Chances a judge will grant you asylum

There is huge disparity among immigration court judges on asylum cases. Some judges deny 90% of cases; others deny 30%.  In the Boston court, the median denial rate is 60% among 26 judges, of whom five have denial rates over 75% and two have denial rates under 25%. In the Houston court, the median denial rate among 22 judges is 91% with no judge under 70%. Efforts to produce less disparate results through data analysis and training appear to have failed.  The high variances within and between courts cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the courts.

I found in my work in the past that special court systems can go seriously wrong, because they were poorly managed and poorly supported by the broader political/governmental constituency. They are in effect run by key participants without any real accountability to the public. One part but only one part of the problem is that the legal community is usually very deficient in the area of system design and oversight.

Go here for statsticics.

 

 

 

mass deportation amok

The mass deportation idea fragments into a confused array of proposals, some aimed at all unauthorized persons, and some aimed only at persons who are encountered by law enforcement, which can be a simple as a traffic stop.  At some early date, this will blow up. This is why I predict that the Trump administration will take another path, which is to terminate DACA and many temporary visas issued by the Biden administration.

From the Associated Press via the Boston Globe:

“We would be finding people who are in violation of this law, and we would be sort of hand-delivering them to the nearest port of deportation so that they could be removed in a safe and orderly fashion,” said Missouri state Sen. Curtis Trent, who is sponsoring one of the proposals. Trent’s bill would empower local law officers to arrest people for a new state crime of “improper entry by an alien,” punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and a court-ordered ride to the U.S. border.

A separate bill by Missouri state Sen.-elect David Gregory would offer a $1,000 reward to informants who tip off police about people in the country illegally and allow private bounty hunters to find and detain them.

Missouri’s Republican Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe hasn’t endorsed a specific legislative plan after campaigning against illegal immigration and the scourge of fentanyl smuggled across the U.S. border. But he told The Associated Press: “If they’re here illegally, it definitely should trigger something more than it does now.”

Immigrant advocacy groups already are raising alarm about some state proposals. Missouri’s proposed bounty system would “create absolute chaos and division,” said Ashley DeAzevedo, president of American Families United, which advocates for U.S. citizens married to foreign nationals.

….

Following Texas’ lead, Republican-led legislatures in Iowa, Louisiana and Oklahoma passed measures allowing law officers to arrest people who are in the U.S. illegally. Shortly after Trump’s election, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt announced he was working on a plan to deport some of the more than 500 immigrants currently in Oklahoma prisons who are not legal citizens.

 

Dependence on foreign-born workers

Given the restrictionist tone of the incoming administration, it is useful to look at the pinch points in the American labor market where both legal and unauthorized foreign born workers count.  I want here to look at industries not requiring a lot of formal education (such as medicine, where a quarter MDs in practice are foreign-born). I first got involved in immigration when studying and writing on injury risks of low wage immigrant workers, in about 2000.

The most obvious sectors to look at are farming and construction.  Nationwide, about 15% of the agricultural workforce are legal immigrants and 14% unauthorized. In construction, the figures are 13% and 12% (go here, and for farming indepth go here). Note that there are wide variations in estimates of the percentage of workers in an industry that is unauthorized. And, the percentages have changed over time.

The industry-wide figures don’t really help because one needs to isolate instances where foreign born labor is so critical that work will be severely disrupted and for some time for lack of replacement of labor.   In construction that might be day labor jobs in residential construction, and possibly roofing jobs.  In agriculture, the family, non-corporate diary farm industry would suffer severely because it is economically imperiled already and depends on unauthorized Hispanic workers. Also, California, the source of one third of fresh produce, has depended on foreign-born labor for 100 years. The law enforcement and employer communities there have worked out informally how to protect this workforce.

As a general rule, unauthorized workers hold non-public facing jobs – that is, they don’t work in customer service, aren’t waiters in restaurants, aren’t day care workers, in large measure due to lack of English language proficiency.  They do work in personal care. In some states like Florida and New York, well over half of personal care workers are foreign-born.

Here is one of a number of profiles you can find today about unauthorized workers.

Senator Tom Cotton’s immigration ideas

Senator Cotton is probably the most articulate Republican Senator with regard to a possible major reform in immigration. Neither he nor anyone has put forth what might be called a comprehensive bill for at least ten years.  But I expect that is the Senate moves toward immigration reform, a comprehensive bill will be introduced at some time.

In 2017 Senator Cotton introduced the RAISE Act. Here is a section by section analysis.

Reducing Overall Immigration: Cut legal immigration by half, from approximately 1 million to around 500,000 annually. This reduction is intended to alleviate what Cotton describes as the negative economic impact of high immigration levels on American workers’ wages and job opportunities.

Points-Based Immigration System: A points-based system for employment-based visas, where immigrants would be evaluated based on criteria such as education level, English proficiency, and work experience. This system is designed to prioritize highly skilled individuals who can contribute effectively to the U.S. economy. Canada and Australia use a points based system.  There is wide popular support for skilled immigration.  the system is designed for permanent immigration.

By implication, temporary work visas for seasonal agricultural workers (H-2A) are apparently imperiled.

Family Sponsorship Limitations: The legislation seeks to limit family-sponsored immigration strictly to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. This would eliminate the ability of citizens to sponsor adult children and siblings. for many decades the large majority of immigrants has come through family unification. This was baked into the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act).

End the Diversity Visa Lottery: The RAISE Act proposes to abolish the Diversity Visa Lottery, which Cotton argues does not serve the economic interests of the United States.

Cap refugee admissions to 50,000. The Obama and Biden administrations targeted 100,000 to 125,000. The first Trump administration sought in effect to destroy this program.

End birthright citizenship. The Constitutional Citizenship Clarification Act of 2024 would deny citizenship to persons born in the United States of “alien parents” who are unlawfully present in the United States.  This ban will join two pre-existing ones: parents are in the U.S. for diplomatic purposes or engaged in hostile occupation.

An important analysis of the immigrant vote in November

Brookings released a well-documented study of how naturalized immigrants have been voting and specifically how they voted in November. Bottom line: Harris won their vote, but not by much overall. Here are some excerpts:

The proclivity to vote:

Foreign-born Asian and Latino groups vote at higher rates than their U.S.-born ethnic counterparts. Black immigrants vote at similar levels while white immigrants participate at lesser rates compared to U.S.-born whites. Yet, in recent years, the foreign-born population appears to be a much more politically engaged cohort, demonstrating above-average levels of voter enthusiasm with turnout exceeding the general electorate. National-level polling conducted between August 16 and August 28, 2024, prior to the election, showed that roughly 97% of naturalized citizens were “definitely or probably going to vote” in the 2024 election. This is above 2020 election levels, where 86.8% of respondents cast their vote, exceeding the nearly 66% of the total electorate—the highest rate since 1900.

How they voted:

Among those who would certainly vote, the polling found they favored Kamala Harris over Trump (by approximately 55% to 41%), both nationally and with some slight variation across key swing states. Similar to the general electorate, high cost of living/inflation ranked as the top issue with immigration following closely behind. Interestingly, on social values issues, foreign-born migrants are almost twice as likely to hold conservative/very conservative views and still identify as a Democrat compared to the overall population. This is further underscored with religious views—overall, immigrant evangelicals identify less with the Republican Party compared to U.S.-born evangelicals and young individuals (ages 18 to 29) are found to be more religious and conservative on social issues than their U.S.-born counterparts.

The Latino vote:

Within the Latino base, Harris secured a majority of all Latino voters (52% to 46%), However, Trump made significant gains—largely driven by the economic anxieties of Latino men. Notching a 10-point advantage with Latino men (54% to 44%), he overcame a roughly 23-point deficit to Biden just four years prior (59% to 36%). Still, while migrants favored Harris (by a seven-point margin) and also favored a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (by an eight-point margin), compared to the overall Latino electorate, they still appear to hold somewhat similar views to U.S.-born Latinos. Despite having been subjects of anti-immigrant language by Trump, polling finds that a majority of both U.S.-born (67%) and foreign-born Latino voters (51%) do not feel that the president-elect is referring to them.(Note: I have addressed the low turnout of Hispanics, which belies their growth in numbers, here).

 

 

Latino resentment about surge of temporary immigrants

Propublica reports, “Across the U.S., Latino immigrants who’ve been in the country a long time felt that asylum-seekers got preferential treatment. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” said one woman from Mexico who has lived in Wisconsin for decades.

“ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter.”

The report summarizes well the problem which the Biden administration created:

In the months leading up to the presidential election, numerous polls picked up on the kinds of frustrations felt by Rosa and her family. Those polls indicated that many voters considered immigration one of the most pressing challenges facing the country and that they were disappointed in the Biden administration’s record.

Biden had come into office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to immigration after four years of more restrictive policies during the first Trump administration. But record numbers of immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border began to overwhelm the system. While the Biden administration avoided talking about the border situation like a crisis, the way Trump and the GOP had, outspoken critics like Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott amplified the message that things at the border were out of control while he arranged to bus thousands of immigrants to Democrat-controlled big cities around the country. In Whitewater, hundreds of Nicaraguans arrived on their own to fill jobs in local factories, and many of them drove to work without licenses, putting a strain on the small local police department with only one Spanish-speaking officer.

While the Biden administration kept a Trump expulsion policy in place for three years, it also created temporary parole programs and an app to allow asylum-seekers to make appointments to cross the border. The result was that hundreds of thousands more immigrants were allowed to come into the country and apply for work permits, but the efforts didn’t assuage the administration’s critics on the right or left.

 

Aging trends in U.S.

Average annual percentage increase from 2000 to 2050:
1. The entire US population: 0.61% per year
2. The population 65 and older: 2.09% per year

The total US population is projected to increase from 331 million in 2020 to 379 million in 2050, growing at a decelerating rate.  The population aged 65 and older is projected to grow from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million in 2050.

The impact of immigration is captured by the likelihood that by the early 2030s one third of the workforce will be first or second generation immigrants.

Thanksgiving poem

Poem by Rumi, in Gold, trans by Haleh Liza Gafori, New York Review Books, 2022 page 55

 

Spring is here—

fragrant, musky spring is here.

The Beloved is here,

the Soul of souls is here,

the One who welcomes everyone is here.

 

Wine is here, the wine of dawn is here,

wine that floods the soul with joy is here.

The cupbearer fills everyone’s cup.

 

Clarity is here—

stones in the river pulse with sunlight.

 

The cure is here, the cure for every ill is here.

The friend who soothes the ache is here.

 

The healer is here.

The healer who’s felt every shade of feeling is here.

 

Dance is here, the whirling dance is here.

The eternal bond and glorious breeze are here.

Poppies, basil, and the tulips’ stunning eyes are here.

 

One is here.

One who makes someone of no one is here.

 

The bright moon that clears the haze is here.

The heart stirring all hearts to laughter is here.

 

The Beloved is here, the Soul of souls is here—

and never left.

It’s our eyes that come and go.

 

Be silent now. Let silence speak.

Surrender the syllables you count on your fingers.

The river of countless messages is here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which countries are most dependent on remittances?

Here are 11 countries many households of which are dependent on remittances from their diaspora workforces.

In the orbit of the United States: El Salvador – 24%; Haiti – 20%, Honduras – 26%

In the orbit of Russia, with Germany also involved: Kyrgyz Republic 20%, Tajikistan – 37%

Jamaica -19% from US and UK

Somalia – 25% large share of remittances likely from U.S, and UK, many in Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen

Gambia – 26% from U.S. and western Europe

Lebanon – 36%: diaspora widely dispersed, likely large share from Saudi Arabia and U.S:

South Sudan – 35% from Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia

Nepal – 27%: from India, Saudi Arabia, U.S. and Malaysia

 

 

The Jordan Commission on immigration in the 1990s

It is a rare day when you come across a crisp vision statement on immigration to the United States. You can find one in the report of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, informally known as the Jordan Commission, for its chair, Barbara Jordan (1936-1996) , a Democratic Congresswoman from Texas.

Created by the Bill Clinton’s White House,  the Commission addressed much of the major issues: family reunification, employment-based immigration, enforcement measures to stem unauthorized immigration, and numerical limits on all classes of immigrants, non-immigrants, and asylees.

Between 1994 and 1997 it issued four reports. In the last report, Becoming An American: Immigration and Immigrant Policy, the Commission defined a vision in 90 words:

“Properly-regulated immigration and immigrant policy serves the national interest by ensuring the entry of those who will contribute most to our society and helping lawful newcomers adjust to life in the United States. It must give due consideration to shifting economic realities. A well-regulated system sets priorities for admission; facilitates nuclear family reunification; gives employers access to a global labor market while protecting U.S. workers; helps to generate jobs and economic growth; and fulfills our commitment to resettle refugees as one of several elements of humanitarian protection of the persecuted.”

The Commission proposed to reduce legal immigration to 550,000 per year, down from approximately 800,000. It aimed to scale back family chain migration by prioritizing certain family relationships. It recommended a shift towards admitting highly skilled individuals as support for national interests. The Commission recommended elimination of unskilled worker admissions, and abolishment of the diversity visa lottery. It recommended vigorous enforcement and deportation policies.