The Roots of American Prosperity
Do native-born Americans have higher household incomes than naturalized citizens? It is a simple question the Census Bureau answered this week. The answer? No.
Do native-born Americans have higher household incomes than noncitizens? Yes.
In fact, when it comes to ranking household incomes by the nativity of the householder, according to the Census Bureau, households headed by naturalized citizens are at the top and those headed by noncitizens are at the bottom.
“Foreign-born householders can be classified into two categories: those who are naturalized U.S. citizens and those who are not U.S. citizens,” says the Census Bureau’s newly released report on income in the United States in 2023.
“Households maintained by naturalized citizens ($86,060) had the highest median incomes in 2023, followed by native-born individuals ($81,700),” the report says.
“Households maintained by noncitizens had the lowest median household income ($61,440),” it says.
The Census Bureau report also indicates that by 2023 the household income of Americans had recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic that struck the nation in 2020.
“Median household income was $80,610 in 2023, 4% higher than the 2022 estimate of $77,540,” says the report. “This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The 2023 median household income is not statistically different from the 2019 median household income of $81,210. Household income in 2019 was the highest since 1967, the highest ever recorded in this report.”
In fact, the historical data in the Census Bureau’s report shows that the median household income in the U.S. increased significantly in the years leading up to the pandemic. In 2016, the median household income was $73,520 in constant 2023 dollars. By 2019, that had grown by approximately 10.5% to $81,210.
In 2016, according to the report, 36.4% of American households had incomes that were $100,000 or greater. By 2019, that percentage had risen to 41.1%. By 2022, it had dropped to 38.9%. But in 2023, it rose again to 40.9%.
As this column has noted before, the Census Bureau’s annual income data demonstrates that certain characteristics correlate with higher household incomes—and with lower household incomes.
Maintaining a traditional family structure matters. Among married-couple families in the U.S., the median household income was $119,400 in 2023. When the family household was headed by a man without a spouse, the median income was $81,890. When it was headed by a woman without a spouse, the median income was $59,470.
Male householders without a family had a median income of $57,200. Female householders without a family had a median income of $42,140.
In other words, the median household income of a married-couple family ($119,400) in 2023 was more than twice the median income of nonfamily households headed by a man ($57,200) or woman ($42,140).
Earning a diploma also continued to matter in America.
“Householders with more education had higher income,” the Census Bureau says. “In 2023, households maintained by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree had the highest median income ($126,800), followed by those with some college ($73,610) and those with a high school diploma ($55,810).”
“Householders aged 25 and over with no high school diploma had the lowest median household income ($36,620),” says the report.
Thus, the median annual income of a householder who had earned a college degree or higher ($126,800) was more than twice as much as the median income of someone who had only earned a high school degree ($55,810).
In fact, the $70,990 difference between the median household income of someone who had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher and someone who had only graduated from high school would go a long way toward paying the $82,866 in charges that Harvard, according to its website, will levy this year for tuition ($56,550), fees ($5,126), housing ($12,922), and food ($8,268).
Another obvious factor that affects someone’s income is how much they work.
“Total workers (also referred to as ‘all workers’) include both part-time and full-time workers,” says the Census Bureau report. “A full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked at least 35 hours per week (full-time) and at least 50 weeks per year (year-round).”
In 2023, the Census Bureau reports, total workers had $50,310 in median earnings. Full-time, year-round workers, by contrast, had $61,440 in median earnings.
This Census Bureau’s new income report reinforces the lessons this column has noted before about the the agency’s income data. This nation’s prosperity is rooted in traditional families and hard work.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/12/the-roots-of-american-prosperity/
***********************************************Reports of Missing Pets True or Not, Ohio City Suffers From Huge Haitian Migrant Influx
A small city in western Ohio has become a focal point of discussions about the mass immigration policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
At Tuesday night’s presidential debate on ABC, former President Donald Trump mentioned how the city of Springfield, Ohio, was being overrun by Haitian migrants and that people have reported their dogs, cats, ducks, geese, and all kinds of other animals being eaten by the new arrivals.
“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump claimed.
The line about the dogs was widely ridiculed as an absurd exaggeration, but there’s no question that Springfield is in turmoil due to the massive surge in Haitian migrants, estimated at 20,000 in a city with a population of about 58,000.
The Biden administration has granted “temporary protected status” to hundreds of thousands of Haitians, and there will likely be many more people coming from that troubled Caribbean island nation.
Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be enthusiastic about the temporary status program for Haitians, too.
That policy is part of this administration’s larger, general policy of just letting people from all over the world flood into the United States—legal or not, beneficial to the U.S. or not.
The temporary protected status for Haitians has been renewed to extend into 2026, so many more will likely come to America and to Springfield.
The border and immigration catastrophe often gets the most attention in big, blue sanctuary cities like New York. But this issue is hitting countless smaller towns and cities at the border and around the country that never chose to be sanctuary cities, but nevertheless are forced to deal with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies.
The burden for inundated smaller cities is often far worse. The arrival of tens of thousands of people can be transformative in a way it wouldn’t be in a city of millions. It’s awfully hard to assimilate a population of new arrivals whose numbers may soon rival the number of native residents.
And at the end of the day, why is it that these small towns—or really any American city—must bear the burden of another nation’s failure to create a livable place for their citizens?
Haiti has been in a state of crisis since its president was assassinated in 2021, but its problems extend back for centuries. Violent gangs have taken control of large parts of the country and its government teeters on the edge of oblivion. It has consistently rated as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is quite stable and functional by comparison.
This isn’t a new situation for Haiti, once called the “Pearl of the Caribbean.” A violent, lawless founding launched in 1791—more like the bloody and vicious French Revolution than the American Revolution—set the country on a course to becoming a long-term basket case.
Haiti famously threw off the shackles of slavery, but it never sustained the conditions to create a truly free, prosperous society. It’s a tragic story.
Many on the Left, and certainly many of Haiti’s politicians, blame Haiti’s problems on European colonization and the legacy of slavery. They demand reparations. Yet, it’s been given tens of billions of dollars in aid over the course of half a century and conditions have hardly improved. The problem isn’t just one bad regime; it’s been caused by systemic failure to create good governance.
From 2011 to 2021, the U.S. alone gave the country $13 billion. We’ve been shoveling money to the island nation for more than half a century. The Clinton Foundation has been busily making a bigger mess of things there, too. What are we getting in return for this massive public investment? What we are getting is an endless set of bills and now importation of Haiti’s problems.
The “solution” of the Biden-Harris administration is apparently to let them mass migrate to the U.S.
For little Springfield, Ohio, the city’s resources have been taxed to the limit, housing prices have skyrocketed, housing availability has crashed, and many of the residents are deeply troubled by the changes they see around them.
In the days before the Trump-Harris presidential debate on Tuesday night, videos from the Springfield City Commission meetings emerged showing residents livid about the changes they’ve seen occurring around them.
Here’s one Springfield resident saying at a commission meeting that he’s tired of seeing the Haitian migrants “grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them and eating them.”
Here is a woman explaining how her town is being “invaded,” and transformed. She says at a commission meeting that the migrants have been “stealing animals from farmers and leaving their severed heads at the site of an old school where children play.” She listed other disturbing behaviors, too.
Here’s a woman saying at a hearing that she has men who don’t speak English “screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard.” She further says that the danger is making it difficult to remain in Springfield.
Here’s yet another woman explaining how Haitian migrants are behaving badly in grocery stores and how city services are stressed to the breaking point.
Worst of all is the testimony of a woman who said her mother-in-law was killed by a Haitian migrant who was driving recklessly. As she rightly said, this is a far bigger problem than what’s possibly happening to dogs and cats.
Some local authorities are saying that they haven’t had significant reports of animal cruelty, but are we really supposed to discount the testimony from all these people saying otherwise?
You won’t be surprised to learn that most corporate media outlets are uninterested in covering this story except to repeat the “no problems here” mantra from local bureaucrats. With scant investigation, they insist that cats, dogs, and ducks aren’t being roasted in the parks; it’s all fake news.
The insinuation is that you should assume this is all just rube-ish American bigotry and nothing more.
But it’s quite disturbing that most media outlets are dedicated to just reporting what government agencies tell them.
Were some online memes and videos about Haitians devouring cats inaccurate? It looks like it. But it’s hard to discount what locals in Springfield are saying about their problems and what the numbers show.
The strain on local resources is real, and there is no question that the recent Haitian arrivals bring some drastically different cultural assumptions with them.
The issue has obviously become large enough that it’s caused significant turmoil in Springfield. Why are distressed locals simply being dismissed?
Whatever one can say about Trump’s comment about people eating dogs, at least it’s finally provoking a response. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, announced Wednesday that he is sending in state troopers and financial aid to help beleaguered Springfield.
That’s a better response than dismissal. But this issue can only be resolved by a federal government willing to put the interests of our citizens and communities first instead of just joining with the media and telling residents they are imagining their problems and should just shut up about it.
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Lack of Opt-Out Option Spurs Maryland Parents to File Suit Against K-5 Gender, Sexuality Indoctrination
A group of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish parents in Maryland petitioned the Supreme Court on Thursday to ask it to take up a case regarding school board policies that keep parents in the dark on books with themes about “gender” and “sexuality” being taught to children.
The case originates from the Montgomery County Board of Education instituting an “inclusive” storybook program in 2022 for students in grades pre-K through 5th grad, initially informing parents of when they would be read until changing that policy in March 2023, also restricting parents’ ability to opt their kids out, according to a press release from the Becket Fund, a nonprofit law firm representing the parents.
Shortly after the Montgomery Board of Education announced the change in policy, the group of parents filed a lawsuit against the board in May 2023 and lost, and were denied again in May 2024 when they appealed to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The storybooks include topics on gender transitioning, pride parades and preferred pronouns, according to the press release. One book includes terms like “intersex flag” and “drag queen.”
One book mentioned in the lawsuit, “Jacob’s Room to Choose,” includes two transgender children and a teacher who use a game to persuade their class to be “supportive of gender-free bathrooms,” court documents states. Another book, “Pride Puppy,” directed at 3- and 4-year-olds, describes a pride parade and has students identify images including “leather” and “underwear.”
“Most fundamentally, it violates the First Amendment, which guarantees the right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children,” Will Haun, an attorney for the Becket Fund, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The parents allege that the Board of Education is targeting them and their kids based on their religious beliefs towards gender and sexuality and is driving a wedge between parents and their children, according to a case summary. The parents argue that the initial change in policy violates Maryland’s law, the board’s policies, and the U.S. Constitution.
“Parents shouldn’t have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to introducing their children to complex and sensitive issues around gender and sexuality,” Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund, said in the press release.
“Nearly every state requires parental consent before high schoolers can attend sex-ed. Parents should have the right to excuse their elementary-school children when related instruction is introduced during story hour.”
Despite parents not having the option to opt their children out of learning about the storybooks, the option is given for high schoolers regarding similar lessons that are taught during the sex-education unit for health classes that are state-mandated, according to the court documents.
The Supreme Court will consider deciding on the case in the fall, according to the press release.
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Angel Moms to Texas Democrat: ‘Insulting’ to Say We’re Politically Exploited
A Texas congresswoman is under fire after saying Angel Moms who testified about how their children were brutally murdered by criminal illegal border crossers released into the U.S. are “being exploited for political purposes.”
Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, Texas, made the remarks Tuesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing after mothers described how their children were murdered because of Biden-Harris administration border policies.
Escobar initially expressed her condolences as a mother of two children.
“I cannot imagine the grief of losing a loved one in such a tragic way,” the Texas Democrat said. “I want you to know how much I respect the courage that it took for you to be here today, to share your grief and your pain.”
Escobar also said she, as a third-generation border resident, is “the only member of this committee who actually lives on the border, raised her kids on the border.” Other committee members are border residents of Arizona, California, and Texas.
Escobar next accused her Republican colleagues of “exploiting people’s pain for political purposes.”
“Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening today,” she said. “The finger-pointing at the administration by members of Congress is frustrating … because we are the ones who write the laws.”
Escobar’s Republican colleagues, and at least half of U.S. attorneys general who’ve sued the administration, argue the border crisis was created by the Biden-Harris administration’s breaking laws established by Congress. If existing federal laws were followed, they say, millions of illegal border crossers wouldn’t have been released into the U.S. but would have been deported.
April Aguirre, a victim’s advocate in Houston and an Air Force veteran, lashed out, pointing to Escobar and saying: “It’s insulting that you would say that to these families, that you would make an assumption that they’re being used or exploited anyway.”
“I’d like a phone call from you to see what you can do to help these families because every single week I get bombarded with calls from victims all over the United States,” Aguirre said.
While she was helping victims’ families “navigate the criminal justice system,” she said, “not one Democrat called me to offer their assistance. It was only Republicans.”
She is an independent and votes “both ways,” Aguirre said. “So, it’s insulting,” she continued but got cut off by Escobar, who interrupted.
“Please don’t speak over me. I’m still talking. I have the floor,” Aguirre said.
Escobar kept talking.
“If you want to answer me, you ask for time,” Aguirre said, pointing to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who intervened.
Pointing to Escobar, Aguirre said: “It’s insulting; these people lost loved ones. They lost children. I assure you that we’re not being used in any way.”
Other Angel Moms said they “do not feel exploited” and criticized Democrats for not asking them a single question.
Angel Mom Anne Fundner said, “I’m getting tired of hearing about the most comprehensive border bill.”
Fundner was referring to Democrats who claim a Senate border bill would have solved the border crisis. Senate Republicans didn’t support it, and the bill doesn’t do what it purports to do, The Center Square reported.
“The bill did zero for American citizens,” Fundner said. “I would love for somebody to [to tell] me what it actually did for American citizens.”
Several of the Angel Moms’ children were killed by Venezuelans after they illegally entered the country and were released by federal agents under Biden-Harris administration policies. The illegal aliens went on to rape and strangle to death teenagers and young adult women in Texas, Maryland, and other states, The Center Square reported.
Many illegal border crossers from Venezuela who’ve been arrested for committing violent crimes are directly linked to a parole program created by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They include members of the violent prison gang Tren De Aragua, who are taking over apartment complexes and hotels nationwide.
Multiple state attorneys general sued to stop the parole program; House Republicans impeached Mayorkas, arguing that it and other programs he created to usher in millions of illegal border crossers are illegal.
Escobar’s remarks were no surprise to El Paso native Irene Armendariz-Jackson, a Republican who is challenging her in Texas’s 16th Congressional District.
“Escobar’s comments to the Angel Moms were degrading and lacked empathy for the American mothers who have had to bury their children because an illegal alien has murdered them,” Armendariz-Jackson told The Center Square.
Escobar, first elected in 2018, has championed Biden-Harris border policies.
“She has continuously expressed her support for illegal aliens no matter what the American human cost is,” Armendariz-Jackson said. “I sounded the alarm over four years ago, warning America that these illegals coming in through El Paso were not going to stay here and we would start hearing of Americans being killed by illegals.”
“As the wife of a retired Border Patrol agent, I know the devastation and danger that comes from open borders and as a native of El Paso, I see what our city has turned into,” she said. “I’m running to unseat the most radical and dangerous member of Congress.”
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http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
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http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
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https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
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http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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