printYou know just how scholarly an essay is when it is studded with loaded pop-words like “conversation”: “We need to have a conversation about race (when we do nothing but subject ourselves to one-way brow-beatings about imagined slights committed against the pigmentally burdened). “We need to have a conversation about immigration (translation: Get with the program of mass immigration from the third world and its implications for your communities—reduced quality of life, poorer education, environmental degradation; less safety and security, more taxation).
Jennifer Bradley of the liberal Brookings Institute lectures Middle America on how to prepare its diverse workforce for tomorrow.
Thus, for example, it is stated that “America is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, where new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economics, and politics.” The implication is that the seismic shift is due to a mystic force, and not to willful policies in which the host population has never had a say.
A feature of the Minneapolis-St. Paul diversity explosion, as Bradley sees it, is a widening “race-based education and achievement gap” that will “become a drag on workforce growths unless something was done to reverse these trends.” In other words, the immigrant population isn’t up to scratch.
I can think of a few options to narrow the gap. One is to welcome immigrants who’ll add value, not drain resources. But Bradely is here not to explore all options, but to dictate them.
The raiment of scholarship is shed as quickly as a hooker sheds her clothes (only less admirably; working girls deserve respect). Bradely brays about the need to “reframe the conversation about race-based education and achievement gaps in Minneapolis-St. Paul — turning what had been a moral (and insufficiently effective) commitment to its underserved communities into an economic necessity. Leading figures from the worlds of government, business, and academia, and public and private groups throughout the region, are now trying to figure out how to undo the effects of decades of neglect, tackling the problem from many perspectives and with an ever greater sense of urgency.”
If a population is not achieving parity it is inferred that it has been “underserved”; that its inhabitants need more resources rather than that the fault lies with the kind of incompatible immigrant being privileged by policy makers. The essay’s premise is that America is “underserving” her immigrant population, when it is the other way round:
Averaged out, the immigrant population is underserving the American economy.
And, research is only as good as the semantics used to state the hypothesis.
MORE braying (with apologies to donkeys; they’re adorable).