Immigration To The United States

"Iwant to live in a world where instead of there being one company in one place in the world with one dominant model."

"Overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations."

"We focus on where AI tools are being experimented with before they get to the rest of the society and uncover what happens to the people."

"What I’ve realized is that we can talk about the ethics and fairness of AI all we want, but if our institutions don’t allow for this kind of work to take place, then it won’t.”"

"Generative AI is not just about creating something new, but about capturing what was once impossible to express.”"

"I think it made it really clear that unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self regulate."

"We should remember that we have the agency to do that."

"We aim to expose the harms of the current AI system, serving as an early warning system to stop their spread."

"“Even at places like Stanford, we have too much concentrated power that is impacting the world, and yet the world has no opportunity to affect how technology is being developed.""

"I was being attacked by a bunch of guys, and nobody helped me at all."

"That’s not the world I want to live in."

"We have many people who are each working to support their communities in some way and sharing profits back."

"The primary motivation with all of these AI technologies is either to have more warfare or to have more profit."

"We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive."

"A lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it."

"That was the scariest thing."

"Feels like a gold rush."

"Impacts people all over the world and they don’t get to have a say on how they should shape it."

"My hope is that our work counteracts the drive to centralize power and disenfranchise human beings."

"It’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not."

"You don’t want someone like me who’s going to get in your way."

"I’ve met so many people like you who think that they can just come here from other countries and take the hardest classes."

"AI tools that actually help people and not try to replace them."

"I want a different kind of root motivation for technology that puts human welfare first."

"I want to live in a world where we’re not trying to disenfranchise humans or devalue labor."

"Chess Life: Let’s begin by talking about your return to the Candidates tournament. What does it mean to you at this point in your career to be a Candidate once more? Hikaru Nakamura: First and foremost, it comes as a very pleasant surprise. It was not really an objective of mine when I chose to play in the (2022) FIDE Grand Prix. I was very fortunate to be granted a wild card by the FIDE president, Arkady Dvorkovich. I went into the event wanting to see if I could still cut it against the best players in the world. As most people know, I’ve been streaming a lot over the last couple of years. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I still feel I am quite competitive [with the top players]. I wanted to see how it would go, but there were really no illusions — or delusions, you could say — of qualifying for the Candidates for me.Even after the first event, which I did win, it [qualifying] was not anything that I was thinking about in a serious way. Then in the second event, probably one of the worst possible results [from my perspective] occurred with [GM] Richard Rapport winning, and [GM] Maxime [Vachier-Lagrave] and [GM] Anish [Giri] having fairly... decent results.Before the third event started, I knew the groups weren’t very favorable with [GM] Levon [Aronian] being in mine. I never really was thinking about [qualifying] until I won this game against Levon in the fourth round of the third FIDE Grand Prix. Prior to that, I knew there were chances. Everyone [was] talking about it when I’m streaming and so forth, but it really wasn’t something that I was thinking about."

"his masterpiece, "Tevye the Dairyman""

"The only famous Yiddish stories from Latin America I'm able to make people invoke are the handful of ones by the masters Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. They are set in, or at least refer to, Argentina (and on occasion in an eternally rainy Brazil) and invariably deal with the Jewish prostitution ring-la trata de blancas."

"What is rarely known except by scholars is the range and variety of the pre-Holocaust Ashkenazi communities of Europe: traditional, socialist, communist; Orthodox and secular; capitalist and worker; Yiddish-speaking and/or fluent in the vernacular of wherever they lived: Russian, Polish, French, Czech, German. ... There is a whole literature, not just Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Sholem Aleykhem whose Tevye stories hit Broadway as Fiddler on the Roof, but also brilliant narrative writers and experimental poets such as Chaim Grade, Kadia Molodowsky, Anna Margolin, Mani Leyb, Itsik Manger, and a host of others."

"He would grab his fiddle and with one pass of his bow, just one mind you, the fiddle would begin to speak. What do I mean by “speak”? I mean literally, with words, with a tongue like, excuse the comparison, a living human being. Talking, arguing, singing mournfully in the Jewish fashion with such a wild cry from deep inside, from the very soul."

"From Sholem Aleichem to Peretz and beyond, canonical Yiddish literature does not mince words when it comes to identifying the tormentors of Jews as Christians."

"That is precisely the problem with the youth of today: we never have any time, and we rush the entire work in one single breath, standing, as the saying goes, on one foot, without stopping to ponder each thought, each separate word, without working on it and filing it down, as you do."

"In one of your letters, you [Grandfather] said to me: “I would advise you not to write any novels, as your taste, your style is something else entirely, and above all, if there are novels to be found in the lives of our people, they are entirely different from those of other nations. One needs a firm grasp of this and must write accordingly.” Your words bore deep into my brain and I began to understand how different a Jewish love story needs to be from all other novels, because Jewish life in general, and the circumstances under which a Jew can love, are in no way similar to how they are for other nations."

"We Jews are fond of listening to music and have a good grasp of melody—even our enemies would be the first to admit that—and yet on the other hand, we don’t often get the opportunity to hear it. What do we have to celebrate after all, for us to suddenly break into song and dance? Say what you will, though, we are still connoisseurs, experts in both singing and playing music, and in all manner of other things to boot."

"No doubt everyone has worries—a Jew does not need to go looking for trouble."

"The heart itself, and particularly the Jewish heart, is a violin: you pluck the strings, teasing out various, generally sad and gloomy songs"

"In the short run, the identity of victim does, indeed, pay off. Sholem Aleichem recognized this in his story "Lucky Me, I Am an Orphan." Anyone who is a victim and nothing but a victim-in the sense of "deserving" compensation and forgiveness for everything-usually milks this position for all it is worth, through the end of the generation that witnessed the tragedy. In the longer run, the perpetuation of the victim identity causes complete severance from reality, utter dependence on the past and the past alone, and distortions of all proportions and emphases to the point of warping the personality."

"Sholom Aleichem can be forgiven for writing stories that often resemble fairy tales, since his own life was one itself."

"Once a joke, twice a joke, but not a joke forever."

"In America there’s a custom: you moofe. That is, you pack up from one apartment to the next. From one street to the next. From one biznes to the next. Everybody has to moofe. If you don’t moofe of your own free will, then they make it so you have to."

"The sun gave light, but no warmth. Like a stepmother, as they say in Kasrilevke."

"The fiddle weeps, sinking to the lower strings"

"Modern Yiddish literature attained its maturity with the work of three classical masters: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. These three authors were the literary forebears whom subsequent generations of Yiddish writers both emulated and rebelled against... the depiction of Jewish women is, with some exceptions, not among our literature's finest accomplishments. Throughout all of Yiddish literature, beginning with the classical writers, for instance Mendele and his portrayal of Beyle in Fishke the Cripple, or Sholem Aleichem's depiction of Tevye's daughters in Tevye the Milkman, or Rokhele in Stempenyu, or Bashevis's "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" and Grade's The Agunah, there is an undercurrent of sympathy for the Jewish woman, as well as guilt about her double enslavement, both as woman and as Jew... Thus, some male Yiddish prose writers did faithfully and realistically describe the situation of women in the late-nineteenth century. They depicted their female characters with great tenderness and understanding. But as a general rule, they avoided looking deeper into the more complicated qualities that make up a woman's individuality. The male writer sympathized with the woman's plight; he idealized her, sang her praises, wondered at her, but he knew nothing about who she really was. He did not illuminate her from within."

"The likelihood of being granted asylum differed for affirmative and defensive cases and varied depending on the immigration court in which the case was heard. Overall, the grant rate for affirmative cases (37 percent) was significantly higher than the grant rate for defensive cases (26 percent). The affirmative asylum grant rate ranged from 6 percent in Atlanta to 54 percent in New York City. The grant rate for defensive cases ranged from 7 percent in Atlanta to 35 percent in San Francisco and New York City."

"The accuracy of an asylum decision is critical because of the decision’s potential impact on the safety of the asylum seeker and the security of our nation. An incorrect denial may result in an applicant being returned to a country where he or she had been persecuted or where future persecution might occur. At the other extreme, an incorrect approval of an asylum application may allow a terrorist to remain in the United States, a concern that was heightened by the attacks of September 11, 2001."

"Just as the likelihood of being granted asylum varied across immigration courts, it also varied by nationality. The grant rate for affirmative cases exceeded 50 percent for asylum seekers from some countries, including Albania, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Russia, Somalia, and Yugoslavia. For other countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, it was lower than 10 percent. Similarly, while about 50 percent of asylum seekers in defensive cases from Iran and Ethiopia were granted asylum and almost 60 percent of such cases from Somalia were granted asylum, the same was true of 13 percent or less defensive asylum cases from El Salvador, Honduras and Indonesia."

"In the 19 immigration courts that handled almost 90 percent of asylum cases from October 1994 through April 2007, nine factors affected variability in asylum outcomes: (1) filed affirmatively (originally with DHS at his/her own initiative) or defensively (with DOJ, if in removal proceedings); (2) applicant’s nationality; (3) time period of the asylum decision; (4) representation; (5) applied within 1 year of entry to the United States; (6) claimed dependents on the application; (7) had ever been detained (defensive cases only); (8) gender of the immigration judge and (9) length of experience as an immigration judge. After statistically controlling for these factors, disparities across immigration courts and judges existed. For example, affirmative applicants in San Francisco were still 12 times more likely than those in Atlanta to be granted asylum. Further, in 14 of 19 immigration courts for affirmative cases, and 13 of 19 for defensive cases, applicants were at least 4 times more likely to be granted asylum if their cases were decided by the judge with the highest versus the lowest likelihood of granting asylum in that court."

"In 2014, an unprecedented 68,000 parents and children, most of them fleeing violence and lawless-ness in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, crossed into the United States from Mexico – a refugee crisis that has contributed to the bloated backlog of asylum petitions. Many of the migrants, including Gutierrez and Ana, convinced initial interviewers that they had a “credible fear” of returning home, the first step in filing an asylum claim. Having come from a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world may have helped establish “credible fear.” But the two women were already at a dis-advantage – precisely because they came from Honduras. Country of origin is a big factor in de-termining who gets to stay in the United States because immigrants from some countries are afforded special protections. For example, courts ruled in favor of Chinese immigrants 75 percent of the time, the Reuters analysis found. A 1996 law expanded the definition of political refugees to include people who are forced to abort a child or undergo sterilization, allowing Chinese women to claim persecution under Beijing’s coercive birth-control policies. Hondurans enjoy no special considerations. They were allowed to stay in the United States in just 16 percent of cases, the Reuters analysis found."

"Globally, the total number of refugees reached an estimated 11.4 million people at the end of 2007, of whom tens of thousands from over 100 countries came to the United States to apply for asylum. U.S. immigration law provides that non-citizens who are in this country—regardless of whether they entered legally or illegally—may be granted humanitarian protection in the form of asylum if they demonstrate that they cannot return to their home country because they have a well-founded fear of persecution."

"Differences in the extent to which applicants from various countries are granted or denied asylum in the United States is not surprising in light of the differences that exist among countries’ political climates and human rights records."