Search results

Fair enough, I suppose. Well, Yeah, let's hope that Mexico can actually raise its PISA exam scores to Spanish and Portuguese levels. US Hispanics actually don't perform that much worse than Portuguese or Italian students on the PISA exam: But I wonder just how much PISA testing is actually...

Some interesting reading about this topic: https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-Paradox-Stalled-Progress-Recent-Immigrants-Children

It's not surprising that a lot of Mexicans are open to joining the US. The crucial question is, of course, what exactly is in this for the US? There are a lot of Mexicans who will need subsidizing, after all, and based on the book Generations of Exclusion, underachievement is still a notable...

Well, I gave you one such source. If you want me to try finding additional ones, I'll see what I can find. That said, though, in The Grand Chessboard, former US National Security adviser Zbig Brzezinski wrote this about Ukraine: “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/07/13/the-ukraine-seen-as-key-to-success-of-gorbachevs-union-treaty/c4690b55-d738-4aec-b887-fc98d46e25b5/ And more recently...

That Russia would be hesitant to accept a union without Ukraine unless it was forced to do so, in which case it would be a moot point because if Russia would be forced to remain in the Union, then in all likelihood so would Ukraine.

AFAIK, the 1991 Russian vote was based on the assumption that Ukraine would remain in the Union. And even if the Caucasians will leave, Central Asia will still need to be subsidized, and they were VERY pro-union in real life.

If Gorby is ousted in 1987 or so, then no SSRs would likely be allowed to secede regardless of their will. And Yes, Ukraine issued a declaration of state sovereignty, but that wasn't quite the same thing as actually leaving the USSR before the August 1991 coup attempt. And while Russians...

Gorbachev's reforms already allowed them to resurface. What exactly do you think that the sovereignty resolution in the Russian SFSR symbolized, for instance? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_State_Sovereignty_of_the_Russian_Soviet_Federative_Socialist_Republic Russians were also...

No, the issue was that without Ukraine, the Slavic percentage in the Soviet Union would become too small and diluted. You'd see a union that was only 60% or so Slavic, which is too close for comfort for Russian nationalists.

OK, but even so, you need either a Soviet or a Russian leader who would actually be willing to have a (new) Union without Ukraine in order for the Soviet Union to survive.

AFAIK, Yeltsin only favored breaking up the Union after it became clear that Ukraine was not going to participate in any (new) Union. Had Ukraine been willing to participate, so would Yeltsin.

This is just a hunch, but I suspect that the post-Trump GOP might be willing to reconsider their views of Reagan as well. They certainly don't like the Bushes all that much anymore, especially the younger ones (GWB and Jeb!). Fair points. Yes, it would be, by either Gorbachev or Yeltsin...

Yes, the GOP tried to appeal to Hispanic voters over the last several decades. But still, those voters were already US citizens and thus the US already invested in them either way. But when you annex a 100+ million-strong middle-income country, well, that's going to require a lot of subsidies...

Reagan supported amnesty in 1986 but this didn't help the GOP afterwards, which might have caused the GOP base to learn the lesson that the GOP is unlikely to get more than 40% of the Hispanic vote even in a very good year. As for Puerto Rico, you're talking about three million Puerto Ricans...

Americans were relatively hostile towards immigration in the 1990s, and you expect them to be OK with the absorption of 100+ million Mexicans? : https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/wfpzvsyqx0w7finbsb5k5a.png As for the Soviet Union, Russian leader...

It takes two to tango. While Mexicans might have been interested in this, I doubt that Americans would have been. For one, the US would have likely needed to subsidize Mexico for a very long time, possibly indefinitely. Secondly, the demographic effect could be perceived as being a big deal by...