Posts Tagged ‘immigration’
“Jobs in factories will come roaring back into our country”*…
When President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on “Liberation Day” last spring, the promise was that manufacturing– and the jobs it provides– would return to the U.S. Scott Lincicome (from the conservative Cato Institute) assesses the “progress” to date…
US manufacturing ended 2025 with a thud, capping a rough year for the sector. To recap, manufacturers shed 63,000 jobs, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It wasn’t just labor that was hurting. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index clocked in at 47.9 for December, marking the 10th consecutive month of contraction as new orders were especially weak and costs at historically elevated levels.
Then there’s the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book of regional economic conditions and surveys from the regional Fed banks, which have repeatedly documented cases of manufacturers delaying hiring and investment amid weak market conditions, rising costs, shrinking profit margins and persistent uncertainty. As for the “hard” data, manufacturing capacity and output, while incomplete, sagged through the Fall.
Overall, the evidence reveals a sector that’s stagnant at best, and a long way from the manufacturing renaissance President Donald Trump promised when he took office for a second time a year ago. No wonder administration officials have pivoted from predicting a factory boom in 2025 to now saying it will happen in 2026 and beyond.
Better tax, regulatory, and monetary policy should indeed provide a tailwind for manufacturing, but the sector will probably continue to struggle. If so, Trump’s tariffs will be a big reason why…
[Lincicome unpacks the several ways that Trump’s tariffs have confounded domestic manufacturing: increased costs (especially on materials/compnents not available in the U.S.) and tariff and policy/regulations that might be politely called “inconsistent” (or less politely, “flighty”); last year, the US tariff code was amended 50 times)– which has added management/coordination costs (Federal Reserve economists estimate that domestic manufacturers will pay $39 billion to $71 billion annually to comply with the new regime, representing time and money they can’t spend on their businesses); but perhaps even more damagingly, has created uncertainty that has slowed corporate action/investment. Lincicome concludes…]
… The harms to manufacturers are consistent with research on past tariff episodes and help to explain why the sector struggled in 2025 — and why things might not get much better this year. Recent forecasts also suggest caution, with manufacturers and supply chain professionals predicting continued headwinds due to the costs, uncertainty and complexity of tariffs. And the Supreme Court won’t save them. If it invalidates Trump’s “emergency” tariffs in the coming days, administration officials have promised to invoke alternate authorities to recreate them.
Global supply chains took years to develop. They’ll take even longer to reorganize and will do so at great cost if, that is, they don’t break altogether in the meantime…
“America’s Manufacturing Renaissance Is Missing in Action,” (gift article) by @scottlincicome.bsky.social in @opinion.bloomberg.com.
Relatedly, Trump’s immigration policy was (like the “manufacturing boom”) supposed to have reduced the federal deficit. The Administration is deporting immigrants at a brisk clip– but at an extraordinary cost, both economically and constitutionally. That’s not to mention the costs to the targeted immigrants themselves, to their familires and to the companies and economies of which they have been preponderantly positive and productive parts. Indeed, a different group at Cato recently published a thorough study demonstrating that– far from being a drag on the economy– immigrants have reduced federal (and state and local) deficits by $14.5 Trillion since 1994… though, of course that contribution is now, thanks to the ICE storm, slowing down.
The immigration crackdown was also supposed to turbo-charge job growth (for the U.S.-born); it has not. Indeed, the climate of fear and the difficulty in securing visas has led to a hiring boom abroad: “Silicon Valley can’t import talent like before. So it’s exporting jobs.”
It’s easy to see Trump’s election and the imposition of his economic and immigration policies as America’s Brexit. That abrupt rupture of social, cultural, and economic conventions is now about a decade old… and the results aren’t pretty…
Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union, is a rare contemporary example of a major developed economy raising trade barriers and more generally pulling back from international economic integration. When the Brexit referendum took place in 2016, academic and professional economists generally forecast that the policy about-face would result in a negative hit to the United Kingdom’s economy of about 4% of GDP over the long-term. Rather than a sudden, visible economic shock following the vote, the costs of Brexit have been gradual and cumulative. Now, almost a decade later, new research aims to assess Brexit’s actual impact on the United Kingdom’s economy, which involves the challenging task of comparing the country’s economic indicators to what they would have been if the United Kingdom had remained in the European Union. This research finds that, ten years on, the economic cost of Brexit has been larger than analysts predicted and that prolonged policy uncertainty contributed importantly to the magnitude of the impact… We estimate that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time… Understanding the ways in which Brexit resulted in a drag on economic growth for the United Kingdom provides potential lessons about the costs of abruptly pulling back from the global economy for other countries… – “The Economic Costs of Brexit on the UK” (where there is much more detail)
* Donald Trump
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As we interrogate empty promises (and lest we think that history doesn’t rhyme), we might recall that it was on this date in 1856 that the Know Nothing Party (dba, “the American Party” and “Native American Party”) convened in Philadelphia to nominate its first presidential candidate. A nativist (and largely anti-Catholic) group composed of anti-immigrant/Old Stock breakaways from the American Republican and Whig parties, the Know Nothings nominated Millard Fillmore.
The last member of the Whig Party to serve as President, Fillmore had been a Congressional Representative from New York who was elected to the Vice Presidency in 1848 on Zachary Taylor’s ticket. When Taylor died in 1850, Fillmore became the second V.P. to assume the presidency between elections.
Fillmore’s signature accomplishment was the passage of the Compromise of 1850 passed, a bargain that led to a brief truce in the battle over slavery– but was so ill-conceived (it contained the Fugitive Slave Act) and unpopular that Fillmore failed to get his own party’s nomination for President in the election of 1852, which he sat out. Unwilling to follow Lincoln into the new Republican Party, he got the nomination of the Know Nothings– though he was not a member of the party and hadn’t sought it; he was out of the country during the convention. Fillmore finished third in the 1856 election. By the 1860 election, the Know Nothings were no longer a serious national political movement.
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong”*…
The founding fathers’ hopes notwithstanding, citizenship is under attack in the U.S.— and the intensity of the attack is increasing. On this 4th of July weekend, let us appreciate Kieran Healy‘s account of his path to citizenship…
In 1995, at the beginning of the last week of August, on the afternoon of an inhumanly hot and intolerably humid day, I arrived at Newark Airport to live in the United States. I was twenty two years old and about to start as a graduate student at Princeton. I have been here more or less the whole time since. I spent six years on an F-1 Visa while getting my PhD. After that, I lived and worked in Tucson for seven years. My conception of what counts as an inhumanly hot day changed. During that time I was on an H1-B Visa sponsored by my employer, the University of Arizona. Subsequently, I was granted Permanent Residency—a Green Card—through marriage. In 2009 I moved to North Carolina. My conception of what counts as an intolerably humid day changed. I am an immigrant to this country. I have made my life here. My two children are Americans. And now, as of yesterday [June 27], so am I.
When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths—as you please—about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.
If you are a legal permanent resident of the United States, you apply to be naturalized as a citizen by filling out Form N-400. Part 1 of the form asks for information about your eligibility for becoming a citizen. Parts 2 and 3 ask about your name, address, country of birth, and also identifying information about you including your race and ethnicity. In Part 4 you list everywhere you have lived in the past five years. In Parts 5 and 6 you tell about your marital history and your children. Part 7 is your employment and schooling. In Part 8 you document all the times you have been outside the United States in the past five years even though, as a Lawful Permanent Resident, the state already knows this about you. Frankly, it already knows all the other stuff about you, too. Every time you enter the country you are photographed and fingerprinted.
Part 9 consists of thirty seven questions designed, in the main, to establish whether you are a person of good moral character and also whether you understand, assent to, and are willing to swear to each component of the Oath of Allegiance to the United States. After filling out the form you go to a biometrics appointment where your identity is once again confirmed and you are once again fingerprinted and photographed. Then your citizenship interview is scheduled. At the interview you are assessed by a USCIS Officer on several points, including whether you can speak, read, and write English at a basic level. They also check once again whether you understand and are willing to take the Oath of Allegiance that will make you a citizen. Finally, you must also pass the Civics Test.
The test has one hundred questions. At the interview you are asked up to ten of them at random and you must get six right. There is a Civics Booklet and Study Guide for the test. It is eighty five pages long. Its index is also a list of all one hundred questions and their acceptable answers. The test covers the Constitution, the branches of government, some elements of U.S. history and geography, the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizens, and national symbols and holidays.
[The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that over 95% of applicants pass the test. A 2018 survey found that only about 1/3 of American citizens at large would pass.]
The ceremony room was the kind of place, if you are an academic like me, you might expect to be named “Salon C” or “Wabash Room” or “Sequoia East” and be the site of a sparsely-attended conference talk. The two main differences were the words stenciled on the slightly dropped ceiling, and the fact that the room was full up and alive with nervous energy. At the front of the room there was a large-screen TV. The person leading the ceremony—who, coincidentally, was the USCIS Officer who had interviewed me a couple of months ago—introduced himself and welcomed everyone. All the staff were dignified and low-key delighted. The ceremony opened with a two-minute video that consisted of Ken Burns effect pans over still images and with W.G. Snuffy Walden music underneath. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. Immigrants arriving in the nineteenth century at various locations. And then photographs of the modern equivalents of those people. I began to worry that I might have something in my eye.
The room filled up. It looked just as you might imagine. Some people looked like me, which is to say a middle-aged Irish guy in a standard-issue blazer and tie. There was a guy from Ghana in an immaculate suit. A couple from Algeria held their baby son. A family from the Republic of the Congo had their three young sons sit in the guest area. The boys all wore identical red-white-and-blue check. A German man looked dapper in a lavender shirt. An Indian woman had a green and gold sari. A Chinese family all in a row. A Romanian delightedly offering to take pictures of anyone in need of a photo. A Mexican man in cream-colored linen. A Peruvian woman’s bold floral dress. A family whose two children were wearing tiny plastic Stars and Stripes cowboy hats. It looked like America.
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
But isn’t it more complicated than that? You know as well as I do that it is. So much more complicated. So much more painful. So much more dangerous. So much more messed-up. I will think about and work on strands and threads of that impossible tangle tomorrow, just like I have thought about and worked on bits and pieces of it since I came here. But I will not forget this moment. I will not forget what it felt like.
Now all standing, we raised our hands and took the oath. Once we stopped speaking, we were citizens. We watched a two-minute congratulatory video from President Trump. Even though the video was short, you could see that, in his usual way, he was improvising and riffing around what was on his teleprompter. The result was that he said some odd-sounding things, like how we had U.S. citizenship “like no-one has ever had it before”. It did not matter. The video finished. We filed out of our seats in row order to get our certificate of citizenship. And that was the end.
Afterwards people milled about in the room, delighted, shaking hands, hugging one another. I hugged my daughter. I hugged my friends who had come down from New York at the last minute on an overnight bus to be there. I counted my blessings. There was a little staged area in the corner where people could pose for photographs against a backdrop. At the rear of the room, volunteers were set up and ready to register you to vote if you wanted. People were smiling and crying. Children were running around meeting one another. We were gently reminded that there was another ceremony due to start in twenty minutes.
A new line began to form outside…
“American,” from @kjhealy.co.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoined us: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants…”
* George Washington
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As we remember our roots (and celebrate all that has– and can still- grow from them), we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, having been ratified by 38 states, was certified as adopted by the Administrator of General Services, Robert Kunzig. The amendment establised a nationally-standardized minimum age of 18 for participation in state and federal elections.
“If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in”*…
Perhaps… but as Laurie Winer explains in an excerpt from her Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical, at a time when immigrants were pouring into the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe, the vaudeville circuit became a venue for the expression of those arriving cultures– and ultimately gave us so much more…
The term ‘melting pot’ comes from the theater — it was popularized by a 1908 drama with that title about a Russian composer who loses his family in the 1903 Bessarabia pogroms, emigrates to America, and falls in love with the daughter of the officer responsible for his family’s murder. Such was the compression of migrants in the first decades of the new century. In fact, about fifteen million eastern and southern Europeans arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1915. In 1907 Ellis Island received its highest number of immigrants in a single year, processing more than one million arrivals. In the public sphere, all these cultures introduced themselves on the stages and in the audiences of vaudeville, the American equivalent of the British music hall.
Willie Hammerstein managed the country’s premiere vaudeville house from 1904 until 1913, so his son Oscar II grew up at the epicenter of a cultural mashup unlike anything that had come before. In an oral history he recorded for Columbia University, Oscar remembered going to his father’s theater, the Victoria, every Sunday, where the performers taught him everything he needed to know about comedy and pacing.
Ticket prices were low and audiences comprised many nationalities. Since a good number of performers and spectators alike had escaped famine or pogroms or the social rigidity of the Old World, their evenings together at the theater were fueled by a giddy sense of possibility, both for themselves and for their new country. For instance, ‘It Isn’t What You Used to Be, It’s What You Are Today’ was a staple song for comedian Al Shean, born Abraham Adolph Schönberg in Germany in 1868.
From the 1880s to the early 1930s, peaking from 1905 to 1915, vaudeville presented a unique parade of cultures. Here is where theater became integral to constructing a multihued American identity, a space to figure out who we were and who we wanted to become. A dictionary defines vaudeville as ‘a comedy without psychological or moral intentions,’ and it was this very insignificance that lent the form its power.
With political correctness a concept far in the future, ethnic stereotyping was the entire point of acts like ‘Harry Harvey, the Quaint Hebrew Comedian,’ ‘The Original Wop,’ ‘The Wop and the Cop,’ ‘9 Orientals 9,’ ‘Two Funny Sauerkrauts,’ and ‘The Sport and the Jew.’ Al Shean’s sister Minnie managed and sometimes acted with her five sons, later known as the Marx Brothers, who presented several nationalities in one family. Their first stab at ethnic comedy was an act from 1911 or 1912 called ‘Fun in Hi Skule’: Groucho, playing a thickly accented German teacher, tried, and failed, to control his students, including Harpo (representing the Irish in a bright red wig), Gummo (with a Yiddish accent), and Paul Yale, who played a gay man with a limp wrist. (Chico, who would play the Italian, had not yet joined the act.) Groucho remembered the skit as a big hit, evoking lots of laughter.
In 1905, journalist Hartley Davis wrote an appreciation of vaudeville in Everybody’s Magazine, declaring it to be the ‘most significant development in American amusements of the last decade’:
There is a cheerful frivolity in vaudeville which makes it appeal to more people of widely divergent interests than does any other form of entertainment. It represents the almost universal longing for laughter, for melody, for color, for action, for wonder-provoking things. It exacts no intellectual activity on the part of those who gather to enjoy it; in its essence it is an enemy to responsibility, to worries, to all the little ills of life. It is joyously, frankly absurd …. Vaudeville brings home to us the fact that we are children of a larger growth. It supports the sour Schopenhauer theory — one of those misleading part truths — that life consists in trying to step aside to escape the immediate trouble that menaces us.
Later, when the musical evolved to embrace virtually any subject that could be broached by a play or novel, it kept something of this cheerful frivolity. Even tragic and historically illuminating musicals, like The Scottsboro Boys (2010) or Shuffle Along (2016), employ the percussive delights of tap or the offhand elegance of a hat-and-cane number, if only to emphasize the cruel distance between representation and reality. That these songs are performed on the very stages that hosted legends like George M. Cohan and the Nicholas Brothers adds a visceral link between the past and present.
An era’s popular culture can tell us more than its high art, though critics at the time often have trouble seeing it. About vaudeville, most contemporary commentators sniffed. For instance, critic and playwright Channing Pollock wrote in 1911 that vaudeville ‘addresses itself to amusement seekers incapable of giving, or unwilling to give, concentrated or continuous attention.’ For his part, J. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times enjoyed the Yiddish-accented vaudevillians Potash and Perlmutter’s 1926 play Abe and Mawruss (God Forbid!), but allowed that the act ‘makes no pretense to mental clarity.’ Audiences, less exacting, showed up to absorb the jabs and jokes, and the country expanded itself nightly in their laughter. In this way vaudeville provided context and backstory to the progressive nature of American theater and its playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
In Willie’s day, a typical vaudeville bill consisted of nine acts, the order of which spilled over into the Broadway musical of the 1920s. First up was a ‘dumb act,’ mimes or dancers or animals, so that latecomers would not annoy fellow audience members too much, just as, on Broadway, the introductory song was a throwaway having little to do with story, such as it was. The biggest names-acts like Will Rogers, the Three Keatons, or Mrs. Patrick Campbell — took either the third slot or the penultimate place, just as, on Broadway, songwriters reserved their most rousing treat, known as ‘the eleven o’clock number,’ for second to last. And the evening ended with something graceful or otherworldly, like an equestrian or trapeze artist, an act that sent the audience out into the night feeling buoyant or revived…
On one of the under-appreciated gifts that immigrants have given America: Vaudeville, from @lauriewiner.bsky.social via @delanceyplace.
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As we tread the boards, we might send entertaining bitrthday greetings to George M. Cohan; he was born on this date in 1878. A playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer, wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards “Over There,” “Give My Regards to Broadway'” “The Yankee Doodle Boy” [AKA “(I’m a) Yankee Doodle Dandy”], and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
Known in the decade before World War I as “the man who owned Broadway,” Cohan is considered (with Oscar Hammerstein II) one of the fathers of American musical comedy. He got his start performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as “The Four Cohans.”
“The first wealth is health”*…
As Angela J. Wyse and Bruce D. Meyer explain, lack of health insurance explains five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans…
We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing and adoption of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and earlier waivers and adheres to a preregistered analysis plan, a rarely used approach in observational studies in economics. We find that expansions increased Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced the mortality of the low-income adult population by 2.5 percent, suggesting a 21 percent reduction in the mortality hazard of new enrollees. Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. These expansions appear to be cost-effective, with direct budgetary costs of $5.4 million per life saved and $179,000 per life-year saved falling well below valuations commonly found in the literature. Our findings suggest that lack of health insurance explains about five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans. We contribute to a growing body of evidence that health insurance improves health and demonstrate that Medicaid’s life-saving effects extend across a broader swath of the low-income population than previously understood…
“Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults,” from @nber.org.
Congress, of course, just moved to cut Medicaid; as the wording in the “Big, Beautiful BIll” stands, 8-10 million Americans stand to have the their covergae terminated orr severely reduced.
But even as we agree that extending coverage– fixing the “demand side” problem– could save lives, we should note that we have some serious supply side problems to address: 80% of the country, insured or not, lacks adequate access to healthcare service; and there’s a large and growing shortage of healthcare professionals and workers (a problem aggravated by the Trump administration’s draconian crackdown on immigration). Technology offers some hope, but humans remain at the center of the issue.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As we contemplate care, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Susan Lindquist; he was born on this date in 1949. A molecular biologist, she was a pioneer in the study of protein folding. She showed that alternate structural shapes of protein molecules could result in substantially different effects and demonstrated instances in fields as diverse as human diseases, evolution, and synthetic biomaterials designed to interact with biological systems. Her work laid the foundation for the development of AI-driven systems like Alpha-Fold that accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs and therapies.
“And miles to go before I sleep”*…
Anna and Kelly Pendergrast on the mechanics of a disorienting life event (that has spawned a mammoth industry)…
In 2022, about 12.6% of the US population (aged 1 year or over) lived in a different house or apartment than they did a year prior. The migration rate within the United States has been steadily declining over recent decades after sitting around 20% from the end of World War II to the 1980s. While people moving within the same county consistently make up the largest share of movers, the percentage of people moving between states has been rising, increasing from 18.8% [that the portion of the opularion that moved] in 2021 to 19.9% in 2022.
Moving house is profoundly disorienting, throwing into disarray the entirety of your material existence, your daily routines, and your relationship to the land and built environment. It’s also one of the most significant organizational challenges people willingly undertake — a moment of intersection with the global logistics infrastructures that move things from one place to another.
Moving house is a very specific, personal pain, but as with all stressful life events (marriage, divorce, death) there’s an entire industry around it. Professional moving companies — previously represented by the American Moving & Storage Association, now a part of the broader American Trucking Association — are dedicated to streamlining all aspects of moving house and extracting money from the weary and frazzled. Moving is a big industry: There were 17,936 companies in the moving services industry in 2024, with over 109,062 employees.
If you’re accustomed to scrappy DIY moves, watching a moving company at work is like glimpsing a more logistically sophisticated world. If the DIY mover is a stevedore, loading lamps and houseplants one by one into a truck or station wagon, professional movers are workers at the containerized port, a model of efficiency as they stack standardized boxes into a standardized truck. The professional move is faster and more streamlined than doing it yourself, but it requires more materials, more coordination, and more infrastructure.
Part of the mover’s arsenal is the specialized box and other assorted paper products. For instance, the Dish Barrel is a double-walled cardboard container designed specifically to move dishware, enabling multiple layers of delicate kitchen items to be stacked while minimizing the risk of crushing. There are different methods for packing a Dish Barrel, both with and without cardboard dividers (which U-Haul calls cell kits). But in all cases the best practice for the Dish Barrel is to use copious sheets of newsprint before packing into a box.
A review of moving YouTube videos like those linked above reveal a curious gender binary: While organizing YouTubers (who teach viewers how to sort, label, and display items in a house) tend to be women, moving YouTubers (who teach viewers how to wrap, pack, and box items to leave a house) are more likely to be men. While the tasks are very similar, the connotations of the work — homemaking and aesthetics on the one hand, lifting and logistics on the other — keep them squarely in gendered categories…
More redolent reportage on relocation: “Moving House,” from @annapendergrast.bsky.social and @kellypendergrast.bsky.social in Scope of Work.
(Image above: source)
* Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening“
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As we decamp, we might recall that it was in this date in 1962 that the Seattle World’s Fair (more officially known as “the Century 21 Exposition”) opened. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair during its six-month run; and as planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works (including the iconic Space Needle and the monorail). Unlike many Fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit– and, relevantly to the topic above– is credited with revitalizing Seattle’s economic and cultural life and attracting an increased flow of movers to the area.
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