Month: July 2018

Religious affiliation of immigrants

86% of immigrants express a religious affiliation. This is much higher than for the United States as a whole, where 77% say they are affiliated. In other words, immigrants increase the number of persons who practice a religion.

According to Pew Research, while Christians continue to make up a majority of legal immigrants to the U.S., the estimated share of new legal permanent residents who are Christian declined from 68% in 1992 to 61% in 2012. Over the same period, the estimated share of green card recipients who belong to religious minorities rose from approximately one-in-five (19%) to one-in-four (25%). This includes growing shares of Muslims (5% in 1992, 10% in 2012) and Hindus (3% in 1992, 7% in 2012). The share of Buddhists, however, is slightly smaller (7% in 1992, 6% in 2012), while the portion of legal immigrants who are religiously unaffiliated (atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular) has remained relatively stable, at about 14% per year.

Unauthorized immigrants, by contrast, come primarily from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the overwhelming majority of them – an estimated 83% – are Christian. That share is slightly higher than the percentage of Christians in the U.S. population as a whole (estimated at just under 80% of U.S. residents of all ages, as of 2010).

Inter-racial inter-ethnic marriage in U.S.

One-in-six newlyweds (17%) were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity in 2015, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. This represents a more than fivefold increase from 3% in 1967, the year in which the Supreme Court ruled in the Loving v. Virginia decision that interracial marriages were legal.

While intermarriage is generally more common in metropolitan areas than in more rural non-metro areas (18% of newlyweds vs. 11%), there is tremendous variation within metro areas in the shares of newlyweds who have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity.

Honolulu has by far the highest share of intermarried newlyweds of any metro area analyzed – 42%. The same is true of about three-in-ten newlyweds living near Las Vegas or Santa Barbara, California.

Honolulu is made up of 42% Asians, 20% non-Hispanic whites and 9% Hispanics. In the Las Vegas area, 46% of people in the marriage market are non-Hispanic white, while 27% are Hispanic, 14% are non-Hispanic black and 9% are Asian; and around Santa Barbara, 52% of people in the marriage market are non-Hispanic white and 37% are Hispanic.

Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the area around Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Florida, have high intermarriage rates as well. Both are located near military bases likely contributes to the high rates of intermarriage, since intermarriage is typically more common among people in the military than among civilians.

At the other end of the spectrum, about 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi, and Asheville, North Carolina, are married to someone of a different race or ethnicity. The same is true of 5% of newlyweds around Chattanooga, Tennessee, and 6% of those around Greenville, South Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama. Intermarriage is relatively uncommon in the Youngstown, Ohio, area as well.

From here.

 

 

How to de-toxify the immigration issue

U of California-Hasting law professor Joan Williams says in the WSJ (gated) there are three steps to reduce the anti-immigration fears and retentments of blue collar America:

One: The first is to recognize that the nation-state matters greatly for nonelites in developed countries. Dismissing national pride as nothing more than racism is a recipe for class conflict and more racism. Better by far to embrace national pride, balance it with concern for those outside the nation, and refuse to allow racism to pose as national pride.

Two: The second step is to highlight the ways President Trump’s immigration and trade policies are hurting red-state constituencies that voted for him. Critics can point to farmers unable to find farmworkers, small-business owners unable to find dishwashers, and construction workers hit hard by steel tariffs.

Three: The third step is to fight the scapegoating of immigrants by ensuring that hardworking Americans without college degrees can find good jobs.

Immigrants in construction — key facts

In 2015, there were 25.7 million foreign-born workers in the U.S., making up 17.1% of the U.S. workforce. Among the major industrial sectors, the construction industry employed the highest percentage of foreign-born workers outside of agriculture. About 2.4 million construction workers, nearly a quarter (24.7%) of the industry workforce, were born in foreign countries

The majority (84.3%) of foreign-born workers in construction were born in Latin American countries in which 53.1% were born in Mexico, 6.6% in El Salvador, 5.4% in Guatemala, 4.7% in Honduras, 2.4% in Cuba, 2.1% in Ecuador, and a small percentage in other countries in that area. Europeans made up 7.3% of foreign-born workers in construction, and 6.4% came from Asia.

About 74% of foreign-born construction workers reported they were not U.S. citizens when the survey was conducted. In 2015, nearly 30% of construction workers spoke a language other than English at home. Among foreign-born construction workers, about 86% reported they spoke Spanish at home. Other languages spoken at home among foreign-born construction workers included Portuguese (1.8%), Polish (1.5%), and Russian (1.1%). In fact, less than 9% of foreign-born construction workers spoke English at home. Overall, more than 33 million workers in the U.S. spoke languages other than English at home in 2015.

From CPWR

 

 

Why do Central Americans migrate?

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a global fellow at the Wilson Center who has interviewed hundreds of Central American migrants in the field, said that they are primarily motivated to leave their countries by violence and lack of economic opportunities, phenomena which she described as closely connected.

She said these migrant families choose the United States because they often have networks in the country already and know that there are many job opportunities. “There are push and pull factors. The push factors are the lack of economic opportunities and the security problems in their countries. It’s a mix of these conditions. The pull factors are of course the jobs and the families.”

Even with steep drops in the number of recorded murders in the past year, El Salvador and Honduras, the home countries of many migrants, are still among the most dangerous countries in the world. Poverty is hammering away at livelihoods in much of Central America, and for some, the decision to leave is a gamble on a better life.

From here.

 

 

 

 

 

Trump’s Four Pinocchios Score on his crime figures

On June 22, President Trump fabricated numbers to assert that illegal immigrants are dangerous criminals. The Washington Post awarded him the maximum four Pinocchios.

He assigned to illegal aliens (about 11 million) crime numbers which he took from an accounting of all aliens, which includes legal and not naturalized aliens of about 13 million.

He used figures collected over very many years but attributed them to seven (2011 – 2018).

He used the percentage of persons in federal prison who are aliens (legal and illegal) to proportion state and local crimes to illegal aliens. A relatively high federal prison count of aliens is heavily weighted by immigration and drug crimes. Trump used this federal prison inmate ratio to estimate murders (a state crime for the most part) committed committed by illegal aliens.

In fact, the crime rates among both legal and illegal immigrants are below those of citizens. And, the percentage of inmates in state and local prisons who are aliens is well below the percentage of persons in the United States who are aliens.

White population began to decline in 2016

For the first time since the Census Bureau has released annual statistics, they show for 2016 and 2017 an absolute decline in the nation’s white non-Hispanic population—accelerating a phenomenon that was not projected to occur until 2023.

For the first time, minorities outnumber whites nationally for each age under 10. While earlier estimates revealed “minority white” status for some of these youthful ages, this is now solidly the case for individuals born in each year since 2007. Whites under the age of 10 sustained a loss of 1.2 million between 2010 and 2017, according to the new estimates. This loss of youthful whites is fairly pervasive, occurring in 43 states and 81 of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas.

Minorities have not stopped all geographic areas from child population decline but they contributed to gains in the under age 10 populations for 17 states and the District of Columbia, 48 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, and over 800 counties. Some of these gains are attributable to immigration, but in fact, only 38 percent of total minority growth is due to immigration

Pre-millennials: 68.4% white
Millennials (1984 – 2000): 55.8% white
Post-millennials (post 2000 as of 2015): 51.5% white

From Brookings here and here

America’s great internal migration

What happened when much of the country’s African-American population migration from the South to the North?

In the South, “black outmigration between 1940 and 1970 (4 million, or 40% of African-Americans) from southern counties: i) favored the mechanization of agriculture, in turn increasing the average value per acre of farmed land; ii) induced planters to change their crop-mix, switching away from labor intensive crops such as cotton; and iii) reduced the share of blacks working as farm tenants, likely because white planters shifted from sharecropping on small plots to hired labor on consolidated farms.”

In the North, tracking the northern migration of 1.5 million African-Americans between 1910 and 1930: “Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e. Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more effort, assimilation success was larger for those that were culturally closer to native whites (i.e. Western and Northern Europeans). These patterns are consistent with a framework in which perceptions of racial threat among native whites lower the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants.”

These findings from the talented Marco Tabellini.

Re-Definition of ‘Public Charge’ Could Drastically Slash Family Immigration

Thomas Ewing writes about a planned Executive Branch change in immigration policy for “public charges” which will severely impact immigrants with moderate to low household income. It would make them ineligible for green cards. It may lead to expulsions. He says, “If these measures are translated into federal regulations, the share of immigrants who would qualify as a public charge would skyrocket.”

The Migration Policy Institute says that Applying the definition of public charge outlined in the March 2018 leaked draft, MPI estimates the share of non citizens who could face a public-charge determination based on benefits use would increase more than 15-fold—from 3 percent under current policy to 47 percent under the terms of the draft rule.

The covered benefits are very popular among native-born Americans — 31% use them, per the  MPI which estimates that 36% of naturalized citizens use them and 47% of non-citizen immigrants use them.

The administration plans to add to the circumstances under which a non-U.S. citizen is deemed a public charge—meaning someone who depends on government means-tested benefits or is likely to depend upon these benefits in the future. Being a public charge is grounds for inadmissibility into the country, and—depending on how far the administration wants to take this—might even become grounds for deportation as well.

If the policy is implemented, an immigrant would also be considered a public charge if he or she utilized (or might have to utilize) for herself or for her dependents, even if American citizens, non-cash benefits such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Let’s look at SNAP beneficiaries. According to here, cross monthly income — that is, household income before any of the program’s deductions are applied — generally must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line. 130 percent of the poverty line for a three-person family is $2,213. The poverty level is higher for bigger families and lower for smaller families.

The Federal minimum wage now is $7.25 per hour. Full-time work at this level yields monthly earnings of $1,256 monthly. The average monthly SNAP benefit is $254.

But a better way to look at SNAP eligibility is to see that for working age households, SNAP is often used during temporary periods of unemployment, such as for seasonal workers. The planned new policy will put at severe risk low income households in seasonal work.

The official page of the federal government on public charge is here.

Also go here.