legislators and the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison corporation in the United States.(56) This is part of what Naomi Klein calls “a privatized security state, both at home and abroad,” as she outlines how the War on Terror has maximized profitability for security markets.(57) In this lucrative market of migrant detention and border securitization, the value of Israeli exports in security technologies has almost quadrupled.(58) A notable example is the contract for the border fence between the United States and Mexico going to a consortium of companies including Elbit.


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Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

.: Pew Research Center, 8 December 2016). http://www.people-press.org/2016/12/08/3-political-values-government-regulation-environment-immigration-race-views-of-islam/#most-say-immigrants-strengthen-the-country 326 Jens Manuel Krogstad, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’Vera Cohn, “Five Facts About Illegal Immigration in the U.S.” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Institute, 27 April 2017). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/ 327 Nan Marie Astone, Steven Martin, and H. Elizabeth Peters, “Millennial Childbearing and the Recession” (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, April 2015). http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/2000203-Millennial-Childbearing-and-the-Recession.pdf 328 Ibid. 329 Jeffrey S.

.: Pew Research Center, 27 September 2017). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/29/hispanic-dropout-rate-hits-new-low-college-enrollment-at-new-high/ 342 Anna Gonzalez-Barrera and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “What We Know About Illegal Immigration from Mexico” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 20 November 2015). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/ 343 D’Vera Cohn, “Future Immigration Will Change the Face of America by 2065,” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 6 October 2015). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/05/future-immigration-will-change-the-face-of-america-by-2065 344 Teresa Welsh, “Minority Babies Outnumber Whites Among U.S.

Unless. The suspicious, nativist, America First groundswell of recent years threatens to choke off the immigration tap that made America great by walling up the border between the United States and everywhere else. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government not only cracked down on illegal immigrants, it reduced legal admissions for skilled workers, a suicidal policy for the U.S. economy. If this change is permanent, if Americans out of senseless fear reject their immigrant tradition, turning their backs on the world, then the United States too will decline, in numbers and power and influence and wealth.


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Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

It also minimizes the problems faced by people who increasingly must rely on globalized call centers for technology support and to purchase products and services. In media framing of stories about job loss in the United States, illegal immigration is a key culprit, along with downsizing and outsourcing. Articles and news reports about the “Americano Dream” explain how indigenous workers are pitted against illegal immigrants, sometimes referred to more politely as undocumented workers, who are a source of cheap labor in this country. Frequently, media sources employ this terminology when a major corporation is accused of labor violations, as when Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer (with 1.4 million U.S. workers in 2009), was alleged to be using undocumented workers as cleaning personnel in its megastores.

Although earlier media coverage of the chain had praised Walmart’s economic success and applauded the ingenuity of founder Sam Walton and other members of his family, subsequent news reports focused on the corporation’s questionable labor practices, including the use of undocumented workers.116 According to Walmart officials, the company hired subcontractors to do the janitorial work without knowing that they hired illegal immigrants: After federal agents raided 60 Wal-Mart stores in October and found more than 200 illegal immigrants in the cleaning crews, the world’s largest retailer was 9781442202238.print.indb 155 2/10/11 10:46 AM 156 Chapter 5 quick to defend itself from this enormous embarrassment. Wal-Mart’s officers said they had no idea those workers were illegal, insisting they knew next to nothing about the workers from Mexico, Mongolia, Russia and elsewhere because they were employed by contractors.

Nor did Wal-Mart know, its spokesmen said, that the contractors were cutting corners by not paying overtime or Social Security taxes or by flouting other labor laws, as the investigators claimed.117 As the media later reported in articles such as “Wal-Mart Settles Illegal Immigration Case for $11M,” the retailer paid up to end the federal probe and escape criminal charges for using illegal immigrants as custodial workers. Twelve businesses that provided contract janitor services to Walmart also agreed to pay $4 million in fines and pled guilty to criminal immigration charges to resolve the matter.118 Walmart officials emphasized that the chain is a good corporate citizen and does not hire undocumented workers.


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

Militant Illegals If there is one group of people in America that has generally kept a low profile, it is the 12 million illegal immigrants in this country—and generally with good reason. As Edward R. Murrow said in his famous 1960 documentary, Harvest of Shame, “migrants . . . have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables, [but] they do not have the strength to influence legislation.” They have been quiet and in the shadows. As a result, they have been the truly forgotten in America. Now fast-forward to the spring of 2006. A bill introduced by Republican James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, and passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, pushed many illegal immigrants and their families too far.

House of Representatives, pushed many illegal immigrants and their families too far. The bill would have made it a felony to be in this country illegally, or to give assistance—like food or medical care—to anyone who was. Deeply wounded, American’s illegal immigrants took to the streets. In broad daylight. In matching white T-shirts, in 140 cities, and in at least thirty-nine states. From Phoenix to Philadelphia, from Boise to Birmingham, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants marched in organized parades, in front of TV cameras, to protest the House-passed bill and to call instead for liberalized immigration reform that would not narrow but widen the path to citizenship.

The power of individual choice is increasingly influencing politics, religion, entertainment, and even war. In today’s mass societies, it takes only 1 percent of people making a dedicated choice—contrary to the mainstream’s choice—to create a movement that can change the world. Just look at what has happened in the U.S. to illegal immigrants. A few years ago, they were the forgotten Americans, hiding from daylight and the authorities. Today they are holding political rallies, and given where they and their legal, voting relatives live, they may turn out to be the new Soccer Moms. Militant immigrants fed up with a broken immigration system just may be the most important voters in the next presidential election, distributed in the key Southwest states that are becoming the new battleground areas.


pages: 249 words: 79,740

The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going by George Friedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, It's morning again in America, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

The counterargument—that migrants take jobs from others, or that their claims on social services outweigh whatever economic advantages they provide—is not entirely frivolous, but it has some weaknesses. First, 10 percent unemployment in the United States translates into about 15 million people out of work. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. If the replacement theory were correct, then getting rid of illegal immigrants would create 12 million job openings, leaving only 3 million unemployed and an unemployment rate of only about 2 percent. That such a replacement scenario seems intuitively illogical argues to the point that most of the low-cost, unskilled labor that is imported does not compete with the existing workforce.

Therefore, as with the Mexican government and drugs, the best U.S. strategy is to appear to be doing everything possible to stop the movement of immigrants while making certain that these efforts fail. This has been the American strategy on illegal immigrants for many years, creating a tension between short- and mid-term economic interests and long-term political interests. The long-term problem is the shift in demographics—and in potential loyalties—in the borderland. The president must choose between these options, and his only rational course is to allow the future to tend to itself. Given the forces interested in maintaining the status quo, any president who took the steps needed to stop illegal immigration would rapidly lose power. Therefore the best strategy for the president is to continue the current one: hypocrisy.

Within the borderland, they have the option of retaining their language and their national identity, distinct from whatever legal identity they adopt. This state of affairs can create serious tension between the legal border and the cultural border. This is the root of the profound anxiety within the United States today about Mexican illegal immigration. Critics say that American concern is really an aversion to all Mexican immigration, and they are not altogether wrong, but this analysis does not fully appreciate the roots of the fear. Non-Mexicans within the borderland and even beyond are afraid of being overwhelmed by the migrants and finding themselves living culturally in Mexico.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

This reconfiguration in the nature of borders is being fuelled by what Allen Feldman calls ‘securocratic wars’11 – open-ended and de-territorialized wars (on drugs, crime, terror, illegal immigration, biological threats) organized around vague, all-encompassing notions of public safety rather than around territorial conquest. Their purpose is to maintain state sovereignty, not through external war combined with internal policing, but through raising the spectre of mobilities and flows deemed to contaminate societies and threaten the social order, both internally and externally. Unknown and unknowable, these dangers –terrorism, demographic infiltration, ‘illegal’ immigration, disease (SARS, bird flu, tuberculosis) – are understood to lurk within the interstices of urban and social life, blending invisibly with it.12 EVENTS AND NORMALITY The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward to foreignness, is no longer a barrier structure but a shifting net, a flexible spatial pathogenesis that shifts round the globe and can move from the exteriority of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic state.13 At their root, open-ended, securocratic wars are an attempt to police both subnational and supranational dichotomies of safe and risky places, both within and beyond the territorial limits of nation-states.14 An important component is the distinction between event and background.

Feldman points out, for example, that many ‘gated edifices … depend on small armies of undocumented migrant labor’.209 When overzealous crackdowns on ‘illegal immigrants’ occur, as happened around Long Island’s gated communities in 2008, the super-rich residents of such enclaves soon find their houses uncleaned, their parks untended, their children lacking day care and, ironically, their borders unpoliced. Paradoxically, then, the collapse of such services reveals how ‘illegal immigration’ works across complex, transnational labour geographies and militarizing borders – invisibly sustaining economies, cities and social norms.

Crucially, as the Raytheon example again demonstrates, the same constellations of security companies are often involved in selling, establishing and overseeing the techniques and practices of the new military urbanism in both war-zone and homeland cities. Often, as with the EU’s new Europe-wide security policies, states or supranational blocks are not necessarily bringing in high-tech and militarized means of tracking illegal immigrants because they are the best means to address their security concerns. Rather, many such policies are intended to help build local industrial champions by developing their own defence, security or technology companies so they can compete in booming global markets for security technology. In this lucrative export market, the Israeli experience of locking down cities and turning the Occupied Territories into permanent, urban prison camps is proving especially influential.


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

Immigrants,” Pew Research Center, May 3, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/03/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants; González Barrera, “More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.” Mexicans, once almost two-thirds: Jens Manuel Krogstad, Jeffrey S. Passel, and D’vera Cohn, “5 Facts About Illegal Immigration in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 27, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s. Many of those who crossed without papers, including Efrain Jimenez and Demetrio Juárez in Hazleton, later legalized their status through work visas sponsored by American employers or, in some cases, marriage to an American citizen or legal resident.

“Hazleton is like a miniature Brooklyn, a diverse urban landscape in a semirural, mountainous region,” says Charles McElwee of the Greater Hazleton Historical Society. “In the city, the past remains visible in the present.” Over a decade ago, in 2006, Hazleton found itself at the center of the national debate about illegal immigration and America’s relationship with Mexico. Faced with a new influx of immigrants, many from Mexico, it became the first city to pass local ordinances that banned hiring or renting to unauthorized immigrants. The city became ground zero for protesters against immigration, and national news cameras camped out in the city for weeks to follow the debate.

Sometimes it seems that Mexico has become more an emblem of Americans’ hopes and fears for our own future than a real country that we deal with on its own terms. Today, with Donald Trump as president, political discussions of Mexico have become focused, above all, on his promise to build “a big, beautiful wall” to keep Mexicans from jumping across the border into the United States. It’s sold as a way of stopping illegal immigration and the flow of drugs into American communities, but it’s also a powerful symbol of how he wants to deal with the larger forces shaping American society. For Trump and some of his most ardent supporters, the wall is less about effective policy than about making a statement. Yet the contrast between Trump’s symbolic promise to build a border wall and what’s actually going on between Mexico and the United States is dramatic.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Windrush generation’s immigration status should never have been in question, and the cause of their predicament is recent: the 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’ that would make it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy pushed the mentality of border control into everyday social and economic life. The 2016 Immigration Act extended it further, introducing tougher penalties for employers and landlords who fail to play their part in maintaining the ‘hostile environment’, and adding to the list of privileges that can be taken away from those who cannot prove their right to live and work in the UK.

One of the dangers of the ‘hostile environment’ policy is that it deliberately collapses the distinction between judicial due process and bureaucratic administration. It’s almost as if, on discovering that law alone was too blunt an instrument for deterring and excluding immigrants, May decided to weaponise paperwork instead. The ‘hostile environment’ strategy was never presented just as an effective way of identifying and deporting illegal immigrants: more important, it was intended as a way of destroying their ability to build normal lives. The hope, it seemed, was that people might decide that living in Britain wasn’t worth the hassle. The policy has echoes of the ‘benefit sanctions’ regime the Coalition Government introduced in 2012 to penalise ‘jobseekers’ who failed to meet specific conditions such as attending daily appointments at job centres.

Nudgers celebrate the sunnier success stories, such as getting more people to recycle or to quit smoking, but it’s easy to see how the same mentality might be applied in a more menacing way. Policies such as the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ work by cultivating anxiety among those they target, in tandem with campaigns such as the quickly aborted ‘Go Home’ vans introduced on Britain’s streets in August 2013 in an effort to persuade illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. One problem with governing via mood is that there is no precise way of controlling who you affect and how. It’s no good saying that the innocent have nothing to fear: fear doesn’t work like that. In any case, the argument for creating a ‘hostile environment’ rests on the assumption that legal and illegal residents are prima facie indistinguishable, and can only be separated through constant hounding.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

As a policy reporter, I’m much more a generalist than a specialist. And I like doing stories about solutions. Like many people, when I look at something long enough I start to see patterns in it. The solution to America’s new urban housing crisis is to build more houses so more people can move to in-demand cities. The solution to the illegal immigration crisis is to let more people come legally, not tie ourselves into knots trying to stop the flow. Both America’s vast rural hinterland and many of its aging northeastern and midwestern cities need an influx of people to prevent their current priceless assets from wasting away. America’s families need help from a more robust welfare state in order to be able to have and raise children with secure middle-class lifestyles.

The slowdown in actual birth rates has been even more dramatic because the declining number of babies was partially offset for much of this period by a rising number of immigrants. But a combination of the Great Recession and the roughly contemporaneous hardening of the US-Mexico border led to a reduction in illegal immigration from Mexico. Then under Trump, the United States began moving to curtail the number of people who move here legally while somewhat increasing the pace with which those present illegally are removed. Trump, of course, wants to enact further sharp reductions in legal immigration, and his view of this has become increasingly mainstream in Republican Party circles.

The result is that the country is currently on course to accept a continued decline in population growth rates. The basic economic pressures that make it increasingly difficult for people to form families aren’t going to be ameliorated by magic—on the contrary, they are overwhelmingly likely to accelerate—and the huge wave of illegal immigration from Mexico that powered population growth until ending more than a decade ago isn’t going to come back. These are, however, policy choices, not inevitable features of the landscape. What we need to do is make different choices. A country that did more to support families and welcome immigrants would be a richer, stronger country.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The Enlightenment was a promising idea, but doomed: kaput, finis, hasta la vista. Seeking relief from such gloom, I bought tickets to the theater. I saw one of the most-performed plays in American drama: twelve men argued about illegal immigrants ruining the nation as crime turned inner cities hellish. I walked across Broadway to another playhouse to watch the work of a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The subject was how illegal immigrants are tearing the United States apart. Perhaps the movies would divert me. I attended a top-grossing film in which a Hollywood star declared, “This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”

The first play was Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, initially performed in 1954 as a drama, then a famed 1957 movie starring Henry Fonda. Twelve jurors known only by their numbers debate the effect of illegal immigration on the United States and whether what’s now called stop-and-frisk policing is public safety or racism. The second play was Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, which premiered in 1955, just before Miller wed Marilyn Monroe. The illegal immigrants believed by the play’s protagonist to be ruining America are not from Syria or Yemen, rather, from Italy. The movie was Easy Rider, premiering the same month as the Apollo 11 moon landing and starring Jack Nicholson.

Detailed support for all the above points will be provided in coming chapters. That the US, European, and global situations are better than commonly perceived should not lead to complacency. On the contrary, awareness of progress should inspire greater reform. The challenges of the present day are daunting: inequality, racial tension, climate change, illegal immigration, refugees forced to flee war zones or failed states, never-ending conflagration in the Middle East, tyrants and warlords in parts of Africa, low-achieving public schools, a shallow and corporate-driven culture that makes the task of public schools Sisyphean, public discourse contaminated by rage—and these are just for starters.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

One national poll produced the following results, showing the percentages in favour of each proposition: ● increasing fines for employers of illegal immigrants 80% ● criminalising employment of illegal immigrants 75% ● requiring police to report illegals to federal government 70% ● National Guard patrols of the Mexican border 68% ● building more border fences 60% ● allowing police to demand proof of migrant status 50% ● excluding illegal immigrant children from school 42% ● requiring churches to report illegal immigrants 37% In South Africa, an even more ugly development typifies what is happening in many parts of the world.

It promptly instituted a crackdown on the Chinese, launching night-time raids on their factories and ‘sweatshops’, rounding up workers and demonising them, just as the League’s political ally, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, spoke of his determination to defeat ‘the army of evil’, as he described illegal immigrants. A shaken Chinese ambassador hurried from Rome and said that what was going on reminded him of the Nazis in the 1930s. Bizarrely, the Chinese government seemed reluctant to take the migrants back. THE PRECARIAT 5 The problems were not just caused by intolerant locals. The nature of the enclave contributed.

But demonisation is pervasive. The growth of the migrant precariat in the United States was matched by official commando-style raids on factories suspected of employing ‘illegals’. Although President Obama ordered an end to such raids, they could easily return. The Arizona law of 2010, which made illegal immigration a state misdemeanour as well as a federal civil violation, intensified the tension between migrants and ‘native citizens’ fearful of joining the precariat. It requires local police, after making ‘lawful contact’, to check the immigration status of those who cause ‘reasonable suspicion’ and to arrest them if they lack documents, opening the door to random stopping of Hispanic-looking drivers on minor pretexts.


pages: 427 words: 114,531

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Evidence of Lloyd George’s enduring support for Zionism comes from the House of Commons in 1930 – many years after he lost office – in the wake of severe disturbances in Palestine the previous year. The Passfield White Paper of 1930 drew attention not only to general Arab concerns about levels of authorised Jewish immigration into Palestine, but also to their specific concern that illegal immigration was continuing, unchecked. Lloyd George scoffed. ‘This White Paper is a one-sided document. It is biased. Its whole drift is hostile to the mandate. It breathes distrust and even antagonism of the Jewish activities… You have only got to look at one or two things with which they are dealing.

In the event, however, there was little to be concerned about here. At one level this policy simply made sense. More importantly, no figures were cited; the economy was expected to grow; and there was to be no restriction on land purchases. ‘Absorptive capacity’ proved impossible to calculate; the policy proved unenforceable; and illegal immigration accompanied legal, largely unimpeded. Second, the Legislative Council. Zionists well knew that Arabs would outnumber Jews if elected proportionally. This was not the time or place for democracy. ‘The Jewish population was fearful of representative institutions.’38 But they had nothing in fact to fear: this proposal was doomed, anyway, because the Arabs were determined to boycott any institution that implied their acceptance of the Balfour Declaration (and the mandate terms).

It claimed consistency of immigration policy with its forerunner of 1922, in that the ‘economic capacity’ of Palestine should continue to determine immigration levels; consistency of policy, too, with Article 6 of the mandate insofar as ‘the rights and position of the other sections of the population shall not be prejudiced by Jewish immigration’. It acknowledged that there had been a range of problems: ‘many cases of persons being admitted who … should not have received visas’; around 8,000 arrivals, over three years, who had stayed on ‘without sanction’; and a large number of illegal immigrants who evaded frontier control. In this context, the White Paper went on, the administration would more closely scrutinise the work of the Jewish Agency. The British gamely sought to present a balanced policy. On the one hand, the Arabs had to recognise ‘the facts of the situation’. Jewish leaders, on the other hand, had to recognise the need for ‘some concessions’.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

The main reason for governments’ appalling and illegal behaviour is that most citizens of rich countries want to control who gets into their country and are particularly wary of asylum seekers, whom they lump together with other irregular migrants and often consider ‘illegal’ or ‘bogus’. Many kinds of irregular ‘Illegal’ immigrants are the most demonised of all migrants. The very label ‘illegal’ immediately condemns them. Yet irregular migrants are a diverse group who don’t conform to the negative stereotypes about them. Pham Thi Tra My was a pretty twenty-six-year-old Vietnamese woman, Nguyen Dinh Luong a fresh-faced twenty-year-old man.8 Had you seen them in the street or on Instagram, you’d have thought they looked nice. Yet they were – briefly – ‘illegal’ immigrants to the UK; they were among the thirty-nine people found dead in a refrigerated lorry in Essex on 23 October 2019.

We’ll retrace the steps of Donald Trump’s German grandfather and Nigel Farage’s German great-great-grandfather. And we’ll tell the story of Sam King who came to Britain from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush ship in 1948 and went on to become a postman, politician and community organiser. What to do about the thorniest aspects of immigration – irregular (or ‘illegal’) immigrants and illiberal ones? We’ll hear from Reza Adib, an Afghan journalist who sought asylum in Greece, about how badly Europeans treat people who need their help. We’ll talk to Gabriela, who came to Britain from then-communist Poland as a student, overstayed her visa, worked without papers and became a legal resident again when Poland joined the EU.

Trumpf’, occupation – ‘none’.9 Why would America want a draft-dodging good-for-nothing like him? Fortunately for Friedrich, the US then had an ‘open-door’ immigration policy, so even seeming undesirables such as him were admitted. Migrants didn’t require a passport, let alone a visa; there were no illegal immigrants or failed asylum seekers in those days. Frederick Trump, as he later became, went on to make a fortune operating restaurants and brothels in mining towns in the Wild West during the gold rush. He returned to Germany with his family in 1904 a wealthy man. But despite petitioning the government to stay, he was ordered to leave the country the next year for having emigrated to evade military service.


pages: 736 words: 210,277

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

Albert Einstein, British Empire, family office, friendly fire, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Suez crisis 1956

The veterans of both were to stand the Yishuv in good stead in the 1948 War. In the first months of World War II, Zionist organizations stepped up efforts to save European Jews from the impending massacre-and to strengthen the Yishuv by bringing them to Palestine-through an illegal immigration operation run mainly by the newly created Institute for Illegal Immigration (hamossad le`aliya bilti ligalit), a secret arm of the Haganah. The British countered with a Royal Navy cordon that intercepted the rickety steamers, and many were stopped and their passengers reshipped to detention camps in Mauritius and, later, Cyprus.

The three armed groups negotiated a formal accord, known as the Hebrew Rebellion Movement (tnu`athameri ha`ivri), and on the night of 9-io October several Palmah squads raided the British detention camp at Atlit and freed 2o8 incarcerated illegal immigrants.''' What followed was even more dramatic: on the night of i November Palmah sappers blew up railway tracks at 153 points around Palestine and, a few days later, destroyed a patrol vessel and two British coast guard stations, at Giv`at Olga and Sayidna Ali. The British reacted byraiding a handful of kibbutzim, which were suspected of housing illegal immigrants, and panicky troops killed nine civilians and wounded sixty-three. Anti-British emotions crested. Bombings of British installations continued through the winter and spring, culminating in the spectacular simultaneous destruction by Palmah sappers, on the night of 17 June 1946, of eleven bridges connecting Palestine to Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Attlee was bowled over: he complained that Truman "did not wait to acquaint [himself] with the reasons" for the plan.82 Meanwhile, the Haganah pressed on with its illegal immigration campaign. On z7 January 1947, the British took one last shot at resolving the crisis. They reconvened the London conference, this time with the AHC represented. But the Zionists continued to boycott the talks, and the United States declined to send an observer. The Arabs continued to refitse anything short of complete, immediate independence, and the Jews, anything less than Jewish statehood in all or part of Palestine. With no acceptable military solution to the Jewish guerrilla-terrorist and illegal immigration campaigns, and with no political solution to the ZionistArab impasse, Britain had reached the end of the road.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

In 1996, as President Clinton swept to reelection, the Democratic Party platform included a section on immigration that sounds as if it could have been released by the Trump administration today: Today’s Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again. President Clinton is making our border a place where the law is respected and drugs and illegal immigrants are turned away. We have increased the Border Patrol by over 40 percent; in El Paso, our Border Patrol agents are so close together they can see each other.

There’s an interesting debate about whether Trump became a culture warrior out of calculation or authentic fury. After Romney lost in 2012, Trump criticized him for telling undocumented immigrants to “self-deport” and argued for a gentler GOP. “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” he told Newsmax. “They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.” III. The origination of this quote is unclear, but ironically, given how popular the line has become as a feminist riposte, the earliest antecedent that Quote Investigator could find was from a 1997 Usenet message board missive by Mike Jebbett, which read, “Women like her are suffering from a condition I call ‘Advanced Pedestalism.’

The speech, which came at a moment of peril for the Affordable Care Act, is largely forgotten today. But there is a moment in it that has passed into the political lore and meme of the era. Obama had made the case for his plan and turned to trying to rebut the distortions that had snaked into the national conversation. “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants,” he said. “This, too, is false—the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” Sitting in the audience, Congressman Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, couldn’t contain himself. “You lie!” he shouted. Obama wasn’t lying. The legislative text barred the undocumented from benefits.


pages: 127 words: 51,083

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

This is not accounting for the effects of oil depletion, which will severely exacerbate the situation, as will globalization. A. Population Increase The current population in the US is a little under 280 million. The population has been increasing at a rate of 1.1% per year, not including illegal immigration. At this rate, the US 20 The Oil Age is Over population will reach 520 million by the year 2050.20 If illegal immigration continues unabated, that number will increase drastically. B. Arable Land per Person As urbanization and soil erosion continue unabated, the US is projected to only have 290 million acres of arable land by 2050. With a population of 520 million, that means that each person will only have .6 acres of arable land from which they can derive their food.

................................. 64 63. Why are we going off to the Moon and then to Mars at a time when we should be dealing with these oil shortages? .................................................................................. 65 64. What about Bush's plan to give amnesty to the illegal immigrants from Mexico? Does that have anything to do with Peak Oil?.............................................................. 66 65. Does Peak Oil have anything to do with the war on drugs?......................................... 66 66. I'm a Baby Boomer. What can I expect in the years to come?

Foremost among them are superconducting magnets, plasma control and diagnostics, robotically controlled mining equipment, life-support facilities, rocket-launch vehicles, telecommunications, power electronics, etc. 106 The fact that we are aggressively pursuing such an unviable source of fuel underscores how desperate the situation is getting. D. To send more US jobs offshore Just wanted to see if you were paying attention. 64. What about Bush's plan to give amnesty to the illegal immigrants from Mexico? Does that have anything to do with Peak Oil? Mexico is the third leading oil supplier to the US. According to Dick Cheney's National Energy Report released in May 2001, "Mexico is a leading and reliable source of imported oil. It has a large reserve base, approximately 25% larger than our own proven reserves."107 On May 8, 2003, the US Congressional Committee on International Relations voted to tie reform of US immigration laws with a requirement that Mexico open up its state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, to US corporate investors.108 In other words, the US told Mexico, "Give us your oil and we will give you favorable immigration laws." 65.


pages: 750 words: 169,026

A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East by James Barr

bank run, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Khartoum Gordon, operational security, Scramble for Africa, short selling, éminence grise

The Committee’s British members reluctantly accepted this recommendation; but they managed to persuade their American colleagues to agree to the insertion of a sharp criticism of Ben-Gurion’s half-hearted condemnation of the police station attacks the previous December, and a call on the Jewish Agency to resume cooperation with the British government in stopping terrorism and illegal immigration. The report also recommended that terrorism should be ‘resolutely suppressed’.²⁷ Without conferring with Attlee, Truman immediately endorsed the Committee’s immigration proposals, but pointedly refused to offer any further American assistance to enforce a policy that was bound to lead to Arab uproar.

As a result, although British soldiers uncovered a large and ingeniously concealed arms cache in one settlement, their search of the Jewish Agency itself yielded nothing that was truly damning. The British were initially mystified. ‘We failed to get the evidence to connect the Agency with Jewish terrorism. We failed to get the evidence, I’m sure it was there, before we arrived, to connect them with the illegal immigrant traffic,’ complained the CID’s head of political intelligence, Dick Catling. ‘We failed. We got nothing.’⁴⁰ Meanwhile the French savoured the moment when MI5’s officer in Palestine told them, ‘with some astonishment’, that Britain had found nothing compromising them among the paperwork seized from the Agency.⁴¹ The only evidence of the increasingly close links between the French government and the Zionists is a photograph taken on the day of the operation.

Israel now’, Korff hired a pilot and arranged to rendezvous with him at an aerodrome ten miles outside Paris early on 4 September.¹⁷ The pilot, however, tipped off the French Sûreté, and, in an appropriately absurd dénouement, when he and Korff met at the airstrip they were arrested by a squad of twenty policemen disguised as mechanics. The French, though, made no effort whatsoever to try to hinder Zionist efforts to organise mass illegal immigration into Palestine from the south of France. In March that year the French cabinet had decided not to impose stringent checks on people wishing to leave the country, with consequences that became immediately obvious. Before the month was out the British ambassador, Duff Cooper, visited the Quai d’Orsay to register a protest at ‘French slackness in preventing illegal departures of Jews for Palestine’.¹⁸ Bidault, on the surface sympathetic, continued to do nothing to help Cooper.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

The immigration agency is usually content to deport the workers without going after the employers as well. A noted exception came in the form of a federal grand jury indictment of Tyson’s Foods and six employees on charges of arranging to have illegal immigrants smuggled into the country and provided with false documents. The case was thin, however, and despite testimony by several employees who pleaded guilty, a federal jury acquitted the company and the three managers who were brought to trial.8 The only authentic piece of identification illegal immigrants can obtain is a driver’s license, and that has become more difficult since the terrorist attacks of September n, 2001. A license is not a necessity for the newest arrivals who don’t have cars and don’t drive farm equipment, but it’s essential for those who want to step off the migrant train and stay in one place for a while, or move up a rung on the job ladder from field hand to tractor driver.

Greater disparities of net worth separate the wealthiest and the poorest families, larger gaps in resources divide affluent school districts from others, more children miss school because of asthma, more Americans go without health insurance, more experience hunger, more are imprisoned, fewer workers are unionized, more illegal immigrants do essential jobs, and more of them die in the desert after crossing the border from Mexico. Congress and many state legislatures have raised minimum wages, but they still leave most single-earner families below the poverty line. Astonishing percentages of adults who have been surveyed remain unable to perform everyday tasks in reading, math, and document comprehension, rendering them uncompetitive in a global marketplace.

In 1995, seven years after the involuntary servitude began, and three years after the INS had received its first report on the problem, federal and state agents finally raided the place, “freeing” seventy-one hapless workers only to imprison them in a federal penitentiary pending deportation. The INS, bound by law to detain and deport illegal immigrants, thereby reinforced the intimidation commonly used by employers to enforce their workers’ silence. The official toughness “could only serve to discourage workers from reporting labor law, civil rights, and human rights abuses, and push operations like El Monte further underground,” Su argues.


pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

As a stunt in 2013 (under a Conservative majority government) the Home Office organised a number of vans with advertising posters along the sides to drive around six London boroughs where many illegal immigrants lived. The posters read ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest’, followed by a government helpline number. The posters immediately became politically toxic. The Labour Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, described them as ‘divisive’ and ‘disgraceful’. The campaign group Liberty not only branded the vans’ message as ‘racist’ but also ‘illegal’. After some months it was revealed that the pilot scheme had successfully persuaded only 11 illegal immigrants to leave the country voluntarily. The then Home Secretary, Theresa May, admitted the scheme had been a mistake and too ‘blunt’, and it was not repeated.

But while Christianity witnessed this collapse in its followers – a collapse that was only expected to continue precipitately – mass migration assisted a near-doubling in the size of the Muslim population. Between 2001 and 2011 the number of Muslims in England and Wales rose from 1.5 million to 2.7 million. While these were the official figures there was a widespread acceptance that illegal immigrations made all these numbers far higher. At least a million people were recognised to be in the country illegally, and thus unlikely to have filled in census forms, and the two local authorities which had already grown the fastest (over 20 per cent in ten years) were those that already had the highest Muslim populations in the UK (Tower Hamlets and Newham).

Eventually politicians of the mainstream right also tried to make their names by sounding tough on immigration. In 1993, while a minister with responsibility for immigration, Charles Pasqua had announced that France would close its borders and that France would become a ‘zero immigration’ country. In 1993 he boasted of forthcoming crackdowns on illegal immigrants: ‘When we have sent home several planeloads, even boatloads and trainloads, the world will get the message.’ But it is doubtful that he believed this, even at the time. ‘The problems of immigration are ahead of us and not behind us,’ the same Charles Pasqua said a short time later, acknowledging that in the not too distant future the tens of millions of young people in Africa who were ‘without a future’ would be likely to want to head north.3 The French political debate throughout these years was both unique and utterly representative in Europe.


The Revolt by Menachem Begin

British Empire, Defenestration of Prague, illegal immigration, Internet Archive

The difficulty lay in the unfortunate desire of the Jews to save their lives and run away from Hitler. Soon any dormant belief that the sealed frontiers of Europe would prevent their escape was shattered. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, which in association with the Zionist-Revisionist Party and the Betar youth organisation, had brought many thousands of "illegal" immigrants into the country, never halted its activities. The British authorities exerted themselves to horrify the world by gruesome descriptions of the conditions aboard the refugee ships, the "coffin-ships," which, old and dilapidated, were crowded to the gunwales. The British Consul at Constanza, who visited one of the ships, had reported that no Englishman would be prepared to travel in such unhygienic and insanitary conditions. . . .

This did not prevent some of them from crossing the frontier and joining other Jews from Czechoslovakia, Austria and Rumania in a new effort to get to Eretz Israel. 1 Again news reached the British officials of a large number of Italian ships lying idle at Trieste and the presence in that port of many Jewish "tourists." It was plain not only that the Jews had not given up, but that they were planning a "large-scale invasion" of illegal immigrants. By this time the Haganah 1 , much more wealthy than the Irgun, and backed by the resources of the Jewish Agency, 8 had also become active in the immigration field. I They succeeded. They reached Eretz Israel in the famous Sekariya expedition organized by Mr. Eri Jabotinsky, son of the creator of the Irgun.

Sir Harold Mc-Michael, the High Commissioner, announced that they would not be sent back to Europe—propaganda had not succeeded in justifying that kind of treatment in the eyes of civilised men and women—but would be packed off to Mauritius. He added, however, that with the war's end they would be returned to their "homes" in Europe. To teach the "illegal" immigrants a lesson, the military forces carrying out the deportation used "a certain amount of force" before the ships were sent off on their way to Mauritius. The Patria never sailed. Jewish "terrorists" placed a bomb to prevent its departure. The bomb exploded and more than two hundred Jews were killed or drowned.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

But most of them remained in place; ministers repeated they were necessary to deal with ‘illegal immigrants’. Months after Windrush made headlines, the government still didn’t know how many people had been deported thanks to their policies, and many of those who had been affected were still living in homelessness hostels, unable to work.5 A year later, a compensation scheme was set up for the people who had been caught up in the whole affair. The government was at pains to emphasise that the Windrush generation were here legally, and that the aim of their hostile environment policies was to tackle ‘illegal’ immigration. But the tag ‘illegal’ obscures more than it tells us.

When the Conservatives changed the rules on social housing so that people living in properties deemed as having a ‘spare room’ had their benefits cut, they called it the ‘spare room subsidy’. Campaigners renamed it the more appropriate ‘bedroom tax’. But when Theresa May unveiled her flagship immigration package as home secretary, she didn’t even attempt to hide its cruelty. She flaunted it. The aim was to create a ‘really hostile environment for illegal immigrants,’ she boasted.1 The plan was to make their lives unbearable. And, so, the government began to create this hostile environment, stitching immigration checks into every element of people’s lives. Through measures brought in by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, a whole host of professionals – from landlords and letting agents to doctors and nurses – were turned into border guards.2 Regardless of how removed their profession was from the world of immigration policy, the threat of being fined or sentenced to jail time loomed over them if they failed to carry out checks to ensure people they encountered through their work were in the country legally.

Seen as representing strength and protection, they are, if you look at them more closely, violent and discriminatory in all kinds of way. Borders are not only where the lines on the map tell us they are. They are also drawn between people, with the use of words like ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’. By crossing a border, you can cease to be a human being to the people around you, becoming an (‘illegal’) immigrant or a (‘bogus’) asylum seeker. These words we use to talk about people aren’t just descriptive or neutral categories; how they’re used doesn’t always and only coincide with their legal meaning; they’re laden with other associations.44 Just look at the term ‘migrant’. Twisted to apply to specific groups of people at particular times, there is no hard and fast rule of who is an immigrant and who isn’t.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Viktor Orbán, ‘Speech at the Opening of the World Science Forum’, 7 November 2015; Shaun Walker, ‘Hungarian Leader Says Europe Is Now “Under Invasion” by Migrants’, Guardian (15 March 2018). 74. ‘Remarks by President Trump on the Illegal Immigration Crisis and Border Security’ (1 November 2018); https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-illegal-immigration-crisis-border-security/. 75. Holly Case, ‘Hungary’s Real Indians’, Eurozine (3 April 2018). 76. Ronald Reagan, presidential farewell address to the nation (11 January 1989). On Reagan’s suggestion that immigrants have ‘made America great’, see https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/03/becoming-american-initiative/did-ronald-reagan-say-immigrants-made-america-grea/. 77.

In Chapter 1 we explained the emergence of anti-immigrant politics in Central Europe, even in the absence of actual immigrants, as a roundabout expression of the demographic anxiety caused by catastrophic depopulation throughout the region. In the American case, the first-hand experience fostering hostility to immigrants is not depopulation as in Eastern Europe but de-industrialization.82 Without being the cause of economic insecurity, illegal immigration has been turned by populists into a focal point around which those suffering most from the loss of jobs and opportunities can rally. During the two decades after the Second World War, when the United States was the world’s sole industrial powerhouse, working-class America did extraordinarily well.

As economic disparities grew and chances for upward mobility shrank, America’s Cold War victory continued to buoy up the lucky few. But to the new plutocracy’s ‘forgotten man’, it began to feel like a post-Cold War defeat. Some portion of white working- and middle-class resentment can be explained as a hostile reaction not to illegal immigrants but to perceived contempt from America’s increasingly wealthy and insulated liberal establishment.84 The distress of lower-middle-class and working-class whites with only a high-school degree at their perceived political invisibility made them an easy touch for Trump, whose rhetorical attention to their plight, however opportunistic and insincere, stood out among the general indifference of political elites in both parties.


Antonio-s-Gun-and-Delfino-s-Dream-True-Tales-of-Mexican-Migration by Unknown

Berlin Wall, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, trade route

Thus while everything was changing in South Gate, much remained The Saga of South Gate / 71 the same, and in this awkward stasis the town spent the s and early s. The jolt came in  with Proposition . The proposition would have denied illegal immigrants education and health care, among other things. Californians passed Proposition  overwhelmingly, but the courts ruled it unconstitutional. Still, the initiative changed America. Millions of illegal immigrants had become legal residents under an amnesty that the U.S. Congress passed in . By law, they had to wait at least seven years after amnesty to apply for citizenship. Just as those seven years expired, Proposition  came along.

What was undeniable was that the life of Andrés Bermúdez could not have prepared him more poorly to resist the narcotic of media attention or navigate the crafty Mexican political maze. He was a simple man without one political instinct. The first vote he cast in his life was for himself. As an illegal immigrant, then a farmer and businessman, he had learned directness and self-reliance. He depended on common sense and hard work. Life had taught him not to balance the interests of competing groups but to make quick decisions, alone, obeying only his gut. He was like his fellow immigrants. His interests were theirs: making money and a future for himself and his family, working out of poverty.

Every few weeks after that, Diez would head down from Phoenix to Sonoyta, a small Mexican border town. There he and his new partner would take north ten Delfino II / 149 or twelve people at a time. This is how Diez, who first went to the United States looking for work, learned to smuggle illegal immigrants when he was not yet sixteen years old, and came to lead much older men through the Arizona desert. Coyote was a term he disliked. He thought it sounded bad. In Mexico the word had sleazy, cowardly associations. Instead, he referred to smuggling humans as “the work.” He didn’t like the work any more than the job title, but he had nothing else.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, Democrat senator Chuck Schumer of New York once said during a 2009 speech at Georgetown University: “The American people are fundamentally pro-legal immigration and anti-illegal immigration. We will only pass comprehensive reform when we recognize this fundamental concept. “First, illegal immigration is wrong. A primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.” Then, nervous Nancy Pelosi added: “We all agree we need to secure our borders, while honoring our values.” Even Democrat senator Dianne Feinstein of California criticized the flood of migrants coming from Mexico.

He added: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.” A few years later, in a 2013 State of the Union address, Obama promised to put illegal immigrants “to the back of the line.” Real reform means strong border security, and we can build on the progress my administration has already made—putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history and reducing illegal crossings to their lowest levels in forty years. Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship—a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English, and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.


pages: 586 words: 184,480

Slow Boats to China by Gavin Young

Ayatollah Khomeini, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, Malacca Straits, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship

‘Oh, Macao,’ the policeman said sadly. ‘Smuggling illegal immigrants from China to Macao to Hong Kong is big money there. The syndicates [the Chinese tongs] actually sell tickets for places in their launches, “snake boats” and speedboats. They are difficult to catch – faster than ours, sometimes.’ Last year the Hong Kong marine police had picked up 451 bodies out of Deep Bay at the mouth of the Pearl river, which runs up to the port of Canton. ‘The Chinese are born gamblers,’ the assistant commissioner said sadly. Forty A few nights later, when I reached the marine police’s illegal immigrant patrol depot, the Chinese crew of the Special Boat Unit (SBU) I had been permitted to accompany were taking their evening meal of pork, fish, rice and beer.

So we’d be in Zamboanga that evening? ‘If we have good luck.’ We would have taken five and a half days from Borneo to Mindanao, but we still had to reach the island and find a boat to ferry us to Zamboanga. There the immigration officers awaited me, but they were the smallest worry of all; they might imprison illegal immigrants, but surely they didn’t kill them, did they? The Haji said he doubted it. Through the same dazzling azure screen of sea and sky, the Allimpaya pushed on. Standing on the roof with Carlos an hour later, I saw, one after the other, a chain of small islands – first a tiny blur, then an outline of palms, finally a white beach encircling an islet like a collar.

‘I have been robbed four times in my thirty-five years of happy travail in the Orient as a resident barefoot reporter,’ Hughes declaimed in the rolling tones of an Australian Mr Micawber. ‘Twice in Tokyo between 1948 and 1950 by individual operators, once in Laos by a gang of two and now, with my wife in Hong Kong by a gang of three armed with a meat cleaver and heavy sticks. They were Cantonese thugs, evidently illegal immigrants from Canton, who threatened my dear Chinese wife with the cleaver and struck me with a stick, and then gagged and bound us in our humble Mid-Levels abode at 3.00 a.m.’ Dick stuck a fork into the boeuf Wellington on his plate. Marsh Clark poured more wine. I said, ‘Donald, did anyone whistle “Colonel Bogey” when you were building that railway line over the River Kwai as they did in the film?’


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

In Europe, governments encouraged migration for postwar reconstruction; in the United States, the government permitted Mexicans to cross the border to engage in seasonal agricultural labor. But political opposition to these policies ensured that they were temporary and often involved work-arounds and winking at illegal immigration. In Germany, for example, the government allowed Turkish workers to settle in the country but did not grant them citizenship; in the United States, legal immigration programs were replaced by illegal immigration since the border was not controlled. But whether legal or illegal, migration never reached the level that would satisfy demand in the host countries and the supply of people willing and able to migrate.13 In Europe, migration between EU member states was institutionalized.

Foreign tourists swarm our cities, and talented foreign workers and immigrants populate our start-ups, banks, and universities. Globalization has increased foreign trade, capital flows, tourism, and the migration of highly skilled workers. Yet, for all the controversies about refugees and (in the United States) illegal immigration, migration of people with ordinary skills proceeds at a trickle. From the standpoint of economic theory, this “migration imbalance,” as we will call it, is puzzling. Economists believe that global wealth increases when all factors of production—goods, services, capital, labor—are allowed to flow across borders to the locations where they can be most efficiently employed.

While the logic of the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem is widely accepted among economists, the exact extent to which various categories of workers are harmed or benefited by immigration is more complex. There is significant evidence that immigration reduces the wages of native workers whose backgrounds are similar to those of migrants. For example, illegal immigration to the United States from Mexico and Central America tends to hurt native workers with low education and weak language skills.21 However, the effects of migration on the broader labor markets are murkier. Some scholars believe that the native workers are in aggregate harmed, albeit only to a limited extent.22 Others argue that effects are negligible or even that most workers may benefit because migrants buy more goods, which native workers produce, or take the lowest rungs on the employment ladder, pushing some native workers up into better-paying supervisory roles.23 These small and mixed effects are dwarfed by the large benefits migration brings to the migrants themselves and their employers.24 Moreover, the fiscal structure of migration prevents significant sharing of these benefits through government and may even impose costs on domestic workers.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

For during the neoliberal years the super-rich had spared no effort or expense to create a plebeian backlash against the Federal state. From the platform of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s employees had railed against big government and high taxes. Across the Bible Belt, the holy book had been brandished by preachers warning against the combined evils of abortion, gay marriage, ‘positive discrimination’ for black people, illegal immigration, big government and high taxes. By February 2009, the religious right in America had an enemy it had always dreamed of: a black president, committed to liberal social policy, big spending and a bailout of Wall Street at the expense of everyone else. In November 2010 they found the means to humiliate him, when the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives, including eighty-seven signed-up members of the Tea Party.

It’s not that they want to be here, but they just don’t have any other option. SB 1070 won’t stop them coming. Arpaio made videos of prisoners in the chain gang under the sun: people see this, but they still come. Latino migrants work, but for precious little: it is a certainty that the impact of illegal immigration is to reduce wages for people like Maurice and Larry in New Mexico, who are US citizens. Fernando tells me that some of his friends are working a 100-hour week, for below the minimum wage: housekeeping, landscaping, kitchen work. ‘They should be creating jobs instead of jails, building schools instead of jails.’

I met the party’s second in command, Ilias Panagiotaros, in the back yard of the store he runs: a militaria shop, selling police uniforms to serving officers and Combat 18 t-shirts to football hooligans. In his opinion, ‘Greek society is ready—even though no-one likes this—to have a fight: a new type of civil war. On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times. Golden Dawn is at war with the political system and those who represent it, with the domestic and international bankers, we are at war with these invaders—immigrants.’ Panagiotaros, one of eighteen fascist MPs, was clear as to the sequencing of the Greek denouement.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

As a result, there were chronic food shortages until 1623, when they created private parcels of land and made families responsible for feeding themselves. Ben wrote up a column based on William Bradford’s 1647 history that you can access here: http://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1423. 8. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “What we know about illegal immigration from Mexico,” Pew Research Center, December 3, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/03/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/. 9. Michael Clemens, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 3 (2011): 83–106. 10. Benjamin Powell, ed., Immigration: From Social Science to Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 11.

Oddly, none of the speakers at the opening rally commented on the importance of central planning and abolishing private property. Instead, we heard things like “Damn the Supreme Court to Hell,” in reference to the court’s recent ruling limiting the power of public unions to coerce fees out of non–union member employees. There was also plenty said about the immigration crisis and the separation of illegal immigrant parents from their children. We were reminded that, “Democrats are deporters too.” Of course, President Trump was the frequent target of negative remarks. No big surprise there. Most of what we heard was just support for a wide array of leftist political positions that have little to do with Marx or socialism.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In much of the twentieth century, the targets for demagogues were African Americans, but over time Americans have learned to recognize the deeper purpose behind such language. More recently, illegal immigrants have emerged as the new target, and much angst is expended over the possibility that benefits may leak to them. Indeed, a battle has erupted in the most recent round of health care legislation over the access of illegal immigrants to any form of taxpayer-funded programs. In this debate, few legislators have asked how U.S. society can remain healthy and humane with a sick and unprotected immigrant population in its midst.

The reasons for rising inequality are, of course, a matter of much debate, with both the Left and the Right adhering to their own favored explanations. Other factors, such as the widespread deregulation in recent decades and the resulting increases in competition including for resources (such as talent), the changes in tax rates, the decrease in unionization, and the increase in both legal and illegal immigration, have no doubt all played a part.5 Regardless of how the inequality has arisen, it has led to widespread anxiety. Many have lost faith in the narrative of America as the land of unbounded opportunity, which in the past created the public support that made the United States a bastion of economic freedom.

When people see a dim economic future in a democracy, they work through political channels to obtain redress, and if the political channel does not respond, they resort to other means. The first victims of a political search for scapegoats are those who are visible and easily demonized, but powerless to defend themselves. Illegal immigrants and foreign workers do not vote, but they are essential to the economy—the former because they often do jobs no one else will touch in normal times, and the latter because they are the source of the cheap imports that have raised the standard of living for all, but especially those with low incomes.


pages: 784 words: 229,648

O Jerusalem by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, land bank, lateral thinking, Mount Scopus, union organizing

* The Haganah nickname for a hiding place, taken from the Hebrew verb lesalek, meaning to dispose of. * From 1946 to February 1948, according to a report submitted to the War Office by Sir Gordon MacMillan, the last commander in chief of British forces in Palestine, the British intercepted forty-seven shiploads of illegal immigrants, interning 65,307 illegal immigrants in their detention camps on the island of Cyprus. * There were, of course, exceptions. The Jewish Agency had an unknown ally in its campaign for a Jerusalem police force, British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham. Despairing of maintaining order in the rest of Palestine, Cunningham hoped at least to salvage Jerusalem.

Avriel had displayed no surprise. For ten years the quiet Austrian intellectual had devoted himself to the Zionist cause, achieving some of its most spectacular triumphs. From Vienna, then Istanbul, Athens and finally Paris, Avriel had supervised one of the most extraordinary adventures of the Jewish movement, the illegal immigration of thousands of European Jews into Palestine. In the middle of the war, he had succeeded in smuggling his men into Hitler's death camps. Over one hundred thousand Jews from every country in Europe were personally indebted to Avriel and his organization for having gotten them out of the Nazi inferno and onto the shores of the Promised Land.

The Arabs are getting ready. They have five armies preparing to invade us sooner or later. After the United Nations' vote, we are going to have an Arab revolt on our hands right here in Palestine. What happened in 1936 was just child's play." He was, he told Avriel, sending him to Europe to put his experience in the illegal immigration service to work buying arms. "We've got to change our tactics. We haven't got time any more to stuff four rifles into a tractor and wait for them to get to Haifa. We have to work fast and decisively. "You have one million dollars at your disposal at the Union de Banques Suisses in Geneva," Ben-Gurion said.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

Trump met this measure when he questioned the legitimacy of the electoral process and made the unprecedented suggestion that he might not accept the results of the 2016 election. Levels of voter fraud in the United States are very low, and because elections are administered by state and local governments, it is effectively impossible to coordinate national-level voting fraud. Yet throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump insisted that millions of illegal immigrants and dead people on the voting rolls would be mobilized to vote for Clinton. For months, his campaign website declared “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary from Rigging This Election!” In August, Trump told Sean Hannity, “We’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged….I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

In 2010, in the face of Congress’s failure to pass a new energy bill, he issued an “executive memorandum” instructing government agencies to raise fuel efficiency standards for all cars. In 2012, in response to Congress’s inability to pass immigration reform, he announced an executive action to cease deportation of illegal immigrants who came to the United States before the age of sixteen and were either in school or were high school graduates or military veterans. In 2015, President Obama responded to Congress’s refusal to pass legislation to combat climate change by issuing an executive order to all federal agencies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use more renewable energy.

A poll taken prior to the 2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed that fraud could be in play. In the United States, the figures were even more dramatic. In a survey carried out prior to the 2016 election, 84 percent of Republican voters said they believed a “meaningful amount” of fraud occurred in American elections, and nearly 60 percent of Republican voters said they believed illegal immigrants would “vote in meaningful amounts” in November. These doubts persisted after the election. According to a July 2017 Morning Consult/Politico poll, 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Republicans said they believe that American elections are massively rigged.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

Zapatero’s 2005 law was in a way a mopping-up, designed to ensure that all the residents of Spain’s arrival cities would be legal, tax-paying citizens.26 It was followed, in 2007, by an even more ambitious program, engineered in cooperation with the government of Senegal, designed to deter dangerous illegal sea crossings by migrants and end illegal immigration to Spain. While amnesties offering regularization of “illegal” immigrants have been used throughout the Western world in the postwar decades, Spain’s program was part of a new approach designed to make regularization an option in advance, incorporating rural-to-urban transition into the employment system. Under this program, tens of thousands of Africans every year were granted work permits, allowing them to enter the country legally and work for a year; if their employment contracts were extended, they were allowed to bring over their families and so embark on a path toward citizenship—an effort to prevent the fragmented families and underground lives of the European arrival city and to allow Spain to add half a million immigrants to its economy each year without creating a marginalized class on the outskirts.

In most cases, governments come to realize that millions of potential taxpayers are living below the radar, earning incomes but not paying taxes, and creating gray-market families and awkward legal paradoxes as their deracinated children come of age; the result is usually a mass amnesty. The United States has granted post-facto citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants in recent decades (most recently in the early 1990s); similar amnesties, involving hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, have been granted in Spain, Italy, France, Britain, and Germany. More such amnesties are almost certain in the future. A typical example is the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, which began in 1986 as a congressional effort to stop, once and for all, the movement of Latin American villagers across the southern border.

After a decade and a half, this exposed and unprotected setting had become a social and humanitarian worry, so, in 2005, the Herndon town council, led by Mayor Michael O’Reilly, voted to create an indoor day-labor center, using county funds and staff from a local church non-profit agency. This initiative attracted anti-immigration forces, such as the vigilante group the Minutemen, which opened a chapter in Herndon. They claimed that it was unacceptable to use taxpayer money to assist illegal immigrants. The proposed center then became the focus of an ugly election for Virginia governor in 2005, in which Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore built much of his campaign around his opposition to Herndon’s approach, making the town a conservative emblem of wrongheaded state support for undocumented migrants.


pages: 442 words: 112,155

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk

23andMe, affirmative action, basic income, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, Donald Trump, failed state, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, language acquisition, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, unpaid internship, World Values Survey

What is clear, though, is that Hispanic identity is already much more fluid than much of the country’s political class tends to assume. In the run-up to the 2020 election, for example, two Hispanic progressives conducted a series of focus groups. Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito assumed that Latinos would see themselves as “people of color,” and reject concerns about “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” as a racist dog whistle. Instead, López and Gavito found that many of the people they interviewed insisted on being white, and that Latinos were actually more likely than non-Hispanic whites to agree with anti-immigrant messages. Progressives, López and Gavito concluded, commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well.

His is the sound of encounter, of mutual cultural influence, of people from different countries clashing and, together, creating the world anew. This does not mean that Manu Chao’s songs are silent about the difficulties and injustices that many members of diverse democracies face. Much of Clandestino, his first album, is told in the voice of illegal immigrants who have to contend with the indifference of the people they encounter. On the album’s second song, “Desaparecido,” he vividly describes the predicament of a street vendor who has to flee whenever he spots the police, making a touching plea to see him as, simply, human: They call me the one who’s disappearing A phantasma that never stays They call me the one who’s profiteering But that doesn’t express the truth In my body, I carry a pain That doesn’t let me breathe In my body, I carry a sentence That always makes me leave.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT But they also worry: It might seem as though I am implicitly taking the perspective of members of the majority in this passage. But polling suggests that many descendants of immigrants and members of minority groups are just as torn on these issues. For example, a substantial portion of them favors harsh policies to crack down on illegal immigration. For a longer treatment of the political and cultural views of minority groups, especially in the United States, see chapter 9. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Part One: When Diverse Societies Go Wrong According to most scientists: Yvonne Rekers, Daniel B. M. Haun, and Michael Tomasello, “Children, but Not Chimpanzees, Prefer to Collaborate,” Current Biology 21 (October 2011): 1756–58, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.066.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

How much easier America would be to understand if it conformed simply to all our snootiest, snobbiest and most sneering expectations. Instead it does conform, but not simply. It conforms with ambiguity, contradiction and surprise. Maybe that is why I love it so. Border Patrol The frontline in America’s war against illegal immigrants is the Mexican border. I come to El Paso, where many of the fiercest frontline battles in that war are daily fought. Mexico has influenced Texas hugely; their respective cultures have combined to form a very particular style of Tex-Mex food, drink, music and architecture. But while Mexican music, beer and quesadillas may be welcome in the United States, its people are less so.

Every now and again we pass a genuine government Border Patrol vehicle. They are on friendly terms, Shannon assures us, for the Federal Agents know the Minutemen are law-abiding and would never tackle an illegal themselves, they would radio the information to the proper authorities. Are there British ‘patriots’ who are so incensed by illegal immigration into the United Kingdom that they would set up their own border patrols in like manner? Shannon strikes me as more sad and lonely than dangerous. He has that slightly obnoxious and overstated pride in his obedience to the law and his respect for proper authorities characteristic of the self-righteous patriot.

Poorer, but better dressed than their gringo neighbours. With Agent Romero on the American side. Scratching out a living. Incidentally, I say that the Mexicans look out over a river, and it may be that you already know that I am referring to the Rio Grande, which for much of its course forms the natural border between America and Mexico. Illegal immigrants are often called ‘wetbacks’ on account of their having had to swim that river. You may imagine my surprise then when Shannon showed me the Rio Grande. Not a river at all, but a drain, a dry ditch. Further along it swells into a small stream, I am told, but here it is no more than a trickle.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Danny Schechter “Financial Crisis Goes Global, Slams into Europe,” Huffington Post, March 10, 2009. www.huffingtonpost.com. Jay Solomon and Siobhan Gorman “Financial Crisis May Diminish American Sway,” Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2008. Spiegel Online “Ticking Timebomb: The Financial Crisis Reaches Germany’s Economy,” October 15, 2008. www.spiegel.de. Brian Whitley “With Fewer Jobs, Fewer Illegal Immigrants,” Christian Science Monitor, December 30, 2008. www.csmonitor.com. 127 CHAPTER Effects of the Global Financial Crisis on Developing Nations 128 3 1 Viewpoint Worldwide, Migrant Workers Are Threatened by Job Losses and Xenophobia Ron Synovitz Ron Synovitz is a senior correspondent in Radio Free Europe’s central newsroom, where he has worked since 1995.

In response, governments in Spain, Russia, and elsewhere are putting restrictions on the number of foreign workers allowed into their countries. International organizations and advocacy groups worry that such restrictions on foreigners may cause dangerous large-scale migration, enrich criminal organizations by promoting illegal immigration, and encourage xenophobic attitudes toward foreigners. As you read, consider the following questions: 1. In the Persian Gulf, from where does Ron Synovitz assert the majority of migrant workers come? 2. In Spain, where do the majority of migrant workers come from, according to the author? 3.

But now, the fall in the price of oil that has accompanied the global recession is causing a sharp downturn in development within the six Gulf Cooperation Council states—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman. Analysts say neither the developers, the investors, nor the migrant workers are prepared for what is next. They predict that as many as half of the region’s 13 million foreign workers could lose their jobs in the months ahead. The migrants will either have to stay in the Gulf countries as illegal immigrants or go back to their own countries to seek employment. 130 Effects of the Global Financial Crisis on Developing Nations European countries also are seeing similar problems as a result of the financial crisis. Millions of foreign workers flocked to Spain for jobs from 1994 to 2007 when that country saw continuous economic growth.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Baird wasn’t a household name, or a controversial one. Women’s groups cheered and the rest of Washington shrugged. Confirmation was sure to be a cakewalk, an assessment that didn’t budge when the January 14 issue of the New York Times hit the streets. Their scoop: Baird and her husband, Yale professor Paul Gewirtz, had been employing two illegal immigrants from Peru, a husband and a wife, as household help for the last few years. The woman was the nanny for their son; the man acted as their chauffeur. It wasn’t something she was trying to hide. Baird had told Clinton’s team about the arrangement and the information had been included in her submissions to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the venue for her confirmation hearings.

Baird had told Clinton’s team about the arrangement and the information had been included in her submissions to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the venue for her confirmation hearings. Technically, this put Baird and her husband in violation of the law, which mandated that all employers verify the eligibility of their employees to live and work in the United States. But as a practical matter, they’d had nothing to worry about. The penalty for knowingly employing an illegal immigrant for domestic work was only a few thousand dollars, and the provision had never actually been enforced in the state of Connecticut, where Baird and Gewirtz lived. They also hadn’t paid any Social Security taxes for the couple, something employers were also required to do. It would be pointless to try, their lawyer had told them, since the Peruvian couple wasn’t legally permitted to work in the United States.

The original price tag had been fifty billion dollars, but when members of Congress balked at that, Clinton went around them to impose a package worth twenty billion. To the Perot army, it was a sellout of America’s interests, and Buchanan now stoked the rage. “Illegal drugs are coming across the border, illegal immigration is soaring,” he said. “And what do we get in addition to that? We are required to pay fifty billion dollars to the government of Mexico? For whose benefit was that, my friends? I’ll tell you. That was not for the benefit of the working Americans on Main Street. That was for the benefit of the investment bankers on Wall Street, and we all know it.”


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

In the late 1940s, propaganda, whilst providing its own attack on communism, was used in conjunction with economic operations disrupting Czechoslovakian industry.20 Around the same time, diplomats hoped to use it alongside sabotage to target Italian elections and alongside both sabotage and deception to prevent illegal immigration to Israel. In Iran, propaganda from as early as 1951 worked in conjunction with bribery to play an important role in the eventual coup two years later.21 Similarly, plans for covert action in Syria in the 1950s saw propaganda, bribery, and sabotage working side by side, whilst propaganda provided the backbone of Britain’s anti-Nasser operations too.

The Persia crisis formed the first exploratory response to communist pressure and propaganda.30 Palestine served as another testing ground.31 Drawing on existing machinery and personnel, covert action formed a bridge between wartime and peacetime operations, demonstrating that such activity could still be successful. Here, both Attlee and Bevin strongly supported moves to stem ­illegal immigration from Europe which threatened the delicate balance of peoples in the region but also appeared to be feeding a troublesome Zionist insurgency against British rule. Attlee wanted action. Unfortunately for Britain, however, global opinion was hostile to any attempts to prevent the Jewish people, who had suffered such persecution in Nazi Germany, from reaching their homeland.

A simultaneous propaganda and deception offensive complemented the sabotage. This aimed to divert suspicion away from the British by creating a notional organization called the Defenders of Arab Palestine to claim responsibility for the attacks. Propaganda also attempted to implicate Soviet Russia in the illegal immigration. Deemed a success, Operation Embarrass showed observers in Whitehall what peacetime covert action could achieve.34 Attlee and Bevin knew, however, that it was far less risky to conduct such operations in Palestine than Eastern Europe. There was little chance of escalation and SIS could, and did, simply use channels and personnel already in place from the war.


pages: 442 words: 135,006

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

If he thinks back on how he was able to stand his ground with the Mancuso family: he was just a kid with a small business then, his turnover ridiculously small. Yet he had resisted the Mancusos for years. Then they crushed him for no reason, just for the sake of trying to squeeze him like an orange picked on the Rosarno plain. And now he’s letting himself be squeezed, like the lowliest illegal immigrant. But he’s not a lowly illegal immigrant. This is not who he is. If he wasn’t afraid as a kid, he shouldn’t be afraid now either, now that he has learned that everyone, whether in Calabria or Colombia, has a hand on his head that can crush him at any time, either in punishment, by mistake, of just for the heck of it.

In spring 2011, such a grave was discovered in San Fernando; it contained 193 corpses, the victims all killed with powerful blows to the head. And this sadistic carnage occurred just a few months after what has become known as the First San Fernando Massacre. More innocent victims, more mass graves: August 24, 2010. More than seventy illegal immigrants from South and Central America were trying to cross the U.S. border at Tamaulipas. We know about them from a man from Ecuador who survived. In San Fernando he and his companions were joined by a group of Mexicans claiming to be Los Zetas. They herded the immigrants onto a farm and started beating them up.

When the Soviet regime collapsed, imports proliferated, prices dropped, and the drugs of the West—cocaine and ecstasy—finally made their way onto the market. At first cocaine use was limited to those Russians who could afford to spend the equivalent of three months’ average salary. There was an invasion of substances that found fertile ground in part because of the breakup of neighboring states: wars, open borders, and an army of illegal immigrants unable to find work in the legal economy. For many of them—as in the rest of the world—drug dealing was the only way to earn a living. But the decisive step came with the opening toward the Western Hemisphere, first the United States and Canada, then Latin America and the Caribbean. That part of the world had a high demand for arms, and Russia a notable supply of Soviet military weapons.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

There is simply too much trade crossing the border with Mexico to make such barriers effective. Nor will illegal immigrants likely ever be deported. The opposition to deporting illegal immigrants is far too great, and the political costs when their children become eligible to vote are even greater. While legal low-skilled immigration could be dialed back, high-skilled immigration is likely the only viable alternative for rebalancing the mix between high- and low-skilled workers. The latter solution is better for growth, too. And even if illegal immigrants were deported, America is still employing many lower-skilled Mexicans in Mexican factories that supply the American economy.

See technology-hollows-out-the-middle-class myth homeowners, 49, 53–54, 121–22, 132–34, 168–69, 247 mortgage lending by credit score, 133–34, 134 household income, median. See median household income housing supply and minimum wage, 111–12 humanities degrees, 15, 91, 236–37, 238–39 illegal immigration, 198, 247–49 immigration, 15, 59–61, 198. See also low-skilled immigration empirical studies on slowing wage growth and, 54–59 labor supply and slowing wage growth, 47–52 test scores, 219–20 ultra-high-skilled immigration for accelerating growth, 244–49, 254 incentives among countries, 66–67 CEO pay as motivation for risk-taking, 92–95 for risk taking.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Stocks of two largest private prison companies soared by 43 and 21 percent Heather Long, “Private Prison Stocks Up 100% since Trump’s Win,” CNN.com, February 24, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/​2017/​02/​24/​investing/​private-prison-stocks-soar-trump/. ICE: 34,000 illegal immigrants; 73 percent of whom are held in private facilities Associated Press, “Trump’s Stance on Illegal Immigration May Aid Private Prisons,” Denver Post, November 23, 2016, http://www.denverpost.com/​2016/​11/​23/​donald-trump-illegal-immigration-may-aid-private-prisons/. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan at Boeing Dominic Gates and Jim Brunner, “Trump Taps Boeing Executive Pat Shanahan for Deputy Secretary of Defense,” Seattle Times, March 16, 2017.

The Central Park Five were later exonerated by DNA evidence, and their sentences were vacated. Trump refused to apologize or retract his claims. No wonder, then, that his Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is arguing that social services and infrastructure in cities such as New York and Chicago are “crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime”—conveniently moving the subject away from years of neoliberal neglect toward the supposed need to crack down on crime, and to bar these cities from declaring themselves “sanctuaries” for immigrants. Divide and Conquer In truth, nothing has done more to help build our present corporate dystopia than the persistent and systematic pitting of working-class whites against Blacks, citizens against migrants, and men against women.


Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Arizonans were seen as troublemakers by the federal government, and for years acquiring their riches wasn’t worth the potential trouble. Cynics might say that Arizonans are still making trouble. In 2010, Arizona’s legislature passed the most restrictive anti-immigration law in the nation, garnering headlines and controversy. How severe was the illegal immigration problem? In 2009, 250,000 illegal immigrants crossed the state’s 350-mile border with Mexico. The legislature wasn’t spurred into action, however, until the mysterious shooting of a popular rancher near the border the following year. Today, the hot-button law, known as SB1070, winds through the court system. The state was shaken in 2011 by the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords during a public appearance.

Courts rule the law unconstitutional, given California’s civil rights protections; appeals are pending. 2010 Arizona passes controversial legislation requiring police officers to ask for identification from anyone they suspect of being in the US illegally. Immigration rights activists call for a boycott of the state. 2012 New Mexico and Arizona, the 47th and 48th states to join the Union, celebrate their Centennials. Top of section The People Who lives in the West? If you believe the headlines, it’s angry Arizonans up-in-arms (literally) about illegal immigration, gay couples rushing to marry in San Francisco, hair-pulling housewives in Orange County and pot-smoking invalids in Colorado. And, if the Twilight novels are to be believed, the damp and foggy state of Washington is a favorite of stylish vampires and shirtless werewolves.

Despite some early fumbles, the actor-turned-Republican-politician ‘Governator’ surprisingly put environmental issues and controversial stem-cell research at the top of his agenda. Budget shortfalls have caused another staggering financial crisis that Sacramento lawmakers and once-again Governor Jerry Brown have yet to resolve. Meanwhile, the need for public education reform builds, prisons overflow, state parks are chronically underfunded and the conundrum of illegal immigration from Mexico, which fills a critical cheap labor shortage (especially in agriculture), continues to vex the state. Local Culture Currently the world’s eighth-largest economy, California is a state of extremes, where grinding poverty shares urban corridors with fabulous wealth. Waves of immigrants keep arriving, and neighborhoods are often miniversions of their homelands.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC, which initially tried to project a “mainstream” image, has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing the late pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” The group’s newspaper, Citizens Informer, regularly publishes articles condemning “race mixing,” decrying the evils of illegal immigration, and lamenting the decline of white, European civilization. Gordon Baum, the group’s founder, died in March of 2015.3 To verify what might be possible to find in the post–Dylann Roof murders of nine African Americans, I too conducted a search of the term “black on white crimes.” In these search scenarios from August 3 and 5, 2015, in Los Angeles, California, and Madison, Wisconsin, NewNation.org was the first result, followed by a number of conservative, White-nationalist websites that foster hate toward African Americans and Jewish people.

This could lead to significantly greater transparency, rather than continuing to make the neoliberal capitalist project of commercial search opaque. 5 The Future of Knowledge in the Public Student protests on college campuses have led to calls for increased support of students of color, but one particular request became a matter of national policy that led to a threat to the Library of Congress’s budget in the summer of 2016. In February 2014, a coalition of students at Dartmouth College put forward “The Plan for Dartmouth’s Freedom Budget: Items for Transformative Justice at Dartmouth” (the “Freedom Plan”),1 which included a line item to “ban the use of ‘illegal aliens,’ ‘illegal immigrants,’ ‘wetback,’ and any racially charged term on Dartmouth-sanctioned programming materials and locations.” The plan also demanded that “the library search catalog system shall use undocumented instead of ‘illegal’ in reference to immigrants.” Lisa Peet, reporting for Library Journal, noted, The replacement of the subject heading was the culmination of a two-year grassroots process that began when Melissa Padilla, class of 2016, first noticed what she felt were inappropriate search terms while researching a paper on undocumented students at Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library in 2013.

Almost as soon as the successful change was approved, House Republicans introduced HR 4926 on April 13, 2016, also known as the “Stopping Partisan Policy at the Library of Congress Act,” sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-TN). In essence, the bill threatened the Library’s budget, and Black suggested that the effort to change the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) was a matter of “caving to the whims of left-wing special interests and attempting to mask the grave threat that illegal immigration poses to our economy, our national security, and our sovereignty.”7 The battle over how people are conceptualized and represented is ongoing and extends beyond the boundaries of institutions such as the Library of Congress or corporations such as Alphabet, which owns and manages Google Search.


pages: 753 words: 233,306

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

As I listened to my Dominican friends describing the situation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, I became astonished by the close parallels with the situation of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries in the United States. I heard those sentences about "jobs that Dominicans don't want," "low-paying jobs but still better than what's available for them at home," "those Haitians bring AIDS, TB, and malaria," "they speak a different language and look darker-skinned," and "we have no obligation and can't afford to provide medical care, education, and housing to illegal immigrants." In those sentences, all I had to do was to replace the words "Haitians" and "Dominicans" with "Latin American immigrants" and "American citizens," and the result would be a typical expression of American attitudes towards Latin American immigrants.

I picture the scene at Gardar as like that in my home city of Los Angeles in 1992 at the time of the so-called Rodney King riots, when the acquittal of policemen on trial for brutally beating a poor person provoked thousands of outraged people from poor neighborhoods to spread out to loot businesses and rich neighborhoods. The greatly outnumbered police could do nothing more than put up pieces of yellow plastic warning tape across roads entering rich neighborhoods, in a futile gesture aimed at keeping the looters out. We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar's chiefs and Los Angeles's yellow tape. That parallel gives us another reason not to dismiss the fate of the Greenland Norse as just a problem of a small peripheral society in a fragile environment, irrelevant to our own larger society.

The border between California and Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively against people from Central America seeking to immigrate here illegally in search of jobs and personal safety. Every month, one reads of would-be immigrants dying in the desert or being robbed or shot, but that does not deter them. Other illegal immigrants come from as far away as China and Central Asia, in ships that unload them just off the coast. California residents are of two minds about all those Third World immigrants seeking to come here to attain the First World lifestyle. On the one hand, our economy is utterly dependent on them to fill jobs in the service and construction industries and on farms.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Moreover, America’s refugee policy opened the floodgates to displaced capitalists whose entrepreneurial skills and ambitions clashed with Communist dogma. Vehement anti-Communists, these newcomers posed no threat to the nation’s prevailing ideology but instead reinforced the image of the United States as the world’s chief bulwark of capitalism. The illegal immigrants were for the most part desperately poor, compelled by economic necessity to defy the law. Because of their precarious legal status, they could be readily exploited by American employers, paid less than minimum wage, and forced to work in conditions that no native-born American would tolerate.

Between 1990 and 2000, the Mexican population of the Los Angeles area rose 44 percent, as compared with a 13 percent rise in the overall number of inhabitants.21 The long-standing heart of Mexican American settlement was East Los Angeles. Most of the newcomers to this area were poor, coming to the United States to better their economic condition. And many were illegal immigrants. Consequently, the old East Los Angeles barrio spreading eastward from Boyle Heights reflected the poverty of Mexico rather than the affluence that moviegoers associated with southern California. According to one observer from early 1990s, “In the bars and restaurants of Boyle Heights, bedraggled youngsters go from table to table pleading with people to buy novelties like those found in the stalls of Tijuana.

Moreover, the sight of successful, well-heeled “foreigners” cruising the streets in Mercedeses could prove disturbing to native-born residents who had never been able to rise one rung on the economic ladder and feared slipping even lower. Altogether, the strangeness of the newcomers could prove unsettling, and their success raised doubts that the fulfillment of the American dream was reserved only for Americans. FIGURE 6.4 Anti–illegal immigration billboard in Los Angeles. (Michael Edwards, Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library) Among non-Hispanic whites, anti-immigrant sentiment focused on the newcomers’ refusal to give up their native languages. Miami was the scene of one of the earliest English-only battles. In 1973 the Dade County Commission decided to adopt a bilingual policy, publishing official documents in both English and Spanish, hiring Spanish-speaking personnel to serve Hispanics, and posting signs that offered information in both languages.


pages: 385 words: 119,859

This Is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah

British Empire, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, gentrification, high net worth, illegal immigration, mass immigration, multicultural london english, out of africa, period drama, plutocrats, Skype, white flight, young professional

He was whimpering, and covered in bruises, when the Policeman finally cuffed him. ‘Me . . . I could understand where he is coming from. Man . . . I felt so bad. He was not gonna get away. He was not gonna get away from the dog unit. We thought it was drugs or maybe an illegal weapon. But he was an illegal immigrant. Which is why he saw police . . . and ran. I empathize with him. I’m human. I know where he is coming from. Y’know, I only hope he empathize with me. ‘He was a Nigerian.’ He noticed little things on his patrol. The crimes that were more daring, with a bit of punching or running, they were mostly done by the black boys.

Tree skeletons leered over the wet tarmac shimmering with light. The double-deckers glowed out against the night, their upper windows all steamed up with the cold. ‘Bruva, I cannot tell you how much I hate begging.’ There is a whole illegal city in London. This is where 70 per cent of Britain’s illegal immigrants are hiding. This is a city of more than 600,000 people, making it larger than Glasgow or Edinburgh. There are more illegals in London than Indians. Almost 40 per cent of them arrived after 2001. Roughly a third are from Africa. This is the hidden city: hidden from the statistics, hidden from the poverty rates, hidden from the hunger rates.

But the thing about lying well is knowing this is only the birth of your lie. The longer a lie lives the easier, and the lighter, it becomes. I turn off the motorway and loop round the roundabout into the worn low rise of Barking. The estate I am looking for curls into a winding close. My heart pumps. I am beginning my lie: I am a Russian illegal immigrant. I speak English – very bad. I wear the lie: my clothes are a tatty blue puffa with a fake fur rim, smelling strongly of detergent, a grey hoodie with a chewed sleeve and a hood too tight on my head, black scuffed Puma tracksuit bottoms and water-stained brown shoes. I repeat my lie time and time again in the car: I am here to work; but when they grow suspicious, I will take them into a bigger lie, that I am really a university educated asylum-seeker who is fleeing conscription for the frontlines in Ukraine.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The poverty she saw terrified her and stoked up a host of bigotries and stereotypes. But at some level she recognized how intricately her own story was tied up with that of the destitute people of whom she was so scared. Nowhere is the attempt to wall off the poor as having, somehow, separate narratives from the rest of us more overt than in the roiling politics around illegal immigration. Many observers have noted that starving public institutions of cash is a pastime that state electorates sign off on during times in which populaces are in flux. Smaller, more homogenous populations rarely vote to defund social safety nets and educational infrastructure that they see as benefiting mainly people culturally, linguistically, and racially more like themselves.

And as with southern Louisiana parishes and the racism of some of their residents, oftentimes the most extreme politics on immigration comes from people who live in close proximity to, and experience the daily presence of, undocumented populations. FIGHTING TALK In a televised debate in 2010, Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, author of the nation’s toughest anti–illegal immigration law, argued that the Constitution “does give the federal government the responsibility to protect the states from invasion. But it’s right also in the Constitution, it says, when there is an invasion the states have a right, even—even to declare war if you will, you know, they have a right to protect.

I’ll keep working while I can. My life scares me. I look at the people I work for and think about how I have seen some people treat them. I worry, because what will happen to me when I’m old? I want to study; I want to be a nurse. That’s my biggest dream. Dotted through the West and Southwest, illegal immigration encampments have been built up in recent years. Cumulatively, many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children now live in these communities. The buildings are basic: third-hand trailers; wooden, cardboard, and tin shacks. The amenities are improvised: some are hooked up to the power grid, water delivery systems, and sewage lines after the fact—a de facto acknowledgment by local counties of their existence, even absent zoning permits and ownership titles.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

For too long, Tanton wrote in a cover article for The Ecologist magazine, environmentalists had been overly focused on reducing the birth rate, allowing the “role of international migration in perpetuating39 population growth” to escape notice. The growing size of the human population “dwarfs the absorptive capacity of the few countries still willing to receive legal (and certainly illegal) immigrants,” he wrote. The only solution was to do as the bees did: evict the surplus and close the borders. The July 4, 1977, edition of the Washington Post landed with a thud on millions of doorsteps, with an explosive two-thousand-word exposé of India’s population control program40 on its front page.

European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Amsterdam, April 12, 2016. Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Lalami, Laila. “Who Is to Blame for the Cologne Sex Attacks?” Nation, March 10, 2016. Lam, Katherine. “Border Patrol Agent Appeared to Be Ambushed by Illegal Immigrants, Bashed with Rocks Before Death.” Fox News, November 21, 2017. Laughlin, H. Hamilton. The Second International Exhibition of Eugenics Held September 22 to October 22, 1921, in Connection with the Second International Congress of Eugenics in the American Museum of Natural History, New York: … Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1923.

the economic benefits contributed Julie Hirschfield Davis and Somini Sengupta, “Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees,” New York Times, September 18, 2017; “Fact Check: Trump’s First Address to Congress,” New York Times, February 28, 2017. overrepresented in federal crime statistics Salvador Rizzo, “Questions Raised About Study That Links Undocumented Immigrants to Higher Crime,” Washington Post, March 21, 2018; Alex Nowrasteh, “The Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr.’s Study of Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona,” Cato Institute, February 5, 2018; John R. Lott, “Undocumented Immigrants, US Citizens, and Convicted Criminals in Arizona,” 2018; Jonathan Hanen, Greater Towson Republican Club, Towson, Md., January 16, 2018. Biographical details from Jonathan Hanen’s public profile are on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-hanen-89a93715.


pages: 288 words: 85,073

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

But at the check-in counter, they are stopped by the airline staff from getting onto the plane. Why? Because of a European Council Directive from 2001 that tells member states how to combat illegal immigration. This directive says that every airline or ferry company that brings a person without proper documents into Europe must pay all the costs of returning that person to their country of origin. Of course the directive also says that it doesn’t apply to refugees who want to come to Europe based on their rights to asylum under the Geneva Convention, only to illegal immigrants. But that claim is meaningless. Because how should someone at the check-in desk at an airline be able to work out in 45 seconds whether someone is a refugee or is not a refugee according to the Geneva Convention?

Sweden did not confiscate the boats of those smuggling refugees from Denmark during the Second World War—see the BBC documentary “How the Danish Jews Escaped the Holocaust.” According to Goldberger (1987), 7,220 Danish Jews were saved by these boats. Today, EU Council[1] Directive 2002/90/EC defines “smuggler” as anyone facilitating illegal immigration, and an EU Council[2] framework decision allows “confiscation of the means of transport used to commit the offence.” While the Geneva Conventions say that many of these refugees have the right to asylum, see UNHCR. See gapm.io/p16 and gapm.io/tpref. CO2 emissions. Researchers are trying to figure out how to adjust emissions quotas for changing population sizes; see Shengmin et al. (2011) and Raupach et al. (2014).


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The trouble was that Mexico had earlier taken to issuing dollar-denominated debt (called tesobonos) to encourage foreign investment, and after the devaluation could not mobilize enough dollars to pay them off. The US Congress refused to help, but Clinton exercised executive powers to put together a $47.5 billion rescue package. He feared a loss of jobs in those US industries exporting to Mexico, the prospect of increasing illegal immigration, and, above all, the loss of legitimacy for neoliberalization and the NAFTA agreements. As a convenient side-effect of the devaluation, US capital could then rush in and buy up all manner of assets at fire-sale prices. While only one of the Mexican banks privatized in 1990 was foreign-owned, by 2000 twenty-four out of thirty were in foreign hands.

While too much can be made of the ‘race to the bottom’ to find the cheapest and most docile labour supplies, the geographical mobility of capital permits it to dominate a global labour force whose own geographical mobility is constrained. Captive labour forces abound because immigration is restricted. These barriers can be evaded only by illegal immigration (which creates an easily exploitable labour force) or through short-term contracts that permit, for example, Mexican labourers to work in Californian agribusiness only to be shamelessly shipped back to Mexico when they get sick and even die from the pesticides to which they are exposed. Under neoliberalization, the figure of ‘the disposable worker’ emerges as prototypical upon the world stage.19 Accounts of the appalling conditions of labour and the despotic conditions under which labourers work in the sweatshops of the world abound.

Rights cluster around two dominant logics of power—that of the territorial state and that of capital.43 However much we might wish rights to be universal, it is the state that has to enforce them. If political power is not willing, then notions of rights remain empty. Rights are, therefore, derivative of and conditional upon citizenship. The territoriality of jurisdiction then becomes an issue. This cuts both ways. Difficult questions arise because of stateless persons, illegal immigrants, and the like. Who is or is not a ‘citizen’ becomes a serious issue defining principles of inclusion and exclusion within the territorial specification of the state. How the state exercises sovereignty with respect to rights is itself a contested issue, but there are limits placed on that sovereignty (as China is discovering) by the global rules embedded in neoliberal capital accumulation.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

Internal pressure, particularly in the south, will divert Russian attention from the west and eventually, without war, it will break. Russia broke in 1917, and again in 1991. And the country's military will collapse once more shortly after 2020. CHAPTER 7 ——————————— AMERICAN POWER AND THE CRISIS OF 2030 Awall is being built along the southern border of the United States. The goal is to keep illegal immigrants out. The United States built its economic might on the backs of immigrants, but since the 1920s there has been a national consensus that the flow of immigrants should be limited so that the economy can absorb them, and to ensure that jobs will not be taken away from citizens. The wall along the Mexican border is the logical conclusion to this policy.

While NAFTA cut the cost of exports and increased the institutional efficiency of the relationship, the fundamental reality is that Mexico's proximity to the United States has always given it an economic advantage, despite the geopolitical disadvantage that goes with it. Third, there are massive amounts of cash flowing back to Mexico from the United States in the form of remittances from legal and illegal immigrants. Remittances to Mexico have surged and are now its second-largest source of foreign income. In most countries, foreign investment is the primary means for developing the economy. In Mexico, investment by foreigners is being matched by foreign remittances. This remittance system has two effects.

Some inhabitants will see themselves as primarily Americans. Others will accept that Americanism but see themselves as having a unique relationship to America and ask for legal recognition of that status. A third group, the smallest, will be secessionist. There will be an equal division within Mexico. One thing to remember is that illegal immigration will have generally disappeared after 2030, when migration to the United States will be encouraged as American national policy. Some on each side of the border will see the problem as solely American and will want to have nothing to do with it lest it interfere with peaceful economic relations with Mexico.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

When he asked under what authority the agent was operating, the agent pointed his weapon at the senator and said, “That’s all the authority I need.”11 The current intensification of border enforcement began in the early 1990s, under the Clinton administration, with the launching of Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, and Operation Safeguard in Arizona and the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). Within a few years, funding for what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) doubled, as did the number of Border Patrol officers. These operations represented the first real effort to close the southern border.12 It involved several new initiatives, including significantly increasing the amount of fencing, immediately deporting immigrants living in the US for a long list of major and minor criminal infractions, creating immigration courts in border areas to facilitate quicker processing and deportation of captured migrants, and creating a massive system for identifying migrants through biometric data collection.

Reforms While the inauguration of President Donald Trump withered much of the will to reform border policing, there are still efforts to rethink how we manage the need for migrant workers, who have become central to several parts of the American economy. Some argue for a return to a system of foreign worker authorization similar to the Bracero Program. While this program did reduce the flow of unauthorized immigration and created some regularized employment for Mexico’s poorest workers, it did not stem all illegal immigration and did little to improve the living standards of either American or Mexican workers. Part of the problem is that migrant workers are not limited to agricultural work; migrants work in a variety of construction, production, and service industries, including construction, food processing, domestic work, and cleaning.

Conner 19, 234n43 Grant, Melissa Gira 246n4 Grant, Oscar 1 Greene, Judith 254n13, 259n2 Greenwald, Glenn 212, 251n59, 258n41 Gurley, Akai 1 Hadden, Sally 237n31 Halstead Act 129, 131 Handschu v City of New York 207 Hari, Johann 132, 229, 248n6 Harm reduction 127–8, 150–2 Harris, David 234n47 Harris, Eric 1 Harris, Jason 1 Harrison, Jason 77 Hayes, Chris 27, 235n58 Herbert, Steve 16, 92–3, 229, 234n41, 243n1, 245n2 Hernandez, Kelly 177, 229, 253n3 Hernandez-Rojas, Anastasio 188 Herrnstein, Richard 6, 232n15 Hill, Anthony 1 Holiday, Billie 132 Homeless courts 101–2 Homestead strike 204 Hoover, J. Edgar 201–2, 205 Housing First 103–4 Howell, Babe 166, 252n17 Hoyt, Edwin Palmer 257n15 Human Rights Watch 212, 250n42, 258n42 Human Trafficking Intervention Court 120–1 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act 180, 183–4, 189 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 178, 182–5 Immigration and Naturalization Service 180 Immigration Movement International 196, 256n50 Immigration Restriction League 176 Implicit bias 7–8, 24, 68 Independent prosecutors 17–20 International Workers of the World (IWW) 205 Jacobins 36 Jaun Crow 44 Jim Crow 33, 47–8, 225 John schools 118–19 Johnson, Benjamin 236n27 Johnson, Hank 217 Johnson, Lyndon 14 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) 208–10 Jones, Reece 194, 230, 256n45 Justice League 55 Justice Reinvestment 224 Justice Strategies 147, 254n13, 259n2 Karp, David 252n27 Katz, Jack 253n20 Katzenbach report 14 Kelling, George 5, 231n12 Kempadoo, Kamala 246n5 Kennedy, David 167, 173, 252n19, 253n29 Kerner Commission 14, 50 Keunang, Charly Leundeu 95 King, Martin Luther 203, 206 King, Rodney 21, 159, 188 Klein, Malcolm 156, 230, 252n3 Klein, Naomi 256n3 Knapp Commission 117 Kohn, Alfi 70 Koval, Mike 87–8 Kraska, Peter 234n55 Ku Klux Klan 48 Kuzmarov, Jeremy 42, 236n22 Lager beer riots 38 Laker, Barbara 230, 248n16 Lambert, Bob 200 Lane, Roger 235n10 Latimer massacre 40 Law Enforcement against Prohibition 140 Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion 85–6 Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit 205 Leahy, Patrick 179 Legalization of alcohol 222; of drugs 152–3, 222; of gambling 222; of sex work 124, 222 Leone, Peter 74–5, 241n58 Levine, Harry 248n5, 250n41 Lewis, Paul 256n11 Lind, Dara 237n17 London Metropolitan Police 34–5, 36, 45, 199–200 Longmire, Sylvia 255n42 Lopez, Derek 66 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) 93–5, 137, 158–9, 169–70 Luddites 36 Mather, F.


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The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

This granted members of allegedly victimized identity groups unquestionable moral authority.42 Identity lay at the core of all systems of power, Crenshaw argued; the only way for those of victimized identity to gain freedom would be to form coalitions with other victimized groups in order to overthrow the dominant systems of power. The biggest problem with the intersectional coalition, however, remained practical rather than philosophical: the coalition was itself rift by cross-cutting internal divisions. Black Americans, for example, were no fans of same-sex marriage or illegal immigration—so how could a coalition of black Americans and gay Americans and Latino Americans be held together? And how could that coalition unite with enough white voters to win a majority again? Obama did so in his very person. Essentially, Obama used his own identity as the wedge point in favor of policies black Americans didn’t especially like—then used his popularity with black Americans in order to glue together the coalition.

Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights. Afraid of alienating Latino Americans, Democrats began treating the term Latino itself as insulting, instead embracing the little-known and little-used academic terminology, Latinx; more broadly, they advocated decriminalizing illegal immigration itself. As each intersectional demand grows more radical, however, the Democrats’ coalition is threatened. The renormalization of American politics that Democrats seek can only occur in the absence of majoritarian backlash. If, for example, a majority of Americans—including members of the Democratic coalition—said no to the radical transgender agenda, the coalition would have to choose between jettisoning transgender interest groups (perhaps fracturing the coalition) or losing the soft moderates who join their coalition (probably losing its slim majority in the process).

Josh Earnest, “President Obama Supports Same-Sex Marriage,” ObamaWhiteHouse.Archives.gov, May 10, 2012, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/05/10/obama-supports-same-sex-marriage. 44. Julia Preston and John H. Cushman Jr., “Obama to Permit Young Migrants to Remain in US,” NYTimes.com, June 15, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/16/us/us-to-stop-deporting-some-illegal-immigrants.html. 45. Shannon Travis, “Is Obama taking black vote for granted?,” CNN.com, July 13, 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/07/12/politics/obama-black-voters/index.html. 46. Rodney Hawkins, “Biden tells African-American audience GOP ticket would put them ‘back in chains,’” CBSNews.com, August 14, 2012, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-tells-african-american-audience-gop-ticket-would-put-them-back-in-chains/. 47.


How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee

carbon footprint, Etonian, illegal immigration, negative equity, off-the-grid, quantitative easing, Russell Brand

A drunken young man in a suit in the front row kept shouting that he didn’t want to hear about anything I had to say – admittedly voicing the feelings of most of the room – and that I should talk about illegal immigrants. ‘Talk about illegal immigrants,’ he grunted, ‘talk about fucking illegal immigrants.’ I decided to take a bold course of action and get him onstage and hand him the mic, probably having just read a biography of the erratically inspired American comic Andy Kaufman or some other dangerous piece of literature, to see what he came up with on the subject of illegal immigrants, while I watched from his now vacant seat. I knew it would be incoherent and awful, which it was, as he slurred and stammered about asylum-seekers and how they should be sent back, but my plan was to let the room boil in irritation and fade away, before flipping the mood with a perfectly chosen bon mot.


pages: 801 words: 242,104

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

As I listened to my Dominican friends describing the situation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, I became astonished by the close parallels with the situation of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries in the United States. I heard those sentences about “jobs that Dominicans don’t want,” “low-paying jobs but still better than what’s available for them at home,” “those Haitians bring AIDS, TB, and malaria,” “they speak a different language and look darker-skinned,” and “we have no obligation and can’t afford to provide medical care, education, and housing to illegal immigrants.” In those sentences, all I had to do was to replace the words “Haitians” and “Dominicans” with “Latin American immigrants” and “American citizens,” and the result would be a typical expression of American attitudes towards Latin American immigrants.

I picture the scene at Gardar as like that in my home city of Los Angeles in 1992 at the time of the so-called Rodney King riots, when the acquittal of policemen on trial for brutally beating a poor person provoked thousands of outraged people from poor neighborhoods to spread out to loot businesses and rich neighborhoods. The greatly outnumbered police could do nothing more than put up pieces of yellow plastic warning tape across roads entering rich neighborhoods, in a futile gesture aimed at keeping the looters out. We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar’s chiefs and Los Angeles’s yellow tape. That parallel gives us another reason not to dismiss the fate of the Greenland Norse as just a problem of a small peripheral society in a fragile environment, irrelevant to our own larger society.

The border between California and Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively against people from Central America seeking to immigrate here illegally in search of jobs and personal safety. Every month, one reads of would-be immigrants dying in the desert or being robbed or shot, but that does not deter them. Other illegal immigrants come from as far away as China and Central Asia, in ships that unload them just off the coast. California residents are of two minds about all those Third World immigrants seeking to come here to attain the First World lifestyle. On the one hand, our economy is utterly dependent on them to fill jobs in the service and construction industries and on farms.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

States (Asian, made up of US main- origin have multiplied tremendously in the last Nicaraguans and Salvadoreans, non Some retain a plural disposition about language, culture and identity like whose points of to, in dis- West among others. But New this phenome- ethnic enclaves in the United Indian, as well as Hispanic and/or Latino), refugees, exiles, legal and illegal immigrants, boat people, rafters and tourists, defy categories that have been ren- dered meaningless by hemispheric migratory pressures. The Latino in the US is, therefore, a particular distraction to the "American melting-pot" concept experience, and the "Cuban exile" modeled on white European ideology of national recon- quest, paradoxically (but perhaps only) kept alive ble split between an aging both myths, caudillo in Cuba and by an intracta- a transplanted ruling class that has thrived economically in the United States.

Perhaps this is are going to get As whites see their lives declining, will they Or will there be an up its their power go quietly into the 219 Such indiscrete ventings of white supremacism temporarily paralyzed anti-Spanish as a mainstream cause. In addition, many Republican strategists were appalled by Pete Wilson's scorched- MAGICAL URBANISM 122 earth tactics in California as he openly recruited the dregs of the Brown Invasion ("They Keep Com- militia fringe to help repel the ing - 2,000,000 Illegal Immigrants" intoned a notorious television ad endorsed by Wilson). was Ron Unz, financed his One of the governor's sharpest a whiz-kid millionaire critics PhD who 1994 when he took with a physics own emergence from obscurity in 30 percent of the Republican primary vote away from Wilson. Intellectually, Palo Alto-based Unz is the love-child of Mickey Kaus and Thomas Sowell, the New Republic and Commentary, not the traditional California right. to see them quickly He assimilated without undue in the marketplace of talent.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Ironically, while most of the recent efforts of the digerati have focused on liberating the data from closed databases, the focus of their future efforts may soon shift to squeezing the open data back in or at least finding ways in which to limit the mobility of that data. This is a particularly important problem for various ethnic minorities who suddenly find themselves under threat, as digitized information has publicly identified them in ways they could not anticipate. In Russia a local branch of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), the country’s powerful anti-immigration network, created a series of online mash-ups in which they put census data about various ethnic minorities living in the Russian city of Volgograd onto an online map. This was not done to get a better understanding of urban life in Russia but to encourage DPNI’s supporters to organize pogroms on those minorities.

“Globalization and National Governance: Antinomy or Interdependence?” Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 59-88. ———. “Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State.” New Left Review, no. 225 (1997): 3-27. ———. The Myth of the Powerless State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Zuev, D. “The Movement Against Illegal Immigration: Analysis of the Central Node in the Russian Extreme-Right Movement.” Nations and Nationalism 16, no. 2 (2010): 261-284. CHAPTER 10 Achterhuis, Hans, ed. American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. Translated by Robert P. Crease. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

See also Authoritarian governments; individual dictators Dictator’s dilemma Digital Orientalism “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (Rittel and Webber) Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union (Shane) Dissidents. See also Cyber-dissidents conference Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack Djukov, Alexander Dominguez, Ricardo Domino effect The Doors of Perception (Huxley) Doppelt, Gerald Doran, Michael Dörner, Dietrich Douglas, Susan Dow 36,000 (Glassman) DPNI. See Movement Against Illegal Immigration Dreazen, Yochi Dreyfus, Hubert Dunlap, Orrin Eastern Europe Eastern European Revolution Ebadi, Shirin Economics, and technology E-Darshan.org Efficiency Egerstad, Dan Egypt El Ghazzali, Kacem Elections “Elude the cat” episode Email address book Enclave extremism Encryption.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

The discussions are spirited, but it is a warm, convivial, garrulous bunch. For all that, however, one cannot escape a pervasive sense of anger and fear in the room that portends some encroaching, escalating and all-encompassing calamity. The list of sources for this fear seems endless: the media, illegal immigrants, gays, civil rights leadership, the judiciary, Democrats, liberals, establishment Republicans, China, government, schools, the coastal states in general, California in particular. Each place setting comes with a copy of the constitution: a sacred document being violated by the government. When I ask how many believe they are living in tyranny, they all raise their hands.

I ended up staying with a fantastic journalist in a plum location just by the Panthéon. This was less of a catch than it might have seemed. Few black people could afford to live there so whenever I went out I ran the risk of being stopped, searched and rifled for my papers. The assumption was that I was either an illegal immigrant, a thief or a burglar. Almost every day I would suffer this indignity at the hands of the state, and some days more than once. The humiliations were routine. Color bars in nightclubs meant that I needed white people to vouch for me. Standing in line at a taxi rank, I would wait my turn only for the driver to say he wouldn’t take me anywhere (my trip was from one part of central Paris to another).

“But minorities can.” In the US, there have long been spates of violent and sometimes fatal attacks against Latino day laborers who gather at certain locations around suburbs and cities in the early morning waiting for contractors and others to pick them up. “People see day laborers and they see a proxy for illegal immigration,” explains Amy Seymour, a lawyer with the Immigrant and Non-standard Worker Project. “If they have an anxiety about globalization or outsourcing and the precariousness in their working lives, they may look at day laborers and see them as embodying all the things that are making them anxious.”


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

David Card, “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market,” Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, August 1989), http://www.nber.org/papers/w3069. 29. Rachel M. Friedberg, “The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (2001): 1373–1408, doi:10.1162/003355301753265606. 30. Amy Sherman, “Jeb Bush Says Illegal Immigration Is ‘Net Zero,’ ” Miami Herald, September 3, 2012, http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/01/2980208/jeb-bush-says-illegal-immigration.html. 31. Gordon F. De Jong et al., “The Geography of Immigrant Skills: Educational Profiles of Metropolitan Areas,” Brookings Institution, June 9, 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2011/06/immigrants-singer. 32.

Despite this and other evidence, concerns persist in America that large-scale immigration of unskilled workers, particularly from Mexico and other Latin American countries and particularly by illegal means, will harm the economic prospects of the native-born labor force. Since 2007, it appears that net illegal immigration to the United States is approximately zero, or actually negative.30 And a study by the Brookings Institution found that highly educated immigrants now outnumber less educated ones; in 2010, 30 percent had at least a college education, while only 28 percent lacked the equivalent of a high school degree.31 Entrepreneurship in America, particularly in technology-intensive sectors of the economy, is fueled by immigration to an extraordinary degree.


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War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

Trump didn’t take long after bursting onto the stage to get to his main campaign messages: “They’re ripping the auto companies apart, they’re taking your jobs, they’re closing your plants, moving them to Mexico . . .” Bring back jobs from abroad—that was one of the three pillars of his pitch, the other two being the reduction of legal and illegal immigration and the cessation of foreign wars. Combined, these themes formed the message that Steve, then Trump’s campaign manager, believed could overcome almost any hurdle, including sensational demonstrations of sexism and racism. But the success of that plan hinged on the campaign’s ability to get their message to the right place and the right people.

The president took the next day to proclaim the entire week, by means of a presidential proclamation, National School Choice Week in recognition of nonpublic and charter schools. He also issued executive order 13767, “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements,” calling for the immediate construction of a physical wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico and the acceleration of processing and deportation of illegal immigrants. This was accompanied by a second executive order, 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” seeking to block federal funding for U.S. cities that deliberately limited the capability of the government to enforce immigration law (so-called sanctuary cities) and giving officials permission to initiate deportation proceedings against those only suspected of posing a safety risk.

That made it easier for him to converse with the other guests, and with me. * * * “IT BECAME SO THIN,” Steve says. “There was no resonance to the debate, it was—it didn’t mean anything. The Republicans never addressed trade, they never addressed jobs, they never addressed mass immigration, illegal immigration as taking away people’s sovereignty and taking away their jobs. They never discussed it. They had this very thin thing on tax cuts. It was, it’s what I call thin, with no human substance, no lifeblood. That’s what Trump provided. Trump provided a non-politically correct vernacular that hit the working class right in their . . .”


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Louis American, July 19, 2019, http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/guest_columnists/if-i-don-t-make-this-move-st-louis-is/article_b6dbe594-aa4e-11e9-af76-bf4ee9e9def4.html. 24.   Kim Bell, “Trump Blames Gangs of Illegal Immigrants for Woes in Ferguson, St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 25, 2016, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/trump-blames-gangs-of-illegal-immigrants-for-woes-in-ferguson/article_ab07521a-1426-5799-9908-00e3eeb5398b.html. 25.   Jamil Smith, “The Central Park Five Told Us Who Donald Trump Really Is,” MTV News, August 23, 2016, http://www.mtv.com/news/2922644/the-central-park-five-ad-told-us-who-donald-trump-really-is/. 26.   

* * * At the one-year anniversary of the Ferguson events, reporters began relaying the lies of a new commentator: presidential candidate Donald Trump. Speaking at an Iowa news conference, he proclaimed, “You know a lot of the gangs that you see in Baltimore and in St. Louis and Ferguson and Chicago, do you know they’re illegal immigrants? They’re here illegally,” Trump said. “And they’re rough dudes. Rough people.”24 Trump’s comments were not tethered to reality in any way. Undocumented immigrants make up less than 1 percent of the population of Missouri and the foreign-born population of Ferguson is 1.1 percent. Given that the Ferguson protests were filmed around the clock for months on end, one would think someone would have noticed the presence of roving immigrant gangs.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In many cases, original inhabitants never received official citizenship – it wasn’t until the 1960s that indigenous Australians were given citizenship of the land their ancestors discovered and inhabited for 60,000 years. In April 2021, Governor Kristi Noem tweeted: ‘South Dakota won’t be taking any illegal immigrants that the Biden Administration wants to relocate. My message to illegal immigrants … call me when you’re an American.’ Consider that South Dakota only exists because thousands of undocumented immigrants from Europe used the Homestead Act from 1860 to 1920 to steal land from Native Americans without compensation or reparations. This kind of exclusive attitude from a leader weakens the sense of shared citizenship among all, creating divisions between residents who are deemed to belong and those who are not.

Migrants to rich countries are less likely to be in receipt of benefits than natives, partly because they tend to be younger, healthier and motivated to stay in the country for work, returning to their country of origin before they are old enough to need social security payments. In many rich countries, migration controls mean they are prevented from even applying for benefits, and so ‘illegal’ immigrants often end up paying taxes but not seeking benefits for fear of discovery. In the US, social security paid by employers on behalf of migrants but never claimed by them swelled the US coffers by at least $20 billion over the 1990s alone. Meanwhile, Trump’s 2020 restrictions on work visas cost the US economy $100 billion.2 Overall, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates that immigrants pay at least as much in tax as they receive in benefits.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Another inevitable question to ask is the following: Is it reasonable to assume that in such a world the national borders of countries can remain closed for illegal immigrants, as some would like them to be? What will happen to the role of the state when or if immigration flows cannot be controlled, as has been happening to a large extent in European countries? As mentioned, to some extent, the control of national borders to protect a country from explicit foreign invasion or from uncontrolled illegal immigration was and remains the most fundamental role of the national state. Should we rethink that role? Ch apter 25 The Quality of the Public Sector and the Legal Framework In recent years some literature has focused on the quality of the public sector, as distinguished from the quantity and scope of the state’s economic actions.

The country was still settling in a new, immense territory, and few individuals lived in cities or especially in large cities. Therefore, many of the modern needs for the government’s role had not manifested themselves at that time, and those who wrote the Constitution could not have anticipated them. For example, the need to defend the borders from illegal immigrants, even at the cost of building a wall thousands of miles long, could not have been anticipated; neither could that of protecting the country against terrorists. Some conservatives continue to believe that rules that had spontaneously developed in communities in past centuries, for example, the “lex mercatoria,” the set of implicit rules that guided commercial exchanges in centuries past, could play important roles in, or even guide, today’s world in social and economic interactions among individuals.

By and large the literature has been more specific in suggesting what to do about these situations when they are internal to a country and when a national government has the power to act. It has been less specific, or it has been silent, on what to do when the situations concern several countries, or even the whole globe, as in the cases of global warming, the growing resistance of viruses to antibiotics, or illegal immigration. Although some problems of allocation can be dealt with by the use of regulations and taxes, or by free negotiations among market participants, others require public spending. Furthermore, problems connected with the working of public sectors make some of the theoretical solutions now available not always practical to implement.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

To his list can be added a further set of perplexing global problems: the threat of new trade wars and the international political tensions they will foster; a rising number of failing states and the cross-border problems they spawn; the struggle between nations to gain control of natural resources, in particular oil and food; the renewed strength of authoritarian regimes and ideologies that threaten to clash with the democratic world; cross-border flows of refugees and illegal immigrants; and the growing power of international organized crime in places such as Mexico and the Balkans. Even if tensions between a wounded West and a rising Asia can be contained, the relative weakening of the United States makes it significantly less likely that the world will be able to find solutions to these festering international problems.

But high unemployment and a fear of Muslim immigration have largely persuaded Europe to call a halt. The prospects of Turkey fulfilling its longstanding ambition to “join Europe” seem to be receding year by year as European politicians shrink from the implications of adding a Muslim nation of some 70 million people to their Union. Anger about illegal immigration continues to rise in the United States, which is currently thought to play host to over 12 million illegals. That anger is reflected in the popularity of the antimigrant campaigns of Lou Dobbs, the former television host, in books such as Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, and in controversial new laws, such as Arizona’s statute requiring the police to check the papers of suspected illegal migrants.

Anti-immigration parties have made serious headway in several European countries, including France, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, and, most spectacularly, the once famously liberal Netherlands. European Union leaders have responded to a more fearful public mood by increasingly portraying the outside world in threatening terms: railing against cheap Asian goods and illegal immigrants. Both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have called for a “Europe that protects.” A European Union that more than doubled in size between 1995 and 2004 is now much more cautious about further expansion. But while the Europeans may look fearfully at the outside world, the real threat to the vaunted “European model” may lie within.


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

JSM people were already contracted to raise signatures for a conservative ballot initiative, Protect Arizona Now, that would deny public services to illegal immigrants. JSM agreed to collect signatures for Nader in Arizona. The Nader campaign paid two dollars per signature. It appears that the JSM people were sent out with both the Protect Arizona Now and Nader petitions on their clipboards, and theyencouraged people to sign both without worrying overmuch about whether that made any sense. It didn't make any sense. In the June issue of The American Conservative, Nader's former opponent Pat Buchanan asked him point blank whether illegal immigrants should be eligible for welfare. Nader answered that undocumented aliens "should be given all the fair-labor standards and all the rights and benefits of American workers, and if this country doesn't like that, maybe they will do something about the immigration laws."

But, he admitted, "I don't know if they're doing it for me or as a tactic against Bilbray:' The mystery was solved when ads touting Griffith began running on conservative talk radio, saying in part: Think lobbyist Brian Bilbray's a conservative when it comes to immigration? Think again ... Lobbyist Bilbray isn't the candidate to secure our borders. You have a choice. Independent William Griffith is en- 121 GAMING THE VOTE dorsed by the San Diego Minutemen and San Diego Border Alert because he opposes guest worker programs, amnesty, and the hiring of illegal immigrants. Francine Busby supports John McCain's position on immigration-stronger enforcement at the border, better support for border agents, and no amnesty. When it comes to immigration, don't expect lobbyist Brian Bilbray to fix Washington, or fix our borders. I'm Francine Busby, candidate for Congress, and I approve this message.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

There is a real question how many of those 2.8 billion men, women, and children living in states classed as free are in any meaningful sense themselves, individually, free. The great twentieth-century liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin always insisted, against the Marxists of his time, that we keep two things distinct: freedom is freedom, poverty is poverty. Everything is what it is and not another thing. But plainly the unemployed Moroccan illegal immigrant I met one sultry evening in the Lavapies neighborhood of Madrid—“I live,” he told me, “like a wolf”—is not free in the sense that I and you, if you have the money, education, and leisure to read this book, are free. “Are the poor free?” is one of the most pressing questions facing us, the free, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Could we stand aside as an anti-American Europe clashed with an anti-European America? If Britain was unable to remain indifferent to the balance of power on the European continent in the nineteenth century, or to the continental clashes of fascism and communism in the twentieth, how could it in the twenty-first? And the illegal immigrants, terrorists, and economic shocks coming from an unreformed near East will not stop at the white cliffs of Dover. Yet even if this strategy for an offshore Greater Switzerland were sustainable, a further question would remain: is this who we want to be? It’s one thing—and a fine thing—for the Swiss to be Swiss.

I have argued in the first part of this book that unless we bring more prosperity and freedom to young Arabs, even more young Arabs will come to us. This formula applies also to Turkey, the Balkans, the new eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova), the Caucasus, and Russia, all of them being, in different degrees, sources of legal and illegal immigration, political radicalism, and organized crime. I’ve suggested that we should pursue the E.U.’s classic “politics of induction” toward Turkey, the Balkans, and the new eastern Europe, in a time frame of twenty years. For the rest of our “near abroad,” stretching 10,000 kilometers along our southern and eastern borders, we need to craft a new kind of partnership which does not involve the promise—or even the flirted ankle—of full membership.


pages: 301 words: 97,199

Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Mexican Migrants by Ted Conover

illegal immigration, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

If things were going according to plan, we were somewhere near the Rio Grande, and would soon be ferried across to the United States. But, if they disbelieved the story I had invented and still suspected I was an undercover cop, then ... anything could happen. I was an unlikely client. Blond haired and blue eyed, I was in Mexico as a journalist, researching what illegal immigration to the States means to Mexicans. It had not been my plan, when I boarded a northbound bus in central Mexico, to cross the Rio Grande this way. But then I met Alonso. He was on his way to the border. Sitting next to him I realized that, with a partner lined up, I too might sneak across the border.

Here international corporations, taking advantage of cheap labor and few unions, had constructed numerous giant maquiladoras—assembly plants, for the most part, using materials brought in duty-free from the United States (such as textiles and electronics components) and then exported back to the States with duty levied only on the value added by the work done in Mexico. The relative ease with which a Mexican, male or female, could find work in the border towns was a main reason that these towns, contrary to what many Americans thought, were not large generators of illegal immigrants to the States. Those who crossed, as studies have shown, typically began their journeys in poorer regions far to the south. “What if you can’t find a job, though?” I asked. Alonso seemed to me to travel on distressingly slim resources, without a great deal of forethought, with faith in what seemed the questionable belief that something would turn up.

“The United States,” wrote Nathan Glazer in 1985, “remains the permanently unfinished country.” I was not selective about the Mexicans I chose to include in this story—no chapter was censored that included ones I met who were less desirable. These are the guys. They’re not perfect, but the majority would make good neighbors; I’d welcome them as mine. I found the illegal immigration monster to be the sort that’s less scary up close than it is from a distance. Immigration, you could say, is America’s history book. This is the latest chapter, and I am left eager, not frightened, to see what comes next. About the Author Born in Okinawa and raised in Colorado, Ted Conover now lives in New York City, where he is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University.


pages: 282 words: 28,394

Learn Descriptive Cataloging Second North American Edition by Mary Mortimer

California gold rush, clean water, corporate governance, deskilling, illegal immigration, machine readable, Norman Mailer

Some of the factors that affect the decision on the fullness of a bibliographic description include • library priorities • importance of an item to the collection • relative value of an item • volume of incoming material • availability and experience of staff to process the material • needs of the user. An example of first level: From welcomed exiles to illegal immigrants. - Rowman & Littlefield, c1996. - xxii, 168 p. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0847681483 An example of second level: From welcomed exiles to illegal immigrants : Cuban migration to the U.S., 1959-1995 / by Felix Roberto Masud-Piloto. - Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, c1996. - xxii, 168 p. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0847681483 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0847681491 (pbk. : alk. paper) Third level would include all elements in AACR2 that are applicable to the item in hand.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

When Ludmila first succeeded in escaping, she was handed back to her pimp by the duty sergeant, who happened to be a client of the brothel. In response, she was beaten senseless by her “owner.” The second time she got away, she handed herself in to a police station in another part of town. As is habitual, she was charged with being an illegal immigrant and thrown in a detention center for several months as her deportation order was processed. When she finally arrived back in Chisinau, destitute and traumatized for life, Ludmila could not return to her home, partly for reasons of shame but above all for fear of being found by her traffickers.

Lao was the most powerful and successful criminal businessman ever arrested in Brazil. But within a few months of his initial incarceration, Roberto Porto, investigator at the Chinese organized crime unit of the São Paulo police, noticed something happening. “Most of the Chinese working in the markets of São Paulo are illegal immigrants. They are unprotected, and the last thing on their mind is to go to the police—they think as soon as they do, they’ll be deported,” he said. “So Lao Kin Chong gave them protection.” In São Paulo’s Chinese community, Lao was the state and the police. “When Lao was arrested two years ago,” Porto continued, “everyone lost their protection.”

In the United States, the Department of Justice floated an idea of offering an amnesty to illegal Chinese immigrants who would testify against the snakeheads. “When the DOJ came to me with this idea,” explained Professor Ko-lin Chin in New Jersey, “I said, ‘You’ve gotta be crazy!’ These snakeheads are regarded as heroes by the illegal immigrants. They pay the fee quite happily—there is no coercion. The snakeheads are heroes, not villains. The last thing the migrants want to do is turn these people in—they want to thank them!” We will never know what Lin Guohua thought of the snakehead who flew him to Belgrade. The Serbian capital witnessed the fastest growth of any Chinatown in the world during the late 1990s, despite Serbia’s status at the time as an international pariah.


pages: 539 words: 151,425

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

8 * * * The fortnight-long visit furnished Gillette with plenty of ammunition that he could use on his return to the US. Although the British had denied his request to meet convicted Jewish terrorists in prison, and close surveillance prevented him from meeting the leaders of the Irgun, he saw in Haifa harbour the vessels used by the British to deport arriving illegal immigrants to Cyprus. Decrying them as ‘slave ships’, he wrote in a press release, ‘The African ships I read about as a boy were something I would not believe to be repeated in the 20th century.’9 On his return home Gillette flew to address the League’s West Coast branch in Los Angeles, spoke on the radio in Chicago, and addressed further public meetings in Philadelphia and New York.

Four days later they bombed the British Officers’ Club in Jerusalem, across the road from the Jewish Agency and inside the supposedly secure zone the British army had expanded after the King David Hotel bombing. Thirteen people died, while sixteen more were injured.17 The location of the latest bombing showed that the British were losing the battle. Terrorism was now out of hand; so too was illegal immigration. Thanks to fundraising by organisations like Kook’s American League, Jewish immigrants were now coming to Palestine in bigger, faster ships. By the end of 1946 British intelligence had identified twenty vessels that were ready to transport refugees from European ports, and a later assessment stated that nearly twenty more were probably being prepared to make the same journey.18 During the war the British had been able to board and take over any ship they wanted to.

With the captain radioing a running commentary to sympathisers on the shore, British sailors boarded in order to take control of the ship, killing the American first mate and two passengers in the process; the destroyers then towed the now listing vessel into port. As there was no longer any space in the internment camp on Cyprus where the British had previously housed illegal immigrants, the British government had decided to resort to the old practice of ‘refoulement’, or return to origin. The passengers were disembarked by armed British soldiers at Haifa and made to board three ships waiting to take them back to France. They ‘looked as though they had been through a major battle,’ reported an American newspaper correspondent.24 By now the UN Special Committee was in Palestine.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

When Farage and his colleagues debated the best name for their party in the 1990s, they rejected the word British since it overlapped with the overtly racist British National Party. Farage refers to the BNP as the ‘Bloody Nasty Party’.32 He pointed out that many of UKIP’s potential voters were old enough to remember the Second World War and had a lifelong allergy to fascism. When Theresa May, then Home Secretary, set up a pilot scheme to round up illegal immigrants, he criticised her methods as ‘nasty’ and ‘not the British way’. UKIP is officially opposed to ‘unlimited mass immigration’. But for the most part, it has focused on stopping Britain from turning into ‘a province of the United European superstate’. Only during the Brexit campaign did the party endorse overt xenophobia with its ‘breaking point’ poster showing hordes of Muslim immigrants streaming across the border.

In some cases, such as the US, it is falling into a kind of hybrid pluto-populism that looks increasingly Latin American. Donald Trump’s plans to deregulate Wall Street are a perfect illustration. Having railed against its greed on the campaign trail, he is now loosening the restraints on it in office. In the meantime, he plans to satisfy the populist urge by demonising illegal immigrants and Muslims, and indulging in theatre politics. Trump will operate as a kind of Ku Klux Kardashian, combining hard-right pugilism with the best of postmodern vaudeville. It is as though the French Bourbons have come back to life as twenty-first-century neoliberals. They never learn. No matter what the challenge, cake and cheap diversion is the answer.


pages: 135 words: 53,708

Top 10 San Diego by Pamela Barrus, Dk Publishing

California gold rush, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, East Village, El Camino Real, G4S, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Silicon Valley, the market place, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

Turn right on 1st. It’s a straight stretch back to the Market Place. Around Town – Southern San Diego As the endangered Western snowy plover seeks a place in which to lay her fragile eggs, the green-and-white vehicles of the US Border Patrol swoop down hillsides, lights blazing, in search of the illegal immigrant. An enormous, rusty, corrugated metal fence, which separates the US and Mexico, slices through the park before plunging into the sea. This southern part of the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (see p47) attracts nature lovers who come to hike, ride horses, picnic on the beach, and birdwatch.

If you are in any way associated with an accident, your vehicle will be impounded and you will be arrested until liability is sorted out. Protect yourself by buying a policy before driving over the border. Coyotes & Narcotraficantes Coyotes, sometimes called polleros or chicken keepers, smuggle illegal immigrants over the border. A clampdown in San Diego has forced the crossings into the desert, where death by heatstroke is common. Narcotraficantes, or drug smugglers, thrive along the border with the local drug cartel. sewer leaks are common. Especially hardhit beaches are Imperial Beach and Border Field State Park.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

M. Aiello, N. Djuric, V. Radosavljevic, and K. Lerman (2017) Analyzing Uber’s ride-sharing economy, in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference, ACM Press. 4. K. Bryan (2019) Deliveroo and Uber Eats takeaway riders rent jobs to ‘illegal immigrants’. The Times. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/deliveroo-and-uber-eats-takeaway-riders-rent-jobs-to-illegal-immigrants-ml36gvp93. 5. M. Perry (2000) Bread and work: social policy and the experience of unemployment, 1918–39. Pluto Press, p. 103. 6. A. Marotta and L. Hughes (2018) Rebellion at the LSE: a cleaning sector inquiry. Notes from Below. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/rebellion-lse-cleaning-sector-inquiry. 7.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

For example, the EU’s border agency Frontex, whose headquarters are in Warsaw—the first EU agency to be based in one of the accession states—had trouble finding suitable job candidates. Lower salary levels in Poland, even for EU employees, made recruitment difficult, thereby threatening to undermine efforts to curb illegal immigration. These problems sparked concerns among some eastern Europeans that they were being treated unequally by their western counterparts and that a two-tier Europe of border controls was coming into existence. To be sure, the need to ensure uniform standards of public security within the Union was brought home by the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, which were planned in Hamburg and other parts of the EU.

The Spanish state recognizes Catholicism as the country’s official religion but affords Islam special privileges. These include the teaching of the Qur’an in schools and observation of Muslim religious holidays. Due to its geographical position, Spain has become a primary entry point for African migrants to Europe. In 2006, it was reported that close to 20,000 illegal immigrants had arrived from Africa to the Canary Islands alone. About onethird of all Africans are Muslim, so Spain’s Islamic culture may be becoming less exclusively Moorish. The country with the largest Muslim population in old Europe is France. About 70 percent originate in the north African states of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

But it was not just Le Pen anymore who expressed anti-foreigner sentiments. In the runoff to the 2007 presidential elections, both candidates appealed to the French-French vote. Winner Nicolas Sarkozy proudly pointed to his record as interior minister when he was responsible for expelling tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from France. In 2005, he had attacked the “scum” living in ethnic Arab and Muslim neighborhoods who took part in three weeks of violent protests about living conditions. His electoral promise was to establish a ministry of immigration and national identity that would oversee the propagation of French secular values among all immigrants.


Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris

big-box store, call centre, David Sedaris, desegregation, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, remote working, stem cell

Someone got my license plate number as I was taking off, and the next thing I know, I’m in jail with one charge of second-degree manslaughter and three charges of first-degree murder! Plus the hit-and-run bit. And all because some high-and-mighty legislators in New York State thought they knew better than the rest of us! Of course, if I was gay they’d probably let me off, so I tried kissing my cell mate, an illegal immigrant named Diego Rodríguez, if you can believe it. And I’m here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it’s really not that bad. Understanding Understanding Owls Does there come a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself, I’ve got to weed out some of these owls?

Both Miles and Todd are familiar with protest marches, mostly from their misguided college days, but as my son said, “Walking is walking, Mom, and whether you’re for torture or against it, you’re going to need to drink lots of water. That’s rule number one: Stay Hydrated! You’ll also need some good, comfortable shoes and a hat that’ll keep the sun off your face.” I got a sombrero and hung tea bags off the brim, but Todd said it sent a mixed message, like I supported illegal immigration—which I don’t! He said it was better to wear this cone-shaped thing, a wimple, he called it, though it looked to me more like a dunce cap. He said, “Mom, please. A little sophistication!” I said, “How will it keep the sun off my face?” So he added a visor to the front of it. As for the writing that runs top to bottom, it might look like ASSHOLE, but it’s actually A.S.S.H.O.L.E., which stands for: Another Savvy Senior Hopes Obama Loses Everything That might sound harsh, but it’s how I feel.


pages: 555 words: 163,712

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, computer age, defense in depth, European colonialism, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, plutocrats, Scientific racism, undersea cable

Wilson, general: “number one” for Palestine in the Special Operations Executive Henry Maitland (“Jumbo”) Wilson: general, commander of British Troops in Egypt, later of the Ninth Army NEW ZEALAND General Bernard Freyberg: commander of New Zealand forces in North Africa POLAND Marian Rejewski: codebreaker Jerzy Rozycki: codebreaker Henryk Zygalski: codebreaker FRANCE Gustave Bertrand alias Godefroy: army officer, director of cryptological services in French military intelligence Pierre Koenig: general, Free French commander in North Africa Philippe Petain: leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime after France’s surrender to Germany Susan Travers: British-born Free French soldier, Koenig’s driver EGYPT Abdul Rahman Azzam: politician, diplomat, and cabinet minister Kemal el Din: prince and explorer, cousin of Farouk Farouk: king from 1936 Fouad: king, father of Farouk Hassan Gaafar: half brother of Johann Eppler Abbas Halim: prince, cousin of Farouk Nevine Abbas Halim: princess, daughter of Abbas Halim, cousin of Farouk Ahmed Hassanein: explorer, later diplomat, mentor of Farouk, chamberlain of the royal household, and head of the royal cabinet Ali Maher: politician, adviser to Farouk, prime minister Aziz el-Masri: military figure, mentor to Farouk, briefly army chief of staff Khaled Mohi El Din: army officer Mustafa Nahas: leader of the Wafd party, prime minister Gamal Abdel Nasser: army officer Nazli: queen, wife of Fouad, mother of Farouk Antonio Pulli: Italian-born palace electrician, Farouk’s close confidant and reputed procurer Anwar al-Sadat: signals officer Ernesto Verucci: Italian-born architect at the royal court, confidant of Farouk Youssef Zulficar: Farouk’s father-in-law, ambassador to Persia PALESTINE Yisrael Galili: socialist Zionist political and military figure Eliahu Gottlieb: German-born soldier in the British Special Interrogation Group, SIG Hajj Amin el-Husseini: exiled former mufti of Jerusalem Moshe Shertok: head of the political department of the Jewish Agency Maurice Tiefenbrunner: German-born illegal immigrant to Palestine, soldier in the British Special Interrogation Group, SIG IRAQ Rashid Ali al-Gailani: politician: prime minister after 1941 coup, afterward in exile GERMANY Werner Best: deputy to Heinrich Himmler Wilhelm Canaris: commander of the Abwehr Hans Entholt: actor, later junior officer, lover of Laszlo Almasy Johann Eppler, alias Hussein Gaafar: Abwehr agent Erwin Ettel: ambassador to Iran, afterward Middle East expert in Foreign Office Hermann Göring: senior Nazi figure with multiple positions, confidant and personal envoy of Hitler Reinhard Heydrich: head of the Gestapo and the SD, later of the RSHA Heinrich Himmler: head of the SS Adolf Hitler: the Führer, Nazi dictator of Germany Albert Kesselring: Luftwaffe field marshal, commander of German forces in the Mediterranean Franz von Papen: German ambassador to Turkey Walther Rauff: SS officer, inventor of the mobile gas chamber Joachim von Ribbentrop: foreign minister Nikolaus Ritter: Abwehr officer Erwin Rommel: general, later field marshal, commander of Axis forces in North Africa Heinrich Gerd Sandstede, alias Sandy, Peter Muncaster: Abwehr agent Alfred Seebohm: army officer, commander of frontline signal intelligence company under Rommel ITALY Pietro Badoglio: field marshal, governor-general of Libya, army chief of staff Italo Balbo: prominent Fascist, aviator, air marshal, governor-general of Libya Ettore Bastico: general, nominal commander in chief in Libya Ugo Cavallero: field marshal, army chief of staff after Badoglio Galeazzo Ciano: foreign minister, son-in-law of Mussolini Italo Gariboldi: general, briefly commander in Libya after Graziani Rodolfo (“the Butcher”) Graziani: general and vice governor of Libya; later field marshal and commander of Italian forces that invaded Egypt Orlando Lorenzini: officer in Libya Pietro Maletti: general, commander of an army group in Libya Serafino Mazzolini: ambassador in Egypt Paolo Monelli: war correspondent Benito Mussolini: the Duce, Fascist dictator of Italy Umberto Piatti: general and landowner in Libya Manfredi Talamo: commander of the paramilitary Carabinieri’s counterespionage center and of its Removal Section, the P Squad HUNGARY Laszlo Almasy: explorer, aviator, later officer in the German army in North Africa Gyula Gömbös: fascist and anti-Semitic politician, premier 1932–1936 Laszlo Pathy: honorary consul in Egypt INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY AGENCIES Abwehr: German military intelligence B-Dienst: German Navy signal intelligence GC&CS: Government Code and Cipher School, British signal intelligence GCHQ: Government Communications Headquarters, previously GC&CS ISLD: Inter-Services Liaison Department, MI6 station in Cairo MI5: British domestic security and counterintelligence MI6: British overseas intelligence, officially the Secret Intelligence Service OKW/Chi: German High Command signal intelligence OP-20-G: US Navy signal intelligence RSHA: Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Nazi roof body of the SS, Gestapo, and police SD: Sicherheitsdienst, Nazi Party intelligence bureau Sezione Prelevamento: Removal Section (P Squad) of Italian counterintelligence, responsible for thefts from foreign embassies SIG: Special Interrogation Group, German-speaking British commando unit SIM: Servizio Informazioni Militari, Italy’s Military Information Service SIME: Security Intelligence Middle East, British counterintelligence in the Middle East SIS: Signal Intelligence Service, US Army signal intelligence SOE: Special Operations Executive, British agency responsible for training and directing partisans in Axis-occupied countries SS: Schutzstaffel, feared Nazi security, combat, and genocide force that grew out of Hitler’s personal guard Note on Names and Spellings NAMES OF PLACES and countries are given in the form common at the time of the events.

“We are not interested in American traffic,” Denniston answered, “and do not want it at all.”31 Churchill had promised to stop eavesdropping on America. Denniston was very definite that the promise was real. ELIAHU GOTTLIEB TALKED his way into the British army in February 1942, at a recruitment office in Haifa, on his third attempt. His story that time was that he was nineteen years old, that he had reached Palestine in 1938 on an illegal immigration boat, and that he’d had to leave his parents behind in Germany. The part about being from Germany was true. He was seventeen. He’d been born in Berlin, where his name was Ernst. His parents had brought him to Palestine in November 1933. He’d tried signing up the first time in Jerusalem when the war broke out, soon after his fifteenth birthday.

American Jewish Yearbook 5707 (1946–47) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 5707/1946), 609, www.ajcarchives.org/ajc_data/files/1946_1947_13_statistics.pdf (accessed November 24, 2019). The figures for Palestine, based on government calculations, do not include significant illegal immigration. 30. The message itself, CX/MSS/1122/T9, is in HW 5/105 with the key indicated and in HW 1/676 with Churchill’s question. The latter file contains Menzies’s answer, C/9871, June 29, 1942. Menzies wrote that leakage would end “as from 25th July”; in context, July is clearly a typographic error, and the intent is June. 31.


pages: 359 words: 113,847

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

If the Wall was not under way by the midterm elections in November, it would show Trump to be false and, worse, weak. The Wall needed to be real. The absence of the Wall in the spending bill was just what it seemed to be: Trump out to lunch. Trump’s most effective message, the forward front of the Trump narrative—maximal aggression toward illegal immigrants—had been muted. And this had happened without him knowing it. * * * The night of the twenty-second, the Fox News lineup—Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity—hammered the message: betrayal. The battle was on. The Republican leadership on the Hill, along with the donor class, stood sober and pragmatic in the face of both political realities and the prospect of unlimited billions in government spending—with, certainly, no illusions that Mexico was going to pay for the Wall.

But Hannity was sanguine: he believed his future was with Trump, and soon after Trump’s inauguration he began telling people that he was staying at Fox only to “fight for Donald J. Trump.” This was a programming approach—abject fealty to Donald Trump—that, buttressed by obsessive warnings about the evils of illegal immigration, suddenly turned Hannity into cable gold. Carlson, a former magazine writer, had migrated to Fox via CNN and MSNBC, where he had struggled in the role of the young old-fogey conservative in a bow tie. As liberal channels shut down even their token conservative voices, he met a predictable end.

Anybody entering the United States illegally will be arrested and detained, prior to being sent back to their country! Bannon had focused Hannity on the caravan story, and now Hannity had focused the president. For Trump and his most dedicated confederates there was only one truly reliable issue: illegal immigration. In Trump’s short political history, the issue had never failed to inspire and activate core voters. The caravan was a Trump-Fox-Bannon play. Every other part of the Republican spectrum was all but writing off the party’s ability to hold the House. But the Trump-Fox-Bannon alliance held a different view, and their October surprise was to double down on their most potent issue.


pages: 251 words: 69,245

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, colonial rule, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Gini coefficient, high net worth, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, open borders, Pareto efficiency, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, Simon Kuznets, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Lampedusa is only one of those European camps. A similar camp, Hal Far, exists in Malta—a camp where African refugees had to hang a huge banner reading “We are humans!” to attract passersby’s attention to the people living there cordoned off by the barbed wire.3 In Spain, which every year expels around 100,000 illegal immigrants, the government has to deal with an even more macabre problem: what to do with the dead bodies of the harraga when they float to the beaches and in midsummer scare off tourists who have come to forget all their daily worries on the beaches of southern Spain? The Spanish government has recently asked the Algerian government to take more than 170 bodies that have thus far been found.

For Italy, see Banca d’Italia, Relazione annuale sul 2008, May 29, 2009, chap. 11, table 11.4, p. 128, available at http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/relann/rel08/rel08it/. 3 See David Blanchflower and Chris Shadforth, “Fear, Unemployment, and Migration,” Economic Journal (February 2009): table 17, p. F157. 4 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, based on the estimated increase in Mexican illegal immigrants between 2000 and 2005 (1.3 million). 5 The total number of people killed while trying to cross the Berlin Wall was around two hundred during its twenty-seven-year existence. On an annual basis, the number of Mexican deaths is thus fifty times greater. 6 BBC, July 2, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6228236.stm.


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Mobility between national states, on the other hand, is regarded as ‘migration’ and subjected to major restrictions. At the border posts, ‘desirable flexibility’ thus turns into ‘undesirable migration’, and people who do what is so much demanded within individual countries find themselves being criminalized. They are ‘economic refugees’, ‘asylum-seekers’ or ‘illegal immigrants’, who put themselves in the hands of ‘human traffickers’ – a task discharged within each country by the official employment exchange. How can citizens who believe in universalist values and rights become, within a transnational dimension, enemies of the very mobility for which they insistently call inside their own country?

By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle-class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what was in colonial times called the Republic of Indians – the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Michoacan, Guerrero, Puebla, Chihuaha and Sonora, all known today as el México profundo: deep Mexico.69 And Ludger Pries reports that in Puebla, Mexico's fourth largest city with a population of roughly 2 million, when you ride in a taxi and talk to the driver, you can hear life-stories that sound strange to Western ears. It is not at all untypical that the taxi-driver used to be formerly employed as a lorry driver or had been an illegal immigrant in the United States, or even earned his living on the assembly-line at Volkswagen de México. He will then give this or that reason why he ‘voluntarily’ gave up that work situation, bought himself a second-hand Volkswagen Beetle from his severance pay, and set out to work as a taxi-driver ‘on his own account’.


Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

In Waukegan, for instance, the local government considered police officer training to initiate deportation for illegal immigrants. This proposal was met with strong protest from the local immigrant community. 68 / Chapter 5 Laws concerning day-labor sites, language, rental housing, and law enforcement have been introduced by local suburban governments across the country. These laws attempt to either curb immigration or to drive immigrants out. In the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the suburbs of Prince William County in Virginia were recently caught up in a controversy about illegal immigration. County officials advocated checking the immigration status of anyone using public services, such as schools, libraries, and swimming pools.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

There was truth to the claim that the Greek system failed to adequately provide for the surge in asylum seekers living in the community, and this failure had inevitably led to fear and paranoia. “Political asylum is fine—we should help people from Syria and other places that really need our help; but illegal immigrants must be rejected,” Stathis argued. “Illegal invaders must be sent back, and we must sign a new agreement with the EU and Turkey. Areas of Athens are now [violent ghettos] filled with immigrants.” He dreamed of the Greek people giving Golden Dawn a majority at a future election. He knew that one of the ways this could happen was through a party program such as talking to employers, encouraging them to fire immigrants and then hire local Greeks at the same rate of pay.

If you ask every leader in Europe what they were doing forty years ago you may find some interesting stories, too.” During my time in Greece barely a day passed without new and recent photographs in the media of Golden Dawn members mimicking Nazi iconography. Panagiotaros wanted the EU to operate “a strict immigration policy,” because “illegal immigration is mostly Muslim jihadists who plan to overtake Europe. If Syrians, Libyans, or Iraqis need to go somewhere they should go to the US, the country that caused the wars in their countries. Let the US take these people in.” Panagiotaros claimed to be against rampant privatization, despite the record of his party in parliament backing moves to outsource state services.

Detention Watch Network issued a report in 2013 that examined 250 facilities across the country, many of which were run for profit, and found that none of them could guarantee basic medical care or appropriate protection against sexual and physical abuse. A lack of official oversight exacerbated the problem, along with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which allowed inmates to be punished for minor crimes as if they were serious felonies.40 Punishment, not rehabilitation, remained the corporate and governmental focus, as it was more profitable. CCA refused a simple proposal in 2015 from former prisoner and associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, Alex Friedmann, for the company to commit an additional 5 percent of its net income to reducing recidivism.41 Public opposition to these companies was growing; the Interfaith Prison Coalition launched a campaign in 2015 to boycott and divest from firms that made profit from prison labor and charged exorbitant prices for prisoner phone calls.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

This is a beautiful place, but a jungle known to harbour FARC guerrillas is not somewhere you can relax. To make money from outsiders, the locals would need to make Darien accessible and safe. The experiences of Darien’s latest group of adventurers – the illegal immigrants trekking through the jungle – show that goal is a long way off. BUCCANEERS VERSUS PIRATES Illegal immigrants – all of them heading for the US – enter the Darien Gap on its eastern border, at the Colombian town of Capurganá. The little port was previously a no-go area because of fighting between the Colombian Army and FARC rebels, but following the 2016 peace accord adventurous travellers have returned.

Abercrombie, Sir Patrick 203 Aceh 2–39, 10, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335 ‘building back better’ 24–5, 29–31, 42 civil war 32–3 education 13, 31 financial system 20–22 history 17–18 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) 32, 33 tsunami 2–3, 6, 12–14, 15, 16, 18–19, 23 ageing populations 6, 212–49, 331 agglomeration see industrial agglomeration AI see artificial intelligence Akita, Japan 212–49 ageing population/ low birth rate 7, 213–25, 227–49, 331 suicides 225–6 Allende, Salvador 296–8, 301 amoral familism 196, 202 Anglo-Dutch wars 25 Angola: Kongo people 83 Angola (Louisiana penitentiary) 5, 76–104, 331, 335, Angolite, The 80 Argentina 110, 144, 291, 303 Arkwright, Richard 267 Arrol, Sir William 191 artificial intelligence (AI) 245, 268–9, 270, 284, 286, 287, 378 automation: and job losses 253 see also technology Azraq refugee camp 57–67, 71, 72, 144, 334, 340, 348–9 Bajo Chiquito, Panama 106, 108–9, 1112, 133, 136, 139 Banda Aceh 13, 16, 18, 20, 26–7, 34–5 Bandal, Kinshasa 144, 162 Bandudu, Congo 164, 165 banks 97, 99 in Aceh 19, 21, 22 Chilean 296, 297, 302 in Kinshasa/ Congo 151, 158 online 99, 278 Panamanian 131 Barbour, Mary 203, 366 barter economy, prison 89–90 Bevan, Aneurin 201 birth rates, falling 215–16, 226–7, 233, 247 Blockbuster Video 97 blood circulation (William Harvey) 3–4 borders: and conservation of common resources 126–7 Borland, Francis: History of Darien 107 Brazil: ageing population 213, 214 Brazzaville, Congo 174–5 Bruce, Robert 203 Brumberg, Richard 218 buccaneers and Darien 112–14 business start-up rates 54 Calabria, negative social integration 195–6 Calton, Glasgow 179, 190, 191, 192 Cambridge University 26, 182 Cameron, Verney Lovett 141, 143, 149 cannabinoids, synthetic 93–4, 95–6, 352 cartels, Chilean 321–3 Casement, Roger: on Congo Free State 150 cash vs. barter 89–90 Castro, Fidel 298 Castro, Sergio de 301 centenarians, Japanese 215, 216 Chesterton, George Laval 77 Chicago Boys 294–5, 296, 300, 301, 314, 325 El Ladrillo (economic plan) 301–5, 315–16, 317, 323–4, 325–6 protests against 305, 317 Chile Allende period 296–8, 301 education 294, 295, 302, 304–5, 310, 311–12, 312, 313–17, 318, 324, 326, 327 national income 291–3 nationalization 296–7 Pinochet dictatorship 298, 300–1, 305, 322, 383 tsunami 15 see also Chicago Boys ‘Chilean Winter’ 317–18 Clyde shipyards 178–9, 181, 183–4, 185 Cold Bath Fields prison 91 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 113 Colombian peace accord (2016) 111, 134 common resources and conservation 124–5 depletion paradox 122–39 overgrazed land 122–3 and self-regulation 125, 126–8 Confucian ethics 220 Congo, Democratic Republic of ‘Crisis’ 151–8 GDP per capita 153, 173 independence (1960) 151 unemployment 142–3 see also Kinshasa; Mobutu, Sese Seko; Zaire consumerism as slavery 319 copper mining 143, 151, 156, 296, 323–4 corruption 133 in Kinshasa 143, 145–6, 148, 159–61, 168, 333, 361 credit: and poverty 308–10 Crompton, Samuel 267 crop rotation 279 Cunard Line 185 currencies cacao beans 91 cigarette papers 91 cigarettes/tobacco 92, 95 coffee 77, 96, 100 commodities 90–91 ‘dot’ payment system 97–100 dual-currency system 166–7 ‘EMAK’ (edible mackerel) 92 postage stamps 92 in prisons 91–101 ramen noodles 92 roles played (Jevons) 90 on Rossel Island 91 salt 91 Yoruk people 91 Cut Nyak Dhien 35 Dael, Syria: refugees 42–4 Dagahaley settlement, Kenya 45, 46 Dampier, William 113, 114 Daraa: and Syrian civil war 44 Darien Gap 6, 106, 107–39, 332, 333, 334 borders and common resource conservation 126–7 buccaneers’ accounts 112–14 eco-tourism 132 environmental damage 6, 120–21, 129–31 ethnic rivalry 126–8 externalities 131, 138, 183, 186, 332 illegal immigrants 132–7 market failure 109–10, 122–3, 129, 138 Scottish disaster 114–15, 133, 137–8 Darien National Park 126, 132 deaths lonely 225, 226, 236, 237, 248 premature (‘Glasgow effect’) 192–3 suicide 194, 213, 224, 225–6, 236, 248, 366 see also life expectancy digital divide 254, 281, 377 digital ID 277, 279 digital infrastructure, Estonian 259 drugs in Angola (prison) 81, 82, 88, 93–4, 95–6, 97, 99, 100, 101, 352 in Chile 306, 310, 322 in Darien 110, 111, 128, 134, 135 in Scotland 191–2, 193 in Tallinn 206 Dunlop, John Boyd 150 Durkheim, Emile: La Suicide 194, 196, 206 e-democracy (Estonia) 284, 287 e-Residency (Estonia) 277–8, 279, 283, 287, 379 education in Aceh 13, 31 in Chile/Santiago 295, 302, 304–5, 310, 311–12, 312, 313–17, 326, 327 in Italy 195 in Japan 220, 223, 229 in Louisiana 81 in Zaatari camp 67, 71, 349 see also universities Embera tribe 108, 109, 111, 119, 127, 128, 129, 133, 136, 137, 138–9, 357 entrepreneurs 331 in Aceh 19, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 39 in Akita, Japan 236–7, 238 in Angola (prison) 89, 102–3 Chilean 295, 296 in Darien 5, 114 Estonian 270, 275, 278–9, 281 in Glasgow 181, 182 in Kinshasa 162, 171 in Zaatari camp 43, 46, 54, 55–8, 62–3, 71 environmental damage see Darien Gap Estonia 256–7, 259 Ajujaht competition 252, 260, 275, 276, 278, 283–3 companies 281 economic revival 275–87 e-Government services 254–5 as ESSR 257–9, 272–4 labour shortage 280 Russia border 271–2 Russian population 272–4, 281–3 technology 252–6, 259–87 externalities 183, 206 Darien Gap 131, 138, 183, 186, 332 Glasgow 183–4, 186, 189–90, 333 and markets 332 extractive economy 122–39 Fairfield Heritage 349 Fairfield shipyard 178, 186, 189, 200, 206 FARC guerrillas 111, 132, 133, 134–5, 137, 355, 357 Ffrench-Davis, Ricardo 302 Foljambe, Joseph 265–6 Force Publique 150 foreign aid 23, 27–9, 54, 170 foreign exchange traders 166–7 Franklin, Isaac 83 free markets 128, 131, 174, 296, 300–3, 316, 320, 326–7, 331–2, 356 Frente Amplio coalition 318, 384 Friedman, Milton 289, 295, 303, 319, 326, 383, 384 GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) freedom fighters 18, 32, 346 Gbadolite 159 GDP see Gross Domestic Product Gécamines 155–6 Geddes, Reay: report 189–90 gender roles, Japanese 223–4, 232 Germany 187, 195, 222, 227, 247, 249, 292, 302, 360 Glasgow 6–7, 176, 177–207, 333 culture 180 drug users 191–2 externalities 183–4, 186, 189–90, 333 population density 197 shipbuilding 178–9, 181, 184–6, 187–8, 189, 190–91, 199–200, 206–7, 333, 334 tenement homes and social capital 196, 197–202, 205, 335 unemployment 190 see also Calton; Gorbals; Govan and below Glasgow City Council (GCC) 202–4 Glasgow City Improvement Trust 202–3, 366 ‘Glasgow effect’, isolation 205–6 Glassford, John 181 Glenlee 179 gold in Aceh 17, 20–22, 37, 332, 334 in the Congo 143 in Darien 109, 113, 117, 120, 356 Golden Island 114–15 Good Neighbor Policy (USA) 294, 383 Goodyear, Charles 150 Gorbals, Glasgow 176, 191, 192, 204, 205, 367 Govan, Glasgow 176, 178, 184, 186, 192, 197–8, 201–3, 206, 207 Great Depression 26 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 26 Aceh 27, 37–8 Chile 316 Congo 153, 173 Estonia 259 Hagadera refugee camp, Kenya 45 Han, Byung-Chul 319 Harberger, Arnold ‘Alito’ 295, 305, 326 Hargreaves, James 266, 267 Harris, Walter 115 Harvey, William 1, 3–4, 5, 6, 329, 330, 336 Heinla, Ahti 263–4, 268, 282, 284, 285 Hinohara, Shigeaki 211 housing 90 Aceh 12–13, 16, 19, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 26, 38, 39 Akita, Japan 223, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 236–7, 239, 248 Azraq and Zaatari camps 44, 45, 48, 54, 55, 59, 61, 63, 70, 71 Chile 296, 297, 300, 302, 204, 306, 207, 308, 326 Darien 118, 139 Glasgow 197–9, 202–6 Kinshasa 142 Louisiana 95, 102 human capital 38–9, 168, 305, 335, 346–7 human rights abuses 300–1 Hyakumoto, Natsue 235 ID cards, personal data 260–61 Ifo refugee camp, Kenya 45 incarceration rates, USA 76–7, 78 industrial agglomeration 182–6, 200, 206, 330–31, 333, 365 inequality 6, 18, 254, 331, 337 in Chile 6, 291–2, 292, 293, 297, 298, 304, 308, 311, 317, 318, 324–7 intergenerational (Japan) 221–3, 238, 248 informal economies 122–5, 214–15, 331, 333–4, 336 Aceh 21–2, 24, 30, 31, 34, 37 Akita 233, 248 Chile 297, 306–7, 310, 323 Darien 122, 128, 129 Estonia 258 and Glasgow 204, 206, 334 Italy 196, 336 Kinshasa 142, 146, 148, 163–6, 167–8, 170, 173–5, 334 in prisons 77, 78–9, 86–7, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100–1, 102 in Zaatari camp 43, 45, 47, 57, 61, 64, 71, 72, 86 Innophys 245 innovation in Chile 315 and currency 97, 99–100 and economies 43, 79, 80, 87, 100, 122, 162, 333, 334 in Estonia 252, 256–7, 258–87 in Glasgow 179, 180, 182, 185, 188, 192, 201 technological 97–8, 183, 187, 252, 256–7, 258–87 intergenerational inequality (Japan) 221–3, 238, 248 International African Association (IAA) 149 International Cooperation Administration (ICA) 294 International Monetary Fund 303 inventions 265–6 in Estonia 252–3, 260, 265, 275–6, 282–3 isolation, ‘Glasgow effect’ 205–6 Italy 195–6, 201, 202, 335–6, 366 ageing population 213, 220, 222, 243, 331 population decline 227, 230, 233, 249 ivory trade 149 Jackie Chan Village 35–7, 39 Jackson, Giorgio 317–20 Jadue, Daniel 322, 332 Japan ageing population 6, 213–25, 227–49, 331 common forest conservation 124, 125 education 220, 223, 229 shipyards innovation/ competition 187–8, 189 tsunamis 15 Japan Football Association (JFA) 212–13 Jendi, Mohammed 54–5, 56, 71 Jevons, William Stanley 75, 89–90, 99, 352 Kabila family 154, 161, 162, 173 Kajiwara, Kenji 238 Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya 45 Kalanick, Travis 57 Kasa-Vubu, Joseph 151 Katanga 143, 151 Katumba refugee camp, Tanzania 45 Kenya: refugee camps 45, 46 Keynes, John Maynard 5, 7 Kinshasa 6, 140, 141–75, corruption 143, 145–6, 148, 159–61, 168, 333, 361 informal economy 142, 146, 148, 163, 166, 167–8, 170, 173, 334 natural wealth 143 pillages 157–8 police 159–61 roads as informal markets 163–6 tax system 145–6, 147–8, 16 Kirkaldy, David 4, 5, 6, 330 Kuala Lumpur 293 Kuna tribe 126, 340 Laar, Mart 258 labour pools, industrial agglomeration 183, 184–5, 200 Ladrillo, El see Chicago Boys Lagos 293 Lampuuk 2–3, 6, 13, 14, 22–3, 26, 32, 33, 35, 37, 345 Lancashire 266, 267 Las Condes 288, 290, 293, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 321, 322, 325 Lasnamäe, Tallinn 272, 281 Le Corbusier: Cité radieuse 203 Leontief, Wassily: Machines and Man 251, 377 Leopold II, King of the Belgians 149–50 Lhokgna 10, 12–13, 14, 26, 27–8, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 345 life-cycle hypothesis 218–19, 248 life expectancy Glasgow 179, 190, 191–3 Japan 215 Russia 273–4 Swaziland 179 Lima 293 Liverpool 89, 177, 192, 193, 205–6 Livingstone, David 148–9 Lloyd, William Forster 122–3 lonely deaths 225, 226, 236, 237, 248 Louisiana 74, 76, 81 Department of Public Safety and Corrections 83 Prison Enterprises 83–4, 85, 351 State Penitentiary see Angola Lüders, Rolf 293, 295, 304, 305, 325 Lumumba, Patrice 151 machine learning 268–70 Makarova, Marianna 272, 274 Malacca Strait 10, 17,. 18, 35, 39 Malahayati, Admiral Laksamana 34–5 Maluku steel mill, Kinshasa 155, 156–7 Manchester 192, 193, 205–6 market economies Chile 297, 302, 305, 317 prison 78, 79, 87, 89, 100, 101, 103 markets 71, 122, 332–3, 336 Aceh 20–22, 36–7, 38, 144, 331 Azraq camp 62–4, 71, 144 Chile 295, 296, 297, 298–9, 304, 309, 319, 320–23 Darien 122, 126–7, 128, 129, 131, 138 free 128, 131, 174, 296, 300–3, 316, 320, 326–7, 331–2, 356 Glasgow 181, 190 Japan 232, 233, 248, 249 Kinshasa 143, 145, 146–7, 162, 163–6, 167, 173, 174 Zaatari supermarkets 48–53, 64, 348 Marshall, Alfred 182–3, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 200, 206, 329, 330, 365 Maslow, Abraham 41, 65–7, 68, 71, 72, 286, 319, 326, 349 Meikle, Andrew 266 Melvin, Jean 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205 ménage lending system 201, 334 Menger, Carl 90, 99, 352 Michelin brothers 150 military coup, Pinochet’s 298 Mill, John Stuart 11, 38, 335, 346–7 minimum wages 94, 267, 296, 307–8, 310 Mishamo refugee camp, Tanzania 45 Mississippi River 74, 76 Mobutu, Sese Seko (formerly Joseph-Désiré) 141, 151–2, 154–9, 161, 162, 166, 173, 297, 333, 360–61 Modigliani, Franco 218–19, 372 Mojo (synthetic cannabis) 92–4, 95–6, 97 monopolies, facilitated 319 Montgomery, Hugh 3–4 Moore, Gordon 269 Morgan, Henry 112–13 Narva, Estonia 250, 271, 272, 274, 283, 287, 378 National Health Service 201–2 nationalization 187, 296, 301–2, 383 natural disasters: and economic growth 24–5 New Caledonia 114, 356 New Orleans 74, 76, 79, 93, 101, 102, 103 Ninagawa, Yukio 234–5 norms, economics and 196, 200, 201, 323, 334, 336 obesity 81, 309, 326, 351 opportunism: and depletion of common resources 126–38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 291, 316, 326, 377 Ostrom, Elinor 123–5, 137 Pan-American Highway 106, 110, 111, 115–17, 118–19, 121, 139, 355 Panama 106, 108-9, 110, 111, 113, 117, 118, 121, 130, 131, 356–7 see also Darien Gap; FARC guerrillas Panian refugee camp, Pakistan 45 Paro robot 243–5 Paterson, William: A Proposal to Plant a Colony in Darien 107 pawn shops 200, 334, 367 Penguins’ Revolution 317 pepper: global boom 17, 345 Pepper robot 246–7 personal data 260–61 Petty, William 25–6, 38n, 346 Piñera, Sebastián 309 Pinochet, General Augustine 298, 300–1, 305, 322, 383 pirate economies see informal economies population 122, 125, 330, 347 Aceh 14, 16, 18 Chile/Santiago 291, 324 China 76 Congo/Kinshasa 143, 150 Dael 42 Darien Gap 126, 128 Estonia 255, 256, 265, 272 Glasgow 179, 197 Greece 238 Japan 226–7, 229 Portugal 238 refugee camps 44, 45, 49, 57, 348 Sweden 238 US prisons 76–7 see also ageing populations Portugal 213, 227, 230, 233, 238, 243, 249, 291, 331, 351, 360 poverty Chile 291, 293, 300, 301, 303–4, 305, 208, 311. 15. 326 Congo/Kinshasa 143, 144, 160, 169, 11, 173 Glasgow 192 Italy 195 Japan 220, 226, 233, 248 Louisiana 81, 351 prices 147–8, 302 Pride of York 207 Prisoner’s Dilemma 174 privatization 169, 173, 301–2, 315, 326, 361 Pugnido refugee camp, Ethiopia 45 Putnam, Robert 195–6, 201, 202, 335–6, 366 Rahmatullah mosque, Aceh 14 rainforest destruction 121, 128–31 Rand, Rait 260, 275–6, 283, 284 Red Road Estate, Glasgow 203 refugee camps 45, 46, 55, 173 see also Azraq; Zaatari Reid, Alexander 180 resilience 3, 5, 6, 13, 16, 22, 31, 34, 35–9, 78, 103, 109, 122, 123, 146, 170, 248, 293, 325, 333–7, 384 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia see FARC Rideau, Wilbert 79–80, 82, 87–8, 100, 351 Rio Chucunaque 117, 119 robotics/ robots and care 243–4, 245–7, 248 delivery robots 262–4 for egalitarian economies 284–5 human overseers/ minders 280 ‘last-mile problem’ 264 machine learning 268–70 Sony AIBO robotic dogs 245 trams, driverless 264 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 294, 356 rosewood trees 120, 128, 138 rubber trade 149–50 Russian-Estonians 272–4, 281–4, 286–7 salarymen, retired 223–4, 228, 248 Samuel, Arthur 269 Santiago 7, 288, 289–327 see also Chile schools/ schooling markets 165, 311–15 Scotland Darien disaster 114–15, 133, 137–8 see also Glasgow self-governance 125–8 shipbuilding 178–9, 181, 184–6, 187–8, 189–91, 199–200 Sikkut, Siim 259, 277, 284 Skype 254, 263, slavery 82–6 smuggling 42, 46–8, 68 social capital 195–6, 199, 200, 202, 323, 325, 335–6, 366 social inequality 142–3, 324–5 Somalia 15 South Korea 213, 214, 220, 227, 233, 247, 319, 373 Spain 115, 137, 213, 222, 227, 243, 331 Spice (synthetic cannabis) 352 Spice Islands 17 Spiers, Alexander 181 Spinning Jenny 267, 269, 274, 378 Sri Lanka 15, 17, 49 Stanley, Henry Morton 148–9 Stanyforth, Disney 266 Starship Technologies 262–4, 269, 280 stateless people 255 store cards, prepaid 97–8 students 81, 168, 218, 221, 223, 236–7, 238, 248, 282, 283, 294–5, 304–5, 311–14, 315–18 suicide 194, 213, 224, 225–6, 236, 248, 366 Sumatra 17-18, see also Aceh supermarkets, Zaatari 48–53, 64, 348 Swing Riots 266, 378 synthetic cannabis see Mojo; Spice Takahashi, Kiyoshi 235, 236 Tallinn 7, 250, 251–87 Russian population 272–4, 281–4, 286–7 start-up paradise 254 Tallinn, Harry 278, 282–3 Tanzania: refugee camps 45 taxation 25, 346 Aceh 32 Chile 295, 302, 307, 315–17, 325 Darien 111, 130 Estonia 256–7, 259, 273, 278, 287 Glasgow 190 Japan 220, 231 Kinshasa 145–6, 147–8, 151, 152, 158, 161–2, 165, 167–8, 169, 173–4 in Zaatari refugee camp 48, 56 Tay Bridge collapse 5 teak trees 116, 130–31, 138, 333, 356, 357 technology and inequality 253–4 innovation 97–8, 183, 187, 256–7, 258–9 spill-overs 183, 189 and unemployment 253, 262, 270, 279, 286, 287, 377, 379 tectonic plates 13–14 tenement buildings, Glaswegian 196, 197–202, 205, 335 Thailand 15, 144, 213 tobacco 77, 85–6, 92, 95, 100, 143, 156, 181, 191, 202, 365 Tomaya, Yoichi 235 Törbel, Switzerland: forest conservation 124 towerblocks 203, 204, 205 trade in prison 97–100 in Zaatari camp 43–57, 67–70 see also markets traditions, economic resilience and 21, 22, 24, 34, 196, 336 trust 148, 150, 174, 196, 199, 201, 206, 248, 261, 295, 321, 323, 325, 335 Tshisekedi, Félix 154 tsunamis 2–3, 12–14, 15, 16, 18–19, 22–3, 25 Tull, Jethrow 266 Turkey 28, 58, 144, 213 Uber 57 Ukegawa, Sachiko 234 underground economies 77–9, 87–101 see also informal economies unemployment 64–5, 142–3, 190, 275 Chile 290, 297, 302, 307, 311 Congo 142, 359 Estonia 270, 273, 275, 279, 283, 379 Glasgow 179, 190, 191 and technology 253, 262, 270, 279, 286, 287, 377, 379 United Kingdom 4, 18, 26, 181, 187, 188, 199, 213, 223, 278, 335 agriculture 265, 267 housing 232 jails 86, 91, 96, 352 National Health Service 201, 203 population 226 and technology 253, 254, 257, 260, 262, 264 see also Glasgow; Scotland United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 44, 46, 48, 54, 57, 72, 348 World Food Programme (WFP), and Zaatari 48, 49–50 universities Aceh 13, 33, 34 Akita, Japan 221, 223 Chile 294, 305, 313, 314, 315, 316–17, 318, 324, 326 Congo/Kinshasa 151, 160, 166, 168 Estonia 275, 282, 283 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) 189 urbanization: and agglomeration forces 330–31 United States 26, 54, 76, 83, 93, 213, 223, 253, 262, 279, 292, 294, 297–8 prisons 76–7, 78, 81, 91–2, see also Angola population 226 and technology 260, 262, 264, 267, 269, 276 USAID 28, 29 Valdez, Samuel 121, 128–9, 130 Vallejo, Camila 317–18, 384 Van Gogh, Vincent 180 Vatter, Ott 277, 278 Viik, Linnar 257, 258–60, 261–2 Wafer, Lionel 113–14, 134, 355 Waisbluth, Mario 313 Walpole, Sir Spencer: A History of England 177 Walsh, David: History, Politics and Vulnerability … 177 Watanabe, Hiroshi 234 wealth 4–5, 159, 218–19, 324–5, 329, 334–6 nation’s 25, 38n, 346–7 natural 109, 132, 143 workforce 184–5, 264–8, 275, 297 World Bank 303, 305, 346 World Health Organization (WHO) 63, 215 World Trade Organization 303 Wounan tribe 126, 127 X-Road data system 261, 274–5, 279, 283, 377 Y Combinator 252 Yamamoto, Ryo 236–7 Yaviza, Panama 110, 111, 116–20, 127, 132, 135, 138, 144, 356 Yida refuge camp, South Sudan 45 Zaatari Syrian refugee camp 6, 40, 41–73, 86, 89, 100, 163, 173, 308, 331, 332, 334, 335, 348, 349 declining population 57 education 67, 71, 349 informal economy 43, 45, 47, 57, 61, 64, 71, 72, 86 smuggler children 42, 46–8, 68 supermarkets 48–53, 64, 348 trade development 43–57, 67–70, 71, 72 UNHCR cedes control 44–6 Zaire 152, 154, 155–6, 159, 361 Zorrones 324 TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA penguin.co.uk Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.


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Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The increase of services sales (compared with appliance sales) doubled in less than ten years. 1965: 6.3 percent; 1970: 8.7 percent; 1975: 11.8 percent; 1976: 11 percent. 16. The present collapse of the birth rate plays an important role in current discussions of immigration policies (see Michael L. Wachter, “The Labor Market and Illegal Immigration: The Outlook for the 1980s,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 33, no. 3 (April 1980): 342-54. 17. This was the case of five female workers at the Cyanamid Company Wilson Island plant (Pleasant County) in West Virginia, who had themselves sterilized for fear of losing their jobs when the company reduced the number of chemicals to which women could be safely exposed.

In Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women, edited by Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. de Waal, Alex. Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. London: Zed Books, 1997. Wachter, Michael L. “The Labor Market and Illegal Immigration: The Outlook for the 1980s.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 33, no. 3 (April 1980): 342-54. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press, 1974. Walton, John, and David Seddon. Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994.


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That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

“If we don’t have that competitive edge, our standard of living will eventually revert to the global mean.” Unfortunately, in the Terrible Twos the American political system failed to enact legislation to reform the nation’s immigration system. President George W. Bush made a mighty effort but was blocked largely by members of his own party, who were so outraged by illegal immigration that they could not think straight about the vital importance of legal immigration. “The H-1B visa program—that is the key to making us the innovators of energy and computers,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who has been critical of his own party’s obstinacy on this issue.

If you wanted to get really smart and have a degree that would allow you to be a leader in the world, you came to America. Well, it’s hard as hell to get to America now. And once you get here, it’s hard to stay.” Immigration reform that better secures the borders, establishes a legal pathway toward citizenship for the roughly twelve million illegal immigrants who are here, and enables, even recruits, high-skilled immigrants to become citizens is much more urgent than most of us realize. We need both the brainy risk takers and the brawny ones. Low-skilled immigrants may not be able to write software, but such people also contribute to the vibrancy of the American economy.

Department of Homestead Act (1862) H-1B visa program Honeymooners, The (television show) Hong Kong Hood, John Hoover Digest Hope Street Group Hormats, Robert Horse Feathers (movie) House of Representatives, U.S.; Oversight and Government Reform Committee How (Seidman) Howe, Caroline Hu, Peter Danming Huamei Garment Accessory Company Humphrey, Hubert Hungary Hussein, Saddam hydroelectric power I IBM Iceland Idealab IHS Global Insight illegal immigrants Illinois Immelt, Jeffrey immigration; from Asia; government policy on; innovation and; of victims of oppression; workforce needs and Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) IMPACT teacher evaluation system incentives; in energy and climate policy; for innovation; political India; call centers in; cell phones manufactured in; electric cars in; financial services in; immigrants in U.S. from; Internet sales from; Obama in Indiana Indiana University Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) Industrial Revolution information technology; see also IT revolution infrastructure; deterioration of; investment in; lobbying for; modernization of; partisan polarization over; public-private partnership and Inglis, Bob Inhofe, James innovation; in China; during Cold War; connectivity and; education and; in energy technology; immigration and; incentives for; in information technology, see IT revolution; military; partisan polarization and; regulation and; workforce and; see also research and development Innovation Award for Energy and the Environment Intel Corporation; Science Talent Search intellectual property International Monetary Fund International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Internet; bandwidths for; customer service via; democratizing power of; globalization and; origins of; political process and; public-private partnership and; values eroded by interstate highway system Investment Answer, The (Murray) Ipsos Public Affairs Iran; Revolutionary Guard Corps Iraq Iraq war; nation-building goal of; partisan politics and; renewable power use in; Special Forces operations in; surge in; wounded veterans of Ireland Irwin, Neil Islamic terrorism Israel IT revolution; challenges of; merger of globalization and Italy iTunes J Jacobins Jakpor, Otana Agape James, LeBron Japan; bullet trains in; earthquake and tsunami in; education in; fascism in; recycling in Jassy, Andy Jazwiec, John Jefferson, Thomas Jerry Maguire (movie) Jews Jharkhand (India) Jiang, Ruoyi Jobs, Steve John Locke Foundation Johnson, Lyndon B.


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Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

Even the Daily Mail reported: ‘Home Office vans telling illegal migrants to go home investigated by advertising watchdog’.53 Of 1,653 enquiries sent to the advice line, over 63 per cent were hoaxes, and apparently the entire exercise resulted in only eleven migrants leaving. GETTING RID OF THE UNWANTED Undeterred, Theresa May at the Home Office produced yet another Immigration Act in 2014 intended to ‘make it easier to remove those with no right to be here, limit the appeals system, prevent illegal immigrants accessing or abusing public services or the labour market, and end the influence of the European Convention of Human Rights on immigration appeals’. This Act included expectations that private landlords, driving instructors and vicars, as well as hospitals and schools, would check on the legal status of people and report if uncertain.

The stories included a woman who had lived in the UK for fifty years and worked as a cook in the House of Commons but was threatened with deportation, and a former NHS driver who had arrived in the UK in 1968 as a fourteen-year-old and spent thirty-five years working and paying taxes, but was left jobless, homeless and living in an industrial unit after being told fifty years later that he was now an illegal immigrant. On 20 April 2018, Gary Younge argued in the The Guardian that Theresa May saw Windrush migrants as an easy target. On 21 April, in the same newspaper, Robert Booth and Nick Hopkins presented detailed evidence that the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd had boasted to the Prime Minister that she would hunt down even more illegal migrants and accelerate Theresa May’s own deportation programme.

, The Guardian, 26 April, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/26/theresa-may-go-home-vans-operation-vaken-ukip 52 https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/9376736345 53 Chorley, M. (2013) ‘Home office vans telling illegal migrants to go home investigated by advertising watchdog’, Daily Mail, 9 August, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2387728/Home-Office-vans-telling-illegal-immigrants-Go-Home-investigated-advertising-watchdog-60-complaints.html 54 Baker, A. (2017) ‘97 per cent of international students leave UK after studies’, The Pie News, 24 August, https://thepienews.com/news/government/97-international-students-leave-uk-studies/ 55 McInerney, L. (2016) ‘What society lets families fear deportation for sending their children to school?’


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

The targeted assault was kicked into high gear through Reagan’s insulting “War on Drugs” that placed the Government’s large thumb on the scale of democracy. It was taken to new and horrifying levels under Clinton and the Mandatory Minimum laws that disproportionately targeted the inner cities and then pushed into something from a Philip K. Dick novel as Trump enforced Obama’s illegal immigrant laws by rounding up, then splitting up families and warehousing them like they were jars of tomato sauce into Walmarts that have been recently converted into private concentration camps in anticipation of these events unfolding. Another factor that has changed the landscape of American prisons is the shift away from trial and towards a plea agreement.

Crony capitalism is the government handing their favorite camper a large stick to bash another camper in the leg first before turning and running away from the bear. Sure, they will survive, but all of the other campers will instantly hate and distrust them, and with good reason. A politician that is in charge of a massive budget to build 100 detention camps to warehouse illegal immigrants, as an example, is going to give some company a fortune to do the job. It is fair to say that the politician probably would love to take a tiny little piece of that large budget, but to do so might be too obvious, so what happens is that the money flows to his buddy’s commercial real estate development company for them to build the facilities, then once he retires from public office he becomes the Senior Advisor to the CEO of that same development company and is paid $3 million a year to “advise” the company while playing golf with clients.

The open border policy under the Obama administration allowed the flow of undocumented people to funnel into the country while the administration worked to either provide them with a path to citizenship or amnesty, thus allowing them the ability to vote, hopefully for Democrats. The Republicans were no better, they just did not want the immigrants in the country at all. A massive flow of illegal immigrants also works to destabilize the country on the receiving end because it puts heavy burdens on infrastructure, schools, welfare, low-level jobs, the legal system, prisons, and so on. America has been turned against itself, just like Clower & Piven theorized that it would, but the amplification of the division by the corporate media was probably something that they could only dream of.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

In the same Daily Caller column in which he’d praised Cruz’s intelligence, he’d dumped on Trump as “sort of symptomatic of everything that is wrong with New York City.” And yet, Trump was, in many ways, a perfect avatar for the political project Thiel had been pursuing. He was, like Ron Paul, in favor of an extreme crackdown on illegal immigration. His campaign platform, like Paul’s in 2012, included ending birthright citizenship and fortifying the border. Nor was Trump, like Paul, averse to white identity politics—his views on race in New York in the 1980s and ’90s were roughly in line with the positions expressed in Paul’s newsletters from the same period.

No one objected to this, nor did any of the CEOs attempt to inveigh against another policy that Trump had signaled he was considering: creating a registry to track the entry of Muslims into the United States. Instead, they attempted to sidestep the discussion, implying that it would be fine to crack down on illegal immigrants as long as Trump could supply their companies with enough skilled workers. “We should separate the border security from the talented people,” Cook said. He suggested the United States try to cultivate “a “monopoly on talent.” Thiel, who’d often privately made the distinction between immigrants who embraced American values and those who did not, offered that the United States could adopt a system along the lines of New Zealand’s, which uses points to make it easier for well-educated immigrants with good language skills to enter the country and harder for low-skilled immigrants.

Johnson, who would receive a third of the company’s equity, had no formal operational role. His job would be to raise money for the company and to help sign up customers. Johnson boasted that this software would be ideal for Trump’s immigration crackdown. “Building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads” was how he put it in a Facebook post. “It was a joke,” Johnson later said. “But it became real.” Indeed, Clearview would eventually sign a contract to give ICE access to its technology—and would have Thiel’s help. After hearing Johnson’s pitch, he provided $200,000 in seed capital to the effort


pages: 237 words: 72,716

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

Rasmussen only” approach advocated by the European Commission and Conservative governments is implemented. Unemployment figures in the U.S., according to two American professors, Nobel Prize winners both, are even more concerning than official reports indicate. They told me: “Poul, it’s not around 13%; it’s 20%, if you add to the official figure all the illegal immigrants and the informal sector.” If you ask who’s become unemployed due to the crisis, the answer is certainly that only a very small part of it is coming from Wall Street, and they will survive, one way or another. The economic recession here has shown us the underlying fragility of our advanced service-based economies and societies.

I’m not sure that’s concrete enough. I like the example of a category of infrastructure which if constructed could have a real economic impact. Those roads and that economic development would benefit not merely Mexico, but also of course the United States, because real prosperity in Mexico is the deadly enemy of illegal immigration and narcotics trafficking. What are the reasons behind the increase in inequality over the past twenty years in the United States? The rich got too much richer. They got fat, dumb, and happy. Part of it was the movement of the capital markets toward increasingly convoluted and abstruse mechanisms that created vast pools of wealth and people then tithed them at bonus time, at the end of the year.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

Not only do immigrants possess fewer educational skills than native workers, but also many of their skills don’t translate into the American workplace.23 Between 2000 and 2002, about 3.3 million illegal immigrants entered in the United States. Mexicans made up 57% of undocumented workers, with another 23% coming from other Latin American countries.24 A significant portion of Hispanic poverty is attributable to these large numbers of illegal workers entering the United States and the low-paying jobs they occupy. Although there is no reliable data about the number of immigrants who use the fringe economy, it is undoubtedly high. The 1996 welfare-reform bill had profound implications for both legal and illegal immigrants. Specifically, the bill disentitled most legal immigrants (including many who had lived in the United States for years but chose not to become citizens) from food stamps, TANF, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).25 The low wages paid to many immigrants, especially those from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, put them squarely in the ranks of the working poor.


pages: 333 words: 86,628

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

The complaint may be with respect to the establishment of military bases on its borders or the rapid expansion of its neighbor’s armed forces and arms industries. Or it may be about the neighboring state’s suppression of certain national minorities or religious sects, which have asked repeatedly for outside relief. Or the plaintiff state may see itself as being harmed by the economic practices of its neighbor, or by the encouragement of illegal immigration across its border, or by the rise of drug cartels or terrorist organizations on the other side of the border. Or by the over-utilization or destruction of a joint water supply or other shared resources. Or by interference in its elections or its internal politics. Or by espionage or assassinations or public disturbances that it regards as having been instigated by its neighbor.

., 42. 14. Ambassador Jesper Var, speaking at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference, December 11, 2014. Video of his comments available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYojm0TRGPg. 15. In one especially striking incident in 2010, the Arizona legislature empowered state law officers to restrict illegal immigration. In response, the Obama administration inserted a legal challenge to the state’s action in a report filed with the United Nations Human Rights Council. Far from defending the freedom of Americans against foreign encroachment, the US government joined forces with an international body in an effort to tar Arizona with the stigma of moral illegitimacy.


pages: 320 words: 86,372

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

Now let us return to the equally open intrigue of the neoliberal enterprise and the societies of control. How might this ideological technique be deployed in a corporate setting? A good illustration pertains to the way communication guerrilla groups challenged a number of European airlines involved in deporting ‘illegal immigrants’. Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe (2002) report on the symbolic sabotage of Lufthansa by the German anti-racist collective Kein Mensch ist illegal. They understood that a radical critique would need to bypass the cynical neoliberal distancing norms discussed above. Kein Mensch ist illegal therefore prepared overly positive leaflets using the company’s easily recognizable brand.

capitalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 General Motors plant (Michigan) ref1 Goffee, R. ref1 Goldman Sachs ref1 The Good Soldier Svejk (Hasek) ref1 Gordon, D. ref1 Gorz, A. ref1, ref2 Graeber, D. ref1 Groundhog Day (Ramis) ref1 Guattari, F. ref1, ref2, ref3 on criticism/criticality ref1 and de-subjectification ref1 language ref1, ref2 Gujarat NRE ref1 Gulf of Mexico oil spill (2010) ref1 Hamper, B. ref1 Hanlon, G. ref1 Hardt, M. ref1 Hart, A. ref1 Harvard Business Review (HBR) ref1 Harvey, D. ref1, ref2 Hayek, F. ref1, ref2, ref3 health and safety ref1, ref2 ‘Help to Buy’ support scheme ref1 Hirschhorn, N. ref1 Hodgkinson, T. ref1 holiday policy ref1 Houellebecq, Michel ref1, ref2, ref3 human capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 human relations movement ref1 Human Resource Management (HRM) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 humour ref1 ‘I, Job’ function ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and biopower ref1, ref2 and death drive ref1, ref2 as escape into work ref1 and illness ref1, ref2, ref3 resisting ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 see also escape; totality refusal see also work, as all-encompassing; working hours illegal immigrants, deportations ref1 illness ref1, ref2 collective ref1, ref2 see also Social Patients’ Collective as desirable experience ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 of managers ref1, ref2 and productive power ref1, ref2 as weapon against capitalism ref1 ‘immersion room’ exercise ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 imperceptibility ref1 see also invisibility incentivization ref1 indexation process ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 informality and authoritarianism ref1, ref2 see also deformalization insecurity ref1 Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) ref1, ref2, ref3 invisibility ref1, ref2 ‘Invisible Committee’ ref1, ref2 Italian autonomist thought ref1, ref2 Jameson, F. ref1 Jones, G. ref1 Junjie, Li ref1 Kamp, A. ref1 Kein Mensch ist illegal ref1 Kellaway, L. ref1 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) ref1 Keynes, J.M. ref1, ref2 Khrushchev, Nikita ref1, ref2 Kim, Jonathan ref1 King, Stephen ref1 ‘Kitchen Debate’ ref1 Kramer, M. ref1, ref2 labour unions ref1 dissolution of ref1, ref2 language, evolution of ref1 Larkin, P. ref1 Latour, B. ref1, ref2 Laval, C. ref1, ref2 Lazzarato, M. ref1, ref2 leaders backgrounds ref1 remuneration and bonuses ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 see also managers Lefebvre, H. ref1 Leidner, R. ref1 Lewin, D. ref1 liberation management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 life itself, enlisting ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 lines of flight ref1, ref2 Lordon, F. ref1, ref2, ref3 Lucas, R. ref1, ref2 Lukács, G. ref1 Lynch, R. ref1 McChesney, R. ref1 McGregor, D. ref1 management ref1, ref2 and class function ref1, ref2 as co-ordination ref1 and inducement of willing obedience ref1, ref2 information deficit ref1 and power ref1, ref2 self-justification rituals ref1 as transferable skill ref1, ref2 managerialism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and abandonment ideology ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and boundary management ref1 and conflict-seeking behaviour ref1 division between managers and managed ref1, ref2 general principles of ref1 and leadership ref1 profligate management function ref1 refusing ref1 and securitization ref1 as self-referential abstraction ref1 managers as abandonment enablers ref1, ref2 and deformalization ref1 and engagement of workers ref1, ref2 lack of practical experience ref1 overwork ref1, ref2 see also leaders Marcuse, H. ref1 Market Basket supermarket chain ref1 Marx, K. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Maslow, A. ref1 Matten, D. ref1 meat consumption ref1 Meek, J. ref1 Meyerson, D. ref1 Michelli, J. ref1 Miller, W.I. ref1 Mitchell, David ref1 mobile technology ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Modafinil ref1, ref2 Monaghan, A. ref1 money ref1, ref2 see also accumulation Mooney, G. ref1 Moore, A.E. ref1 Moore, Michael ref1, ref2 music industry ref1 Naidoo, Kumi ref1 NASA ref1 Natali, Vincenzo ref1 Negri, A. ref1, ref2 neoliberal capitalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and bureaucracy ref1 and ideal worker ref1, ref2 and non-work time ref1, ref2 and paranoia ref1, ref2 resisting ref1, ref2 see also post-labour strategy and threat of abandonment ref1, ref2 and truth telling ref1, ref2, ref3 neoliberalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and class relations ref1, ref2, ref3 and disciplinary power ref1 and human-capital theory ref1 and impossibility ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and micro-fascism ref1 and reign of technocrats ref1 role of state ref1 and truth telling ref1, ref2 and worker engagement ref1, ref2, ref3 Nestlé ref1 New Public Management ref1, ref2 New Zealand, and capitalist deregulation ref1 New Zealand Oil and Gas (NZOG) ref1 Newman, Maurice ref1 Nietzsche, Friedrich ref1, ref2 Nixon, Richard ref1, ref2 Nyhan, B. ref1 obsession ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Onionhead program ref1 overcoding ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 The Pain Journal (Flanagan) ref1, ref2, ref3 paranoia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 overwork/paranoia complex ref1, ref2 Paris Commune ref1, ref2 Parkinson’s Law ref1 Parnet, C. ref1 Parsons, T. ref1 Peep Show (TV comedy) ref1 pensions ref1, ref2 personnel management ref1 see also Human Resource Management Peters, T. ref1 Philip Morris ref1 Pike River Coal mine (New Zealand) ref1 Pollack, Sydney ref1 Pook, L. ref1 Porter, M. ref1, ref2 post-labour strategy, recommendations ref1 postmodernism ref1, ref2, ref3 power ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and truth telling ref1 Prasad, M. ref1 Price, S. ref1 private companies, transferring to public hands ref1 privatization ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 profit maximization ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 quantitative easing ref1 Rand, Ayn ref1 rationalization ref1, ref2, ref3 Reifler, J. ref1 reserve army of the unemployed ref1 Ressler, C. ref1 results-only work environment (ROWE) ref1, ref2, ref3 Rimbaud, A. ref1 Rio+20 Earth Summit (2012) ref1 ‘riot grrrl’ bands ref1 rituals of truth and reconciliation ref1 Roberts, J. ref1 Roger Award ref1 Roger and Me (Moore) ref1 Rosenblatt, R. ref1 Ross, A. ref1, ref2 Ross, K. ref1 Rudd, Kevin ref1 ruling class fear of work-free world ref1, ref2 and paranoia ref1, ref2 Sade, Marquis de ref1 Sallaz, J. ref1 Saurashtra Fuels ref1 Scarry, E. ref1 Securicor (G4S) ref1 Segarra, Carmen ref1 self-abnegation ref1 self-employment ref1 self-management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 self-preservation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 self-sufficiency ref1, ref2, ref3 shareholder capitalism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 shift work ref1, ref2 see also working hours Shragai, N. ref1 sleep and circadian rhythms ref1 as form of resistance ref1 working in ref1, ref2, ref3 smart drugs ref1, ref2 Smith, Roger ref1 smoking and addiction ref1 dangers of ref1, ref2 scientific research ref1 sociability ref1, ref2 ‘the social’ ref1, ref2 social factory ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and structure of work ref1 social media ref1 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission ref1 Social Patients’ Collective (SPK) ref1, ref2, ref3 social surplus (commons) ref1, ref2, ref3 socialism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Sontag, S. ref1 Spicer, A. ref1 stakeholder management ref1, ref2 Starbucks ref1 state, theory of ref1 subcontracting ref1, ref2, ref3 subsidization ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 suicide as act of refusal ref1 Freud’s definition ref1 work-related ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 surplus labour ref1, ref2 surplus living wage ref1 ‘tagged’ employees ref1 ‘tagged’ prisoner ref1 Tally, Richard ref1 taxation ref1, ref2, ref3 Taylor, F.W. ref1 Taylor, S. ref1 Taylorism ref1 technological progress, and emancipation from labour ref1 Thatcher, Margaret ref1 Thatcherism ref1 They Shoot Horses Don’t They?


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

In effect, the police can find cause to pull over practically any driver they choose, a tactic permitted under a long line of Supreme Court cases allowing traffic stops for ulterior purposes.22 Purely suspicionless stops, however, are allowed only if everyone gets stopped, as at a checkpoint, and only to investigate certain noncriminal matters. The Court has approved police roadblocks to check for drunken drivers,23 for illegal immigrants,24 and for invalid licenses and registrations,25 but not for drugs.26 The exception to these rules comes during “exigent circumstances” after a crime, when police can use checkpoints to capture an escaping car. Then comes the question of what police can do once they make a stop. They can look through the windows, and if they see something illegal “in plain view,” such as a bag of crack or the handle of a gun, they have probable cause to search the vehicle.

Attorney General’s office might still bring criminal charges in such an instance, the Justice Department stopped doing so after District of Columbia v. Heller. The department also stopped countersigning search warrants for guns in homes unless connected with drugs or owned by classes of people still barred by federal law from possessing firearms, who included convicted felons, illegal immigrants, and the mentally ill.3 Outside the home, though, guns were still prohibited, and police gun squads still operated vigorously. Inside residences, drugs remained a key target of police searches, and this one was finished. Quigley was bending over Wendy and explaining the inventory of items seized (the guns, the ammunition, the money, and photographs to be used to identify her son).

Without a chance to see the collected information and what agents conclude from it, neither the Congress nor the courts nor the public can tell whether innocents are being pursued, whether the precious resources of law enforcement are chasing around fruitlessly. After investigating itself, the Department of Homeland Security found its procedures to remove names listed incorrectly to be wholly inadequate. A healthy correction by the judicial branch stopped the executive branch in 2007 from using a severely flawed database to ferret out illegal immigrants. The plan required employers to submit Social Security numbers provided by their employees for verification against a government master file. It seemed straightforward enough. The government would issue “no-match letters” when workers provided phony numbers, and employers would be required to fire them within ninety days or face prosecution.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

By contrast, China’s rapid and widespread upgrading of worker training has meant that since joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, it has rapidly outpaced Mexico in manufacturing and textile exports to the United States. Despite Mexico’s geographic advantage, more than three hundred maquiladores have shut down and moved to China, resulting in three hundred thousand Mexican jobs lost, almost directly correlating to a massive spike in illegal immigration into the United States.2 With or without a border fence, Mexico’s problems may become America’s even faster than they already are. Inequality and instability go hand in hand. Outside Mexico City—and certainly within it—is a country of colonial monuments juxtaposed at every turn with ramshackle slums, with public investment in hospitals and schools an afterthought.

This turns border towns like Nuevo Laredo into frightening spectacles of robbery, kidnapping, and gang warfare.4 Mexican immigrants are a double-edged sword for the United States, taking jobs in construction and restaurants Americans don’t want, working harder and for longer hours, but also straining underfunded education and health systems.5 The $16 billion in annual remittances they provide from all fifty American states are a primary source of Mexico’s national income, helping raise its per capita GDP to $9,000, almost double the level at which emigration should begin to decrease. But because the country is so unequal—with up to half the population living in poverty—illegal immigration continues whether America likes it or not. It will require more than laissez-faire NAFTA-nomics to make one country out of Mexico. America’s most magnanimous gesture toward Mexico was bailing out the peso during the 1994 financial crisis, but since then NAFTA has fallen far short of what the EU has done for Turkey.

The influx of low-wage migrant labor has expanded the ranks of the poor, both due to their own numbers and because they reduce the wages of unskilled Americans.24 Almost two decades ago Los Angeles was described as the “capital of the third world” due to its segregated immigrant communities seeking simply to stay afloat with little regard for the broader society.25 Samuel Huntington also recently argued that America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and melting pot creed have been undermined by nonintegrating Hispanic minorities, warning that there cannot be an “Americano dream” to substitute for the American Dream without America becoming a schizophrenic nation.26 But it is hard to speak of a deep “community of values” in America when the primary reason Americans don’t support a welfare state to support the poor is that the poor are disproportionately minorities.27 In a country where recidivist violence seems never more than a few steps away, could white nativism reappear more regularly than it already does? The idea of homeland security seems to have as much to do with illegal immigration coming through the southern border as it does with the threat of terrorism. Americans have shown a fear of the future, one that may only accelerate its arrival. In 2005, Europe, India, the United States, and China were all hit by major storms or flooding. In Germany and Poland, thousands of citizens had their livelihoods wiped away, but through immediate assistance from their governments, people worked together to restore homes and towns as quickly as possible.


pages: 863 words: 159,091

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, illegal immigration, information security, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two and twenty, W. E. B. Du Bois, yellow journalism, Zeno's paradox

Identify the material as a comment, and include the date when the comment (not the entry itself) was posted. If the comment author's name is incomplete or a pseudonym, add pseud. in brackets after the posted name. N: 8. Peter Pearson, comment on “The New American Dilemma: Illegal Immigration,” The Becker-Posner Blog, comment posted March 6, 2006, http://www.beckerposner-blog.com/archives/2006/03/the_new_america.html#c080052 (accessed March 28, 2006). 11. Bill [pseud.], comment on “The New American Dilemma: Illegal Immigration,” The Becker-Posner Blog, comment posted March 10, 2006, http://www.beckerposner-blog.com/archives/2006/03/the_new_america.html#c080149 (accessed March 28, 2006). 17.7.3 Electronic Mailing Lists To cite material from an electronic mailing list, include the name of the author, the name of the list, and the date of the posting.

Include the author's name and the date of the posting. Such items should usually be cited only in a note. You generally need not include them in your bibliography, although you may choose to include a specific item that is critical to your argument or frequently cited. N: 7. Gary Becker, “The New American Dilemma: Illegal Immigration,” The Becker-Posner Blog, entry posted March 6, 2006, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/03/the_new_america.html (accessed March 28, 2006). To cite a comment posted on a Weblog by someone other than the author of the site, follow the basic pattern for Weblog entries. Identify the material as a comment, and include the date when the comment (not the entry itself) was posted.


pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Another decisive issue that separated Trump from the Republican establishment in 2016 was border security. Despite pledging to protect the border, Republicans often lost the courage of their convictions once they made it to Washington. The Republican establishment was at best mealymouthed when it came to fighting illegal immigration, and at worst two-faced. Trump blew all that up by running aggressively on the border issue, pledging to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out. Trump ended up building over 450 miles of border wall, leading to a decline of illegal crossings in those areas of 90 percent. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized over two million pounds of fentanyl, heroin, meth, and other narcotics.

Just as Biden locked up his nomination in March, the country locked down in response to the coronavirus outbreak, a global pandemic that had spread across the world from its origin in Wuhan, China. The pandemic crushed the thriving economy, one of Trump’s major selling points as the country underwent what he liked to call a “blue-collar boom.”5 His deregulatory agenda, tax cuts, willingness to tackle illegal immigration to stop the flood of cheap labor into the country, and renegotiation of trade deals to strengthen industry had jump-started an economy that had been flagging throughout his predecessor’s two terms. But now, churches were forced to close, children were banned from school, and public gatherings were declared illegal.


pages: 77 words: 24,968

Without Ever Reaching the Summit by Paolo Cognetti

illegal immigration

But he was not a good prophet when he wrote of Saldang, “One day human beings will despair of grinding out subsistence on high cold plateaus, and the last of an old Tibetan culture will blow away among the stones and ruins.” He was wrong. Famines would not kill them off: those mountain people have always faced hunger. So I corrected him: “Sooner or later these human beings will build a direct road to China, from here trucks full of goods and illegal immigrants will pass, barracks of all kinds will rise along the valley, and the riverbed will be reduced to a landfill; and the last vestiges of an ancient Tibetan culture will disappear amid garbage and cell phones.” Om Mani Padme Hum, the old man muttered. Om, the Jewel in the Lotus! I would have liked to ask him for a sip of his liquor.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It would be a lot easier to listen to what these people have to say if they would just stop whining about how underappreciated they are and insisting that they’re the only people left in America who’ve read the Constitution. In fact, if you listen to them long enough, you almost want to strap them into chairs and make them watch as you redistribute their tax money directly into the arms of illegal immigrant dope addicts. Which is too bad, because when they get past the pathetic self-regard and start to articulate their grievances, they are rooted in genuine anxieties about what’s going on in this country. In the case of these Westchester County revolutionaries, the rallying cry was a lawsuit filed jointly by a liberal nonprofit group in New York City and the Department of Housing and Urban Development against the county.

Instead of talking about what to do about the fact that, after all the mergers in the crisis, just four banks now account for half of the country’s mortgages and two-thirds of its credit card accounts, we’ll be debating whether or not we should still automatically grant citizenship to the American-born children of illegal immigrants, or should let Arizona institute a pass-law regime, or some such thing. Meanwhile, half a world away, in little-advertised meetings of international bankers in Basel, Switzerland, the financial services industry will be settling on new capital standards for the world’s banks. And here at home, bodies like the CFTC and the Treasury will be slowly, agonizingly making supertechnical decisions on regulatory questions like “Who exactly will be subject to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?”


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

National interest also makes it difficult for China and India to reduce their reliance on coal-fired electricity generation, despite commitments to reducing carbon emissions. India is building its own Great Wall, a 3,360-kilometer (2,100-mile) border fence surrounding Bangladesh. Designed to prevent illegal immigration, it will also provide protection from future Bangladeshi climate refugees. Economics, according to economist Robert Heilbroner, entails the study of resourcing society. But resource limits require re-evaluating society's consumption of the present at the expense of the future. In 1954, German economist E.

Tensions even threaten access to space, due to reliance on Russian launch capabilities following the end of the US Space Shuttle program. The peace dividend from the end of the Cold War may reverse with rising defense spending. The costs of humanitarian relief operations, as well as refugees and illegal immigration driven by instability, are increasing. The risk of armed conflict is ever-present. A 2012 report to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton spoke of China and Japan being one error away from outright war over the Diaoyu, or Senkaku, Islands in the East China Sea. Any conflict over the disputed islands could involve the US, if Japan were to activate treaty commitments.


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

In terms of food, a “rational” capitalist will produce unhealthy food if it is more profitable than healthy food, and will utilize polluting and toxic chemical inputs as long as profits are increased by doing so. Similarly “rational” capitalist farmers will pay the lowest possible wages to field workers in order to maximize profits, and if this means hiring illegal immigrants, this will be the direction taken as long as they can get away with it. Because most crops are annual and because capitalist farmers develop expertise and buy machinery for a limited range of production, it may be difficult to switch commodities or to switch into or out of farming in response to profit criteria in the short run.

Capitalist agriculture has always had difficulties with the commodification of labour-power that capitalism needs, because of the seasonal requirements for agricultural labour and the backbreaking nature of so much harvesting labour. This is no doubt one of the stronger reasons that the family farm persisted for so long in the United States. Given the typical low pay and sporadic employment in the agricultural sector, capitalist farmers often have had to rely on vulnerable workers (children, women, “guest” workers, illegal immigrants, immigrants and low-status minorities not protected by unions). In the United States today much of the work on capitalist farms is carried out by vulnerable immigrant labourers, who work very hard for little pay.36 Further, there is a long history of forced labour attached to colonial agriculture, which to some degree has lasted to this day.37 Up until the twentieth century, workers spent as much as 75 percent of their income on food.


pages: 340 words: 91,387

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

Indeed, in all three countries, the people who earn money off the books spend their ill-gotten gains in the national economies, so you might argue that these nations are indirectly benefitting from this cash-only work. And, since many of these people would give up their clandestine jobs if their income was taxed, you could argue that “tackling” the black economy in this way could be counterproductive. Yet the complaints continue. Politicians routinely denigrade the street trade as the zone of illegal immigrants and criminals. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has argued that street peddlers, many of them undocumented migrants from Africa, are committing crimes and taking jobs away from native-born Italians. His proposed solution: deport many of them back to their home countries. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has started a series of pogroms against longtime Gypsy residents, who live and work in System D.

Stanford Law Review, vol. 61, no. 5 (2009). Remer, Rosalind. “Preachers, Peddlers, and Publishers.” Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 1994). Report of the Mayor’s Push-Cart Commission, City of New York, 1906. Reuters. “Analysis—Faltering Economy Boosts Spain’s Black Market,” March 3, 2011. Reyneri, Emilio. “Illegal Immigration and the Underground Economy,” National Europe Centre Paper No. 66, February 2003, accessed March 8, 2011. Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Rothbard, Murray N. The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press, 1998. ———. Man, Economy, and State. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009.


pages: 294 words: 89,406

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

He bumped through a series of clerical and menial jobs before fetching up in a Montreal jail, claiming that the banking fraud which had put him there was all a big misunderstanding, probably the fault of one of his love rivals, and that he would one day be avenged. After being encouraged to seek fortune outside the Dominions of Canada, he headed back to the USA in the company of a party of illegal immigrants, which resulted in another short jail sentence. He promoted power and light investment schemes, pretended to be in a secret society in New Orleans, hung around with medical insurance fraudsters in Alabama, got married and ended up back in Boston in 1919. Here, he turned to a seemingly legitimate business, aiming to use his natural gifts for languages and for salesmanship to publish The Trader’s Guide, a compendium of useful addresses, consulates, customs details and similar information.

.), you are not meant to do any transactions where you are not sure of the true identity of the ‘beneficial owner’ (as in, not a lawyer’s office or a front corporation) on both sides. That’s hugely inconvenient, but every year the extent to which the regulators and cops are prepared to accept excuses seems to diminish. * Although sometimes freight companies are held responsible for failing to take precautions against illegal immigration and people-smuggling. * And Michael Levi the criminologist agreed, after looking through conviction data and speaking to police officers. * Although in the typical way of management consultants looking for ‘proprietary’ solutions to sell, there have been all sorts of proposals for Fraud Squares, Double Triangles and all manner of other polygons.


pages: 398 words: 86,855

Bad Data Handbook by Q. Ethan McCallum

Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Benoit Mandelbrot, business intelligence, cellular automata, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, conceptual framework, data science, database schema, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, Gini coefficient, hype cycle, illegal immigration, iterative process, labor-force participation, loose coupling, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, selection bias, sentiment analysis, SQL injection, statistical model, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, text mining, too big to fail, web application

In addition, this data does not include earnings that are not reported to SSA (for example, earnings from cash-based employment or acquired “under the table”) or earnings from workers who do not have, or do not report, a valid Social Security number. Unreported earnings may be particularly important for research on, say, immigration policy because many immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, do not have—or have invalid—Social Security numbers.[39] Let’s put these differences in datasets in some context. A few years ago, two co-authors and I were interested in examining year-to-year changes in individual earnings and changes in household incomes—so-called earnings and income “volatility.”[40] The question of whether people’s (or households’) earnings (or incomes) had grown more or less volatile between the 1980s and 2000s was a hot topic at the time (and, to some degree, still is) and with administrative data at our disposal, we were uniquely suited to weigh in on the issue.[41] To track patterns in earnings and income volatility over time, we calculated the percentage change in earnings/income using three variables: Earnings/income from the survey data.

In that case, I inferred emigration rates by following longitudinal earnings patterns over time using administrative data; although that was the strength of the analysis (and, to my knowledge, was the first attempt to use administrative data in that way), the weakness of such an approach is that I clearly missed foreign-born workers who were living and working in the country without authorization (that is, illegal immigrants) and thus may not have filed a W-2.[50] Although determining whether the dataset you are using is riddled with reporting errors (and whether those errors actually matter) is difficult, being aware of such data shortcomings will take your research further and, importantly, make the validity of your conclusions stronger.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest, this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger, and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says, “I have got an answer, we have an enemy”? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), has said that the drug trade has permitted the Taliban to thrive and expand despite the presence of NATO troops: “The Taliban’s direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex and increasingly widespread.”25 The UNODC estimates the Taliban earned $90 million to $160 million a year from taxing the production and smuggling of opium and heroin between 2005 and 2009, as much as double the amount it earned annually while it was in power nearly a decade ago. And Costa described the Afghanistan-Pakistan border as “the world’s largest free-trade zone in anything and everything that is illicit,” an area blighted by drugs, weapons, and illegal immigration. The “perfect storm of drugs and terrorism” may be on the move along drug trafficking routes through Central Asia, he warned. Opium profits are being pumped into militant groups in Central Asia, and “a big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources.”


Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, flag carrier, G4S, game design, gentrification, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, information security, Khartoum Gordon, Louis Pasteur, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Haifa-Hof HaCarmel ( GOOGLE MAP ), used by buses heading south along the coast (i.e. towards Tel Aviv), is on the Mediterranean (western) side of Mt Carmel. It's 8km around the base of Mt Carmel from the German Colony, near the Haifa-Hof HaCarmel train station. The quickest way to get to Tel Aviv and other coastal cities is by train. Other destinations: Atlit 'Illegal' Immigrant Detention Camp (bus 221, 25 minutes, every 30 minutes) Jerusalem (Egged bus 940, 44NIS, two hours, every 30 to 90 minutes except Friday evening to sundown Saturday) Zichron Ya'acov (Egged bus 202, 16.80NIS, one hour, every 90 minutes except Friday afternoon to Saturday night) Haifa-Merkazit HaMifratz ( GOOGLE MAP ), on the Haifa Bay side of Mt Carmel, is used by most buses to destinations north and east of Haifa.

From the roof (access is via the shop), you can see the Mediterranean, Mt Hermon (when it's clear) and everything in between. Out front is a peaceful little garden with a statue of Elijah. The Muhraqa is 5km south of the centre of Daliyat al-Karmel; bear left at the signposted Y-junction. Atlit %04 1Sights Atlit 'Illegal' Immigrant Detention CampHISTORIC SITE (%04-984 1980; adult/child 32/27NIS; h9am-5pm Sun-Thu, to 1pm or 2pm Fri, last tour departs 3pm or 4pm Sun-Thu, at noon Fri) In 1939, as the situation of the Jews of Europe became increasingly dire, the British government issued a white paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine to 10,000 to 15,000 'certificates' a year.

Atlit %04 1Sights Atlit 'Illegal' Immigrant Detention CampHISTORIC SITE (%04-984 1980; adult/child 32/27NIS; h9am-5pm Sun-Thu, to 1pm or 2pm Fri, last tour departs 3pm or 4pm Sun-Thu, at noon Fri) In 1939, as the situation of the Jews of Europe became increasingly dire, the British government issued a white paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine to 10,000 to 15,000 'certificates' a year. If Jewish refugees could not come to Palestine legally, the leaders of the Zionist Movement decided, they would do so illegally. Thousands of Jews fleeing Nazism made it past the British blockade, but many more were captured and interned at the Atlit 'Illegal' Immigrant Detention Camp. On 10 October 1945, the Palmach (the Special Forces unit of the Haganah) broke into the camp and released 200 prisoners. The daring infiltration, led by a young Yitzhak Rabin, caused the British to close the camp. After that, Holocaust survivors and other Jews arrested for illegally entering Palestine were sent to camps on Cyprus.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

In this new media universe, not just money, journalism, and political activism mixed, but also truth and hateful disinformation. News reports of actual events were presented alongside false ones, making it hard for readers to differentiate between them. A series of articles on illegal immigration, for instance, might mix stories about real illegal immigrants with false reports of Al Qaeda–linked terrorists sneaking in via Mexico. In some cases, this situation entered the realm of the bizarre, such as when Breitbart quoted a Twitter account parodying Trump, instead of his actual feed, in order to make him sound more presidential than he did in reality.

Social media companies can also use neural networks to analyze the links that users share. This is now being applied to the thorny problem of misinformation and “fake news.” Multiple engineering startups are training neural networks to fact-check headlines and articles, testing basic statistical claims (“There were x number of illegal immigrants last month”) against an ever-expanding database of facts and figures. Facebook’s chief AI scientist turned many heads when, in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, he noted that it was technically possible to stop viral falsehoods. The only problem, he explained, was in managing the “trade-offs”—finding the right mix of “filtering and censorship and free expression and decency.”


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

Now they haven’t delivered, Britain needs a rethink’? As home secretary, Mrs May authorised schemes in which vans drove around with large signs inviting people to send the authorities information about anyone working illegally. They were quickly dubbed ‘Shop an Immigrant’ vans and were widely derided. They both failed to deliver a single illegal immigrant for deportation and were like an Orwellian echo of demands in totalitarian states that citizens inform on and denounce each other. Recognising her error, Mrs May quickly abandoned the programme and the vans disappeared from public view. In May 2016, a month before the Brexit vote, Mrs May went to talk to Goldman Sachs bankers.

In both countries defence expenditure has gone down despite the threat of Russian aggressive posturing, the continuing neighbourhood crises that Europe faces and the constant urging from the United States that Europe accepts more responsibility for defence. The eastern and southern Mediterranean is a mixture of conflict zone and a region where people-smuggling and - trafficking, the transportation of illegal immigrants, occasionally of jihadists, into Europe, is rife. This is Europe’s most important external frontier but it is without defence, regular patrols or aggressive naval action against criminals. Instead of allocating more of their national budgets to control Europe’s external borders and send messages about readiness to defend European interests, Prague and Rome want someone else to do the job.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Since then there has been another immigration surge in the US and, as noted, the non-Hispanic white population has fallen to just 62 per cent. Moreover, because of an overwhelming consensus in favour of legal immigration on the establishment centre-left and centre-right there has been almost no debate about this big demographic shift. The immigration debate, prior to Trump, was only about what to do about the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the US and even in that debate opponents of ‘paths to citizenship’ measures were rountinely accused of racism. Will Trump’s extraordinary campaign and early immigration curbs leave an even starker racial divide in US politics with a core of disaffected whites, now stirred into political consciousness?

But when one third of all graduate jobs in London are taken by people born abroad there is also bound to be some displacement of British citizens, either in London itself or people who would have come to the capital from other parts of the country. At the bottom end the displacement story is even clearer (and that is without even considering illegal immigration in the capital). Around 20 per cent of low-skill jobs are taken by people born abroad, and according to Ian Gordon of the LSE, wages in the bottom 20 per cent may have been depressed by at least 15 per cent in periods of peak inflow.57 Until the big immigration surge starting in the late 1990s there were fewer people in London employed at the very bottom end of the labour market than elsewhere in the country, and they were better paid.


pages: 319 words: 95,854

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Robert Lane Greene

anti-communist, British Empire, centre right, discovery of DNA, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Parag Khanna, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Immigration has increased steadily since the 1920s-era quotas were relaxed in 1965, and with illegal immigration bolstering the legal kind, Hispanics are now the largest minority in the United States. In 2009, Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, born in the Bronx, to be the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court, in a tacit recognition of Hispanics’ growing political clout. When it came to light that she had once praised the virtues of being a “wise Latina” in a speech, conservatives were apoplectic, many flatly calling her a racist. Mark Krikorian, a professional worrier about illegal immigration, found even the prosody of her name galling, writing in the blog of the conservative National Review magazine: Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits.


pages: 328 words: 100,381

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

Immigration and Customs Enforcement—the federal government’s second-largest law enforcement agency after 9/11—had started operations against suspected terrorists in the United States, too. To that end, it was getting help from the most elite military Special Operations Forces to target and arrest, if need be, suspected terrorists and illegal immigrants. And even as the Obamas headed toward the bulletproof parade reviewing stand, overseas the CIA was starting a new day targeting individuals from afar using its armed Predator drones, a practice criticized by some as assassination, which had been banned decades before. Many people in Pakistan, where most of the hits took place, saw it as an undeclared war, and their resentment against the United States only grew bigger with each new strike.

(They could even tell, by the heat signature underneath its chassis, whether the car had just been turned off.) In Arizona, the Maricopa County sheriff’s office purchased the sort of facial recognition equipment prevalent in war zones, using it to record some nine thousand biometric digital mug shots a month, many of them of illegal immigrants. And, just as soldiers in the field did when trying to keep towns free of insurgents, many American police departments purchased equipment allowing them to record images of license plate numbers belonging to every car going through toll booths and tunnels. Such surveillance was especially intense around larger cities, especially those that had felt the direct impact of the 9/11 attacks.


pages: 320 words: 97,509

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

Immigration status was going to be very relevant in deciding how we were going to manage her. As a cardiology fellow at NYU, I had treated several illegal immigrants with end-stage heart failure. Usually there were hospitals in their native countries that performed heart transplants, but if they went back home, they would not be allowed to return to America, so they almost never wanted to discuss that option. (And none of them could afford transplants in their native lands anyway.) In many cases, the only hope for an illegal immigrant with end-stage heart failure was to raise the quarter of a million dollars for a cardiac transplant herself.


pages: 344 words: 100,046

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

correlation does not imply causation, germ theory of disease, illegal immigration, out of africa, Silicon Valley, trade route

“You signed up for the course like I asked? That’s good.” “Yeah, well.” Paulette put her empty mug down. “Do you want to go through it all again? Just so I know where I stand?” “Not really, but…” Miriam glanced at Brill. “Look, here’s the high points. This young lady is Brilliana d’Ost. She’s kind of an illegal immigrant, no papers, no birth certificate, no background. She needs somewhere to stay while we sort things out back where she comes from. She isn’t self-sufficient here—she met her very first elevator yesterday evening, and her first train this morning.” Paulette raised an eyebrow. “R-i-i-ght,” she drawled.

Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one ability that is as important, more important, than what’s between our legs: another source of status. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own. Do you think I’d ever go back there for any reason except to help you change the world?” Taken aback, Miriam recoiled slightly. “Ouch,” she said. “I didn’t realize all that stuff. No.” She picked up her wine glass again.


pages: 316 words: 103,743

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

‘The police went to see the family and told them, “You can’t buy people, they’re not animals.” They asked me if I wanted to prosecute the family, but I said, “No.” I just wanted to forget it and go home.’ Aba was treated well by the police, a new development in itself. Until recently, the Chinese authorities regarded all trafficked women as illegal immigrants and imprisoned them until they could be returned to their home countries. Three years after disappearing from her parents’ lives, Aba walked alone across the official border crossing to Muse and returned to her house. ‘My mother and father were very shocked to see me,’ said Aba. ‘They started crying and so did I.

Many of those who cross the border now leave Yanbian quickly and make for the big cities, where the police are not looking for DPRK refugees and they can blend in by claiming to be Chaoxianzu. Others, like Piao’s wife, try and escape to South Korea. There are two routes used to reach Seoul: either via Mongolia, which deports all North Korean illegal immigrants to South Korea automatically, or across China to Yunnan and then on to Thailand. Both the escape lines are run by the South Korean missionaries in Yanji. They fund them by raising money at home and from the American Korean community. One day, Piao’s wife was spirited south-west to Kunming, then to Laos and Bangkok and finally to Seoul.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

But, with the government refusing to build homes and large numbers of foreign-looking people arriving in certain communities, the BNP's narrative just seems to make sense to a lot of people. The BNP's strategy has been obligingly boosted by the right-wing tabloids. '£Sm benefits for disabled migrants who flew home', screams one Daily Express headline. 'Secret report warns of migration meltdown in Britain', warns the Daily Mail. 'Illegal immigrant mum gets four-bedroom house', gasps the Sun. If you are a working-class person struggling to scrape by, who cannot get an affordable home or at least knows others in that position, then being bombarded with these stories gives credence to the BNP narrative: that there aren't enough resources to go round, and immigrants are gettit~g the lion's share of them.

And I would never move out of Dagenham.' They are both deeply scornful of 'the crap that the BNP are coming out with ... At the moment they're frightening people, they're saying old people can get chucked out of their house, and it's given to the "illegals". If they can say where the illegals are, fine. But there are no illegal immigrants inthis borough. There's not. I mean, there's good and bad in everybody. But the BNP are very bad.' 'They're very racist, aren't they?' asks Leslie, drawing a quick response from Mora: 'Very, yery racist, they are.' Although neither had faith in politicians at the national level, they did trust their local Labour councillors.


pages: 335 words: 98,847

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

Rather than squirming as before, I now find myself nodding along (as a consequence of my time with Romanian Dan) before realising what I’m doing. Another report investigates how illegal immigrants are crossing into the UK in the back of trucks. ‘They should chain the doors shut!’ yells Ted. I can’t let this one slide. ‘When you absconded, you bunked off to Spain in the back of a lorry. Doesn’t this make you an illegal immigrant as well?’ Such challenges usually trigger a pointless half-hour argument, after which Ted always claims victory because ‘we won Brexit’. The banter is mostly good-humoured, but I get annoyed when he slags off our neighbour, ‘China’, a Chinese computer hacker with the most unimaginative nickname in Wandsworth, making a barbed comment about him being stupid and untrustworthy.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

Hours earlier, Donald J. Trump’s campaign had posted on Facebook a video of a speech the candidate had made in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. In it, Trump promised to take a dramatically harder line against terrorists, and then he linked terrorism to immigration. President Obama, he said, had treated illegal immigrants better than wounded warriors. Trump would be different, the presidential candidate assured the crowd. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he announced.3 The audience exploded with cheers.

The Oval Office encounter was considered a coup by Kaplan and Nick Clegg, who felt strongly that Facebook’s leaders needed to interact more with the current administration. Central to the strategy was a meeting with Trump. Zuckerberg had been wary of engaging directly with the president, even as his counterparts at other businesses had made the pilgrimage to the White House. Privately, he told close aides he was disgusted by Trump’s detention of illegal immigrants and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Zuckerberg had long supported immigrant rights, including Dreamers, the children of undocumented immigrants. Priscilla was the daughter of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam; when she was teaching in East Palo Alto, she suggested Zuckerberg tutor students at her high school.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The anti-immigrant gambit of the ruling Fidesz Party issued in a massive PR campaign. Citizens were confronted by thousands of government-sponsored billboards asking: “Did you know that since the beginning of the immigration crisis, more than 300 people have died as a result of terror attacks in Europe?” “Did you know that Brussels wants to settle a whole city’s worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary?” “Did you know that since the beginning of the immigration crisis the harassment of women has risen sharply in Europe?” “Did you know that the Parisian terror attacks were committed by immigrants?” “Did you know that close to one million immigrants want to come to Europe from Libya alone?”


pages: 113 words: 36,039

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

The list of catastrophes and especially betrayals is long: birth control, abandonment of the gold standard, speech codes, the Common Market, no-fault divorce, poststructuralism, denationalizing important industries, abortion, the euro, Muslim and Jewish communitarianism, gender studies, surrendering to American power in NATO, surrendering to German power in the EU, surrendering to Muslim power in the schools, banning smoking in restaurants, abolishing conscription, aggressive antiracism, laws defending illegal immigrants, and the introduction of halal food in schools. The list of traitors is shorter but just as various: feminists, left-wing journalists and professors, neoliberal businessmen, anti-neoliberal activists, cowardly politicians, the educational establishment, European bureaucrats, and even coaches of professional soccer teams who have lost control of their players.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Nearly 70 percent of the members carry firearms—some as a result of the group’s conversations. Small but vigorous protests have been planned, organized, and carried out in three state capitals. A march on Washington, DC, is now in the works. Recent discussion has occasionally turned to the need for “self-protection” against illegal immigrants, terrorists, and the state, through civil disobedience and possibly selective “strikes” on certain targets in the public and private sectors. The motivation for this discussion is the widely disseminated view that the “FBI and possibly the CIA” are starting to take steps to “dismember” the group.

Kelly, 114–15 Gates, Bill, 52–53, 134, 196 general-interest intermediaries: bias and, 148; citizens and, 166; Daily Me and, 20; as default, 25; improving, 230; judgment and, 43; mass media and, 18–19; newspapers and, 13 (see also newspapers); polarization and, 84; power of, 18; republicanism and, 253, 257, 260–61; self-insulation and, 13; shared experiences and, 152; social clarity and, 142–43; spreading information and, 140–43, 148, 151–52, 156; television and, 13 (see also television); as unacknowledged public forums, 41–44, 58 genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 59, 100, 130–32, 217 Gentzkow, Matthew, 115–16, 120–21 Gerken, Heather, 85 Germany, ix, 6, 17, 19, 25, 32, 34, 73, 203, 237 global warming, 68–69, 88, 217 Goodman, Jack, 197–98 Google, 3, 28, 37, 53, 118, 229, 265n2 greenhouse gases, 9, 127, 130–32, 218 group identity, 75–78, 81 Guess, Andrew, 116–17 Habermas, Jürgen, 46–47 Haberstam, Yosh, 120 hacking, 109, 178, 184, 186, 188, 201 Hale, Scott, 105–6, 108 Hamilton, Alexander, 49, 54 Hand, Learned, 249–50 Hardball (TV show), 120 Hardin, Russell, 240 Harvard University, 160 hashtags, 3, 43, 119, 245, 271n23; Congress and, 82; Democrats and, 80–81; entrepreneurs and, 4, 79–82; Internet Relay Chats and, 79; polarization and, 59, 79–82; Republicans and, 80–81; serendipity and, 79–81; Trump and, 83 hate groups, 67–68, 70, 87, 236 HBO, 179 health issues: Affordable Care Act (ACA) and, 81, 129; AIDS/HIV and, 110; bandwagon diseases and, 100; conspiracies and, 125–26; cybercascades and, 99–101; deliberative opinion polls on, 133; democracy and, 23, 29; false information and, 110; famine as metaphor and, 149; GMOs and, 59, 100, 130–32; insurance premiums and, 129; OSHA and, 218–19 Hebrew University, 112 Her (Jonze film), 20–22, 33 heterogeneous society: anti-federalists and, 48; fragmentation and, 51, 135; improving, 216; mass media and, 19; opinion polls and, 134; polarization and, 84, 86, 88–89; public forums and, 38–39, 41, 43; republicanism and, 257, 262; shared experiences and, 140; social problems and, 7; spreading information and, 140, 145, 155; US Constitution and, 48–51 Himelboim, Itai, 118–19 Hitler, Adolf, ix HIV, 110 holidays, 7, 141–42, 242 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 52–57, 247–48, 250 homogeneous society: Facebook and, 125; polarization and, 69, 86, 92; social media bias and, 135; spreading information and, 151; Twitter and, 119; US Constitution and, 48–51; virtual world and, 13 homophily, 1–2, 5, 117–22 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 160 Huffington Post, 117, 123 Hughes, Chris, 82 human rights, 107 Hurricane Katrina, 19, 139 Hussein, Saddam, 94 Huxley, Aldous, x, 21 ideal speech situation, 47 identity: culture and, 129–35; group, 75–77, 81; judgment and, 129–35; shared, 239 ideologies: cultural cognition and, 129–30; cybercascades and, 115–23, 127, 131; polarization and, 61–62, 65, 81, 94–95; republicanism and, 260; spreading information and, 140; values and, 11, 14–15, 22, 30, 52, 75, 101, 113, 126–32, 142, 145, 163, 165, 169, 227, 232, 235, 253, 258; website choice and, 5, 25 ILOVEYOU virus, 176–78, 186, 191, 207 immigration, 1, 3–4, 11, 19, 39, 66, 129, 159, 235, 246 inert people, ix, 56, 145, 204, 261 information: advertising and, 146, 152–53; algorithms and, 3, 15, 21–22, 28–29, 32, 122–24, 257, 265n2; backfiring corrections and, 93–97, 111; bias and, 151–53 (see also bias); conspiracies and, 124–26; consumer sovereignty and, 52–53 (see also consumer sovereignty); copyright and, 29, 184–85, 195, 200–201, 219; cultural cognition and, 129–30; customized filtering and, 52–53 (see also filtering); cybercascades and, 98–136; Daily Me and, 1–4, 14–15, 19–21, 30–31, 52, 56, 58–59, 114, 153, 253, 255; disclosure policies and, 215, 218–23; easy creation of, 27–28; Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act and, 218; exposure and, 40–41; false, 11, 23, 109–10, 135, 155, 237, 250; fragmentation and, 140–41, 146, 149–55 (see also fragmentation); general-interest intermediaries and, 140–43, 148, 151–52, 156; hashtags and, 3–4, 43, 59, 79–83, 119, 245, 271n23; Internet and, 31, 138, 143–44, 148–54 (see also Internet); must-carry rules and, 215, 226–29; News Feed and, 2, 14–16, 41, 124, 232–33; preferences and, 58; producers and, 145–46; as product, 149; propaganda and, 109, 160, 236–37, 239, 245, 248–50; public forums and, 142, 156 (see also public forums); as public good, 45, 51, 57–58, 147–48, 260; reinforcement and, 63, 72, 78, 81, 114–15, 132, 148, 260–61; rumors and, 103, 108–11, 125, 236–37; self-imposed echo chambers and, 5–13, 17, 20, 50, 57, 59, 68, 71, 81, 90, 93, 114–18, 122–24, 131–32, 153, 163, 244, 262–64; social glue and, 7, 140, 143, 155, 260; social media and, 138–39, 148, 150, 152, 154–55; solidarity goods and, 58, 141–44; sound bites and, 43, 151, 224, 268n19; tipping points and, 102–4, 108–11; trending petitions and, 106; up/down votes and, 112–13; as wildfire, 102–4 innovation, 5, 133, 183, 243 “Inspire” (online terrorist journal), 236 Instagram, 22; cybercascades and, 114; polarization and, 79, 83, 89; public forums and, 36–37; regulation and, 179; spreading information and, 138, 149; terrorism and, 237–38 Internet: access to, 30; advertising and, 28; algorithms and, 3, 15, 21–22, 28–29, 32, 122–24, 257, 265n2; architecture of, 13; baselines and, 23; beginnings of, 181–86; Berners-Lee and, 183; bomb-making instructions and, 192, 235–37; browsing habits and, 5, 21–22, 116, 124; citizens and, 158, 160, 164, 169, 171–74; commercialization of, 183; consumer effect of, 171–74; conveniences of, 31–32; copyright and, 29; cybercascades and, 102, 108–11, 115–16, 123, 133–35; DARPA and, 182–83; death of mass media and, 19; deliberative domains and, 215–17; filtering and, 25–26 (see also filtering); forms of neutrality and, 207–10; free content and, 28; freedom of speech and, 192, 201–10; hashtags and, 3–4, 43, 59, 79–83, 119, 245, 271n23; ideologies and, 5, 25; ILOVEYOU virus and, 176–78, 186, 191, 207; improving, 215–16, 223, 226, 228–29; information available on, 31; isolation index and, 116, 120; legal issues and, 184–88; most popular sites on, 171–72; music and, 3, 21, 31–34, 64, 102, 104–8, 159, 192; online behavior and, 22–23, 65, 83, 98, 116–17, 130, 234–35; overload and, 63–68; Pariser and, 265n2; partyism and, 10; polarization and, 59–60, 64–68, 70, 72, 76–79, 86, 89; politics and, 116–17; potential of, 24; as public forum, 36; public sphere and, 153; regulation and, 178, 182–90; republicanism and, 253–61; self-insulation and, 13; shared experience and, 143; social media and, 22 (see also social media); sovereignty and, 52, 55; spreading information and, 138, 143–44, 148–54; tabloidization and, 223–24; terrorism and, 234–38, 240–43, 245–47; as threat, ix–x; websites and, 3, 6, 13, 22, 27–28, 32–33, 59–60, 62, 65, 67, 106–12, 146, 154, 166, 179, 185–94, 207–8, 212–17, 222–25, 229, 235, 242, 255, 268n18 Internet Relay Chats, 79 Iraq, 18, 42, 64, 93–94, 98, 242 ISIS, 238, 244 Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), 98, 234, 236, 239, 241–48, 283n22 isolation: filtering and, 27, 38, 64, 98, 115–16, 120–22, 234, 242–43, 254, 265n2; index for, 115–16, 120–21; self-imposed echo chambers and, 5–13, 17, 20, 50, 57, 59, 68, 71, 81, 90, 93, 114–18, 122–24, 131–32, 153, 163, 244, 262–64 Israel, 6, 87, 91, 140–41, 245–46, 284n31 Italy, 6, 124, 203 Jacobs, Jane, 12–13, 260 jarring of parties, 49, 54 Jefferson, Thomas, 51–52 Jews, 96, 185 Jiabao, Wen, 139 jihad, 239, 241–42 John, Peter, 105–6, 108 Jonze, Spike, 20–22, 33 judgment: citizens and, 167, 169–70; cybercascades and, 99, 101–2, 127–35; freedom of speech and, 206; general-interest intermediaries and, 43; identity and, 129–35; insulation and, 51; prediction and, 28; republicanism and, 259, 261; sound bites and, 268n19; strengthening preexisting, 34; terrorism and, 235 Kahan, Dan, 129–31 Kahneman, Daniel, 17–18 Kennedy, Anthony, 36–37 King, Gary, 160–61 Knight, Brian, 120 Koran, 239 Kossinets, Gueorgi, 118 Ku Klux Klan, 109 Lazzaro, Stephanie, 127 legal issues: behavior and, 220–21; Brandeis and, 52–56, 145, 203, 220, 228, 247–48, 250–51; child-support and, 133; commercial speech and, 193, 205, 207; communications and, 220, 227; constitutional doctrine and, 192–201, 204 (see also constitutional doctrine); copyright and, 29, 184–85, 195, 200–201, 219; deliberative democracy and, 25, 34, 44, 48, 55–56, 86, 92, 133–35, 169, 195, 215–17, 220, 222, 228; Dewey and, 252; disclosure policies and, 215, 218–23; educational programming for children and, 170, 181, 197–99, 202, 204–5, 210–11, 221, 226; Facebook’s complicity in terrorism and, 246; First Amendment and, 36, 193, 195–207, 212, 227–28, 231; forms of neutrality and, 207–10; Fourteenth Amendment and, 199; fraud and, 2–6, 74, 109, 200–201, 258; freedom of speech and, 55–56, 191–212; Hand and, 249–50; Holmes and, 52–56, 247–48, 250; interference in communications market and, 177–79; Internet and, 184–88; must-carry rules and, 215, 226–29; national security and, 4, 42, 74, 178, 186, 216, 246; Nuremberg Files and, 191–92, 208; President’s Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters and, 196–98; privacy and, 178, 225, 237, 243; property rights and, 179–90, 194, 258; Second Amendment and, 119, 198, 234; self-protection against illegal immigrants and, 235; sexual harassment and, 101; terrorism and, 246–47; unfreedom and, 163; US Constitution and, 247 (see also US Constitution) Lessig, Lawrence, 184 liberals: blogs and, 231; Colorado experiment and, 68–70, 77; confirmation bias and, 123; cybercascades and, 114–23; differing points of view and, 230; Facebook and, 3, 232; foxnews.com and, 228; fragmentation and, 10; polarization and, 61, 64, 68–70, 74, 84–85, 90, 94–95 liberty, 5, 11, 52, 138, 174, 204 limited argument pool, 72, 76 limited options, 164–67, 174 Littleton, Colorado attack, 236 lone-wolf attacks, 241, 244–45 long tails, 149–51, 171 Lorenz, Jan, 113–14 Los Angeles Times, 19, 152 loss aversion, 59 machine learning, 4–5 Madison, James, 45, 51–52, 203, 261 magazines: bias and, 152; choice of, 18; isolation and, 116; free content and, 229; general-interest intermediaries and, 41–42, 257; points of view and, 18, 66, 230; public forums and, 41–42; regulation and, 179, 181–82, 184, 187, 189; Twitter and, 118 majority rule, 53–54, 169–70 Malik, Tashfeen, 241 manipulation, 17, 28–29, 95, 164 Mao Tse-tung, ix Margetts, Helen, 105–6, 108 Marginal Revolution, 22 Martin, Gregory J., 61 martyrdom, 241 mass media: behavior and, 19; bias and, 151–52; death of, 19; echo chambers and, 116; freedom of speech and, 203; as general-interest intermediaries, 18–19; heterogeneous society and, 19; improving, 222; opposing viewpoints and, 71, 84, 207, 215, 231–33, 255; public forums and, 36–37; public sphere and, 153–54.


pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

This, despite the actual spectacular record of President Obama in saving the economy after the crash of 2008, preventing the worst recession from becoming another Great Depression, the extension of health care to the poor and middle class, and the general spreading of enlightened attitudes toward minorities and women. The insistence that grave danger exists in reality because it exists in one’s mind is the hallmark of the dictator. For Hitler, the Jews represented an existential threat; for Trump, it is illegal immigrants and Mexicans in particular. Also, the disregard for facts, the denial that “factualization” is a necessity before making an assertion of danger or insisting on the nefarious intent of a large group (i.e., the Jews for Hitler, the Muslims for Trump) is typical of paranoid characters who need an enemy against whom to focus group hate.

Many critics of Trump, particularly journalists but also those in the mental health field, have focused on his so-called narcissism, his need to be constantly approved of, the childlike nature of his character. In this they are minimizing the significance of his paranoid beliefs and, in so doing, are relegating his psychological dysfunction to a much higher level than is actually the case. This is also true of those who believe he is simply using his attack on illegal immigrants and Muslims to feed his base. In doing so, they are suggesting that he himself knows better, that he knows that he is merely using these ideas because they will appeal to the white working-class men who make up the bulk of his voters. Yet, this overlooks and minimizes the more ominous probability: that he actually is paranoid and that there is an overlap of his personal hatreds and those of his followers.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

FAHMY, Dalia. (2014, May 27). “25 Years After Communism, Eyesores Spur Landmark Debate,” Bloomberg Business, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-26/25-years-after-communism-eyesores-spur-landmark-debate. FAINSTEIN, Susan. (1994). The City Builders: Property, Politics and Planning in London and New York, London: Blackwell Publishers. FARAGE, Nigel. (2014, December 18). “Surprise, surprise: tens of thousands of illegal immigrants have dropped off the Home Office’s radar,” The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/surprise-surprise-tens-of-thousands-of-illegal-immigrants-have-dropped-off-the-home-offices-radar-9934496.html FARRAR, Lara. (2008, June 21). “Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/16/suburb.city/index.html. FASHIONUNITED. (2013).


pages: 350 words: 107,834

Halting State by Charles Stross

augmented reality, book value, Boris Johnson, call centre, forensic accounting, game design, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, Ken Thompson, lifelogging, Necker cube, no-fly zone, operational security, Potemkin village, RFID, Schrödinger's Cat, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Meanwhile, in other local footnote news (digested from the dailies by your agents, after they prioritize the important stuff about industry mergers, devkit point releases, and new game announcements): The ongoing squabble between Holyrood and Westminster over who pays for counter-terrorism operations is threatening to turn nasty (because nobody north of the border really believes that Scotland is some kind of terrorism magnet, whatever the bampots in London think). The first minister is making some kind of high-profile announcement about reintroducing free schooling to encourage the birth rate. And a Russian illegal immigrant has been necklaced down in Pilton, the victim of a suspected blacknet gangland slaying. It’s your usual Embra Monday morning rubbish, aside from the Brookmyre special. The bus snakes up the road in due course, flanks rippling with Hollywood explosions advertising Vin Diesel’s latest attempt to revive his ancient and cobwebby career.

“What’s down there?” “It’s a rabbit-hole,” he says slowly, looking around as if at a different landscape. “Where’s it go?” “Looks like Zhongguo shard, going by the map. Which is part of Hentai Animatics’ zone, and we don’t have an admin contract for that. I think you’ve just uncovered an illegal-immigrant tunnel.” SUE: Chop Shop Hackman’s weird outburst has haunted you all through the case team meeting up at the station, despite your hasty cramming on blacknets and anonymizing peer-to-peer crime networks and the people who set them up and skim off the profits; in particular his admonition not to have anything to do with the “bottom-feeding scum.”


pages: 325 words: 107,099

The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

airport security, fake news, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, messenger bag, rolodex, white picket fence

Miraculous or not, the manner of our escape meant that we didn’t land in the United Arab Emirates as refugees. We had a three-month sponsored visa courtesy of Baba’s wealthy relative, Mr Jahangir, miracle number three, the man who had surfaced during our weeks in hiding. But Maman knew that soon we would become refugees. Or worse, illegal immigrants. We had no intention of returning to Iran when our visas expired. The day after we landed, Maman requested European asylum from the United Nations office in Abu Dhabi and hoped for a response before our visas ran out and the Emirati immigration authorities found out we had blown through our welcome.

Maybe it helped that Maman’s stride was wearier than her age and that Daniel and I were covered in so much sweat and ketchup and pantry dirt. Their answer would take months and who could guess what Westerners needed to witness in order to believe a story. A few weeks later our visa expired. We were now illegal immigrants. Was it before or after our change in station that we met the Sadeghis? The days blur together, but soon, our world expanded. Another Persian family arrived in the hostel. They, too, had left Iran on a tourist visa. They, too, would become illegal, or already had – we didn’t ask. Mozhgan Sadeghi was my age, taller, with thick black eyebrows and hair.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Even among those voters who were upset that more wasn’t being done to address their environmental concerns, just 16 percent reported feeling angry about it—70 percent reported the milder feelings of disappointment and concern. Perhaps the most important finding of all was this one: even self-identified environmentalists prioritize other issues—gay marriage, abortion, and illegal immigration—ahead of the environment.14 When the pollsters asked voters to rank issues in terms of their importance, the environment almost always came in last. In the Nicholas Institute’s survey, pollsters asked, “What is the most important issue to you personally?” The environment came in dead last (10 percent of voters), after economy/jobs (34 percent), health care (25 percent), Iraq (22 percent), Social Security (21 percent), education (20 percent), terrorism (20 percent), moral values (15 percent), and taxes (12 percent).15 In a June 2006 survey, researchers with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked people what issues they considered very important.

[back] 14. In response to the question “If you disagreed with a candidate on just that issue, would you still consider voting for that candidate, or would you not vote for that candidate based on that issue alone?” 53 percent named gay marriage, 51 percent named abortion, 49 percent named illegal immigration, and 44 percent named the environment as issues that would cause them to vote against a candidate. Survey for the Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions, Peter Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies, eight-hundred-person survey of voters, August 25–28, 2005. [back] 15. Ibid.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most environmentally degraded and deforested regions in Central America. They cut their forests; we got their kids. It is not only Europe and America that have become the promised land for economic and climate migrants from the World of Disorder. So too has the Promised Land. In recent years, Israel has been flooded with some sixty thousand illegal immigrants, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan. Stroll the blocks around the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, where many have found shelter, and you’ll see African men on cell phones on every street. They sailed, walked, or drove to Israel’s borders and either slipped in on their own or were smuggled in by bedouins across Egypt’s Sinai Desert.

“Emerald City of Giving Does Exist” (New York Times article) emerging markets Emerson, Ralph Waldo empathy; live video and Empire of Wealth, An (Gordon) encryption Energryn energy, technological change and energy efficiency Enestvedt, Harold Enova Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Ericsson Eritrea ethics, innovation in; freedom and; leadership and; sustainable values and Ethiopia Ethiopians, in Minnesota Euphrates River Europe: illegal immigration into; wireless networks in European Union; Britain’s exit from evolution; human manipulation of Evolution and Human Behavior Exploratorium exponential change; see also Moore’s law export systems Express, L’ extreme weather “Eye, The” (song) Facebook Facebook Messenger Fadell, Tony Fairchild Semiconductor family planning FAO Food Price Index Fargo (film) Farook, Syed Rizwan Fast Company Faten (Syrian drought refugee) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Federal Trade Commission Feldon, Barbara Fendrik, Ármin Ferguson, Mo.

David Time Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Tipirneni, Ashok Tocqueville, Alexis de topsoil “topsoil of trust” Torvalds, Linus Toynbee, Arnold Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) translation software Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) transparency, in workplace Transparent (TV series) Trestman, Marc tribalism Tropic of Chaos (Parenti) Truman, Harry Trump, Donald trust: community and; financial flows and; as human quality; politics and; sharing economy and; as social capital; social technologies and Trust (Fukuyama) truth, live video and Tunisia TurboTax Turki, Karim Turner, Adair 24/7 Customer Twenty-Fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit Twin Cities Business Twin Cities Metropolitan Council Twitter 2G wireless networks typewriters Uber; surge pricing algorithms of Udacity Uganda, population growth in Ukraine; 2014 uprising in unemployment, political instability and Unesco United Bearing United Nations; Human Development Report Office of; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of; Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of; Population Division of; Refugee Agency (UNHCR) of United Press International (UPI) United States: China’s relations with; global dependence on; illegal immigration into; immigrant entrepreneurs in; Madagascar and; Middle East policy of; population growth in; post–Cold War hegemony of; Russia’s relations with UPS USA Today value sets: of author; community and; cultural identity and; in opinion writing; sustainable vs. situational; see also ethics, innovation in van Agtmael, Antoine Vedantam, Shankar Venezuela Venmo Ventura, Jesse Veritas Genetics Verizon version control systems Vestberg, Hans video, live, empathy and video games Vietnam Vietnam War Visa Vital Signs of the Planet (NASA report) voice prints Volkswagen Beetle Vox.com wage insurance Wakefield Research Walensky, Norm Walker, Robert Wall Street Journal Walmart, online operations of Wanamaker, John Wanstrath, Chris Warburg, Bettina Waryan, Don Washington Post Waters, Colin water scarcity Watson, Thomas Watson (computer) Watson (software): medical applications of weak signals, detection of weak states: in age of accelerations; biodiversity loss in; breakers and; building stability in; civil wars in; climate change and; in Cold War era; contrived borders of; dwindling foreign aid to; global flows and; infrastructure in; Internet and; population growth in; risk to interdependent world of We Are All Khaled Said (Facebook page) Webster University WeChat Weekend Edition (radio show) Weiner, Jeff Weisman, Alan Welby, Justin Wells, Lin Welsh, Tim West Africa; Ebola outbreak in; migration from WhatIs.com WhatsApp “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism” (Haidt) White House, 2015 drone crash at White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) Whitman, Meg “Why ‘Keep Your Paddle in the Water’ Is Bad Advice for Beginners” (Levesque) “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work” (Miller) Wieseltier, Leon Wikipedia Williams, Jake Wilson, Dan wind energy Windows Wired wireless networks wisdom, patience and Wolf, Frank women: education of; empowerment of WomenNewsNetwork.net workforce, innovation in; accelerated pace of; blending of technical and interpersonal skills in; computerization and; connectivity and; disruption in; education and; empowerment in; high-wage, middle-skilled jobs in; intelligent assistance in, see intelligent assistance; intelligent assistants and; lifelong learning and; mentors in; middle class and; new social contracts in; on-demand jobs in; retraining in; self-motivation and; self-reinvention and; skill sets and, see skill sets; technological change and; transparency and; see also job seekers World Bank World Cup (2014) World Is Flat, The (Friedman) World of Disorder World of Order World Parks Congress, Sydney “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision” (U.N.)


pages: 126 words: 37,081

Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt

business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, deindustrialization, financial innovation, full employment, illegal immigration, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral hazard, post-work, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population

The year marked a watershed moment in American social history. It was then President Johnson rolled out his “Great Society” programs, giving birth to the modern welfare state as we know it today. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 initiated a huge new wave of immigration into the United States, substantially increasing legal and illegal immigration, boosting the country’s population, and altering its ethnic composition over the past half century. But 1965 was also an important social milestone for another reason: it was roughly then that a national crime wave began to sweep over the United States. The reaction to the explosion of criminality crystallized in a national consensus that America should suppress crime by arresting, convicting, and incarcerating felons.


Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars?: A Believer Book of Advice by The Believer, Judd Apatow, Patton Oswalt

Albert Einstein, carbon tax, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Saturday Night Live, side project, telemarketer

Anonymous Chicago, IL Dear Anonymous: Are you sure you’re not my congressman who I saw at that “Eyes Wide Shut Party” about two years ago? Remember? I believe you spilled cider on my harness and kept bragging to me that you had a split dick and your wife was into space docking. Anyway, I really admire your stand on illegal immigration. Rich Merrill Markoe Dear Merrill: Say you’ve discovered you have bedbugs—at what point do you have to tell your roommates? And say those roommates are not actually your roommates, but a girl who just spent the night and is now asking what all the “red marks” are on her arms. What then?


pages: 387 words: 120,155

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

It probably didn’t help that the political advisers in that department weren’t big fans of Steve Hilton, and perhaps coincidentally the department did eventually warm to the approach after he left, at least around some issues. Other ideas that fell on political grounds in 2010–15 included those around illegal immigration (to break the implicit collusion between rogue employers and illegal employees); healthcare (such as clarifying the wishes of patients approaching end of life); social inequality (encouraging people to bequeath benefits to later generations); and changes to incentives to encourage employers to take on the long-term unemployed (in effect, offering a money-back guarantee to take on a young, unemployed person).

Many such issues continue to pass through government in-trays and Ministerial boxes. Some are driven from inside government itself, and many by public demand. Is there more that can be done about the cost of living, to promote social mobility, or address mental health? What to do about new forms of crime, such as cyber-theft or bullying, illegal immigration, or obesity? Should we introduce taxes on unhealthy foods? Should we legalise certain drugs? Many of these issues are choices for society, as markets, technology and preferences evolve, with strong business and special interest views arrayed around them. The key challenge for behavioural scientists is whether our approaches can identify solutions to these challenges that traditional analysis may have missed.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Most generally applicable laws are enforced by the states and local police, not by the federal government. Even enforcement of federal laws, which overlap with state laws in many ways, requires cooperation with local authorities. Already some cities have announced that they will not cooperate with Trump’s plan to round up illegal immigrants; they could even actively shield illegal immigrants from federal authorities. The federal government can impose its will on the states in many ways—by, for example, bestowing or withholding funds, or simply enacting new laws and enforcing them with federal agents. But limits on such control are formidable. The large number of states, their historical independence, the important role that state officials play in the party system, and numerous other factors suggest that they will present significant pockets of resistance to any president who seeks to be dictator.


pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

In response, the immune system tries to defend itself by releasing zonulin to loosen the chains, uncouple the cells of the intestinal walls and flush out the system. The gut lining is no longer an impenetrable wall, keeping out everything but tiny food molecules. Instead, it has grown leaky. Through the gaps between the cells seep all sorts of illegal immigrants, making their way to the promised land of the body. Now, this takes us into controversial territory. The concept of a leaky gut is a favourite of the alternative health industry, which can be as rapacious and truth-distorting as its more mainstream sibling, Big Pharma. Claims that ‘leaky gut syndrome’ is the root of all illness, and many other evils beside, are as old as the industry itself.

Good-quality scientific work into its importance in the genesis of a number of conditions is currently overshadowed by its sullied past. Obesity, allergies, autoimmune diseases and mental health conditions all show significant rises in the permeability of the intestines, with chronic inflammation ensuing. This inflammation comes in the form of an overactive immune system, reacting to the illegal immigrants crossing the gut’s border into the body: from food molecules such as gluten and lactose to bacterial products such as LPS. Sometimes the body’s own cells get caught in the cross-fire, resulting in autoimmune diseases. A balanced and healthy microbiota seems to act as a gatekeeping force reinforcing the integrity of the gut and protecting the sanctity of the body.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

To receive a card, individuals submit various documents to a local registrar. If they are unable to provide documentation, an “introducer,” such as an elected representative or a local teacher or doctor, can vouch for the person’s identity. This parallel process decreases the chance of UIDAI storing inaccurate information or providing social services to illegal immigrants or other illicit actors. The UIDAI has a database that holds information such as name, date of birth, and biometrics data that may include a photograph, fingerprint, iris scan, or other information. The Aadhaar program has been very effective in increasing financial inclusion with over one billion people enrolled for accounts; however, there are still some outstanding concerns about information protection and privacy.

A 2014 study done across seven countries (Canada, Australia, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States) by the Federal Reserve of Boston showed that cash is by the most common means of payment vehicle for small size/low-value transactions ($5, $10), but for larger payments it is increasingly insignificant. However, the same cannot be said for the underground economy. The underground economy includes not only illegal activities such as terrorism, drug trade, bribery, human trafficking, and money laundering, but also tax evasion via cash payments and employment of illegal immigrants. Some crimes are more serious than others, but irrespective of the type of crime being committed, it is the size of the underground economy and especially the impact of tax evasion that are truly noteworthy. Studies done by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS ) , show that business owners and corporations report less than their income to evade taxes.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

After World War I, relatively few foreigners worked in Germany, with numbers declining to about 100,000 in 1932 after reaching about a million in 1907.57 Foreign laborers were highly regulated through “strict state control of labour recruitment, employment preference for nationals, sanctions against employers of illegal immigrants and unrestricted police power to deport unwanted foreigners.”58 The Weimar Ordinance on Foreign Workers, which centralized a restrictive admission and control policy, was later implemented by the Nazi regime. With the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor in 1933, the ideal of racial purity initially precluded the use of foreign labor.

The hiring regulations around high-skilled jobs are more consistently enforced than those around low-skilled workers, so undocumented migrants may work undetected for years. Working outside of the law exposes them to exploitation and abuse. The regulation/enforcement gap in low-skilled sectors represents a political compromise for governments that face pressure to be “tough on illegal immigration,” when key sectors of the economy depend heavily on the low-skilled labor that they provide. Undocumented migration is quietly tolerated because such migrants are feeding critical demands in the workforce. The current situation will be increasingly untenable in the coming decades. Developed countries cannot continue to meet the growing gaps in their workforces through growth in undocumented migration.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

More broadly, these mental models are all instances of a more general model, availability bias, which occurs when a bias, or distortion, creeps into your objective view of reality thanks to information recently made available to you. In the U.S., illegal immigration has been a hot topic with conservative pundits and politicians in recent years, leading many people to believe it is at an all-time high. Yet the data suggests that illegal immigration via the southern border is actually at a five-decade low, indicating that the prevalence of the topic is creating an availability bias for many. U.S. Southern Border Apprehensions: at Five-Decade Low Availability bias can easily emerge from high media coverage of a topic.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Globalization is a part of the story; the manufacture of many goods that used to be made in the United States by low-skilled workers has moved to poorer countries, and many companies have sent offshore jobs that used to be done domestically, including “back-office” work (like claims processing) and customer call centers. Legal and illegal immigration has also been blamed for downward pressure on low-skill wages, though such claims remain controversial, and some credible studies show that the effect is small. The rising cost of medical care has also been important; most employees receive health insurance as part of their overall compensation, and most research shows that increases in premiums ultimately come out of wages.16 Indeed, average wages have tended to do badly when health-care costs are rising most rapidly and to do better when health-care costs are rising more slowly.17 The share of GDP going to health care, only 5 percent in 1960, was 8 percent in the mid-1970s but had risen to nearly 18 percent by 2009.

The fraction of private-sector workers who were union members declined from 24 percent in 1973 to only 6.6 percent in 2012. Although the unionization of public-sector workers increased in the 1970s, it has been stagnant since 1979; the majority of union members are now in the public sector. The declining political clout of unions is made worse by the fact that there are other groups that can’t vote at all. Illegal immigrants obviously do not vote, but neither do legal immigrants who are not citizens. Between 1972 and 2002, the ratio of noncitizens to the voting-age population rose fourfold at the same time as they became poorer relative to the general population. As immigration policies changed, legal immigrants moved from being relatively well heeled to being relatively poor; their political voice was quieted even as the political power of unions declined.


pages: 397 words: 114,841

High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline by Jim Rasenberger

AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, East Village, Ford Model T, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, MITM: man-in-the-middle, scientific management, strikebreaker, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, young professional

By the early 1920s, Mohawks were regularly crossing the border to work on bridges and buildings up and down the Eastern Seaboard, traveling together in tight four-man gangs, communicating on the steel in Mohawk, boarding together wherever they could find inexpensive housing. The practice was nearly halted in 1925 when an ironworker named Paul Diabo (a common surname at Kahnawake) was arrested for illegal immigration while working on the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia. Diabo’s case resulted in a landmark decision by a federal court in 1927. Citing the 150-year-old Jay Treaty, the judge ruled that Mohawks, whose land had once overlapped parts of both countries, were entitled to pass freely over the border from Canada into the United States.

Hockin, Harry hole Homeguard Home Insurance Building hooker-ons Hoover, J. Edgar Horn, Ky Hot Wrench connectors housesmiths. See also ironworkers Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Society. See also Parks, Sam Housesmiths Mutual Protection Association Iannielli, Edward Icarus high up on Empire State ice idleness illegal immigration injuries. See accidents; falling; fatalities Institute of the Ironworking Industry International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers Irish iron. See also steel ironworkers accident dangers for, (see also accidents) bars and drinking beating the wow bridgemen as early, (see also bridgemen) climbing columns B.


pages: 296 words: 118,126

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Sally later read a newspaper article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that mentioned one of her students, a young man named LeMoyne Reine, whom the article said was still stuck in Houston, without the resources to return to his hometown—“[The] future looks grim for some left to fend for themselves,” the subtitle said. Most people like LeMoyne never planned to stay in Houston over the long term—New Orleanians like him were being blamed for a rise in murders, denied job interviews because of their 504 area codes, and referred to as “illegal immigrants” at public meetings. Nevertheless, thousands of Katrina refugees ended up staying in the city, either because they eventually achieved stability or because they did not have a home in New Orleans to which they could return. Sally put in her retirement notice at Delgado a few years early and decided to start fresh.

and a more attractive lifestyle: Interviews with Mathew Hauer, May 2020 and March 2021. I am grateful to Matt for providing extra context on his fascinating research. with some other family member: Interview with Sally Cole, April 2021. the subtitle said: Copy of Times-Picayune article provided by Sally Cole. referred to as “illegal immigrants”: Reeve Hamilton, “The Huddled Masses,” Texas Tribune, August 30, 2010. ended up staying in the city: Tom Dart, “ ‘New Orleans West’: Houston Is Home for Many Evacuees 10 Years after Katrina,” The Guardian, August 25, 2015. 15 percent more than did at the turn of the century: Darryl Cohen, “About 60.2M Live in Areas Most Vulnerable to Hurricanes,” US Census Bureau, July 15, 2019.


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The award-winning La casa de enfrente (2003), directed by Tonatiúh Martínez, delves into such gritty subjects as corruption and prostitution; it’s part of the new wave of Guatemalan filmmaking. Director Paz Fabrega won international awards for 2010’s Agua fría de mar (Cold Sea Water), the Costa Rican story of a young couple and a seven-year-old girl from opposite sides of the social spectrum. Sin nombre (Nameless) was a 2009 Sundance prize winner about gangs and illegal immigration that opens in Honduras. The first Panamanian-made commercial film was 2009’s Chance, a worthy tropical comedy about class shenanigans, told by two maids. Also from Panama, Burwa dii Ebo (The Wind and the Water), an official 2008 Sundance selection, follows an indigenous Kuna teenager who moves to Panama City.

The Carretera Fronteriza is the main thoroughfare connecting a number of excellent ecotourism projects including some in the Lacandón village of Lacanjá Chansayab (see boxed text, opposite page). For information on other ecotourism projects in the area, check out www.laselvadechiapas.com. Dangers & Annoyances Drug trafficking and illegal immigration are facts of life in this border region, and the Carretera Fronteriza more or less encircles the main area of Zapatista rebel activity and support, so expect numerous military checkpoints along the road and from this area to Palenque and Comitán. For your own security, it’s best to be off the Carretera Fronteriza before dusk.

The ongoing test for the new administration will be whether or not it can curb the actions of the Mara Salvatrucha (mara means ‘gang’, trucha means ‘clever trout’). Also known as M-13 and M-18, these gangs of roughly 100,000 across Central America were formed in the US in response to orchestrated attacks by Mexicans. Deported en masse between 2000 and 2004, the maras became heavily involved in drug cartels, guns, the sex trade and illegal immigration. Despite countless arrests, the previous government’s policy of Super Mano Dura failed to have a lasting impact. THE CULTURE The National Psyche Most travelers who have been to El Salvador rate its people as the best part. Straight-talking, strong-minded and hard-working, Salvadorans are also extremely helpful and almost universally friendly (even gang members can rustle up charm when interviewed).


pages: 752 words: 201,334

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Boycotts of Israel, Burning Man, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, Transnistria, Yom Kippur War

They passed the rows of flat white stones and came to a stone from which rose a modest pillar and on which was chiseled a single word, Anatole’s Hebrew name, “Elimelech.” Though Avital had only been five years old at the time, he vividly recalled that terrible day in 1946, just before Hanukkah, when Anatole was killed. It began with a rumor. Word reached Ein Shemer that British soldiers were surrounding Kibbutz Givat Haim, searching for “illegal immigrants,” as the British referred to Holocaust survivors trying to reach the land of Israel. Jews from around the area, including forty young men from Ein Shemer, rushed toward the besieged kibbutz. In fact there were no survivors hiding there, and the British were instead searching for members of the Haganah Zionist militia who had destroyed a radar station monitoring the sea for refugee boats.

The veterans loved to tell Yoske stories, like the time he responded to cancellation of weekend leave by setting fire to a field near the base, forcing the army to send the men home. Yoske’s buddy in Company A was Aryeh Weiner, a neighbor of Arik’s from Netzer Sereni. Weiner, whose family survived the war in Romania, had come to pre-state Israel alone at age twelve on an illegal immigrant boat running the British blockade. He claimed he’d gotten his father’s agreement to leave, thanks to a card game: If I win this hand, his father had said, you have my blessings. His father won, and Weiner set off for the Holy Land. Weiner and Yoske wouldn’t let Arik forget that he wasn’t a veteran like them.

Loudspeakers demanded the surrender of the crew. In the brief battle, refugees threw iron bars at the British soldiers boarding the ship. When the British took control of the ship, Yisrael stood with the grown-ups and sang “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem of hope. The Hasenfratzes were sent to a detention camp on Cyprus for illegal immigrants, and eventually landed in Haifa, where they remained, collapsing into the first embrace of home. Growing up in Haifa in the early 1950s, in a two-room apartment that his family shared with another family of survivors, Yisrael dreamed of becoming a kibbutznik—the ultimate Israeli. As an Orthodox boy and a member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, he would join one of the handful of religious kibbutzim.


Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

With Newt Gingrich the harsh-edged, shut-the-government face of the Republican Party in Washington, Bush stood out as a different kind of Republican, one trying not only to forge bipartisan alliances but to break out of the old paradigm of a seemingly heartless conservatism. He drew attention for disagreeing with Governor Pete Wilson’s attempts in California to limit public benefits for illegal immigrants, and he implemented policies intended to address social ills but through more conservative means. His willingness to buck party orthodoxy attracted the likes of Mark McKinnon, a Democratic media consultant who switched parties to work for Bush. In February 1998, Bush visited a juvenile detention center in Marlin, Texas, and was surprised when a fifteen-year-old African American boy locked up for petty theft asked, “What do you think about us?”

Just as Clinton had sought to shift the Democratic Party away from its liberal, soft-on-crime, weak-on-defense, pro-welfare identity, Bush was now trying to redefine the Republican Party, sanding off the harsher edges of the Gingrich revolution. Instead of what Karen Hughes called “grinchy old Republican” promises to abolish the Department of Education and deport illegal immigrants, Bush advocated more federal intervention in schools to fight the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and more acceptance of the millions of undocumented workers. Hughes was a driving force behind this approach. An army brat born in Paris, she moved with her family to Texas, where she studied journalism at Southern Methodist University and then went into television news.

But in the end, Bush liked Kerik and brushed aside concerns. It was a revealing miscalculation. In the week after the announcement, a torrent of media stories highlighted Kerik’s checkered past, until finally people at Giuliani’s firm scouring Kerik’s finances discovered he had not paid Social Security taxes for a nanny who apparently was an illegal immigrant. Kerik later said the White House knew about everything that became public except the nanny. So the nanny became the excuse given for pushing Kerik to withdraw on December 10. The political damage did not last long, but it should have been an alarm bell inside the White House. With reelection behind them, the danger was the sort of hubris that leads a president to believe that a fundamentally flawed nominee could still be pushed through Senate confirmation.


pages: 143 words: 43,096

Tel Aviv 2015: The Retro Travel Guide by Claudia Stein

illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, machine readable, New Urbanism, Suez canal 1869, urban planning

On 19 of 23 floors, there are luxury flats with a private pool on the rooftop. In the lower part of the building, there is a shopping mall with several movie theaters. 8) London Square Right behind the Orchid Hotel, you will find a little garden with sculptures like ships. This is the memorial for the Aliya Bet (in Israel, “ha-apala”), the “illegal” immigration of Jewish refugees. Historic photos and documentation explain the events. On the eve of the Reichskristallnacht – night of the broken glass – the government of the British Mandate published the 1939 White Paper that also contained the quota of Jewish refugees that were allowed to enter Palestine in the coming years.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

That feeling turned out to be rooted in fact: In a conversation with a friend in Dubai, I learned that the government of the United Arab Emirates had launched a novel program to grant citizenship to the bidoon—stateless residents of the UAE who had no documentation, and whom the country considered illegal immigrants. Only the Gulf monarchy didn’t give the bidoon Emirati citizenship; it bought for them citizenship from the Comoro Islands—an impoverished archipelago off the east coast of Africa whose very name most of these would-be citizens wouldn’t recognize. The agreement the Gulf state had with the Comoros did not include a provision to actually resettle them on the islands.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

The overwhelming approval of Proposition 187 in California during the November 1994 elections reflected a rising anti-immigrant feeling—in a nation forged of immigrants. More recently, we have seen television coverage of illegal border crossings and reports on efforts to erect physical barriers to stem the tide of illegal immigration from Mexico; CNN has almost daily news reports under the rubric "broken borders." But on the question of assisting other countries in family-planning campaigns, there is no consensus in the United States. POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT Even if human population stabilizes some time in the second half of this century, and even if it then commences an overall decline, it will be too late for much of what remains today of forests and wildlife that sustain environments and link us with our past.

The Argentinian press reports that known militants' telephone traffic, fiscal transactions, and travel patterns indicate links not only to Sao Paulo and Lebanon but also to disorderly Guayaquil, one of South America's toughest cities, and to sprawling Maracaibo in Venezuela. Where, beyond these cities, the trails lead is uncertain, but consider this: the United States is flanked to the north by a dependable neighbor and to the east and west by wide oceans, but to the south it is exposed to access in various forms, from illegal immigration overland to stepping-stone entry via islands in the Caribbean. The logical route for terrorists would surely be from the south, and the staging area may very well be the Triple Frontier. In recent years the situation has become still more complicated because Venezuela has taken on the characteristics of a malfunctioning state.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

Twenty-five years ago, illegal drugs were usually first or second and certainly never lower than fourth in polls of public concerns in the United States. Now the drugs issue trails many others. The country’s political agenda is dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the measures introduced to manage the recession. The only other domestic issues likely to intrude are healthcare reform and illegal immigration. Scare stories about drugs have passed their sell-by dates. In New York City, the crack scare that so gripped the press in the 1980s came to a swift end once the police had been granted the resources to take back the city’s streets. That done, coverage of drug use and drug markets became onerous and unhelpful.

The strongest nation in the world now sees itself as besieged by forces beyond its control.’12 In this intoxicating atmosphere of all-pervading fear, it becomes all the more difficult to persuade Americans that the legalization of drugs would supply more, not less, peace and order. However dramatic the failure to prohibit the use of certain drugs, the lack of a sober appraisal ensures that prohibition is unlikely to be repealed on the grounds of health, ethics or human rights. As countering terrorism, preventing illegal immigration and staving off economic decline come to dominate the political agenda, all three are going to demand greater resources and manpower. The war on drugs will most likely be abandoned for financial reasons, as the United States government is forced to accept that it doesn’t have the resources to prosecute this war to its logical conclusion.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

In his Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), Kim Stanley Robinson plays out the consequences of transnational corporations (“transnats”) gaining enough control and power over Martian citizens, leading to a balance between a global government overseeing relatively autonomous settlements and cities and a blended economic system of capitalism, socialism, and environmental conservationism; this works so well that soon Martians face the problem of illegal immigration – from Earthlings whose planet has suffered from environmental ruin. According to the renowned science fiction author (and physicist) David Brin (The Postman, Kiln People, Uplift War), whom I queried on the matter, “New, cyber technologies do offer a chance for meaningful revisions of democracy that would make it more responsive while retaining some benefits of delegation.”7 He suggests two: (1) Self-sorted constituencies: “Let any 750,000 Americans gather and claim a US Congressional Representative.

US Government Archives. https://bit.ly/2fmjJXA 5. BLM (#blacklivesmater), BDM (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions of Israel), MSM (Main Stream Media), LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, questioning, intersex), SJW (Social Justice Warriors), #metoo (Harvey Weinstein), #TakeAKnee (NFL national anthem protests), Dreamers (children of illegal immigrants born in the USA), Google Memo (the firing of James Demore), Milo (Yiannopoulos), Charlottesville (neo-Nazis), Evergreen (protests against professor Bret Weinstein), Berkeley (protests against Milo, Ann Coulter, et al.), Yale (protests over Halloween costumes), Middlebury (protests against Charles Murray), Parkland (school shooting), microaggressions (offensive words or phrases), safe spaces (places for students to go after hearing offensive speech), no platforming (disinvitation of speakers), hate speech (v. free speech). 6.


pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The deepening economic depression had made jobs scarce and burdened local relief rolls, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans provided a convenient scapegoat population, one whose racial “otherness” made them expendable. “The movement [to deport and repatriate] did not distinguish between legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and American citizens,” explains historian Mae Ngai. “Mexican Americans and immigrants alike reaped the consequences of racialized foreignness that had been constructed throughout the 1920s.”35 By 1935, it looked like the census categorization might cause a cascade of legal and bureaucratic consequences that would cement in place the idea of a distinct Mexican race, with all the limitations and discrimination that would entail.

-Mexico Border, 1910–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1999): 41–81. 31.  See, for instance, U.S. House, To Amend the Constitution: Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives Seventieth Congress Second Session on H.J. Res 102 H.J. Res. 351 (February 13, 14, and 19, 1929), 28. “Contemporaries estimated that illegal immigration ran as high as 100,000 a year throughout the 1920s. Unofficial entry was not new, as migration across the border had had an informal, unregulated character since the nineteenth century,” writes Ngai, “The Architecture of Race,” 90. 32.  I rely here on Ngai, Impossible Subjects, especially chapter 2.


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

After the British discovered that the officer had escaped, they sent out photographs of her taken during her imprisonment—front and side view—to all the military police stations. We went through the refugee camp and identified her. When we addressed her in German, she played the fool and said she only knew Hungarian. That wasn’t a problem. A Hungarian kid went up to her and said: “A ship carrying illegal immigrants from Hungary is about to sail for Palestine. Pack up your belongings quietly and come with us.” She had no choice but to take the bait and went with us in the truck. During this operation, I sat with Zaro [Meir Zorea, later an IDF general] in the back while Karmi drove. The order Karmi gave us was: “When I get some distance to a suitable deserted place, I’ll honk the horn.

After World War II, when the Haganah command learned that Harari spoke a few languages, he was sent to Europe, to help with the transportation of the surviving Jewish refugees to Israel. He was involved in the secret acquisition of ships and the complicated logistics involved in moving these illegal immigrants through the ruins of Europe to the boats, then smuggling them into Palestine under the noses of the British. “That was the period during which I created for myself the criteria and the methods for covert activities abroad, the tools that I used later on in the Mossad.” After the establishment of the state, Isser Harel recruited Harari to the Shin Bet and then the Mossad, where he rose rapidly before being assigned to investigate Caesarea’s operations.

Later in the war, after Meiri was captured and forced into hard labor at an airstrip, he saved the life of a senior Luftwaffe officer who crashed his Messerschmitt on the runway. Meiri climbed into the burning aircraft and rescued the unconscious pilot, thereby buying himself years of protection. After the war, he immigrated to Palestine on the famous illegal immigrant ship Exodus. He fought in the 1948 War of Independence, was taken prisoner, and once again miraculously survived after a Jordanian soldier began mowing the POWs down. Afterward, he joined the Shin Bet, serving on Ben-Gurion’s bodyguard detail. His colleagues and superiors noted that he was coolheaded and had no moral qualms about killing anyone who harmed Jews.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

An immigrant from Portugal living in Massachusetts told a reporter, through an interpreter: “Every day we are afraid the letter will come. What will we do if we lose our checks? We will starve. Oh, my God. It will not be worth living.” Illegal immigrants fleeing poverty in Mexico began to face harsher treatment in the early nineties. Thousands of border guards were added. A Reuters dispatch from Mexico City (April 3, 1997) said about the tougher policy: “Any crackdown against illegal immigration automatically angers Mexicans, millions of whom migrate, legally and illegally, across the 2,000-mile border to the United States in search of jobs each year.” Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who had fled death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador while the United States was giving military aid to those governments now faced deportation because they had never been deemed “political” refugees.

The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system—the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government—to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world. All of us have become hostages in the new conditions of doomsday technology, runaway economics, global poisoning, uncontainable war.

An ex-GI who had been mutilated by an American land mine came to Minneapolis to join the campaign, joined by a young woman who was traveling all over the world to tell people of the children dying on all continents as a result of millions of land mines planted by the United States and other nations. Four nuns, the “McDonald sisters,” who were indeed sisters, participated in the protest, and were arrested. In 1994 in Los Angeles, in opposition to a new California law that took away basic health and educational rights from the children of illegal immigrants, a quarter of a million people took to the streets in protest. When the United States made clear its intention to drop bombs on Iraq, presumably because Iraq was not allowing inspection of what American officials called “weapons of mass destruction,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other officials spoke to a town meeting in Columbus, Ohio, to build up public support for the bombing.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

Everywhere one sees posters showing serious-looking men and women, the same fresh faces you see on the city councils of provincial Dutch towns. The candidates are worried about day-care centres, health care, about Finland's young people and two per cent of the population that is not Finnish. ‘Finland for the Finns’, one sees that here as well. On 1 January, 1999, Finland had precisely 1,272 asylum seekers and almost no illegal immigrants – yet still the country is home to at least 80,000 non-Finns. That is a source of great concern for many political parties. That evening I attend the jubilee concert of the Helsingen Sotainvalidirpurin Vejeskuro, the Helsinki Veterans’ Chorus, directed by Tapio Tutu, Arvo Kuikka and Erik Ahonius.

The roofs of their caravans are weathered, the canvas of their tents has turned grey, they appear to be gradually becoming one with this forest. ‘Most of us live here all year round,’ the man across the way tells me. He crosses the camping ground slowly, leaning on his cane, his head held stiffly at an angle, his swollen feet in a pair of slippers. A few couples live here as well, and a few illegal immigrants, but most of the campers are men like him. ‘I'm from Caen, that's right, a divorce. And life here is cheap, right?’ But what about the cold? ‘It only freezes here a few days each winter, most years, and I get along fine with my kerosene heater.’ The tent attached to the front of his caravan has curtains and a television with a satellite dish, and he has gladioli in his little garden.

Added to this were many hundreds of thousands of immigrants – estimates from 1998 put their number at around 3 million – who lived and worked in Europe illegally: in restaurants and cleaning firms, in nursing and health care, in agriculture and construction. Their contribution to the European economy should not be underestimated. In 1990, the Financial Times claimed that it was to a large extent the work of illegal immigrants that ‘kept the wheels turning’.‘The construction sector depends on it, including the construction of the Channel Tunnel; the clothing industry would collapse without its illegal worker; and all household help would evaporate.’ Europe, which had been faced in the early 1950s with the phenomenon of emigration – hundreds of thousands of Irish, Portuguese, Spaniards and southern Italians in particular had left each year for the United States and South America – was now suddenly the destination of millions of immigrants.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

The newly formed Independence Party pulls enough votes away from both the Republican and Democratic candidates to give its own candidate, Margaret Jones, a plurality of votes, an electoral college victory, and the presidency. A significant number of Independence Party members have also taken seats away from Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The platform of the Independence Party, as well as its message, is clear and uncompromising: zero tolerance of illegal immigrants; a freeze on legal immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia; increased tariffs on all imports; a ban on American companies moving their operations to another country or outsourcing abroad; a prohibition on foreign “sovereign wealth funds” investing in the United States. America will withdraw from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; end all “involvements” in foreign countries; refuse to pay any more interest on our debt to China, essentially defaulting on it; and stop trading with China unless China freely floats its currency.


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

This is a major theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I visited in October 2011 (see figure 7.5).17 On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).18 FIGURE 7.5. Fairness left and right. Top: Sign at Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, New York City. Bottom: Sign at Tea Party rally, Washington, DC (photo by Emily Ekins). Everyone believes that taxes should be “fair.” (photo credit 7.2) Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds.

By the time they reach high school and begin to take an interest in politics, the two siblings have chosen different activities (the sister joins the debate team in part for the opportunity to travel; the brother gets more involved with his family’s church) and amassed different friends (the sister joins the goths; the brother joins the jocks). The sister chooses to go to college in New York City, where she majors in Latin American studies and finds her calling as an advocate for the children of illegal immigrants. Because her social circle is entirely composed of liberals, she is enmeshed in a moral matrix based primarily on the Care/harm foundation. In 2008, she is electrified by Barack Obama’s concern for the poor and his promise of change. The brother, in contrast, has no interest in moving far away to a big, dirty, and threatening city.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

They were essentially similar to the conclusions he had reached six months earlier – that 100,000 new immigrants should go to Palestine and that an autonomous, but not entirely independent, Jewish state should now be established. The Arabs vehemently opposed the plan from the start; the Jews broadly accepted it as a basis for negotiation. But a week later Attlee rejected the proposals out of hand, and warned that Britain would take firm action against the ‘illegal’ immigration routes Zionists had established to smuggle Jews from the camps in Germany to Palestine. Jewish guerrilla groups pledged to renew fighting to force the British to leave and grant them their homeland – Israel. It was this that escalated a small-scale series of skirmishes into a widespread war on terrorism – and underlined how painful Britain would find it to retreat from empire.10 * The 475,000 Jews already settled in Palestine, the Yishuv, had mixed feelings about the ‘surviving remnant’ of European Jewry in refugee camps.

Steps should be taken in consultation with these two governments to see whether we cannot get that common support for a policy which will give us a happy, free and prosperous Jewish state in Palestine. Elsewhere, Dalton made it clear to Labour colleagues that it was ‘inherent in our . . . [policy] that there should henceforth be no such thing as a Jewish illegal immigrant.’26 But once in office the Labour leadership changed its mind. The blame for Britain’s failure in Palestine has principally been laid on Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary. In 1946, Bevin was sixty-five, a huge bear of a man and one of the great figures in Labour history – ‘a colossus in more ways than one’, Attlee called him.


pages: 433 words: 129,636

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

The Man and the Nayarit Northern Nevada By the early 1990s, the Man was doing time at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, a medium-security prison in Carson City. White inmates ran the yard; blacks were also a force. But the prison’s Mexican population was small and vulnerable. They were mostly illegal immigrants and first-time inmates, wary and quiet, and spoke no English. The Man, bilingual all his life, became their spokesman. Blacks and whites had their own large gardens, watered by underground pipes, where they could grow vegetables, melons, and other food. Mexicans had nothing. He lobbied for a plot where Mexicans could grow their food.

That’s when you rise to corporate culpability.” By the fall of 2006, John Brownlee was prepared to file a case of criminal misbranding against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. “Took Over the OxyContin Belt” Columbus, Ohio Forget you have children. This advice was given to Mario, an illegal immigrant, by his new boss from Xalisco, Nayarit. Mario was preparing for what turned out to be a short career as a dispatcher for a black tar heroin cell in Columbus, Ohio, a few years after the Man brought the drug there. “Forget that people may do to your kids what you’re doing to the children of others,” his new boss told him in a restaurant one day.


pages: 537 words: 135,099

The Rough Guide to Amsterdam by Martin Dunford, Phil Lee, Karoline Thomas

banking crisis, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, place-making, plutocrats, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, young professional

The difficulties this created for the police were legion, so finally, in 1996, a special soliciting zone was established and a couple of years later brothels were legalized in the hope that together these changes would bring a degree of stability to the sex industry. The authorities were particularly keen to get a grip on the use of illegal immigrants as prostitutes and also to alleviate the problem of numbers. This legislation is partly the result of a long and determined campaign by the prostitutes’ trade union, De Rode Draad (“The Red Thread”), which has improved the lot of its members by setting up new health insurance and pension schemes – and generally fighting for regular employment rights for prostitutes.

This legislation is partly the result of a long and determined campaign by the prostitutes’ trade union, De Rode Draad (“The Red Thread”), which has improved the lot of its members by setting up new health insurance and pension schemes – and generally fighting for regular employment rights for prostitutes. Whether this has happened or not is debatable: the number of “window brothels” is limited, so a significant group of women ply their trade illicitly in bars and hotels. There are still lots of illegal immigrants in the Red Light District, and lots of pimps too. The windows, which are rented out for upwards of €100 a day, are less easy to control than registered brothels, and at least half of the District’s prostitutes hand over some of their earnings to a pimp, who will usually be Dutch and often an ex-boyfriend. The city has taken action over the past couple of years to crack down not only on this but also on the number of outlets in the Red Light District, buying up some of the buildings itself and enouraging initiatives like Redlight Fashion Amsterdam, in which young fashion designers have exhibited their clothes in some of the windows.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Six other countries contributed more than 1 million people to the United States’ immigration numbers: Puerto Rico, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, South Korea, and the Dominican Republic.12 The great and growing economic inequality of the United States sucked in people from neighboring and nearby countries, especially Mexico. U.S. politicians reacted to this acceleration with sanctions. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was signed into law in September 1996. “I don’t think people fully appreciated what those laws had done,” said New York University academic Nancy Morawetz, referring to both the IIRIRA and other 1996 laws that affected immigration. One effect was clear: after IIRIRA came into effect, deportation from the United States went from being a rare phenomenon to a relatively common one: “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” noted sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren.

See also carbon emissions gross domestic product (GDP), 232–41; China, 239–41, 241; concept of, 232–33; global, per capita, 233–37, 234, 292, 293, 297; United States, 237–39, 238 Grosz, Stephen, 317 Guatemala, 209, 210 Haiti, 212, 213 Haque, Umair, 319 Harrison, John, 30 Hawking, Stephen, 144 height, average adult, 266–67, 268, 269, 283 Henriksson, Anna-Maja, 312 hierarchy, 152, 182, 264, 285–86, 363n50 High-Speed Society (Rosa and Scheuerman), 272–73, 360n28, 360n30 home-loan debt, 49–56, 54 Hong Kong, 154, 263 household appliances, 267, 269 housing: house prices, 247–51, 249, 253–55; mortgages, 49–56, 54; rental, 49–50, 53; social housing, 51, 56 Huygens, Christiaan, 30 Ibbitson, John, 140, 141, 296 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), 153–54 immigration: and birth rates, 312; future scarcity of, 296; Japan and, 326; and population growth, 318; United Kingdom and, 165; United States and, 152, 153–54, 296, 318 income inequality, 24, 284, 294 India: automobile production, 115, 118; democracy in, 264–65; fertility rates, 226, 227; population, 3, 147, 165–68, 167, 171, 307–8 Indicators of Social Change (Sheldon and Moore), 313 Indonesia, 172, 173, 174 Industrial Revolution, 99, 230 Indus Valley Civilization, 264 inequalities: debt and the concentration of wealth, 37–38, 45–46, 56–58; and population slowdown, 7–8; redistribution imperative, 294–95; and slowdown, 319–22, 343n1; in United States, 152–53 infant mortality, 185, 217–18, 220 information.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

See also ‘Chaos at the gates of Paris: Inside the sprawling migrant camps nobody talks about,’ The Local (France), 29 March 2019, https://www.thelocal.fr/20190329/out-of-sight-but-still-there-the-scandal-of-squalid-paris-migrant-camps; Louis Jacobson and Miriam Valverde, ‘Donald Trump’s False claim veterans treated worse than illegal immigrants’, Politifact, 9 September 2016, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/09/donald-trump/trump-says-veterans-treated-worse-illegal-immigrants/. 77 Vera Messing and Bence Ságvári, ‘What drives anti-migrant attitudes?’ Social Europe, 28 May 2019, https://www.socialeurope.eu/what-drives-anti-migrant-attitudes. 78 Ibid., and for the US see also Sean McElwee, ‘Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Is Most Extreme in States Without Immigrants’, Data for Progress, 5 April 2018, https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2018/4/5/anti-immigrant-sentiment-is-most-extreme-in-states-without-immigrants. 79 Senay Boztas, ‘Dutch prime minister warns migrants to “be normal or be gone”, as he fends off populist Geert Wilders in bitter election fight’, Telegraph, 23 January 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/23/dutch-prime-minister-warns-migrants-normal-gone-fends-populist/. 80 Jon Henley, ‘Centre-left Social Democrats victorious in Denmark elections’, Guardian, 5 June 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/05/centre-left-social-democrats-set-to-win-in-denmark-elections; idem., ‘Denmark’s centre-left set to win election with anti-immigration shift’, 4 June 2019, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/04/denmark-centre-left-predicted-win-election-social-democrats-anti-immigration-policies. 81 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, 1951), p.356. 82 E.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Menczer and his colleagues point to an example in their data in which a single bot mentioned @realDonaldTrump nineteen times, linking to the false news claim that millions of votes were cast by illegal immigrants in the 2016 presidential election. The strategy works when influential people are fooled into sharing the content. Donald Trump, for example, has on a number of occasions shared content from known bots, legitimizing their content and spreading their misinformation widely in the Twitter network. It was Trump who adopted the false claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election as an official talking point. But bots can’t spread fake news without people.


pages: 483 words: 127,095

The Road to Roswell: A Novel by Connie Willis

Doomsday Book, illegal immigration, Skype

He let go of the window frame and held his hands up in a “hands off” gesture. “Just give me a ride to the next town.” “I can’t,” she said helplessly, and tried to start the car again. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know why you don’t want to give me a ride, but if you’re engaged in something nefarious, like bringing in illegal immigrants from Mexico or something, I promise I won’t tell.” Illegal immigrants, she thought wryly and glanced down at the still-motionless alien. Mistake. In the split second of her looking down, Wade had reached in, unlocked the door, and started to open it. “No!” she said, diving over to hold it shut against him. “Get away from the car!


Greece by Korina Miller

car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, flag carrier, Google Earth, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, invention of the printing press, pension reform, period drama, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

As islands such as Samos struggle to house boatloads of migrants, there is mounting criticism from the international community on the poor conditions and treatment of refugees and immigrants in Greece. With the lowest acceptance rate in Europe for asylum requests (only 379 out of 20,000 were accepted in 2008), many illegal immigrants and refugees simply disappear into Greece’s informal economy or attempt to cross into other European countries. Others linger in shanty towns and deportation centres. All of this would have once been discussed in a haze of smoke at the local kafeneio but in July 2009, Greece brought in antismoking laws similar to those across Europe, meaning all public places should be smoke free.

Greece continues to face the challenge of resolving its sometimes abrasive relationship with its Balkan neighbour, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), over the contentious issue of it adopting the nomenclature of Macedonia (a topic negotiated between the two nations via UN-mediated dialogue). Relations with Turkey these days are more neighbourly. Greece supports Turkey’s steps towards EU-ascension, and is urging joint action between the two nations to manage illegal immigration across Greece’s borders. But Greece has expressed rumblings of concern since Turkey declared its intention to explore for oil and gas in the eastern Aegean, sparking a diplomatic headache. Return to beginning of chapter TIMELINE * * * 7000–3000 BC For 4000 years the early inhabitants of the Greek peninsula live a simple agrarian life, growing crops and herding animals.

Mixed marriages are becoming common, especially in rural areas where Eastern European brides fill the void left by Greek women moving to the cities. While there is still a long way to go before migrants are accepted into the community, there is recognition that they keep the economy going. Greece’s illegal immigration problems have also sparked anti-immigrant rallies by far-right fringe groups. Until recently Greece’s only recognised ethnic minority were the 300,000 Muslims in western Thrace (mostly ethnic Turks exempt from the 1923 population exchange), who continue to have a difficult time, despite being Greek-born.


pages: 193 words: 48,066

The European Union by John Pinder, Simon Usherwood

Berlin Wall, BRICs, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, failed state, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, non-tariff barriers, open borders, price stability, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

Not surprisingly, given the requirement of unanimous agreement among the then 15 governments before a decision could be taken, there had not been much progress by the time the Amsterdam Treaty was negotiated. No convention had yet entered into force and action in other respects was slow. But concern about cross-border crime and illegal immigration continued to grow; and the Eastern enlargement, expected to bring new problems, was approaching. So most member states wanted a stronger system. Amsterdam’s project The Amsterdam Treaty affirmed the intention to establish what it rather grandly called ‘an area of freedom, security, and justice’ (AFSJ).


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Its founder, Glenn Spencer, is certainly a controversial figure. He describes illegal immigration as “The Second Mexican-American War” and Latin America as “a cesspool of a culture” that threatens the “death of this country.” Spencer may sound like a sad throwback to the 1950s or even 1350s, but his group’s technology is twenty-first century. They operate three drones that carry video and infrared cameras. The drones are launched by radio control and then automatically fly a patrol pattern using GPS, staying at four hundred feet, just below what the government requires for certification. While in the air, they search out any illegal immigrants crossing the border and record the images to TiVo for playback and review.

The robot border-cop helped arrest 2,309 people and seize seven tons of marijuana. In 2008, DHS presented plans to Congress to buy eighteen drone planes to patrol the U.S. border. Of course, all realize that the drones are actually focused on stopping a different type of border crosser than al-Qaeda agents—illegal immigrants. “But the acceptability of using these systems for border surveillance has increased dramatically since terrorism became such a real, in-our-backyard threat,” says Cyndi Wegerbauer of General Atomics, which sold the Predator drone to the Border Patrol. Indeed, in the war to defend against would-be immigrants, robots have also gone to work not only for the government, but also for the private border patrols, or “militias,” as some have called themselves.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

While the percentage of the world population that is migratory has remained close to the figure in the early twentieth century, the sheer number of migrants has swollen to historic proportions because of the dramatic rise in human population. More than eighty million human beings migrated to new lands in the 1990s—many more if we count the unaccounted-for illegal immigrants.32 Capital and labor flows are the earmarks of the new globalization process. Each affects the other. Today’s migrants, like migrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are following the money. The search for new economic opportunities is forcing a massive resettlement of human population from south to north and from east to west.

The migration to North America has been particularly steep, more than tripling, from 13 million to 41 million between 1970 and 2000.35 Migration into the European Union has also been sizable, rising from 19 to 33 million between 1970 and 2000.36 The biggest concentration of international migration is in the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK.37 More than a million legal immigrants enter the United States alone each year.38 The number of illegal immigrants in the United States in 2000 was estimated at around seven million, the majority of whom were from Mexico. Of the total immigration to the United States, more than 80 percent has been from developing countries since 1990.39 The United States is now home to 20 percent of the international migrants of the world.40 The rising tide of international migration from poorer to wealthier countries—especially illegal migration—is likely going to turn into a flood in the years ahead as the global economic downturn and the real-time impacts of climate change threaten the survival of hundreds of millions of people.

(Fromm) Tocqueville, Alexis de Today (TV show) toddlers induction discipline and Tolstoy, Leo Tomasello, Michael Tomlinson, John Tonight Show, The (TV show) Torah Totem and Taboo (Freud) Toulmin, Stephen tourism traditional societies transatlantic cable transcendence transportation revolution travel Travers, Jeffrey Treisman, Uri tribes Trilling, Lionel Trist, Eric Trobriand Islands Trotter, Wilfred true self trust Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) truths tsunamis Tudor England Turkle, Sherry tweens Twenge, Jean M., Dr. Twitter Two Treatises of Government (Locke) UCLA UK Meteorological Office Ulysses (Joyce) United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization Human Development Index (HDI) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change United States credit crisis in greenhouse gas emissions illegal immigrants in income disparity in interstate highway system kiddy consumption in market model in materialism of as media capital as music capital pet industry in presidential election of 2008 religious values in self-help groups in United States Democratic Review universal God universal literacy universality University Hospital (London) University of Amsterdam University of Chicago Oriental Institute University of Groningen University of Michigan University of Minnesota University of Missouri University of North Florida University of Rochester University of St Andrews University of Western Ontario University of Wisconsin uranium urbanization urban life in Roman Empire in Sumeria Utilitarian philosophers utopia Value of the Individual, The: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Weintraub) van den Boom, Dymph Varela, Francisco Vedic religion Vegetarian Society vendetta Venice Vermont vernacular (language) vernacular cosmopolitanism Vernadsky,Vladimir Vickers, Sir Brian Vico, Giambattista Victorian architecture Vie de Marianne, La (Chamblain de Marivaux) village life village settlements violence Virginia Declaration of Rights virtual reality Vischer, Robert vision vocabulary Voltaire Vygotsky, Lev Walqa Technology Park (Huesca, Spain) Walter, Katey, Dr.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly, two of the most striking geologic features in the Southwest, are protected as sacred places. Tribal traditions and imagery influence art across the region. The Spanish and Mexican cultures are also a part of daily life, from the food to the language to the headlines about illegal immigration. In Utah 58% of the population identifies as Mormon, and the religion’s stringent disapproval of ‘vices’ keeps the state on an even keel. So savor the cultural differences – and start with that green chile stew. The Mittens, Monument Valley RUTH EASTHAM & MAX PAOLI/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © TOPexperiences Top of section Grand Canyon National Park 1 Go ahead, don’t hold back.

Understand Southwest USA Southwest USA Today History The Way of Life Native American Southwest Geology & The Land Southwest Cuisine Arts & Architecture Top of section Southwest USA Today It’s All Politics… »Population of AZ, NM, UT, NV & CO: 19 million »Regional unemployment rate June 2011: 8.9% »US unemployment rate June 2011: 9.2% Tourism officials in Arizona are surely not pleased by headlines in recent years. One of the biggest issues facing the state is illegal immigration. About 250,000 people crossed illegally into Arizona from Mexico in 2009. Although that was a 50% decline from a few years earlier, the State passed law SB 1070 in 2010, requiring police officers to ask for identification from anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally. What’s happening on the ground?

Las Vegas enters its second golden heyday, hosting 37.5 million visitors, starting work on its latest ‘megaresort’ and becoming the number-one party destination. 2006 Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS) is charged with aggravated assaults of two under-age girls. He is serving a life-plus-20 years sentence. 2010 Arizona passes controversial legislation requiring police officers to request identification from anyone they suspect of being in the US illegally. Immigration-rights activists call for a boycott of the state. 2011 Jared Loughner is charged with shooting Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords outside a Tucson grocery store. Giffords suffers a critical brain injury, six others are killed. 2012 New Mexico and Arizona celebrate 100 years of statehood with special events and commemorative stamps.


Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror by Meghnad Desai

Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, global village, illegal immigration, income per capita, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Yom Kippur War

Global฀ Islamism฀ has฀ arrived฀ at฀ a฀ time฀ when฀ other฀ forces฀ have฀ been฀at฀work฀globalising฀the฀world.฀Internet฀and฀mobile฀telephony฀ made฀ possible฀ by฀ satellite฀ technology,฀ rapid฀ deregulation฀ and฀ liberalising฀ of฀ international฀ capital฀ movements฀ and฀ progressive฀ dismantling฀of฀tariff฀barriers,฀vast฀movements฀of฀legal฀and฀illegal฀ immigrants฀and฀the฀growing฀evil฀of฀human฀trafficking,฀clandestine฀ trade฀in฀drugs฀and฀money-laundering,฀the฀cheapening฀of฀lethal฀arms฀ and฀the฀ease฀with฀which฀they฀are฀traded฀across฀borders฀–฀all฀have฀  made฀the฀world฀of฀the฀last฀ten฀or฀fifteen฀years฀very฀different฀from฀ the฀ previous฀ thirty฀ years.฀ Global฀ Islamism฀ and฀ the฀ terror฀ it฀ has฀ fostered,฀along฀with฀drugs฀and฀arms฀and฀human฀trafficking,฀inhabit฀ the฀dark฀side฀of฀globalisation.฀ It฀is฀necessary฀to฀understand฀the฀true฀nature฀of฀Global฀Islamism฀ if฀we฀are฀to฀defeat฀it,฀since฀otherwise฀its฀lethal฀effects฀will฀spread฀ and฀accelerate.


Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Donner party, East Village, financial engineering, illegal immigration, index card, medical residency, pre–internet, rent control, Saturday Night Live, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

The Girl with No Tattoo When Your Boyfriend Fits into Your Jeans and Other Atrocities The Book That Was Never a Blog Always Wear Flats and Have Your Friends Sleep Over: A Step-by-Step How-To Guide for Avoiding Getting Murdered Harry Potter Secret Book #8 Sometimes You Just Have to Put on Lip Gloss and Pretend to Be Psyched I Want Dirk Nowitzki to Host Saturday Night Live So Much That I’m Making It the Title of My Book Barf Me to Death and Other Things I’ve Been Known to Say The Last Mango in Paris (this would work best if “Mango” were the cheeky nickname for an Indian woman, and if I’d spent any time in Paris) So You’ve Just Finished Chelsea Handler’s Book, Now What? Deep-Dish Pizza in Kabul (a touching novel about a brave girl enjoying Chicago-style pizza in secret Taliban-ruled Afghanistan) There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes I Don’t Know How She Does It, But I Suspect She Gets Help from Illegal Immigrants I Forget Nothing: A Sensitive Kid Looks Back Chubby for Life I DON’T REMEMBER a time when I wasn’t chubby. Like being Indian, being chubby feels like it is just part of my permanent deal. I remember being in first grade, in Mrs. Gilmore’s class at Fiske Elementary School, and seeing that Ashley Kemp, the most popular girl in our class, weighed only thirty-seven pounds.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

‘It is believed that many rogue landlords removed occupants either by relocation or illegal eviction prior to inspection,’ the report stated. It concluded that on the basis of information gathered by the Metropolitan Police, borough-wide there might be 1,000–2,000 ‘bed in shed’ structures. Particularly concerning to the authors of the report were the associated offences, such as tax fraud, exploitation, profiteering from illegal immigrants and human trafficking, which are becoming increasingly identified with rogue landlords. According to estimates, there are up to 13,000 human trafficking victims in the UK,3 and typical traffickers’ methods of control, such as removing their documentation and passports and periodically relocating them from one place to another to isolate them, apply here.


End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

Depending on monetary fraud for national prosperity or a reversal of our downward spiral is riskier than depending on the lottery. Inflation has been used to pay for all wars and empires as far back as ancient Rome. And they all end badly. Inflationism and corporatism engender protectionism and trade wars. They prompt scapegoating: blaming foreigners, illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities, and too often freedom itself for the predictable events and suffering that result. The Congress, the bureaucrats, and the courts took an unsound monetary system destined to wreak havoc on our economy and made it much worse. Various programs, many started in the 1930s, encouraged and sometimes forced lenders to make subprime loans.


pages: 188 words: 54,942

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

Maybury pointed to “homeland security” as a key future use of drones, complete with maps of the United States intended to highlight the need for “Integrating [drones] in National Airspace.”139 The future is here. In 2005 Congress authorized Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to buy unarmed Predators. By the end of 2011, CBP was flying eight Predator drones along the southwestern border with Mexico and along the northern Canadian border to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. By 2016, CBP hopes to have two dozen drones in its possession, “giving the agency the ability to deploy a drone anywhere over the continental United States within three hours,” according to the Washington Post.140 And beyond, it seems, as the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has deployed several drones in neighboring Mexico to spy on that country’s powerful drug cartels.141 In June 2011, the Post reported that CBP’s drone fleet had “reached a milestone…having flown 10,000 hours.”


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

American juries also refused to convict patriots of sedition before the Revolutionary War. In more recent times, jury nullification has been defended in cases where African American juries refused to convict black defendants for drug offenses.10 Jury nullification in California became an election issue in 2015 when Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, fired a gun that killed a young woman, Kate Steinle. At trial the jury acquitted him of murder since Steinle was struck on a ricochet, but it also acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter, which looked like jury nullification. Federal immigration laws are very unpopular in San Francisco, where Garcia Zarate was tried.


America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

After the military abandoned conscription in the wake of Vietnam, it 44 AN EXCEPTIONAL NATIONALISM? became highly dependent on low-income groups for its recruits—among whom the racial minorities are overrepresented. More recently, military service has even become a way for American immigrants (including illegal immigrants) to gain early citizenship—a practice which recalls late imperial Rome. The military also remains deeply mindful of the bitter racial tensions which split the troops in Vietnam, when (thanks to class bias in the conscription system) an army containing a very high proportion of Blacks was commanded by an officer corps which was overwhelmingly White.

Meanwhile income inequality increased considerably. In 1969 the richest 5 percent of families earned 15.6 percent of all income. In 1996, the figure was 20.3 percent.2 Ruthless competition, the lack of state regulation and a minimum wage, the increase in temporary and informal employment, the use of unregistered illegal immigrants and the decline of the trade unions have meant that many jobs which once kept people in the middle classes now barely maintain them at subsistence level. This process was symbolized in 2003 by moves on the part of supermarket chains to freeze salaries and slash benefits.3 The effect of wage cuts and of job insecurity and frequent changes of low-paying jobs is not only to impoverish many working Americans and corrode their family lives; it is also deeply to undermine their personal dignity, their image of themselves as members of the respectable middle classes.4 This combination of factors has undermined the "moral economy" which prevailed for most of American history, whereby a man who worked hard, was honest and did not drink or take drugs could be assured of a steadily rising income, enough to support himself and his wife in their old age and to give his children a head start in social advancement through education.5 Just as in the past America, unlike other countries, was spared the threat of attack on its homeland and civilian population, so most of the nation (except the South) was also spared for most of its history from the economic disasters inflicted by wars, revolutions and externally driven economic transformations that afflicted so many other countries.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

-Canada border that stretches from the Arctic to the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean is the world’s longest at almost nine thousand kilometers, but 300,000 people and over $1 billion in daily trade traverse the almost twenty major border crossings. There are many places where borders are stiffening: Israel’s security barrier, the fifteen-kilometer Évros River fence in Greece, and the two-hundred-kilometer Bulgarian barbed-wire fence aimed at curbing illegal immigrants, among others.*4 And yet all of these borders—and even more unfriendly ones—remain porous. And indeed, almost all such fences are terribly costly and ineffective responses to problems that borders cannot solve. If borders are meant to separate territories and societies, then why are ever more populations clustering along them?

San Diego and Tijuana now view the border between them as a hindrance costing $2 billion in lost revenues. Their new mantra is “Dos ciudades, pero una región.” San Diego’s mayor has a satellite office in Tijuana and envisions a bridge linking their airports and a joint Olympic bid for 2024. Crime, illegal immigration, and narco-trafficking have fallen drastically there not because of a more rigid border but because of more investment and job creation across the border. As pipelines, water canals, freight rail corridors, electricity grids, and other infrastructures link hundreds of key economic hubs across the continent’s borders, America should come to think of itself as the heart of an integrated North American supercontinent.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“We have the citizenship action plan,” he said about the Rohingya. “Already, we are granting citizenship cards for those who apply.” “But only if they don’t identify themselves as Rohingya,” Derek interjected. The Burmese denied that the Rohingya were a distinct ethnic group, referring to them as Bengalis—illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. For the next three and a half years, we’d have to constantly press the government, often working with other countries, to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control. “The situation is very complicated,” Soe Thein said. “We aren’t going to change the views of the local Rakhine or the people in Burma.

One writer told me in a matter-of-fact way that she had nearly died in prison because she shrank to under eighty pounds. Rohingya brought me large volumes of documentation proving that they had lived in Burma for generations, as if I were the one who would judge this fact. Rakhine Buddhists were unabashed in their bigotry, speaking of the “Bengalis” as illegal immigrants who needed to be deported. At the Myanmar Peace Center, we talked to a small group of men trying to negotiate a cease-fire with more than a dozen ethnic armed groups. I was surprised to see pamphlets that translated the Cairo speech into Burmese. I asked why the speech was of interest to people here.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Interested citizens can review camera feeds near a reported shot and press a button if they see something strange happening on their computer monitors. Should a citizen do so, other citizens can be asked for verification. If the answer is yes, the police can be sent. In November of 2006, the state of Texas spent $210,000 to set up eight webcams along the Mexico border as part of a pilot program to solicit the public’s help in reducing illegal immigration.44 Webcam feeds were sent to a public Web site, and people were invited to alert the police if they thought they saw suspicious activity. During the month-long trial the Web site took in just under twenty-eight million hits. No doubt many were from the curious rather than the helpful, but those wanting to volunteer came forward, too.

Sig Christenson, Border Webcams Rack Up Millions of Hits in a Month, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS, Dec. 10, 2006, http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/ MYSA121106.01A.border_webcam.323e8ed.html. 45. Id. (“[S]tate officials Sunday tout[ed] it as a success beyond anyone’s dreams.”). 46. Assoc. Press, Texas Border Cam Test Catches 10 Illegal Immigrants, CHI. SUN-TIMES, Jan. 8, 2007, http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/201613,CST-NWS-bord08.article (“It seems to me that $20,000 per undocumented worker is a lot of money” (quoting state Rep. Norma Chavez) [internal quotation marks omitted]); Editorial, Virtual Wall a Real Bust That Didn’t Come Cheap, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS, Jan. 19, 2007, at 6B (“[T]he results are in: The plan bombed.”). 47.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

In Denmark, a 70-year-old woman named Lise Ramslog was convicted for offering a lift to a migrant family. In France, a 72-year-old retired lecturer named Claire Marsol was convicted of facilitating illegal immigration after she gave a boy and a young woman a lift to the train station. Police searched her home, handcuffed her, seized her belongings and put her in custody. A French mountain guide named Benoit Duclos was charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration for helping a pregnant Nigerian woman across the border in the snow. It was not enough to leave migrants to die, or to trap them in the torture chambers of Libya or the slaughter house of Syria.


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/trump-transcript-rnc-address.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Glenn Kessler, “Analysis: Stephen Miller’s Claim That ‘Thousands of Americans Die Year After Year’ from Illegal Immigration,” Washington Post, February 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/21/stephen-millers-claim-that-thousand-americans-die-year-after-year-illegal-immigration/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Ben Kamisar, “Trump Brings Mothers of Children Killed by Undocumented Immigrants on Stage,” The Hill, August 23, 2016, https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/292431-trump-brings-mothers-of-children-killed-by-undocumented-immigrants-on-stage.


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

The number of signatures being collected each week for the recall petition went through the roof. Each time Gray Davis made another mistake, I was boiling. What was he doing giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants? Why was he increasing fees rather than pushing back on pensions? Why had he taken campaign money from Indian tribes that owned casinos? Why were we running out of electricity? Why would he sponsor job-killing legislation that would force businesses to flee the state? I thought about what I’d do: cut taxes, end driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, cut the vehicle license fee. Spend no more than the state is taking in. Rebuild California. Find alternatives to fossil fuels.

If a lawmaker felt intimidated that I really might be the Terminator—it’s funny how literally people take these movie roles—I wanted him to think of me more as the open-minded Julius in Twins. I’d promised the voters that I would deliver results fast. Within an hour of being sworn in, I canceled the tripling of the vehicle registration fee and, soon after, with the help of the legislators upstairs, got rid of the law allowing drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. “Now, that’s what you call action,” I told the cameras. Within two weeks of taking office, I put before the legislature the financial-rescue package on which I’d based my campaign—including a refinancing of California’s debt, a sweeping budget reform, and a reform of the workers’ compensation system that was driving employers out of the state.


pages: 215 words: 60,489

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, disinformation, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, trade route

London, the House of Commons Major Tufton Beamish: What arrangements have been made to counter Zionist plans for the illegal emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine? Mr. McNeil, British Minister of State for Foreign Affairs: It would clearly lessen the efficiency of the measures taken against illegal immigration of Jews into Palestine if these measures were made public, but I hope the honorable and gallant Gentleman will accept my assurance that the measures are vigorous, extensive, and varied in character. Major Tufton Beamish: Will the Minister say whether the arrangements are effective? Mr. McNeil: To some degree.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Its goal was to decrease the taxpayers’ burdens by denying social services to all illegal immigrants. In practical terms, it was specific to Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America. And its chief tactic was to lower public health costs by denying the Latinos all but life-and-death emergency care. When Prop. 187 was passed by popular vote, physicians and public health workers cried foul: it would violate the Hippocratic oath to deny needed care. And how, they asked, are we to know which Spanish speaker is a legal versus an illegal immigrant? Do we demand to see proof? If the patient is comatose, do we leave him untreated until residency documents can be found?

The girls, their mamochkas, and the protective thugs could be seen day and night along highways, in train stations, in front of the state’s sacred Red Square and Duma, inside discos and casinos, and in hotel bars. In Moscow’s most exclusive nightclubs high-class hookers charged $1,500 for a night’s “entertainment.” At the extreme opposite end of the economic scale were women along Moscow’s Ring Road who demanded $50 a night—or, lower still, illegal immigrant girls, homeless, who serviced their customers for a train station $2 kiosk meal.137 In the daytime abandoned or runaway children dashed among cars in Moscow’s heavily congested streets, hawking prostitute pamphlets and “hot sex” tip sheets. Tiny ten-year-old Natasha, who clearly hadn’t bathed in days and said she lived on the streets, darted among cars around Pushkin Square hawking a book that was a guide to Moscow prostitutes.138 “Gimme fifty thousand rubles [about $8],” Natasha demanded.

Shortly after taking office, President Reagan had ordered a combination of covert and overt operations in support of pro-U.S. forces throughout Central America: the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua and the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As the brutal wars and repression spread, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fled to the United States, most settling illegally in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. Between 1981 and 1988 Los Angeles County absorbed the largest number of these illegal immigrants, variously estimated to have totaled 350,000 to half a million. (When, by 1991, the wars had largely ended, few of these refugees returned to Central America.) Most of the Salvadoreans who reached Los Angeles during those years were traumatized and terrified of deportation back to what they felt would be certain death or torture.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Just before his 1968 speech, he suggested that by the end of the century, the number of black and Asian immigrants and their descendants would number between five and seven million, or about a tenth of the population. According to the 2001 census, the relevant figures were 4.7 million people identifying themselves as black or Asian, or 7.9 per cent of the total population, though with large-scale illegal immigration since then, the true numbers are certainly higher. Immigrants are far more strongly represented, in percentage terms as well as raw numbers, in London and the English cities than in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. It can also be argued that Powell did British democracy a kind of service by speaking out on an issue which had been up to then cloaked in elite silence and so provoking a debate which needed to happen at some time.

The likeliest explanation is simply that he believed in political action and that, though flawed, Labour’s belief in social justice was nearest to the Christian social views he had formed. Once in the party, working his way through local branches in London, he displayed the full kit of soft-left beliefs of the time, being hostile to the European Community and privatization, pro-CND and high taxes, the rights of illegal immigrants and greater freedom for the press. He would ditch all of these views later but this does not mean they were insincerely held at the time; for the Labour Party of Foot’s time they were considered moderate, and Blair was always opposed to the hard-left Bennite and Militant groups. After fighting a hopeless by-election, Blair won a safe Labour seat in the north-east of England with his combination of chutzpah and charm and, in the Commons from 1983, quickly fell in with another new MP.

He hived off the struggling IND as a separate agency and promised to clear a backlog of around 280,000 failed asylum-seekers still in the country within five years. Uniformed border security staff were promised, and the historic Home Office was to be split up. Meanwhile, many straightforwardly illegal immigrants had bypassed the asylum system entirely. In July 2005 the Home Office produced its own estimate of what the illegal population of the UK had been four years earlier, reckoning it between 310,000 and 570,000 souls, or between 0.5 and 1 per cent of the total population. A year later unofficial estimates pushed the possible total higher, to 800,000.


pages: 230 words: 60,050

In the Flow by Boris Groys

illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Julian Assange, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, WikiLeaks

Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art – not so much inside the art system as outside it, that is, change the conditions of reality itself. Art activists try to change living conditions in economically underdeveloped areas, raise ecological concerns, offer access to culture and education to the populations of poor countries and areas, attract attention to the plight of illegal immigrants, improve conditions for people working in art institutions. In other words, art activists react to the increasing collapse of the modern social state and try to substitute for social institutions and NGOs that for different reasons cannot or will not fulfil their role. Art activists want to be useful, to change the world, to make the world a better place – but at the same time, they do not want to cease to be artists.


Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

carbon footprint, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, financial independence, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, trickle-down economics, wage slave

He could also — if he was really desperate — sell himself into debt slavery, in which case he’d most likely stay a slave because no one would come forward to redeem him. Debt slavery is by no means a thing of the distant past. Consider present-day India, where a man may be a virtual debt slave all his life — many get into this position through having to provide dowries. Think, too, of the smuggling of illegal immigrants from Asia into North America, where the person smuggled is told he has to work without wages forever in order to pay off the cost of his travel experience. In the nineteenth century, in the mining villages of northern Europe, the company store supplied the place of the slave owner: the miners had to buy their food and the necessities of life from the store, where these things cost more than the miners could ever earn.


pages: 251 words: 63,630

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

business climate, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, glass ceiling, high net worth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income per capita, indoor plumbing, job-hopping, Maui Hawaii, middle-income trap, price stability, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional, zero-sum game

Even at the height of the financial crisis with 24 million Americans unemployed, with Occupy Wall Street protests erupting across America, thousands of farm jobs in America have gone unfilled, because so many Americans don’t want to work in those conditions. However, the Obama administration has deported a record high of nearly one million illegal immigrants—the very people who were willing to take those jobs. Aside from plentiful jobs causing Chinese wages to rise, there are simply fewer workers, because the one-child policy implemented in 1978 has resulted in an aging population today. The magazine Science found that 22.9 percent of the Chinese population was under the age of 14 in 2000.


pages: 202 words: 62,773

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

The Bay Colony’s reactionary immigration legislation is not unlike reactionary immigration legislation throughout history: it exposes a people’s deepest fears. For example, the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, passed by Congress to bar anarchists from the United States after an anarchist assassinated President McKinley. Or the not particularly Magna Carta-friendly clause in the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowing for illegal immigrants to be detained indefinitely and without legal counsel for up to six months if they are suspected of terrorism, or simply have terrorist “ties.” Behind every bad law, a deep fear. And in 1637, the two things panicking the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony the most are the Pequot and Anne Hutchinson.


pages: 190 words: 61,970

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, Cass Sunstein, clean water, do well by doing good, end world poverty, experimental economics, Garrett Hardin, illegal immigration, Larry Ellison, Martin Wolf, microcredit, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Peter Singer: altruism, pre–internet, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, union organizing

He grew up in a village by the sea, in Senegal, in West Africa. His father and grandfather were fishermen, and he tried to be one too. But after six years in which he barely caught enough fish to pay for the fuel for his boat, he set out by canoe for the Canary Islands, from where he hoped to become another of Europe’s many illegal immigrants. Instead, he was arrested and deported. But he says he will try again, even though the voyage is dangerous and one of his cousins died on a similar trip. He has no choice, he says, because “there are no fish in the sea here anymore.” A European Commission report shows that Nodye is right: The fish stocks from which Nodye’s father and grandfather took their catch and fed their families have been destroyed by industrial fishing fleets that come from Europe, China, and Russia and sell their fish to well-fed Europeans who can afford to pay high prices.


pages: 230 words: 62,294

The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger

biodiversity loss, California gold rush, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, do well by doing good, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, European colonialism, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, open economy, price stability, Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

The Coffee Crisis signaled not just a particularly bad swing in the long-standing coffee cycle, but a new structure for the global coffee trade, one in which life on the farm had reverted to a form that was palpably reminiscent of coffee’s days of overt slavery on colonial plantations. It’s not surprising that the desperation unleashed by the crisis eventually made it back to consuming nations: in one well-known 2001 case, six of the fourteen illegal immigrants to the United States who died of exposure in the Arizona desert were found to be destitute small-scale coffee producers from Veracruz trying for a better life in a land where their coffee sells for twenty times what they could earn for it back home. Worldwide, the financial impact of the crisis was equivalent to the United States, the world’s biggest development donor, halving its aid budget.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

To reduce this effect, a compromise was reached whereby a slave counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House. But, even so, three-fifths of an injustice was still considered an injustice by many.* The same controversy exists today in regard to illegal immigrants, who also count as part of the population for apportionment purposes. So states with large numbers of illegal immigrants receive extra seats in Congress, while other states correspondingly lose out. Following the first US census, in 1790, notwithstanding the new Constitution’s requirement of proportionality, seats in the House of Representatives were apportioned under a rule that violated quota.


pages: 600 words: 165,682

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, bank run, colonial rule, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, old-boy network, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Had I been in the bloc at the time, grass would be growing out of me.”87 At Kibbutz Ne’ot Mordechai near the northern tip of Israel, on the other hand, strategic goals were explicitly on the mind of forty-six-year-old commune member Rafael Ben-Yehudah. Ben-Yehudah had left his native Vienna as a teenager in 1938, a month after the Nazis marched in, reached Palestine with a boatful of illegal immigrants who swam to shore, spent World War II in communes of landless workers, became a follower of Yitzhak Tabenkin, and helped found Ne’ot Mordechai on the Jordan River. On June 14, Ben-Yehudah sat down to talk with Dan Laner, a member of Ne’ot Mordechai and the chief of staff of the army’s Northern Command.

Israel needed to declare that “we will never repress the rights of the Palestinians to national self-determination, and we are willing to help them establish a state.”42 Eliav was forty-seven, with a hint of a Russian accent from the country he left as a child, and a hint of pudgy Russian cheeks. Before independence he had served in the British army, then captained an illegal immigration boat running the British blockade on Palestine. After a stint of intelligence work and another as an Israeli naval officer, he became Levi Eshkol’s assistant at the Settlement Department, build-ing farm villages and towns for Jewish refugees. It was a standard heroic CV. By the time of the 1967 war, he was deputy industry minister, a rising Mapai man.


pages: 670 words: 169,815

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

The government had made primary and junior secondary education both compulsory and free; there were only minimal charges for medical treatment, while ‘more than 2 million people lived in 400,000 government provided or government subsidised flats’.22 Hong Kong was probably the most successful exercise in benevolent dictatorship in history. Its success could be measured by the vast influx of immigrants which, every year, descended upon the colony from China. During 1979, some 70,000 legal immigrants entered Hong Kong, while 90,000 illegal immigrants were arrested and repatriated to China. Perhaps the most startling fact of all was that 110,000 illegal immigrants had actually escaped arrest that year and had been merely absorbed into the population. An ‘annual influx of nearly 200,000’ people into Hong Kong could not be ‘sustained without serious social and economic consequences’.23 These figures represented about 5 per cent of the total population of Hong Kong.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The arrival of the 1990s and middle-aged security might have been a chance to reverse those positions in favor of maximum consumption without any worry of personal replacement (and indeed, this was when NAFTA passed with bipartisan support and when a major wave of illegal immigration occurred). By 2016, with Social Security kicking in and a transfer of spending from foreign goods to domestic services (provided for by millions of illegal immigrants already emplaced), one might have been free to indulge in whatever view aligned with the prejudices of the moment. And this was, of course, basically what happened: heavy-handed statism under Reagan, liberalization starting with Clinton and perhaps ending after Obama, and a certain renewed tolerance among those older, on the dole, or in possession of large portfolios, of nativism and monopoly power (more on the last in a moment).


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

But as soon as we sat down, and I treated him like a person – like an equal human being – something very interesting happened. He dropped the act. Suddenly the guy, who was having difficulties articulating a few words just seconds earlier, became a fluent speaker of three languages. He told me he came to Italy as an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, where he studied economics at university and graduated, but could not find any job in the country. Nigeria is widely known as one of the most corrupt states in the world,121 where even janitors have to bribe officials in order to get a job. The integration process through legal means in Italy was close to impossible, and inaccessibly expensive.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Poe’s shaming methods were so admired in Houston society that he ended up getting elected to Congress as the representative for Texas’s 2nd Congressional District. He is currently ‘Congress’s top talker’, according to the Los Angeles Times, having made 431 speeches between 2009 and 2011, against abortion, illegal immigrants, socialized healthcare, etc. He always ends them with his catchphrase: ‘And that’s just the way it is!’ ‘It wasn’t the “theatre of the absurd”.’ Ted Poe sat opposite me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington DC. I’d just quoted to him his critic Jonathan Turley’s line - using citizens as virtual props in his personal theatre of the absurd - and he was bristling.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

He suggested, at a time when oil imports were soaring, that there be a tax on gasoline proportional to the fraction of U.S. oil consumption that had to be imported. If imports continued to rise, the tax would rise until it suppressed demand and brought forth substitutes and reduced imports. If imports fell to zero, the tax would fall to zero. The tax never got passed. Carter also was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped.


pages: 192 words: 72,822

Freedom Without Borders by Hoyt L. Barber

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, diversification, El Camino Real, estate planning, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, money market fund, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, quantitative easing, reserve currency, road to serfdom, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail

This would include Social Security, representing 40 Freedom Without Borders $63 trillion of the total, and which pays out retiree pensions, and health care benefits to Medicare recipients. These facts are part of why the total figure sounds so high, but imagine what the deficit will look like after Obamacare kicks in? Further, illegal immigrants also contribute to the rising deficit. Should this deficit double again in four years, as it did in the previous four, we’ll be looking at $260 trillion in national debt. What comes after trillion? Europe is in bad shape, as well, with the sovereign debt problems of at least a half a dozen countries threatening the entire European Union, including Europe’s ability to keep it together.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

This desire to silence—or subdue—those who disagree with us has been reaching new, terrifying heights. To take a minor example, in September 2017, Republicans and Democrats clubbed each other savagely over the exact same policy: President Obama had issued an executive amnesty for certain children of illegal immigrants, the so-called DREAMers; President Trump had revoked that amnesty, but called on Congress to pass a legislative version that would protect the DREAMers. Democrats called Republicans cruel, inhumane; one congressman called Trump “Pontius Pilate.” Meanwhile, Republicans called Democrats lawless and irresponsible.


pages: 233 words: 64,479

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

That initial engagement led to fuller appreciation of the fundamental problems facing her community—and to creating an organization that today is helping thousands of poor and moderate-income people in Cleveland and other parts of Ohio to fight predatory lenders and stay in their homes. Catalino Tapia, a winner in 2008, was a gardener just south of San Francisco, a few miles from where the Samaritan House clinic is housed. He came to the country as an illegal immigrant with six dollars in his pocket, eventually building a small gardening business. Tapia and his wife managed to put their son through UCLA and then law school at Berkeley. At his son’s law school graduation, Tapia was so moved by what had been accomplished that he determined to help other parents from similar backgrounds have the same experience.


pages: 305 words: 69,216

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression by Richard A. Posner

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, equity premium, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, very high income

In the Republican Party they fall into three main groups: believers in (1) free markets, low taxes, and small government—economic conservatives; (2) believers in tough criminal laws and a strong foreign policy— I'll call them security conservatives; and (3) social (mainly religious) conservatives, who are hostile to abortion, gay marriage, pornography, gun control, and a clean separation of church and state. The security and social conservatives converge on hostility to illegal immigrants. The economic and security conservatives are in some tension because a national-security state requires a big government and therefore high taxes, and the economic conservatives are in tension with the social conservatives because the former are libertarian and the latter are interventionist.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

By cutting taxes, he would put lots more money in the average Joe’s pocket. He was going to eliminate the trade deficit and balance the federal budget. He would end our endless wars and bring the troops home where they belong, while requiring America’s freeloading allies to shoulder their share of the load. He would put a stop to illegal immigration. He would make the United States once more the God-fearing Christian country it was meant to be. All this together formed his vision of an America made great again. Recall as well the button-pushing provocations that candidate Trump employed to incite establishment outrage, thereby delighting those holding that establishment in contempt.


pages: 217 words: 69,892

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh

East Village, illegal immigration, index card, messenger bag, off-the-grid, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, rent control, white picket fence

Stacks of old, unsold newspapers were piled up against a broken window next to the fridge of milk and sodas. I read the headlines slowly, my eyes blurring and crossing as I stared. The new president was going to be hard on terrorists. A Harlem teenager had thrown her newborn baby down a sewage drain. A mine caved in somewhere in South America. A local councilman was caught having gay sex with an illegal immigrant. Someone who used to be fat was now extremely thin. Mariah Carey gave Christmas gifts to orphans in the Dominican Republic. A survivor of the Titanic died in a car crash. I had a vague notion that Reva was coming over that night. She probably wanted to pretend to want to cheer me up. “I’ll pay you back for a pack of Parliaments,” I told the Egyptian.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

It was served up by two officials from the normally staid corridors of the Federal Reserve Bank. “Walmart has been fingered as the source of virtually every conceivable economic ill,” they declared. “It kills jobs and downtowns, say critics, and destroys community character. It’s been accused of discriminating against women, using illegal immigrants, requiring work off the clock, and being overly aggressive in stopping the formation of labor unions among its workers. It’s been blamed for sprawl and traffic congestion, as well as aesthetic offenses.” A distinct genre of literature emerged during this period panning the company’s avaricious behavior: The Case Against Walmart, Slam-Dunking Walmart, The Bully of Bentonville, How Walmart Is Destroying America (and the World).


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

China has arbitraged its labor all along by keeping exchange rates artificially low, studding the countryside with frictionless zones, and turning a blind eye to the 140 million illegal immigrants flooding the coast. All so it can keep growing 8 percent per year—the minimum speed before the wheels start to come off from unemployment and unrest. Until now its people have been largely immobile, confined to the countryside or the factory towns of the Delta, scrimping and saving. All of this will change as the Chinese begin to leave the west for the West, streaming into Africa and Detroit, or places like Prato, the center of Italy’s textile industry. As James Kynge tells the story in China Shakes the World, Prato became a magnet for illegal immigrants smuggled out of China in the 1990s.


pages: 573 words: 180,065

On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads by Tim Cope

feminist movement, global pandemic, illegal immigration, Iridium satellite, mass immigration, trade route

What are you waiting for? Let’s go to the highway!” When I protested sleepily and asked why, he shook me in a rage. “To get prostitutes, of course!” I wasn’t the only one who had to endure these tirades, although I was probably the only one who found them the least bit curious. Sharing the hut with me was Yura, an illegal immigrant from Georgia who worked at the tile factory. His passport and visa had long expired; afraid of what might happen at the border, he hadn’t been home to see his family for four years. His situation had recently become more tenuous because of the deteriorating relations between Russia and Georgia.

During the dead of winter a mysterious explosion on the gas pipeline had left the population of Georgia’s capital, Tbilsi, freezing, and Georgia had accused Russia of sabotage. Georgians such as Yura who lived and worked illegally in Russia found themselves the focus of unwanted attention from authorities. Yura’s story would have resonated among hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in Russia who had come from former Soviet republics to work but were stuck with expired documents and cut off from family with no support or legal protections. Like everything in Russia, citizenship could be bought at a price, but few could afford the going rate, which apparently was around $5,000.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

Some even went so far as to suspect him of double-dealing—of maintaining “close ties” with Chinese secret service agents in Paris.34 A detailed report by French internal intelligence in March 1993 analyzed these problems. It described “an investigation into smuggling and Mr Wan Runnan’s and his relatives’ links with Beijing agents and the community of illegal immigrants, which was entrusted by the FDC’s Board of Directors to a dissident.” Wan was criticized for the opacity of his management of “a vast group of political associations and commercial companies, in which appear both Chinese officials and other members of the Chinese community involved in suspicious activities.”

This is an extremely important agency, not only because of the historical Sino-Russian border conflict, but also because it is a key—if often underestimated—intelligence service, as explained to me by the China–Russia relations expert Iliya Sarsembaev. The focus of these three-way meetings was another area of cooperation: organized crime and illegal immigration, mainly from the PRC to the Russian Federation, as the flow of Chinese immigrants into the Russian Far East intensified, accompanied by the emergence of Chinese mafia organizations in Khabarovsk and elsewhere. The previous year, Chinese gangsters had murdered the head of the Russian mafia in Khabarovsk.


pages: 695 words: 189,074

Fodor's Essential Israel by Fodor's Travel Guides

bike sharing, call centre, coronavirus, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, sensible shoes, starchitect, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Palmach Museum HISTORY MUSEUM | This museum makes you feel as if you were back in the days of the Palmach, the pre-State underground army, with a group of young defenders. Visitors are led through rooms, each of which encompasses one part of the Palmach experience. There’s the “forest,” which has real-looking trees; a room with a falling bridge and faux explosions; and a chilling mock-up of an illegal-immigrants’ ship. Visits to the museum must be booked in advance and the tour can accommodate up to 25 people. Call ahead for reservations. E 10 Levanon St., North Tel Aviv P 03/545–9800 wwww.palmach.org.il A NIS 30 C Closed Sat. Tel Aviv Port CITY PARK | Once a cluster of decrepit warehouses, the old port is buzzing with cafés, restaurants, and clubs.

s Sights Atlit Detention Camp JAIL/PRISON | Atlit, a peninsula with the jagged remains of an important Crusader castle, also holds a more recent historical site: to the west (about 1,500 feet from the highway) is the Atlit detention camp used by the British to house refugees smuggled in during and after World War II. The reconstructed barracks, fences, and watchtowers stand as reminders of how Jewish immigration was outlawed under the British Mandate after the publication of the infamous White Paper in 1939. More than a third of the 120,000 illegal immigrants to Palestine passed through the camp from 1934 to 1948. In 1945, Yizthak Rabin, then a young officer in the Palmach, planned a raid that freed 200 detainees. The authenticity of the exhibit is striking: it was re-created from accounts of actual detainees and their contemporaries; you see the living quarters, complete with laundry hanging from the rafters.


Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Hordes of retired and wealthy EU citizens are catered for by co-nationals on the holiday coasts. The image of illegal immigrants crossing the Straits of Gibraltar, and the more dangerous Atlantic route (to the Canary Islands) from Mauritania and even Senegal, in barely seaworthy boats has been a daily reminder of a litany of suffering. The alarmed cries over this ‘deluge’, however, ring hollow. Far more illegal migrants arrive by more mundane means: over the French border and by air. Border controls are generally cursory and many South Americans do not need a visa to travel to Spain. Pretending to be a tourist is all a prospective clandestino (illegal immigrant) needs to do to get past passport control.

Zapatero then forged on with a series of social reforms that predictably angered the Spanish right but largely pleased his party’s supporters, including the many young voters who chose the PSOE in the wake of the Madrid bombings. The new government legalised gay marriages, made divorce easier, took religion out of the compulsory school curriculum, gave dissatisfied Catalonia an expanded autonomy charter, and declared an amnesty for illegal immigrants that allowed 500,000 non-EU citizens to obtain legal residence and work permits in Spain. In 2007 parliament also passed the ‘Historical Memory Law’ designed to officially honour the Republican victims of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship. The law ordered the removal of any remaining Francoist symbols from public buildings, opened archives and provided for the exhumation of those buried in anonymous graves after Francoist atrocities.

The national population has grown from around 40 million to more than 46 million since 2000, almost entirely due to immigrants. Of them, 1.7 million come from other EU countries. The Balearic Islands have the greatest percentage of foreign residents – almost 20% (mostly Britons and Germans). Speculation on the presence of illegal immigrants in Spain ranges from 200,000 to one million – it is virtually impossible to know. Some 1.5 million Muslims (around 650,000 from Morocco) live in this once ultra-Catholic country. More than one million nationals from Spain’s former South American colonies have come to claim their birthright in the madre patria (mother country).


pages: 230 words: 79,229

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

Glasman, for his part, had worked with immigrants from South America, West Africa and Eastern Europe at the East London Communities Organisation (TELCO), through which he developed and led the London Citizens campaign to improve wages and conditions for workers in the East End of London. Crucially, given the irony of his later pronouncements, London Citizens also campaigned to formalize the status of illegal immigrants. To me, it seems as though the only way Glasman could have followed his progressive work with London Citizens with such a grimly conservative line on immigration is by mentally separating the working-class people he worked with at TELCO and the working-class people ‘out there’ whom Labour needed to ‘win back’ from the BNP and Ukip.


pages: 232 words: 77,956

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, call centre, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, electricity market, Etonian, Ford Model T, gentrification, HESCO bastion, housing crisis, illegal immigration, land bank, Leo Hollis, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-industrial society, pre–internet, price mechanism, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor

Supporters of the law believe it will more than pay for itself; its increased costs will be offset by thinning out the armies of walking wounded who throng hospital emergency rooms, and by spreading risk more widely. But as many as thirty million people will still be left without medical cover – low-paid people in the pro-inequality states, illegal immigrants and people who gamble that they won’t need a doctor and prefer to pay a tax penalty rather than a premium. And even if you are insured in America, and have access to some of the world’s finest medical facilities, just paying the premium each month doesn’t make healthcare free at the point of delivery.


pages: 267 words: 74,296

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed by John Peet, Anton La Guardia, The Economist

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, Doha Development Round, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Money creation, moral hazard, Northern Rock, oil shock, open economy, pension reform, price stability, quantitative easing, special drawing rights, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, éminence grise

Fuller market access, particularly for agricultural products, has also been notable largely by its absence: three years after the Arab spring began, only Morocco has even begun negotiations on a deep free-trade deal with the EU. As for migration, hostility towards it has grown as the euro crisis has led to rising unemployment, especially in the southern Mediterranean countries. Far from providing more routes to legal migration, ever more resources have been poured into tightening controls on illegal immigration. Leaky boats carrying would-be immigrants continue to sink in the Mediterranean around the Italian island of Lampedusa, one of the nearest parts of the EU to north Africa. Over migration, indeed, the EU now stands towards north Africa rather as the United States stands towards Mexico – and a part of the reason for this is the dire economic consequences of the euro crisis in terms of jobs and growth at home.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

Over the course of a lifetime, even those getting off to a poor start in a new country generally put more back into society—and the national treasury—than they get out of it. Far from being a drain on public resources, extensive research by economist Julian Simon found that the average legal immigrant receives less from government and pays in a greater amount in taxes than the average native-born citizen. Though calculations for illegal immigrants are more difficult, even here Simon found a likely net benefit to the host society. Summing up his findings, Simon even estimates the rough dollar amount of benefit each new immigrant provides his host country: Evaluating the future stream of differences as one would when evaluating a prospective dam or harbor, the present value of a newly arrived immigrant family discounted at 3% (inflation adjusted) was $20,600 in 1975 dollars, almost two years’ average earnings of a native family; at 6% the present value was $15,800, and $12,400 at 9%. 24 If some immigrants do become permanently dependent on handouts, that merely illustrates one reason to seriously reform our welfare policy and labor market regulations.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

And they deliver ideological bombs that politicians will only hint at on the record. According to Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist and professor at the University of North Carolina, these groups pinpoint vulnerable voters and then target them with fear-mongering campaigns, scaring them about their children’s safety or the rise of illegal immigration. At the same time, they can keep those ads from the eyes of voters likely to be turned off (or even disgusted) by such messaging. Successful microtargeting, in part, explains why in 2015 more than 43 percent of Republicans, according to a survey, still believed the lie that President Obama is a Muslim.


pages: 257 words: 72,251

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security by Daniel J. Solove

Albert Einstein, cloud computing, Columbine, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, invention of the telephone, Marshall McLuhan, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, security theater, the medium is the message, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, urban planning

Times, May 6, 2003, at A1. 19. David Cole, Enemy Aliens, 54 Stan. L. Rev. 953, 960–61 (2002). 20. Stephen Graham, U.S. Frees 80 Afghan Detainees, Phila. Inquirer, Jan. 17, 2005, at A12. 21. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 524 U.S. 507, 535 (2004). 22. See, e.g., Eric Lichtblau, U.S. Report Faults the Roundup of Illegal Immigrants after 9/11, N.Y. Times, June 3, 2003, at A1. 23. Jerry Markon, U.S. to Free Hamdi, Send Him Home, Wash. Post, Sept. 23, 2004, at A1. 24. Posner, Pragmatism, supra, at 304. 25. See Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents 76–86 (1994); see also Seth F. Kreimer, Sunlight, Secrets, and Scarlet Letters: The Tension between Privacy and Disclosure in Constitutional Law, 140 U.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Joint military exercises, intelligence sharing and criticisms of US policies in Afghanistan have provided further common ground – as does a propose $10bn offshore gas pipeline deal that again serves to benefit both sides.71 While the idea that ‘permanent destabilization creates American advantage’ might sound convincing to policymakers in Washington, it has consequences. Announcements that children of illegal immigrants will be separated from their parents and held in a ‘separate refugee facility’ in tented cities at military posts in Texas does not so much make America look determined and bold as unkind and cruel.72 Reports of mothers being in tears after their children were taken for a shower and then not brought back shocked the world.73 The revelations that DNA tests needed to reunite children with their parents – after some had been forcibly injected with drugs, leaving them unable to walk, afraid of people and wanting to sleep constantly did enormous damage to the US abroad.74 Such revelations are all but unbelievable in a country that has long been regarded as a beacon of hope, a bastion of decency and the defender of freedom and justice.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

She also faced accusations of racism. The Mail on Sunday got hold of a promotional video from 2008, when she was still a Conservative, in which she talks about immigrants. Between takes she says as an aside: ‘I just want to send the lot back, but I can’t say that.’ Ayling claims she was talking about illegal immigrants. This is not obvious from the video. The same newspaper claimed Ayling had been a member of the National Front in the late 1970s. Ayling denies she was a member, but admits having gone to meetings, saying she was carrying out research for a thesis. Ayling came to Grimsby from local politics in the Lincolnshire countryside, where her opposition to the twenty small wind turbines generating electricity in the fields at Conisholme was an uncontroversial, even popular stance: ‘Click here to email us if you can hear the turbine blades swishing at night,’ urged the website of the Louth Leader in 2008.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

The trend in income among families with a head aged 25 to 54, in the prime of the work career, is very similar to that for all families.59 5. There are more immigrants. Immigration into the United States began to increase in the late 1960s. The foreign-born share of the American population, including both legal and illegal immigrants, rose from 5 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2007.60 Many immigrants arrive with limited labor market skills and little or no English, so their incomes tend to be low. For many such immigrants, a low income in the United States is a substantial improvement over what their income would be in their home country.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

It is criticised for (1) paying its employees wages that are barely higher than the poverty line, especially the full-time staff, (2) not providing them with social security, (3) passing on the cost of social security to taxpayers, (4) discriminating against women and (5) forcing suppliers to sell at the lowest possible prices, even if it forces these to relocate to countries such as China or resort to illegal immigrant labour or child labour. In spite of that, it would seem that thanks to its economic ‘management’ model, Wal-Mart saved the average American household close to $2,500 in 2006. However, these figures are provided by a study commissioned by the multinational itself. Whatever the case may be, Wal-Mart proudly displays its sustainability programme on its website as well as the many awards received in this framework.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

("Middle-class" Russians, for example, spend 40 percent of their income on food as compared to a global middle-income standard of less than one-third.)56 Although the worst "transitional poverty" is hidden from view in derelict regions of the ex-Soviet countryside, the cities display shocking new extremes of overnight wealth and equally sudden misery. In St. Petersburg, for example, income inequality between the richest and poorest decile soared from 4.1 in 1989 to 13.2 in 1996.57 Moscow may now have more billionaires than New York, but it also has more than one million squatters, many of them illegal immigrants from the Ukraine (200,000), China (150,000), Vietnam, and Moldavia; these people live in primitive conditions in abandoned buildings, rundown dormitories, and former barracks. Sweatshop firms, often praised in 53 Akmal Hussain, Pakistan National Human Development Report 2003: Poverty, Growth and Governance, Karachi 2003, pp. 1, 5, 7, 15, 23. 54 Challenge, p. 2. 55 Braithwaite, Grootaert, and Milanovic, Poverty and Social Assistance in Transition Countries, p. 47. 56 Alexey Krasheninnokov, "Moscow," UN-HABITAT Case Study, London 2003, pp. 9-10. 57 Tatyana Protasenko, "Dynamics of the Standard of Living During Five Years of Economic Reform," International journal of Urban and Regional Research 21:3 (1997), p. 449.


pages: 265 words: 74,000

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

To reach my community in North Jersey with a political ad, for example, candidates often have to buy airtime on expensive New York stations. This means that their message spills to millions in New York and neighboring Connecticut who can never vote for them. They're also paying to reach loads of children, illegal immigrants, and the significant crowd of eligible voters who don't bother going to the polls. For campaigns accustomed to such staggering degrees of waste, reaching a targeted voter on three out of four tries sounds almost too good to be true. Looking at it the other way, one quarter of us—43.75 million American voters—are pegged to the wrong tribe.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

The North American Free Trade Agreement was peddled by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, stanch Mexican immigration into the United States. “There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home,” President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill. But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the effect of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans grown by Mexican farmers, those farmers had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

But M arx's point is that, if there is no value and surplus value being produced in production in general, then these sectors cannot exist by themselves. If no shirts and shoes were produced, what would retailers sell? There is, however, a caveat that is terribly important. Some o f the flow of what seems to be fictitious capital can indeed be involved in value cre­ ation. When I convert my mortgaged house into a sweatshop employing illegal immigrants, the house becomes fixed capital in production. When the state builds roads and other infrastructures that function as collec­ tive means of production for capital, these then have to be categorized as T H E U R BAN ROOTS OF CAP I TALI ST C R I S E S 41 "productive state expenditures:' When the hospital o r university becomes the site for innovation and design of new drugs, equipment, and the like, it becomes a site of production.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

One woman we meet – let’s call her Estela – has different ideas. She appreciates living in the tower, and frames the advantages of being in the city centre in simple terms. ‘I can take a cab from here at any time,’ she says. ‘In a barrio I can’t.’ Unluckily for her, she lives in what would have been the elevator lobby, with no exterior windows. She’s an illegal immigrant from Colombia who came to the tower to join her nephew. But he died shortly afterwards when he fell off the twelfth floor. She claims she bought this place for 7,000 bolívars four years ago, despite what the managers say about flats not being for sale. ‘They keep that quiet,’ she says. Perhaps what she means is that she bought the improvements from the previous owner?


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

As the rebels tried to break the siege, they shelled government-held western Aleppo indiscriminately too: the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recorded seventy-four civilian deaths there in October.26 Mary Ana went on writing the reports, reciting the facts of crimes against humanity, facts that no longer seemed to have any power. On television Donald Trump was debating Hillary Clinton for the US presidency. He wanted to build a wall; he wanted to stop Muslims coming to America, he said Muslims were terrorists. He made numbers up as he went along: there were thirty million illegal immigrants in America; Clinton would let in 650 million more.27 No one took his chances seriously. Mary Ana knew different, that many would vote for him back in Arizona. And if facts didn’t matter in Aleppo, why would they in the US? The sitting US president, Barack Obama, had often talked about history having a ‘right side’ and a ‘wrong side’ (which he accused Russia of being on).


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

Clark, Robert Lawson, Alex Nowrasteh, Benjamin Powell, and Ryan Murphy, “Does Immigration Impact Institutions?” Public Choice 163:3-4 (2015): 321–335. 36. Muzaffar Chrishti and Michelle Mittelstadt, “Unauthorized Immigrants with Criminal Convictions: Who Might Be a Priority for Removal?” Migrationpolicy.org. November 2016; Vivian Yee, “Here’s the Reality about Illegal Immigrants in the United States,” New York Times, March 6, 2017. 37. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Population, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. National Academies Press, 2016. 38. Keith Head and John Ries, “Immigration and Trade Creation: Econometric Evidence from Canada,” The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue Canadienne d’Economique 31:1 (1998), 47–62; Sourafel Girma and Zhihao Yu, “The Link between Immigration and Trade: Evidence from the United Kingdom,” Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 138:1 (2002): 115–130. 39.


pages: 338 words: 74,302

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

He suggests there’s a cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s lovers, with the implication being that there’s scores of women who’ve had the former Secretary of State’s tongue in their birth canals. He says that Clinton is old and sick and that there’s a cover-up about her impending death. He claims there are 80 million illegal immigrants living in the US. Things are different than back in 1997 AD. The coherent worldview has changed and encompassed some very dubious thoughts. There’s an edge in this interview that’s nowhere to be seen in the early days. This is a person who knows that he’ll never be understood. While Michael Kinsley sneered at Drudge for an hour in 1997 AD, he was wrapped in a delusion about the nature of his job.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Arizonans were seen as troublemakers by the federal government, and for years acquiring their riches wasn’t worth the potential trouble. Cynics might say that Arizonans are still making trouble. In 2010, Arizona’s legislature passed the most restrictive anti-immigration law in the nation, garnering headlines and controversy. How severe was the illegal immigration problem? In 2009, 250,000 illegal immigrants crossed the state’s 350-mile border with Mexico. The legislature wasn’t spurred into action, however, until the mysterious shooting of a popular rancher near the border the following year. Today, the hot-button law, known as SB1070, winds through the court system. The state was shaken in 2011 by the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords during a public appearance.

Some people believe the nation’s current system deals with illegal immigrants too leniently – that walls should be built on the border, immigrants who are here unlawfully should be deported and employers who hire them should be fined. Other Americans think those rules are too harsh – that immigrants who have been here for years working, contributing to society and abiding by the law deserve amnesty. Perhaps they could pay a fine and fill out the paperwork to become citizens while continuing to live here with their families. Despite several attempts, Congress has not been able to pass a comprehensive package addressing illegal immigration, though it has put through various measures to beef up enforcement.

Following the Reclamation Act of 1902, huge federally funded dams were built to control rivers, irrigate the desert and encourage development. Rancorous debates and disagreements over water rights are ongoing, especially with the phenomenal boom in residential development. Other big issues today are illegal immigration and fiscal solvency. Local Culture The Southwest is one of the most multicultural regions of the country, encompassing a rich mix of Native American, Hispanic and Anglo populations. These groups have all influenced the area’s cuisine, architecture and arts, but the Southwest’s vast Native American reservations offer exceptional opportunities to learn about Native American culture and history.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

These reforms will advance the safety and prosperity of all Americans while helping new citizens assimilate and flourish.’37 Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 187 Beyond immigration policies, Wodak argues that the hallmark of right-­wing populism is to amplify the politics of fear, using simple transgressive language, identifying scapegoats as the culprits blamed for ‘our’ problems, and legitimating Us/Them exclusion.38 Trump’s derogatory language against diverse minorities has been widely noted, such as when attacking Gold Star Muslim parents, African-­American NFL football players, suggesting that Haitian immigrants ‘all have AIDS’ and Nigerians in the United States ‘would never go back to their huts,’ and that Mexicans are rapists and criminals.39 His campaign speeches about the need for tough actions to protect America’s borders against ‘the flood’ of illegal immigrants linked those seeking entry with threats to security: ‘We have people that are criminals, we have people that are crooks. You can certainly have terrorists. You can certainly have Islamic terrorists.’40 It has been suggested that Trump’s nativist and nationalistic policies reflect his personal fear of foreign peoples, predating his entry into politics.41 These views are certainly longstanding, as evidenced by his reviving the ‘Birther’ conspiracy against President Obama in March 2011, years before announcing his candidacy.42 But his derogatory comments and racist language may also be a strategy to mobilize his white base.43 In any case, Trump’s executive actions seeking to implement his goals to limit immigration have been deeply divisive, marking a clear break from the Republican Party’s long-­standing claims about the economic value of migrant workers, and the Democratic Party’s commitment to respect the rights of refugees and lawful migrants seeking a path to American citizenship.

He also delivers to his base symbolically through executive actions, signed in the Oval Office with much flourish, on key issues fulfilling campaign pledges, such as attempts to tighten border security against perceived threats of Muslim terrorists, to implement more aggressive ICE deportation of illegal immigrants, and to roll back environmental protection such as by withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, eliminating protection of public lands in the American West, and lifting restrictions on building the oil pipeline from Canada. This perspective emphasizes that Trump’s support can be explained largely as a social psychological phenomenon, reflecting a nostalgic reaction among social conservatives and older sectors of the electorate seeking a bulwark against long-­term processes of value change, the ‘silent revolution’ that transformed American culture during the second half of the twentieth century.


pages: 297 words: 83,563

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

crowdsourcing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, no-fly zone, pre–internet, trade route, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks

Wald spent much of his time monitoring a worsening crisis in the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria, where rebel groups and criminals were kidnapping American oil workers and holding them for multimillion-dollar ransoms. Wald also spotted the potential for trouble in what he called the “vast, ungoverned spaces” of the Sahara. Arab racketeers were making tens of millions of dollars a year running cigarettes, drugs, weapons, and illegal immigrants from Mali and Niger to North Africa and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Some smugglers had links to the Islamist rebel groups that had waged a brutal civil war against the Algerian regime in the 1990s in which tens of thousands of civilians had been killed. The nexus of money, weapons, crime, and radical Islam was worrying the Algerians, and the Americans, who passed on intelligence to them and helped them with border surveillance, shared their concern.


pages: 274 words: 85,557

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You by Misha Glenny

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, BRICs, call centre, Chelsea Manning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, James Watt: steam engine, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pirate software, Potemkin village, power law, reserve currency, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Stuxnet, urban sprawl, white flight, WikiLeaks, zero day

For absolute beginners, CrimeEnforcers posted helpful videos in which an animated Cha0, blessed with an electronic voice that still betrayed the distinctive timbre and lilt of the real man, offered tips and guides on how to choose the best ATMs when planning to execute a crime. He taught his audience, for example, that installing skimmers on ATMs where there was a high concentration of illegal immigrants was a bad idea (not much ATM traffic, a lot of prying eyes and too much criminal competition). Instead, he suggested placing them near nightclubs, ‘where rich children will often use their parents’ credit cards’. As a reliable supplier to criminal industries, Cha0 saw his name spread rapidly across the Internet, so it became extremely important to him to consolidate his reputation and escape detection.


pages: 298 words: 84,394

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Albert Einstein, illegal immigration, language acquisition, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, theory of mind, your tax dollars at work

A bright yellow road-sign was printed on his T-shirt, with the silhouette of a family running across it. The father was in front, pulling his wife by the hand behind him. The wife was pulling their child and the child had a doll, also by the hand. I’m from Indiana, and Davis is not San Diego. I didn’t know this was an actual road-sign, an encouragement to not hit illegal immigrants with your car. Both child and doll were airborne; that’s how fast the family was running. I could see their legs pumping, the child’s braids whipping behind her. I should maybe say here that I’d taken a couple of pills Harlow gave me. It’s a lucky thing I’d never faced peer pressure before; I turned out to suck at it.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

When Charisma felt that her students needed a counterbalance to the onslaught of disingenuous pride and niche marketing that took place during Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months, I came up with the one-off idea for Whitey Week. Contrary to the appellation, Whitey Week was actually a thirty-minute celebration of the wonders and contributions of the mysterious Caucasian race to the world of leisure. A moment of respite for children forced to participate in classroom reenactments of stories of migrant labor, illegal immigration, and the Middle Passage. Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you’ve all made it. It took about two days to convert the long-out-of-business brushless car wash on Robertson Boulevard into a tunnel of whiteness. We altered the signs so that the children of Dickens could line up and choose from several race wash options: Regular Whiteness: Benefit of the Doubt Higher Life Expectancy Lower Insurance Premiums Deluxe Whiteness: Regular Whiteness Plus Warnings Instead of Arrests from the Police Decent Seats at Concerts and Sporting Events World Revolves Around You and Your Concerns Super Deluxe Whiteness: Deluxe Whiteness Plus Jobs with Annual Bonuses Military Service Is for Suckers Legacy Admission to College of Your Choice Therapists That Listen Boats That You Never Use All Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as “Phases” Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious To the whitest music we could think of (Madonna, The Clash, and Hootie & the Blowfish), the kids, dressed in bathing suits and cutoffs, danced and laughed in the hot water and suds.


pages: 254 words: 14,795

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler

barriers to entry, corporate social responsibility, currency peg, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, full employment, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, new economy, out of africa, price discrimination, unpaid internship, urban planning

Workers were paid by the ton, and most were averaging about $80 per month. It was even less than what factories paid. At Waste Corp’s plant in New Jersey, workers pulled out only the most obvious pieces of foreign material as the recyclables moved along a fast conveyor belt on their way to be baled. America’s lowest wage earners—illegal immigrants—were earning more than 25 times what workers at the South China facility averaged. China needed great volumes of raw materials like paper fiber, and it also happened to be in a position to sort the product efficiently. Even so, it surprised me to hear from Winston that most of the paper recycled in the United States was making its way to China.


pages: 258 words: 83,303

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

In Australia, immigration targets are set to fall in 2010 for the first time since 1997, and Canada has also given notice that it will be welcoming fewer newcomers in 2010. In the UK, the Home Office has raised the bar for applicants arriving without a job from a Bachelor’s to a Master’s degree. And in the US, rising unemployment and stricter patrols along the Mexican border have slowed illegal immigration to a trickle. And what does that mean for the developing world? As challenging as triple-digit oil prices will be for the world’s richest countries, think how much more challenging they will be for the poorer countries. Just as climate change is already affecting the poorer nations near the equator more cruelly than it does the richer, more temperate countries, rising fuel prices hit those places a lot harder as well.


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

To own an apartment in Tel Aviv, in most cases one needs to inherit one. The Black City has certainly and literally become blacker, and this is not a metaphor anymore. In addition to the growing number of minorities, and fragmentary and split communities resulting from the accumulation of generations of legal and illegal immigrants from all countries and continents, which already spread across Jaffa and the southern neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv, in the past decade the Black City has absorbed a new population of some 60,000 refugees from South Sudan, Sudan and Eritrea. The Black City’s geography is now composed not only of the phantom names of its dead Palestinian past but also of new imaginary places such as ‘Manila Avenue’ and ‘Little Khartoum’.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

I will tell you why: Because Islam has entered America and is taking over Europe … Islamic neighborhoods are expanding … Europe is becoming a continent of head scarves and mosques … We all have a problem. It is called Islam. The problem is growing. And we cannot afford to ignore it any longer because our existence is at stake. Here, in the United States, you have a problem with illegal immigration from Mexico. Just imagine if Mexico were an Islamic country and there were millions of Islamic immigrants crossing your border. That is exactly what is happening in Europe right now … Our political leaders, your president Barack Obama, Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, my own Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, they still say that Islam is a religion of peace.


pages: 284 words: 84,169

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

No discussion of register and American presidents would be complete without a look at Obama’s successor. For many journalists and pundits it was obvious that there was no way Donald Trump would become president. No candidate in the history of the republic, surely, had used the word “rapists” in announcing his bid for the presidency. But Trump, in talking of illegal immigrants from Mexico, threw caution to the wind. Instead of the usual high-flying clichés about America’s greatness, the entire speech was a bizarre series of extemporised, often repetitive riffs. I’ve been on the circuit making speeches, and I hear my fellow Republicans. And they’re wonderful people.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

The top search result was an article from a website, 70 News, which stated: ‘Final election 2016 numbers: Trump won both popular and electoral college’.3 The statement was incorrect, although Clinton had lost the election, she had won the popular count by several million votes. When I entered the 70 News website, I found a set of views I had never seen before. The ‘final election count’ article claimed that over three million illegal immigrants had voted in the election. Assuming that most of these ‘illegals’ voted for Hillary Clinton, 70 News had worked out that Trump had, in fact, won the popular vote. The source for their claims of voting irregularities appeared to be a tweet and it was obvious that 70 News had no credibility.


pages: 244 words: 82,548

Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer by Alan Huffman

blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, illegal immigration, no-fly zone, satellite internet, Skype

A high wind chilled the April night as the boat finally departed. The next day, hundreds of people greeted the boat in Benghazi with banners that read “UK & US we grieve for your loss.” Cervera had already left aboard a small fishing boat headed for Malta, which was turned back by NATO forces because it carried illegal immigrants. As a result, he ended up in Benghazi as well. After spending a cold night on the deck of the boat, sleeping under fishing nets, Cervera hired a car at the Benghazi port to drive him to Cairo, and from there he flew to Spain. He said he wasn’t sure why he was so quick to leave. He was confused, perhaps in shock, he thought.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Countries in the OECD are slowing the flow of legal migrants by lowering immigration quotas. Meanwhile, other steps, such as the physical walls erected along the US border with Mexico, are attempting to curb illegal migration. In Arizona, police now have the authority to ask anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant for identity papers. The controversial legislation has echoes of France’s recent deportation of groups of Roma (gypsies) to eastern Europe. In Europe, borders are suddenly reappearing where they haven’t been seen in nearly two decades. One of the consequences of the Arab Spring is a new wave of migration out of North Africa.


pages: 269 words: 78,468

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Etonian, gentrification, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, sensible shoes, Stephen Hawking

I mean, you’re unlikely to come in from work of a Friday evening and—during the course of a quiet weekend with your girlfriend—spend nearly two grand on coke, crack, booze, Viagra and hookers. I don’t imagine that’s how it goes, is it? Your girlfriend is unlikely to suggest the kind of evening out that will terminate sometime the following afternoon in an Albanian knocking shop in Brixton, up to your nuts in an illegal immigrant. You don’t do that nasty stuff with a girlfriend, do you? You…What do you do? You go to, I don’t know, the cinema? Or maybe for a walk? Stuff like that? But then I think about the downsides. The talking. They’re really into the whole talking thing, girlfriends. Ross has a girlfriend. He tells you about the things they do, the stuff they say.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

He learned on the job, a clear reminder that fragmented informal education is becoming a powerhouse for generating high-calibre people. Once Raul had completed building the life-size car we shipped him and it to Australia to meet its makers, the patrons who supported him and made it possible. Getting a visa for Raul to enter Australia was no easy task. Romania is regarded as a high-risk country for illegal immigrants. Our first couple of applications were rejected by immigration because of his unique status of not being a student and not technically being in paid employment. It wasn’t until we applied for special consideration that we were able to get a work visa. This serves as yet another example that the formality of the industrial governmental structures does not serve well a world of pan-global startup projects and border hopping.


pages: 285 words: 83,682

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

in My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991), 92–102. 19.The more than 1 million people of Japanese descent in the Brazilian city of São Paulo almost outnumber the non-Japanese legal residents who live among the 125 million Japanese. There are about a quarter of a million illegal immigrants in Japan as well. See “Japan Web Site Irks Illegal Aliens,” Taipei Times, May 7, 2004, 5, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/05/07/2003154450. I discuss these matters in “Misunderstood Cultures: Islam and the West,” in Toward New Democratic Imaginaries: Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture, and Politics, ed.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

Of the 127 Republican representatives who voted, just 10, or 8 percent, opposed the bill. In other words, a full 92 percent of Republican representatives joined Democratic representatives in ending the national origins quota system.” Tom K. Wong, The Politics of Immigration (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 12. Wong, The Politics of Immigration. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) “passed in a Republican-controlled House by a vote of 370 to 37. Of the 226 Republican representatives who voted, 202, or 89 percent, supported the bill. Of the 180 Democratic representatives who voted, just 13, or 7 percent, opposed the bill.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

For all of Farage’s success at ventriloquising the sentiment of a large section of the population, his behaviour has often been reprehensible: never more so perhaps than when, in the final week of the referendum campaign, he launched the anti-immigrant ‘breaking point’ poster depicting a column of Muslim Syrian refugees in the Balkans, the wretched of the Earth. Farage deliberately conflated legitimate economic migration with the refugee crisis and illegal immigration: even the former UKIP MP Douglas Carswell called the poster ‘morally indefensible’. Farage was unapologetic. ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg says that poster won the referendum, because it dominated the debate for the last few days. The establishment hated it, the posh boys at Vote Leave hated it, but it was the right thing to do.


pages: 298 words: 83,625

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson

illegal immigration, impulse control

The Turn reverses the mother–child relationship from one of loving acceptance to life-threatening rejection. Masterson (1980) quotes a borderline’s child as stating that his childhood was “like living in a permanent funeral, as if I might soon be buried” (p. 18). The borderline’s children are acutely aware of their disposability, and, like illegal immigrants, live in fear of sudden exile. The Witch attacks her child one minute, later behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary occurred. Blinding rage seems to erase her memory. Kernberg (1985) provides one such example: A hospitalized borderline patient literally yelled at her hospital physician during their early half-hour interviews, and her voice carried to all the offices in the building.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The complaints come in the form of emails and comments regarding the supposed bad choices of the financially unstable. These emailers find fault with the underresourced for ostensibly choosing to be single mothers or not saving themselves for marriages to good providers or for being evicted for being “illegal immigrants” or even for trying to continue to work as journalists. They wag their fingers at the indigent for having college or graduate school debt and for not getting adequate job retraining, not seeing this as a paradox. Others lecture the economically unstable for putatively wallowing in their condition.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Overall, in the European Union it was estimated that in the early 1990s the total foreign population of non-European citizens amounted to about 13 million, of which about one-quarter was undocumented.23 The proportion of foreigners in the total population, for the five largest countries of the European Union in 1994, only surpassed 5 percent in Germany; it was actually lower than in 1986 in France; and it was only slightly over the 1986 level in the UK.24 The situation changed in the late 1990s, as Eastern European migrations intensified in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, and African migrants made their way into southern Europe. A relatively new phenomenon was massive illegal immigration particularly from Eastern Europe, often organized by criminal smuggler rings, and including thousands of enslaved women for the profitable prostitution traffic in the civilized Western European countries. In 1999 the number of illegal immigrants into the European Union was estimated at about 500,000 per year, with their main points of destination being Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy (see volume III, chapter 3).


The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Given that only a few decades have passed since white racists in the American South urged relocalization in defense of racial segregation policies, this may be questionable. There are still places in America, after all, where relocalization would promptly bring back racist “Jim Crow” laws, and many others where more currently popular scapegoats — ​ gay people, religious minorities, illegal immigrants and the like — ​ would face mob violence without the protection of Federal civil rights laws. Only in the eyes of those seeking Utopia is unfettered local power always a good thing. I suspect that some awareness of these awkward realities remains even among the most vocal proponents of relocalization, if only because very few of them have abandoned the anonymous freedom of large cities and moved, say, to small Midwestern farm towns where a half dozen churches and the local Grange hall still anchor Community something like the close-knit communities of yesteryear.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Growth in economic activity between countries contributes up to 25 percent to global GDP growth each year.11 Yet the public—and certain elements of the business and governing elites—is often wary of participating in such activities, in part because they create obvious dislocations. Global trade is routinely blamed for job losses. Capital flows can be volatile and difficult to manage. Anti-immigration sentiment is high in many countries, developed and emerging alike, and can target legal as well as illegal immigrants. And many policy makers highlight the dark side of increased connectivity in the form of higher exposure to global shocks.12 The strain of the recession, austerity, and the fragile recovery have combined to stretch social safety nets and given rise to anti-immigration sentiment not just in Europe but also in countries traditionally built around migrant workforces.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Is this because of currency manipulation by those countries, or is it more likely a result of fundamental choices we have made as a country to favor consumption over investment and manufacturing? Our fears extend well beyond terrorism and economics. Lou Dobbs, the former CNN commentator, became the spokesman of a paranoid and angry segment of the country, railing against the sinister forces that are overwhelming us. For many on the right, illegal immigrants have become an obsession. The party of free enterprise has dedicated itself to a huge buildup of the state’s police powers to stop people from working. The Democrats are worried about the wages of employees in the United States, but these fears tend to focus on free trade. Though protecting American firms from competition is a sure path to lower productivity, open economic policies are fast losing support within the party.


pages: 265 words: 93,231

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversified portfolio, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, medical residency, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Quicken Loans, risk free rate, Robert Bork, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, the new new thing, too big to fail, value at risk, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

"I was like, 'So you're going to go shoot...guns?'" That Sunday afternoon of January 28, at The Gun Store in Las Vegas, it wasn't hard to spot the Bear Stearns CDO salesmen. They came dressed in khakis and polo shirts and were surrounded by burly men in tight black t-shirts who appeared to be taking the day off from hunting illegal immigrants with the local militia. Behind the cash register, the most sensational array of pistols and shotguns and automatic weapons lined the wall. To the right were the targets: a photograph of Osama bin Laden, a painting of Osama bin Laden as a zombie, various hooded al Qaeda terrorists, a young black kid attacking a pretty white woman, an Asian hoodlum waving a pistol.


pages: 303 words: 93,545

I'm a stranger here myself: notes on returning to America after twenty years away by Bill Bryson

flying shuttle, illegal immigration, millennium bug, National Debt Clock, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, telemarketer

There aren’t many human acts more foolishly simplistic or misguided, or more likely to lead to careless evil, than blaming general problems on small minorities, yet that seems to be quite a respectable impulse where immigration is concerned these days. Two years ago, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 187, which would deny health and education services to illegal immigrants. Almost immediately upon passage of the proposition, Governor Pete Wilson ordered the state health authorities to stop providing prenatal care to any woman who could not prove that she was here legally. Now please correct me by all means, but does it not seem just a trifle harsh—a trifle barbaric even—to imperil the well-being of an unborn child because of the actions of its parents?


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

The shift of meth from localized production in California to big-time assembly lines in Mexico didn’t go unnoticed by enforcement agents in the United States. But the eventual crackdown brought another unforeseen consequence: as California tightened its border in response to both drug smuggling and illegal immigration in the nineties, the drug runners gradually moved east. “The eastward expansion of the drug took a particular toll on central states such as Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska,” noted the 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment. The Midwestern methedemic, as it came to be dubbed, was born.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Because of changes in ocean dynamics, as well as the fact that the ground beneath the city is sinking as the continent recovers from the last ice age, seas are now rising about 50 percent faster in the New York area than the global average. Building fortifications around a city is an idea that is as old as cities themselves. In the Middle Ages, walls were built to keep out invading armies. Now they are built to keep out Mother Nature (or, in Trumpland, illegal immigrants). Obviously, if they are built right, they work. Seventy percent of the Netherlands is below sea level; without walls, dikes, and levees, the nation would be a kingdom of fish. New Orleans exists today only because of enormous levees holding back the sea. Japan is practically encircled by giant seawalls to protect residents from tsunamis.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They cross in the back of lorries, at the bottom of containers filled with rotting vegetables, scrunched up in the fetid smell and complete darkness for a day or two, not knowing if the only person who knows they are there will still be with them on the other side. Bribes are sometimes paid. Other times you just rely on luck. In 2011 a smuggler in Turkey burnt to death seven Pakistani immigrants over a financial dispute. In 2012 eleven illegal immigrants were shot dead in the Pothan area near the border between Pakistan and Iran. The group included Pakistanis, Uzbeks and Tajiks. Similar incidents have taken place on a regular basis since then. To make the long journey from Pakistan to the European Union is less a great adventure than an obstacle course from which only the very lucky will emerge without physical or psychological scars.


pages: 376 words: 93,160

More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds

clockwatching, friendly fire, hive mind, illegal immigration, place-making, power law, Stanford prison experiment

‘Well, if you are that stupid, you’ve just opted out of talking to me,’ I said to her. I left the hospital. Here is the thing that made my crewmate and me so angry. We like our job—we both like helping people and we’ll help anyone, we don’t care what colour their skin is, which religion they believe in, or if they can speak English or not. I don’t even care if they are an illegal immigrant. We sure as hell don’t do this work for the pay. My crewmate is a trained plumber so he could be earning much more money installing radiators. We don’t need to work in this area—I could put in for a transfer to a more ‘white’ area tomorrow. But I enjoy working in east London—it’s a challenge—and I enjoy working with all the different cultures that make up our ‘demographic’.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

China, meanwhile, through draconian restriction on family size, seeks to contain the growth of its already huge 1.2 billion population while the United States has sustained its demographic growth through a more open but now increasingly challenged immigration policy (supplemented by a significant influx of illegal immigrants who provide much of the low-wage labour required for agribusiness, construction and domestic services in particular). People occupy space and have to live on the land somewhere and somehow. How they live, sustain themselves and reproduce the species varies enormously from place to place, but in the process people create places within which they dwell, from the peasant hut, the small village, the favela, the urban tenement, to the suburban tract house or the multimillion-dollar homes in the Hamptons of Long Island, in China’s gated communities or in Sao Paulo’s or Mexico City’s high rise penthouses.


pages: 318 words: 92,257

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy by Sudhir Venkatesh

creative destruction, East Village, gentrification, illegal immigration, public intellectual, side project, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, urban renewal, working poor

For a sociologist, half the job is trying to see the holes in your theory. I needed more prostitutes, more pimps, more madams, more under-the-table employment brokers, more counterfeiters who dealt in fake social security cards—not just the Manjun-approved ones. I especially needed to find more illegal immigrants and learn how the underground economy helped keep them alive. One day I told Shine about my frustration. I meant nothing by it. We were just talking and I was complaining in an ordinary way, as you would about any work problem. I told him that no one really had done a study on the complicated lives of people who toiled underground and it could really help my career.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business process, call centre, carbon credits, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, failed state, financial innovation, illegal immigration, Mark Zuckerberg, microcredit, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Skype, TED Talk, vertical integration

.), 170 underwear manufacturing, 103–104 union labor in coca production, 11 United Fruit Company, 112 United Kingdom abortive drug deal, 53–55 cartel public relations, 81 Deep Web regulation, 174 locating cannabis farms, 218–219 measuring economics of drug trafficking, 240 prison gang members, 72 synthetic drugs, 156–157 trafficking network, 185–186 two-man smuggling operations, 67–68 United Nations, 14, 139, 246–248, 250–251 United States BZP use, 154 human trafficking, 193–194, 196–201 keeping drug carriers in line, 73–74 mafia services, 97, 99–100 moon rock sales, 111 murder of a government agent, 145–146 prison population, 57–58 Salvadoran gang truce, 48–49 synthetic drugs, 155–156 Uruguay: legalizing marijuana, 252 Valdez Villareal, Édgar, 79 Valor por Tamaulipas (Courage for Tamaulipas), 89 value of drugs business model, 3 cocaine, 9, 15 confiscated drugs, 4–5, 239–240 economic impact of coca eradication programs, 17–19 economics of the war on drugs, 242–244 human trafficking, 199–201 legal marijuana, 229–230 synthetic drugs, 158–159 vigilante justice, 94–95 violence against journalists, 83–86, 88–89, 100–101 dispute resolution without, 70–71 effect of market conditions on, 49–51 ethnic conflict among traffickers, 72–73 execution of business rivals, 30 franchise alliances, 138–139 Guerrero, Mexico, 140–142 Juárez cartel takeover, 38–40 keeping drug carriers in line, 73 kidnappings in Monterrey, 83–84 legalization controversy, 122 media images, 88–89 Mexican cartel turf wars, 87 Mexico’s war on cartels, 31–32, 34–35 personal safety concerns in Guatemala, 108–109 public image of cartels, 80–81 Sinaloa cartel, 79–80 traffickers’ staff turnover rate, 55 vengeance against thugs, 93–95 Zeta franchise, 146–147 See also murder wages and salaries Central America, 107 illegal immigration, 203 payment in product, 114 Walmart, 16–17 Walt Disney Company, 205 war on cartels, Mexico’s, 29–30, 246–250 war on drugs alternatives to incarceration, 74–75 Bolivian coca production, 12 confusing prohibition with control, 250–253 cost to taxpayers, 6 crop subsidies, 20 economic data, 239–240 economic mistakes, 6–7 extravagant spending on, 244–246 increasing drug seizures in the Caribbean, 56–58 meth labs, 206–207 Nixon’s handling of, 254 shifting cocaine traffic from the Caribbean, 56 synthetic drugs, 155–156 targeting drug supply, 241–244 U.S. and Mexican tactics, 36 Welch, Jack, 116 Wells, H.G., 81 wine industry, 195–196 The Wire (television program), 180 women illegal migration, 203–204 prescription painkillers, 210–212 prison populations, 65, 72 World Bank “Doing Business” report, 117–118 World Economic Forum (WEF), 118, 120–122 Zapata, Jaime, 145 Zetas (cartel) Central American corridor, 106 competition over Mexico’s borders, 84 corporate social responsibility, 95 franchising, 136–137, 139–141, 146–147 important figures, 29–30 murder of a U.S. government agent, 145–146 philanthropic activities, 91 public image of, 81–82 territorial control, 144 Courtesy of the author Tom Wainwright is the Britain editor of the Economist.


Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages by Derek Bickerton

colonial rule, dark matter, European colonialism, experimental subject, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, rent control, Suez crisis 1956

But I was on my way to Costa Rica and I had other plans. Someday I'll go, I told myself. But I never did. In Cartagena, the Palenqueros had gotten themselves a comer of the produce market where they sold their fruit and vegetables. There I got talking to a bootblack who told me some interesting things. He'd traveled as an .illegal immigrant into Venezuela, and worked for a time at a sugar town near the head of Lake Maracaibo, a place called Bobures. And in Bobures, he told me, they spoke a Those places, Bobures, the Choc6, are still there, and to this day I don't know of anyone who's investigated them. Someone should. Preferably some smart Afro-American grad student who speaks Spanish and doesn't mind a spot of hardship when it comes to marking up a career notch.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

Reflecting key aspects of the NCPS, these priorities included taking a multifaceted approach to crime reduction that would bring together all the relevant departments and agencies in implementing social crime prevention as a complement to more aggressive strategies. The first 120╇ ·â•‡ Gangsterism and the Policing of the Cape Flats action carried out under Crackdown was the massive cordon and search operation in Johannesburg in March 2000 discussed in chapter 1, the main targets of which were Nigerian crime syndicates and illegal immigrants in the Hillbrow neighborhood. Crackdown came to the Western Cape the next month, and although it had a different target than its predecessors, the structure was fairly similar: It was intelligence driven, emphasized high-density swarm and storm operations targeting national crime hot spots, and relied on crime data analysis and resource clustering.


The Fractalist by Benoit Mandelbrot

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, double helix, financial engineering, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Olbers’ paradox, Paul Lévy, power law, Richard Feynman, statistical model, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto

It was rebuffed, yet annexed southeastern Lithuania around Vilnius, the historical capital—but not Mother’s birthplace. An armistice was in force but peace was never signed. Letters from Mother’s older brother in Lithuania had to go through a business partner in Danzig (today’s Gdańsk), which was then a free city. Far more serious was the fact that the armistice made Mother an “enemy alien” in Poland—an illegal immigrant. Appropriate bribes saved her from being expelled back to a country she did not remember and away from her family and friends. But our later move to Paris brought an incidental minor delight. To have been born in Šiauliai rather than Warsaw became safe. Between the wars, Jews of Lithuanian descent residing in Poland were citizens in theory but in fact were viewed as foreigners in two undesirable ways.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

A typical day’s work will see Pete walk into a two-bedroom house ‘and find 20 to 30 men in there, sleeping four to five to a room. The record is 38’, he says. The most recent problem in Newham has been the proliferation of hundreds of illegal ‘supersheds’ put up in back gardens. ‘It’s mostly legal and illegal immigrants’, Pete says. ‘People accept it – it’s crap but it’s cheap, but there’s the cost of the social consequences – on health and mental health. The owners do what they like to the properties to maximise the rent. A lot of them are first generation. It’s okay to do that in Dakkar but it’s not okay here.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

‘At a general level’ the report observes, ‘evidence suggests that Trump’s grandiose rhetorical style was one of the reasons he won the Republican primary. Further and more specifically, polls from the election cycle suggested that people liked his provocative language and that feeling voiceless better predicted Trump support than multiple other variables, some of which include age, race, and attitudes towards Muslims, illegal immigrants, and Hispanics.’ The research further showed the extent of the problem by coming to an interesting conclusion – it was not in fact Trump voters’ fault that they had issues with political correctness, what they displayed was a natural reaction to the ‘norms of restrictive communication’. This is the deeply buried seed of grievance creation, that managing speech or behaviour, something humans do organically all the time in order for society to function, is somehow unnatural when it comes to PC.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Famously, he organised a fake wedding in Miami, inviting drug dealers and BCCI officials from around the world, all of whom were promptly arrested. You couldn’t make BCCI’s charge card up: ‘money laundering, bribery, support of terrorism, arms trafficking, the sale of nuclear technologies, the commission and facilitation of tax evasion, smuggling, illegal immigration, and the illicit purchases of banks and real estate; . . . a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers’. BCCI’s clientele included a stellar cast of baddies – the Medellin cartel, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and Abu Nidal, to name but a few.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

Political prisoners are either unpaid or underpaid workers for private companies in everything from shoemaking to electronics assembly.12 The Chinese government’s distinct attitude to worker protections also extends to its treatment of hundreds of millions of migrants moving from the countryside to the cities. Thanks to China’s hukou system, these workers are effectively illegal immigrants in their own country. Originally meant to keep workers on farms in the Maoist era, the hukou system limits the rights of Chinese to move and settle anywhere in China outside of where they were born. Local governments have declined to enforce the laws preventing rural migrants from holding jobs in cities because it has been good for business.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Celedon introduced me to a variety of local leaders who are fighting to transform their community: The lawyer who helped secure the relocation of the noxious Darling rendering plant, located less than a mile away from public schools. The teenagers who collected survey data to help redraw the route map for city buses, a crucial source of transportation in low-income communities. The advocates pushing for code enforcement in pest- and mold-infested properties run by slumlords, who know that that their legal and illegal immigrant renters will not complain to authorities. I also met Kieshaun White, a student at Cambridge High School, who is installing air quality monitors in schools across his district. He’s developing an app that would display in real time the air quality in each location. “I’m letting my community know about the air quality they live in and the long-term health effects of living in bad air,” said White to a Fresno Bee reporter.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

These efforts include changing the voting system to ensure Democratic Party control for decades, which has as its purpose the eradication of the Republican Party and political competition; attempting to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule so all manner of laws can be imposed on the country without effective deliberation or challenge; threatening to breach separation of powers and judicial independence by plotting to pack the Supreme Court with like-minded ideologues; planning to add Democratic seats to the Senate to ensure its control over that body; using tens of billions in taxpayer funds to subsidize and strengthen core parts of the Democratic Party base (such as unions and political activists); and facilitating massive illegal immigration, the purpose of which is to, among other things, alter the nation’s demographics and eventually add significantly to the pro–Democratic Party voting base. These actions and designs, among others, are evidence of an autocratic, power-hungry, ideological movement that rejects political and traditional comity and seeks to permanently crush its opposition—and emerge as the sole political and governmental power.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

Just before landing I remember him saying to me, ‘You know, Richard, I’ve probably flown across the pond a thousand times but that’s the first trip I’ve ever made standing up all the way with a drink in my hand!’ The other little-known fact about that inaugural flight into New York is that the very first passenger that Virgin Atlantic landed in the USA was an illegal immigrant. When the aircraft door opened at Newark, we were met by a bevy of local officials at the end of the jetway, all of whom I suspect were more than a little curious to see what this rock-and-roll airline actually looked like. There had been stories all week on New York City radio stations about how Boy George would be flying the airplane, that we would likely be met by drug-sniffing dogs and all sorts of nonsense.


pages: 339 words: 99,674

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

“They don’t treat locals any better than anybody else,” said an exasperated Karen Jenne. In an ironic twist, Canadian officials moved in late 2012 to close off the Canadian side of Church Street to stop people from illegally entering Canada from America. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police installed a row of flowerpots across the road, because illegal immigrants in the United States were seeking refuge in Canada, which has easier rules for obtaining political asylum. The fortress-like mentality damaged businesses on both sides of the border. Fewer Canadians are willing to cross to shop in downtown Derby Line, and fewer Americans run errands in Stanstead.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Coral Davenport, “Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris,” New York Times, 12 December 2015.   6. Evangelicals heavily dominate the first Republican primary, in Iowa. Polls there show that of likely Republican voters, “nearly six in 10 say climate change is a hoax. More than half want mass deportations of illegal immigrants. Six in 10 would abolish the Internal Revenue Service” (thereby providing a huge gift to the superrich and corporate sector). Trip Gabriel, “Ted Cruz Surges Past Donald Trump to Lead in Iowa Poll,” New York Times, 12 December 2015.   7. Sociologists Rory McVeigh and David Cunningham found that a significant predictor of current Republican voting patterns in the South is the prior existence of a strong chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

If that were true, however, then one would expect that people who identify as liberals would tend to espouse the “liberal” perspective on most matters, and that conservatives would espouse a consistently different view. Yet research finds that regardless of whether people identify themselves as liberals or conservatives, what they think about any one issue, like, say, abortion, has relatively little relation to what they believe about other issues, such as the death penalty or illegal immigration. In other words, we have the impression that our particular beliefs are all derived from some overarching philosophy, but the reality is that we arrive at them quite independently, and often haphazardly.15 The same difficulty of reconciling what, individually, appear to be self-evident beliefs shows up even more clearly in the aphorisms that we invoke to make sense of the world.


pages: 269 words: 104,430

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

While listening to moderate talk radio was shown to lead to being better informed, a survey of adults in San Diego found that more exposure to conservative talk radio resulted in listeners being more misinformed on issues.59 For example, an overwhelming majority of conservative talk radio listeners believed the following patently false statements to be true: “Illegal immigrants cause most of the crime in this area,” “President Reagan cut the national deficit,” “Giving clean needles to drug addicts has increased AIDS in California,” and “Most of the homeless in America are too lazy to work.” Clearly, depending on your station choice, riding in the car may actually make you less knowledgeable about the world you live in.


pages: 346 words: 101,763

Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic by Hugh Sinclair

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bernie Madoff, colonial exploitation, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, high net worth, illegal immigration, impact investing, inventory management, low interest rates, microcredit, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Vision Fund

He wanted to travel, to see the world, and it appeared our jobs would provide him with such opportunities. However, Nigerians have certain difficulties obtaining visas to travel abroad, and thus Onyeka asked me if I could help him get a visa to leave the country. “Look, if you get a visa to go to Europe, it is not easy to get a job, and they are really strict on illegal immigrants there. Life would be miserable. You would have to do badly paid, boring work, and you would always fear the police, and you would have no healthcare if you have a problem. It really isn’t a good life.” Onyeka then told me his personal story of the last few years. His wife had died of a medical complication, and he was lonely without her and wanted a change, a fresh start.


pages: 364 words: 102,528

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

How to Exploit Restaurant Workers First, quality food is cheaper when there is cheap labor available to cook it. In a relatively wealthy country like the United States that can be hard to find. We have a high level of labor productivity, there is a legal minimum wage, and in a lot of parts of the country even illegal immigrant labor earns more than the legal minimum. Still, the one obvious example of cheap labor is in family-owned, family-run Asian restaurants. Family members will work in the kitchen or as waiters and they will be paid relatively little or sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes they’re expected to do the work as part of their contribution to the family.


pages: 308 words: 96,604

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", airport security, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Mason jar, McMansion, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, tech billionaire

They spent the trial on the two floors of the Palm Beach County Jail that housed federal prisoners. They all had prison-life stories by now, especially about the interminable and inexplicable bus and plane rides from one facility to another, fueled only by bologna sandwiches. Dr. Patrick Graham had faced the toughest stretch. He’d been incorrectly assigned to a Mississippi prison for illegal immigrants, and before his transfer could be worked out, a riot broke out, and his neck was grazed by a bullet. After that, he spent six weeks in solitary confinement. The co-defendants spent long days together and they weren’t supposed to talk about the trial, so they compared notes about their various sentence lengths, about their different prisons, about their kids.


pages: 329 words: 97,834

No Regrets, Coyote: A Novel by John Dufresne

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, always be closing, fear of failure, illegal immigration, index card, mirror neurons, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, young professional

Were things that rotten in Everglades County? Well, let’s see. Five elected officials had been indicted in the past year for fraud, extortion, bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Six cops had gone to jail for assault (on camera), extortion, fraud (on camera), coercing sex from illegal immigrants, groping female suspects at traffic stops, distributing Oxycodone, and grand theft (a tractor). A half dozen other public officials had been arrested and faced charges. A town manager was busted for stealing $500,000 from town coffers. One county commissioner made the mistake of accepting a doggie bag stuffed with cash from an undercover FBI agent.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

The overall increase in the project cost was estimated at Rs 5 billion, an expenditure justified by the massive improvements in inclusiveness and data security that iris data can bring about.12 It wasn’t just the government that raised objections to Aadhaar. Concerns about national security led some people to protest on the grounds that any resident of India could enrol for Aadhaar, even non-citizens; they were apprehensive that illegal immigrants could use their Aadhaar number to bilk the government of funds by claiming social security benefits. These fears are not grounded in reality. As we’ve pointed out before, Aadhaar is purely an identity platform, and provides no information other than verifying who someone is. It offers no information on the citizenship status of the Aadhaar holder, and merely furnishing your Aadhaar number is not sufficient to get any welfare benefits; you still have to prove to the state that you are below the poverty line if you want subsidized foodgrains, or that you are above eighteen and live in a rural area if you want to enrol in the MGNREGA scheme, or that you are a child enrolled in a government school if you want a free mid-day meal, and so on.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

It is not obvious why some species should be allowed to be deliberately imported. Why was Japanese knotweed allowed in? What are the next waves of plants coming our way? Why are ships allowed to take few if any measures to ensure that they are not carrying alien cargoes as a condition of entering a British port, given that we are controlling for illegal immigrants and drug-smuggling? There is great scope to limit the damage across all the environments with a properly funded biosecurity regulatory system, and it is economically efficient to make the polluters pay, and hence the horticultural and shipping industries in particular to contribute levies to ensure that security systems are adequately funded.34 The costs of these biodiversity measures need to be weighed against the full economic impacts of established alien colonies throughout Britain.


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

And if that new information raises even more questions, they’ll rise to the bait. This makes them more open-minded and willing to change their opinions, and stops them becoming entrenched in dogmatic views. In ongoing research, Kahan has found similar patterns for opinions on issues such as firearm possession, illegal immigration, the legalisation of marijuana and the influence of pornography. In each case, the itch to find out something new and surprising reduced the polarisation of people’s opinions.41 Further cutting-edge studies reveal that the growth mindset can protect us from dogmatic reasoning in a similar way, by increasing our intellectual humility.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The truth of the matter might well be that the public understands better than most economists that large, well-paying employers offer something that is worth preserving through adversity. An extreme form of bad job is sweatshop work. This is an exploitative form of employment that is mostly confined to illegal immigrants in developed countries but can be rather prevalent in underdeveloped countries. Work in sweatshops means excessive overtime, wholesale disregard of safety and health conditions, low wages and lack of rights POWER AT WORK 183 and representation. The fact that people work in them at all makes it clear that decent jobs are rationed; otherwise, nobody would choose the very bad working conditions at lower pay which prevail in sweatshops (Chau 2009).


pages: 364 words: 102,225

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

In many cities, migration has brought disparate ethnic, racial, and religious groups into uneasy contact. It happens in Europe (North Africans in Paris, Pakistanis in London) as well as the United States. Is it any wonder that Arizona would become the epicenter for the American debate over illegal immigration? The political and population center is an instant city, metropolitan Phoenix, roughly sixteen times larger than it was in 1950. Anglo migrants from the north arrived along with migrants from Latin America, making an urban area that’s almost entirely new, where the rules are still being written.


pages: 348 words: 98,757

The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

business intelligence, call centre, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, index card, inflation targeting, land reform, multilevel marketing, profit motive, Project for a New American Century, seigniorage

Like Nazma Hussein, aged twenty-six, daughter of Yemeni immigrants, married to Ali the cook, cleaning and setting out tables in the front of her family's small lunch diner on K Street NW, worrying about her younger sister Ayesha who is having trouble at school: Papa wants her to come and work in the restaurant until he and Baba can find her a suitable husband, but Nazma thinks she can do better— Like Ryan Baylor, aged twenty-three, a law student at GWU, hurrying along H Street to get to the Burns Law Library and swearing quietly under his breath—overslept, forgot to set his alarm, got a reading list as long as his arm and a hangover beating a brazen kettledrum counterpoint to the traffic noise as he wonders if those cans of Coors were really a good idea the evening before a test— Like Ashanda Roe, aged twenty-eight, working a dead-end shelf-stacking job in a 7-Eleven on D Street NW, sweating as she tears open boxes of Depends and shoves them into position on an end galley, tossing the packaging into a rattly cage and whistling under her breath. She's worrying because her son Darrick, who is only seven, is spending too much time with a bunch of no-good kids who hang out with— Six thousand, two hundred and eighty-six other people, ordinary people, men and women and children, tourists and natives, illegal immigrants and blue bloods, homeless vagrants and ambassadors— Stop all the clocks. In the grand scheme of things, in the recondite world of nuclear war planning, a one-kiloton atomic bomb doesn't sound like much. It's less than a tenth the yield of the weapon that leveled the heart of Hiroshima, a two-hundredth the power of a single warhead from a Minuteman or Trident missile.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And while returnable cans lying on the side of the road represent free money, few people stop to pick them up. Besides, there’s a degree to which doing more things for yourself can actually detract from efficiency. If Mitt Romney were to mow his own lawn instead of hiring a landscaping company that may (or may not) employ illegal immigrants, it would save him some money, but his time is likely more valuable than that of the landscapers. Growing your own carrots may be satisfying, but it’s not necessarily cheaper than buying them at Stop & Shop. Finally, there are plenty of very large businesses that rely on consumer inefficiency.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Another satirist, Daniel Kurtzman, saw rejection by Apple of two apps meant to accompany his two satirical books, How to Win a Fight with a Conservative and How to Win a Fight with a Liberal. The apps were programmed to generate ridiculous insults, such as “May a commune of gay, Marxist Muslim illegal immigrants open a drive-through abortion clinic in your church” and “Listen, you bongo-playing vegan, if ignorance is bliss, you must be one happy liberal.” After repeated calls and e-mails, an Apple employee eventually explained that this app had been rejected because it involved insults directed at various groups of people.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Another is the assumption of great economic benefits. Studies of the economic impact of immigration over the past several decades are, at best, mixed. On the one hand, new immigrants have clearly been a net burden on state and local governments, raising the costs of education, health, and social services. On the other hand, illegal immigrants, who pay taxes but do not get benefits, have been a net gain to the Social Security system. The impact on wages in the short run is negative, which is the core argument for the economic benefit of immigration—that it lowers labor costs. The third shared assumption is that government policy matters little.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

“I think they were going to build a fence anyway,” says Rahman. “The data on this isn’t clear, but I think the fence was ultimately built for political reasons. And the climate refugee argument is being used as an excuse,” Rahman adds. India maintains that the purpose of the fence is to protect the country against smuggling and terrorism as well as illegal immigration, claiming that about 5 million Bangladeshis are in India illegally. This is a number the government of Bangladesh is quick to contest. The fence runs along India’s porous 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. It is high, and it’s made of heavily reinforced barbed wire. Climate change may not have created the fence but provides a plausible reason to continue building it.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

When asked, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?” a majority of the 650 Trump-supporting Republicans surveyed said yes. Almost half thought Trump had won the popular vote, and more than two-thirds believed that millions of illegal immigrants had voted and that voter fraud happens regularly.36 These baseless falsehoods came from Trump’s mouth and were promoted by the Kremlin. These surveys remain hypotheticals, and it’s unlikely that such constitutional changes or postponement of voting would stand up to checks by the legislative and judicial branches.


Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars by Dr Peter Lee

crew resource management, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital map, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, QWERTY keyboard, Skype

Meanwhile, back at the fledgling 39 Squadron building, Tim and a more senior colleague were waiting for those carpet contractors. Eventually, a phone call came though from the guards at the main gate. ‘Two men have just arrived to deliver your carpets. Unfortunately, one of them has been identified as an illegal immigrant and arrested. Can you come and help the remaining individual to transport the carpet to your squadron, because he can’t do it on his own?’ After one quick check of the ranks of the two available RAF people – Tim, the Master Aircrew (non-commissioned), and a Squadron Leader, his senior – Tim found himself in the carpet-moving business.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

Oprah lived there; Ellen lived there; the great estates in the foothills overlooking the sea blended into one another to form a single tapestry of American affluence. Even the ocean felt private. But Santa Barbara County was both bigger and more complicated than it seemed. It had the highest rate of child poverty in the state. It sheltered maybe fifty thousand illegal immigrants in abject squalor. Plus all hell could break loose at any time: wildfires and mudslides and oil spills and mass shootings. Scratch the surface of paradise and you were plunged into the Book of Job. The chief health officer of Santa Barbara County never knew exactly where or when or how the next TB outbreak might occur.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

The other candidates cheered. He was wrong and insane, but at least he was “standing out” and not being “passive” (these were other criticisms). And just like that, no joke, the press started to warm to Fred Thompson. He went out on the trail with a “re-invigorated” (read: more aggressive) message. He railed against illegal immigration and said we needed to secure the border before we could have immigration reform. He said we should stay the course in Iraq because those derned terrorists were testing our resolve. By the second time I followed Thompson, the shop talk on the bus was different. I heard things like, “He’s not as dull as I thought” and “people fucking love Law & Order.”


The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

The military calls the whole idea “sensor to shooter.” A minor industry is devoted to shortening the time from one to the other. The Electronic Barrier on the Mexican Border: A less lethal, less high-tech application of the barrier’s technology was strung along the border between the United States and Mexico, to find illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. When the sensors go off, a radio dispatcher sends out immigration officers, not bombers. Jason eventually worked on this system, too; it’s the one about which Freeman Dyson told the Johns Hopkins physicists and that triggered my preoccupation with the Jasons. “We were working for Customs and Immigration, I guess,” Dyson said.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

Judging by the TRUMP 2016 lawn signs, billboards, and posters popping up, Tidewater Trail, particularly north of Gloucester, could rightly be renamed Trump Trail. Old-time shipbuilders circulated a Facebook post: The IRS has returned my tax return to me this year, and I apparently answered one of the questions incorrectly. In response to the question, “Do you have anyone dependent on you?” I wrote, “9.5 illegal immigrants, 1.1 million crack heads, 3.4 million unemployable scroungers, 80,000 criminals in 85 prisons, plus 850 idiots in Washington.” The IRS stated the answer I have was unacceptable. I then wrote back, “Who did I leave out???” Yard Trumpicans rejoiced when Trump won the presidency, and the new commander-in-chief hammered home some of those themes when he appeared in Newport News on March 2, 2017, aboard the Ford, and spoke to sailors and steelworkers.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They burrowed under a fence at Mexicali and later that evening hid in a cemetery while a helicopter flooded the ground around them with light. They found the coyote shortly after and were on their way to life in America when Immigration and Naturalization Service agents pulled them over on the suspicion, correct, that the low-riding car was packed with illegal immigrants. Campos and his family were detained in a cell and later sent back, but they tried again four years later, crossing successfully at Tijuana. They settled in South Los Angeles, where Campos’s father, who was a meteorologist in Guatemala, started a new career as a carpenter. David Campos graduated at the top of Jefferson High School, then went to Stanford and Harvard Law, where he became friends with Scott Wiener.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

In recent years, some of the most regrettable institutions associated with the area – namely non-union sweatshops – have closed, or at least moved (rising rents in Manhattan have forced these factories out to satellite Chinatowns in Queens and Brooklyn), but other sharp practices continue to flourish. Organized crime is prevalent, illegal immigrants are commonly exploited, and living conditions can be abysmal for poorer Chinese. Outsiders, however, won’t see anything sinister, nor will they miss the Chinatown of yore in all the commercial hubbub. The neighborhood is a melange of vintage . # % '7 & :& '" 30 $ -" 3&& 5 5 45 33: 5

Local businessmen took advantage of the declining midtown garment business and made use of the new, unskilled female workforce to open garment factories of their own. In little time, Chinatown overflowed its traditional boundaries, taking over blocks abandoned by Italians and Jews, and had an internal economy stronger than any other immigrant neighborhood in New York. The early 1990s saw another major shift, as large numbers of illegal immigrants from the Fujian province of China arrived. Unlike the established Cantonese, Before Chinatown was Chinatown CHINATOWN, L I TTL E I TALY, AND NOL I TA | Chinatown As is true for many of the neighborhoods in New York City, the area that is now known as Chinatown has undergone several transformations over time.


pages: 391 words: 106,394

Misspent Youth by Peter F. Hamilton

double helix, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, informal economy, it's over 9,000, new economy, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan

Bedlam erupted among the reporters as they all shouted their questions at him. Was he resigning as prime minister to run his presidential campaign? Did he favor referendums for countries to withdraw from the EU? Would he order the EuroArmy into the Indian-Pakistan security zone to enforce the peace? How was he going to tackle the Russian illegal immigration problem? Were the last whites in South Africa to be evacuated to Europe? Would there be more rejuvenations? What did his wife think about him standing? How would he tackle the radiation leakage from the Ukrainian reactors? Would he ask Stephanie and Sir Mitch to endorse him? What was his economic policy?


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

If you'll excuse me, I have to catch up with an old friend." Chapter 21: // Exploit NewsX.com Mexican Drug Gangs Fuel Violence in Midwest--In a press conference Thursday, state police officials in several Midwestern states linked a crime wave that has claimed at least two dozen lives in recent weeks to illegal immigrants operating narcotics rings in the U.S. Police contend that heavily armed Mexican gangs are fighting it out over a shrinking market in tough economic times--with average citizens getting caught in the crossfire. Loki had always known it would only be a matter of time before he found The Major.


pages: 332 words: 104,587

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

agricultural Revolution, correlation does not imply causation, demographic dividend, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

They could hardly communicate with him because none of them spoke Malay, but the tenant let them into his apartment and then out its front door. The girls took the elevator down and wandered the silent streets until they found a police station and stepped inside. The police first tried to shoo them away, then arrested the girls for illegal immigration. Rath served a year in prison under Malaysia’s tough anti-immigrant laws, and then she was supposed to be repatriated. She thought a Malaysian policeman was escorting her home when he drove her to the Thai border—but then he sold her to a trafficker, who peddled her to a Thai brothel. Rath’s saga offers a glimpse of the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world, a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

If you're a landlord in New York City, with its perpetual housing crisis, you'll be tempted to cut all sorts of corners because you know that these days the city has the resources to send out investigators only if there's a flood or a collapse, leaving much illegal behavior unpunished. If you're Wal-Mart, America's biggest company, you'll be tempted to continue the pervasive practice of forcing workers in your stores to put in overtime without paying them for it or using illegal immigrants. While your friends in Washington have not yet closed down the Department of Labor, they've at least kept it on a starvation diet for the past twenty years, leaving its investigators outgunned. If you are fined, the damage is sure to be less than the money you've made by flouting the most elementary of American labor laws.


pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

They tried to make the UK as unattractive as possible without rejecting what they still, high-mindedly, defined as the UK’s international obligation to offer asylum. Yet their failure to stem numbers created an impression of state incompetence and uncontrolled borders. The government could not remove large numbers of those judged by tribunals to have no right to stay: their status as illegal immigrants with no right to stay or to work was officially tolerated because there was no other option. They could not be put on planes back to countries such as China that refused to accept them. Instead, they were dispersed to cities with empty housing. ‘The whole thing was mad – give them a voucher and put them on a bus,’ recalled an insider and loyalist, Nick Pearce, who was Blunkett’s special adviser at the time.


pages: 477 words: 106,069

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

Most garden paths in everyday writing, unlike the ones in textbooks, don’t bring the reader to a complete standstill; they just delay her for a fraction of a second. Here are a few I’ve collected recently, with an explanation of what led me astray in each case: During the primary season, Mr. Romney opposed the Dream Act, proposed legislation that would have allowed many young illegal immigrants to remain in the country. [Romney opposed the Act and also proposed some legislation? No, the Act is a piece of legislation that had been proposed.] Those who believe in the necessity of nuclear weapons as a deterrent tool fundamentally rely on the fear of retaliation, whereas those who don’t focus more on the fear of an accidental nuclear launch that might lead to nuclear war.


pages: 350 words: 109,379

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

RULE 17 CHOICE IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT IN PUBLIC SYSTEMS (it’s a good in itself) APPROACH 4. DEVOLUTION AND TRANSPARENCY The fourth approach is particularly appropriate where choice doesn’t work well: running prisons or immigration systems, for example. No one thinks prisoners or illegal immigrants should be offered choice. In services such as these, there is no obvious customer who can exercise choice because the customer is the government on behalf of citizens. It involves devolving power and responsibility to managers close to the frontline and then, through transparent publication of data on outcomes, holding them to account.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

., 122–23 Gasthalter, Jonathan, 263 gender discrimination, 168, 168n, 176–77, 207 German deutsche marks, 52, 57–58, 110–11, 164–65 Geron Corporation, 310 ghosts, 111 gold, 3, 40, 57, 63–64, 116, 207 Goldman Sachs, 126, 133–34, 256 Goldsmith, Meredith, 176–77 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 88 Goodman, George, 124–25 Google, 48, 272–73 Gore, Al, 212 Graham, Benjamin, 127 Granade, Matthew, 312 Greenspan, Alan, 59 Griffin, Ken, 256, 310–11 Gross, Bill, 3, 163–64, 309 Grumman Aerospace Corporation, 56, 78 Gulfstream G450, 257, 267, 325 Hamburg, Margaret, 206 Hanes, 162 Harpel, Jim, 13–14, 283 Harrington, Dan, 297 Harvard University, 15, 17, 21–22, 23, 46–48, 173, 176, 185, 272 head and shoulders pattern, 123–24 Heritage at Trump Place, 278 Heritage Foundation, 278 Hewitt, Jennifer Love, 270 high-frequency trading, 107, 222–23, 271 Hitler, Adolph, 165, 282 holonomy, 20 Homma, Munehisa, 122 housing market, 224–25, 255, 261, 309 Hullender, Greg, 53–59, 74 human longevity, 276 IBM, 33, 37, 169, 171–79, 311 Icahn, Carl, 282 illegal immigrants, 290–91 information advantage, 105–6 information theory, 90–91 insider trading, 310 Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), 23–26, 28–29, 30–32, 35, 46–49, 93–94 Institutional Investor, 218, 223 interest rates, 163–64, 224–25, 272–73 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 227 Iraq, invasion of Kuwait, 116, 117 Israel, 184–85, 262 iStar, 26 Japanese yen, 49–50, 52–53, 54–55, 65 Jean-Jacques, J.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Later that year, I went to see Koolhaas’s exhibition Content, at Berlin’s National Gallery, staged to mark the opening of the new Dutch embassy he built in the city, which was filled with even more numbers. There was a chart about European immigration; another compared the 800 euros that a Dutch backpacker will typically spend trekking around Machu Picchu to the 4,000 euros a Peruvian illegal immigrant must find to have himself smuggled into Spain. He listed the annual income of every major museum in the world and the average age of the inhabitants of the largest cities – and a head-spinning level of random detail about almost everything else you could think of. Venturing past these statistics, you found an effigy of the architect himself, in the form of an artwork by Tony Oursler.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

After the Second World War, another dilemma: dark-skinned colonials, many of whom had been part of the war effort, came to Britain by sea. ‘Thirty Thousand Colour Problems’, pronounced the Picture Post. Fast forward to the 1980s: a time of social upheaval and, in Brixton, public disturbances. The Daily Mail described one such for its readers as ‘When the Black Tide Met the Thin Blue Line’. In the United States, illegal immigration – mainly from Mexico – and terrorism became the main focus of xenophobia during the 1990s and 2000s. Between 1996 and 2015, US newspapers published far more negative articles about Muslims than any other major religion, even discounting terms such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’, with almost 70 per cent of non-terrorism-related articles mentioning Muslims deemed ‘negative’ by the researchers Erik Bleich and A.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The belief can concern a moral question: “Human life begins at conception, and so abortion is murder.” The belief can be metaphysical, mystical, religious: “God exists as three personifications of one being.” The belief can be technical and empirical, something which in principle could be resolved easily by checking the facts. “Capital-gains taxes reduce revenue.” “Illegal immigrants commit more crimes.” “Unemployment is rising.” It doesn’t matter. If a belief performs the function of defining a group and knitting it together, it plays the social role of a sacred or religious belief (as Jonathan Haidt has explained, drawing on the great sociologist Emile Durkheim). When facts challenge the belief, the congregation will defend its faith by denying the facts.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he’s out in, what, four weeks? He’s New York’s toughest lawyer. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.” Jared and Ivanka believe, said Bannon, that if they advocate prison reform and save DACA—the program to protect the children of illegal immigrants—the liberals will come to their defense. He digressed briefly to characterize Ivanka Trump’s legislative acumen, and her difficulty—which had become quite a White House preoccupation—in finding sponsorship for her family leave proposal. “Here’s why, I keep telling her: there’s no political constituency in it.


pages: 388 words: 119,492

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, Cass Sunstein, correlation does not imply causation, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, mass incarceration

At the same time, homicides had plummeted among the area’s remaining Spanish-speaking immigrants. It was an astonishing change. Among the lessons to be drawn was that poverty does not necessarily engender homicide. Even after gentrification began to take hold, nearly 40 percent of Rampart residents remained below the poverty line. Many of these poor city dwellers were illegal immigrants crammed into shabby brick apartment buildings; the neighborhood was relatively dense by L.A. standards. Yet black residents in South L.A. had vastly higher death rates from homicide. Scholars have made similar findings elsewhere. Despite their relative poverty, recent immigrants tend to have lower homicide rates than resident Hispanics and their descendants born in the United States.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Invited to address a meeting of the American Gynecological and Obstetric Society, I told them this home truth about US maternal risks equalling Armenia, congratulated them on being ahead of Georgia, and said that I was willing to accept that the US has the best obstetric care in the world. I was also willing to guess that if I asked them to jot down on a piece of paper which US women died of a maternal-related cause, all their notes would say much the same thing: the socially excluded, the very poor, illegal immigrants, people with chaotic lives in one form or another. Some of the good doctors might have mentioned ‘race’. I take race as a proxy for other forms of social exclusion, but I’ll come back to that. When people get sick they need access to high-quality medical care. Medical care saves lives. But it is not the lack of medical care that causes illness in the first place.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Coercion, of course, is the bluntest exercise of power—whether exercised through laws, armies, governments, or monopolies. But as the three revolutions progress, organizations that rely on coercion face ever-increasing costs simply to maintain control over their domains and patrol their boundaries. The inability of the United States or the European Union to curb illegal immigration or illicit trade is a good example. Walls, fences, border controls, biometric identification documents, detention centers, police raids, asylum hearings, deportations—these are just part of an apparatus of prevention and repression that has thus far proven to be extremely expensive, if not futile.


pages: 390 words: 115,769

Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples by John Robbins

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, Donald Trump, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, land reform, life extension, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

She was also the author of twelve books, including Soul Sister, in which she related her experiences, after taking a medication to turn her skin black, living as an impoverished African American in Harlem and Mississippi.16 Her book Bessie Yellowhair tells the story of the years she spent living with the Navajo on an isolated reservation in Arizona, and then, with their approval, dyeing her skin ochre and passing as an Indian among white people, including working as a live-in Navajo maid in Los Angeles.17 In researching her book about illegal immigrants in the United States, Halsell, who spoke fluent Spanish, became an illegal and undocumented “wetback,” swimming across the Rio Grande to enter the United States, dodging border patrol guards, crawling through sewers, and hiding from Customs in the dreaded Smugglers Canyon. Then, presenting herself as the journalist she also was, she interviewed the whites of the Sun Belt who fear the rising tide of Hispanic immigration, and also interviewed armed border patrolmen, riding with them as they vainly attempted to seal the porous U.S.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It is this very fluidity and informality of the labour market that has allowed the economy to grow so quickly: ‘This system of official discrimination has enabled China to experience such economic growth – and what makes it unlikely that the second-class citizens will be able to become the sort of consumerist middle class outsiders are predicting.’ In the long term this means that China will remain a nation of home-grown illegal immigrants, and cannot develop the domestic market to consume its own products. For 140 million (over twice the population of the UK), sharing the urban dream is impossible.30 Can we rebuild trust, or is it lost forever once it disappears? Is it a political question or can we design equality into the fabric of the city?


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

If a country like Israel wants to allow in only Jews, and a country like Poland agrees to absorb Middle Eastern refugees on condition that they are Christians, this may seem distasteful, but it is perfectly within the rights of the Israeli or Polish voters. What complicates matters is that in many cases people want to have their cake and eat it. Numerous countries turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, or even accept foreign workers on a temporary basis, because they want to benefit from the foreigners’ energy, talents and cheap labour. However, the countries then refuse to legalise the status of these people, saying that they don’t want immigration. In the long run, this could create hierarchical societies in which an upper class of full citizens exploits an underclass of powerless foreigners, as happens today in Qatar and several other Gulf States.


Lonely Planet Best of Spain by Lonely Planet

augmented reality, bike sharing, centre right, discovery of the americas, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, market design, place-making, retail therapy, trade route, young professional

In a stunning reversal of pre-poll predictions, the PP, who insisted that ETA was responsible despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, was defeated by the PSOE in elections three days after the attack. The new Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero gave Spain a makeover by introducing a raft of liberalising social reforms. Gay marriage was legalised, Spain’s arcane divorce laws were overhauled, almost a million illegal immigrants were granted residence, and a law seeking to apportion blame for the crimes of the civil war and Franco dictatorship entered the statute books. Although Spain’s powerful Catholic Church cried foul over many of the reforms, the changes played well with most Spaniards. Spain’s economy was booming, the envy of Europe.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It doesn’t feel like an option not to consume more and better health and education services as time goes by. Figure 12. Who will care? Yet one consequence of the way services like these are eating up a rising share of personal and government budgets is the employment of a growing army of low-paid and low-status workers in these sectors, sometimes illegal immigrants. At the same time that many people would insist on the intrinsic value of carers, teachers, and so on, they’ve grown increasingly reluctant to pay them higher wages. There’s definitely a paradox in the willingness to pay for costly entertainment and consumer gadgets compared with the reluctance to pay for higher salaries in social care and teaching.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.16 American Correctional Association President Gwendolyn Chunn put the matter more bluntly that same year when lamenting that the unprecedented prison expansion boom of the 1990s seemed to be leveling off.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

When his scheme hit the wall in 2008, investors had accumulated losses of $18 billion.2 Whereas Ponzi had been sent to federal prison for just five years, Madoff was sentenced to jail for a term of 150 years, the maximum allowed. If he gets time off for good behavior, he can look forward to being released on November 14, 2139. At the time of writing, Madoff is seventy-three years old.3 Madoff wasn’t some sleazy, undereducated, illegal immigrant. He was as well connected as they come: chairman of the board of the National Association of Securities Dealers, member of the board of the Securities Industry Association, chairman of NASDAQ. Yet though Madoff’s scheme had a more polished front than Ponzi’s, it was still the same dumb trick underneath.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Americans today listen to a president who talks about race with an abandon that none of his predecessors in living memory could have imagined – whether about a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, which produced a string of riots, security on the Mexican border, where he says the nation is under threat, or about ‘sanctuary cities’ (which set themselves up as bulwarks against mass deportation), about which he mused that it might be a good idea to transport illegal immigrants there against their will. Trump’s language is new. He argues that with job growth strong – more Americans were indeed in work in mid-2019 than for five years – black and Hispanic employment will inevitably improve. The problem is that in the public discourse there is a strong, deeply conservative attitude – which in frequent instances could be justifiably described as far right – which is directly challenged by those on the liberal side of politics who take the most uncharitable view of Trump, his beliefs and his intentions.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

They pressed the vision of a wall. As it became clear that Mexico was not going to pay for it (Surprise! Surprise!), that vision evolved. By 2018, the idea of a wall paid for by Americans was a clear and powerful image that drove the election. The Republicans tried to leverage the fear from a “caravan” of “illegal immigrants” into an electoral victory that would promise to build a wall. They failed in that objective. The nation had the highest turnout in a midterm election since 1914. It was the largest turnover of incumbents since 1974. The Democrats had the largest sweep in more than a generation, gaining forty-one seats, with the largest midterm margin of all time.6 Though the Republicans kept the Senate, after the election the Democrats had a seventeen-seat majority in the House.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

But Donald Trump’s tax cut remains remarkably unpopular, and Republicans barely mention it on the campaign trail—in fact, Democrats are running against the tax cut more than Republicans are running on it. Nor are Republicans talking much about Trump’s trade war, which also remains unpopular. What, then, does the G.O.P. have to run on? It can hype the supposed menace from illegal immigrants—but that hasn’t been gaining much traction, either. Instead, Republicans’ attack ads have increasingly focused on one of their usual boogeymen—or, rather, a boogeywoman: Nancy Pelosi, the former and possibly future speaker of the House. So this seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pelosi is by far the greatest speaker of modern times and surely ranks among the most impressive people ever to hold that position.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

The immigration story is also one of an openness-inclined cognitive class choosing to follow its own intuitions and essentially ignore the sentiments of more than half the population for more control and more modest inflows. Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow more than 1 million refugees to settle in Germany is often seen as an act of great political courage but it deeply divided her country. In the United States before Trump, there was only a debate about illegal immigration. But legal immigration running at more than 1 million a year is considered too high by more than 50 percent of Americans, a mainly less educated voice that was hardly ever heard.20 In the United Kingdom around two-thirds of the adult population has considered immigration too high or much too high for most of the last twenty years, since the number rose sharply after 1997 (although its level of salience to voters has shifted about and immigration anxiety has declined since the Brexit vote).


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

I was in the Obama administration. Once the subject was broached, the woman was quick to volunteer, in the friendliest possible way, that she was a Trump supporter. She talked about how she’d moved to West Virginia from Florida, where her grown daughter was in law enforcement. She had become upset by illegal immigration, she said. She had no problem with immigrants, and she had long been okay with the influx of Latinos. But it had just gotten to be too much in their Florida community, and it was contributing to the crime that her daughter had to deal with professionally. She took out her phone and showed me a picture of her daughter, smiling, in a photo with Trump during a recent trip to Mar-a-Lago.


pages: 357 words: 121,119

Falling to Earth by Al Worden

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, California energy crisis, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, lost cosmonauts, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley

He never took out citizenship papers and never dared to revisit Canada, worried he might not be allowed back to the States. But people vouched for him, so he obtained a Social Security number, a driver’s license, and everything else he needed, without ever getting caught. He even married the daughter of a German-American family from a farm just down the road. Nevertheless, Grandpa Fred was an illegal immigrant. Grandpa looked exactly how I imagined Santa Claus would, except without a beard. White-haired with blue eyes and rosy cheeks, he dressed in overalls and smoked a pipe. He had a particular farm smell about him, even when he’d cleaned up after a hard day’s work. Warm hay, a dusting of manure, and the heavy odor of fresh milk were all bound together with fragrant pipe smoke.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Although mechanization impacted all areas of agricultural production, this case focuses primarily on the mechanization of the tomato harvester developed by UC researchers. Before the development of the tomato harvester, forty-four people worked to harvest tomatoes; the majority of these workers were illegal immigrants. By 1984 there were only eight thousand laborers involved in this process, and their main duty was to ride the harvesting machines.40 When we examine these numbers, it appears as though there was clear labor displacement as a result of the mechanical harvester. Studies have shown that although jobs were lost in the tomato industry, demand in California grew for other labor-intensive produce.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

During the fourteen years from 1995 through 2008, no year had higher than 6.0 percent unemployment, and the median was 5.0 percent. For mature economies, these are exceptionally low unemployment rates. But those who remember these years don’t need the numbers. “Help wanted” signs were everywhere, including for low-skill jobs, and the massive illegal immigration that occurred during those years was underwritten by a reality that everyone recognized: America had jobs for everyone who wanted to work. Inside the black box. Citing macroeconomic conditions leaves us outside the black box. What was going on with these men who were no longer employed or were not even looking for work?


pages: 382 words: 127,510

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

They built the fence: it is fourteen feet high, twenty-six miles long, alive with sensors and arclights, but with 150 gates (only three of which are guarded) through which the local Chinese farmers are permitted to wander more or less at will. There is a standard briefing given to visitors: small men from the hills of western Nepal demonstrate high-technology systems, acronyms like CLASSIC (the Covert Local Area Sensor System) and VINDICATOR, maps are drawn showing how many illegal immigrants—or ‘eye-eyes’, as the troops call them—are seized each month in each of the border’s four sectors, slides of helicopters and dogs and tracker-teams are shown with a mixture of pride, puzzlement and embarrassment. The troops have a threefold official role—protecting the ‘integrity’ of the Sino-British border, collecting low-level intelligence (which means gazing endlessly through those binoculars at the fields and the tower blocks below), and capturing illegal would-be settlers in the colony.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

So, by official Census Bureau measures, which use that standard, 37 million Americans were poor in that year, almost 13 percent of the population—the equivalent of the combined populations of California, Alaska, and Wyoming.1 The official rates were substantially higher for African Americans (one in four), Hispanics (one in five), and children under eighteen, 13 million of whom (almost 18 percent) were poor by government measures. Perhaps 40 percent of the children of illegal immigrants were poor.2 Those over age sixty-five, by contrast, had a poverty rate of just over 10 percent. Rates vary by geography, too: fully one-third of all Detroit residents are poor, as are a quarter or more of people living in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Long Beach, Atlanta, Newark, Miami, and El Paso.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

However appealing or remote that ideal may seem, in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism the contemporary citizen, far from being invited to a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated, by “managed care” and by the managers of fear. From one direction the citizen is assailed by fears of terrorism, not knowing when or how terrorists may strike; a fear that the citizen cannot “fight” against has been amplified by fears of natural disasters (tsunamis, hurricanes), of invasions by illegal immigrants and by epidemics (Asian flu, avian flu) for which, according to official spokespersons, only limited supplies of vaccines will be available. The citizen is all but paralyzed by official warnings that an attack of one kind or another may be imminent or certain to happen sometime and somewhere.


pages: 457 words: 125,224

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig

financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Ocado, pink-collar, Stephen Fry

The foreman who shows him what to do is a huge fellow with cheeks and nose stained bright red from broken veins. He shouts, ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What?’ ‘YES!’ Xan shouts back, nettled. ‘I am English!’ The man looks doubtfully at him and says, at the same volume, ‘Any ID?’ Xan never thought he would be mistaken for an illegal immigrant, but Lottie has had the foresight to get him to photograph his passport. ‘Can you read English?’ ‘Yes,’ Xan says. ‘The sign over there says NO TRESPASSERS.’ The man grunts, and tells him to get changed. Xan scrambles to find a white nylon uniform and boots and to put his clothes in a wire locker.


pages: 427 words: 127,496

Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, Stuxnet, traveling salesman, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Mossad agent David Ben-Uziel described the transfer of the Jews to the boats in a handheld tape recorder. “The sea is stormy,” he said. “We are carrying each one of our brothers in our arms so nobody would drown. The emotions of our men here run very high. Some say the sights remind them of their parents, who came to Israel as illegal immigrants; they were on the verge of bursting into tears when they saw our brothers enter the ship.” “They came in complete silence,” added Gadi Kroll, the commander of the naval force. “Old men, women, babies in arms. We immediately sailed on the stormy seas. They sat down and didn’t utter a word.” The navy boats took them to Eilat.


pages: 473 words: 124,861

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

Why do we champion blue cornflowers, golden corn marigolds, red poppies and the pretty pink (but poisonous) corncockle, while insisting that the wild oat, which has been here since the Bronze Age, is an undesirable alien? While we merrily ring our houses with gardens full of exotics, the countryside is considered a place apart. If a plant escapes into the wider landscape from a park, garden or arboretum, it is suddenly undesirable. At our own back door the exotic is in neutral territory, like an illegal immigrant camping out in an airport. One of the underlying problems is confusion about our own role in introductions. Human agency usually identifies a species as alien. It is interesting how, in delegitimizing or denying ourselves a role as vectors for other species – be it intentional or unintentional – we exclude ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, its pleasant little title anticipating Donald Trump’s later “shithole countries” comment, Coulter claimed that “Today’s immigrants aren’t coming here to breathe free, they are coming to live for free.”16 She also claimed that Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican-born billionaire and owner of the New York Times, had bought the paper because he wanted to be able to place “pro-illegal immigration coverage” in America’s newspaper of record.17 Steve wanted us to stay to meet Ann. “Ah,” Alexander said vaguely. “But we have another important meeting,” he explained. Steve promised to send us a pair of signed copies of ¡Adios, America!, and I tried not to roll my eyes. The second we got outside, Alexander turned to me.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

She knew the streets of America were not paved with gold, but still she hoped to go north in a year, whether legally or illegally. She asked how long the daily siesta was in New York, and whether she could work as a late-night librarian after school. My answer, that no one takes siestas in New York, seemed bizarre to her (and indeed it is); she was also taken aback that an illegal immigrant could not moonlight at a public library. So she switched cities, asking about the siestas in London and the possibilities of working as a non-documented night-librarian there. A generation ago, Mexicans faring across the border recounted to the sociologist Patricia Fernandez-Kelly how little lessons learned at home could be applied abroad.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

Collective humiliation and shame, accompanied by hate for the outgroup, can thus lead to extremist behaviour, including terrorism (more on this in Chapter 8).25 Might Purinton’s individual humiliation have turned into the collective form when he was told the misfortunes of many unemployed Americans were not of their own making but instead the fault of illegal immigrants taking their jobs? If so, was this collective humiliation then projected onto his eventual victims? Failure to empathise is also an ingredient of hate that can thrive in groups. A lack of emotional empathy – resistance to sharing the feelings of another – stems from unwillingness to engage in cognitive empathy – refusal to see the situation from the perspective of ‘them’.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

And the remittances they send back home rival oil company revenues in terms of international flows of money. 35 The workers are also vulnerable because of immigration policy. The current migration apparatus in the United States has its roots in the 1990s—it was put together alongside welfare reform, by the same bipartisan coalition. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 built on the foundation of the Reagan-era Immigration Reform and Control Act, which had allowed three million undocumented migrants to become “legal,” but also heightened enforcement. As the prison system expanded, migrants found themselves criminalized just for existing. 36 It is the very gray area in which many undocumented workers operate that allows the worst employers to take advantage of them, as workers who attempt to escape an abusive boss can be vulnerable to deportation.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

To understand why it matters that so few rogue landlords and letting agents are caught and banned, beyond the obvious questions about mortality and the evident risk to public health you need to understand the link between illegal HMOs and other criminalised activities: tax fraud, the abuse of illegal immigrants and human trafficking. All of this, of course, once again speaks to Theresa May’s infamous ‘hostile environment’ and those worst affected by it who are too afraid of what might happen if they report what they experience to public bodies. The young men we met might have been jovial and projected bravado, but there’s no way of knowing whether there was some form of coercion at play in either their relationships with one another, their respective employers or their landlord.


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

A few months after this meeting, Roosevelt died and was replaced by Truman. Feinberg had the beginnings of a friendship with the man in the White House. Feinberg now became involved in the efforts to bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine, which was still under British rule. He financed and even personally accompanied ships full of illegal immigrants. He helped purchase arms for protection and once got mixed up in an espionage episode that led to his arrest. In Palestine, Feinberg was asked by the Hagana to deliver a report to Ben-Gurion, who was at the time in Paris. The report had come from Damascus from the journalist-spy Eliyahu Sasson, later the Israeli minister of police.

Negotiations were conducted by Menachem Begin and Levi Eshkol, among others. When talks failed, Ben-Gurion saw the affair as a test of the state’s sovereignty and ordered that the ship be bombarded. †Weisgal also benefited from the matchmaking: a few years later he helped Otto Preminger film the story of the Exodus, the ship of illegal immigrants. The movie starred Paul Newman, with Weisgal himself in the role of Ben-Gurion. It was perhaps the greatest achievement of the Zionist movement’s propaganda efforts, greater even than the actual sailing of the Exodus. United Artists, owned by Krim, distributed the movie and promised the Weizmann Institute a share in the profits of approximately $1 million.165 *He once asked Krim to tell Abe Feinberg that he had decided to support the candidacy of Feinberg’s brother for a judgeship, not neglecting to mention that he was thereby angering other influential Jews in New York.


pages: 402 words: 129,876

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It by Ben Goldacre

behavioural economics, classic study, data acquisition, framing effect, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income per capita, meta-analysis, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, sugar pill, systematic bias, WikiLeaks

When three of them were picked up by Harper’s magazine, it resulted in libel threats and apologies. Similarly, following a Bloomberg news story from 2005 – in which more than a dozen doctors, government officials and scientists said the industry failed to adequately protect participants – three illegal immigrants from Latin America said they were threatened with deportation by the clinic they had raised concerns about. We cannot rely solely on altruism to populate these studies, of course. And even where altruism has provided, historically, it has been in extreme or odd circumstances. Before prisoners, for example, drugs were tested on conscientious objectors, who also wore lice-infested underpants in order to infect themselves with typhus, and participated in ‘the Great Starvation Experiment’ to help Allied doctors understand how we should deal with malnourished concentration camp victims (some of the starvation subjects committed acts of violent self-mutilation).6 The question is not only whether we feel comfortable with the incentives and the regulation, but also whether this information is all new to us, or simply brushed under the carpet.


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

It was founded in the 1940s as an extreme-right-wing organization, and over the years its leadership has overlapped with that of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. It has compared electronic medical records to the files kept by the German secret police, linked abortion to breast cancer, and claimed that illegal immigration leads to leprosy. For years, AAPS officials worked with Philip Morris on a junk science campaign attacking indoor smoking bans; as recently as the fall of 2009, it claimed cigarette taxes actually led to a “deterioration in public health.” And those are actually some of the group’s more moderate stances.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

With globalization, we have learned that we cannot completely shut ourselves off from what is going on elsewhere. The advanced industrial countries have long benefited from the raw materials they get from the developing world. More recently, their consumers have benefited enormously from low-cost manufactured goods of increasingly high quality. But they have also been affected by illegal immigration, terrorism, and even diseases that move easily across borders. For many, helping those in the developing world, those who are poorer, is a moral issue. But increasingly, those in the advanced industrial countries are recognizing that such help is also a matter of self-interest. With stagnation, the threats of disorder from the disillusioned facing despair will increase; without growth, the flood of immigration will be difficult to stem; with prosperity, the developing countries will provide a robust market for the goods and services of the advanced industrial countries.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In a powerful example, the US Department of Homeland Security now routinely refers to the US–Mexico border in the same language that the US military uses to describe its war zones: a limitless ‘battlespace’ encompassing a world where civilian life camouflages ‘targets’ and where drones and other high-tech surveillance systems are the key to ‘persistent situational awareness’ achieved through ‘network-centric’ operations.49 Such scenarios are further supported by the latest theories of so-called ‘fourth-generation warfare’. These regularly posit immigrations as invasions, immigrants as threats to the cultural and political integrity of nations and all flows of ‘illegal’ immigrants as Trojan Horse–like harbingers of drug trafficking or terrorism. ‘In Fourth Generation war’, US military theorist William Lind wrote in one demonstration of this view, ‘invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army.’50 Already, there is evidence that the identities of Border Security agents in the US are changing in keeping with this wider shift: many now talk about their role as one of paramilitary force deployment rather than law enforcement.


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

Resiliency is a different way of thinking about security than is usually taken after significant disasters, when the aim is to rebuild stronger, bigger, more solid systems (or structures) that can withstand the same stressor that felled their predecessors. That route, “The Hard Path” or “Infrastructural Hardening,” is equivalent to managing illegal immigration by building a border wall, or protecting a frequently flooded area by strengthening and expanding a dike or a seawall. There is even a hint of the hard path in the initial years of the war on terror, when finding ways to gather total intelligence seemed the surest route to victory, regardless of the cost to human dignity and civil liberties.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

68 The concern of Americans on the Mexican border, though, was not about what was going south. Rather they were upset at what was heading north. I had spent some time with the Minutemen Project in south-eastern Arizona – a group of activists set up in 2005 with a mission to monitor the flow of illegal immigrants across the border. One of them had invited me on a flight low across the border, and as we skimmed across the arid shrub, you could almost feel their paranoia. These men, with names like Chuck and Jim, saw the wave of ‘wetbacks’ – economic migrants from Mexico and beyond – as genuine threats to their safety and liberty.


pages: 452 words: 135,790

Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants by Jane Goodall

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Google Earth, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, language of flowers, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, precautionary principle, transatlantic slave trade

Moreover, in many developing countries slave labor is not a thing of the past, and crops are grown as a result of the sweat of people, including children, who have little option but to accept this servitude because of poverty, cultural norms, and lack of education. In the developed world too, illegal immigrant workers are often treated as slaves and work for a pittance in terrible conditions, unable to complain. And, of course, the destruction of the environment, the cruelty inflicted on the natural world, plant and animal alike, and the terrible legacy we are leaving for the generations to come are ongoing.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

Police seized a machine gun, a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, two silencers, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and various homemade explosives, including 130 hand grenades and 70 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) similar to those used by Iraqi insurgents. The leader of the group was a wanted fugitive living under an alias who often expressed a deep hatred of the government and illegal immigrants. At a bail hearing, a federal agent testified that the group had been planning a machine-gun attack on Hispanics living in a small nearby town. The media weren’t interested and the story was essentially ignored. But one week later, when a group of six Muslims was arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, it was major international news—even though these men were no more sophisticated or connected to terrorist networks than the “Alabama Free Militia” and had nothing like the arsenal of the militiamen.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

Losing 100 percent on a pool expected to have 0.1 percent losses is a bigger shock than losing 30 percent on a pool expected to have 10 percent losses. And even a small amount of fraud spooks the market because it means every pool is at risk. It actually is a good idea to get lots of people in homes, and it’s worth experiencing some failures in the effort. I understand some people have objections to helping tax evaders and illegal immigrants, who were among the beneficiaries of subprime underwriting. Personally I wish the best for everyone, legal or ill, and have a Westerner’s (or maybe it’s a gambler’s) instinctive sympathy for anyone on the run from the government. And some loans were predatory, going to people who could not possibly benefit from them or who were charged unfairly high rates of interest.


pages: 492 words: 141,544

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson

artificial general intelligence, basic income, blockchain, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, precariat, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, seigniorage, strong AI, Turing machine, universal basic income, zero-sum game

With so many poor people in this world, can the middle class afford to share? If they do, won’t they become just as poor as the poor? So a lot of privileged Chinese, and a lot of Party members, are not in any hurry to reform. Why get rid of such a big pool of cheap labor? And so five hundred million people live like illegal immigrants in their own country. It’s like the caste system in India! They’re not untouchables, but no one touches them. And all because they were born in the back country. Waidiren means people from outside the city. Nongmingong means peasant workers, but now it’s another word for these people. So is diduan renkou, the low-end population.”


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The Chinese became the largest foreign-born Asian population, settling mostly on the West Coast, until the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Fast-forward more than a century, and in 2010, Asia officially outstripped Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants into the United States.1 At the same time, Indians are the fastest-growing number of illegal immigrants, whether by overstaying their visas or by trying to enter the United States via Mexico. Today 21 million US residents claim Asian heritage, the largest groups being Chinese (4.8 million), Indian (4 million), Filipino (4 million), Vietnamese (2 million), and Korean (1.8 million).2 There are also an estimated 3 million Americans of Arab descent.


pages: 455 words: 138,716

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

Its lobbyists are everywhere, and in every major anti-immigrant bill, you can usually find a current or former CCA lobbyist lurking in the weeds somewhere. Arizona governor Jan Brewer, for instance, had two ex–CCA lobbyists on her staff helping write the legislation when she pushed through her notorious 1070 law, which essentially legalized racial profiling in the cause of catching illegal immigrants. In Alvaro’s Georgia, Governor Nathan Deal, Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle, and State Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers had all been longtime recipients of CCA contributions when they worked to pass HB 87, a profiling law very similar to Brewer’s 1070 bill. The result is a huge win-win for industry and the politicians they work with.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

She sometimes wonders if her family derives any financial benefit, after she has spent money on child care, domestic help, driving to school, and TV dinners. But Heidi loves teaching, loves children, and knows that she would be bored if she spent every day at home. Pedro's economic life as an illegal immigrant is the life of rational economic man. He hates his job, although he has sacrificed almost every other part of himself to it. His behavior is mercenary. His principal aspiration is to earn enough money to stop being a rational economic man and again become a normal human being. Raoul is tempted to follow Pedro, but values his family more than his material standard ofliving-or theirs.


pages: 513 words: 141,963

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty

New York: Garden City Press, 1962. ———. The Protectors: Our Battle Against the Crime Gangs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1966. ———, and William F. Tompkins. The Traffic in Narcotics. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953. Arpaio, Joe, and Len Sherman. Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes On Illegal Immigration, Drugs, and Everything Else That Threatens America. New York: Amacom Books, 2008. Attwood, Shawn. Hard Time: Life with Sheriff Joe Arpaio in America’s Toughest Jail. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011. Balko, Radley. Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2006. ———.


On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

The Schengen Agreement was also underlined by an ideological commitment to a sense of European “community” that would transcend national allegiances and reduce the chance of conflict between member states. But alongside this commitment to freedom of movement in “Schengen space,” came an equal commitment of fortifying Europe’s external borders against illegal immigrants, terrorists, and drug traffic. As Ginette Verstraete puts it, “new frontiers had to be implemented to be able to distinguish between Europeans and non-Europeans, and between (authorized) travel and (unauthorized) migration. The freedom of mobility for some (citizens, tourists, business people) could only be made possible through the organized exclusion of others forced to move around as illegal ‘aliens’, RT52565_C009.indd 233 4/18/06 7:48:19 AM 234 • On the Move migrants, or refugees.”23 This differentiation of mobilities at a continental scale could only be operationalized through a multitude of local spatial reorganizations and practices of surveillance.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

. § 201(c)(2): “Whoever directly or indirectly gives, offers, or promises anything of value to any person, for or because of the testimony under oath or affirmation given or to be given by such person as a witness upon a trial, hearing, or other proceedings, before any court…or for or because of such person’s absence therefrom, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than two years, or both.” 19. 20. United States v. Singleton, 144 F.3d 1343 (10th Cir. 1998, panel opinion). 21. United States v. Singleton, 165 F.3d 1297 (10th Cir. 1999, en banc). 22. North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25, 28 (1970). 23. Tim Wu, “American Lawbreaking: Illegal Immigration,” Slate.com, October 14, 2007, available at http://www.slate.com/2175730/entry/2175733/. Chapter One: Carl Hiaasen, “Try Martinez Again? It’s Not Worth It,” The Miami Herald, March 28, 1996. 1. Much of the background information about Raul Martinez’s career has been graciously and helpfully provided by one of Martinez’s attorneys, R.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

He said the president was “absolutely right on the border issue.” Dan gave numerous interviews explaining why a border wall was a commonsense solution to stop five hundred thousand migrants from crossing the border every year, and posted a sympathetic video of a “ride-along” with Border Patrol as they discussed the best ways to apprehend illegal immigrants. When images of kids in cages at the border caused widespread outrage on the left, he said they were “trying to stand on their moral high horse.” On climate change, he said in a Facebook Live that he wanted to listen to what the “science says on both sides,” but he subsequently clarified that he understood that manmade emissions play a part in climate change.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Often they are not permitted to do so, and the communities Fritz imagined as homogenous and united may have been more complicated—think of the Chinese in 1906 San Francisco, of Koreans and socialists in Japan’s 1923 Kanto earthquake, of the fact that many civil defense administrators in the American South advocated or planned for segregated fallout shelters. During the 2007 San Diego fires, preexisting animosity toward illegal immigrants prompted authorities to single out Spanish-speaking and Latino-appearing victims of the fire to deny them services and supplies and arrest and deport those who were undocumented when they sought refuge in the stadium and other sites provided. In Texas, similar plans to check legal status in disaster have been decried by disaster sociologists, since such measures would prevent people from evacuating or seeking services crucial to their survival.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Given these differences, the question is how immigration affects our society in the aggregate. Fear of crime has always been close to the top of the list of concerns about immigrants, and that remains the case. But actually, US data shows that immigration reduces crime. Legal immigrants are only a third as likely to be incarcerated as US natives, and illegal immigrants are only slightly more than half as likely.71 The dominant narrative in Europe is that immigration is a certain cause of crime. But we also pay more attention to crime when the perpetrator is different from us, and we draw general conclusions based on a few, visible gangs without considering the context.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

Back in May 2013, the morning after he had watched Madina crumple in the lobby of that Rome hotel as her kidnapped mother and sister landed in Kazakhstan, Peter had launched himself into the task of getting them back. That would involve somehow disproving the official line that this was just a routine deportation of illegal immigrants. He and some Italian lawyers interviewed everyone who had witnessed the two raids: the first one, to snatch Alma, then the second, when they came back for the girl. The police appeared to have shown little interest in establishing whether any crimes had actually been committed. They had drawn up no inventory of phones, iPads and other evidence they confiscated.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

There would be far more internal turmoil over the ICE contract. But in February 2017, all that was in the future. Elder had done his job. He let the troops air their grievances. Now the work continued. McKinsey was racing to provide “deliverables” for the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE, responsible for detaining illegal immigrants and deporting them. The project, started in 2016, was dubbed ERO 2.0, and, in the words of an ICE spokesman, the aim was “to review ERO’s operations and mission execution, organizational model, and talent and culture management.” A short description of the work on McKinsey’s internal website cut through the jargon: “Transformation design to increase arrests.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Political leaders promoted colonial-era suspicions of Muslims as alien interlopers sponsored by foreign empires. In truth, however, merchant-class Indians imported by the British had mostly fled in 1948 or shortly thereafter, so leaders sublimated national ire to an unrelated group of Muslims: the Rohingya. To sell the ruse, the Rohingya were classified as illegal immigrants, a declaration of state-sponsored hate later reiterated even by Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel-winning democracy icon who became Myanmar’s first elected leader. When some Rohingya and Rakhine clashed in 2012, she was still consolidating her hold on politics. She seized on the incident, emphasizing the Rohingya’s supposed danger to Myanmar’s “real” citizens.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

East Harlem has been a Puerto Rican neighborhood since the 1950s, when their Great Migration from the island filled New York. With white flight, the working-class Italians of the neighborhood headed for the suburbs. In the 1990s, Mexicans began moving in. Tensions rose. “The Puerto Ricans accuse the Mexicans of stealing jobs and cheating the tax man, and staying in the city as illegal immigrants,” reported the Times. “The Mexicans, in turn, accuse the Puerto Ricans of crowding them out of apartments, businesses and parks.” Same old story. New groups move into neighborhoods and clash with the old. But this is not gentrification. This is New York always changing. As we see in this example, a kind of equilibrium is maintained in the midst of change, as one low-income group of immigrants replaces another, each one seeking an affordable place in which to begin a new life.


pages: 543 words: 143,135

Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives by Christopher Bartlett

Air France Flight 447, air traffic controllers' union, Airbus A320, airport security, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, crew resource management, en.wikipedia.org, flag carrier, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Maui Hawaii, profit motive, sensible shoes, special drawing rights, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

The last words from the crew were disturbingly matter-of-fact: Going down...eh...1862, going down, going down, copied going down? In addition to the four occupants of the aircraft, 47 people were killed on the ground, with the total perhaps more as the building housed a number of unregistered illegal immigrants. The disaster immediately received considerable publicity because the dramatic pictures probably made people consider just how much damage an aircraft plunging into a building can cause. However, the mystery surrounding the nature of the aircraft’s cargo was to give the story legs. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was one of several European airports allowing El Al to transship cargo unsupervised, and as a result, the details of the manifest were not public knowledge.


A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

airport security, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, trade route, urban renewal

See also Dominican Republic; Haiti present-day, 68, 72–85, 102, 104–14 History of the Improved Order of Red Men and Degree of Pocahontas, 351 Hitler, 362 Hojeda, Alonso de, 70, 97 Hopi Indians, 157, 169 Hore, Richard, 294 horses, 5–6, 68, 157, 181, 200 Houston, George, 75, 99 houston, lebame, 306–8 Hoyo Santo (Holy Hole), 96, 104 Hrafn the Dueller, 11 Hudson, Charles, 218–21, 241, 249, 258, 261 Hudson, Joyce, 220, 221 Hudson Route, 219–22, 227, 249, 258 Huguenots, 265–78, 288–89, 291–92, 324 humans, first, in America, 19–20, 60 human sacrifice, 119, 119 hurricanes, 88 Hyde County, North Carolina, 305, 312–13 Iceland, 11, 24 identification repentances, 276–78 iguana, 59 Illegal immigration, 149 Improved Order of Red Men, 377 Inca, 6, 117, 120, 130, 199 Indian Removal Act, 220 Indians (Native Americans), 3–7. See also specific tribes and places agriculture and,, 353–54 Alarcón and, 159–61 artwork of, at Morro, 167 battle tactics of, 204, 242–44 Cabeza de Vaca and, 123–30 casinos and, 173 Columbus and, 7, 48, 58–71, 60, 76, 85–88 conversion of, by Spanish, 118 Coronado and, 135, 139, 143–47, 150,, 157, 166, 178–79, 197–98 Cortés and, 118 De Soto and, 198–99, 206–9, 211–12, 214–17, 219–27, 229–30, 238–40, 242, 245–46, 254–57, 261–62 disease and, 6, 34–36, 118, 178–79, 211–12, 215, 222, 261–62, 285, 292, 301, 325, 374–75, 375, 380 Dominican Republic and, 106 English and, 295, 373–74 Estevanico and, 131–33 eugenics and, 361–64 gold and, 86 Gosnold and, 372–73 Hatteras Island and, 321–25 Huguenots and, 267–69, 275 Jamestown and, 328, 329–39, 342–49, 351–52 Las Casas and, 86–88 Mounds of, 232–33, 258 Newfoundland, and, 33–34 Norse and, 19–21, 27, 29–44, 46 Oñate and, 169–70, 174 petroglyphs of, 15 Pilgrims and, 7, 374–77, 380–82 Portuguese and, 5 Quivira and, 190–93 rape of, 69 Roanoke and, 298–99, 301–3, 313–19, 317, 318, 322 St.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

While the leading states will no doubt attempt to enforce a cartel to preserve high taxes and fiat money by cooperating to limit encryption and prevent citizens from escaping their domains, the states will ultimately fail. The most productive people on the planet will find their way to economic freedom. It is unlikely that the state will even be effective at keeping people penned up where they can be physically held to ransom. The ineffectiveness of efforts to bar illegal immigrants convincingly shows that nationstates will be unable to seal their borders to prevent successful people from escaping. The rich will be at least as enterprising in getting out as would-be taxi drivers and waiters are at getting in. For the first time since the medieval period of fragmented sovereignty, borders will not be clearly demarcated.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Sandra Bao

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, income inequality, low cost airline, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

This charge is already included in the price for travelers taking the day tour from Palenque. Private vehicles: on the Carretera Fronteriza, there’s a Pemex gas station at Chancalá and another at Benemerito. Because of its location near Guatemala, expect a few military checkpoints looking for illegal immigrants or drugs; it’s best not to drive this road at night. Public Transport To reach Bonampak from Palenque via public transport, take an hourly combi bound for either Frontera Corozal or Benemerito and ask to be let out at San Javier (M$60, two hours). This is the 12km turnoff for Bonampak; from here you’ll have to take a Lacandón vehicle to the ruins (M$70 to M$80 per person round trip with two hours’ waiting time).


pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Collecting money for Sally: subsidies, no-bid contracts, and other policies motivated by rent seeking. Threatening to shoot other passengers who do the same things: prohibitions on vigilantism and setting up competing governments. Confiscating property to make sculpture: state support for the arts. Throwing a passenger overboard: immigration restriction and deportation of illegal immigrants. 24 The state will lack even this right if, as argued in Part II, the state is not necessary for the provision of any vital goods. 6 The Psychology of Authority 6.1 The relevance of psychology In this chapter, I review some evidence from psychology and history, both about the attitudes and behavior of those who are subject to others’ (alleged) authority and about the attitudes and behavior of those who are in positions of authority.


pages: 469 words: 145,094

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

anti-communist, Charles Lindbergh, El Camino Real, illegal immigration, index card, long peace, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, Socratic dialogue

Twenty-four hours later, an immigration official at the airport called Miyoko to tell her what had happened, and she immediately contacted an attorney and headed for the airport detention facility to see Bobby—but when she arrived there, visiting hours were over. She did see him the next day, for thirty minutes. “He was so upset, and I didn’t know what to say to console him,” she told a journalist. Fischer was kept in the Narita Airport Detention Center for illegal immigrants for almost a month on the initial charge that he was attempting to travel on an invalid passport, but the more serious charge echoed back to 1992, for defying the American trade embargo and participating in the match with Spassky in the former Yugoslavia. It’s possible that Fischer’s broadcasts were the fuel that sparked the U.S. government to activate the decade-old charge against him.


pages: 473 words: 154,182

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

An American needs no visa to visit Hong Kong, as he does to visit China, and the half million or so locals who regularly commute across the Chinese border have to pass through one of six checkpoints, an arrangement reminiscent of that found along the border between Mexico and California. Here, as there, the border security serves mainly to control the tide of illegal immigrants seeking better wages, though in the Pearl River Delta that tide flows south instead of north. Here, as there, many of those immigrants speak a foreign language—Mandarin or a provincial dialect, not Cantonese—and if they make it across the border, they, too, can expect to be treated as second-class citizens in their new home.


pages: 523 words: 149,772

Legacy by Greg Bear

illegal immigration, life extension, place-making, three-masted sailing ship

That would have meant I was truly trapped here, with no chance of returning until they arrived … Or someone came from the Hexamon to get me. I pocketed the scrap. I still could not be sure how much time had passed since the arrival of Lenk and his followers. Four thousand one hundred and fourteen illegal immigrants; as much as three decades between my arrival and theirs. What could they have done to Lamarckia in that time? I pushed through a tangle of purple helixed blades. My feet sank into a grainy, boggy humus littered with pink shells and pebbles. No landing visible; no lights, no sign of river traffic.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Will have both counseled that secrecy fosters ignorance, and ignorance guarantees folly—a theme explored in parts one and two of The Transparency Society. The furor over Social Security numbers (Chapter Eight) has escalated. After passing laws requiring that the SSN appear on driversʼ licenses and passports (to help catch fugitives and illegal immigrants) the conservative Congress abruptly reversed itself, pressured by privacy issues. Another reversal concerned use of ID numbers for health insurance portability . We appear to be caught between our need for efficiency and fears that Big Brother may take over when each citizen gets a unique code or number.


pages: 736 words: 147,021

Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety by Marion Nestle

Asilomar, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, confounding variable, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, illegal immigration, out of africa, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, software patent, Upton Sinclair

They might understand why it is so important to institute healthier working conditions and more comprehensive training programs for employees. As noted earlier, food handlers typically earn the minimum wage, receive no sick leave or health benefits, and may not have obtained much education. Many workers in meat and poultry processing plants are illegal immigrants with even less access than others to such benefits.16 These labor issues affect food safety because they lead to unsafe handling practices such as washing hands infrequently, staying on the job while sick, and failing to obtain treatment for intestinal infections. Education of employees would help, but education alone is not enough to ensure safe food.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

For me, the image of these huge devices will always be associated with a heroic little immigration official at Heathrow who was on duty when Margaret Thatcher returned from an overseas trip in 1990 in a plane full of civil servants, advisers and political journalists. This man insisted that the whole party, apart from Margaret and Denis Thatcher, must go through passport control, on the far side of the airport, to check that there were no illegal immigrants on board. No amount of pleading by Thatcher’s staff would budge him. We all had to be driven across Heathrow by coach so that we could file through passport control, watched by a bored officer who sat with arms folded and feet up. The official who showed such zeal in enforcing the rules had a huge mobile phone that he held close to his left ear all the time, in case it rang.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

“Congress,” he complained, “has just been indifferent to cities.” Taking it personally, the mayor made a difference by crossing borders and oceans and bringing help back home. Just south of L.A., Mayor Bob Filner of San Diego decided not to leave his city’s relationship to Tijuana, a supposed hotbed of illegal immigration just across the porous border, to the vicissitudes of immigration politics in Washington and Mexico City. He established a satellite city office in Tijuana, and invited collaboration. “Dos ciudades, pero una region” he announced: two cities but a single region. The issue is not security, says the mayor, but communication; by making the border “the center” rather than “the end,” he hoped to establish a common economic infrastructure of value to both cities.30 The personal character of being mayor can add to the tensions between politics and the demands of good government.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Just fifteen years after the Berlin Wall came down, bringing the Iron Curtain down with it, many of the democratic peoples who celebrated its fall are busy constructing new barriers, bulwarks meant to impede the progress of global anarchy and market injustice and to protect sovereignty, but that will be equally futile in the long term. Not just actual walls to fence out illegal immigrants or insurgent terrorists, but government-subsidized trade barriers and media-driven walls of prejudice. Across these protectionist barriers, French farmer faces Nigerian farmer as an adversary, French agricultural subsidies undermining the capacity of Nigerian agriculture to compete, even inside its own borders, with foreign products.


pages: 530 words: 154,505

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

One Trump trait that the Netanyahu team was quick to adopt was branding unfavorable reports in the media as “fake news.”5 Trump, promising to build a wall on the US border with Mexico, had repeatedly mentioned Israel’s border fence as his model, saying, “Walls work. Just ask Israel.” Netanyahu, trying to curry favor, Tweeted, “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea,” causing a diplomatic spat with Mexico and angry protests from the Mexican Jewish community. Netanyahu was even more delighted when Trump appointed his team for the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Kushner was to be in charge overall, while two of Trump’s lawyers also received key appointments: Jason Greenblatt was to be special representative for international negotiations and David Friedman the new ambassador to Israel.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

No, the problem was that the vector for the word Mexican was itself inherently negative. That’s because the embeddings had been trained on the web, and the web contains lots of English-language stories and posts implying, or stating outright, that Mexicans are bad—that they’re associated with crime or illegal immigration. Humans are racist, so, in American media, they tend to write about Mexicans using often-racist associations. And machine learning is great at picking up those correlations. “Stereotypes and prejudices are baked into what the computer believes to be the meanings of words. To put it bluntly, the computer learns to be sexist and racist because it learns from what people say,” as Speer later wrote about her epiphany.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

There isn’t widespread agreement that our fundamental problems are our polarization, voter turnout and obstacles to voter registration, inequality and declining socio-economic mobility, and declining government investment in education and public goods. Large numbers of American politicians and voters are working hard to make those problems worse rather than to solve them. Too many Americans are seeking to blame our problems not on ourselves but on others: favorite targets of blame include China, Mexico, and illegal immigrants. A trend for wealthy and influential Americans with disproportionate power is to recognize that something is wrong, but, rather than devoting their wealth and power to finding solutions, they instead seek ways for just themselves and their families to escape American society’s problems. Currently favored strategies of escape include buying property in New Zealand (the most isolated First World nation), or converting American abandoned underground missile silos at great expense into luxurious defended bunkers (Plate 10.2).


pages: 488 words: 150,477

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

The reference to British fox hunting, some 950 years after Muqaddasi traveled to Ramla, can be found in "Palestine: 1920-1923," by W. F. Stirling, in From Haven to Conquest, p. 230. Population and Jewish immigration figures are derived from A Survey of Palestine, Vol. I, p. 149 and p. 185. These are official figures; actual numbers, which would include all illegal immigration from Europe, may have been higher. In 1936, more than two-thirds of the immigrants were Polish and German. For an extensive analysis of land sales from Arabs to Jews, see Kenneth Stein's The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939. Stein points out that many of the land sales to Jews were by non-Palestinian Arabs, though many were not: During the 1920s and early 1930s, driven largely by economic need, many "notables" of Palestine sold land to Jews.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Afghanistan’s economy is a mess? The Egyptian army needs to be encouraged to respect democracy? An earthquake in Japan has endangered nuclear power plants? Call the military. We want our military busy here at home too, protecting us from cyberattack, patrolling New York’s Grand Central Station, stopping illegal immigration in Arizona, and putting out summer forest fires. But this hints at some of the less tangible costs of endless, unbounded war. We’re trapped in a vicious circle: asking the military to take on more and more nontraditional tasks requires exhausting our all-volunteer military force and necessitates higher military budgets.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

In the streets they denounced the miserable conditions of the new precarious workers, protested their poverty, and demanded a “guaranteed income” for everyone. Their demonstrations seemed to erupt from thin air, the way Ariel suddenly appears in The Tempest. They were transparent, invisible. At a certain point their demonstrations began to expand dramatically in various cities. The White Overalls began to organize demonstrations together with illegal immigrants (other invisible members of society), political refugees from the Middle East, and other liberation movements. That is when the serious conflicts with the police began, and the White Overalls came up with another stroke of genius of symbolism. They began to mimic the police spectacles of repression: when the police put on their riot gear to look like Robocops behind their Plexiglas shields and armored vehicles, the White Overalls too dressed up in white knee pads and football helmets and transformed their dance trucks into monstrous mock battle vehicles.


pages: 514 words: 153,274

The Cobweb by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, computer age, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Neal Stephenson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

But when she’d first come to D.C. and seen the yellow film covering everything in the month of April, she’d mistaken it for dust—until her immune system had reacted to it, in much the same way that a city girl would react to a live rat on her bathroom floor. It was April now, and the motley collection of professionals’ gleaming Acuras and illegal immigrants’ shambling Gremlins parked along Clarendon Boulevard were covered with that yellow film again. It was stuck down with static electricity or something, and no wind could take it off. A few minutes ago a spattering of rain had swept in off the river, swirling the film into abstract patterns. Suddenly Betsy’s stomping gait faltered and slowed, and she came to a gradual stop, like a ship easing into a berth.


pages: 553 words: 151,139

The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy

airport security, centralized clearinghouse, complexity theory, false flag, flag carrier, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, information security, Occam's razor, operational security, sensible shoes

"I go home to my family," Ricardo answered. Wasn't that simple enough? Maybe this guy didn't have a family? The remaining walk took only ten minutes. Ricardo got in the lead SUV after shaking hands with his party. They were friendly enough, albeit in a guarded fashion. It could have been harder to get them here, but illegal-immigrant traffic was far thicker in Arizona and California, and that was where the U.S. Border Patrol had most of its personnel. The gringos tended to grease the squeaky wheel-like everyone else in the world, perhaps, but still it was not terribly farsighted of them. Sooner or later, they'd realize that there was cross-border traffic here, too.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

But there were also the optionals, including big and complex issues like health care reform, which he had campaigned hard on, and energy and climate-change policies, which were also near and dear to his heart. Besides all this, there were many not-so-optional items outside the economic sphere, like the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would just not go away. And whatever could be done about Pakistan. And ending torture and closing Guantánamo. And dealing with illegal immigration. And more. All this would have constituted a daunting to-do list for a veteran political hand with extensive executive experience, deep Washington connections, and intimate knowledge of how to pull the levers of Congress. It was surely the toughest policy agenda to face a new president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.


pages: 474 words: 149,248

The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--And the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan

active measures, colonial rule, cotton gin, El Camino Real, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, invention of gunpowder

His baptism by fire came in the spring of 1832. Late in the previous year a Mexican garrison and customs house had been installed on the northeastern edge of Galveston Bay. Colonel John (Juan) Davis Bradburn was sent there to enforce the collection of duties and help control the increased smuggling of goods, slaves, and illegal immigrants through the area. He named the settlement Anahuac—which means “place by the water” in the Aztec language. Bradburn’s seventy-five soldiers built a barracks and office a half mile south of town and settled in, and with the arrival of a customs collector, began to uphold the law. Colonists had enjoyed a seven-year exemption from tariff duties, and they resented the resumption of charges—though according to the agreements negotiated by the empresarios, or land agents, the exemption period had expired in November 1830.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

The people doing this complaining inevitably sound petty, but cultural shifts do not happen by crude tabloid use of rhetoric, but by subtle changes in language that within a relatively short period of time will shift opinion, putting some majority-held beliefs beyond the pale. So, when reporting on China or India the BBC uses the term ‘illegal immigrants’, but in the US they mostly use the term ‘undocumented immigrants’ or even ‘dreamers’. It makes you an incredibly tedious person even to notice, of course, but these things effectively change the tone of debate. Conservatives have for years made just these sorts of complaints of bias about the Today programme and other flagship shows.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Lucas Vidgen

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

This charge is already included in the price for travelers taking the day tour from Palenque. There's a Pemex gas station at Chancalá and another at Benemerito on the Carretera Fronteriza. Because of its location near Guatemala, self-drivers should expect to stop at a few military checkpoints where you'll be checked to ensure you are not transporting illegal immigrants or drugs. It's best not to drive this road at night. Bonampak The site of Bonampak (M$55; h8am-5pm) spreads over 2.4 sq km, but all the main ruins stand around the rectangular Gran Plaza. Never a major city, Bonampak spent most of the Classic period in Yaxchilán’s sphere of influence.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

‘Immigration reform’ has been a Washington buzzword for over a decade. Some people believe the nation’s current system deals with illegal immigrants (there are 11 million of them, compared to 470,000 legal immigrants) too leniently – that we should deport immigrants who are here unlawfully and fine employers who hire them. Other Americans think those rules are too harsh – that immigrants who have been here for years working, contributing to society and abiding by the law deserve amnesty. Despite several attempts, Congress has not been able to pass a comprehensive package addressing illegal immigration. RELIGION Separation of church and state has been the law of the land ever since the Pilgrims came ashore in Massachusetts in the early 1600s.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

The assorted fantasies of how a belligerent superhero president would destroy or defeat villains—ISIS, the Chinese government, U.S. corporations that build factories abroad. The fantasy that on 9/11 “thousands and thousands of people” in New Jersey from “the heavy Arab population…were cheering as the buildings came down,” and the fantasy that Mexico will pay for building a high concrete wall along the border. What about the fact that the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico has been declining for years, a fact that makes the case for a wall even weaker? “We will build the wall no matter how low this number gets,” President Trump told the NRA convention at the end of his first hundred days in office. “Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it….We’ll build the wall.


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

On May 1, the New York Times devoted 150 words on p. 13 to a report that 70,000 refugees had fled in three weeks, bringing “tales of torture, rape and robbery,” including more than 18,000 in the preceding 24-hour period. They fled despite the efforts by Bangladesh forces to seal the borders and turn back illegal immigrants. “One refugee asserted that the [Burmese] army had launched an operation to clear the border area of the Moslem community that was not originally Burmese.” Brief mention of this vast refugee flow also appears in subsequent stories. Humanitarians concerned with the suffering people of Asia, particularly the refugees from brutal atrocities and oppression, were clearly alerted to the existence of a major disaster, but the response was undetectable.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Stressing “pure and simple unionism,” the AFL grew steadily as it worked for the immediate improvement of workers’ wages and conditions. Its initial openness to unskilled laborers, blacks, and women closed over time, in part because of the prejudices of the member unions, which forced segregation on black unions. They viewed women at best as part of a pool of labor that, like illegal immigrants today, kept wages down. At worst, they were likely strikebreakers. In keeping with its fierce loyalty to the federation’s core membership of white men, the AFL urged Congress to renew the 1882 immigration restriction on Chinese in 1901. Still, the AFL never enlisted more than 5 percent of the work force.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

And even better: this Wise Man wasn’t willing to be bullied by the media. When the media claimed that Trump said, “Mexicans are rapists,” he pushed back and told them to actually watch the tape: where, contrary to their reports, he didn’t say “they are rapists” but “their rapists” (as in Mexicans illegally immigrating to the United States were “bringing drugs,” “bringing crime” and “[bringing] their rapists.” And when the media still continued to run with their narrative, Trump again refused to back down. “I can’t apologize for the truth,” Trump explained on Fox News. Even to a budding devotee like Malinowski, Trump was not a hero without flaws.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Later, the unexpected arrivals of citizens from so-called “New Commonwealth” countries—the Nigerias, Pakistans, Jamaicas, and Bangladeshes—gave rise to nationalists like Simon Darby. There is environmental justification, he says, for his party’s goal of stopping immigration and “deporting all the illegal immigrants.” As this presumably would take time, the BNP also advocates financial penalties for “communities that continue to have excessively large families.” The ideal number of United Kingdom citizens they propose is 40 million. Leaving aside the environmental and economic implications of such an implosion, census figures show that more than 50 million Britons are white.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

I was concerned that instead of drawing the right lesson from the crisis—that we need to fix the deep fault lines in developed societies and the global order—we would search for scapegoats. I wrote: “The first victims of a political search for scapegoats are those who are visible, easily demonized, but powerless to defend themselves. The illegal immigrant or the foreign worker do not vote, but they are essential to the economy—the former because they often do jobs no one else will touch in normal times, and the latter because they are the source of the cheap imports that have raised the standard of living for all, but especially those with low incomes.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

What if, instead of automatically renewing the meter once the sensors figured out that the car was leaving, the driver were offered the option to either keep the money in the meter—to be used by some future driver in need of parking—or to reset the meter, preventing a potential parking subsidy and boosting the city budget. And, to make this “smart” system truly earn that description, suppose it could also inform the driver of statistics about cars that usually park in the area. Are they fancy new cars that only rich people can afford? Or are they mostly old, decrepit cars used by grad students or illegal immigrants? Under this new scheme, the driver would be compelled to weigh the pros and cons and decide what was more important: fighting congestion and helping the city or being a good fellow citizen and helping those in need with their parking bill. Suddenly, the driver must think about the severity of the parking problem and confront the factors creating it—perhaps enough so to order a copy of Donald Shoup’s book.


Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

activist lawyer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, white picket fence, working poor

Foxy believed that Wishman’s sudden discovery of his two-year-old daughter was simply the most direct route to getting Coco into bed, and that Coco ought to get money from Wishman while she could. Foxy was right. Foxy was in a distinctly mercenary frame of mind; she’d taken a job as a scout for a marriage broker. The broker paid her a couple of hundred dollars for every man or woman she convinced to marry an illegal immigrant for cash; the American bride or groom received up to $1,000—and sometimes a wedding outfit and celebration dinner—as soon as he or she stepped out of city hall. She’d married off whole families—parents, children, their husbands and wives, their common-law in-laws. Some of the husbands were unexpectedly generous: one of Foxy’s in-law’s husbands bought her a used car after she passed the final immigration interview.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

And so, although it was not possible to demonstrate a conclusive link between radiation exposure and reproductive health, Neel nonetheless concluded that genetic mutations must have occurred in the bodies of survivors.4 Alongside birth outcomes, the commission also began studying the effects of radiation at the level of the chromosome. Masuo Kodani, a Japanese American geneticist who had been interned in the United States during the war, played a leading role in this work. After completing a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, Kodani moved to Japan – in part because his Japanese wife had been declared an illegal immigrant by the American government – and began working for the commission in 1948. The focus of Kodani’s research was on the number of chromosomes found in the cells of atomic bomb survivors. By this point, it was possible to identify individual chromosomes – which are the carriers of genetic information, made up of strands of DNA – under the microscope.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

As some places in the United States became more risky or difficult to live in because of rising sea levels and more frequent catastrophic “weather events,” people would have to move. This would compound the dislocation from deindustrialization and economic downturns since the 1980s and put new demographic pressure on regions and resources outside the climate danger zones. The surge in illegal immigration across the southern border from places like Guatemala and Honduras was already a warning sign, as people fled regions devastated by myriad hurricanes and laid waste by years of drought, where they could no longer subsist on small-scale farming. In 2020, I went from sheltering in place for months at home in preparation for the impeachment process to sheltering in place at home in the collective effort to stem the transmission of the disease.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

This is discussed in the next chapter, in the section on governmentality. 96 See Kristol, “Socialism, Capitalism, Nihilism,” LAMP, Montreux meeting, 1972: “And what if the ‘self’ that is ‘realized’ under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises liberal capitalism, and uses its liberty to subvert and abolish a free society? To this question, Hayek—like Friedman—has no answer.” 97 There are exceptions to this generalization. For instance, the MPS member Gary Becker has proposed to solve illegal immigration by “selling” the rights to citizenship. This reduces state services to the ultimate commodity. It is significant that few other neoliberals have endorsed this complete dissolution of nationalist identity, although one could argue it follows logically from the other tenets of the program. What can nationality mean for a person without a stable identity?


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The main strategy currently used to protect existing noncontributory schemes is no dif�fer�ent from the one recommended by Vives: keep out the potential beneficiaries arriving from elsewhere, �unless they come from places ravaged by war. The effectiveness of this strategy is weakened by the unavoidability of illegal immigration and of subsequent regularizations. And the fences, walls, shipwrecks, and expulsions which its implementation requires all illustrate the ugliness of the dilemma involved. The sustainability of (genuine) domestic re�distribution imposes firm limits on hospitality. This is true for conditional minimum-�income schemes, and is at least as true for an unconditional basic income.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

On December 21 Al Meyerhoff passed away at the age of sixty-one, leaving a daughter and his wife and prompting a large wake. The Times of both Los Angeles and New York eulogized him as a leading labor, civil rights, and environmental lawyer, citing his victories over garment retailers for their sweatshops in Saipan, for his challenge to a California law preventing illegal immigrant children from attending public school, and for his ongoing war against cancer-causing pesticides in the fields of America. A memorial was held in San Francisco on February 28, 2009, in the Town Hall of the Delancey Street Foundation the world-famous residential self-help organization for former substance abusers, ex-convicts, and homeless.


pages: 624 words: 189,582

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan, Daniel Freedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, call centre, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, independent contractor, PalmPilot, power law, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

It meant that Atta had all his hijackers in place and had picked the date for al-Qaeda’s planes operation. Ramzi Binalshibh was born in 1972 in Ghayl Bawazir, Yemen, and first tried getting to the United States in 1995, but his visa application was rejected. The United States at the time was suspicious of Yemeni visa seekers, believing they’d attempt to become illegal immigrants. Binalshibh tried moving to Germany—pretending to be a Sudanese citizen and applying for asylum under the name Ramzi Omar. He lived in Hamburg while this request was being investigated, and he attended mosques there, but eventually the request was denied. After returning to Yemen he then went back to Germany, this time under his real name and as a student.


pages: 618 words: 180,430

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

He excitedly told Asquith later that it had been a striking scene – ‘firing from every window, bullets chipping the brickwork, police and Scots Guards armed with loaded weapons . . . I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals.’ But Churchill was widely mocked for his grandstanding. He proposed a tightening up of the law against illegal immigrants and ‘aliens’, for which he was much attacked by other Liberals. One MP warned him that ‘human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions’. The end of the old landed order, the apparently corrupt and cosmopolitan plutocracy of Westminster, the socialistic demagogues, looming revolution and the failure to build a stronger army – all this flashed and flamed on a paranoid canvas that at times seems very reminiscent of post-war Weimar Germany.


pages: 640 words: 177,786

Against All Enemies by Tom Clancy, Peter Telep

airport security, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Iridium satellite, low earth orbit, off-the-grid, operational security, Pepto Bismol, Recombinant DNA, US Airways Flight 1549

Now he realized that those were the good old days, and that his involvement with Corrales and Los Caballeros and the cartel tore at him from both sides. He’d agonized over where his loyalty should lie: to Corrales, his immediate boss, the man who’d taught him everything and had made him a trusted right hand, rescuing him from a life of mowing lawns as an eighteen-year-old illegal immigrant in Las Vegas …or Fernando Castillo, the man whose identity Pablo had only recently learned and who had been repeatedly calling Pablo. That he’d finally decided to answer one of the calls was a well-kept secret from Corrales, who had cloistered all of them away in a pair of apartments above Farmacias Nacional.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

Default would have been a nightmare for ninety million Mexicans, a potential prelude to hyperinflation and mass unemployment. It also would have been a problem for us. Mexico was our third largest trading partner, and the Fed staff calculated that a messy crisis could affect hundreds of thousands of American jobs, reduce U.S. growth by an entire percentage point, and increase illegal immigration 30 percent. We also feared that investors unnerved by Mexico might abandon other emerging economies that seemed to have similar vulnerabilities. Brazil and Argentina were already experiencing this “Tequila Effect,” as their markets slumped in sympathy with Mexico’s. Finally, we knew that if Mexico cratered a year after the North American Free Trade Agreement eased its barriers to foreign capital, protectionists at home and abroad would claim a propaganda victory.


pages: 661 words: 187,613

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

We have also met deaf children who lack a language and soon invent one. Even more pertinent are the deaf adults occasionally discovered who lack any form of language whatsoever—no sign language, no writing, no lip reading, no speech. In her recent book A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

This was generally viewed as acceptable in the tech industry. In Li’s assessment, “In the age of the Internet, we are suddenly faced with an explosion in terms of imagery data.” According to reporting in the New York Times, Clearview has systematically collected facial images without consent, aiming to build predictive tools that identify illegal immigrants and people likely to commit crimes. Such strategies are justified by arguing that large-scale data collection is necessary for technological advancement. As an investor in a facial-recognition start-up summed up, the defense for massive data collection is that “laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology.


pages: 687 words: 204,164

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities, deskilling, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fear of failure, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, l'esprit de l'escalier

Didn’t so much as waste a glance on them… couldn’t even see them unless they were physically in the way. Well-educated people like himself, with his PhD in French literature, were like another species of Homo sapiens. Here in Miami they were self-consciously part of the dyaspora… the very word denoted high status. How many?—a half?—two-thirds?—of Haitians living in the Miami area were illegal immigrants who didn’t begin to rate the term. A vast majority had never even heard of any dyaspora… and if they had, they had no idea what it meant… and if they knew what it meant, they didn’t know how to pronounce it. Ghislaine—he looked at her again. He loved her. She was beautiful, gorgeous! She would soon graduate from the University of Miami in Art History with a 3.8 grade point average.


pages: 588 words: 193,087

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fake news, fear of failure, game design, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Martin Parr, Norman Mailer, out of africa, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

They had their name attached to that individual episode, “The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show,” and the executives had seen the taping. What's rarely mentioned is that not only did the first episode have the Clinton sketch, but it also had a sketch that featured the character of Pat Buchanan eating the live heart of an illegal immigrant. [Laughs] That was much easier to take after the breast-feeding. The heart image was extreme, and probably not ideal for what we were trying to accomplish, but I think we could have gotten away with it. On the other hand, there's just some thing about the combination of a tiny animal and a man's nipples that tends to upset viewers.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

In some instances, migration remains highly active, for example to Africa and Australia. There are also problems of definition as to precisely who the category should include, those of mixed race being an obvious example. The statistics also vary greatly in their reliability and accuracy for various reasons, including illegal immigration, the quality of censuses and definitional issues. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the table below gives a rough idea of the total size of the Chinese diaspora and the main countries where it resides. Chinese migration has a long history, dating back to the Ming dynasty in the case of South-East Asia.


pages: 845 words: 197,050

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

Caught with documents describing the illegal shipment of nearly fourteen thousand Kalashnikovs and 9 million rounds of ammunition, Minin was released from custody after Italian courts ruled that Italy had no jurisdiction over his black-market brokering activities elsewhere. He walked. Had he been convicted and remained in jail, the trade would have continued. Where assault rifles are wanted, recent history shows, they appear. They move across borders like any other contraband, like heroin or hashish, like illegal immigrants, almost like rain. They are liquid. Demand ensures supply. The comparison to illicit drugs has its limits. Like narcotics, assault rifles are difficult to find, secure, and remove once they have been distributed within a population. Unlike narcotics, they are not consumable. They remain in their users’ possession, sometimes for decades.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Of Nepalese descent, the Lhotshampa people were well established in southern Bhutan after workers migrated here from Nepal in the 19th century. Yet things were to change drastically in 1988 during the nation’s first census, when it was announced that anyone who couldn’t provide proof of residency in Bhutan prior to 1958 was to be considered an illegal immigrant. Documentation was difficult to obtain for many Lhotshampa. Combined with an arbitrary ruling as to what exactly constituted a ‘non-national’, it led to rising tensions and interethnic conflict, which saw several thousand Lhotshampa imprisoned. Laws were introduced that made it compulsory for Lhotshampa to wear traditional Bhutanese clothing, while Nepali language was banned from schools.


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

See Jennifer Anderson, The Limits of Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership, Adelphi Paper No. 315 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, December 1997); Mark Burles, Chinese Policy toward Russia and the Central Asian Republics (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1999); and “Can a Bear Love a Dragon?” Economist, April 26, 1997, pp. 19–21. Also, there is a potential source of serious trouble between China and Russia: large-scale illegal immigration from China into Russia for the past decade, which could lead to ethnic conflict or territorial disputes. See David Hale, “Is Asia’s High Growth Era Over?” National Interest, No. 47 (Spring 1997), p. 56; and Simon Winchester, “On the Edge of Empires: Black Dragon River,” National Geographic, February 2000, pp. 7–33. 63.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

According to the Congressional Research Service, identity fraud cost Americans nearly $21 billion in 2012, and more than 13.1 million Americans are reportedly victims of identity fraud annually. That works out to about one American every two seconds. Furthermore, the theft of this personally identifiable information is a gateway crime that leads to any number of other criminal offenses such as financial fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, welfare fraud, illegal immigration, and even terrorist finance. Exponential growth in data is leading to exponential growth in online crime. Children are the fastest-growing group of victims of identity theft. They are particularly vulnerable because they don’t have early-warning systems built in as do adults. If somebody fraudulently charged $500 or $1,000 to your credit card, you would likely notice it on your next billing statement, but children don’t get credit card statements.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

There still remains a bedrock moral structure underneath all these scientific claims and projects … Practices that came under the gaze of the scientific state in the modern home were abandoned to the whims of monetary valuation in the external sphere of the neoliberal market. Once one notes the congruence in moral critiques against illegal immigrants and hoarders of money abroad with the past indictments of vagrants and bankrupts, one sees clearly the continual ability to delimit borders of inclusion and exclusion via daily monetary practices and exchange regulations. (Peebles 2012: 159–60) What these studies show is that cultural variation does not simply add color to forms of money that would otherwise conform to the drearily grey—predominantly classical—view of it as a homogeneous instrument that promotes standardized practices of calculation.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Statutory Definition of ‘Refugee,’ ” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, June 22, 2000; Nicole Tsong, “High Prices for Broken Dreams—a World Away from Home, Smuggled Chinese Stowaways Deal with Imprisonment, Fear, and, for Most, Crushed Hopes,” Yakima Herald-Republic, July 8, 2001; “Two-Hour Sailing into a Life of Emptiness,” Irish Times, Dec. 7, 2002; Yang-Hong Chen, “Stowaways and Illegal Migrants by Sea to Taiwan,” Jan. 2003; Yang-Hong Chen, Shu-Ling Chen, and Chien-Hsing Wu, “The Impact of Stowaways and Illegal Migrants by Sea—a Case Study in Taiwan,” International Association of Maritime Universities, Oct. 2005; Paul Schukovsky, Brad Wong, and Kristen Millares Bolt, “22 Stowaways Nabbed at Port of Seattle: Chinese Found in Good Health After 2-Week Trip in Container,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 6, 2006; James Thayer, “The War on Snakeheads: The Mexican Border Isn’t the Only Front in the Struggle with Illegal Immigration,” Daily Standard, April 19, 2006; Semir T. Maksen, “Transportation of Stowaways, Drugs, and Contraband by Sea from the Maghreb Region: Legal and Policy Aspects,” World Maritime Universities Dissertations, 2007; Sheldon Zhang, Smuggling and Trafficking in Human Beings: All Roads Lead to America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007); Alison Auld, “Stowaways Arrested in N.S.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

Their corpses had been boobytrapped and a British officer was seriously injured when he attempted to cut them down.59 Intelligence had greater success in restricting what Britain declared was illegal Jewish immigration. The Security Service believed that, as a result of its penetration of the Jewish organizations in London and other intelligence sources, ‘only one out of some thirty ships carrying illegal immigrants reached their destination.’60 The most controversial case was that of the Exodus, intercepted off Palestine in July 1947 with 4,500 Jewish ‘illegal immigrants’ on board, whom Bevin ordered to be forcibly returned to refugee camps in Germany. As the captain of the Exodus later recalled, Zionist intelligence officers ‘gave us orders that this ship was to be used as a big demonstration with banners to show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were’.


pages: 1,510 words: 218,417

Lonely Planet Norway (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Donna Wheeler

car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, energy security, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, North Sea oil, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal

Library (Bibliotek; GOOGLE MAP ; Sjøgata; h10am-4pm Mon-Fri) Has free internet access. A FORBIDDING FRONTIER Don't even think about stepping across the Russian border for a photo. Nowadays, in addition to vestiges of old Cold War neuroses on both sides, Norway, as a Schengen Agreement country, is vigilant about keeping illegal immigrants from entering. Both Norwegian and Russian sentries are equipped with surveillance equipment and the fine for illegal crossing, even momentarily, starts at a whopping Nkr5000. Using telephoto or zoom lenses or even a tripod all qualify as violations. As the guidance document sternly warns: 'It is prohibited to intentionally make contact with, or act in an insulting manner towards persons on the other side of the border and to throw items across the borderline.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

They gave him a liberal cachet and allowed him to get the black vote.”30 The Laborers Union, through its Mission-based caucus, the Centro Social Obrero, a major neighborhood political force, and through the Centro’s influence over the Mexican-American Political Association (MAPA), gave Alioto a powerful base of support within the city’s large Spanish-speaking population. It also gave him substantial financial backing, secured as political contributions from the union’s members, many of whom, as recent, and sometimes illegal, immigrants from Central and South America, often had to submit to high initiation fees, dues, and special assessments. Other large and important unions such as the Department Store Employees and the Metal Trades and Industrial Union Council also supported Alioto, and although he was just shy of the twothirds majority needed for AFL-CIO Central Labor Council endorsement, he clearly managed to win labor to his side. 30 / Chapter 2 To explain why union support went to Alioto when he had not been closely identified with labor and when Morrison was clearly more sympathetic to labor, the Chronicle’s labor reporter, Dick Meister, writing in the September 20, 1967, edition, cited these factors: (1) the timing and rapidity of Alioto’s move, which caught Morrison and Burton off guard; (2) the fact that Alioto was making more liberal noises than had been expected; (3) Alioto’s friendship with AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer George Johns (the two men had served together on the Board of Education, and Alioto had been campaign committee chair for Johns’s unsuccessful 1961 Board of Supervisors race); and (4) Alioto’s tactic of using the support of a few key ILWU leaders who had been close to Shelley as a wedge to win over the membership.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

By June 1946, the Red Army, not the American army, was demanding a ban on interzonal travel, and American soldiers, not Red Army soldiers, were helping Germans sneak across (by dressing up German women in American uniforms, among other things, a trick that was apparently not hard to see through).45 From 1949, the West German authorities also stopped treating people arriving from the East as illegal immigrants. Instead, they came to be regarded as political refugees and victims of communist oppression. They received places in refugee camps and help in finding housing and work. In accordance with these changes, the Soviet authorities also began to enforce stricter controls, sending Red Army troops to patrol their border and build ditches, fences, and barriers.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Indeed, as Britain’s borders became more porous, and with the growing volumes of international trade, there was little else that could be done. The expansion of the European Union seemed to suggest practically an open frontier for Britain that extended as far as the Urals.54 In June 2000 the shocking discovery of fifty-eight Chinese illegal immigrants who had perished in a container lorry at Dover highlighted how serious these matters were. The government was now reversing the cuts it had imposed on the intelligence agencies, because they seemed a plausible antidote to these intractable problems.55 GCHQ’s contributions in this realm were valuable.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Both parties had strongly criticized the influx of migrants from the Balkans during the campaign. The People’s Party, led by the youngest head of a political party in Europe, the telegenic and charismatic thirty-one-year-old Sebastian Kurz, itself moved rightwards to address the migrant issue, attacking ‘political Islam’ and promising to end illegal immigration. The Freedom Party’s rhetoric was utterly uncompromising. Its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, declared that he did not want ‘an Islamization of his homeland’. On 18 December Kurz and Strache reached agreement to form a right-wing coalition government. Protests were muted. Austria was moving in step with the trend to the anti-immigrant right that was common to much of Europe.


Lonely Planet Norway by Lonely Planet

carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, energy security, G4S, GPS: selective availability, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, North Sea oil, place-making, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence

Independent travellers armed with a Russian visa (which you'll need to get in your home country) can hop aboard one of the two daily buses to Murmansk ( GOOGLE MAP ) (one way/return 510/780kr, five hours). A FORBIDDING FRONTIER Don't even think about stepping across the Russian border for a photo. Nowadays, in addition to vestiges of old Cold War neuroses on both sides, Norway, as a Schengen Agreement country, is vigilant about preventing illegal immigrants from entering. Both Norwegian and Russian sentries have surveillance equipment and the fine for illegal crossing, even momentarily, starts at a whopping 5000kr. Using telephoto or zoom lenses or even a tripod also qualify as violations. As the guidance document sternly warns: 'It is prohibited to intentionally make contact with, or act in an insulting manner towards persons on the other side of the border and to throw items across the borderline.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

However, as President Felipe Calderon of Mexico targeted the country’s networks of organized crime and drugs—and tried to reform courts and the police—Obama offered quiet and important assistance. Vice President Joe Biden led an effort to thwart state breakdown and criminal capture of governments in Central America. But as the U.S. economy’s recovery strengthened, the surge of illegal immigration and asylum seekers dominated regional relations. Donald Trump made a wall with Mexico into a signature political issue. He pointed to Mexicans and Central Americans as dangers and threatened them. The administration does not view a healthy Mexican economy as a North American asset. Nonetheless, after twenty-five years of deeper continental integration, the three societies have built resilient bonds that have withstood Trump’s call to end NAFTA and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s past opposition.


Lonely Planet Mexico by John Noble, Kate Armstrong, Greg Benchwick, Nate Cavalieri, Gregor Clark, John Hecht, Beth Kohn, Emily Matchar, Freda Moon, Ellee Thalheimer

AltaVista, Bartolomé de las Casas, Burning Man, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, language acquisition, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines, urban sprawl, wage slave

History Older locals will confirm that at the beginning of the 20th century, TJ was literally ‘just a mud hole.’ Prohibition drove US tourists here for booze, gambling, brothels, boxing and cockfights, causing Tijuana’s population to balloon to 180,000 by 1960. With continued growth has come severe social and environmental problems. Today the drug and illegal immigrant trade into the US are the city’s biggest concerns. Orientation Located 19km south of downtown San Diego, Tijuana lies directly south of the US border post of San Ysidro, California. Tijuana’s central grid consists of north–south avenidas and east–west calles. South of Calle 1a, Avenida Revolución (La Revo) is the main commercial center.

In addition, the Carretera Fronteriza is the main route from Chiapas to Guatemala’s northern Petén region (home of several major Maya sites, including mighty Tikal) via the town of Frontera Corozal. Phones in this region usually have satellite service or Guatemala-based numbers. DANGERS & ANNOYANCES Drug trafficking and illegal immigration are facts of life in this border region, and the Carretera Fronteriza more or less encircles the main area of Zapatista rebel activity and support, so expect numerous military checkpoints along the road and from this area to Palenque and Comitán. You shouldn’t have anything to fear from these checks, but don’t tempt easy theft by leaving money or valuables unattended during stops.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Immigrants have forever changed the face of Italian cities and towns, bringing cultural enrichment and social tension. Berlusconi’s centre-right administration has made illegal immigration a major issue and, in 2009, signed a deal with Libya allowing Italian Navy vessels to force boat people back to Libya. The first three boatloads were sent back in May, raising eyebrows from the UN to Brussels and causing an outcry at home. Further protest came with a new, hardline security law package passed in July. It makes illegal immigration a criminal offence and obliges doctors, among others, to report patients without legal papers to the police. Berlusconi dropped another bombshell in February 2009 when he announced that Italy, which had turned its back on nuclear power in the 1980s, would build four reactors with the aid of the French EDF power giant.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

ExxonMobil and its peers installed and operated sophisticated “domain awareness” equipment in the waters around Equatorial Guinea, radars and integrated communications that allowed the companies’ security departments to track, identify, and monitor potentially threatening naval traffic. “If they see something, they communicate,” Nugua said. Cooperation between the oil companies and the Equato-Guinean navy and coast guard evolved to the point where, by 2009, the oil firms monitored “not only a hostile invasion, but illegal immigration” into Equatorial Guinea by boat from neighboring, poorer countries such as Cameroon.7 As long as these security engagements remained secret, and ran on bureaucratic autopilot in Washington, the United States seemed prepared to deepen its partnership with Malabo. The difficulty was, every so often, news reporting or investigations by human rights groups would turn up fragmentary information about the growing security ties, and the disclosures would provoke angry denunciations by members of Congress and human rights advocates.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Manufacturing still accounted for almost one quarter of the GNP. What did happen was that productivity, output per man, rose, and did so substantially. It rose at 3.6 per cent per annum and the answer was that management ‘fat’ had been cut, while there was elsewhere a burst of creative energy from the Wozniaks and Gateses (plus illegal immigrants). There was, at work here, a characteristic American quality - it had been shown during the Second World War - of rationalization and risk-taking in pursuit of profit. There was a new financial idea, venture capital. Someone had to raise the initial money for patents, lawyers, etc. for a start-up company; it was a matter of guessing which one.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

The exhibition Native Land/Stop-Eject, curated by Paul Virilio and Raymond Depardon at Cartier Fondation, Paris, 2008–09 promoted the estimation that 645 million people will be displaced by wars and other catastrophes by 2050. Today it's estimated that there are perhaps 300 million internal illegal immigrants within China. Mostly these are migrants from rural areas who live in major cities like Beijing and the southern factory metropoles without the appropriate hukou, or urban license. They often make their way without official social services and schools for their children, let alone voting rights.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

How many programmers have you asked, “Is this the right way to do things? Is this going to be good for the users?” They reply, “I don’t know and I don’t care. I get paid, I have my cubicle, and the air-conditioning is set at the right temperature. I’m happy as long as the paycheck comes in.” It’s no surprise that programmers’ salaries are headed down to what an illegal immigrant working at a slaughterhouse in Nebraska would get paid, because they just don’t think about if they are doing high-quality work for the end users. I think because of that, managers have said, “I’m tired of these people. I don’t want to see them. I haven’t had a good experience. They’ve been late, they haven’t done what they’ve promised, and what they’ve done has been bugridden and not very good for the end user.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Birth rates declined during the economic depression of the 1930s but the post-WWII baby boom (1945–1965) increased the population by a third in a single generation and by 1970 the total reached 203.2 million, just above the supposed maximum forecast in 1920. The subsequent combination of relatively high fertility (in comparison with Europe and Japan) and strong (legal and illegal) immigration added more than 100 million people in four decades and the 2010 total reached 308.7 million, 56% above Pearl’s 1920 maximum. Reviewing The Biology of Population Growth by Raymond Pearl, Wright correctly noted: If, nevertheless, it turns out that nations really grow by superposition of cycles, as Pearl describes them, it would tend to indicate that the growth of human populations is not, after all, comparable to that of fruit flies in a bottle.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

In 1965, the Immigration Act did away with the NOP, and some twenty thousand new Chinese immigrants, many of them women, began to arrive in Chinatown. Local businessmen took advantage of the declining Midtown garment business and made use of the new, unskilled female workforce to open garment factories of their own. The early 1990s saw another major shift, as large numbers of illegal immigrants from the Fujian province of China arrived. Unlike the established Cantonese, the Fujianese were largely uneducated labourers who spoke their own dialects along with Mandarin. Today, Cantonese is still the lingua franca of Chinatown; though many well-off Cantonese have moved to the outer boroughs, they remain the district’s most important customers, and businesses remain largely Cantonese-owned.


pages: 2,020 words: 267,411

Lonely Planet Morocco (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Paul Clammer, Paula Hardy

air freight, Airbnb, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, Day of the Dead, Dr. Strangelove, illegal immigration, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, place-making, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Like the former West Berlin, it comes across as a grand social experiment concocted by rival political systems. Leaving the beggars and street hustlers behind, you cross over a grim border zone, a 400m no-man’s-land of haphazardly placed barricades (part of a €30 million fence erected by the EU to prevent illegal immigration), to find yourself blinking in the light of Spanish culture, a relaxed world of well-kept plazas, beautiful buildings and tapas bars bubbling over until the wee hours. This experience alone is worth the trip and lingers thereafter. This cultural-island phenomenon is the essence of Ceuta. It explains the heavy Spanish military presence, the Moroccan immigrants, the duty-free shopping, the shady cross-border commerce and the tourism.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Chapter 24 TRUMP On July 21, 2016, a burly figure strode across a podium dressed seemingly to inspire memories of Captain America, Citizen Kane or a 1930s fascist rally. The man in the spotlight was there to deliver a speech with which he meant to change American history.1 It was a flaming denunciation of the Obama administration. He evoked an alarming image of America harried by terrorism, violence and chaos. He told his audience 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records were that very night “roaming free,” terrorizing and murdering innocent Americans. Meanwhile, lives were getting tougher. “Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. Our manufacturing trade deficit has reached an all-time high—nearly $800 billion in a single year.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

In the new millennium, meltdowns on Wall Street and the lingering US recession have caused a staggering financial crisis that California has yet to bounce back from. Ballistic population growth, pollution and traffic are other vexing issues. Meanwhile, the need for public education and prison reform builds, and the conundrum of illegal immigration from Mexico, which fills a critical labor shortage, remains unsolved. CALIFORNIA’S FIRST PEOPLES Immigration is hardly a new phenomenon here: human beings have been migrating to California for millennia. Many archaeological sites have yielded evidence, from large middens of seashells along the beaches to campfire sites on the Channel Islands, that a diversity of indigenous tribes have been living along this coast for up to 12,000 years.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

A few years later, frightened in particular by Davis’s predictions in his 1974 Scientific American article, Tanton spun off the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), ridding himself of the moderate environmentalists in ZPG and focusing his attention on Mexico.63 Ehrlich would prefer to be remembered as one of those moderates, but he joined and led FAIR from the beginning, including with the coauthorship of The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States, a tract that strains to avoid the appearance of anti-immigrant alarmism but nonetheless concludes with a call for readers to join FAIR.64 In 1977, the professor cosigned a mass-mailed letter referring to illegal immigrants as a “human tidal wave.”65 Ehrlich joined some of the country’s most organized bigots, lending their propaganda a respectable Stanford face. Tanton became perhaps the major player in what we might without much hyperbole call American Nazism.66 Through another spin-off organization, American English, specifically dedicated to undermining interracial social democracy, Tanton created and pushed for Proposition 63, the successful attempt to write the English language into the California state constitution.67 He was trying to get rid of, among other things, multilingual ballots, excluding non–English speakers from political representation entirely.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Then, at half the stations, a pair of young Mexicans, conservatively dressed, appeared each morning for two weeks, chatting quietly in Spanish before boarding the train. Then commuters filled out second questionnaires. Remarkably, the presence of such pairs made people more supportive of decreasing legal immigration from Mexico and of making English the official language, and more opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants. The manipulation was selective, not changing attitudes about Asian Americans, African Americans, or Middle Easterners. How’s this for a fascinating influence on Us/Them-ing, way below the level of awareness: Chapter 4 noted that when women are ovulating, their fusiform face areas respond more to faces, with the (“emotional”) vmPFCs responding more to men’s faces in particular.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

As it happened, both men were al Qaeda veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia.43 Without the watch list there was little chance the suspects would face scrutiny. Under the State Department’s consular policies, as one investigator later put it, “Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that did not fit the profile for terrorism or illegal immigration.”44 For all of its sour experiences with the Saudi government on terrorism issues and for all of the mutual frustration and suspicion dating back two decades, the United States was still loath to reexamine any of the core assumptions governing its alliance with Riyadh. Beyond the names of the two mysterious Saudis and the inconclusive photography relayed from Kuala Lumpur, the CIA knew nothing at this stage about the multistranded plot that bin Laden had set in motion in Kandahar late in 1999 to attack American aviation.45 What Tenet did know about al Qaeda that winter frightened him more than ever before.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

In March 1825 the Cape Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, reported to the Colonial Secretary in London that the shortage of workers had put ‘a stop to every undertaking, whether agricultural or of any other nature’.19 Settlers lamented that it was ‘utterly impossible to procure men or boys or even Hottentots to herd’.20 The Xhosa from across the Fish River had been officially barred from entering the Colony since 1812, and a declared purpose of installing the 1820 settlers along the frontier had been to curtail, if not entirely prevent, illegal immigration. Now it was abundantly clear that the viability and further development of the eastern Cape could not be secured without a substantial influx of labour. Schemes to work the farms with indentured white labour had failed.21 The Khoisan were not numerous enough, and the trickle of Mantatees brought in by clandestine slaving was also woefully inadequate.


The Rough Guide to Morocco by Rough Guides

colonial exploitation, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal, walkable city

BORDER TRADE: PEOPLE, DRUGS AND TERRORISM Over the last few decades, the economies on both sides of Ceuta’s border seemed to benefit from the enclave, spurred on by the city’s duty-free status. However, the border is also the frontier between Africa and Europe, and inevitably the EU became increasingly concerned about traffic in drugs and illegal immigrants, financing in 2005 a £15m ($22m) hi-tech “wall” with CCTV and sensors along the 8km boundary. The money to be made from outflanking these defences has attracted equally hi-tech smugglers, trading in hash, hard drugs, disadvantaged Moroccans, and refugees from as far south as Liberia and Rwanda.


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

There’s also been a folk-music revival: keep an ear out for the groups Katice and Katalena, who play traditional Slovenian music with a modern twist, and the vocalist Brina. Well-received Slovenian films in recent years include Kruh in Mleko (Bread & Milk, 2001), the tragic story by Jan Cvitkovič of a dysfunctional small-town family, and Damjan Kozole’s Rezerni Deli (Spare Parts, 2003) about the trafficking of illegal immigrants through Slovenia from Croatia to Italy by a couple of embittered misfits living in the southern town of Krško, site of the nation’s only nuclear power plant. Much lighter fare is Petelinji Zajtrk (Rooster’s Breakfast, 2007), a romance by Marko Naberšnik set in Gornja Radgona on the Austrian border in northeast Slovenia, and the bizarre US-made documentary Big River Man (John Maringouin, 2009) about an overweight dyspeptic marathon swimmer who takes on – wait for it – the Amazon and succeeds.


pages: 1,169 words: 342,959

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, illegal immigration, margin call, millennium bug, out of africa, place-making, plutocrats, rent control, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, the market place, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban renewal, white picket fence, Y2K, young professional

He needed to hurry. “Bella,” he called. “Yes, Mr. Master.” Bella was standing behind him already. Thank God for Bella. She always knew where everything was. “Did I forget anything?” Bella was a treasure. She came from Guatemala, and like so many of the domestics in New York, she had begun her career as an illegal immigrant, but her previous employers had managed to get her a green card. He and Maggie had employed her three years ago—after all, with two people working full-time, it was a lot easier if one had a housekeeper. When they had first engaged her, Gorham had been a little uncertain about the forms of address to be used nowadays, but Bella had solved that for them.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

* At the end of the evening we walk round the corner, find a hotel on Kastanienalle, Hannah telling us of her fury about how immigrants are being treated in Germany now, how the government have now said that it’s not enough to be born here to get German citizenship. She and some friends are considering setting up an informal agency to do marriages of convenience for supposedly ‘illegal’ immigrants. We end up in the Prater Garten, and I get a sense that the old Berlin is still alive. It’s not been entirely erased by the thrusting modernity of Potsdamer Platz and skyscrapers of glass. Here it’s all dark wood, bustling tables, a small red stage at one end with a piano. I go to the bar to ask if they are still serving food.


pages: 1,266 words: 344,635

Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton

airport security, business process, company town, corporate governance, data acquisition, dematerialisation, disinformation, family office, illegal immigration, invention of the telescope, inventory management, plutocrats, stem cell, tech baron, the map is not the territory, undersea cable, VTOL

Enforced off-Earth settlement of all long-term welfare recipients. 2048: Japan opens gateway to New Tokyo. 2048: France opens gateway to Rouen; French citizens only. 2048: Earth economy stalling due to investment shift to new planets. 2049: Germany opens gateway to Odessa; German citizens only. 2049: USA passes illegals dispersal bill. All illegal immigrants in original states on Earth deported to the territories on new U.S. planets. 2049: Saudi Arabia opens Riyadh for settlement; Muslims only. 2050: ET-SB opens Minisa for ‘all’ Grande Europe citizens. Subsidized immigration begins for unemployed, later developing to ‘opportunity immigration’ policy, transporting millions of poor and jobless out of GE states on Earth. 2051: Northumberland Interstellar opens gateway to Sirius star system, discovers earth-giant planet, named St.


Costa Rica by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda, César G. Soriano

airport security, Berlin Wall, centre right, desegregation, illegal immigration, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the payments system, trade route, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

However, even in the most deprived region, such as the Caribbean coast, most people have adequate facilities and clean drinking water. In fact, Unicef estimates that more than 90% of households have adequate sanitation systems, while virtually all have access to potable water. Increased legal and illegal immigration from Nicaragua has started to put a strain on the economic system. There are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, who serve as an important source of mostly unskilled labor, but some believe they also threaten to overwhelm the welfare state. Foreign investors continue to be attracted by the country’s political stability, high education levels and well-developed tourism infrastructure.


Greece Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, pension reform, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban sprawl

In recent years, there has also been a steady stream of Americans, Australians and others with Greek heritage returning to their ancestral islands. But Greece has also become home to many of the economic migrants who have settled here since the 1990s, when the country suddenly changed from a nation of emigration to one of immigration. The surge in the number of illegal immigrants arriving from Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa has become a focal point for politicians and right-wing activists, while overwhelming many of the smaller, remote islands where the immigrants arrive and are detained. Faith & Identity Families flock to church for lively Easter celebrations, weddings, baptisms and annual festivals, but it’s largely women and the elderly who attend church services regularly.


pages: 1,509 words: 416,377

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

At one point the man announced that he was hungry, peeled off a 10,000-yen note (worth around eighty dollars) from a wad of large U.S. and Japanese bills and asked that someone be sent out for food. After spending the night at the airport, the travelers were transferred to a detention center for illegal immigrants. (The aliens who normally were confined in the center tended to be poor job-seekers from Southeast and South Asia.) Mean-while Japanese officials wrangled over whether to (a) arrest the man and question him at length while trying to confirm the identities of all the group members, as the police and the Justice Ministry preferred, or (b) simply deport the group, which was the preference of the Foreign Ministry.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

But when the Japanese set up affiliates in Korea, they soon found wages going up and pulled out for cheaper climes. And maybe the Koreans were glad to see them g o . (Why Malaysia? It has a population o f only 19 million, so labor, at least unskilled labor, is hard to come by. But it has entrepreneurs, and they draw workers like a magnet. Illegal immigrants, mainly from In­ donesia [population 190 million] and Bangladesh [115 million], pour in despite strenuous efforts to guard the gates. As everywhere, a thriv­ ing business smuggles people for oudandish fees. The outsiders don't look that different, but they are; so that it's not the competition for jobs that bothers the natives, it's mixed sex.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

(The direct mail piece: “Radical… gun-grabbing… soft on crime… destroy our Constitution and unleash what could well be the most terrifying crime wave in history…”) Within the NRA, a fundamentalist Christian gun-magazine publisher named Neal Knox, who opposed regulation even of machine guns, maneuvered to take over the organization’s new lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Affairs, bringing in as its director the fearsome former architect of the 1950s federal illegal immigrant deportation program called “Operation Wetback,” Harlon Bronson Carter, whose nickname was “Bullethead”—for his shaved head, and also his favorite medium of expression. (At the age of twenty he had been convicted of shooting to death a Mexican immigrant. The conviction was overturned because the judge had issued incorrect jury instructions.)


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

French Muslims’ strongest national voice remains the French Muslim Council (Conseil Français du Culte Musulman; CFCM), an umbrella organisation of 18 representatives from Muslim associations and mosques in France, established in 2003. Some 90% of the French Muslim community – Europe’s largest – are noncitizens. Most are illegal immigrants living in poverty-stricken bidonvilles (tinpot towns) around Paris, Lyon and other metropolitan centres. Many are unemployed (youth unemployment in many suburbs is 40%) and face little prospect of getting a job, let alone a decent one. According to the Washington Post, unlike in Britain, for example, where Muslims account for 11% of inmates, Muslims in French prisons make up between 60% and 70% of inmates – a reflection, Muslim leaders say, of the deep ethnic and social divide in France that discriminates against ethnic minorities


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Nothing reflects this dichotomy better than the law, in place since 2004, banning the Islamic headscarf, Jewish skullcap, crucifix and other religious symbols in French schools. France’s traditional ball games include pétanque and the more formal boules, which has a 70-page rule book. Both are played by men on a gravel pitch. Some 90% of the French Muslim community – Europe’s largest – are noncitizens. Most are illegal immigrants living in poverty-stricken bidonvilles (tinpot towns) around Paris, Lyon and other metropolitan centres. Many are unemployed (youth unemployment in many suburbs is 40%) and face little prospect of getting a job. Multiculturalism is a dominant feature of French football, with more than half of the 23 players in the last World Cup being of African, West Indian, Algerian or other non-French origin.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Into Brazil From the south side of Canal Laussat in Cayenne, minibuses to Régina and Saint-Georges run from 5am to 6pm by both private operators (€40) and TIG (€30). Do not drive between Cayenne and Saint-Georges at night or pick up hitchhikers along the Régina/Saint-Georges road; French authorities periodically clamp down on those seen to assist illegal immigrants. Saint-Georges is a small border town with a lively Brazilian feel, used as the jumping-off point for Brazil and tours of local indigenous villages along the Oyapok River. To cross over to Brazil, non-EU passport holders must get their passport stamped at the Police aux Frontières (Rue du Commandant Kodji, four blocks from river; daily 8am–6pm; closed for lunch).


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Detractors claim that the billions of pounds being spent are unlikely to be recouped, and local groups protest that a nature reserve, garden allotments and even popular sports venues are being bulldozed to make way for the Olympic Park. But before the Olympics take place, one of the government’s most controversial policies will grind into action. In 2009 the government will begin issuing biometric ID cards to British citizens. Supporters claim the cards will help combat crime and illegal immigration, and will make it easier to prove your identity to banks, the police and government agencies. Anti–ID card campaigners say the policy is an infringement of personal privacy and civil liberties, and that the unified database underlying the scheme is an IT disaster waiting to happen. Whatever the outcome, Britain is already one of the most spied-upon societies in the world, with 4.2 million CCTV surveillance cameras – about one for every 15 people.