nation: United States

The Center for American Progress released a report detailing the state of border policing and the projected impact of immigration policies.  First, notice that spending on border patrol and the number of border patrol agents in the southwest have increased significantly between 1992 and 2009:

Still, despite this, the number of people illegally crossing the border has increased:

So the policing hasn’t deterred a rise in disallowed border crossings, but it has made it more dangerous:

So, the U.S. is spending a lot of money trying to keep undocumented non-citizens out.  Is it worth it?

The report also discusses projected changes in the GDP under three different scenarios: immigration reform, allowing temporary workers only, and mass deportation.

The figure suggests that undocumented workers are making a substantial contribution to the well-being of the U.S. economy, one that would decrease under conditions of mass deportation.  Temporary workers are helpful, but real immigration reform that would bring in greater numbers of permanent and temporary workers is the best thing for America.

Hat tip to Graphic Sociology.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

AGM, while perusing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website and discovered that the U.S. government has seen fit to illustrate various jobs with photographs.  The photographs reveal quite dramatic assumptions about who does what jobs.  I’ll let you be the judge as to what they are, in alphabetical order.

Authors:

Child care workers:

Cooks and Food Preparation Workers:

Dentists:

Dental Assistants:

Executives:

Personal Appearance Workers:

Physicians:

Physician and Medical Assistants (fixed):

Security Guards:

Sociologists!

AGM thought the picture of sociologists deserved the caption, “Sociologists have nothing but contempt for one other, both as scholars and as human beings.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Tom Tierney is a famous paper doll artist.  Katrin sent along a link to his American Family series.  The covers erase all non-white families; apparently American Indian families weren’t “American” enough, nor were the indigenous population of what-would-one-day-be-California, African families during the Civil War era, or the many other non-white people that lived here before and after white people arrived.

Elsewhere on his site, Tierney has paper dolls with non-white characters, but they are always specified (e.g., Famous African Americans Paper Dolls or the new Obama Family).  Non-modified, though, “American”= white.

See also our post on how people tried to claim American-ness by claiming whiteness and suing for whiteness.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

War is always an opportunity for someone, many someones, to make money. A recently closed ebay auction sold a pair of Converse shoes manufactured and sold during World War II. If I understand the description right, the shoes were sold to overseas servicemen who wanted to “stomp” on the Nazis; alternatively, they were sold to Nazis (I think the former).

The shoes:

And, the kicker, the soles:

UPDATE! In the comments Joe C. linked to a website, aryanwear.com, where you can buy these:

Via BoingBoing.  See also our post on the surprising history of the symbol.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

At BoingBoing, German professor Michael Shaughnessy offered his insights regarding how Americans and Germans see and talk about color differently.  Among other things, he noted how few foods in the U.S. are described as blue.  Blueberries, of course.  And blue cheese, I suppose.  (Or “bleu” cheese, as TheophileEscargot points out.)  But little or nothing else.

In contrast, Shaughnessy suggested that many more foods are described as blue in southern Germany.  Notably, blue onions, blue grapes, and blue cabbage (pictured):

In northern Germany, however, “Blaukraut” is “Rotkohl.”  That is, the same color (“blau”) is described as red “(“rot”).  He ponders whether “red onions [in the U.S.] are truly red.” In fact, their better described as purple.

He continues, “Words, impacted by the visual, often vary at the crossroads between colors.”  In other words, perception may be influenced by language and culture.  Where does blue end and red begin?

UPDATE: In the comments Alissa notes:

German wikipedia tells me that the south/north naming difference results from the difference in prepararation of the food. in northern germany it is usually prepared with acidic substances like vinegar giving it a more reddisch color, thus “Rotkraut” (very good with apples), in southern germany sugar or natron is the ingredient of choice, which enhances the blue of the original purple color, hence “Blaukraut”.

Interesting!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

It is commonly claimed and, in fact, I have claimed it on this blog (here and here), that the U.S. is especially individualistic.  Claude Fischer, at Made in America, puts this assertion to the test.  “There is considerable evidence, ” he writes, “that Americans are not more individualistic – in fact, are less individualistic – than other peoples.”

He operationalizes “individualism” as “gives priority to personal liberty” and offers the following evidence.

Question: “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?”

Question: “ Right or wrong should be a matter of personal conscience,” strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Question: “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong,” strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Question: “Even when there are no children, a married couple should stay together even if they don’t get along,” strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Fischer entertains several explanations for these findings.

(1) Americans aren’t really individualistic (anymore).

(2) Americans means something else by individualism (like freedom from government or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps).  Fischer thinks that these are different values, though: anti-statism and laissez-faire, pro-business economics.

(3) Americans are individualistic, but they are also religious and sometimes religion outweighs individualism.  If that’s so, Fischer argues, then maybe it is true that we’re not that individualistic.

(4) American individualism is found not in people’s opinions, but in how we organize our society.  Fischer calls this “undemocratic libertarianism.”

Finally, (5) maybe what is meant by individualism is really voluntarism, the right to leave and join groups as we see fit.

The argument and the answers clearly revolve around how we define (or operationalize) “individualism.”  In any case, the comparative data does put the U.S. into perspective and Fischer’s discussion leaves a lot to unpack.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

You might have heard that the U.S. added 290,000 jobs in April.  At the same time, the unemployment rate rose!  Bwhat!?

The unemployment rate doesn’t measure how many people are unemployed.  It sounds like it should, being that it includes the words “unemployment” and “rate” and all, but it doesn’t.  Instead, the unemployment rate measures how many people are looking for jobs.  When things are really bad, some people get discouraged and give up, or go to school instead, or stay home to take care of their kids and save day care money.

So the number of jobs and the unemployment rate are not directly correlated.  Ezra Klein posted this visual:

It shows unemployment rising as job growth remains negative, leveling off as (perhaps) people drop out of active job seeking, and than actually going up again there at the end in response to two months of solid job growth.

So it turns out that, in this case, a rise in the unemployment rate is good news.  It means some people are hopeful again.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

How have adults and young people weathered the worldwide economic downturn? This two-minute 12-second video shows that young people have been harder hit by joblessness in almost all OECD countries:

From the OECD Factblog.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.