America Needs Better Immigrants

The U.S. isn’t paying enough attention to the potential contributions (and costs) of immigrants it admits. Family reunification accounts for about two-thirds of green cards, while the H-1B and Diversity visa lotteries use a random-selection process. Admitting younger, more highly educated immigrants could reduce U.S. debt by a whopping $20 trillion after 30 years.

Daniel Di Martino estimates that one 30-year-old immigrant with a bachelor’s degree could alone reduce the debt by $1.6 million over the next 30 years. “By contrast,” Di Martino writes, “an immigrant without a high school diploma, even one of working age, costs the Treasury a net $130,000 over the same period.”

Read more about how the U.S. can change the current system to emphasize “newcomers’ potential contributions.”

New York City is mourning the loss of Alvin Kass, who died last week at 89. He worked for the NYPD for almost 60 years, becoming the department’s youngest chaplain at age 30 and climbing the ranks to become chief chaplain.

“In the face of rising anti-Semitism, Rabbi Kass often urged concerned Jewish New Yorkers and officers to be proud of who they are,” Yael Bar Tur writes. “He wore his NYPD yarmulke proudly and advised others to do the same, even if they were scared.”

And he refused to let religion come between him and police officers in an overwhelmingly Christian department. He “liked to say that he held the record for most Catholic Masses attended by a rabbi,” Bar Tur writes.

Radical publishing house PM Press recently released Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion, a collection of essays that offers a direct look at how the far Left thinks.

“It acts as a source for those ‘wanting to learn from the past to gain inspiration and tactics for the struggles going on in the present,’ pushes against ‘normativity,’ argues for radical and militant ‘queer politics,’ and expresses a degree of historical revisionism that would make the most ardent propagandist blush,” Stu Smith writes.

Read his review.

Shirley Jackson was undoubtedly a literary success. She was a popular essayist and bestselling novelist, and her works were adapted into movies and plays. Her best-known book, The Haunting of Hill House, has become a definitive American horror novel. “Its basic set-up—a cast of disparate characters gathering at an ill-starred house for paranormal investigations—provides the plot of dozens of films, novels, television movies, and reality shows,” Carlos Acevedo writes. But Jackson also infuses the story with a human element missing in many thrillers today.

Read more about the novel and Jackson’s impact on the genre.

“They throw ‘fascist’ around like Bernie wields ‘oligarch,’ but they don’t know the meaning of the word, else they would not be using classical fascist techniques to spread their failed Communist pathology.”

Photo credit: JOSEPH PREZIOSO / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images