Working Immigrants

Bopha Malone with an Enterprise Bank client in Lowell, Massachusetts. “When I was three my mother walked to a camp. I arrived in the U.S. in 1989 as a nine-year-old. The refugee generation worked all hours, they did not know the laws. Our generation born just before or in the refugee camps know the system, we’re able to get better jobs. I acclimated very quickly – it scared my parents. Now Cambodians are arriving with some assets.”

The White House yesterday (5/16/19)  announced new immigration legislation without disclosing the text of an actual bill. But we can make an informed guess of its content by looking at the RAISE Act, which was proposed by Senators Cotton and Perdue in mid 2017. If enacted, the bill would turn immigration policy into an extremely selective and narrow funnel into which only the most educated and economically productive would be admitted. If unauthorized persons are not converted to legal status but are driven out of the country through legal enforcement, whole industries that rely on workers with low formal education would be challenged to survive.

The RAISE act would reduce levels of legal immigration to the United States by 50% by halving the number of green cards issued. The bill would also impose a cap of 50,000 refugee admissions a year and would end the visa diversity lottery. Legal immigration would be severely cut by reducing family based immigrations.

The Act would revise the awarding of 140,000 green cards for economic reasons to a merit-based system. The number of economic-based green cards would not increase. Entry through the points systems would surely be incredibly competitive, with only the most highly educated, most English fluent, highest-paid STEM workers making the cut.

It would essentially bar green cards for artists and low formally educated immigrants. Some 27 million foreign-born people work in America, about 17% of the workforce. Among major occupations with no need (1) for a high school degree and (2) much contact with the public, immigrants fill about 40% of these jobs. They include jobs on farms, construction sites, warehouses, in kitchens, and for building cleaning and maintenance. Roughly half of the immigrant workers in these jobs are undocumented.

An analysis of the RAISE Act by the Migration Policy Institute is here.

Thousands of legal residents and citizens, including 55,000 children who are in the country legally, could be displaced under a proposed rule intended to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving federal housing assistance, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The proposal, published on Friday, would prohibit families in which at least one member is undocumented from obtaining subsidized housing, according to an analysis by HUD career officials. The administration is pushing the changes to ensure that the benefits are awarded only to verified citizens — a move that was made without the knowledge of many longtime housing officials at the department.

Current rules bar undocumented immigrants from receiving federal housing subsidies, but allow families of mixed immigration status to live in subsidized housing as long as one household member is a legal resident. The subsidies are prorated based on the number of eligible members of the family. According to the HUD analysis, more than 108,000 people receiving benefits are in a household with at least one undocumented immigrant.

From the New York Times

Pro Publica reports that the care of immigrant children in U.S. custody has faced intense scrutiny over the past year as thousands of sexual abuse allegations and reports of personal enrichment by some nonprofit operators have raised questions about the federal government’s ability to monitor its network of about 100 shelters.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), in the Department of Health and Human Services, oversees the shelters. Lapses in medical care documented by a New Jersey-based pediatrician, Elana Levites-Agababa raise critical questions about the patchwork of state regulations that ORR relies on to monitor the shelters, which range from tiny group homes to 2,000-bed facilities and are often tucked in small towns and remote locations. The other day, a 16-year-old boy died shortly after arriving at an ORR shelter in Texas.

There were 13,500 children in shelters as of the end of February, more than five times as many as there were two years ago. On May 1, Trump requested congressional funding to nearly double the number of beds.

Under a federal court settlement, the shelters are required to provide routine medical care and emergency services, including a medical exam, immunizations and screening for infectious diseases within 48 hours of admission.

ORR’s guidelines further require shelter workers to observe children for signs of illness and to respond to nonemergency requests for medical attention within 24 to 48 hours. The shelters must notify ORR within four hours of an emergency room visit, review hospital discharge plans and follow doctors’ treatment recommendations.

But while ORR has the power to remove kids from shelters and cut off funding, it’s also desperate for beds, and any major reduction in capacity could create a crisis. Those conflicting priorities are why child advocates say state oversight is important.

There was a time when even Ivy League scientists supported racial restrictions at the border, says Daniel Okrent in the NY Times. Their advocacy of racial disparity led to the passage in 1924 of The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act). The Act limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia.

Okrent writes:

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”

They took the ideas of the British gentleman scientist Francis Galton — who had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 — welded them to a gross misunderstanding of the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, and concluded that the makeup of the nation’s population could be improved by the careful control of human breeding.

First published in 1916, “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist,  savagely denigrated the peoples of eastern and southern Europe while exalting the “Nordics” of northwestern Europe.

Princeton faculty member Carl C. Brigham, the inventor of the SAT, wrote, “There can be no doubt that recent history has shown a movement of inferior peoples or inferior representatives of peoples to this country.”