A survey conducted by the AP-NORC Center revealed that Americans believe that immigrants are coming to the country to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s democracy. They also believe that there was a “nefarious intent” to bring in immigrants to influence the outcome of elections.
Most Republicans believe that the main reason why immigrants came to the US was to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s democracy. Yet over 20% strongly agree, and an additional 25% somewhat agree, with the statement that some people (the elite) in the U.S. are trying to replace U.S. born Americans with immigrants and to transform the country. 12% of Democrats strongly agree with that statement. From here.
Tucker Carlson described in 2021 the “great replacement” as “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far away countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it’s happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”
According to a report in the New York Times, Charles Herbster, Trump-endorsed candidate for the Nebraska governor’s office, who lost in the May 10 primary, believes that the coronavirus that infected people in the US in early 2020 was manufactured in China and brought into the U.S. illegal immigrants. He also claimed that drug smugglers from Mexico were responsible for the outbreak.
From here.
If STEM workers get faster visas, what about nurses?
A late March survey reports that large majority of Americans say that we should admit more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Math) specialists in the country into the country. About 65% in favor, 25% opposed, 10% undecided.
The White House is considering a special pathway for Russian, and perhaps, Chinese STEM specialists to obtain permanent residency.
Two questions: First, how sure are we about the long term supply shortage of STEM specialists? (Go here.)
Second, can the same argument for more favorable visa policy also be applied to nurses, whose average wage went up by 9% in the past year (to $87K) , and about which there has been a practice for many years to recruit from other countries (Go here and here.)
Can Biden walk the talk on refugee settlement?
The National Immigration Forum on May 6 wrote, Only 1,984 total refugees were resettled in April, a decrease from March as the system continues to flounder at Trump-like levels.
More than halfway through Fiscal Year 2022, we’ve only resettled 18,414 refugees total — nowhere near the refugee ceiling the administration set at 125,000.
After the administration committed to resettle 100,000 Ukrainians, the U.S. resettled just 125 in April and 12 in March. The good news: The Uniting for Ukraine program has had 14,500 applications in just 10 days.
As for Afghan refugees, there is a “small but very notable increase” in their resettlement this month.
To be blunt, the administration needs to walk the talk and accelerate these processes. They are saying the right thing, but painfully slow in terms of execution.
China’s demographic crisis
Foreign Affairs has an article, China’s doomed fight against demographic decline:
The median age of a Chinese citizen has increased significantly since 1978, reaching 38.4 years in 2021. If the country’s fertility rates continue to decline, the median age of a person could reach over 50 by 2050.
In 2016, China’s government scrapped its one-child policy. In 2021, it began implementing policies aimed at increasing childbearing. However, these efforts are unlikely to help raise the country’s fertility rates. The ruling Communist Party’s re-embrace of gender norms is also expected to contribute to the country’s declining birth rates.
In the 1970s, China launched a population planning program aimed at discouraging couples from having more children. The number of births per woman dropped dramatically from 5.8 to 2.7 in 1978. The program’s targets encouraged authorities to adopt policies that could lead to forced abortions and sterilizations. Fines for violating the program were typically several years’ worth of salary for the average citizen.
By 2000, Chinese academics had begun to voice concerns about the long-term demographic consequences of these policies, including significant imbalances in male-female sex ratios at birth—the result of sex-selective abortions. Officials initially assumed that merely rolling back long-standing state restrictions would boost birth rates. In 2013, Beijing announced that couples would be allowed to have two children if one parent was an only child. In 2016, the one-child policy was formally scrapped in favor of a two-child policy; in 2021, it became a three-child policy.
As the results of the 2020 census trickled out last year, Beijing went into overdrive. In the summer of 2021, the Politburo adopted the three-child policy and rolled out a comprehensive pro-natalist strategy aimed at removing financial and practical barriers deterring couples from having children.
What immigration adds to the labor force
A number of people have been estimating shortfall in our labor force due to the decline in immigration due to Trump and the pandemic from a prevailing level of about one million persons a year. The following passage (from here) estimates that the prevailing rate of 18 to 65 year old immigrants was about 660,000. At a labor force participation rate of 80% for this age cohort, that means that a half million persons were added to our workforce by immigrants every year. The passage below estimate a total shortfall due to immigration downturn of 2 million.
This is most acutely experienced in food and hospitality jobs, which today have an unfilled job rate of 13-15%, and in which 25% of the labor has been foreign born.
Trump and other Republicans sought to reduce immigration by about 40%. Call that a reduction in annual foreign-born labor force addition of say 200,000 from the 500,000 prevailing annual addition. Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 would in effect increase the labor force addition by roughly 200,000, to 700,000. The prevailing increase of the labor force by U.S. born persons is around zero.
The passage from Econofact is here:
This decline in immigrant and nonimmigrant visa arrivals resulted in zero growth in working-age foreign-born people in the United States. Prior to 2019, the foreign born population of working age (18 to 65) grew by about 660,000 people per year, as reported in data from the monthly Current Population survey (see the first chart). This trend came to a stop already in 2019 before the pandemic, due to a combination of stricter immigration enforcement and a drop in the inflow of Mexican immigrants. The halt to international travel in 2020 added a significant drop in the working-age immigrant population. As of the end of 2021, the number of working-age foreign-born people in the United States is still somewhat smaller than it was in early 2019. and, relative to the level it would have achieved if the 2010-2019 trend had continued, there is a shortfall of about 2 million people. A similar calculation done using Current Population Survey (CPS) monthly data on foreign-born individuals with a college degree indicates that of the missing two million foreign workers, about 950,000 would have been college educated, had the pre-2020 trend continued. This is a very substantial loss of skilled workers, equal to 1.8 percent of all college-educated individuals working in the US in 2019.
Why democracies fail
The Washington Post notes Yascha Mounk’s latest book, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. “We all know the reasons. Ethnic hatreds come easy. When scapegoating demagogues stoke them during hard times, they make the classic promise: Break the democracy pact, and people like you can be great again.”
What happens if you believe, as Vice President Mike Pence told the Republican National Convention in 2020, that “the choice in this election is whether America remains America”? And what happens when your version of America loses?
Immigration is at the core of this distress. The shock that 50 million people for whom English is not the dominant language at home. The shock that Nigeria is the source of the highest educated immigrant group. The shock that immigrants due to citizenship have become voting eligible.
Mounk tries to rewrite the basic pro-immigrant slogan: “He asks us to abandon the tired slogans, the “melting pot” and the “salad bowl,” in favor of the “public park” metaphor: “A public park is open to everyone.” “A public park gives its visitors options.” “A public park creates a vibrant space for encounter.” “
(Stephen Douglass in 1869 had coined the term “composite nationality.“)
A copy of the book’s introduction is here.
From the summary on Amazon:
Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time.
Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are now deeply pessimistic that different groups might be able to integrate in harmony, celebrating their differences without essentializing them. But Mounk shows us that the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope.
It is up to us and the institutions we build whether different groups will come to see each other as enemies or friends, as strangers or compatriots. To make diverse democracies endure, and even thrive, we need to create a world in which our ascriptive identities come to matter less—not because we ignore the injustices that still characterize the United States and so many other countries around the world, but because we have succeeded in addressing them.
The border crisis and young men
NAFTA and is replacement, the USMCA, failed to address guest workers. The border cuts in two one of the world’s largest transnational circular labor workforces.
An important observation made by Sam Peak in Politico: that the many men are trying to cross the border for work. He writes.
“The overwhelming majority of people who are being expelled under the Title 42 policy haven’t been families seeking asylum, but rather single adults fleeing extreme economic deprivation and in search of work. In February alone, more than 90 percent of Title 42 expulsions were single adults — the vast majority from Mexico.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has acknowledged this reality and urged Biden several times last year to work with him to expand guest worker programs for the U.S., Mexico and the Northern Triangle. Though the Biden Administration recently suggested a willingness to do so, it has not yet provided any details.
It’s critical that Biden’s post-Title 42 strategy includes increased access to guest worker programs.”
Peak calls for reform of the guest worker programs, mainly I surmise the H-2A program for farm workers. (Go here and here.) He says “The program is already riddled with more than 200 time consuming, duplicative and complex rules that shut out many businesses. According to the State Department, the sponsorship process alone costs the average U.S. farmer more than $10,000.”
The large surge of illegal border crossings in the 1970s, which prompted the search for immigration reform leading to the 1986 act, was per Peak due to the ending of the Bracero system of guest workers.
The even greater surge of illegal crossings in the 1990s was due to ineptitude of this 1986 law. (Go here.)
What is going on at the Mexican border?
The Washington Post categorizes who is showing up at the Mexican border. An unduplicated count might be running at a monthly rate of 150,000 + a month,
Ukrainians: “About 15,000 Ukrainians escaping war have come to Mexico to be allowed across the border, and they are largely being welcomed and given one-year humanitarian parole in the United States.” This channel will be cut off when the United for Ukraine program is introduced (go here.)
People who cross and are not caught: say, 45,000 a month. “Border officials have acknowledged that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 of these border crossings a day are detected but not intercepted.” It seems highly unlikely that the Texas National Guard presence at the border –personnel with zero interdiction training or technology – have any role in containing this flow.
These are likely many single males responding to labor demand in the U.S. The nominal wage gain may be 400%, but after adjusting for cost of living, the wage gain will be far less. (Go here and here).
People who are apprehended and turned back, say, an unduplicated count of 50,000 a month. “Apprehensions” measures how many times the government encounters someone at the border who doesn’t have legal authorization to enter the country. there are very many repeaters. Most people apprehended at the border have been turned away, under the Title 42 public health code that Biden is ending soon: In the past six months, the government has apprehended, and then removed, people at the border some 549,000 times. For a history of the use of Title 42, go here.
People who are apprehended and then mostly processed as asylum applicants: say, 75,000 a month. “These are people who cross the border, get processed by immigration officials and who are let go to various ends, like applying for asylum. Over the past six months, about 500,000 people were taken into custody but not immediately expelled. Some were deported, but most remain in the United States pending a court hearing. It can take years for their asylum cases to resolve, and many people just end up staying in the country, under the radar.
Far easier for skilled people to migrate to Canada vs, U.S.
Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes Magazine that U.S. immigration law has become so inadequate that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will reject up to 82% of the H-1B registrations for high-skilled foreign nationals submitted in the most recent H-1B lottery, according to the latest government data. In contrast, there is no numerical limit on high-skilled temporary visas in Canada under the Global Skills Strategy, and many high-skill temporary visa applicants are approved within two weeks.
The number of international students from India studying at Canadian colleges and universities increased 182% between 2016 and 2019 while at the same time, the enrollment of Indian students in master’s level science and engineering programs at U.S. universities fell almost 40%,” according to a recent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis.
On April 15, 2022, USCIS reported that for FY 2023, it received 483,927 H-1B registrations. USCIS will reject nearly 400,000, or 82%, of the registrations for being beyond the 85,000 annual limit for H-1B petitions.
Motivations for migration from Central America
A 2021 survey of thousands of migrant-sending households in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras looked that the interest in emigrating. In 2021, 43% wanted to emigrate; 3% actually made concrete plans to migrate. Family separation and high costs associated with migrating were cited as deterrents.
55% of migrants were said to have hired a smuggler at an average cost of US $7,500 per person, while migrating through legal channels came at a cost of U$4,500. For 89% of people, the United States was their intended destination country.
Food insecurity has seen a dramatic rise in Central America as the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and poverty continue to make it harder for families to feed themselves. As of October 2021, the number of food-insecure people in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras grew three-fold to 6.4 million, from 2.2 million people in 2019.
Migration flows have been driven by violence and insecurity, as well as climate-related shocks such as severe droughts in the Central American Dry Corridor and more frequent and stronger storms in the Atlantic. The devastating twin hurricanes that hit Central America in November 2020 contributed to the deterioration of living conditions for populations that were already vulnerable.
The Organization of American States said “the study presents evidence that migration in most cases is a survival mechanism and not the voluntary exercise of a right. The causes of migration are poverty, inequality, unemployment, food insecurity, violence, the impact of natural disasters and climate change: these require to be addressed in a decisive and comprehensive manner by States.”
The study is a joint effort by the Migration Policy Institute , the United Nations World Food Programme and the Civic Data Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with support from the Inter-American Development Bank and the Organization of American States.