January 2026 - Ramblin' with Roger

Net migration outcomes in 2025 and the US economy

Aging workforce

In the discussion of immigration in the United States, the Brookings Institution published an analysis of net migration outcomes. Unsurprisingly:

There was a significant drop-off in entries to the United States in 2025 relative to 2024 and an increase in enforcement activity leading to removals and voluntary departures. We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative.
In our assessment, net migration is likely to be very low or negative in 2026 as well

“The downward population pressure stemming from negative net migration has important implications for the macroeconomy. In recent years, growth in the U.S.-born working-age population has been weak, and nearly all growth in the labor force has stemmed from immigration flows. The 2022–24 immigration surge was accompanied by robust job growth, with immigrants both supplying labor and generating demand for goods and services.”

The CDC noted in 2024: “The percentage of older workers employed has grown. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of workers aged 65 or older has grown by 117% within 20 years. Employment of individuals 75 years or older has increased by 117%.”

Weakening the economy

Brookings: “Conversely, the recent slowdown in population growth has affected the level of employment growth consistent with an unchanged unemployment rate, often called ‘breakeven employment growth.’ We estimate that, in the second half of 2025, breakeven employment growth of 20,000 to 50,000 jobs each month was consistent with immigration flows. That number could dip into negative territory over 2026. Reduced immigration also has modest dampening effects on GDP and will weaken consumer spending by an estimated $60–$110 billion combined over the two years. “

In other words, the severity of immigration limitations – and they are not even talking about the MANNER of the crackdowns – is detrimental to the US economy.

The frustration, however, is that there are no solid data. “Though some refugees were likely admitted in early January 2025, the current administration has all but suspended the refugee program, with an exception for an unknown number of white South Africans. Data on the number of refugees is no longer publicly available.”

Guesstimates

As a librarian, I sympathize with statisticians who must rely on estimates. “Our estimate of net migration of –295,000 to –10,000 for 2025 differs from some other prominent estimates. The most recent version of the CBO demographic estimates, released in January 2026, indicates a net migration of approximately 400,000 for 2025.

“Other estimates are much more negative than our own, notably those using Current Population Survey (CPS) data to examine the foreign-born population. For example, the CPS has been used by the Center for Immigration Studies and the Pew Research Center to estimate a decline in the foreign-born population of around 2 million.”

There’s other info, such as how “the reduction in consumer spending by immigrants also further dampens GDP growth.” The Council on Foreign Relations notes, “Most economists say that immigration is good for the U.S. economy because it helps grow the size of the labor force, boost tax revenue, and increase consumer demand. However, there is some debate about the effect of immigration on wages.”

Sunday Stealing — 3×5

beige v eggshell

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

Back in 2007, Donna from Just Me was tagged by her blog buddy, Shaz, to answer a long and lovely list of three things. We’ve pared it back to 5.

3 x 5

Three things I love (Remember, these are things, not people):

Music reference books. Most of them are from Record Research and were compiled by the late Joel Whitburn.

2. My multitudinous photo albums from 1972 -2012, even though I seldom look at them.

3. The streets of Albany, which are weird.

Three things on my desk:

Moisturizing lotion, which I don’t even use in the office.

2. A CD player I just bought. I got it from Best Buy, in part because, if it dies in the next two years, they’ll fix or replace it.

3. An empty Diet Pepsi bottle that I occasionally fill with water.

Three things I can’t do:

Hang a picture on the wall straight without trying it about five times.

2. Paint over something when the old and new colors are too similar, such as painting over beige with eggshell. I can’t see the difference. I’ll paint over yellow with blue, or green over orange.

3. Figuring out technology right out of the box. I have two bins of electronics stuff, most of which I can’t readily identify.

Good

Three things I’m good at:

Paying attention. I seem to see things, especially people, that need tending more than most.

2. Anticipating the behavior of pedestrians and other cars when my wife is driving. And before you ask, she likes it.

3. Remembering scads of musical references based solely on hearing them.

Three things I want to accomplish:

Probably, I need to use lifehacking, or something. Ugh… Or cloning, which I can get behind.

I still want to write that book.

2. I’m in the process of getting reimbursed for medical expenses, a task I didn’t complete at all in 2025.

3. Get back to genealogy, which has fallen off the table. There are a whole bunch of 16th and 17th-century folks from England who end up in my Ancestry “hints.” I have north of 700 hints I should follow up on.

1981 #1 Top rock tracks

Start Me Up

These are the 1981 #1 Top Rock Tracks. I purchased the book Joel Whitburn Presents Rock Tracks last year. It is “compiled from Billboard’s alternative Rock and Mainstream Rock charts.” The mainstream rock chart was first published on March 21, 1981.

Not unlike Spotify today, it would compile the most-played tracks based on their popularity, “regardless of its mechanical configuration, meaning, regardless of whether it is a 45 RPM single, LP cut, or whatever.”

Start Me Up – the Rolling Stones, 13 weeks at #1, #2 pop for three weeks. I remember this song extraordinarily well. I went to my high school reunion, ten years later, at Binghamton Central High School in upstate New York. The reunion itself was so-so, but several of my friends and I ended up going over to my friend Cee’s house. One of my oldest friends, Karen, who was in the music industry, played “Start Me Up,” which had just come out, at least hourly, so about a half dozen times. (We were there for a very long time.) Ultimately, it became a song for Windows 95, by which point I had grown sick of it. But I liked it initially.

The Waiting – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 6 weeks at #1, #19 pop. The line, “the waiting is the hardest part,” is forever stuck in my vernacular.

Wagering?

You Better You Bet – the Who, 5 weeks at #1, #18 pop. This is the last Who song I really remember.

The Voice – the Moody Blues, 4 weeks at #1, #15 pop. Oh, THAT song; I’d heard it, but I didn’t recognize it from the title.

Urgent – Foreigner, 4 weeks at #1, #4 pop. I was a sucker for the saxophone.

Harden My Heart – Quarterflash, 3 weeks at #1, #3 pop for two weeks

I Can’t Stand It– Eric Clapton and his band, 2 weeks at#1, #10 pop. It feels pretty generic.

Burnin’ For You – Blue Oyster Cult, 2 weeks at #1, #40 pop. I’ve never seen this video; I like it.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic – The Police, 2 weeks at #1, #3 pop for two weeks. Ghost In The Machine may have been my first Police album.

A Life Of Illusion – Joe Walsh, 1 week at #1, #34 pop

Waiting For A Girl Like You – Foreigner, 1 week at #1, #2 pop for ten weeks. For nine of those weeks, which rolled into 1982, Physical by Olivia Newton-John was #1 pop; the final week, I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) by Daryl Hall & John Oates was #1 pop

Wikipedia is too “woke”?

neutral and boring and well sourced

In a bit of a hyperenergetic rant, Hank Green spoke about Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust. Hank says, “a community of a bunch of individual volunteers… has built the greatest resource of information the world has ever seen…” And tolerance.

“Elon Musk is like, ‘This is a disaster of a place’ Because, of course, it says things he doesn’t like about him. And so Elon is responding by creating Grokipedia, an AI-created version of Wikipedia… which is admittedly in the Creative Commons.

“It’s just worse in every way because it doesn’t have all of the amazing infrastructure behind it… Holding this community together and keeping it [maintained] on Wikipedia for decades is insane. It’s a miracle.”

Interestingly, Musk’s “anti-woke Wikipedia alternative,” which “aims to create a parallel version of the truth for the right wing,” shows up in this article, revealing what an intellectual fraud it is.

Conversely, “’Musk does not have armies of people writing pages. What he does have is a sh!t-ton of GPUs,” the technology that underpins AI processing…

Community

“Because if Wikipedia is neutral and boring and well sourced, then that is a threat to their worldview and it’s a threat to their ability to define reality.” It is the anthesis of rage bait, Oxford’s Word of the Year.

“Wikipedia is a community of hundreds of thousands of editors…It’s globally accessible. It’s self-correcting. And I cannot emphasize this enough, boring. . And in the media landscape, designed to amplify the drama and the outrage and the conflict, the fact that Wikipedia is kind of boring is one of the most beautiful things about it. I love it. I want a place that’s not about trying to get views.” It is a social good.

I like Wikipedia. It has become a much better source of information. Back in 2005, there was a piece about the Presidential elections. It stated that the next one would be in 2007, which, of course, was inaccurate. I fixed it, and the correction stuck. I find far fewer of such egregious errors.

Here’s a 2024 article from a high school newspaper that is not wrong. “This issue of inaccurate information expands much more than just Wikipedia… That is why it’s strongly recommended that researchers using Wikipedia always check the sources at the bottom. They could lead to better information, if anything.” And I do use the footnotes regularly.

I even donated to Wikipedia in December 2025, possibly for the first time, because it’s useful and a social good.

Under attack

Rebecca Spiess wrote in the Boston Globe (paywall likely): Wikipedia is more important, and more vulnerable, than ever. The largest open repository of human knowledge is under attack.

“The secret sauce is the robust debate among the site’s editors — all volunteers — over the most important entries.

“In an excellent article in The Verge, writer Josh Dzieza explains just how intensely editors disagree: ‘By 2005, the pages where editors stipulated policy and debated articles were found to be growing faster than the articles themselves. Today, this administrative backend is at least five times the size of the encyclopedia it supports.'”

Moreover, “In its annual plan, Wikipedia this year identified the organization’s largest challenge: finding quality volunteers…

“In its most recent annual plan, the Wikimedia Foundation noted that its long-term sustainability largely hinges ‘on a steady influx of new users who contribute quality content and remain engaged.'”

“As algorithms continually work to build up our echo chambers, fact-checking procedures look increasingly quaint, and AI slop splashes all over the internet, Wikipedia is possibly the only fully unmonetized reality that still exists. There is no algorithm, sycophant AI machine, or advertiser trying to game this place.

“That’s why it matters so much.”

Charlie Kirk was not MLK Jr.

‘the beloved community’

mlk targeted Here’s what I didn’t think I’d be writing a year ago. Charlie Kirk was not MLK Jr. To be fair, I wasn’t all that sure who Charlie Kirk WAS 12 months ago.

Some of Kirk’s supporters point to “opening” dialogue, like King attempted to do. “Social media is awash in AI fantasy-tributes of Kirk standing with fallen American heroes such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and even Jesus Christ himself.” Some I have seen are gagworthy.

But as John-Paul Hyde wrote on Substack, “Charlie Kirk isn’t Martin Luther King — He’s Nick Naylor.” Naylor is the protagonist in the movie Thank You for Smoking, which I saw and loved in 2006. “Canonizing a partisan spin doctor as an American Saint is just another layer of spin.”

One way Kirk was unlike King was that, even as King would attempt to prod the government to take action, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, he wasn’t co-opted by Lyndon Johnson or other politicians.

Flip-flop

Whereas, “this is what we saw with Charlie Kirk whenever Trump changed narratives. Kirk beseeched America to turn away from a war with Iran. Then Trump bombed Iran, and Kirk applauded him as a ‘man made for the moment.’ Charlie Kirk was a staunch free-trader. Then Trump started pushing tariffs, and Kirk instantly became a protectionist. Charlie Kirk used to believe in the separation of church and state. Then Christian nationalism grew and merged with the MAGA movement, and Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist defender. “

Brian Recker wrote: “King spent his life battling for what he called ‘the beloved community,’ a world of racial justice, material equality, and peace. He worked to tear down the forces that rip us apart and the systems that dominate the vulnerable. His words inspired us to see the best in each other—towards empathy and solidarity…

“King showed us that we are ‘caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.’ His triumph was the Civil Rights Movement, which secured dignity and civil liberties for Black Americans who had long been denied their humanity. At the end of his life, he was marching with sanitation workers carrying signs that read, ‘I Am a Man.'”

Opportunist

Kirk was an opportunist. From WIRED:

Conservative activist and Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk has a lot of opinions on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2015, Kirk called him a “hero.”

In 2022, MLK was a “civil rights icon.”

In December 2023, speaking before a group of students and teachers at America Fest, a political convention organized by Turning Point USA, Kirk struck a different tone.

“MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

“Kirk’s attempt to discredit civil rights law is an example of how ‘the fringe moves to the center at the speed of light’ in right-wing politics, says public policy scholar Jonathan Rauch.

“‘If they’re going to say the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the death of the Constitution and freedom in America, then that’s going to be extremely divisive, because a lot of people are going to say, ‘Well, if that isn’t racist, I don’t know what is,’’ Rauch says. ‘This is the federal law that ended segregation.'”

So was Kirk merely an opportunist, someone who was willing to take his Turning Point USA group in whatever direction the winds were blowing? Or is the litany of racist and sexist comments a real reflection of his bigotry?

MLK III

I’ll leave the final words to MLK’s son, Martin Luther King III, who “respectfully disagrees” with the MLK Jr/Kirk parallels.

King III pointed out instances in which Kirk had previously attacked what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for. “While King III admits Kirk had a right to his opinion, he says what he represented was quite different than his father, who King III said was about ‘bringing people together.’

“‘It’s not just about blackness,’ King III said. ‘The whole notion of what that means is sad that we are minimizing what made this country what it is, which is, I always say, a potentially great country, because I can’t universally say we are great as long as we’re mistreating people and we are.'”