Month: September 2023

Differences in population growth point to imbalances in workforces

The imbalances in population growth among countries can reflect recent emigration and current and future emigration. I’ve recently note the demand by advanced countries for more workers. The following population growth rates for 2022 paint a larger picture.

Extremes: In 2022, Ukraine lost 14% of its population.  In the same year, Niger’s population grew by 3.7%, the fastest of any nation.

The 2022 rates of growth (0.8% globally) increased inversely to the economic status of the country groups, with the EU countries at 0.2%, U.S. 0.4%, Latin America and the Caribbean 0.7%, Arab World 1.8%, and Sub-Saharan Africa 2.5%. Canada’s relatively growth rate in 2022 of 0.7% is directly attributable to its active acceptance of skilled immigrants.

These trends point to an ever-larger share of the globe’s young adult workers being located in poor countries, especially Sub-Saharan Africa.  Compare its 2022 growth rate of 2.5% with, say Bangladesh’s of 1.1%.

Go here and here.

Private sponsored immigration is surging

Semi-privatized immigration, created by the Biden administration, is proving hugely popular. Households in the U.S. have demonstrated a strong appetite for providing financial guarantees and other support for nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ukraine.

CBS reports that U.S. received more than 1.5 million requests from individuals hoping to sponsor the entry of migrants from four countries which the Biden administration enrolled in a private sponsorship “parole” program: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. I posted last month that by this summer a half million people have been admitted through parole programs, of which most had private sponsorhips.

[The CBS report does not address an earlier – approved private sponsorship program, that for Ukrainians.  As of February 2023, 117,000 Ukrainians have been admitted under United for Ukraine program. Go here and here.]

The internal Department of Homeland Security documents obtained by CBS News indicated that as of the end of last month, the agency was receiving an average of nearly 12,000 applications per day from those seeking to sponsor Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, calling the number “overwhelming.” The documents noted that less than three days’ worth of applications were processed per month due to the 30,000 monthly cap.

The sponsorship policy is also being challenged in federal court by a coalition of Republican-led states that argue the Biden administration does not have the legal authority to use parole to admit up to 360,000 migrants each year outside of the regular visa system.

Work permits—persons who come under this program are granted a two year work permit, but it appears that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is backlogged in issuing the permits.  Conventional amnesty applicants who are permitted to stay in the U.S. have to wait for six months to be eligible to work.

 

 

 

 

More on the Asian higher education phenomenon

Many more Asians, first and later generations, now than in 2000, and far better educated than other groups.

The Asian population in the U.S. rose from 3.9 million in 1980 to 11.9 million in 2000, to 22.4 million in 2019.  That’s a rise from 1.7% to 7% of the entire population.

In 1970, Asian immigrants made up just 12% of the foreign-born population, compared to over 30% in 2019.

Asian Americans have the highest educational attainment of any racial group. In 2019, 54% of Asian Americans aged 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 36% of whites, 26% of blacks, and 20% of Hispanics.

Asian-Americans make up about 5% of the population of public high schools in the United States and were 22% of those admitted to Harvard’s freshman class this year. Asian-Americans make up 26% of the undergraduate enrollment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of course, those numbers may not reflect the full extent of qualified Asian-American applicants. And there is no consensus on what data would actually demonstrate illegal discrimination. (Go here.)

There is significant variation among different Asian origin groups. In 2019, Indians, Taiwanese, Japanese and Chinese Americans had much higher college completion rates (over 60%) than groups like Vietnamese, Hmong and Laotians (under 30%).

 

 

The root of the border crisis is a broken asylum system

In Foreign Affairs, written by Julia Preston, the national immigration correspondent for The New York Times from 2006 to 2016; she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for her reporting on Mexico.

“At the core of the crisis, from the borderlands to the American interior, is the U.S. asylum system. It was created nearly half a century ago to assess foreigners’ claims of persecution case by case. Over the past decade, however, the asylum system has become something else: for lack of other legal avenues, it has turned into the main channel for mass immigration across the southwest border, a function it was never designed to serve. By the end of 2022, almost 800,000 asylum cases were awaiting adjudication in the immigration courts. The average asylum claim took more than four years to decide. Yet in fiscal 2022 the courts nationwide granted asylum in only 22,311 cases.

“Since there have been no clear-cut procedures for deporting asylum seekers whose claims are rejected, many of those people and their families—along with tens of thousands of asylum seekers denied in previous years—have quietly joined the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country.

“The asylum system is failing at every step of the way. It has failed to provide orderly pathways for migrants at the border. It does not provide timely protection for people escaping from truly threatening situations in their home countries; nor does it give timely denials to migrants who are fleeing poverty and cannot meet the exacting legal definition of persecution. And now, as New York, Chicago, and other cities struggle with the rising costs of supporting the newcomers, they confront another failure: the system prevents asylum seekers from going to work to contribute to the U.S. economy. “

Preston refers to Title 42, use of parole, creating intake centers in Latin American countries, and introducing an app for applicants, as dancing around the core problem of the design of the asylum system.

She writes, “The reality is that officials in Washington will have to keep improvising at the border until the failings of asylum are reformed, and for that, Congress must act. Lawmakers will have to update and clarify the persecution standard to encompass victims of organized criminal violence, sexual abuse, and other nonpolitical violations; simplify the screening process; and specify the consequences for migrants whose claims are denied. More urgently, lawmakers must act to restore asylum to its purpose by expanding alternative legal avenues for labor and family immigration.”

Without reforms, the United States will perpetuate a system that draws more people into irregular migration, does not serve the American economy, and could leave hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the country in perpetual legal limbo.