Economists will tell you that immigrants raise wages for the average native-born worker. They’ll tell you that they make things cheaper for us to buy here, and that if we didn’t have immigrants for some of these jobs, the jobs would move to other countries. They’ll tell you that we should allow for much more highly skilled immigration, because that’s about as close to a free lunch as you’re likely to find.

Ezra Klein’s nativist argument for immigration

This, by the way, is really great; a look at the changing standards of female beauty over the years, from our feature on the beauty advantage.

Remember Debrahlee Lorenzana, the chick who sued Citibank, claiming she was hired for being “too hot”? Well, she may be a total attention-obsessed moron, but she does highlight the double-bind of women at work: that we’re expected to be attractive at all times, but if we’re too…

I’m a bit of an overproducer,” says Lynne Feldman, a mother in western Massachusetts who has FedEx’d 250 frozen ounces of her own milk on dry ice to another mother in California.

Maria Dolan writes about the secret world of underground breast-milk exchanges. (Newsweek.com, June 16)  (via katedailey)

And an oversharer…

We’ve written about the Novartis case before, but we did a little more digging and found that the precedent-setting judgment—which could amount to an overall cost of perhaps a billion dollars to the company—will have an even bigger impact than we thought:

Jesse’s really good in this, here.

The problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It’s not just American men who like things this way. In the most troubling chapter in her book, Rhode explores the feminist movement’s complicated relationship to eternal youth. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. They love six-inch heels. They feel beautiful after cosmetic surgery. You can’t succeed in public life if you look old in America. Of the 16 women in the U.S. Senate between ages 46 and 74, not one has gray hair. Rhode cites one feminist icon after another who changed her mind about the evils of cosmetic surgery, hair color, and Botox the instant the sagging, graying, and wrinkling set in.

Dahlia Lithwick, on beauty bias.

In honor of 4/20, our gallery of Pot Propoganda