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#Immigration – New report from CIS: the foreign-born population of the US “hit new record highs in March 2024 of 51.6 million and 15.6 percent of the total U.S. population. Since March 2022 the foreign-born population has increased 5.1 million, the largest two-year increase in American history. The foreign-born population has never grown this much this fast. Although many think of immigrants only as workers, less than half of those who arrived since 2022 are employed.” This should finally squash those crazy Great Replacement theories…
#DEI – UNC Chapel Hill board votes to dismantle DEI programs, use funds on campus police after anti-Israel protests, Fox News reports. Chris Rufo gloats, as he ought to. “Defund DEI to fund the police,” a winning new slogan?
#Immigration – Important and timely report from Heritage’s Jay P. Greene: the percentage of foreign-trained doctors in the US has shot from 9% in 1981 to 25% in 2024. “It was a policy choice to import significantly more foreign-educated doctors rather than train more in the United States.” An anecdote, but perhaps a revealing one: your correspondent heard from a person who worked as an English proficiency judge; this person’s job, working for a private company, was to interview foreigners living in the UK to certify that they had English proficiency and could apply for jobs in the UK. In this process, this person learned–his interviewees were apparently stunningly open in discussing this fraud–that many people from countries like Nigeria or the Sudan came to study in medical school in the UK on student or even refugee visas but did not take their final exams, knowing they would fail them; instead, they would fly home during finals season and take the exams in the medical school in their home country which had lower standards, and then, armed with their foreign medical degree, qualify to practice medicine in the UK. The point is this: while there are no doubt excellent universities and excellent graduates everywhere in the world, it is also the case that many institutions in the third world have dramatically lower standards. So-called high-skilled immigration is one of the few areas where there is still a political consensus in the US, but there are many devils in the details; we discussed these (and many other topics) in our wide-ranging interview with Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian.
#Reg – The Biden Administration’s extremism when it comes to regulation continues unabated. From Dan Goldbeck, Director of Regulatory Policy at American Action Forum: “[T]his past week saw regulatory costs come surging back in rare form. […] There were 36 rulemakings with some quantifiable economic impact – the highest such total in recent memory. Nearly one-third of those actions (11, to be precise) were measured in the billions of dollars. […] Across all rulemakings, agencies published $157.9 billion in total costs and added 7.3 million annual paperwork burden hours.” Our exclusive interview with American Action Forum President Douglas Holtz-Eakin covers the Biden Administration’s regulatory bulimia and many other topics.
#Trade – Cato with an overview of the US’s many food tariffs.
#AI – R Street’s Adam Thierer points out the proliferation of state-level AI bills, which threatens the possibility of having a coherent Federal framework. States as policy laboratories are a great idea, but AI is such a global phenomenon, with significant national security implications, that it’s probably best to address it at the Federal level.
#AgPolicy – “Today, organizations representing taxpayers and consumers [including Heritage, the National Taxpayers Union, and R Street] issued […] statements in opposition to proposals to increase farm subsidy reference prices.” More here.
#Trans – More bad news for the LGBT lobby and good news for sanity and science: new documents released in the legal defense of North Carolina’s age limits on pediatric sex-trait modification reveal that WPATH hired experts at Johns Hopkins to do a series of systematic reviews on the evidence supporting ‘gender affirming’ care, and that the researchers ‘found little to no evidence about children and adolescents,’ writes the medical group Do No Harm. More.
#Energy – The first nuclear reactor in the US since 2016 has started producing electricity! Excellent news! IWF has more on this exciting development.
Chart of the Day
Via CIS: the foreign-born population of the United States has hit record highs in March 2024 of 51.6m and 15.6% of the total U.S. population. Their report here.
Meme of the Day
Via, who else?, Elon Musk:
