Month: September 2024

Three September polls: what they report about immigration

Three polls are worth reading. Bottom line:  sharp differences of opinion on key issues mask agreement on some; also, that immigration will likely not tilt the November voting by much.

A CNN poll released on Sept 25 reports that 49% of registered voters trust Trump (49%) more than Harris (35%) on immigration. 15% don’t trust either. 33% say that increasing the number of many people of different races. nationalities and ethnic groups threatens America. That’s up from 11% in 2019. This September, 66% say that these groups enrich America down from 82% in 2019.

A Pew Research poll in mid September pitted Trump supporters and Harris supporter against each other. The results were predicable except on educated and skilled immigrants.

The following shows Trump supporters first, Harris supporters second. I’m going to get into the weeds but first note what is to me an important matter of consensus:

Legal immigration should stay as current level: 48% to 44%

This result confirms that which has been a consistent consensus about immigration that lies beneath responses to hot button issues: As a nation, we are OK with immigration in  principle as long as it is done right. This consensus is not what Donald Trump wants.

Here is a predictable consensus about the border:

Improving security along the country’s borders: 96% to 80%.

I view the following result as approaching a consensus: U.S. has little or no control over illegal immigration: 66% to 40%

This consensus is of course why Harris visited Douglas, Arizona on September 27 to make a get tough speech about the border. She proposed tougher measures to constrain border crossings and asylum applications, and promoted the failed bi-partisan bill of early 2014 (go here). Her main focus was on executive branch action, which (per here) has been the default solution for over ten years.

Here are the expected divergences:

Deport all immigrants living here illegally: 88% to 27%

Allow undocumented persons married to a U.S. citizen to stay here legally: 35% to 80%

Admitting more refugees: 49% to 85%

Growing number of immigrants will make things worse: 59% to 11%

Authorized persons should be allowed legally to stay: 33% to 87%

Now, some topics for which there is much more of a consensus. There is a consensus that educated and skilled immigrants help:

Allowing international students who receive a U.S. college degree to stay here: 63% to 89%

Admitting more high skilled immigrants: 71% to 87%

A Suffolk/USA Today poll in early Sept implies that while there is a slight majority for Trump managing immigration better, that does not affect a preference for Harris over Trump in November voting.

In the Suffolk University poll, more respondents said that Trump is better at managing immigration (50% to 47%), consistent with results on the economy, national security and relations with China.  Results on managing race relations and healthcare were dramatically the opposite (about 40% to 55%).

The respondents predicted that Harris will win (50% to 38% to 12% undecided). 90% say their mind is made up, and favor Harris over Trump (48% to 43%).

 

 

 

Do countries whose workers migrate to advanced economies lose or gain?

When less wealthy countries send workers to work in advanced countries, do they suffer or gain in the long run? There is no definitive answer to this question that could be generally applied.

Among the sources of internationally migrant workers have made a point of supporting their citizens working abroad are Kerala State in India, and Philippines.

On the plus side, remittances sent by its migrant workers can make up a significant share of the source country’s economy. These remittances can stabilize foreign exchange. Some returning migrants bring back skills and capital, which can be invested in local businesses and industries. This can lead to economic diversification and development in the region.

On the negative side, emigrating workers may be relatively valuable workers (across the range of formal skills) due to having superior personal work attributes. Thus the source country may lose a disproportionate share of its better workers.  A recent research paper (here) points in this direction.  Also on the negative side, the source country’s political and economic policy may settle into to a chronic state of low expectations for domestic growth, knowing that so much for their country’s economic well-being is dependent on other, much larger, economy.

I have never seen study of the circular flow when skilled workers move to advanced countries and later on invest their added skills and capital back in their country of origin.

And, we need some one to write a book on how the politics of less developed countires are impacted by their diaspora.

The lack of a consensus about how to study the issue of net gain or loss to the sourcing country has becomes more and more painful as the relative size of the international migrant workforce (now over 8% of all workers in the world) and the dependence of emerging economy countries on remittances has grown. Global remittances were $100B in 2000; they are now approaching $700B.

 

What Trump has in mind for immigration

An article by Elizabeth Carlson and Charles Wheeler, published in September 2024 in the Journal of Migration and Human Security, outlines potential immigration policies under a second Trump administration. It predicts a continuation and intensification of measures from Trump’s first term, focusing on border security, deportation, and legal immigration restrictions.

The article is a useful checklist of potential actions. Missing from their article is consideration of major legislative changes which I think is likely if both houses of Congress have Republican majorities: Trump will likely use the threat of severely disruptive executive orders (such as termination of DACA) to force through systematic restrictions. Look for Senator Tom Cotton to lead the Congressional initiative (go here). Key provisions of Cotton’s RAISE Act, filed in 2017, are: reducing legal immigration by about 50% over 10 years;  a skills-based points system for immigration visas; limiting family-sponsored immigration to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and permanent residents; eliminating the diversity visa lottery program; and capping refugee admissions at 50,000 per year

Some of their key predictions include the following.

Interior enforcement: A shift in enforcement priorities will target all undocumented individuals rather than focusing on those posing security threats. Trump has several times said he plans massive deportation.  I have addressed this plan here.

Border security: Trump plans to construct more sections of the border wall.  He may try to restore the “Remain in Mexico” program (which requires Mexico’s participation) and Title 42 (which is statutorily bas ed on public health concerns).

Legal immigration restrictions: The administration aims to reduce family-based immigration and impose strict ideological screenings for visa applicants. Senator Cotton wants this severally cut back and a points system introduced to select skilled workers.

Public charge rules: These rules define what public services immigrants can have legal access to (such as public housing, public health insurance, maternal and children services).  Trump tried to sharply reduce access. A federal court denied the proposed rules changes (go here). Trump may re-introduce these changes.

Asylum: The first Trump administration sought to completely dismantle the country’s asylum program, which depends greatly on non-government organizations to receive and support asylum beneficiaries, and to cut back several on admissions. Trump cut admissions from a prevailing level of about 85,000 a year to 12,000 a year. Biden has restored the program aiming at the 100,000 per year level

Humanitarian programs: Temporary admission programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) could be terminated or significantly scaled back. Country-specific parole programs introduced by the Biden administration are likely to be ended. I have addressed his apparent goal of terminating some or all TPS admissions here.

Immigration courts: The administration is expected to limit prosecutorial discretion in immigration courts, increasing case backlogs. The backlog for asylum cases is now about 3.4 million.

 

 

 

 

Springfield OH and Storm Lake IA: united in dependence on immigrant workers

Springfield, OH is among many towns the workforce of which is heavily immigrant-based, far more than the national workforce percentage of 18% immigrant. Storm Lake, IA, has prospered due to immigration. It is now the most diverse community in Iowa. It is a model of rural communities which have grown, not declined, due to immigration.

In the late 20th century, the meat processing industry evolved into large-scale, highly mechanized operations, with locations in small rural towns.  Small plants merged into massive facilities.  Storm Lake was one of these towns. Since the late 19th C, meat processing plants have depended on immigrant labor, at first from Europe, and in the past 30 years from emerging countries.

The city has become a major meat processing production center. Meat processing began there in the 1930s and took off with large plants in the 1990s. Tyson Foods employs around 3,200 people with wages ranging from $17 to $22 per hour.  Many farms in the region rely heavily on Latino workers. Immigrants are increasingly becoming entrepreneurs, opening retail businesses. I visited the town in 2022 and came across a good number of Latino, Asian and even Pacific Islander restaurants.

With a population of about 11,000, it grew 25% since 1990 while the great majority of rural towns in the state lost population. Today, Storm Lake residents include 40% white, 39% Hispanic, 15% Asian, and 4% Black (go here). The most common source countries are Mexico, India and Vietnam. 31% of the population is foreign-born.

(Springfield’s recent history includes losing 20,000 largely manufacturing jobs in the 1990s, and bringing in roughly 10,000 foreign-born workers in the past few years. The city’s population today is about 10,000 below that of 1990.)

The Pulitzer winning Storm Lake Times has written, “Immigration has been the story of Iowa since the mid-19th century. The Danes came to Newell, the Swedes to Albert City, the Germans to Hanover, the Irish to Sulphur Springs. Now Latinos, Asians and Africans are writing a new chapter of growth by launching their own enterprises and improving their own lot through education.”

The picture below is of the high school’s homecoming court in the Fall of 2022. The black woman on the upper right, the child of Sudanese parents, was elected homecoming queen.

The relentless rise of Hispanics in America

From the Federal Government:

The percent share of Hispanics in the total population has been trending upward for the past couple of decades and is projected to continue increasing. From the 2000s onward, this population growth was primarily driven by Hispanics born in the United States rather than those who immigrated here. Prior to the 2000s, Hispanic growth was driven mainly by immigration. The fertility rates of Hispanics are higher than those of other demographic groups – 1.9 for Hispanics vs 1.6-.1.7 for non-Hispanic whites.

This difference results in the percentage of Hispanics continuing to increase over the 2023–33 projections decade. Hispanics are projected to account for 20.2%  of the population in 2033, compared with 17.8% in 2023. The trend is more pronounced for the labor force, with Hispanics being projected to account for 22% of the labor force in 2033, compared with 19% in 2023, 13% in 2003, and 9% in 1993.

Household income of Hispanic households was 70% of non-Hispanic households in 2000, Today the ratio is 77%.

As I recently posted, in 2022, homeownership rates stood at 74% for white Americans, 46% for Black Americans and 49% for Hispanic Americans, according to U.S. census data. But between 2020 and 2040, there will be 6.9 million net new homeowners, a 9% increase, of which 4.8 million more will be Hispanic homeowners, 2.7 million more Asian and other homeowners and 1.2 million more Black homeowners, while white homeownership will dwindle by 1.8 million, the Urban Institute projects. this gigantic shift in home ownership trends is due to the relatively high rate of persons who are not white and who are entering home ownership buying age (roughly 30 years old).

 

 

Policy tools to promote innovation include immigration

An academic study published in 2019 (see below) says that, among nine ways to promote innovation in an economy, skilled immigration is one of the best.  The authors don’t delve into how skilled immigration actually works. And I’ve not ever read a study describing how.

In my view, if skilled immigration works exceptionally well, is does so in several related ways: (1) If the immigrant is directly recruited by an organization, they are likely to be slotted into a job which has been vetted by the recruiting firm as high value in advancing a product or service. Let’s call this the Recruitment Effect.  (2) If the skilled immigrant arrives through a research institution, such as a university, they will enter into a network of skilled persons and find a particularly valuable venue and topic to pursue. Let’s call this the Network Effect. (3) The very nature of skilled immigration tends to select for persons who are relatively self-reliant, meaning that they can perceive opportunities and adapt to them more successfully than others. Let’s call this the Personal Predisposed Effect.

If the skilled immigrant is used primarily to lower the cost of labor, by substituting for domestic workers, the innovation benefit doesn’t exist and may hinder innovation.

From “A toolkit for policies to promote innovation,” by Nicholas Bloom, John van Reenen, and Heidi Williams. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Market economies are likely to under provide innovation, primarily due to knowledge spillover between firms. [That is, companies being discouraged from innovating because competitors will benefit by grabbing shares of the market.) This article has discussed the evidence on policy tools that aim to increase innovation. In the short run, research and development, tax credits, and direct public funding seemed the most effective, whereas increasing the supply of human capital, for example, through expanding university admissions in the area of science, technology, and engineering and mathematics, is more effective in the long run. Encouraging skilled immigration has big effects even in the short run. Competition and open trade policies probably have benefits that are more modest for innovation, but they are cheap in financial terms and also score highly. One difference is that R&D subsidies and open trade policies are likely to increase inequality, partly by increasing the demand for highly skilled labor and partly in the case of trade because some communities will endure the pain of trade adjustment and job loss. In contrast, increasing the supply of highly skilled labor is likely to reduce inequality by easing competition for scarce human capital.

In Table 2 in the article, the highest net benefits are in R&D tax credits, skilled immigration, and trade and competition. The next rank of a net benefits are indirect R&D grants, and universities stem supply. Lower ranked are patent policies, intellectual property reform and “mission-oriented policies” such as “moonshots.” The latter presumably includes the Biden Administration’s CHIPS and Science Act.

Role of immigrants in U.S. business innovation

In 2022, 55 percent of the startup companies in the United States valued at over $1 billion had been founded by immigrants, for a total of 319 companies with a collective value of $1.2 trillion. Among more established technology companies, 60 percent of the top 25 firms were founded by immigrants or Americans with at least one immigrant parent; just under half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. One-quarter of the aggregate economic value created by all patents filed between 1990 and 2016 was generated by patents filed by immigrants.

From “Why Bringing Jobs Back to the United States Requires Letting in More Foreign Workers,” By Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav. Foreign Affairs.

Mayorkas interviewed

Ezra Klein interviews Alejandro Mayorkas — a lengthy discussion of measures the Biden administration has taken in the past 12 or so months, which have brought down by (per Mayorkas) Mexican border encounters by 50%. He discusses in some detail these measures, comments on how smuggling became a big business, confirms the crucial role of long delays in immigration court in driving border encounters, and defends the bipartisan bill of early 2024 killed by Trump.  The picture he paints is incomplete, and suffers from the absence of any coherent presentation by Biden or Harris on immigration in whole or in part.

Go here for my posting of my more comprehensive assessment of how encounters at the Mexican border have been affected.

Alejandro Mayorkas was born in 1959 in Havana, Cuba. After the Cuban Revolution his family fled to the United States. He has a BA from UC Berkeley and a J.D. from Loyola Marymount University.  Mayorkas was appointed by President Obama as the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Between 2016 and 2021 he practiced law in the private sector. On February 2, 2021, Mayorkas was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security by the Senate on a 56–43 vote. On February 13, 2024, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213. The Senate voted 51–49 to dismiss the impeachment charges on April 17, ending the impeachment, without trial

Why recent immigrant estimates differ so widely

Here I draw from an essay by Jed Kolko, posted on Mathew Yglesias’ Substack newsletter, Slow Boring:

Kolko observes that in late 2023 and early 2024, government agencies released wildly different estimates of 2023 net immigration: 1.1 million people, said the Census Bureau, and 3.3 million, said the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). They create a range in estimates of net migration under the Biden administration between 5 and 9 million.

He notes that government agencies, such as the Census Bureau and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), use varying methodologies, leading to significant discrepancies in immigration estimates. The Census Bureau relies on survey data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), which use lagged data. This approach can underestimate recent immigration trends, especially during periods of rapid change. Kolko does not explicitly recognize that the surge in humanitarian program migration (asylum, Humanitarian Parole, and Temporary Protected Status) is very largely Latin American and Caribbean in origin.  The ACS, for example, provides data on foreign-born residents who lived abroad a year ago, but this lag can be problematic when immigration patterns shift quickly.

On the other hand, the CBO incorporates more immediate administrative data, such as visa issuances and border encounters.  This would better capture the humanitarian surge, and possibly also an administrated high figure for undetected migration.  But this method may also overstate immigration due to repeated encounters at the border.

These methodological differences, Kolko concludes, have led to a large gap between Census and CBO estimates, particularly in 2022 and 2023. The Census estimates tend to be lower due to their reliance on lagged data, while CBO estimates are higher, reflecting more recent administrative data.

A gov’t estimate of the immigrant surge under Biden

Estimating the number of foreign born persons in the United States has become much more complicated. I will post tomorrow an analysis of the difficulties in measurement.  The Congressional Budget Office estimated in July that during the Biden administration the numbers shot up to about 3 million a year, 9 million under Biden, or about 1% of the total population per year.   

This rate of 1% of the total population per year us what Canada has experienced purposefully for some years in its policy to attract talented persons as well as to admiy refugees.

This estimate is much higher than past ones. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas writes that there is “no consensus” as to the number of foreign-born who have entered recently.

The Wall Street Journal, using a study by the, estimates the net growth of foreign-born persons during the Biden administration at nine million persons.  At about 3 million persons per year, that comes to triple the annual volume of pre-Biden years of roughly one million. Green card migration was at or below past trends.  The increase is almost entirely due to undetected unauthorized entries and to  humanitarian programs—asylum, Humanitarian Parole and Temporary protected Status.

The WSJ article notes a change in the educational distribution of Biden are immigration. Prior to 2010, immigrants formed an hour-glass profile of formal educational attainment: many without a high school degree, relatively few with a high school degree, and a good share with an advanced degree. After 2010 the flow of migrants shifted from Latin Americans to more highly educated cohorts, for instance from East Asia and, surprisingly, Nigeria. You show that under Biden the profile went back to the old model.