Comment by Riaz Haq on March 17, 2016 at 9:41pm

BBC News - #Trump presidency rated among top 10 global risks: #EIU #Economist http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35828747 …

"He has been exceptionally hostile towards free trade, including notably Nafta, and has repeatedly labelled China as a 'currency manipulator'," the EIU said.
It warned his strong language directed towards Mexico and China in particular "could escalate rapidly into a trade war".
Mr Trump has called for a "big big wall" to be built on the US-Mexican border, paid for by Mexico, to keep its illegal immigrants and drug dealers out of the United States.
Analysis: Anthony Zurcher, BBC News North America reporter
Why is Donald Trump considered only slightly less of a threat to global security than a new Cold War? Perhaps it is because unlike traditional presidential front-runners the candidate has little or no policy substance to back up his shoot-from-the-hip-style pronouncements.
Want details on how the New Yorker would restructure US trade relations with China? Or how he would implement his proposed Muslim immigration ban? Good luck finding out.
Mr Trump has been promising to reveal his foreign policy team since mid-February, but the deadline keeps getting extended.
A well-developed foreign policy campaign structure would provide not only substance behind Mr Trump's rhetoric, it would also give foreign leaders connections for their questions.
So far, however, it seems international affairs and national security experts in the US are more focused on stopping Mr Trump than trying to help him. Until that changes, expect the global alarm bells to continue to sound.
'Innate hostility'
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump has advocated killing the families of terrorists and invading Syria to eradicate the so-called Islamic State group and appropriate its oil.
"His militaristic tendencies towards the Middle East and ban on all Muslim travel to the US would be a potent recruitment tool for jihadi groups, increasing their threat both within the region and beyond," the EIU added.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 17, 2016 at 10:13pm

How #Trump used #casino bankruptcies to enrich himself at the expense of lenders and workers http://n.pr/1PdWms7 


Robert O'Harrow with NPR host Terry Gross on Trump bankruptcies:


GROSS: Was Donald Trump able to get the lower interest bank loans that he promised? 'Cause he promised, I won't use high-interest junk bonds. I'm going to get good rates from banks.

O'HARROW: No, the striking thing for us is just months after he received the approvals that he needed for the Taj, he discovered the prime-rate loans never materialized. He was still determined to move forward. As he told me in a phone conversation, he didn't want to be personally liable for whatever happened, so he went ahead and got the junk bonds after all and paid roughly 50 percent more than he had told the commission he would in order to raise $675 million.

GROSS: So Trump ends up doing what he said he wouldn't do, financing the Taj with the help of junk bonds. He wanted the Taj to be the biggest and the most luxurious, extravagant, whatever casino. It was definitely going to be the biggest. But were there, like, extravagances that he spent money on that he maybe had second thoughts about later when he went bankrupt?

O'HARROW: I've never heard him express any regrets about what he spent money on, but he definitely spent a lot more money than he originally projected. His plans included super deluxe suites and crystal chandeliers and all these expenses, and Trump was questioned about it. And they pressed him about his projected costs which were going to add luxury suites and gourmet restaurants and opulent fixtures, and the commission referred to them as extras.

And one of the commissioners asked him, don't people have to live within their means? And Trump responded that the costs were insignificant, and that they were really necessary to impress customers. He said we are probably talking about a difference of 50 million or so. He said, I mean, the worst thing to happen with the Taj Mahal is for the building to open and for people to have been disappointed with it because word-of-mouth on something like this is so important. He said, it's like a Broadway show.

GROSS: Right. If word-of-mouth is bad in a Broadway show, it's going to close.

O'HARROW: He added one thought that I - depending on your point of view - is true or ironic. He said, my basic attitude has always been that I want to do what is good for Atlantic City.

-------


GROSS: So, Robert O'Harrow, when you spoke to people who had worked with Trump and when you spoke to members of the casino commission in New Jersey, did they talk to you about how he used the bankruptcy laws and if he used them kind of, like, straightforwardly or if there was a lot of, like, manipulation of those laws?

O'HARROW: I did. You know, of course, some of these folks feel spurned by Donald Trump because he made a whole host of promises and they felt that he didn't keep his promises. One of them was Steven Perskie. He's the former chairman of the Casino Control Commission. He also was a former Democratic lawmaker.

Now he worked very closely with Trump to sort through a lot of these problems that came along, and the way he describes it is that the city - Atlantic City officials and the casino regulators were in a really tough spot because Atlantic City was struggling. The casino business was struggling. And in maneuvering the way that he did, according to Perskie, Trump gave them really no choice but to keep going. And here's what Perskie said.

-----

O'HARROW: The answer about who was affected is deeper than it might seem because in March of 1992, Trump's Castle and his Plaza casinos also filed for bankruptcy. And to resolve those debts, Trump gave up half his stake in each of the casino to the lenders. So the lenders definitely lost money through the cascading failures of these three casinos. But small-time investors who had bought the bonds directly or through retirement funds also suffered losses. And so did small business owners who sold the Trump organization paint, equipment, food, limousine services. And many of those were eventually paid only a fraction of what they were due. And we know this in part because a professor at Temple University - in your town - Bryant Simon went in and studied Atlantic City and found that a lot of people recall having to struggle to get by after these bankruptcies.

Bryant Simon - the professor - told me that Trump was quote, "a brutal and ruthless negotiator." And he said that people paid the price. And when I brought that up with Donald Trump, he said that he acknowledged that he drove hard bargains, but he said that he created many opportunities for a lot of people in the city to make money. And here's what he told me.

I wasn't the nicest person on earth. Many of these same people, if not all, made a lot of money with me.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 23, 2016 at 9:00am

#NYPD commissioner condemns #Cruz's call to 'patrol' #Muslim areas. #Islamophobia http://on.msnbc.com/1ZrYvYI via @msnbc

Sen. Ted Cruz’s controversial proposal that “patrols” should monitor “Muslim neighborhoods” in the United States the aftermath of terror attacks in Belgium has been condemned on both sides of the political aisle, and on Tuesday, New York Police Department commissioner William Bratton added his voice to the chorus.

Bratton, flanked by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had previously called Cruz’s remarks “reprehensible” and example of “demagoguery,” told reporters that “the statements he made today is why he’s not going to become president of this country.”

“We don’t need a president that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country,” Bratton added. “As the mayor mentioned, I have over 900 very dedicated officers in this department, many of whom do double duty, and they serve as active duty members of the U.S. Military in combat, something the senator has never seen,” referring to the fact that Cruz has no military experience.

“So before he starts denigrating any population, he should take a close look at who he’s denigrating,” Bratton said. This is not the first time Cruz has provoked the ire of many New Yorkers. In January, Cruz suffered a barrage of bad press in the Big Apple, after he took aim at what he called “New York values.” 

The NYPD has attempted to procure intelligence by secretly monitoring Muslim enclaves in the past, a practice defended by then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But doing so yielded little success, according to the Associated Press. They report that in six years of broad surveillance, the so-called Demographics Unit “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.” Meanwhile, when reports of the program surfaced, first revealed as part of a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation by the AP, it was met with strong rebuke from the Muslim community and led to a discrimination lawsuit against the city which was ultimately dismissed in 2014. Bratton, who was appointed by de Blasio, oversaw the decision to abandon the program. 

Later on Tuesday, Cruz doubled down on his earlier statements, arguing that it’s “standard” police procedure to infiltrate communities overrun with gang activity, and that the same tactics should be applied to areas where radicalization may be taking hold. “Political correctness costs lives,” he added.

However, Cruz did not offer clarity about how he would define a “Muslim neighborhood,” or how he could pre-emptively engage communities “before they become radicalized” as he suggested during an earlier appearance on CNN.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said Cruz’s remarks send “an alarming message to American-Muslims who increasingly fear for their future and to all Americans who value the Constitution and religious liberties.”

In an interview with NBC News, Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for CAIR, compared Cruz’s comments to “the dark days of the 1930s” in Europe and “the interment of Japanese-Americans” in the 1940s. “What is a Muslim neighborhood? How many Muslims have to be in a neighborhood before it becomes worthy of checking papers and kicking in the doors of homes and businesses?” he said. “What constitutes a Muslim neighborhood?”

Still, his plan wasn’t opposed across the board. His 2016 rival Donald Trump, who spent much of Tuesday advocating for torture techniques to reinstated to combat threat of ISIS, called Cruz’s patrol plan a “good idea” which he “100 percent” supports.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 24, 2016 at 4:35pm

Only 15% of the capital on Wall Street goes into investments in real businesses on Main Street. #US #Capitalism

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/21/crisis-in-capi...

risis always brings opportunity. And right now, we are having a crisis of capitalism unlike anything experienced during the last four decades, if not longer. The evidence is everywhere – in rising inequality, in the division of fortunes between companies and workers, and in lethargic economic growth despite unprecedented infusions of monetary stimulus by the world’s governments (a huge $29tn in total since 2008). Eight years on from the financial crisis and great recession, the US, UK and many other countries are still experiencing the longest, slowest economic recoveries in memory.

This has, of course, diametrically shifted the political climate, creating a paradigm of insiders versus outsiders. In the US, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are different sides of the same coin; in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn is an equally dramatic response to establishment politics. The challenges to the political and economic status quo are not going away anytime soon. A recent Harvard study shows that only 19% of American millennials call themselves capitalist, and only 30% support the system as a whole. Perhaps more shocking, the numbers are not much better among the over-30 set. A mere half of Americans believe in the system of capitalism as practised today in the US, which is quite something for a nation that brought us the “greed is good” culture.

In some ways that is no surprise because, as I explore in my new book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, the system of market capitalism as envisioned by Adam Smith is broken – the markets no longer support the economy, as a wealth of academic research shows. Market capitalism was set up to funnel worker savings into new businesses via the financial system. But only 15% of the capital in the financial institutions today goes towards that goal – the rest exists in a closed loop of trading and speculation.

The result is much slower than normal growth, which holds true not just in the US but in most advanced economies and many emerging ones. The politics of the day – populist, angry, divisive – reflect this, in the US, Europe and many parts of the developing world as well.

But the bifurcation of our economy and the resulting fractiousness in politics has become so extreme that we are now at a tipping point. And as a result, we have a rare, second chance to change the economic paradigm – to rewrite the rules of capitalism and create a more inclusive, sustainable economic growth .

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 24, 2016 at 4:39pm

How #American Finance Ruined Business. Only 15% #capital invested in real businesses serving customers http://bloom.bg/1XCJiFk  via @business

Three years ago, your can of Coke suddenly cost a few pennies more. The culprits? The clever bankers at Goldman Sachs. According to a Senate panel, they gamed the global aluminum market, warehousing tens of thousands of tons of the metal in Detroit and delaying delivery to customers like Coca-Cola. The bank was able to ratchet up the price on its supply, netting several billion dollars in the process. The best part: Goldman didn’t do it as a hedge against other investments. The bank did it to make money for itself, at the expense of everyone else.

Maneuvers like this are legal, but they’ve become more distasteful in the wake of the 2008 collapse, giving birth to the coinage of a term. “Our economic illness has a name: financialization,” writes Time business and economics columnist Rana Foroohar in Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. The book offers a blistering critique of how Wall Street’s zero-sum thinking came to dominate and then hobble the U.S. economy. She isn’t peddling a vision of neo-socialism, à la Thomas Piketty or Bernie Sanders. Her argument is that finance for the sake of finance is bad for business—and capitalism as a whole.

Traditionally, finance served the needs of business (Foroohar’s “makers”) by providing capital and investing in long-term growth. But starting in the postwar decades and ramping up from the Reagan era onward, finance (the “takers”) began to take care of No. 1 first. Figures like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara popularized management by statistics, while investors such as Carl Icahn made short-term profits the ultimate goal. Businesses slashed research and development budgets in favor of balance sheet tricks and tax dodges.

In Foroohar’s view, the banks’ primary activity is moving debt around, a risky strategy that hurts the ability of business to grow. As proof, she cites the fate of companies such as General Motors, General Electric, and Xerox, whose myopic thinking led to a decline in innovation and their place at the pinnacle of global business. Instead of serving business, financialization became an end in itself, a closed system unmoored from tangible economic activity.

The message of Makers and Takers isn’t radical or entirely new. (Still, Foroohar’s argument is timeless given the extent to which open-ended anger is fueling populist fervor on the Right and Left.) While she writes with passion, you don’t get a sense of how she intends to fix things beyond the case she makes for a sleepier, simpler capitalism rooted in bread-and-butter businesses such as manufacturing.

If that seems like a simplistic or naive hope, Foroohar notes that our current system wasn’t handed down to us in perfect form from the heavens. Modern capitalism is the product of a messy evolution, driven by natural greed and constrained by the laws we’ve enacted to protect ourselves from it. “We can remake them as we see fit,” she writes, “to better serve our shared prosperity and economic growth.” Those are sunny ideals, no doubt, but there might be enough light just now to prevent Wall Street from ever bilking us out of our Cokes again.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2016 at 7:06am

Global 1%, #Asia Middle Class Gained Most from #Globalization, not Middle Class in #America, #Europe. #Trump #Bexit

https://hbr.org/2016/05/why-the-global-1-and-the-asian-middle-class...


It is by now well-known that the period from the mid-1980s to today has been the period of the greatest reshuffle of personal incomes since the Industrial Revolution. It’s also the first time that global inequality has declined in the past two hundred years. The “winners” were the middle and upper classes of the relatively poor Asian countries and the global top 1%. The (relative) “losers” were the people in the lower and middle parts of rich countries’ income distributions, according to detailed household surveys data from more than 100 countries between 1988 and 2008, put together and analyzed by Christoph Lakner and myself, as well as my book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, which includes updated information to 2011.

The chart above, the Global Incidence Curve, shows the world’s population along the horizontal axis, ranked from the poorest to the richest percentile; real income gains between 1988 and 2008 (adjusted for countries’ price levels) are shown on the vertical axis.

The expansion of incomes around the median of the global income distribution was so overwhelming that it ensured global inequality’s decline — despite the real income growth of the top 1% and rising national inequalities in many countries. Real incomes more than doubled between 1988 and 2011 (though the extension to 2011 is not shown in this chart), a shift that involved large swaths of people (almost a third of the world population, most of them from Asia). And although our data for the past are quite tentative and in some cases not much better than guesses, it is still the first time since 1820 that global inequality is deemed to have gone down, from approximately 69 Gini points to around 64. (On the Gini scale, 100 would be complete inequality while 0 would be complete equality).

------

The intuition behind this result is easy to grasp. In most countries, and especially in the big ones like China, India, the United States, and Russia, national inequalities have risen. So if people are more focused on national inequality, their concerns about what is happening at home will dominate the “objective” reduction of inequality across the globe.

This may be politically a more meaningful way to look at global inequality, and it leads to a somber conclusion. Even if globalization were to be associated with an absolute real income improvement for all, or almost all, and reduced global inequality, if it is also associated with rising national inequalities, the unhappiness stemming from the latter may dominate. Globalization may be “felt” to produce a more unequal world, even if it objectively does not. Then the very facts that are globally hopeful and reassuring may have domestic consequences that are the very opposite.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2016 at 10:21am

Abheek Barua & Bidisha Ganguly: Has global trade lost its mojo?

When market economists get caught up in small ups and downs in data releases, they tend to miss the big picture. One major trend that has not received the attention it should is the significant decline in the value of global trade in 2015 for the first time since the global financial crisis. The question to answer then is whether this is a cyclical phenomenon - slow global growth is likely to mean lower imports and exports or a change in trend. The latter would indeed be worrying, as expansion in trade has been an important driver of global productivity gains. To quote noted economist Gavyn Davies, "the expansion of global trade seems to have lost its mojo".

Let's look at some numbers. According to the International Monetary Fund, world exports in goods and services (measured in US dollars) declined by 10.9 per cent while exports of goods alone declined by 12.5 per cent in 2015. The World Trade Organization (WTO) database shows a marked moderation in the annual growth in world trade volumes, which has fallen steadily from 4.2 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2014 to one per cent in the same quarter of 2015.


This decline is somewhat conveniently attributed to three factors: the rise in the US dollar (that makes values in other currencies translate to less in US dollars), the fall in commodity prices and the replacement of outsourcing with domestic production, particularly by firms based in China. A recent report from the think tank Centre for Economic Policy Research ("The Tide Turns? Trade, Protectionism and Slowing Global Growth" by Simon J Evenett and Johannes Fritz), rejects the interpretation that these are the only factors affecting global trade.

According to them, world export volumes are currently two per cent below their peak, breaking the upward trend apparent since the global economy emerged from the crisis in 2010. Global trade is not just slowing down, it is falling, too. And this cannot be explained by either commodity prices or exchange rates. After decomposing the recent fall in trade values, the authors find that while the collapse in commodity trade stands out, trade in other categories including intermediate, capital and consumer goods also stand at 10 to 20 per cent off their peaks in 2014.

Another hypothesis is that the fall in global trade is actually the result of improved efficiency - companies are reconfiguring their supply chains, buying more of local components, keeping their inventories tight. The report takes a step forward and segregates manufactured products into two categories: ones where parts and components are included within the category and others that are essentially final goods. The contraction in trade involving parts and components is substantially less than the decline in final goods trade. This, the authors believe, casts doubt on the importance of supply chain reconfiguration as a critical explanation of the fall in global trade.

Instead, they find that the products whose exports have fallen are the very same products where G-20 countries have imposed trade restrictions since the beginning of 2014. They argue there has been a rise in the worldwide spread of protectionist measures, with a variety of measures being used to protect domestic businesses. In addition to tariff hikes, these include measures such as subsidies and bailouts, localisation requirements as well as measures against import surges.


http://wap.business-standard.com/article/opinion/abheek-barua-bidis...

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 26, 2016 at 8:25am

The One Demographic That Is Hurting #HillaryClinton: White Men Without College Degrees Overwhlemingly Favor #Trump

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/upshot/the-one-demographic-tha...

In six polls conducted this month, Mr. Trump leads among white registered voters without a degree by a margin of 58 percent to 30 percent. This has been true, to varying degrees, for the entire year. It’s a significant improvement over Mr. Romney in 2012, who led in pre-election polls by a 55-to-37 margin among this group.

In some new polls that are showing Mr. Trump with an overall lead, he has even larger leads among white working-class voters. A Monday CNN poll, for instance, had him ahead by three percentage points nationwide with a 66-to-29 edge among this group. The last live interview poll to show Mr. Trump ahead before the convention, an ABC/Washington Post poll, showed Mr. Trump with a 65-to-29 lead among the group. Conversely, Mrs. Clinton leads when she holds down her losses among these voters.

The notion that Mr. Trump could remain competitive through gains among one group may counter expectations. The prevailing story line of recent elections held that Democrats overcame weakness among white working-class voters with sweeping demographic shifts to a more diverse electorate. This framework implied that white working-class voters had been reduced to just a fraction of the electorate, and that the Republicans had little room for gains among them.

But white working-class voters represented about 44 percent of 2012 voters, and President Obama was not especially weak among them. Across the North, he ran even with, or ahead of, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 with that group. In raw numbers, there were more white-working class voters who supported Mr. Obama than nonwhite voters or college-educated white voters.

Mr. Trump has adopted a message all but perfectly devised to attract these voters. He has a populist message on trade and immigration. He has abandoned key elements of the Republican agenda that hurt the party among white working-class Democrats, like support for cutting the social safety net.

Mr. Trump may also be benefiting from gender. Analysts have tended to treat the “gender gap” as if it always helps Democrats; Democrats are usually said to have an advantage among women, not a disadvantage among men. In truth, there’s no way to distinguish between the two. Mrs. Clinton’s big drop-off among less-educated white men at least raises the possibility that she faces a significant gender penalty among this group.

It is also possible that less-educated white men are reacting to rapid changes in cultural and economic status, completely independent of Mrs. Clinton’s gender. No liberal arts college class on “power, privilege and hierarchy” will tell you that white working-class men have become a disadvantaged group.

But many white working-class men do not feel privileged — not in a society where power and status are often vested in well-educated elites along the coasts. From their standpoint, the Democratic Party might look like an identity politics patronage system — affirmative action, immigration, “political correctness,” gender or whatever else.

Regardless of the exact sources of Mr. Trump’s strength, his narrow but deep appeal has the potential to shake up the electoral map. The extent that Democrats are dependent on white working-class voters varies considerably by state. So, too, does the extent to which Republicans depend on college-educated white voters.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 1, 2016 at 1:50pm

Berkeley Rep casts a vote with Sinclair Lewis' ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ featuring Trump-like main character Buzz Windrip:


http://www.sfgate.com/performance/article/Berkeley-Rep-casts-a-vote...


“We’ve got to change our system!” “Smash the crooked labor leaders!” “Make America a proud, rich land again!” They sound like the rants of a certain current Republican nominee. But they’re actually the ravings of Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, the villainous presidential candidate in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here.”
The tale’s uncanny similarities to the current election, with demagogue Windrip pandering to the electorate’s basest instincts, inspired Berkeley Rep to adapt the novel into a new play that opens the company’s season on Friday, Sept. 30.
After their originally scheduled play dropped out, Artistic Director Tony Taccone and Associate Director Lisa Peterson decided to mount a political work in parallel with the election. “It was February,” Taccone recalls in a sunny room at Berkeley Rep’s offices. “Trump was gaining enough traction that you were like, ‘Oh, that’s curious.’ The book started to get referenced in articles about him.”
“I Googled ‘it can’t happen here,’ thinking, is that a thing?” says Peterson, who also directs the production. “Then we read that it had a theatrical history.” They had unwittingly dusted off an 80-year-old exemplar of political performance.

Lewis is better known for the novels “Main Street,” “Elmer Gantry” and “Babbitt,” as well as a 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature and a 1926 Pulitzer Prize that Lewis declined for “Arrowsmith.”
But “It Can’t Happen Here,” a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism through the American democratic process, was a best-seller in an era when Mussolini led Italy and Hitler was consolidating power in Germany. The complacent American populace is represented by protagonist Doremus Jessup, a Vermont newspaperman who realizes too late that it can, indeed, happen here.
Capitalizing on the book’s popularity, the Federal Theatre Project, an endeavor of the Works Progress Administration, commissioned Lewis and screenwriter John C. Moffitt to adapt it for the stage. And in a stroke of ambition not seen before or since, it premiered in 22 theaters, across 18 states, on Oct. 27, 1936.
Each locale interpreted the script in its own way, including a San Francisco version peppered with air-raid sound effects, Yiddish adaptations in New York and Los Angeles, an African American version in Seattle, and a Spanish translation in Tampa, Fla. (Lewis himself did a turn as Jessup in a Massachusetts summer-stock run in 1938.) Along with providing theater professionals with several months of desperately needed work, the productions entertained more than 500,000 people nationwide and doubled as antifascist propaganda.
But, Taccone says, “It was a terrible play. It was super-melodramatic and didn’t really tie to the book.” Many critics savaged it for those same reasons, but John Hobart praised the San Francisco production, presented at the Columbia Theater (now the ACT’s Geary Theater), in his review for The Chronicle. Describing it as a “taut drama” and “probably the most ‘important’ production the Federalites have yet put on,” he also made the wide-eyed observation that Windrip “combines the chief characteristics of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin with some of the less admirable qualities particular to the third-rate American politician.”
Nonetheless, Taccone and Peterson decided to go back to the source. “The novel’s got a very witty voice, and Lewis’ understanding of American politics was fantastic,” he says, and he and screenwriter Bennett S. Cohen wrote a new script with today’s social climate in mind. “The messenger was different back then,” he explains. “The world had not encountered Hitler yet, but now we are so aware. We talked a lot about how this (story) can still be impactful.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 24, 2016 at 5:27pm

Why are #Muslim immigrants in #America assimilating so quickly? Abandoning beliefs? Leaving faith? #Islamophobia

http://www.newsweek.com/why-are-muslim-immigrants-assimilating-so-q...

This article first appeared on the Cato Institute site.

In my column last week, I demonstrated using surveys mostly from Gallup and Pew Research Center that Muslim-Americans are rapidly abandoning beliefs widely held in their native countries and adopting the more liberal social and political beliefs of other Americans.

But what’s even more remarkable about this fact is that this transition has occurred at the same time that Muslim immigration has ramped up. In other words, immigration is not detracting from those changes and may even be contributing to them.

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While the number of Muslim immigrants and their children doubled from 2007 to 2015—from 1.4 million to 2.7 million—the native Muslim population fell by more than a third—from about 917,000 to 594,000. This provides evidence that the immigrants themselves are taking part in the recent changes.

www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2016/10/18/1021pasted..." alt="10_21_pasted_image_01" title=""/>SOURCES: SEE BELOW.

Sources: Pew 2007, Pew 2011, Pew 2015. Note that Pew 2015 failed to provide the ratio of immigrant to native, so the figure uses Pew 2014. Pew has no surveys before 2007, but the best survey estimate for year 2000 placed the total Muslim population at 1.9 million (Smith2002).

I’ll just give a couple of examples for which I have data for both 2007 and 2014. Figure 2 compares the rate of acceptance of homosexuality among Muslim immigrants and their children with the rate of acceptance among all Muslims, while also tracking the number of Muslim immigrants in the United States.

Pew did not report the breakdown of acceptance of homosexuality by nativity in 2014, but as Figure 2 shows, their views tracked the changes in those for all Muslims in 2007 and 2011—a 12 percent increase for both.

Figure 2: Percent of U.S. Muslims who find homosexuality “morally acceptable” and number of first- or second-generation Muslims in the United States

www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2016/10/18/1021pasted..." alt="10_21_pasted_image_02" title=""/>SOURCES: SEE FIGURE 1.

Given this departure from the strict reading of the Koran, we would expect that many Muslims in the United States may have adjusted their views on Islam’s scripture.

Pew found in 2007 that 50 percent of U.S. Muslims favored taking a “literal” interpretation of the holy book, while 33 percent opposed doing so. By 2014, the literalists had dropped 8 points, and the non-literalists rose 10 points, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 3: Percent of U.S. Muslims who say that the Koran should not be taken literally and number of first- or second-generation Muslims

www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2016/10/18/1021pasted..." alt="10_21_pasted_image_03" title=""/>SOURCES: SEE FIGURE 1.

Here’s another significant point of equal significance: These changes do not include those who abandoned Islam, and it’s safe to assume that these are the people who are likely to be the most liberal.

Thus, these surveys probably under-represent the level of liberalization among people who were raised Muslim or among immigrants who first arrived in the country as Muslim because they exclude those people who defected from the faith in adulthood or after their arrival in the United States.

www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2016/10/18/1021muslim..." alt="10_21_Muslim_Immigants_01" title=""/>The annual Muslim Day Parade in New York City on September 25. David Bier writes that in 2014, 23 percent of all U.S. residents raised in Muslim households had left their religion. Another estimate placed the share at 32 percent. Two surveys found the number of Iranian-Americans who identify as Muslim dropped from 42 percent to 31 percent from 2008 to 2012.STEPHANIE KEITH/REUTERS

Related Stories

• Do Muslims Easily Assimilate Into American Society?
• Is the Imminent Defeat of ISIS the End of Islamism?
• The Koran Does Not Forbid Images of the Prophet
• What Does the Koran Say About Being Gay?

This phenomenon is very significant. In 2014, 23 percent of all U.S. residents raised in Muslim households had left their religion, according to Pew. Another estimate placed the share at 32 percent. Two small surveys found that the number of Iranian Americans who identify as Muslim dropped from 42 percent to 31 percent from 2008 to 2012.

Based on Pew’s 2011 survey of Muslims in America, this number may actually be at the high end. Using American Community Survey data, the numbers imply that the actual share is more likely about 22 percent. Estimates of the effect of “Muslim” immigration on the religious or political makeup of the United States would be highly misleading if it ignored this group.

The bottom line is that very large increases in the Muslim population in the United States due to immigration have not stalled assimilation of those immigrants. Rather, they are demonstrating Americans’ incredible capacity to encourage immigrants to adopt their ways.  

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