Kareen Movsesyan
Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read

Thank you for your comments. I will address two of your points here.

1. On Mexican immigrants, the mystery I mention regards their failure to reach wage parity with the native-born between 1970 and 1990 in California (as presented by the RAND study). If you are suggesting that strict immigration laws are the true cause of this discrepancy, then I would be very interested in reading some studies on this. As far as I know, remittance payments, the sending of money back to one’s native country, has empirically been found to boost foreign investment without any discernible impact on lending workers’ wages (two examples here). Your point seems to better describe why so many illegal immigrants settled into American society over recent years.

2. On the topic of ethnic divisions due to education, there is no clear answer here. A country without a national consciousness is an unstable one, while a country where its people celebrate diversity and different cultural heritages does not imply the absence of said consciousness. The real complication arises from today’s mixing of cultural identities with politics. By itself, the labeling and respect of ones cultural roots is harmless, but when politics comes into play, then we have to worry about claims of discrimination, the end of Western civilization and other very serious, and sometimes hyperbolic charges. Like with my article, these arguments reflect serious disagreements over optics, such as our views of history and the ideal trajectory that society should take.

    Kareen Movsesyan

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    Research hobbyist: covering law, politics and philosophy