Notices by Austin Kocher, PhD 🌎 (austinkocher@mastodon.social)

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but while electric cars are great and all, what we really need is to design human landscapes that don’t rely so pathologically and obsessively on cars in the first place. You can’t car your way out of a geography problem.

I’ve been asked a few times recently, so let me say this simply: Republicans move immigration policy to the right, then Democrats normalize/systemitize those changes, laying the groundwork for Republicans to move the needle further to the right. 🔄 There is no leftward movement.

The idea that immigrants are a coherent and distinct population is barely true in theory and is, in reality, a social fiction. Immigrants are part of our families, our communities, our faith circles, our businesses, our schools. Immigrants are already us, they are not an other.

It is crucial to understand that a tragic number of people dangerously believe that the word "freedom" means not the expansion of freedom for others, but the freedom for themselves to oppress others, to control others, and to force their beliefs on others.

For all the "mass deportation" talk, Trump never came even close to deporting as many people as Obama did, either border or interior deportations. Pandemic policies substantially shaped the first two years of the Biden administration, but his numbers have also been going back up, too.

Rebecca Solnit and Haymarket Books are providing her book “Hope in the Darkness” (epub) for free for a few days. Go download it and read it this weekend.

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/791-hope-in-the-dark

"Springfield OH is a success story. The arrival of so many new people has reversed population decline and helped the city start a new chapter." 🎉

--> Immigrants are making Ohio great! Let’s talk about that.✅

https://immigrationimpact.com/2024/09/17/immigrants-are-making-ohio-great-lets-talk-about-that/

The phrase 'money can't buy happiness' is actually super gaslighting because not having money to pay for basic things is a legitimate source of a tremendous amount of suffering and despair.

One of the greatest failures of the United States in the 20th century is without a doubt our refusal to adopt a civilized approach to mass transportation and instead build roads and freeways everywhere, forcing people to rely on cars at an unsustainable level.

Data shows that immigrants keep America running. Immigrants are just 14% of the population but:

- pay $580B in taxes/year
- are 16% of nurses and 28% of health aides
- are 25% of ag workers
- are 25% of construction workers
- are 20% of entrepreneurs
https://immigrationimpact.com/2024/07/02/immigrants-fill-us-labor-shortages-map-the-impact/

Controversial opinion: coffee shops don’t open up early enough. If you sell coffee and you don’t open until 8:00 am, you may not understand what coffee is for.

How long could you keep working at your current job if for some reason all you had was your smartphone as your daily technology (no laptop, desktop, etc.)? Not saying it would be easy, but like, literally how long until you couldn’t do your job anymore?

“The PhD student is someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income.” 😬

"Immigrants in the US have a combined household income of $2.1 trillion and contribute $382.9 billion to federal taxes and $196.3 billion in state and local taxes, leaving them with $1.6 trillion in spending power."

https://immigrationimpact.com/2024/04/15/immigrants-contribute-billions-federal-state-taxes/

What’s the most hyper-specific college course you’ve ever taken or heard of?

I saw an ad for a class on internet memes once and I took a course on the political geography of South Africa, but I feel like we can do better than that.

Number of Refugees Resettled in U.S. Likely to Reach 30-Year High if Trends Continue

The Biden administration is on track to resettle an estimated 93,000 refugees this year, short of its 125,000 cap but higher than any year since 1995.

https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/number-of-refugees-resettled-in-us

Number of Refugees Resettled in U.S. Likely to Reach 30-Year High if Trends Continue

The Biden administration is on track to resettle an estimated 93,000 refugees this year, short of its 125,000 cap but higher than any year since 1995.

https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/number-of-refugees-resettled-in-us

Fellow writers, I say this with love: most of you are not backing up your computer regularly to minimize the risk of data loss and it worries me. Please back up your computers!

The San Francisco 49ers could still win the Super Bowl if Mike Pence does the right thing.

If Western Civilization is so great, why is cell phone coverage getting worse every single day. 🤔