Italian immigrants murderers?

“But immigration policy is not just about economics; it’s also about rights, said James Hollifield, a professor and director of the Tower Center at Southern Methodist University. The U.S. has imported workers for years, often without giving them legal status, and that’s coming home to roost.

“We’ve fudged that because it’s a fairly difficult political and legal question,” he told the audience on Friday, adding that people were not a commodity like shirts.

America has a history of embracing nativism after major waves of immigration. Hollifield cited a 1930 note from then-President Herbert Hoover: “The Italians are predominantly murderers and bootleggers [and you and your Italian supporters] should go back to where you belong.”

“It’s back to the future,” Hollifield said about the sentiment coming out of Washington today. “Back to America first, back to protectionism, back to nativism — that’s where we were in the 1920s.”

Quote is from here. Profile of Hollifield is here.

Profile of Dallas and immigrants

Dallas Morning News reports that Last year, Dallas created an Office of Welcoming Communities and Immigrant Affairs to ramp up the outreach. At a committee meeting last week, it unveiled a long list of goals developed with a task force of 85 contributors. Their ideas include boosting the number of naturalized citizens, increasing their participation in local government and promoting growth in minority owned businesses.

40.3% of Dallas’ population growth since 2011 has come from immigrants. They now account for almost 1 in 4 city residents, a higher ratio than in the state and nation.

Almost 70% of construction workers in Dallas are foreign-born, as are almost a third of the entrepreneurs. Immigrants are much more likely to have a college degree than the overall population….And a higher share of immigrants are working age, which is important as more baby boomers retire and fewer move here from other states.

Here is a New American Economy profile of immigrants in Dallas.

 

Stephen Miller in profile

Politico runs an in-depth profile of Stephen Miller, Trump’s 33 year old advisor on immigration. Here are some passages:

Liberal upbringing in Santa Monica, California…deeply shaken by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, at Duke as an undergraduate as a columnist for the student newspaper he warned that multiculturalism poses a threat to American identity.

He has installed acolytes across key U.S. agencies, such as the State Department. He has inserted himself into NSC deliberations to an extraordinary degree for someone not in that elite group’s ranks. He takes care to limit his paper trial, avoiding email and keeping his name off documents when possible.

Miller from the start wielded tremendous sway over the Domestic Policy Council, a White House-based forum of top U.S. officials and staffers who deal with issues such as health care, education and other domestic topics aside from the economy. Some elements of immigration policy are among the DPC’s portfolios. But there are other aspects of immigration that have been traditionally dealt with by the NSC, such as refugee resettlement and recalcitrant countries. According to multiple former officials, under Miller, the DPC proposed that it take the lead on all immigration matters, including what was supposed to be handled by the NSC. NSC staffers raised concerns. But Miller pushed then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Tom Bossert, the homeland security adviser at the time, to effectively cede control of immigration policy to him.

“The entirety of my work during my time in the administration was influenced or dictated maybe 90 percent of the time by Miller, but I saw maybe three emails from him,” the former administration official said.

Perhaps Miller’s most important move has been identifying and promoting lower-level staffers who share his anti-immigration views, some of whom he helped place into key agencies, essentially embedding foot soldiers across the federal government.

A White House staffer who admires Miller said the Trump confidant is in contact with many more career staffers across the government who support his views, even lawyers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Miller has asked people to look at every policy change possible within the executive branch’s authority to be stricter on immigration, the White House staffer said.

The former White House official warned, however, against exaggerating Miller’s reach, saying that although he has a solid “kitchen cabinet” of advisers, “there’s a mythology that’s crept up that overstates their influence.” Miller, the former official added, has promoted that “myth.”

Current and former officials say they can’t recall any incidents in which Miller used overtly racist language. Instead, they say, his views appeared more nativist — his language loaded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, toward non-Americans, including refugees.

700 million people want to migrate

According to Gallup, 700m people—14% of the world’s adults—would like to move permanently to another country, usually a rich one. In sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 31%.

— From The Economist

Immigration waves and anti-liberalism

I agree with this description of the role of increased immigration on national politics in Europe and the United States. From Tyler Cowan: “There is another explanation for the rise in anti-liberal sentiment: immigration. Through a series of historical accidents, it was kept off the table as a major issue for many decades. The U.S. had choked off immigration in 1920, and at first the liberalization of the 1960s did not have much of a visible impact on the American population. In those early decades after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, many poor nations were so poor and unfree that it wasn’t easy to leave them.

As for Europe, in-migration was too small to make much of a political impact. For a while in the 1960s and 1970s, the bigger story was emigration, due to high taxes, from countries such as the U.K. and Sweden. The presence of the Iron Curtain also blocked some of the routes and sources that enable some migration to Western Europe today.

In a democratic society where there simply isn’t much immigration, it is much harder for nationalists and populists to use it as an issue. But today much of the West has seen high immigration for 20 years or more, giving nationalist and populist forces a major talking point. Even if most of the population is broadly pro-immigration, perhaps a core of 15 to 20 percent will not be. With that base, a movement of counterreaction can have real political impact.”

From here.

 

New York City immigrants today

New York City is home to 3.1 million immigrants, the largest number in the City’s history. Immigrants comprise nearly 38% of the city population and 45% of its workforce (up from 31% in 1990).

21% of New Yorkers are naturalized U.S. citizens. 10.9% are lawful permanent residents. 6.3% are undocumented.

62% of New Yorkers live in households with at least one immigrant, including one million New Yorkers who live in households where at least one person is undocumented.

The hour glass: Nearly half of immigrant New Yorkers age 25 years or older have graduated from college or have attended some college. These rates are notably higher for naturalized U.S. citizens. Nearly 37% of undocumented immigrants living in New York City have less than a high school degree, compared to approximately 33% of those with green cards and other status, 22% of naturalized U.S. citizens, and 11% of U.S.-born citizens.

 

Source: NYC government.

Worksite investigations by ICE are up

Under federal law, employers are required to verify the identity and employment eligibility of all individuals they hire, and to document that information using the Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9.

ICE has multiplied the number of inspections of employers to check for their compliance with immigration law. According to its press release in late July, ICE served I-9 audit notices to more than 5,200 businesses around the country since January. A notice of inspection (NOI) informs business owners that ICE is going to audit their hiring records to determine whether they are complying with existing law.

In FY 2017, ICE initiated 1,360 I-9 audits and made 139 criminal arrests.

ICE uses a three-pronged approach to worksite enforcement: compliance, from I-9 inspections, civil fines and referrals for debarment; enforcement, through the criminal arrest of employers and administrative arrest of unauthorized workers; and outreach, through the ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers, or IMAGE program, to instill a culture of compliance and accountability.

Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez on abolishment of ICE

Cynthia Nixon on ABC News:

“I think it’s important to know also parents and children aren’t just being separated at the border. They are being separated throughout this country by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. I think we need to abolish ICE. That seems really clear. They have strayed so far from the interests of the American people and the interests of humanity.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in an interview on Democracy Now, less explicitly:

“I didn’t take on the president much at all, because we know—here in our district, we know that we’re united against this administration. And, for me, it was very important to not talk about what I was running against, but to talk about what I’m running for, because, to me, saying something like “abolish ICE” is an implicit—it’s an implicit rejection of the current administration’s policies, and it’s going a step further, to advance the causes of justice.

“First of all, ICE is not BPD [i.e. Customs and Border Protection]…what ICE is—you know, when we talk about abolishing ICE, we’re talking about ending family detention. We’re talking about—we’re talking about ending an agency and ending a practice and a structure that is not accountable to the U.S. Department of Justice, that often takes on things that look a lot like enforcement activities. And so, to have an enforcement agency that operates outside of the accountability of the Department of Justice, it’s no surprise to see the violations of civil and human rights that we’re seeing right now.”

 

Allegations of voter fraud are spurious

Voter fraud allegations by people such as Kris Kobach never are based on any research findings of concerted efforts in recent decades to stimulate and influence fraudulent voting, such as by politicians or activist groups. Nor are they based on a critique of controls in place in polling stations to contain illegal voting.

Instead the allegations are based on database analyze of razor-thin aberrations in voting patterns or voter registration rolls. Kobach mentioned one the other day.

The Washington Post reports, Kobach pointed to a study from the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit founded by Stephen K. Bannon and another Breitbart editor, that purported to find 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election.

The study is America The Vulnerable: The Problem of Duplicate Voting, by the Government Accountability Institute available on the White House website.  The GAI collected voter data from 21 states for the 2016 general election. The GAI found 7,271 highly likely cases of inter-state duplicate voting. It identified another 1,200 cases of likely intra-state duplicate voting. The total of 8,471.

126 million persons voted in 2016. The 21-state sample accounted for 75 million voters. Adjusting the 8,471 figures of estimated duplicate voters for the entire country brings this to 14,231 estimated duplicative votes in the 2016 general election.

For every million voters, that amounts to 113 duplicate votes. For a 100,000 population city, where perhaps 40,000 people voted, that amounts to 5 duplicate votes.

Voter fraud can happen in ways other than voting in more than one jurisdiction. The GAI report does not estimate the amount of other voter fraud. More importantly, neither Kobach of the GAI has come forward with any evidence of a conspiracy to stimulate fraudulent voting.

People vastly overestimate the size of the illegal population

About one quarter of foreign born persons in the U.S. are unauthorized to be here. 45% of Americans say that most immigrants living in the U.S. are here legally; 35% say most immigrants are in the country illegally, while 6% volunteer that about half are here legally and half illegally and 13% say they don’t know.

26% of college grads think that most are here illegally. So do 27% of liberals think. 51% of Republican-leaning non-college grads think so.

From Pew Research.