Maria Enchautegui for the Urban Institute: A large and growing share of the low-skilled workforce are immigrants, many of whom are unauthorized. This often makes people think that immigrants are pushing U.S. citizens out of their jobs. To bring some evidence to this contentious issue, I set out to find what types of jobs low-skilled natives and immigrants hold. I found that, even within the narrowly defined group of workers with no high school diploma, immigrants and natives do different jobs …
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2574118/
The top three occupations with the largest number of immigrants without high school diplomas are maids and house cleaners, cooks and agricultural workers.
In contrast, the occupations with the largest number of native workers without high school degrees are cashiers, truck drivers, janitors and building cleaners.
The top three occupations in which less-educated immigrants are most over-represented are personal appearance workers, such as manicurists (87 percent immigrant); workers who grade, sort and classify unprocessed food and other agricultural products (82 percent); and sewing-machine operators (81 percent).
The top three occupations in which less-educated natives are most over-represented are counter attendants in cafeterias, food concession stands and coffee shops (86 percent native workers); hosts and hostesses at restaurants, lounges and coffee shops (85 percent); and receptionists and information clerks (81 percent).
Less-educated native workers are over-represented in occupations that interact with the public and coworkers, and that have supervising responsibilities, licensing requirements and demanding mechanical and computer operations. Immigrants dominate manual jobs, occupations that are more physically demanding and jobs where interactions with the public happen in more controlled settings, such as taxi drivers and maids.
The feds don’t have to approve of you
Lee Rowland and Samia Hossain for the ACLU: When you walk down the aisles of a supermarket and choose between a CokeTM or a PepsiTM, what do those little superscript “TMs” mean to you? Are they corporate marks intended to ward off competitors, or are they instead tiny little imprimaturs of the government’s approval of that particular corporate message? We don’t know anyone who would pick the latter.
Now consider The Slants, an Asian-American band based in Portland, Ore. The Slants specialize in “Chinatown dance pop” and have released albums entitled “Slanted Eyes, Slanted Hearts” and “The Yellow Album.” Simon Shiao Tam, The Slants’ founder and bassist, has explained that the band selected its name to “take on these stereotypes that people have about us, like the slanted eyes, and own them.”
The Slants applied to register their name as a trademark to get the considerable legal and financial benefits that registration provides. The government denied them a trademark based on the Lanham Act, a law that allows the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to deny registration to trademarks that it determines to be “disparag[ing],” or otherwise “offensive” or “immoral” to a “substantial composite” of an affected group.
The Slants appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the ACLU filed an amicus brief saying that the band has every right to register its name. Today, the ACLU has the opportunity to stand up in court to argue that free speech position.
We think the First Amendment prevents government from Googling a band, deciding that their private speech is “disparaging” and then denying them a government benefit on that basis.
Pigs may be key to organ donation
Marian Tupy for the Cato Institute: We are one step closer to solving the problem of organ shortages.
Harvesting organs from animals may provide the solution to the shortfall of human donors. However, two technical obstacles need to be overcome before animal-human transplants can become a medical reality. One is that human immune systems often reject foreign tissue. The second problem comes from the risk of disease transfer. According to George Church of Harvard Medical School, genetically engineering pigs may provide the key to overcoming this second problem.
Due to their size, pigs are natural candidates for animal-human transplants, but their DNA is naturally rife with dangerous porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs). An innovative gene-editing technique known as CRISPER/Cas9 has the capacity to identify and delete specific sequences out of the genome. Upon discovering that a single porcine gene enables PERVs to infect human hosts, Church and his colleagues turned CRISPER/Cas9 against the culprit. Initial results suggest that this procedure may be a success, preventing human infection without compromising the pig cells.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
