Month: September 2018

A 2017 Census report on immigration trends.

The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States. For years newcomers tended to be from Latin America, but a Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41 percent of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39 percent were from Latin America. About 45 percent were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30 percent of those who came between 2000 and 2009.

For many years, Mexico was the single largest contributor of immigrants. But since 2010, the number of immigrants arriving from Mexico has declined, while those from China and India have surged. Since 2010, the increase in the number of people from Asia — 2.6 million — was more than double the 1.2 million who came from Latin America, Mr. Frey found.

The foreign-born population stood at 13.7 percent in 2017, or 44.5 million people, compared with 13.5 percent in 2016.

Some of the largest gains were in states with the smallest immigrant populations, suggesting that immigrants were spreading out in the country. New York and California, states with large immigrant populations, both had increases of less than six percent since 2010. But foreign-born populations rose by 20 percent in Tennessee, 13 percent in Ohio, 12 percent in South Carolina and 20 percent in Kentucky over the same period.

From The New York Times

Sweden and immigration: a lot has to do with jobs

The foreign-born worker unemployment rate in Sweden is five times that of native born workers. in the U.S. the foreign-born rate is below that of native born workers.

in 2000, 8.9 million people lived in Sweden. 50,000 immigrants entered the country, and 38,000 emigrated. In 2019, 10 million people lived in Sweden. 163,000 persons, equivalent to 1.6% of the population immigrated and 46,000 emigration. That annual rate of immigration is equivalent to 5 million persons immigrated to the U.S, compared to the roughly 1 million who do. In 2016, 67,000 persons, mostly from Syria, were granted asylum. That compares to about 45,000 refugees who will enter in the U.S. in 2918. In 2016, there were 163,000 asylum seekers in Sweden.

Because immigration to Sweden before the Syrian crisis was generally low, the total foreign population in Sweden (about 15% of total) is proportionally not much higher than in the U.S. (13%). Thus Sweden experienced in about a decade the rise in foreign persons in the U.S. that took several decades

In July, 2018, 3.6 native born Swedes were unemployed compared to 19.9% of foreign born workers. Per The Local, “Unemployment is clearly falling among both native and foreign born, but there are still major differences. To get more new arrivals into work, education and subsidized jobs are important,” Arbetsförmedlingen analyst Andreas Mångs said in a statement.

In 2017, Sweden had one of the highest unemployment rates among foreign-born workers (about 15% in its chart) and the U.S. had one of the lowest (about 5%). The low U.S. rate may be in part due to how Spanish speakers with low English proficiency find employment in Spanish speaking worksites.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for foreign-born persons in the United States was 4.1 percent in 2017, down from 4.3 percent in 2016.  The jobless rate of native-born persons was 4.4 percent in 2017, down from 5.0 percent in 2016.

Lessons from past wave of refugees in Sweden: it’s jobs, stupid.

From The Local: Two decades ago thousands of refugees fled war in Yugoslavia and made Sweden their home, where today they are a well-integrated part of society. During the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, many of those fleeing the conflict looked to Sweden for protection, with just over 100,000 coming to the Scandinavian nation at the time. In 1992 alone, 70,000 people from the former Yugoslavia applied for asylum in the country – a record high number for a calendar year until it was surpassed in 2015.

A 2016 study showed that a significantly higher proportion of Bosnians are employed. In the 20-24 age bracket, employment was at virtually the same level as native Swedes/

But what lessons can Sweden learn from its successful integration of Yugoslavian refugees? Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the experience is that a good match between the people coming in and the systems of their new home is worth its weight in gold. One thing was the harmony between the general makeup of those who came from former Yugoslavia to the Scandinavian country, and developments in Sweden, which was moving towards a knowledge-based economy at the same time.

Similarities in level of education was particularly vital to the long-term success: Yugoslavia’s education system, where primary schooling was compulsory until the age of 15 and students were encouraged to follow upper secondary education until the age of 19, was not dissimilar to Sweden’s, where school is compulsory until 16, and most pupils then go on to upper secondary school. But Sweden had a financial crisis in the 1990s. Of the Bosnians who were given a residence permit between 1993 and 1994, only 24 percent in the 20-59 age bracket had found employment after four years.

As the new millennium arrived things improved significantly, but with notable regional differences. So while by 1999, 90 percent of male and 80 percent of female Bosnian refugees aged 20-59 living in in Gnosjö, Gislaved, Vaggeryd and Värnamo were employed, the corresponding figure for Malmö was 37 percent and 28 percent respectively. The integration process for those who ended up in the southern Swedish city would have been quicker if they had been placed in regions with a better economic outlook from day one.

Brett Kavanaugh’s court record on Immigration

Because the federal D.C. Circuit rarely hears cases directly involving immigration law, Kavanaugh has only written three opinions in cases involving immigrants. All three opinions were dissents, where Kavanaugh stated that he believed the immigrant should have lost the case.

In 2008, Kavanaugh issued his first major dissent in a case involving immigrants. In Agri Processing Co. Inc, v. National Labor Relations Board, Kavanaugh declared that undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to labor-law protections because they were not legally permitted to be “employees.”

Even though the Supreme Court had years before declared that undocumented immigrants were “employees” for the purposes of labor law, Kavanaugh argued that a 1986 law making it a crime to employ undocumented immigrants had implicitly overruled the Supreme Court. The majority on the D.C. Circuit called his reasoning illogical and accused him of misapplying principles of statutory interpretation.

Next, in 2014, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion in Fogo de Chao Holdings Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In that case, Washington, DC restaurant Fogo de Chao applied for an L-1 visa to bring a chef from Brazil to the United States. Fogo de Chao argued that the chef had “specialized knowledge” in churrascaria cooking and methods, a form of Brazilian barbecue that the restaurant is known for.

The government initially denied the chef’s visa. In overturning the denial, the D.C. Circuit criticized the government’s “wooden refusal” to consider that specialized knowledge might come from a person’s upbringing, family, and community tradition.

However, Judge Kavanaugh dissented strongly. He framed the dispute as simply about the restaurant “want[ing] to employ Brazilian chefs rather than American chefs,” and suggested that hiring such chefs was just trying to “cut labor costs masquerading as specialized knowledge.”

Finally, Judge Kavanaugh dissented in the 2017 case of Garza v. Hargan, in which an undocumented teenager sued the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement for preventing her from obtaining an abortion. He accused the majority of a “radical” expansion of the law, suggesting that the D.C Circuit had created a “new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.”

From here.

El Salvador and the U.S.

6.3 million people live in El Salvador. The Salvadoran diaspora as of 2016 was 2.2 million, of which 1.4 million lived in the U.S., not including children born here. It is the largest Central American group in the U.S. Starting with a 94,000 base in 1980, on average about 40,000 Salvadoreans have entered the U.S. annually.

As of 2010, 30% of Salvadoreans in the U.S. were American citizens. 24% spoke English “very well.” Of those 25 years or older, 54% did not complete high school. Roughly 500,000 were undocumented.

A civil war begun in the 1970s displaced one million internally and to neighboring countries. The United States heavily supported the military in part to eliminate the risk of communism. Peace accords formally ended the civil war in 1992. Two earthquakes occurred in 2001. Salvadorean waves in emigration to the U.S., under “temporary protected status,” happened in the 1990s and after the earthquakes.

The Trump administration has said it will remove this status from about 200,000 persons in the U.S. Further, the Justice Department under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions determined that domestic and gang violence no longer constitute grounds for asylum

The 1992 Peace Accords did not improve life for most Salvadorans. The quarter-century since has seen worsening living conditions, widening inequality, and an economy artificially sustained by the remittances that Salvadorans abroad, mostly in the United States, send regularly to their families. These remittances—which totaled US $5 billion in 2017, roughly one-fifth of the country’s gross domestic product, according to World Bank data—help keep the Salvadoran economy afloat.

The civil war left behind a militarized society with most of its population unable to earn enough to survive, creating fertile recruitment ground for drug cartels and various organized-crime groups. Furthermore, deportations of Salvadorans from the United States, which started in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s, significantly exacerbated violent trends in the country. Deportees included young Salvadorans who had formed gangs in the United States—their way of navigating life in inhospitable neighborhoods—contributing to a perfect storm that allowed these activities to proliferate back in El Salvador.

it is likely that in the absence of major changes in the country, Salvadorans will continue to migrate.

From the Migration Policy Institute here.

Can Mexico be more prosperous?

The supply of Mexican labor for the domestic U.S. economy is influenced by forces on both sides of the border, including the strength of the Mexican economy. The Economist recently analyzed the failure of the Mexican economy to perform better: “Between 1995 and 2015 real GDP per person increased by an annual average of 1.2%, less than in any Latin American country except Venezuela. Take into account the swelling labour force, and Mexico looks even worse: GDP per worker expanded by just 0.4% a year.”

This is despite an improvement in formal educational levels among Mexicans. As I posted recently, today a quarter for young people in their teens will end up going to college, three times a percentage of those who did in the early 1990s. The Mexican economy is now the 15th largest in the world and is projected to become the seventh or eighth largest by 2050.

The solution: change laws to make it relatively more attractive to hire salaried employees rather than to pay them as non-salaried self-employed workers.

Per the Economist, workers end up in jobs where they are less productive than they might be. Too many individuals who should be workers become entrepreneurs or are self-employed. Efficient businesses are taxed and penalised, while subsidies help sustain unproductive ones.

Mexico has a huge and disproportionate number of small businesses, and unusually wide variation in the productivity of its companies. More than 90% of the 4.1 million firms in the 2013 census had at most five workers. And 90% of the total were “informal”, absorbing 40% of workers.

Economist Santiago Levy distinguishes between firms that have salaried employees and those that do not. Four-fifths of the “informal” firms are in the second category: their staff are either self-employed or paid piece-rates or profit shares. These firms’ only legal obligation is to pay corporate tax, of just 2% of revenues. Firms with salaried workers, by contrast, must pay social insurance, deduct income tax and grapple with employment law (which doesn’t allow them to fire people if business drops).

Immigrants dropping out of support programs

Politico reports that “Local health providers say they’ve received panicked phone calls from both documented and undocumented immigrant families demanding to be dropped from the rolls of WIC, a federal nutrition program aimed at pregnant women and children, after news reports that the White House is potentially planning to deny legal status to immigrants who’ve used public benefits. Agencies in at least 18 states say they’ve seen drops of up to 20 percent in enrollment, and they attribute the change largely to fears about the immigration policy.”

The Trump Administration is planning to expand the “public charge” criteria that is used to bar persons from permanent residence (green cards) if there is a risk of using public support programs –even though millions of low wage employees of Walmart, Amazon and other companies depend on SNAP (food stamps), Head Start and WIC to balance their budgets. The expected expansion of the criteria is a means to cut off permanent immigration of working class households. I have posted on this here.

Politico writes that in the past, if a mom was applying for a green card her own use of public benefits might be examined. Under the proposed change, her child’s enrollment in Medicaid or Head Start would weighed as a negative factor, even if that child is a U.S. citizen.

Politico goes on: Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children — serves about half of all babies born in the U.S by providing vouchers or benefit cards so pregnant women and families with small children can buy staple foods and infant formula.

In some cases, immigration attorneys are recommending that families drop out of all government programs, including WIC, to avoid any chance that using the benefits could negatively affect their chances of getting a green card — or even prevent a family member from being able to get a visa to visit, according to caseworkers.

In January, the State Department instructed embassies and consulates to look at potential use of nutrition and health benefits when deciding whom to admit to the U.S.

Immigration in context of a more threatening world

Bruno Macaes in the National Review puts immigration into the context of new fears, unknown to Americans in the past, of about foreign influence over our jobs, our politics and our futures:

Immigration now takes place in the real world. And it all started in those months leading from Brexit to the Trump election.

The truth is that for many in the United Kingdom and the U.S., there is no longer a functioning liberal order. While the elites see a well-functioning international system of markets, trade, and the free movement of people, those at the bottom can find only the work of blind forces and competing states in an increasingly chaotic world.

Factories are being closed because of competition from China and elsewhere, and the message communicated to workers is that their country is no longer able to compete. Growing numbers of immigrants have a measurable impact on neighborhoods and the provision of public services, predominantly affecting the poor.

What has been taking place in the U.S. since the 2016 elections would look strikingly familiar to Turks or Egyptians. Some episode or other of foreign involvement in the democratic process is reported. That is bad enough as far as it goes, but it gets worse. Once the fatal virus of suspicion enters the political bloodstream, it will never leave.

Trump did not bring this situation with him. He is in fact the product of a new world where voters in the U.S. feel increasingly vulnerable to influences from the outside — influences which can no longer be managed or controlled as they were in the past.

One could speculate endlessly about the root causes of the new situation, but the truth is notably straightforward. Technology — once the preserve of the West — is now universal. [In the 19th C], the Muslim and Chinese worlds were faced with a new kind of civilization, carrying all the secrets of modern science, which at first must have looked like supernatural powers. The encounter between European and Asian empires in the mod­ern age had a very specific meaning to those involved: the superiority of European technology.

We have now entered a new age, one perfectly summarized by saying that Western machines are every day meeting Asian machines.