The Trump White House: Make America Safe Again

The Trump administration addressed immigration in the inauguration speech and on its website in the statement called Make America Safe Again. Here are some observations to a few parts of the statement and to his speech:

“Ending Biden’s catch and release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.”  Comment: This is a catch-all statement which, in my opinion, resets immigration policy to the first Trump administration.

Another statement refers to deportation focusing on “record boarder crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.” Comment: This is an example of Trump’s use of the word criminal to refer to a broad swathe of foreign-born persons without any evidence of actual past or present criminal activity. In his inauguration speech he said that there were people coming from mental hospitals and prisons across the border. Trump and his associates have been cagey in the last month about the scope of their deportation program. Perhaps to avoid embarrassment of failure in expelling a million or more persons, they have referred often to deporting criminals.

Refugees: “The president is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.”  Comment:  We may see a return to a purposeful dismantling of the refugee program, which drove annual refugee entries from the 80,000 – 100,000 level to under 20,000.

The way to significantly reduce refugee resettlement is to reduce the number of refugees and other temporary visa holders coming into the country. Neither the inauguration speech nor this statement address how the administration we’ll cut back on refugee migration and address the large number of humanitarian parole and temporary protected status persons in the country now.

Birthright citizenship: The statement does not address birthright citizenship, but Trump did in the inauguration speech. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Children not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. applies to children born to foreign diplomats who are protected by sovereign immunity.

It also applies to children of an invading force. While not explicitly stated in the Constitution, legal interpretations suggest that children born to members of a hostile occupying force would not be granted citizenship, because an invading force is deemed not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.

No mention of immigration legislation: competely missing from the speech and the statement.

 

The NY Times swallows the bait of the Laken Riley Act

Republicans in Congress got what they sought in the Laken Riley Act, which was a headline in the New York Times saying “House Passes Bill to Deport Immigrants Convicted of Violence Against Women.”

The headlines implies that the law applies to all immigrants. It applies only to persons not authorized to be the country. These persons have always been subject to deportation.  The Biden, Trump and Obama administrations all deported hundreds of thousands of persons annually.

Most deportees had committed a crime, but most of the crimes committed were not crimes committed against persons or property. Rather, they were Illegal entry or reentry, unauthorized work, false claims of U.S. citizenship, and the like.

The headline also implies that the law is especially designed to protect women from violence. The law does not do that.  The past administrations have clearly made a priority of detaining and deporting unauthorized persons who committed any serious crime. This priority was specified in written high-level guidance for years. What this law does is in effect to broaden the range of illegal offences to as low as shoplifting, to mandate detention if is the person is accused of such an act, and to authorize state Attorneys General to have standing in suits that can halt all immigration from a specified country

The incoming Trump administration is trying to create the illusion of a vast population of unauthorized persons who committed some kind of infraction, however trivial, and to lump them together with convicted criminals against property and persons.

 

 

 

 

UK and German program to recruit nurses from other countries

United Kingdom: The UK’s National Health Service has recruited, as of March 2023, 164,198 internationally educated professionals in its Nursing and Midwifery Council program. This means that approximately one in five nurses, midwives, and nursing associates practicing in the UK were educated abroad. The primary sources of international nurses for the UK include India, Philippines, Nigeria, Ghana and Zambia.  The NHS deeply depends on these foreign born and trained nurses: in 2022-2023, 25,006 internationally educated nurses joined the NHS compared to 27,142 UK-educated nurses.

Germany: It is in a much more challenging situation due to language issues, and its very low volume shows how difficult it will be for non-English or perhaps non-French speaking advanced countries to recruit nurses from abroad. Germany has a “Triple Win” program to address its nursing shortage. The initiative was established in 2013. It targets Bosnia and Herzegovina, Philippines, Tunisia, Indonesia, Jordan, India (Kerala and Telangana states). The program appears to have brought in only about 6,000 nurses, compared to a shortage that has been estimated at 150,000.

The program is run by the German Federal Employment Agency’s International Placement Services (ZAV) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH

 

 

Plan for large scale ICE raid in Chicago on January 21

The George W Bush administration launched a series of large raids. This turned out badly in terms of public response and the administration stopped them. I have collected information on these and subsequent raids here.

Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board does not want these kinds of raids.

The Wall Street Journal article: The raid is expected to begin on Tuesday morning, a day after Trump is inaugurated, and will last all week, the people said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will send between 100 and 200 officers to carry out the operation. The Trump team intends to target immigrants in the country illegally with criminal backgrounds—many of whose offenses, like driving violations, made them too minor for the Biden administration to pursue. But, the people cautioned, if anyone else in the country illegally is present during an arrest, they will be taken, too…..

The transition team had been contemplating cities to target in a day-one operation as a way of making an example of so-called sanctuary cities, which adopt policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. They settled on Chicago both because of the large number of immigrants who could be possible targets and because of the Trump team’s high-profile feud with the city’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson…..

The Chicago Police Department referred any questions about pending immigration enforcement actions to the federal government.  CPD, in a statement, cited Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, under which the department “does not document immigration status”—or share information with federal immigration authorities. “We will not intervene or interfere with any other government agencies performing their duties,” it added.

How Many American live outside the US?

Estimates of the number of Americans living outside the United States are very rough and quite varied. Heitor David Pinto delved into the complex way in which one would define and an American (see note below). He does not take into account how many in his estimate may be spending part time abroad and part time in the United States. Overall, he estimates that there are about 5.5 million U.S. citizens who are living outside the country.  1.2 million citizens per his estimate live in Mexico and one million live in Canada. About 300,000 live in the United Kingdom. 280,000 live in Isreal, the equivalent to about 3% of the non-Arab population of Isreal.

Note that the organization promoting Pinto’s estimate, the Associations of Americans Resident Overseas, is most likely to favor a high estimate

How Pinto came to his estimate

The United Nations estimates that about 3 million American live outside the U.S. (go here).

Pinto started from data compiled by the United Nations for 2020 from the most recent census of every country, and updated it with U.S. census data for 2022 and with census data for the years 2010 – 2023 from some individual countries. The census data of each country shows the number of people residing there who were born in each other country so, in the case of Americans abroad, it means only people born in the U.S. Pinto then took the more detailed census data from some countries showing parents’ place of birth to estimate the number of Americans born there from a parent who was born in the U.S., and applied it to all other countries proportionally.

His analysis presents the number of U.S. citizens living abroad as people born in the U.S. plus those born abroad with at least a parent who was born in the U.S. (so it includes the so-called “accidental Americans”). He also included naturalized citizens, assuming that they have the same emigration rate from the U.S. as the rest of the U.S. population. This analysis is an admitted simplification, as it includes some people who are not U.S. citizens (those born in the U.S. from foreign diplomats, or born abroad from American parents who didn’t reside in the U.S. for enough years to transmit U.S. citizenship, or those who renounced U.S. citizenship). But there is no data available to estimate these particular cases and their numbers are thought to be relatively small. Mr. Pinto’s estimate does not include military personnel or their families.

Indians in the US: a thriving and growing community

Today there are about 3 million persons in the United states who were born in India, compared to one million in 2000.  That is a compound annual rate of growth of 5% and that does not take into account the children whom first generation indians are producing. (The annual growth rate for the entire popution was about 0.9%).

Here are some facts, drawn from 2023 by the Migration Policy Institute. They capture how Indians have a distinct advantage over other immigrants and even native born persons in terms of thriving economically.  It is very interesting that Indian immigrants are now quite visible among Republican Party ranks, just as they are among Conservative Party ranks in the United kingdom.

The distinctive profile of Indian immigrants in America today is influenced by several factors that are not readily apparent. The surge in their arrival matched the growing demand for STEM talent. As with most other recent immigrants, they have come well educated and at prime working age. In very different specific ways they are similar to the arrival of German Jews in the 1930s whose talents in science and the arts were quickly absorbed.  Who are the Einsteins and Billy Wilders among our 3 million Indians?

The educational head start: Among persons 25 years or older, 81% of Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 35% of all immigrants and 36% of native born. This means that the second generation of Indians grow up in an educated household.

Income is higher: In 2023, households headed by an Indian immigrant had a median annual income of $166,200, compared to $78,700 for all immigrant-led and $77,600 for native-led households. Indian immigrants were roughly half as likely to be in poverty (6 percent) as immigrants overall (14 percent) or the U.S. born (12 percent). Poverty is an income below $30,900 for a family of four in 2023. I suspect that many Indians in poverty are actually students.

Indians have better health insurance coverage: In 2023, just 4 percent of immigrants from India were uninsured, compared to 6 percent of the native born and 18 percent of the overall foreign-born population. Indian immigrants were more likely to be covered by private health insurance than the overall foreign-born and U.S.-born populations, reflecting their strong labor force participation and employment in high-skilled jobs that often come with employer-provided health insurance.

The intergenerational factor: In 2023 their median age was 42 years old, compared to 47 for all immigrants and 37 for the native-born population. This is due to the high number of working-age adults: 81 percent of all Indian immigrants were ages 18 to 64 and 58 percent of the native born.  Behind these figures is that high number of children born to immigrants and who are now counted, of course, as native born.  Immigration is a multi-generational phenomenon – immigrants being more of working age tend to produce relatively more children.

Laken Riley Act – the controversional provision

The Laken Riley Act, passed by the House of Representatives and being considered by the Senate, is an act that does little to change immigration law. But there are two expansions of the existing law.  One, the Homeland Security “shall” [i.e. must] detain an unauthorized person in the event they are “charged with, is arrested for, is convicted of, admits having committed, or admits committing acts which constitute the essential elements of any burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting offense.”  That is, they cannot be released pending further legal action, but must be detained, even for shoplifting.

Two, the law grants a state Attorney General standing to file suits to enforce certain provisions of existing law if an unauthorized person within that state commits a “harm” as defined by law. A state Attorney General can get a court to require Homeland Security to apply a power already in place, which is to deny the issuance of all visas to a that person’s country if that country tends not to accept their citizens subject to deportation. At this time, these countries include China, India, Venezuela, Cuba, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Pakistan, Russia and Somalia.  For example, if an unauthorized person in Texas who is a citizen of Ethiopia falls within the scope of this law, the Attorney General of Texas can through a court stop all visa issuance for persons from Ethiopia.

The second of these provisions is what is controversial.

 

 

Do immigrant workers create, complement, or displace?

In a modern economy, the dynamics between immigrant and native born workers is so complex that it cannot be reduced to an all-inclusive, simple sum without eliminating 90% of meaningful insight.  Thus, to say that overall immigrants add jobs, do not affect native workers, or compete with native workers is to engage in vast simplification.

Cauimi and Peri came perilously close to vast simplification in a study they released in early 2024. Giovanni Peri is a star academic researcher on immigration who has for some time argued that immigration overall is neutral or positive in its effect on native born workers.

They explain their findings through the concept of complementarity: Immigrants and U.S.-born workers often have different skills and specializations that complement each other rather than compete directly. This complementarity boosts productivity and, in turn, wages for U.S.-born workers. Since 2000, there has been an increase in college-educated immigrants, which has further enhanced the complementary effect, especially benefiting less educated U.S.-born workers.

Pretty much all academic research into the economic impact of immigrants on American workers relies on correlation analysis that deals with association, not cause. Further, these analysis address employment and wages, but not productivity, the investment decision, job switching, career switching, or domestic migration. Nor do they deal with the secondary effects. These analyses cannot capture the possibility that immigrants concentrate on geographic locales and occupations where they perceive substantial growth requiring new workers.

An example of immigrant impact which has a very rich story that is lost in statistical analysis typically done is the independent motel industry. About 60% of all hotels in the US are owned by Indian Americans, and this group may own at least 80% of all motels in small towns.   I addressed this phenomenon here.   At the core of this story is the evolution of a business model crafted by Indian immigrants that facilitated the voluntary purchase/sale of motels and hotels from native owners, and which preserved the viability of thousands of motels in the country.

Bernie Sanders on H-1B

Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement on January 3, “We need major reforms in the H-1B program.” The full statement is here.

Sanders argues that the H-1B visa program is exploited by corporations to replace well-paid American jobs with low-wage foreign labor. He says, “We must utilize this program as a very short-term and temporary approach“ to meeting workforce needs.  He advocates for reforms like raising minimum wages for guest workers and enabling them to switch jobs.

Sanders statement reflects persistent blinkered political thinking about immigration, and exposes the vulnerability of the Democratic Party to a major attack from Republicans. For one, he implicitly buys into the idea that for the most part bringing a worker in on a temporary basis means an American loses a job. I doubt he would say that when addressing the hundreds of thousands of temporary farm workers who come in from Latin America.

Further, he does what virtually every politician does when addressing immigration, which is to think in the extremely short term with no consideration of intermediate, much less long term, workforce needs.   No national Democratic politician, from what I read has come forward with a proposal on how to draw upon the huge talent pool in the world to complement, not replace, American workers.

Republican senators are, I believe, ready to come forward with a comprehensive immigration bill that would feature skilled labor, and defend this approach using a intermediate and long term vision of how to maintain a highly productive workforce. I have zero factual knowledge that such a bill is in the works. I am interested in how Sanders would respond to such a proposal.

How the AMA influences physician immigration

In 1970,10% of practicing physicians were graduates of foreign medical schools (IMGs). In 1985, 22% of practicing physicians were. In 2019, some 230,000 active physicians graduated from international medical schools, accounting for 25% of the total active physician workforce.

Who controls the flow of MDs from abroad? The AMA effectively influences the flow of foreign-born doctors (very roughly = graduates of IMGs. Over 80% of IMGs are non-U.S. citizens).  In contrast, foreign born workers are a quarter of computer science workers but their employers have far less influence over the overseas supply of computer science workers.

Let’s say that the AMA wants to increase the supply of MDs by 10%. How would it make that happen?

Easing International Medical Graduates integration:  The Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) could streamline its certification process for IMGs, making it easier for qualified foreign-trained doctors to practice in the U.S.. This could quickly boost the physician workforce, given as IMGs already constitute about 25% of the U.S. physician workforce. The AMA and ECFMG are separate organizations.  But the AMA’s influence as a leading voice in American medicine ensures that its perspectives are considered in shaping ECFMG.

Increase Medical School Enrollment: The AMA could advocate for expanding enrollment in existing medical schools and support the establishment of new medical schools. This would directly increase the number of U.S. medical graduates entering the workforce.

Support for Residency Programs: Lobbying Congress to increase funding for residency programs would be crucial. The AMA has already urged Congress to remove caps on Medicare-funded residency slots. Expanding residency positions is essential, as it’s a bottleneck in physician training.

State-Level Initiatives: Advocating for more states to follow Tennessee’s example of lowering barriers for IMGs could significantly expand the talent pool.

Policy and Regulatory Changes: The medical community could push for the passage of bills like the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act, which aims to increase Medicare-supported residency positions.

Promoting the use of telehealth could help extend the reach of existing physicians, effectively increasing the supply of medical services.

 

In sum, the AMA has far more concentrated and effective influence over the flow of physician immigration then does Silicon Valley over computer science, and manufacturers over engineering immigrants.