the "illegal immigrant" you are trying to bar from US will turn out to be the doctor/surgeon/ER head who saves your life. — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) August 2, 2017

It’s striking how ignorant America’s cultural elites are about basic immigration-related statistics. The term “cultural elite” gets thrown around pretty elastically, but certainly Joyce Carol Oates would qualify: award-winning author of over 40 novels, professor at Princeton, and not infrequently mentioned as a possible Nobel Laureate in Literature. I must confess I haven’t read any of her novels, but I did read her late 1970s review in The New Republic on one of my favorite novels, Updike’s The Coup, and it’s better than I could have done. She is brilliant.

Yet it turns out that Ms. Oates is statistically clueless about the documented performance of illegal aliens, not to mention their children and grandchildren. Here’s my review of the study of two generations of Los Angeles and San Antonio Mexican-Americans from 1965-2000, Generations of Exclusion by Telles and Ortiz, of the UCLA Chicano Studies department.

Basically, nobody knows these facts except wacko extremists like me.

[Comment at Unz.com]