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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
@Noahpinion
Sep 5, 2018 • 10 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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1/Here's an article about how Trump is screwing up legal immigration to the United States, hurting our economy in the process: nytimes.com/2018/09/02/bus…
2/Trump couldn't get his restrictionist agenda passed in Congress, so he's doing what presidents always do in this gridlocked age - falling back on executive power to make a bunch of small changes that add up.
3/Some people may look at Trump's harassment of legal immigrants and quietly think "Oh good, that means higher wages for native-born Americans."

No it doesn't. It means you just lost your doctor.
4/Policy-by-red-tape is so awful. Ugh.
5/Some immigrants are genius engineers who invent cool stuff and start companies that hire Americans, and stuff like that.

Others are humble child-care and elder-care workers.

We need both.
6/Everyone focuses on ICE, but it's Citizenship and Immigration Services that's harassing legal immigrants out of the country under Trump.

"Merit-based system" my ass. It's the most meritorious immigrants who they're trying to keep out. It's racial.
7/Oh look, they're keeping out doctors.

How the hell is that "merit-based"?

And I'm sure that's going to do wonders for the health care cost problem.
8/Of course, racism itself is a pretty effective anti-immigration policy.

Who'd want to immigrate to America just to be harassed by Trump's government and harassed by Trump voters in the street and in the schools?
9/Canada is getting this right, and we are getting this wrong.
10/All the Trump people who say they're only upset about illegal immigration are bullshitting you.

All the Trump people who say they want merit-based immigration are bullshitting you.

You know what it's about. I know what it's about. We all know what this is about.

(end)

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
Aug 26, 2025
Feel like Blu*sky is a microcosm for all of American liberalism right now. The entire left-of-center became defined by cancel culture. Now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack, but everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces.
There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small # of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values. For a decade it seemed to be working. But it overreached and collapsed.
But progressives got addicted to that seemingly infinite power. They forgot everything else. They forgot how to persuade. They forgot how to organize. They forgot how to compromise. They thought the only tool they would ever need again was heckling and shunning on social media.
Read 8 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
May 6, 2025
1/This post didn't get a lot of attention, but I really enjoyed writing it (which is what really matters). So I figured I'd turn it into a thread!
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.

theringer.com/podcasts/plain…
3/Why are some people in the West looking to China for their visions of the future right now?

I see four basic reasons. Image
Read 29 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
Apr 27, 2025
1/I haven't written a thread of one of my posts for a long time, so I thought I'd do one today.

Today's post is about how MAGA isn't going to rebuild America.

noahpinion.blog/p/maga-doesnt-…
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.

noahpinion.blog/p/a-new-indust…
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.

a16z.com/its-time-to-bu…
Read 20 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
Nov 25, 2024
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
Read 8 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
Oct 20, 2024
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special. Image
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.

There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings. Image
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".

This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development. Image
Read 33 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 Profile picture
Sep 1, 2024
This will be a running thread of observations from my trip to Poland!
Most European apartment buildings don't look any better than an American 5-over-1. But people like them more, because:

1. "Thing, Europe! 😃"

2. They have shops on the first floor and you can walk in and out on the street -- i.e. the neighborhood is walkable. Image
One thing you see a lot of here are Polish flags. There's so much red and white around here it feels like I'm back at Stanford!
Read 38 tweets

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