Immigrants replace them in the labor force; leisure replaces work in their lives.
“[T]he United States has been a magnet for low-skill immigration even as low-skill natives have worked less and less,” Richwine writes.
..What it does show is that immigrants are picking up the slack left by jobless natives, taking the pressure off American society to do something about its problem of idle young men. Businesses looking for low-skill labor, for example, don’t have to attract natives, because they can hire immigrants instead—leaving low-skill natives to do whatever it is they do in their parents’ basements when they don’t have jobs.
..Since the early 2000s, young, low-skill men have added about four hours a week to their leisure time, replacing almost one-to-one the working hours they lost.
About three of those additional hours are spent on video games.
Each day, low-skill young men who aren’t employed spend an average of about two hours apiece (roughly 12 hours a week) playing video games.
Each day, a quarter of these nonworking men game for three hours or longer; a tenth game six hours or more. (Note that it’s hard to say whether these are the same people binging day after day. In the time-diary survey, each person is interviewed only once, about what they did on a single day.)
.. there is a difference between correlation and causation, and if men left the labor force for reasons unrelated to video games, no one would be surprised if they nonetheless ended up playing more video games in their newfound free time. But he offers an argument that is at least plausible:
.. However, if it were up to him, I have no doubt he would play video games 23-and-a-half hours per day. He told me so. If we didn’t ration video games, I am not sure he would ever eat. I am positive he wouldn’t shower.
.. Even among low-skill men who aren’t employed, only about 40 percent play video games on any given day, while more than 80 percent watch TV or movies.
.. if there’s anything to the argument that leisure time has become more pleasant, the story should start with TV, not video games.
.. Perhaps one should not dwell too long, however, on the question of what type of leisure low-skill young men are engaging in. The more important fact remains that leisure is slowly replacing work in their lives, as immigrants replace them in the labor force.
Phillis Schlafly: Baseball Ruined by Foreign Players
Schlafly’s idea of conservatism could move in unusual directions. She contended that Major League Baseball was being ruined by foreign players:
More than a quarter of Major League Baseball players today are foreign-born, with whom our youth are less likely to identify. Some of these players cannot speak English, and they did not rise through the ranks of Little League. These foreign-born players enter on visas and take positions that should have gone to American players . . . Perhaps baseball owners think that foreign players are cheaper and easier to control.
Er, cheaper? Has she looked at those multi-million dollar salaries that both native-born and foreign-born players are getting?
Donald Trump’s Alt-Right Brain
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the alt-right “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”
.. “Immigration is a kind of proxy war — and maybe a last stand — for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile,” Mr. Spencer wrote
Weeks after campaign pledged answers, big questions about Melania Trump’s immigration status linger
Donald Trump’s immigration position is, at its heart, fairly simple. People in the country illegally will be subject to deportation if he is elected president, as he said in his speech this week in Arizona.
.. “Immigration law doesn’t exist for the purpose of keeping criminals out,” he said. “It exists to protect all aspects of American life — the work site, the welfare office, the education system and everything else.”
.. “The act of marrying a legal permanent resident of the United States doesn’t in and of itself do anything,” Leopold said.
.. A green card isn’t guaranteed to the new spouse, but it makes them eligible to begin the process.
.. that the coming in and going out, to anybody who’s been around this stuff, suggests that she was on a visitor visa, which doesn’t permit work,” he said. If Melania Trump came in on a visitor visa and began working over a short period of time, the government would assume that she entered the country fraudulently. If she told a customs official she was entering the United States as a visitor but was planning to work, that’s a material misrepresentation.
.. To get a work-related immigrant visa, Leopold added, Trump’s prospective employer would have had to prove that Trump filled a job duty that no American could fill — to show, in other words, that no other model in New York City would have done that shoot. Unless, of course, she had special skills — or a special degree.
.. You may remember that shortly before questions about Trump’s status arose, she suddenly took down her personal website. That change followedrevelations that Trump claimed to have a degree that biographers from Slovenia discovered she didn’t... We don’t know why Melania Trump claimed to have that degree — but having such degrees could bolster an argument for a work visa. If she told an employer she had degrees she didn’t to obtain a visa (and the employer wasn’t the wiser), Melania Trump is culpable… when you apply for citizenship, one of the questions they ask you is if have you ever sought to obtain immigration benefits from fraud. If you don’t ‘fess up and answer ‘yes’ if you’ve done that, now you have bad moral character and you’re ineligible for citizenship.” In the worst case, this could lead to denaturalization — loss of citizenship... In an interview with Univision, a former attorney for the Trump Organization said that Melania Trump obtained her green card in 2001 “based on marriage.” But she married Donald Trump in 2005 and has said that she wasn’t married previously.