Studies showing lower mobility in the U.S. (and UK) for people born in the U.S.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf
It still makes sense for someone NOT born in the U.S. to come here to further economic opportunity, but notice that the illegal immigration rate has fallen dramatically, so it would seem the U.S. has become less attractive even here in some sense.
I"m aware that the flow of immigration from south had slowed to almost nothing except for the children that keep getting sent up here from Central America.
But I also know that despite lower mobility starting to develop here it’s still more mobile than any country in Europe.
We could lose that, but right now we are still able to achieve the American Dream - we have to work harder now than used to be the case.
That’s not what the Brookings Study (the first link I posted) says. The study places us in the “low mobility” group with the UK and possibly Italy.
All of these countries do better (some much better):
France
Germany
Sweden
Canada,
Norway
Finland
Denmark
Spain
Australia
The U.S. does have a high per capita GDP, but the enormous skew in income (the highest in the advanced world) makes that less relevant to the not-wealthy.
Here are some quotes from some of the conclusions in the Stanford study
Figure 1 demonstrates substantial variation
in the degree of intergenerational
earnings mobility across 24 countries,
as measured by the percentage change
in child earnings for each percentage
change in parent earnings. The strength
of the tie between parent and child
earnings, when the child’s earnings are
measured in adulthood, varies more than
threefold between the most and least
fluid countries. At one extreme, a father
who makes twice as much as another
(i.e., 100% more) can expect his son to
earn 50 to 60 percent more in adulthood,
a very high level of intergenerational rigidity
found in countries like Peru, South
Africa, China, and Brazil. At the other
extreme, the earnings disparity between
such children shrinks to less than 20 percent
in countries like Denmark, Norway,
Finland, and Canada.
The U.S. sits at the upper end of this list,
among a band of countries with rela-tively low intergenerational mobility, where 40 to 50 percent
of income inequality is passed on across the generations. As
many have pointed out, the American Dream is evidently more
likely to be found on the other side of the Atlantic, indeed
most notably in Denmark.1
What accounts for this substantial cross-national variability?
Alan Kreuger, the former chief economic advisor to the
Obama administration, is one among many to point out that
intergenerational mobility measured in this way is also related
to cross-national differences in income inequality.2
That is,
high-inequality countries tend to be countries with low mobility,
a relationship that led Krueger to suppose that, as income inequality is increasing in the U.S., so too mobility may be
declining.
And I acknowledged that it may be. But may be is in direct opposition to what I’m being told.
And in direct opposition to what i’ve been told in both Italy and Spain.
I am sure what you are saying is correct - that that is what you are hearing from some people. I personally know many Canadian doctors who came to the U.S. to increase their earnings potential, and of course we all know many immigrants who have come and been success stories here that they could never have been in their native countries.
But what we are talking about is the likelihood of someone making a significant transition from one class to another in the United States - in other words, how likely is it that a significant portion of children born to low income households are going to move to middle or high income, and that number has been steadily declining since the 60’s, got a shot of steroids under Reagan, and is becoming less and less likely as our policies (getting rid of inheritance taxes, reducing taxes on dividends, making college less and less affordable) tend to cement the class system into place.
Not to mention the destruction of unions.
Lankford: U.S. Doesn’t Hold Children Accountable For Actions Of Their Parents
…
But trump does. And especially if they happen to be a brown skinned family. Then “they are rapists and criminals although some are good people” trump said.
Indeed. Hard to imagine the Rs would just do this without adding something draconian to it. Imagine it now: The DACA-like immigrants can stay, if their parents self-deport, and if a Bigly, Beautiful, wall is authorized. What? See? The Ds didn’t really care about the DACA after all. It’s those obstructionist Ds fault the six months passed and the Trump administration has to load up the boxcars…
Votes with trumpp 95.8% of the time. This is useless happy talk.
There’s a statue in New York Harbor which has been welcoming to immigrants since 1886, We are the shining beacon which tells them they have the chance at the American dream. If other countries do something similar, I don’t know about it, but it seems the only honorable, humane thing to do. I feel shitty, still, and it’s manifesting itself in anger today.
If they were really serious about the “we’ll fix it in six months” thing, they’d just bleeping fix it. This is about as credible as the plan to repeal the ACA with a one-year grace period to figure out a replacement.
This way they all get to posture about trump and about how they love young people whose parents were in the US without valid documents, and then in six months when everything goes to hell they can be shocked and surprised.
The thing about ending DACA is that it doesn’t by itself deport anyone, it just makes a huge chunk of younger immigrants and their families subject to the same crap as people who came to the US as adults. Which some employers will love, because they get to pay lower wages to a bunch of college-educated english speakers. (Yeah, I know that shortly after that it all falls apart, but that will be the beginning of how it works.)
I doubt it. Most of them are very valued employees and I know that those who are in the Dallas area have had their employers go to bat for them.
Writing this legislation in six months - and I mean this seriously - should be easy, as long as it’s focused on the people who are currently eligible for DACA only. President Obama’s executive order includes the eligibility standards and the consequences (work permit, education) of meeting that eligibility - so the only additional step would be deciding on the conditions by which those people get to move on to citizenship. Although that step is more controversial, it also is something that has been written into various drafts of immigration “reform” bills over the last decade, and (again, for the DACA-eligible Dreamers) is broadly supported in both parties, i.e. that they eventually should become U.S. citizens.
It’s unfortunate that it took an evil move on Trump’s part to prod Congress to get this done, but it seems like the conditions are actually favorable legislation enshrining in law what up to now amounted to a non-deportation policy + work/school permits. At least I hope so after hearing all the Republican legislators’ whinging about how eliminating DACA is bad …
o/t
from The Hill
The White House had said that an announcement would be made Tuesday as Trump grappled with whether to scrap the 2012 program, which defers deportation for those brought to the U.S. illegally as children who applied for work visas.
Trump’s daily schedule released by the White House for Tuesday noted several meetings relating to national security and tax reform but included no mention of a DACA announcement.
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/904882277297082368
Pastor Jentezen Franklin personally pleaded Trump to help those who would be impacted by his decision during a meeting with Trump’s spiritual advisers in the Oval Office Friday, Franklin told The Washington Post.
Franklin said he and Trump discussed Trump’s love for his own children before Franklin said he wanted “to see that kind of heart toward these children.”
I have not seen a single accusation against Tiffany Trump
She may be the smartest one of the whole herd.
“However, we as Americans do not hold children legally accountable for the actions of their parents.”
So, adoptions for everyone? Or is this another ‘pro-life’ ‘anti-living’ crusade? Let’s feel better about allowing all the kids to stay when we’re deporting their parents to another country?