WORKING IMMIGRANTS

A state court in New Mexico ruled that the legal exemption of most farm workers is unconstitutional. I expect that well over half of these workers are immigrants.

New Mexico 2nd Judicial District Judge Valerie Huling said Dec. 27 in an opinion in Griego et al. v. New Mexico Workers' Compensation Administration that agriculture is the only industry allowed to shift the burden of injured workers onto taxpayers by not providing workers' compensation coverage.

The distinction used to define who is exempt and who is not exempt comes down to whether the worker is directly involved in harvesting crops or working with animals. For example, a worker picking onions on a farm would be excluded from coverage, but a person who is packing those same onions inside a building on the same farm would be covered by the Act.

The court found this distinction arbitrary and thus unconstitutional.

Many thanks to WorkCompCentral and its CEO David DePaolo for permission to run the complete story on his web-based service.

The article in full:

NM Case Makes Clear Work Comp Can't Discriminate Arbitrarily

Workers' compensation is a creature of statute. We're constantly reminded of that. But even though statutorily created, rules of fair play and application still apply - in other words the laws of any particular state must still meet constitutional standards.

In New Mexico a court ruled that a statute enacted in 1917 that excludes farm and agricultural workers from the New Mexico Workers' Compensation Act is unconstitutional.

Continue reading "Immigrant farm workers in New Mexico given a legal boost" »

According to Caitlin Fairchild, only 13 states require employers to cover seasonally agricultural workers in the same way as other workers, and 16 states do not. The remaining 21 states’ laws are apparently not clear-cut as to coverage. Farmers have tried to stay exempt from workers compensation laws in their states.

She cites two organizations as resource for more information about the laws in particular states. Farmworker Justice is working with other groups to improve workers' access to workers’ compensation benefits. It is working with the Migrant Clinicians Network to educate clinicians about the workers’ compensation system so that more clinics are able to handle such cases.

Fairchild reports:

Specifically, only 13 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands require employers to cover seasonal agricultural workers to the same extent as all other workers. These jurisdictions are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. In an additional 13 states (including Florida and New York), only small farmers are exempt from providing coverage to their migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Moreover, employers who hire legal temporary foreign workers under the H-2A visa program are required to provide workers’ compensation insurance or equivalent benefits to their employees.

By contrast, 16 states do not require employers to provide any workers’ compensation insurance for migrant or seasonal farmworkers. These states are: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. In an additional eight states, coverage is limited to full-time workers (e.g., Maine), workers in specialty jobs (e.g., South Dakota), or those employed on large farms (e.g., Rhode Island).

I am back, after two months of extensive travel

The chickens are coming home roost in Alabama. Two legally working foreign workers in auto plants have been arrested.

According to Fox News, “Before the auto workers' problems, in early November, [Alabama Governor Robert] Bentley told a Birmingham business audience that the law had not hurt Alabama's image with industrial prospects. But Bentley now says the two arrests involving foreign auto workers "theoretically" could hurt Alabama's ability to recruit foreign industries.”

The article in full:

Alabama Governor to Foreign Biz: Don't Worry About Immigration Law

After local police recently detained employees of Mercedes-Benz and Honda under the state's immigration law, Alabama's governor is reaching out to foreign executives to let them know that the state welcomes them.

"We are not anti-foreign companies. We are very pro-foreign companies," Bentley told reporters at the Capitol.

The Republican governor and other supporters of Alabama's new immigration law -- aimed at driving undocumented immigrants out of the state -- have described it as the nation's toughest. Some parts of it were put on hold by the federal courts, but major provisions took effect in late September, including allowing police to detain motorists who can't produce a valid driver's license.

Before the auto workers' problems, in early November, Bentley told a Birmingham business audience that the law had not hurt Alabama's image with industrial prospects. But Bentley now says the two arrests involving foreign auto workers "theoretically" could hurt Alabama's ability to recruit foreign industries.

Since then, two foreign workers with the Mercedes-Benz and Honda auto assembly plants in Alabama have run into problems.

Continue reading "Alabama now reaping the harvest of its immigration law" »

This from the NY Times: “John Harold found himself short of workers to harvest his corn and onions after he decided to try to hire more local residents and fewer foreign laborers for his 1,000-acre farm." The local workers quit in six hours.

The article in full:

By Kirk Johnson
Published: October 5, 2011

OLATHE, Colo. — How can there be a labor shortage when nearly one out of every 11 people in the nation are unemployed?

That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado.

The simple-sounding plan that resulted — hire more local people and fewer foreign workers — left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka.

The more they tried to do something concrete to address immigration and joblessness, the worse off they found themselves.

“It’s absolutely true that people who have played by the rules are having the toughest time of all,” said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado.

Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.

Continue reading "Colorado farmer can’t find local workers to replace Hispanic immigrants" »

The Nation’s Cruelest Immigration Law

The Alabama Legislature opened its session on March 1 on a note of humility and compassion. In the Senate, a Christian pastor asked God to grant members “wisdom and discernment” to do what is right. “Not what’s right in their own eyes,” he said, “but what’s right according to your word.” Soon after, both houses passed, and the governor signed, the country’s cruelest, most unforgiving immigration law.

The law, which takes effect Sept. 1, is so inhumane that four Alabama church leaders — an Episcopal bishop, a Methodist bishop and a Roman Catholic archbishop and bishop — have sued to block it, saying it criminalizes acts of Christian compassion. It is a sweeping attempt to terrorize undocumented immigrants in every aspect of their lives, and to make potential criminals of anyone who may work or live with them or show them kindness.

It effectively makes it a crime to be an undocumented immigrant in Alabama, by criminalizing working, renting a home and failing to comply with federal registration laws that are largely obsolete. It nullifies any contracts when one party is an undocumented immigrant. It requires the police to check the papers of people they suspect to be here illegally.

The new regime does not spare American citizens. Businesses that knowingly employ illegal immigrants will lose their licenses. Public school officials will be required to determine students’ immigration status and report back to the state. Anyone knowingly “concealing, harboring or shielding” an illegal immigrant could be charged with a crime, say for renting someone an apartment or driving her to church or the doctor.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department have also sued, calling the law an unconstitutional intrusion on the federal government’s authority to write and enforce immigration laws. The A.C.L.U. warns that the law would trample people’s fundamental rights to speak and travel freely, effectively deny children the chance to go to school and expose people to harassment and racial profiling.

These arguments have been made before, in opposition to similar, if less sweeping, laws passed in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. What is remarkable in Alabama is the separate lawsuit by the four church leaders, who say the law violates their religious freedoms to perform acts of charity without regard to the immigration status of those they minister to or help.

“The law,” Archbishop Thomas Rodi of Mobile said in The Times, “attacks our core understanding of what it means to be a church.”

You’d think that any state would think twice before embracing a law that so vividly brings to mind the Fugitive Slave Act, the brutal legal and law-enforcement apparatus of the Jim Crow era, and the civil-rights struggle led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But waves of anti-immigrant hostility have made many in this country forget who and what we are.

Congress was once on the brink of an ambitious bipartisan reform that would have enabled millions of immigrants stranded by the failed immigration system to get right with the law. This sensible policy has been abandoned. We hope the church leaders can waken their fellow Alabamans to the moral damage done when forgiveness and justice are so ruthlessly denied. We hope Washington and the rest of the country will also listen.

On June 9, 2011, Alabama enacted H 56, the most aggressive state law to date to control immigration. Federal judge has stayed the implementation of the law until at least late September. Most of the media discussion has been about non-work-related provisions of the law, for instance, police questioning, access to church-related services, and public education. Here, we look at the business –related provisions, which are excerpted below. The key provisions are:

Section 9 - Government contractors prohibited from hiring unlawful aliens

Section 11 - curb-side hiring prohibited

Section 13 – Harboring an unlawful alien

Section 15 prohibiting private sector hiring of unlawful aliens, at penalty of permanent revocation of licenses and permits

And

Section 26 - State of Alabama to provide E-Verify service to small employers

I have included below key passages in each of these sections.

“….the court shall direct the applicable governing bodies to forever suspend the business licenses and permits, if such exist, of the business entity or employer throughout the state….” (Section 15 (f)

Section 9 - Government contractors prohibited from hiring unlawful aliens

(a) As a condition for the award of any contract, grant, or incentive by the state, any political subdivision thereof, or any state-funded entity to a business entity or employer that employs one or more employees, the business entity or employer shall not knowingly employ, hire for employment, or continue to employ an unauthorized alien and shall attest to such, by sworn affidavit signed before a notary.

……Violations of Section 9 (a)

Continue reading " Alabama’s Immigration law dissected " »

The Pew Research Report, which I cited yesterday, prompted a New York Times article. I am including below the article. Must of the severe collapse of Hispanic assets is due to the housing collapse -- Hispanic households is trying to gain a foothold in home ownership were victims of the over-promotion of home ownership in America.

"Nearly two-thirds of Hispanics’ median net worth in 2005 came from home equity, according to the report, and when the housing market collapsed, so did their wealth. Median home equity for Hispanics fell by 51 percent in the period of the survey. The drop was compounded by the fact that Hispanics tended to live in the places that were hit hardest in the recession, like Florida and California, the report said."

The article:

WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Hispanic families accounted for the largest single decline in wealth of any ethnic and racial group in the country during the recession, according to a study published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

The study, which used data collected by the Census Bureau, found that the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66 percent from 2005 to 2009. By contrast, the median wealth of whites fell by just 16 percent over the same period. African Americans saw their wealth drop by 53 percent. Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent.

The declines have led to the largest wealth disparities in the 25 years that the bureau has been collecting the data, according to the report.

Median wealth of whites is now 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, double the already marked disparities that had prevailed in the decades before the recent recession, the study found.

“It’s a very stark reminder of the high share of minorities who live at the economic margins of this country,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center and an author of the report. “These data really show their economic vulnerability.”

Household wealth, also referred to in the report as net worth, is made up of assets, like a house, a car, savings and stocks, minus debts, like mortgages, car loans and credit cards. It is tracked by the Census Bureau in the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a broad sampling of household wealth by race and ethnicity.

Nearly two-thirds of Hispanics’ median net worth in 2005 came from home equity, according to the report, and when the housing market collapsed, so did their wealth. Median home equity for Hispanics fell by 51 percent in the period of the survey. The drop was compounded by the fact that Hispanics tended to live in the places that were hit hardest in the recession, like Florida and California, the report said.

Continue reading "further on impoverishment of Hispanics" »

This is how the New York Times characterized the Pew Research Center Report issued this week. Here are some key passages from the Report:

The Pew Research analysis finds that, in percentage terms, the bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.

As a result of these declines, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth; and the typical white household had $113,149.

Moreover, about a third of black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15% of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares had been 29% for blacks, 23% for Hispanics and 11% for whites.

Hispanics and blacks are the nation’s two largest minority groups, making up 16% and 12% of the U.S. population respectively.

Continue reading "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest" »

“No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped. For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.” So says an immigration expert about illegal migration of Mexicans into the United States.

Legal migration has increased in the past five years, thanks in large part to better management of the visa process by American consulates in Mexico. But illegal migration has declined, and not primarily to stronger immigration enforcement by the United States. The major factors are smaller families, better education resources in Mexico, and better job projects in Mexico if you are educated.

These observations from a New York Times article.

Megan McArdle, the libertarian pundit at the Atlantic Monthly, did a (partly) tongue in cheek posting today pitching for vastly greater immigration to boost the economy. Here it is, with the research abstracts at the end:

Tim Pawlenty Can Get 5% Growth (but He Needs Immigrants to Help)
Posted: 22 Jun 2011 07:40 AM PDT

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro made an important contribution to the social sciences. His unexpected declaration that the port of Mariel would be temporarily open to any Cubans seeking to flee the island served as a natural experiment that has helped labor economists understand the impact of immigration. In his now classic paper, economist David Card [SEE ABSTRACT BELOW] convincingly showed that the massive influx of 120,000 Cubans increased the labor force of Miami by 7% yet had almost no impact on the employment or wages of natives.

This result is probably shocking to many, and certainly runs contrary to the popular but unfortunate myth that immigrants "steal our jobs". But while this study is an important result in the literature, it is not an isolated one. Most research on immigration shows small or zero impacts on unemployment and wages. This, however, does present something of a puzzle: if immigration increases labor supply, then why didn't wages fall and unemployment rise? How was it that the labor market in Miami was able to absorb so many new workers?

Immigration has little impact on wages and employment. But a 10% increase in immigration drives up house prices by 1%.

One important reason is that immigrants aren't just workers, but also consumers. Economists Bodvarsson, Lewer, and Van den Berg studied [SEE ABSTRACT BELOW] the Mariel boatlift and found that migrants increased labor demand enough to offset the increase in labor supply so that there was no negative impact on natives that one might otherwise expect when labor supply increases drastically. This result shouldn't be surprising. Immigrants buy stuff, that means businesses sell more, and they need to expand and hire new workers.

What does this have to do with Tim Pawlenty? He recently came under criticism for suggesting that he could make GDP grow 5% per year. But if immigration, even large influxes of unskilled immigration, has zero or a very small effect on wages and employment of natives, then it's actual pretty easy to make GDP grow 5% a year: just increase immigration until that happens. If we're expecting 2.5% real GDP growth a year, then increase immigration by 2.5%. If we're expecting 1.5%, then increase it by 3.5%. This shouldn't be too hard considering there are 145 million adults worldwide who would like to come here.

The bonus here is that aside from the affect on overall consumer demand, immigration has a particularly large impact on the demand for housing. Research by Albert Saiz has shown that a 10% increase in immigration drives up house prices by 1%. Whatever immigration research you're looking at, this is an order of magnitude larger than the labor market effects. This is important because immigrants tend to migrate to areas where there are already large numbers of immigrants. This means some of the worst housing markets will benefit the most from more immigration. will benefit the most. For instance, California, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona, are ranked 1st, 4th, 5th, and 9th by percent of population foreign-born. Since falling house prices are hurting the wider economy, the economic benefits of immigration would have secondary positive effects on GDP.

Is an increase in immigration what Tim Pawlenty had in mind when he promised 5% GDP growth? I doubt it. But if he was serious about his promise, he'd take a lesson from the Cuban immigrants of the Mariel boatlift and embrace one of the few ways that he could actually achieve that kind of growth.

David Card, The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market,
Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 43, No. 2. (Jan., 1990), pp. 245-257.

On the web at: http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/%7Ecard/papers/mariel-impact.pdf

Abstract:

Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift.

Bodvarsson et al Measuring Immigration's Effects on Labor Demand: A Reexamination of the Mariel Boatlift, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and IZA
Discussion Paper No. 2919 July 2007

On the web: ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp2919.pdf

Abstract:

It is now well known that exogenous immigration shocks tend to have benign effects on native employment outcomes, thanks to various secondary adjustment processes made possible by flexible markets. One adjustment process that has received scant attention is that immigrants, as consumers of the goods they help produce, contribute to their own demand. We examine the effects of an immigration shock on labor demand by testing a general equilibrium model in which imperfectly substitutable native and immigrant workers spend their wages on a locally produced good. The shock induces three responses: (i) a substitution of immigrants for natives; (ii) out-migration; and (iii) stimulation of labor demand. According to (iii), native wages can fall, stay the same or rise, depending upon the strength of the shock and various product and factor market elasticities. As our test case, we reexamine the 1980 “Mariel Boatlift,” using Wacziarg’s “Channel Transmission” methodology. Our data set includes approximately 6,600 observations for 1979-85 from the Current Population Survey on workers in 9 different retail labor markets and Survey of Buying Power data on retail spending by consumers in Miami and four comparison cities. Our results provide a more complete explanation for why the Boatlift’s overall effects on native wages in Miami were benign: Lower wages due to greater labor supply were offset by higher wages due to greater labor demand. We conclude that the demand-augmenting effect of an immigration shock is a significant secondary adjustment process that must be considered when assessing the distributional effects of immigration.