Immigration Kills

Migrants, not cities, strike fear into the hearts of tyrants at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Geographic mobility and social anxiety.

Subject Article: "Urban Apartheid in Vietnam."

Other Links: 1. "Footprints of the Ancestors."
2. "Bananas thrown at black Italian minister during speech."
3. "Mobility Paradox."
4. "Suddenly, all politics is municipal."
5. "Creatives grow better in the South West."
6. "Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum."
7. "MATTHEW HANNAH: GERMANY'S CENSUS BOYCOTT, POLICE TACTICS, OPPRESSION, BIOPOLITICS."
8. "On Los Angeles as an 'Arrival City.'"

Postscript: An academic article, "Cities, Redistribution, and Authoritarian Regime Survival" inspired my post about the intrinsic fear of migrants. As a rule, place comes before people. That bias plays out in research and policy, creating blind spots. A place-centric Matthew Yglesias misunderstanding anti-immigrant sentiment:

A related intuition I have that I'd be interested in reading relevant research on is that when you take the basic dynamic of population migration out of the "immigration" context, suddenly people understand it more clearly. When people hear about a town that's attracting many new residents, they say it's "booming" not that the newcomers are poaching a fixed supply of jobs. Nobody in Texas seems to have proposed trying to close the state to migrants from the Northeast and Midwest; rather, they see the state's attraction to migrants as one of its strengths. The "foreign-ness" of newcomers from other countries distracts people from fundamental dynamics that they understand in other contexts. 

Uh, what planet does Yglesias live on? All the nobodies in Texas:

Californians are loathed by “original” Austinites. They move here, flooding the bars and buying the houses, making everything more expensive and turning the cool less cool. Lock up your daughters and hide the silver, because these West Coast jerks are here to take over.

One word for you, Mr. Yglesias. Carpetbaggers.