1 Family Photo:
American

On Monday, Luana took the Oath of Allegiance at the USCIS field office in Los Angeles. The naturalization ceremony was her final step in becoming an American citizen. Our family is now 100% American! ...and also still 25% Brazilian. I guess now we're one of those families that gives 125%.

The appointment card said the ceremony would start at 9:30am. Arriving at 9:00am, we were instructed to wait in the lobby. At 10:00am, an administrator arrived with an armful of packets. She addressed the dozen or so assembled citizens-to-be:

"Sorry for the wait, our system wasn't working."

This probably applied to the start of the naturalization ceremony, but also seemed appropriate for every interaction we've have had with USCIS since we got married.

Apology accepted.

Then, there in the lobby of the USCIS field office, the naturalization ceremony began. The applicants turned in their green cards, received their certificates of naturalization, raised their right hands, and recited the Oath of Allegiance. Then 17 new Americans took a few pictures before driving home or going about the rest of their day.

The naturalization ceremony concluded, it's left me pondering Americanness. What does it mean to be American?

We drove from Truckee to LA for the naturalization ceremony. To break up the trip, we stopped at the Great Mall in San Jose. The Great Mall has a LEGOLAND Discovery Center. The boys picked up a flyer for the discovery center somewhere along the way, so it's been on our list of places to visit.

Calvin and Lawrence had a great time. Calvin found the LEGO train area right away and spent almost all his time assembling new ones. "Mine is a blue-and-white train because that's like a BART train." Lawrence built racecars and played with LEGO cars of all sizes. The center also had a room filled with massive LEGO replicas of Bay Area landmarks: Golden Gate Bridge, Downtown SF, Palace of Fine Arts, Apple Park, Beehive Stadium.

But to me, the most impressive feature was outside the LEGO Discovery Center: The Great Mall food court. The Dining Pavillion, as it's referred to on the website, is a tribute to culinary variety. There's a Jamba Juice across from a Cinnabon, Thai and Italian Kitchens, Cheesesteaks and Popeyes, Mongolian BBQ and Cajun food. There was a sign for a new restaurant coming soon: Saucy Asian, which seems like a place that will serve tacos with siracha.

The Dining Pavillion is maybe 15 different restaurants surrounding seating for maybe 500 people.

How many people does it feed per day? ChatGPT guessed 10,000.

We ate there twice. Both meals were great!

Looking around, there might have been as many different languages spoken inside the food court as there were restaurants. I recognized Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Farsi, Japanese. I don't know how many Chinese dialects were represented. At lunch, we sat next to an Asian family with two little kids splitting a cheesesteak. On our other side, some Latino teens sampled fried Taiwanese street food.

The Great Mall food court is people from different cultures coming together to create and enjoy greatness from around the world, side-by-side.

That's what America means to me. I want America to be a great mixture of prosperity and harmony. I want people to be able to eat whatever they want, and also to try new things. I want America to be a place where Home Eat Authentic Chinese Cuisine and Shihlin Taiwan Street Snacks peacefully do business next to each other, connected by a Subway.

Is there anything more American than a great food court?

A corny thought occurred to me: we should measure the greatness of our country not by our Great Walls, but by our Great Malls.

--

While we ate, Calvin also had a thought:

"Do you know the best part of this restaurant inside of other restaurants?"
"What's that Calvin?"
"You can sit wherever you want. You just have to pull up a chair."

That's my favorite part of America too.

1 Dad Joke:
Golf of America

When I was a kid, parents got upset over the New Maths. Now it's the New Maps.

Source: Terrible Maps

Highlights:
This Is America

The American Dream and The Complacent Class by Tyler Cowen (2017)

I'm not a fan of the plan to send back immigrants. I do feel there's something broken in legally, how we treat immigrants and how we enforce the law. And I would much rather we proceed with a sensible immigration reform where we would take in more skilled and more unskilled immigrants. President Trump talks about wanting 4% growth. You can't do that by sending people away. You've got to bring people in and include them in some manner. So one of my hopes for this country is that we do still have a dynamic heritage. I feel most Americans actually are still accepting of immigrants. If you look at poll data, are immigrants good for America? That's actually a very mild slope upwards.
...

I think the longer a historical perspective one has, actually, the easier it is to be optimistic, because in this country, times have been much worse. But the 80s and 90s, those are decades where there are remarkably few bumps. And globally, everything seems to be moving in the right direction. And that spoiled us. So I think a lot of the complacency is that we got spoiled by our own successes. Bravo. To us, those were real successes. And we've lost sight of the bumps, and now we're trying to pretend the bumps aren't there. But I think the last election, whether or not you favor or oppose Trump, it's now hard to run away from this narrative. And you [interviewer Richard Longworth] were pushing it in 2009. You're so far ahead of the curve on this. For those of you who don't know, he wrote a great book about problems in the Rust Belt in the Midwest, but now there's hardly anyone who denies the bumps. But we don't yet seem to be in the problem-solving mode.

...

Immigrants are an enormous free lunch. Admittedly there are political problems, and even significant social problems. But nonetheless, on net, that's one of the remaining sources of low hanging fruit is for a country to take in more immigrants and do it better rather than worse. I still think of the countries in the world, the United States, Canada, and Australia have probably done the best job, and we're still in the top 3 there, and that's one of the biggest reasons that gives me hope and ultimately puts me in the optimist camp.

Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong by Derek Thompson

If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.
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Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live. But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”
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[T]he economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay.
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I have been thinking and writing about an abundance agenda to identify win-win policies for Americans in housing, energy, health care, and beyond. Immigration is an essential ingredient in this agenda.
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Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants.
...

The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.

Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age by Alexander Klein & Christopher M. Meissner

We study the relationship between tariffs and labor productivity in US manufacturing between 1870 and 1909. Using highly dis-aggregated tariff data, state-industry data for the manufacturing sector, and an instrumental variable strategy, results show that tariffs reduced labor productivity. Tariffs also generally reduced the average size of establishments within an industry but raised output prices, value-added, gross output, employment, and the number of establishments. We also find evidence of heterogeneity in the association between tariffs and value added, gross output, employment, and establishments across groups of industries. We conclude that tariffs may have reduced labor productivity in manufacturing by weakening import competition and by inducing entry of smaller, less productive domestic firms. Our research also reveals that lobbying by powerful and productive industries may have been at play. The era’s high tariffs are unlikely to have helped the US become a globally competitive manufacturer.