Someone who needs a trip to NZ
Matthew Yglesias, who writes a generally sensible and data-heavy opinion column at Slate, has been arguing (correctly) that US immigration policy deserves much more attention than it gets:
Imagine a counterfactual history of the United States in which we had slightly different tax and budget policies over the centuries, and you’re imagining an extremely boring scenario. Most likely, things would be about the same. But imagine a counterfactual history of the United States in which we never opened our borders to the ethnic “others” of the past—the Catholics and Jews of Eastern and Southern Europe, then more recently Asians and Latin Americans. That is a very different vision of America. Not a bad place, necessarily, but probably one that looks a lot more like New Zealand—pleasant, much less densely populated, much more focused on primary commodities, somewhat poorer, and much more monolithically focused on the originally settled port cities.
He clearly doesn’t realise that nearly a quarter of NZ residents were born elsewhere, a figure the US has not approached for at least 150 years.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I’d add that perhaps more important than the proportion of people born overseas is the diversity of those people compared to the rest of the population. I’d say that the increase of immigrants from Asia, particularly in contrast with people from UK and Ireland, has worked wonders to improve the palatability of food in New Zealand and to make NZ’s society more cosmopolitan.
12 years ago