Working Immigrants

There are 52 immigrants and children of immigrants serving in the House of Representatives and 16 serving in the Senate. Counting both chambers, 57 of the 68 lawmakers who are immigrants or children of immigrants are Democrats. Ten others are Republicans, and one – Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont – is an independent.

The following table shows the region of origin. Note the drastic shift from presentation from European countries. (Data from here.)

Poland is introducing personal income tax exclusions to induce its people to return to the country. In 2004, when it entered the EU, 400,000 Poles lived outside the country. Millions of Poles have left – about 2.5 million, of which 750,000 are students studying in Germany and elsewhere. These expatriates are likely concentrated among the young and prime working age. The country’s entire population is about 39 million.

A new law will exclude many persons under 26 years old from an 18% income tax. From here.

No country has worked harder than the Philippines to export its people, and no people have proved more eager to go. since the mid-1970s the government has trained and marketed overseas workers not just drumming up jobs but fashioning a brand — casting the Filipino as a genial hard worker, the best in low-cost labor. in 1977 Wingtips, the magazine of Philippine Airlines, insisted that “Filipinos don’t pose the problems that guess workers from, say, the Mediterranean belt have in Western Europe.” they won’t riot or strike.

Critics later called the sale of the happy hard-working Filipino infantilizing, an effort to turn people into remittance machines.  But most Filipinos like that their country was known as the HR department of the world.

More than 2 million Filipinos depart each year, enough to fill a dozen or more Boeing 747s  a day. About one and seven Filipino workers is employed abroad. and the $32 billion that they send home accounts for 10% of the GDP. Migration to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: the civil religion. The Philippine Daily Inquirer runs nearly 600 stories a year on overseas Filipino workers or “OFW‘s”. Half have the fevered feel of gold rush ads. Half sound like human rights complaints.

Published in The Atlantic. Adapted from A Good Provider is one who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21^st Century, by Jason Deparle, published 2019.

Filipino women packing pineapples in Hawaii, 1928.

Climate change is inducing several hundred thousand Bangladeshis to migrate within their country, but globally there will be little international migration due to climate change. This assessment is made by Valerie Mueller of Arizona State University. She says, “The research suggests that we are unlikely to see massive global migration movements, except among areas already experiencing conflict. It seems that, in the case of Syria and elsewhere, climate change may be a risk multiplier for conflict-prone migration…. People that move in response to a climatic event typically move short distances….. many climatic events, such as soil salinity from sea level rise, floods, landslides, hurricanes, heat stress, etc. are highly localized…. Often, migration in response to climate change is a method of last resort among those who lack alternative options to cope with a disaster. For example, in our study in Bangladesh, we find that some households diversify into aquaculture, in response to the rise in soil salinity from sea level rise and other human-induced causes, while others migrate.”

Source: interview here.

Adding “and they are very visible”, this is what a Minnesotan said commenting on refugee settlement in the state, especially St. Cloud, the Minnesota’s 10th-largest city, said in a conversation about an influx of Somali refugees. The city increased in population by 33% over the last 30 years, thoroughly 70,000 people. The share of nonwhite residents grew to 18% from 2%, mostly with East African immigrants from Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, and the numbers of Somalis are estimated to grow.

Only 6% of Minnesota Republicans (vs. 66 % of Democrats) want the state to increase its intake of refugees from then (2018) current level of about 1,000, and 47% (vs 7% of Democrats) want a temporary suspension of refugee intake.

50% of poll respondents in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional district (NE part of the state) in 2018 answered “yes” to this question: “Has discrimination against whites become as big a problem as discrimination toward blacks and other minorities?

The foreign-born population in 2017 was 45.6 million, or about 13.8% of our total population. The pie chart below shows four segments: naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, persons in temporary protected status, and unauthorized..

A few observations: Asians with green cards are more likely to become citizens than persons from Mexico and Central America….the unauthorized population has declined in the past ten years (12.2 million in 2007, 10.5 million in 2017), gotten older (over 60% in U.S. for at least ten years)….5 million children born in the U.S. have at least one unauthorized parent, but births to unauthorized parents have declined sharply since a peak in 2006.

From various reports from Pew Research, including here

The Guardian reports from the southern side of the Gateway International Bridge separating Brownsville, Texas, from Matamoros, Mexico. “A mysterious set of documents known collectively as “La Lista” holds enormous power over hundreds of migrants stranded outside a tiny immigration office. On that list is a number assigned by Mexican authorities that determines if migrants pass through or stay behind, prosper or have journeyed in vain, or in the case of Martinez and his daughter Valeria, risk their lives trying to circumvent its order.

Nowadays at Matamoros, like at other main border crossings, an American official will call across the bridge and tell their Mexican counterparts how many migrants the Americans are willing to interview for asylum that day, and in what form – families, or single men or women – in a process known as metering. How the Americans choose that number is anyone’s guess, people say. The Mexican official in charge of the lists then calls out a person’s number. For those chosen, it’s like winning a lottery. But the reasoning behind the Mexican process is even more of an enigma.

In the past several weeks, as more and more migrants arrive, the number of people called has dwindled to just four or five a week – coinciding with Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs if Mexico did not control the surge of migrants. On Friday, since Sunday, there had been zero people called. For those camped out, waiting to enter the country legally, some for as long as four months, the numbers and how they are chosen has become a kind of obsession, as if a divine hand is orchestrating this random and maddening system.

“People here, we talk about one thing,” says Guevara. “Our numbers and if we’re going to cross.”