An article in today's New York Times runs under the headline, "New York Carries On, but Test of Its Grit Has Just Begun." The article reports, "A wonderful paradox has resulted, according to Stephen A. Cohen, vice dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Even with a foreign-born population of about 40 percent, New York is now seen by most of the rest of the country 'as the most American of cities,' he said."
This is not a paradox at all. There is nothing un-American about being born in a foreign country and then moving to America. It's one of the classic elements of the American story. Every American who is not a full-blooded American Indian is either an immigrant or has ancestors who came to America from somewhere else relatively recently. And it makes sense that the foreign-born are the "most American" -- they are the ones that opted to come here of their own free will, rather than being here by accident of birth. And they are the ones with the freshest memories of life outside America, and therefore the ones least likely to take America's freedom and prosperity for granted. Pollsters can push and pull on this issue, and the debate over the appropriate levels of immigration hasn't been fully and vigorously joined in this country for years. But Smartertimes.com believes that on some basic level, "the rest of the country" understands -- even though the Times and this Columbia dean may have doubts -- that a large foreign-born population is not incompatible, not even apparently incompatible, with being "American." It's not a paradox and it's not a case of "even with." It's inherent in the nature of a nation of immigrants.
Recount: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on a city council candidate from the Independence Party who is asking for a revote in his party's primary because of primary-day irregularities. The Times tells us that the winning candidate "received 65 percent of the vote in the party's primary," but it doesn't tell us how many votes were cast, which is a highly relevant fact. If there were only 20 Independence Party voters in that council district who went to the polls, and 13 of them voted for the winner and seven for a losing candidate, then a swing of four votes would change the result. If there were tens of thousands of votes cast, it is a different matter. Space that could be used to tell readers about how many votes were cast is instead devoted to telling readers irrelevant details such as the street location of a "low-rent hotel" that the winning candidate is said to run.