Transcript
Adriel: What would you say are the effects of the post-war boom on the passing of the Immigration Act of 1965?
The last big wave of immigration was from 1890 to 1914 when 15.9 million immigrants poured in to this country coming from Europe. They were not coming from Northern Europe. They were coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. They were Italians and Greeks and Poles. They were not Protestants. They were Catholics. They came and took our jobs and in 1924, Congress enacted this incredible law that basically stopped all immigration into this country that was not coming from Northern Europe. For fifty years [after] there was virtually no immigration into America. The post-war period was a period of tremendous economic expansion with broad based economic prosperity. The average American man doubled his income between 1950 and 1970. The average American woman was at home in the suburbs giving birth to 3.6 children and the baby boom was spun out. We thought immigration was a thing of the past. We were a nation of immigrants, [but] now there is no immigration anymore. This racist law that blocked all non-Europeans from coming here was the law of the land in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. It could not survive the shifts of conscience of the civil rights movement and Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In 1965, Congress changed the law. That is why I sent you that chart. Isn’t that a remarkable chart? It shows the collapse of immigration for 50 years. Then in 1965 with the Hart-Celler Act, for the first time in the 20th century the door was open to non-Europeans. Congress changed the law when immigration was a thing of the past, and we got rid of this racist law. And totally unexpectedly everything changed.
In the 1960s with about 3.5 million immigrants coming, only 38% were from Europe. By the way, from 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean, to 1965, when LBJ was still alive, 82% of all human beings on the face of this earth that came to America's shores came from Europe. We were an amalgam of European nationalities. Another 12% were African, brought here as slaves to serve the Europeans’ needs. There was a handful of Chinese, Japanese working as farmers and laborers in California and Hawaii. This nation was an amalgam of European nationalities, deliberately so. It was operating in the last forty years of the period between 1924 and 1965 under one of the most viciously racist laws that the U.S. Congress has ever passed, the National Origins Quota act. You see that in the chart. The main thing that happened after 1965 is we become a nation of immigrants again, and this immigration is unprecedented in American history in being non-European and in being remarkably bifurcated with remarkable socioeconomic diversity. All past immigrants came here as peasants, and two or three generations ago [that changed] from peasants to plumber to professional. Now we have one group of immigrants coming with extraordinary educational credentials. - a new pattern of immigration, non-European and with tremendous socioeconomic diversity that represents the new America of the 21st century.
Adriel: How do the Cold War and America’s rise as a superpower affect the American public’s opinion of immigration?
Be clear that the law, an incredibly racist law, was on the books starting in 1924, that said there are three subspecies of the white race; Nordics who are biologically and intellectually superior, the Alpines, who in turn are superior to the Mediterraneans. All of them are superior to the Jews and the Asians. It said in the law. It codified the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in California and gentleman who have been to Japan in 1906 to declare. The 1924 Act declares that Asian’s are an inferior sub species of humanity ineligible from ever becoming American citizens. Asians were banned entirely from coming to America. It was a deeply racist world in America at the beginning and then in the middle of the twentieth century. What happened with the cold war was we were competing with the Soviets for the loyalty of all the other nations of the world. We divided the world as the Soviet Block and the Western Block. A lot of these nations were nations that had a lot of Asians in them, and a whole bunch of Jews.
After World War II, the law was still on the books, and was one of the powerful reasons why everyone said we got to get rid of this law, we’ve got to change the law. But no one expected it would change the realities of the American Immigration policy. We’d been pressured to change the law. Isn’t that an incredible statement for a leading country in the world to make about for the rest of the planet? It was just incredible. We thought that that was how the world was, there were sub-species of races and this was all biologically given, and that Europeans who came at the beginning of the 20th century, these peasants from Poland and Greece and Italy, were destroying the country. They were the inferior stock bringing down the American race. It was just incredible stuff. It was clear that it could not survive the competition for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world in our competition with the Soviet Union.
Adriel: Do you believe that the family reunification aspect of the 1965 immigration Act to be a success or failure of the bill?
It is the central hallmark of the American immigration policy. We are in the business of reuniting families. That is a major basis of our immigration. If you are the father, mother, sister, brother, son or daughter of an American Citizen you can come to the head of the line. Di you ever hear about Elian Gonzalez, that Cuban boy who was brought over by his mother, escaped a terrible incident on a boat where his mother died and Elian arrived in Miami where he had a great uncle who said “we’ll take him”, but the boy’s father back in Cuba said “he is my son and I want him back with me”? When the immigration people came to make a determination, there was no question as what needed to happen. A father trumps a great uncle. So Elian Gonzales went back to his father in Cuba. That was by the way one of the reasons why Congress thought nothing would change - we’re going to get rid of this racist law in 1965 and continue the hallmark of American immigration policy which is family reunification. If people coming here are already related, nothing will change and we’ll just get rid of this terrible law. Then it added another provision; if you are a professional or have exceptional ability or if you have skills that are in short supply you too can come to the head of the line. In its debate in the 1950s, Congress was saying we need to open the door to more British doctors, some more German engineers. It never occurred to anyone back in the 1950s that there were going to be African doctors, Indian engineers, Chinese computer programmers who’d be able for the first time in the 20th century to come to America. That is also why this bifurcated the immigration stream, because the Africans and the Asians who came here when the law was changed in 1965 had no family to reunify with because they had been banned the entire 20th century. The only way an African or an Asian could qualify was as a professional with exceptional ability- a doctor or an engineer- or to qualify for jobs that were in short supply. In Houston, the example was Filipino nurses -- trained in American-based nursing schools and coming here under the occupational provisions of the 1965 immigration reform act -- or in the case of the Vietnamese, qualifying for refugee status after escaping from communism at the fall of Saigon in 1975. One group of immigrants that can come in was [those] with extraordinary credentials.
The way Latinos are coming here legally is through family reunification. If you don’t have family in America, and you don't have special skills, and you are a Mexican worker wanting to come here to work in construction, or be a nanny or work in a daycare, and you don't have special skills, you cannot get here legally. That is the reason why we have 11 million people who are undocumented immigrants in the United States today. It is because we have not allowed for thirty years for immigrants to come here to do the jobs we desperately needed to have done in our economy, by people who desperately need to do them. The only way to get here was to sneak across the border. There is no legitimate line. You get here if you are professional, or you can get here if you're related to people already here. If you are not one of those two, and you are coming from Mexico, the line is about twenty eight years. Twenty eight years you’d have to wait to get here legally. That's why it's so critical to have immigration reform and why it is likely to happen this year finally. That is another story.
Adriel: How do you believe that this bill revolutionizes what it means to be an American and our ethnic heritage?
It is turning America from having been, through all of its history, a microcosm of European nationalities into becoming a microcosm of the world. We are the first nation in history that can say we are a free people and we come from everywhere and it is a truly remarkable moment and it is happening across all of America. Cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston already are majority minority. Washington is one of the main ones. By 2040 or 2045, the entire United States would be majority minority. Somewhere between 2040 and 2045, a majority of American’s will trace their ancestry to somewhere else on this planet than to Europe. That is a remarkable new reality and it is inevitable. [There is] nothing you can do to stop it because the older folks are disproportionately Anglo, the younger folks are disproportionately non-Anglo. Whether you like it or not we are becoming so truly a multiethnic society. A microcosm of the world. At the same time, we are becoming fully integrated into a single global economic system, a tremendous advantage for America to have people positioned with economic power who are African-American, Hispanic, and Asian to build new bridges to the global marketplace. But it is also a challenging time for change. Not surprisingly, not everybody is entirely happy about this. It is absolutely inevitable in the future of America and it can be the greatest asset this county can have.
That day in 1965, marked a fundamental transformation in the nature of America’s population. All the older people in America, all the people 65 years and older, are Anglos, because they were the ones who were born in the 20s and 30s. When we had that Baby Boom, I mentioned that Baby Boom 76 million babies born in this country between 1946 and 1964, we had a great economic expansion. They are the leading edge of 76 million babies that turned 66 this year. There will be a doubling of the Americans aged 65 and older in the next 25 years. They are overwhelmingly Anglos because it was not until 1965 for the first time in the twentieth century that non- Europeans were allowed in any meaningful numbers to come to America. The young people are disproportionately African-American, Latino and Asian. They will be the future of America. The future of America will be where all of us would be minorities, where all of us are working together to build this multiethnic world.
Adriel: What impact did the new wave of immigrants have on the suburbanization and decentralization?
That is another interesting thing about this new immigration. Always before, immigrants moved into cities because the cities had factories and these were unskilled peasants coming and working in Chicago and New York and Boston and Philadelphia. Then there was no immigration for 50 years. And now, with new immigration, one group is construction workers who’d move in to the city but another big group are doctors and engineers who move straight to the suburbs. So surrounding Houston, is a suburb called Fort Bend County. Fort Bend County is the most ethnically diverse county in America. It is 19% Asian, 22% Latino, 20% African-American, 36% Anglo. Always before immigrants went to the city and then eventually got out to the suburbs. Now this large group of immigrants, upper middle class professionals, come straight into the suburbs. Asians in America: 57% of Asians in Houston have college degrees compared to 37% for Anglos. This is an extraordinary community of upper middle-class professionals coming from educational and occupational backgrounds that are far superior to the average background of the average Anglo-American. That is something totally new under the sun from all of our immigration experience. That is why so many went straight out to the suburbs. Now there is a new move where many people in the suburbs want to come back to the city. That is another report.
Adriel: That was really, really, interesting because last year I did my entire National History Day project on the Suburban Revolution. I find it really interesting how this generation of immigrants is moving to the Suburbs and achieving the American Dream as soon as they cross the border which is pretty incredible.
That is the wrong way to see it. They came from upper middle class backgrounds. So achieving the America Dream just meant working as a doctor in Houston instead of Shanghai. It isn’t that they achieved the American Dream by hard work and strong family values, working way up from poverty. They came from far higher backgrounds than the vast majority of Anglos. Latinos are having a lot of trouble because they have come with very low levels of education. If all the Americans you’d see in India are upper-middle-class Americans, you’d say all the Americans are so smart and so successful. You miss the fact that this is not a random sample of Indians who would come to America. This is the upper crust of Indians who’d come. The reason again is because that is the only way you could get here. There is no possibility of family reunification. This immigration is strengthening and adding to the population of the suburbs because for the first time in American immigration history, immigrants are going straight out to the suburbs and bypassing the cities.
Adriel: How did this new wave of immigration affect the economy?
Almost no question that immigrants at all level bring enormous economic vitality. They work very hard , they have come here to work. The upper echelon of immigrants are sort of obvious, you are getting doctors, engineers and businesspeople and entrepreneurs -- Silicone Valley was overwhelmingly constructed by immigrants. High-level immigrants have been extraordinary in what they contributed to the American economy across the board; so have the less skilled immigrants who work very,very, hard at very low wages and [who also] contribute enormously to the economic vitality of the country. Cities that have been doing well the last 20 years are the cities that have been big destinations for immigrants. Cities that are not doing well, the cities that are losing population, the cities that are losing their status as a major city in America, are all the cities that have not been attractive to immigrants; Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Buffalo. You can see those cities that have not been able to make the transition to the knowledge economy and to be a magnet for immigration of the 21st century. No question that immigrants even in the short run, and obviously the long run, make major contributions to American economy.
Adriel: Do you think immigrants have changed the economy from perhaps being more labor oriented one to a more knowledge oriented one?
That change is happening everywhere no matter what. It is happening for two reasons. One is globalization. A very good way to think about our problems today is if somebody said “it is not the decline of the West but the rise of the rest”. We are in a world where there are large numbers of highly educated middle class people in India and China and Vietnam and in South America. So the result is that American kids are now competing in a global marketplace and education is now critical. Blue-collar jobs have disappeared. If you are in a global economy, companies can produce goods anywhere and sell them everywhere. If you are doing a job that I can train a third-world worker to do and pay that the worker ten dollars a day to that job, I'm not going to pay you ten dollars an hour. Across America there are growing inequalities between rich and poor. Above all else is access to quality education. Education has become the critical determinant of a person’s ability to earn enough money in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. That is happening everywhere and immigrants have been a part of that bifurcated stream coming into a bifurcated economy. The economy is an hourglass economy with a shrinking middle class, because the good blue-collar jobs, where we dropped out of high school with a strong right arm and expected to make a middle class wage, those opportunities are gone forever. We are in a new world, a new single worldwide global economy. Education is now critical where it was never before.
You are one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve interviewed so far. You are really forward thinking compared to most of the people I’ve interviewed.
Adriel: How did the Immigration act change globalization?
I am not sure. Two ways. One is we now have in America extraordinary [Asian] Indians, extraordinary Chinese, extraordinary Vietnamese, extraordinary Latinos and we are in a global economy. We now have people in this country who can build the bridges to the global marketplace in a very, very effective way. An example of a country that isn’t in a position to do that is Japan, which is totally homogeneous, very few immigrants and much less able to operate successfully in the global economy. So having Americans who are also Indians, who are also Chinese, who are also Mexican, is a tremendous advantage for this country, precisely because we now know in a globalized economy.
Send me link to your website. Don’t hesitate to call or email if you have other questions.
Adriel: Thank you. Nice talking to you.
The last big wave of immigration was from 1890 to 1914 when 15.9 million immigrants poured in to this country coming from Europe. They were not coming from Northern Europe. They were coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. They were Italians and Greeks and Poles. They were not Protestants. They were Catholics. They came and took our jobs and in 1924, Congress enacted this incredible law that basically stopped all immigration into this country that was not coming from Northern Europe. For fifty years [after] there was virtually no immigration into America. The post-war period was a period of tremendous economic expansion with broad based economic prosperity. The average American man doubled his income between 1950 and 1970. The average American woman was at home in the suburbs giving birth to 3.6 children and the baby boom was spun out. We thought immigration was a thing of the past. We were a nation of immigrants, [but] now there is no immigration anymore. This racist law that blocked all non-Europeans from coming here was the law of the land in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. It could not survive the shifts of conscience of the civil rights movement and Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In 1965, Congress changed the law. That is why I sent you that chart. Isn’t that a remarkable chart? It shows the collapse of immigration for 50 years. Then in 1965 with the Hart-Celler Act, for the first time in the 20th century the door was open to non-Europeans. Congress changed the law when immigration was a thing of the past, and we got rid of this racist law. And totally unexpectedly everything changed.
In the 1960s with about 3.5 million immigrants coming, only 38% were from Europe. By the way, from 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean, to 1965, when LBJ was still alive, 82% of all human beings on the face of this earth that came to America's shores came from Europe. We were an amalgam of European nationalities. Another 12% were African, brought here as slaves to serve the Europeans’ needs. There was a handful of Chinese, Japanese working as farmers and laborers in California and Hawaii. This nation was an amalgam of European nationalities, deliberately so. It was operating in the last forty years of the period between 1924 and 1965 under one of the most viciously racist laws that the U.S. Congress has ever passed, the National Origins Quota act. You see that in the chart. The main thing that happened after 1965 is we become a nation of immigrants again, and this immigration is unprecedented in American history in being non-European and in being remarkably bifurcated with remarkable socioeconomic diversity. All past immigrants came here as peasants, and two or three generations ago [that changed] from peasants to plumber to professional. Now we have one group of immigrants coming with extraordinary educational credentials. - a new pattern of immigration, non-European and with tremendous socioeconomic diversity that represents the new America of the 21st century.
Adriel: How do the Cold War and America’s rise as a superpower affect the American public’s opinion of immigration?
Be clear that the law, an incredibly racist law, was on the books starting in 1924, that said there are three subspecies of the white race; Nordics who are biologically and intellectually superior, the Alpines, who in turn are superior to the Mediterraneans. All of them are superior to the Jews and the Asians. It said in the law. It codified the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in California and gentleman who have been to Japan in 1906 to declare. The 1924 Act declares that Asian’s are an inferior sub species of humanity ineligible from ever becoming American citizens. Asians were banned entirely from coming to America. It was a deeply racist world in America at the beginning and then in the middle of the twentieth century. What happened with the cold war was we were competing with the Soviets for the loyalty of all the other nations of the world. We divided the world as the Soviet Block and the Western Block. A lot of these nations were nations that had a lot of Asians in them, and a whole bunch of Jews.
After World War II, the law was still on the books, and was one of the powerful reasons why everyone said we got to get rid of this law, we’ve got to change the law. But no one expected it would change the realities of the American Immigration policy. We’d been pressured to change the law. Isn’t that an incredible statement for a leading country in the world to make about for the rest of the planet? It was just incredible. We thought that that was how the world was, there were sub-species of races and this was all biologically given, and that Europeans who came at the beginning of the 20th century, these peasants from Poland and Greece and Italy, were destroying the country. They were the inferior stock bringing down the American race. It was just incredible stuff. It was clear that it could not survive the competition for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world in our competition with the Soviet Union.
Adriel: Do you believe that the family reunification aspect of the 1965 immigration Act to be a success or failure of the bill?
It is the central hallmark of the American immigration policy. We are in the business of reuniting families. That is a major basis of our immigration. If you are the father, mother, sister, brother, son or daughter of an American Citizen you can come to the head of the line. Di you ever hear about Elian Gonzalez, that Cuban boy who was brought over by his mother, escaped a terrible incident on a boat where his mother died and Elian arrived in Miami where he had a great uncle who said “we’ll take him”, but the boy’s father back in Cuba said “he is my son and I want him back with me”? When the immigration people came to make a determination, there was no question as what needed to happen. A father trumps a great uncle. So Elian Gonzales went back to his father in Cuba. That was by the way one of the reasons why Congress thought nothing would change - we’re going to get rid of this racist law in 1965 and continue the hallmark of American immigration policy which is family reunification. If people coming here are already related, nothing will change and we’ll just get rid of this terrible law. Then it added another provision; if you are a professional or have exceptional ability or if you have skills that are in short supply you too can come to the head of the line. In its debate in the 1950s, Congress was saying we need to open the door to more British doctors, some more German engineers. It never occurred to anyone back in the 1950s that there were going to be African doctors, Indian engineers, Chinese computer programmers who’d be able for the first time in the 20th century to come to America. That is also why this bifurcated the immigration stream, because the Africans and the Asians who came here when the law was changed in 1965 had no family to reunify with because they had been banned the entire 20th century. The only way an African or an Asian could qualify was as a professional with exceptional ability- a doctor or an engineer- or to qualify for jobs that were in short supply. In Houston, the example was Filipino nurses -- trained in American-based nursing schools and coming here under the occupational provisions of the 1965 immigration reform act -- or in the case of the Vietnamese, qualifying for refugee status after escaping from communism at the fall of Saigon in 1975. One group of immigrants that can come in was [those] with extraordinary credentials.
The way Latinos are coming here legally is through family reunification. If you don’t have family in America, and you don't have special skills, and you are a Mexican worker wanting to come here to work in construction, or be a nanny or work in a daycare, and you don't have special skills, you cannot get here legally. That is the reason why we have 11 million people who are undocumented immigrants in the United States today. It is because we have not allowed for thirty years for immigrants to come here to do the jobs we desperately needed to have done in our economy, by people who desperately need to do them. The only way to get here was to sneak across the border. There is no legitimate line. You get here if you are professional, or you can get here if you're related to people already here. If you are not one of those two, and you are coming from Mexico, the line is about twenty eight years. Twenty eight years you’d have to wait to get here legally. That's why it's so critical to have immigration reform and why it is likely to happen this year finally. That is another story.
Adriel: How do you believe that this bill revolutionizes what it means to be an American and our ethnic heritage?
It is turning America from having been, through all of its history, a microcosm of European nationalities into becoming a microcosm of the world. We are the first nation in history that can say we are a free people and we come from everywhere and it is a truly remarkable moment and it is happening across all of America. Cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston already are majority minority. Washington is one of the main ones. By 2040 or 2045, the entire United States would be majority minority. Somewhere between 2040 and 2045, a majority of American’s will trace their ancestry to somewhere else on this planet than to Europe. That is a remarkable new reality and it is inevitable. [There is] nothing you can do to stop it because the older folks are disproportionately Anglo, the younger folks are disproportionately non-Anglo. Whether you like it or not we are becoming so truly a multiethnic society. A microcosm of the world. At the same time, we are becoming fully integrated into a single global economic system, a tremendous advantage for America to have people positioned with economic power who are African-American, Hispanic, and Asian to build new bridges to the global marketplace. But it is also a challenging time for change. Not surprisingly, not everybody is entirely happy about this. It is absolutely inevitable in the future of America and it can be the greatest asset this county can have.
That day in 1965, marked a fundamental transformation in the nature of America’s population. All the older people in America, all the people 65 years and older, are Anglos, because they were the ones who were born in the 20s and 30s. When we had that Baby Boom, I mentioned that Baby Boom 76 million babies born in this country between 1946 and 1964, we had a great economic expansion. They are the leading edge of 76 million babies that turned 66 this year. There will be a doubling of the Americans aged 65 and older in the next 25 years. They are overwhelmingly Anglos because it was not until 1965 for the first time in the twentieth century that non- Europeans were allowed in any meaningful numbers to come to America. The young people are disproportionately African-American, Latino and Asian. They will be the future of America. The future of America will be where all of us would be minorities, where all of us are working together to build this multiethnic world.
Adriel: What impact did the new wave of immigrants have on the suburbanization and decentralization?
That is another interesting thing about this new immigration. Always before, immigrants moved into cities because the cities had factories and these were unskilled peasants coming and working in Chicago and New York and Boston and Philadelphia. Then there was no immigration for 50 years. And now, with new immigration, one group is construction workers who’d move in to the city but another big group are doctors and engineers who move straight to the suburbs. So surrounding Houston, is a suburb called Fort Bend County. Fort Bend County is the most ethnically diverse county in America. It is 19% Asian, 22% Latino, 20% African-American, 36% Anglo. Always before immigrants went to the city and then eventually got out to the suburbs. Now this large group of immigrants, upper middle class professionals, come straight into the suburbs. Asians in America: 57% of Asians in Houston have college degrees compared to 37% for Anglos. This is an extraordinary community of upper middle-class professionals coming from educational and occupational backgrounds that are far superior to the average background of the average Anglo-American. That is something totally new under the sun from all of our immigration experience. That is why so many went straight out to the suburbs. Now there is a new move where many people in the suburbs want to come back to the city. That is another report.
Adriel: That was really, really, interesting because last year I did my entire National History Day project on the Suburban Revolution. I find it really interesting how this generation of immigrants is moving to the Suburbs and achieving the American Dream as soon as they cross the border which is pretty incredible.
That is the wrong way to see it. They came from upper middle class backgrounds. So achieving the America Dream just meant working as a doctor in Houston instead of Shanghai. It isn’t that they achieved the American Dream by hard work and strong family values, working way up from poverty. They came from far higher backgrounds than the vast majority of Anglos. Latinos are having a lot of trouble because they have come with very low levels of education. If all the Americans you’d see in India are upper-middle-class Americans, you’d say all the Americans are so smart and so successful. You miss the fact that this is not a random sample of Indians who would come to America. This is the upper crust of Indians who’d come. The reason again is because that is the only way you could get here. There is no possibility of family reunification. This immigration is strengthening and adding to the population of the suburbs because for the first time in American immigration history, immigrants are going straight out to the suburbs and bypassing the cities.
Adriel: How did this new wave of immigration affect the economy?
Almost no question that immigrants at all level bring enormous economic vitality. They work very hard , they have come here to work. The upper echelon of immigrants are sort of obvious, you are getting doctors, engineers and businesspeople and entrepreneurs -- Silicone Valley was overwhelmingly constructed by immigrants. High-level immigrants have been extraordinary in what they contributed to the American economy across the board; so have the less skilled immigrants who work very,very, hard at very low wages and [who also] contribute enormously to the economic vitality of the country. Cities that have been doing well the last 20 years are the cities that have been big destinations for immigrants. Cities that are not doing well, the cities that are losing population, the cities that are losing their status as a major city in America, are all the cities that have not been attractive to immigrants; Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Buffalo. You can see those cities that have not been able to make the transition to the knowledge economy and to be a magnet for immigration of the 21st century. No question that immigrants even in the short run, and obviously the long run, make major contributions to American economy.
Adriel: Do you think immigrants have changed the economy from perhaps being more labor oriented one to a more knowledge oriented one?
That change is happening everywhere no matter what. It is happening for two reasons. One is globalization. A very good way to think about our problems today is if somebody said “it is not the decline of the West but the rise of the rest”. We are in a world where there are large numbers of highly educated middle class people in India and China and Vietnam and in South America. So the result is that American kids are now competing in a global marketplace and education is now critical. Blue-collar jobs have disappeared. If you are in a global economy, companies can produce goods anywhere and sell them everywhere. If you are doing a job that I can train a third-world worker to do and pay that the worker ten dollars a day to that job, I'm not going to pay you ten dollars an hour. Across America there are growing inequalities between rich and poor. Above all else is access to quality education. Education has become the critical determinant of a person’s ability to earn enough money in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. That is happening everywhere and immigrants have been a part of that bifurcated stream coming into a bifurcated economy. The economy is an hourglass economy with a shrinking middle class, because the good blue-collar jobs, where we dropped out of high school with a strong right arm and expected to make a middle class wage, those opportunities are gone forever. We are in a new world, a new single worldwide global economy. Education is now critical where it was never before.
You are one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve interviewed so far. You are really forward thinking compared to most of the people I’ve interviewed.
Adriel: How did the Immigration act change globalization?
I am not sure. Two ways. One is we now have in America extraordinary [Asian] Indians, extraordinary Chinese, extraordinary Vietnamese, extraordinary Latinos and we are in a global economy. We now have people in this country who can build the bridges to the global marketplace in a very, very effective way. An example of a country that isn’t in a position to do that is Japan, which is totally homogeneous, very few immigrants and much less able to operate successfully in the global economy. So having Americans who are also Indians, who are also Chinese, who are also Mexican, is a tremendous advantage for this country, precisely because we now know in a globalized economy.
Send me link to your website. Don’t hesitate to call or email if you have other questions.
Adriel: Thank you. Nice talking to you.