I like arguing with my dad. I never have to explain simple concepts, and he makes me think about shit i don't normally think about. On the news today, some fuckin blowhard anchor was going on about how the big reason California has a high GDP as well as a high poverty rate was because... illegal immigrants use welfare? It was wierd.
Me: I think it's stupid how he went straight to the "damn beaners" line. It's pretty easy to see that with tech being such a high profit/low employment industry there's not much room for much else besides ag work and the service industry.
Dad: Well, I bet illegals still play a part in it... (My dad proceeds to go on a bit of a rant vis-a-vis welfare. He's got an antiquated view of poverty and he's seen a lot of the worst on offer humanity wise, so he's super cynical. Just insert "people on welfare blah blah blah getting off topic).
Me: Okay, woah, we got away from the main point. Why do illegals play a part in California's poverty rate?
Dad: You can't have a large group of people at the lowest rung in society enter a country and not impact the bottom line. I think the way they gather those statistics is partly by tracking welfare outputs, so...
Me: What? They can't have that much of an impact, right? There's only, what, 10 million illegals living in the US?
Dad: How do we even know? You can't ask somebody breaking the law by living somewhere whether they're living there illegally and expect them to answer honestly.
Well, this sparked a research dive into a case study and two reports published by the DHS. As per the usual, we got completely off topic and started talking about how they gather these statistics before my mom cut us off; we'd been talking over the movie she'd been trying to watch for, like, thirty minutes.
I like being back home