Item: On Thursday, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the back of a small business in Newark, NJ without a warrant and arrested three undocumented workers. They also detained and questioned employees who are U.S. citizens, one of them, according to Newark’s mayor, a military veteran.
Item: Large numbers of farm workers in Kern County, at the heart of California’s agricultural country, have reportedly stopped showing up for work after what appears to be a wave of arrests — based, as far as anyone can tell, on racial profiling — by Border Patrol agents.
This is how it begins.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the two areas in which Trump seems likely to do a great deal of economic damage, tariffs and deportations (although I should add energy policy to the list.) Wearing my professor’s hat, blocking imports of foreign-made goods and deporting foreign-born workers are, in some ways, similar in their economic implications. But tariffs are about dollars and cents; a crackdown on immigrants is about people. And because it’s about people, Trump’s hostility to immigrants is likely to do far more damage, humanitarian and even economic, than his trade policy.
For the moment, financial markets seem to believe that when it comes to tariffs, Trump won’t follow through on most of what he’s been threatening. I think this is excessively complacent. If you think that Trump’s economic advisers will convince him that slapping high tariffs on our neighbors is a really bad idea, you haven’t been paying attention: Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who won’t even consider telling him that he's wrong.
I guess we’ll see. But when it comes to the crackdown on immigrants, we’re already seeing the first evidence that the administration’s bite will be worse than its bark.
Trump officials have at various points tried to suggest that the deportation efforts will be limited, that at least initially they will only go after criminals, And some Trump apologists were suggesting just days ago that the administration wouldn’t really take actions that would seriously affect the agricultural work force, which includes many undocumented immigrants. Thus Chad Wolf of the America First Policy Institute told Politico,
If there’s 16 workplace raids in agriculture over the course of two months, then yeah, let’s, let’s start talking about how [the economic impact] may be a concern. But I think until there’s actually facts there, I think it’s a little overblown.
Well, I think the facts are already there.
The thing is, I don’t believe that Trump could pursue a limited, restrained crackdown on immigrants even if he wanted to. If you incessantly make the false claim that millions of criminal migrants are fueling a vast crime wave, if you make it clear that respecting the rights of the accused is a liberal, DEI thing, of course some ICE and Border Control agents will run wild. Basically, anyone with brown skin will be at risk of at least temporary detention.
And if you want to think about both the humanitarian and the economic impact of the crackdown, you shouldn’t focus too much on the logistics — on the fact that the Trump administration doesn’t have remotely enough resources to deport millions of U.S. residents or put them in concentration campsholding facilities [insert latest euphemism]. The number of immigrants arrested may be small so far, but the raids are already inspiring widespread fear. And this fear will have major consequences, with workers staying home or, if they can, going back to their home countries, with businesses laying off valuable employees for fear that they may be raided.
Let me make a further prediction that I hope turns out to be wrong: As the official immigrant crackdown ramps up, we’re also going to see a lot of vigilantism. Some of this may take the form of swatting, reports to ICE that such and such a business or gathering place is full of migrant criminals. Some of it will take the form of direct action; remember when the Guardian Angels roughed up a “migrant” (actually a New Yorker) in Times Square? Expect to see much more of that.
All of this will be ugly and scary. America may very quickly become a nation in which everyone — or at least every nonwhite — feels the need to carry proof of legal residence with them wherever they go, and even having the right papers may not protect you from detention or vigilante violence.
Given all this, it seems almost crass to talk about the economic impact. But it will be large.
At this point, almost 1 in 5 U.S. workers is foreign-born:
Most of these workers are here legally, although as we’re already seeing, that may not be as much protection as you think. Most estimates suggest that unauthorized immigrants make up around 5 percent of the work force:
Source: Pew
Losing a large fraction of these workers would be a serious blow to the economy, especially because immigrants, legal and not, play a much bigger role in some industries and occupations than they do in the economy as a whole.
Agriculture is the most striking example: Immigrants — many of them undocumented — make up most of the farm labor force:
Source: USDA
Push those workers out, either by actual deportation or detention or simply by creating a climate of fear, and just watch what happens to grocery prices.
About a quarter of construction industry employees are immigrants — 40 percent in Texas and California — but this number rises to 31 percent if you look only at “construction trades,” i.e., people who actually build stuff as opposed to working in offices or marketing. And the immigrant share is much higher in particular trades:
Source: National Association of Homebuilders
So at a time when Americans are still angry about the price of groceries and, with more justification, about the unaffordability of housing, Trump’s immigrant crackdown seems set to hobble food production and home construction.
Yet I don’t think he can dial it back. He can call off his tariffs, claiming to have won big concessions from Canada and Mexico, or grant tariff exemptions to his friends, turning them into one more instrument of corruption. But his screeds against immigrants have, I believed, unleashed forces of hatred that he can’t rein in. And these forces will make America poorer as well as uglier.
in absolute tears about the pride module at my work
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
The slur songSLRSLR
Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work…
Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you’re the only big account I know who might share (sorry).
cw for like literally every slur in english I think but oh my god
2024 has been a great year for Twitterbickering, with one of the year's most heated arguments bleeding into 2025 in the form of "Treatler discourse." Those in the know might remember rousing arguments between people who think that food-delivery services like Doordash, Ubereats, and Instacart should be more affordable, and those who think that such services are a luxury and not some fundamental right.
Now, the latter crowd has created a questionable nickname for those overly reliant on poorly paid gig workers for delivering their groceries— "Treatlerite," a charming play on the words "treat" and "Hitlerite." Here's where the new slang term originated, and why you might be seeing more of the word in the coming months.
Where Did The Term 'Treatler' Come From?
The cost of Doordashing food has risen drastically in recent years, leading to a fracture between those who wish they could still comfortably afford it, and those who think that such industries are inherently exploitative of gig workers and should either not be supported or be considered a luxury service.
This sentiment led to jokes about people wanting a Private Taxi For Their Burrito instead of making the effort to go out and buy one in person. Such discussions eventually led to sprawling debates about disability rights, and whether having food delivered for cheap right to one's doorstep should be considered a fundamental right for disabled people.
"Why don't they sell individual slices of cheese, lettuce, bacon and tomato?" pic.twitter.com/5WjDBpniFU
By June 2025, someone finally came up with a word that encapsulates the sentiment of wanting one's treats more than wanting to alleviate someone else's suffering— being a Treatler.
How Did The Terms 'Treatler' and 'Treatlerite' Spread?
Discussions about "Treatlers" and "Treatlerites" continued to gain traction into December 2024, as seen in the responses to a now-deleted December 2nd tweet by X user @carbdiem, who wrote, "Idc if this makes me a Karen, if your UberEats profile picture shows that you're a woman and my delivery person shows up and they're a cis man then I will report every time and so should you!!!"
The tweet received widespread backlash and support, with some people saying that being "deceived" by their driver trumps whatever economic disadvantage they might have. One such X user tweeted about "expecting a polish blonde lady to be delivering your food to your house only for a MAN to turn up to your address," prompting people to call them a "Treatler."
By late December 2024 and early January 2025, the terms "Treatler" and "Treatlerite" had caught on, with X user @YourSilvrFriend posting an edit of Adolf Hitler wearing childlike accessories and X user @punishedgothgf posted a "Hitler Particles / We Agree" edit featuring a fatter "Adolf Treatler."
On January 5th, 2024, X user @dennismhogan posted about the term "Treatlerite," calling it "one of the more useful recent internet coinages."
Generational trauma is a recurring debate on social media in which users share how a negative family history can have a major impact on future generations.
As is often the case, the internet has a mix of humor and sarcasm to comment on such stingy topics, in this case, the prominent meme that has emerged is known as "It’s Up To You To Break Generational Trauma."
This meme, using a webcomic or cartoon as an exploitable, turns the stable of a powerful message about trauma into a hilarious scope of image macro and creative texts related to all kinds of addiction, fandom culture or simply mocking the original intention of the artwork.
Here's a quick breakdown of where the original comic comes from, how it started becoming a meme format and how it's evolved over the years since it first emerged.
What Is The 'It’s Up To You To Break Generational Trauma' Meme?
The "It’s Up To You To Break Generational Trauma" meme, also known as "Break The Cycle" or "It's Up To You To Traumatize Your Child," is a motivational catchphrase paired with a cartoon that illustrates the generational trauma dynamic of parenting.
In this artwork, multiple fathers are shown yelling criticisms at their sons, creating a lineage of negativity with their actions.
First shared on Instagram in June 2021, the original motivational cartoon quickly gained traction on platforms like Facebook and Reddit as numerous users recaptioned it into various ironic and exploitative templates.
How Is The Break The Cycle Meme Used Online?
The "Break The Cycle" meme gained traction as an exploitable image macro format on social media in the 2020s, serving as both a conversation starter and a source of mockery for individuals grappling with familial trauma.
For instance, the Facebook page Fathers Matter uploaded a version of the meme with the top cation, "It's up to you to break generational trauma" (shown below, left), which was later reposted on Instagram in early November 2021 by the meme page stalememesfornormiehasbeens that recaptioned the text to reference Big Chungus, thus becoming the earliest known page to re-edit the template for another joke (shown below, right).
Many cartoon iterations inspired by the original artwork were shared on social media over subsequent years, typically following the family dynamics of reinforcing negative comments to the following generation. The Instagram page motivationsspace's version of john_lee_official's cartoon became the more notable exploitable template going into 2022.
For instance, in May 2022, the Instagram page femcelincelalliance posted a version that replaced the bottom text with, "It's Up To You To Traumatize Your Child" (shown below, left), which was later recaptioned by the Instagram page pairofkingspod to reference the clothing brand Chrome Hearts (shown below, right).
For the full history of "Break The Cycle," be sure to check out Know Your Meme's entry for even more information.
I ran into the following economic dictum at Paul Krugman’s new Substack. The author is Rudi Dornbusch, who formulated it originally in the context of monetary policy and financial crises, but it clearly has wider applications:
The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.
This is reminiscent of Mike’s description in The Sun Also Rises of how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
I was thinking about these insights in the context of the economic future of higher education in this country. I’ve spent all but three years of my adult life in academia, first as a student and then as a faculty member. For the last quarter or so of that 47-year span, I’ve been wondering how much longer this thing of ours could keep going in the direction it’s been going, certain in the knowledge that the answer was “definitely not indefinitely,” but also unclear in my mind, or the back of my mind, when it would become clear to everyone that our methods were unsound.
Here is the change in the total revenues for degree-granting institutions of higher education in America over the last four decades, per total full-time equivalent enrollment, converted into 2022 dollars:
FY1980: $26,417
FY2001: $39,141
FY2022: $49,749
How did this happen? The answer has a lot of components, so let’s take a look at some of them, in no particular order.
(1) America as a nation is a lot richer than it was 40 years ago, and the growth in higher ed revenue reflects this broader economic growth pretty closely, as both figures have roughly doubled over this time.
(2) Some costs in higher ed are necessarily much higher than they were 40 years ago. The most obvious is IT, although this raises the question — not begs the question, raises the question — of whether and to what extent the cost savings to institutions generated by IT should cancel out or exceed costs of IT itself (I would think the answer would be “by a lot” but I’m no expert).
(3) Colleges and universities are expected by pretty much everybody involved with them to be far more full-service sorts of institutions than they were 40 years ago. This is true in both serious (mental health services) and relatively frivolous (the infamous climbing walls and lazy rivers) ways.
(4) The professional incentives of upper administrators in higher education are perverse. Essentially, upper administration is evaluated and rewarded in terms of a hyper-capitalist model, in which the prime directive is always more growth, especially of revenues. Obviously, the parallel between the economics of the university and those of the larger society is not coincidental.
(5) An extremely clear example of the perverse effects of this model is provided by comparing the change in compensation between faculty and upper administrators. The average salaries of all FULL TIME university faculty essentially didn’t change between 1970 and 2022, going from $96K to $98K, in constant dollars. But the PERCENTAGE of faculty that was full time changed from 78% to 52% over this same time frame, which means that faculty salaries have gone down very sharply over the past couple of generations, if you count the half of the faculty that does two-thirds of the teaching in higher ed as actual faculty, which I realize many a chaired professor doesn’t, for reasons that are too obvious to belabor.
Meanwhile, compensation for upper administrators has exploded. 40 years ago, hardly any university president was making more than $300,000 per year in constant, 2022 dollars. Today, dozens of presidents make many multiples of that, but what’s even more relevant is that literally thousands of other administrators have larger salaries than the highest-paid university presidents did a generation ago. And the sheer NUMBER of upper administrators has proliferated, for both good and bad reasons. The good or at least arguably good reasons have to do with the demands that universities be full service institutions in ways that they weren’t, referenced above.
The bad reasons include the fact that the very highest administrators will strive to unload their putative job responsibilities onto underlings, who will perform the actual work that the Lord High Chancellor of Synergistic Interdisciplinary Synergies is in theory paid to perform. Also, as the professional administrative class has been increasingly hived off from the faculty into a separate career track/social caste, its members naturally come to consider administration to be the most central and important and valuable thing that happens at the university, as opposed to research and teaching and other stuff that members of the professional administrative class no longer do, because they have achieved academic escape velocity.
(6) It’s difficult to overstate the corrupting effects that pseudo-evaluative ranking rituals have had on higher education. US News and its various imitators have, over the past generation, created a ready-made pragmatic excuse for what upper administrators want to do anyway, which is to constantly spend more money. This is because these institutions are rewarded directly and indirectly for spending more money, as a proxy for the quality of the institutions themselves. This is, from an economic and social standpoint, very obviously insane, but when sanity collides with the social and economic self-interest of the relevant decision makers, sanity is going to lose.
(7) A critical factor in regard to how all of the above happens is the extremely weak and inadequate governance structure at so many institutions of the higher learning in America. I can from personal experience state in the most polite terms that I can muster that, for example, the regents of the University of Colorado don’t have the faintest idea about what’s going on at my employer, let alone any clue how to go about managing whatever that might be. This is not, I hasten to add, because of any character flaws on their part as individuals, but rather because the combination of the regents’ professional backgrounds and the essentially total control that the upper university administration exercises over the information available to the regents makes anything resembling an independent check on the administration’s self-dealing — which, again, is structurally overdetermined down to the last turtle — all but impossible.
For various economic, demographic, and political factors, these dynamics are hurtling American higher ed toward a reckoning, that is even now approaching gradually, but will one day arrive suddenly.
Until that day, the motto of the powers that be in academia is exactly the same one that governs the behavior of the masters of our increasingly plutocratic universe: I’ll be gone; you’ll be gone.
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