School districts were reporting in June that half or more of ESL students were not showing up for online instruction.
The challenge of ESL needs is huge. Five million K – 12 students receive ESL instruction. The number of states in which ESL students account for at least 5% of the student body rose from 19 in 2001-2002 to 34 states in 2017-2018.
Minnesota students speak 311 languages other than English. 22% of school districts serve student populations that speak ten or more languages, and 5% serve students speaking 50 languages or more.
Linguistic isolation: As of 2018, 18% of children of immigrants were living in families where all members of the household over the age of 14 were limited English proficient.
Poor internet connection: According to one analysis of 2018 Census data, 17 million U.S. children live in homes without internet subscriptions, and 7 million have no access to computers or tablets. Nearly one-third of Latino families with children do not have high-speed
internet, and 17% lack computer access.
From the Migration Policy Institute
Archive for the ‘Demographics’ Category
ESL suffering from pandemic
Saturday, September 26th, 2020Countries trying to manage their emigrants
Saturday, September 19th, 2020Southeastern Europe has been experiencing a gradual, sustained decline in population in part due to emigration.
Bulgaria has a population of 7 million. There are 700,000 Bulgarians living in Turkey and 300,000 living in Germany. In total, the number living outside the county equal one fifth of those living in the country. By 2050, Bulgaria will lose one quarter of its population due to low birth rates and emigration. Remittances from outside the country into Bulgaria rose for $60 million in 2000 to $467 million in 2019, account for over 3% of the country’s GDP in 2019.
Albania has for many years had many of its citizens live outside the country. Remittances to Albania in 2019 was 9.4% of the country’s GDP. The number of Albanians living outside the country equal 40% of persons living inside Albania.
The Migration Policy Institute says that some countries have been trying to expand their outreach to their emigrating populations, beyond cultural programs, but few economic programs are in place. This contrasts with the Philippines, which has long supported their citizens who work outside the country.
Portugal is possibly the most active European country to promote the return of emigrants and immigration of non-nationals. The Portuguese emigrant population equals 25% of the population of the country.
Do Hispanics use the term “Latinx”?
Monday, September 14th, 2020One quarter say they know the term. 3% use it.
From the Pew Research Center
Unauthorized immigration in Europe far less than U.S.
Tuesday, September 1st, 2020Europe has had relatively very few unauthorized residents, about 1% of its population compared to the U.S.’s 3%. In 2014, The Pew Research Center estimated that there were 3 to 3.7 million unauthorized immigrants, or about 0.7%. A refugee surge after 2014 included unauthorized persons, increasing the total unauthorized population to between 3.9 and 4.8 million in 2017.
My research in the past suggested that the unauthorized population in some Western European countries such as France, Benelux, and the U.K. was 0.5% or less. I believe that the relatively low rate is due to stricter mandated employer-based practices. The U.S. does not require employers to check legal status with federal databases (e-Verify). Plus, the U.S.’s long history of an essentially transnational workforce of Latin Americans, the basis for most unauthorized immigration, has no match in Europe.
Go here.
The Indian community in Middlesex County NJ
Friday, August 28th, 2020Middlesex County, just west of New York City, is an example of a local area where immigration has surged, especially South Asian, with employment gains in many sectors. It compares with Cupertino, CA, a center of Asian immigrants in California. Rutgers University and bio-medical employers dominant the economy.
Between 2013 and 2018, the immigrant population in the county increased by 8.6%, while the overall population increased by 0.1%.
It is the largest and most diverse South Asian cultural hub in the United States (Wikipedia). Monroe Township celebrates Diwali as a Hindu holiday. Carteret Borough’s Punjabi Sikh community, is the largest concentration of Sikhs in New Jersey. The County prints election ballots in English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi.
While representing 34.5% of the total population (most from Asia), immigrants represented an outsize share of workers in industries such as professional services (54%), wholesale trade (52%), transportation (51%) and manufacturing (50%).
Go here.
The rise of the Indian immigrant elite in the United States
Thursday, August 20th, 2020
Kamala Harris’ vice president candidacy shines a spotlight on the Indian immigrant population, which grew from virtually nothing in 1980 to 2.4 million as of 2015. 45% are naturalized citizens. Harris’ mother, who started graduate school at Berkeley when she was 19, in about 1957, was a very early Indian educated immigrant. (Atul Gawande’s physician parents immigrated in the early 19609s.)
In 2015, 77% of Indian adult immigrants had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 29% of all immigrants and 31% of native-born adults. Among college-educated Indian immigrants, more than half had an advanced degree.
Indian immigrants have a much higher economic status than other immigrants and the average native-born person. Households headed by Indian immigrants had a median income of $107,000, compared to $51,000 and $56,000 for overall immigrant and native-born households, respectively.
As for type of employment, 73% were employed in management, business, science and arts, compared with 31% of all immigrants and 38% of native-born workers.
The Silicon Valley Elite. Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley not only build ventures in the United States, but they are also wired into a huge global network of entrepreneurs.
Indian venture capitalists from around the world were behind the founding of The Indus Entrepreneurs in 1992 It worldwide board is composed of Indians. Some 10,000 members are scattered through 62 countries. It describes itself as follows: TiE connects the entire entrepreneurship ecosystem from early stage entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, professionals at leading corporations, venture capital, angel investors, thought leaders among others.
Some of the Indians who have co-led high tech ventures in the United States are graduates one of the six Indian Institutes of Technology, created in the 1940s. These graduates often invest in ventures founded by other graduates of these universities.
Kamala Harris’ family and intermarriage across the U.S.
Thursday, August 13th, 2020Kamala Harris is half West Indian Black, half sub-continent Indian. Her husband Douglas Emhoff had (I infer) two White parents.
In 1967, when miscegenation laws were overturned in the United States, 3% of all newlyweds were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity. Since then, intermarriage rates have steadily climbed. By 1980, the share of intermarried newlyweds was 7%. And by 2015 the number had risen to 17%. (Go here and here).
Newlywed intermarriage rates are generally much lower in the South than in the Pacific State, Florida and some Northeast metro areas – see the graph below.
Indian caste discrimination in America?
Monday, August 10th, 2020California’s fair-employment regulator is suing San Jose technology giant Cisco, alleging it allowed supervisors of upper-caste Indian origin to discriminate against an engineer from the caste formerly known as “untouchable.”
The Department of Fair Employment and Housing noted in its suit that members of the “Dalit” caste, known previously as “untouchables,” continue to face discrimination and segregation in India, and the agency alleged that at Cisco, “higher caste supervisors and co-workers imported the discriminatory system’s practices” into the team where the engineer worked. The engineer is identified anonymously as John Doe in the suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, which accuses Cisco of violating federal civil rights law and state employment laws.
Doe’s team was made up entirely of employees who immigrated to the U.S. as adults from India, all but him from high castes, the suit alleged. “Doe was expected to accept a caste hierarchy within the workplace where Doe held the lowest status within the team and, as a result, received less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment,” the suit claimed. “They also expected him to endure a hostile work environment.”
From here.
American immigration policy and global talent
Saturday, August 1st, 2020In 2016 I posted on global talent flows. Where does American immigration policy now stand on these flows?
If Trump is not re-elected, we may see a return of immigration policy that is friendly to talent, but will face challenges: (1) the pandemic’s disruption of travel, which may translate into changes in employment location, (2) a great imbalance of talented immigration into a relatively few metros, (3) the chronic resistance of both parties to workforce planning, which makes it very difficult to forge intelligent immigration reform.
The American economy participants in the global talent flow in three channels: as a desired location of getting advanced degrees; for temporary employment; and for permanent immigration. One channel cannot be cut off without adversely affecting the others.
Advanced degrees: According to a 2013 article, “Over the last half century, the United States has been the most important training ground for the global supply of science and engineering talent. Where S&E PhDs choose to locate after they have completed their education is likely to affect the global distribution of innovative capacity. “77% of foreign-born S&E PhDs state that they plan to stay in the United States.”
The higher education industry is the U.S. has become financial dependent on these students. “As of 2017, 81% of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79% in computer science are. National Foundation for American Policy report in 2017 said that “both majors and graduate programs could not be maintained without international students.”
This flow of students to the U.S. is being diverted to Canada and other English speaking countries, but not to China.
Non-academic immigrants, temporary and permanent: Foreign workers make up about half of some STEM workforces in the U.S. This is part of a dramatic global migration of highly educated workers. The number of migrants with a tertiary degree rose nearly 130 percent from 1990 to 2010, while low skilled (primary educated) migrants increased by only 40 percent during that time. Then flow has headed to English speaking countries.
For the U.S. and other recipient countries, high-skilled immigration is linked to clusters of technology and knowledge production. The H-1B visa program is the nation’s largest temporary employment visa program. The visa holders are concentrated in metro areas of New York City, Dallas, Washington, Boston, and San Jose. These markets have depended on temporary and permanent foreign stem workers for their growth of knowledge industries. Most areas of the country do not experience the flourishing of the knowledge economy and its foreign workers (as does the Boulder CO area to which I recently moved from Vermont).
The student flow and non-academic flows are intertwined. In San Diego, 28% of H-1B temporary visas went to foreign workers with advanced degrees from a U.S. university or college
Source of some data: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, Çaǧlar Özden and Christopher Parsons. Global Talent Flows, Working Paper 22715. NBER, October 2016
If undocumented are not counted for House seats
Tuesday, July 21st, 2020President Trump signed a memo today with the intent to remove undocumented persons from the population count in the 2020 census when the 435 congressional seats are apportioned. Since neither authorized nor unauthorized persons are identified in the census, the probability of this policy happening are slim simply on data collection grounds. But let’s do some numbers. It appears that 4 seats might be switched among states.
There are 320 million people in the U.S. There are about 11 million undocumented persons, or 3.4% of the total population. The only states where the undocumented population is so proportionally large that they would lose seats are California (lose 2 seats of 53), Texas (lose 1 seat of 36) and Illinois (lose 1 of 18). Florida would come close to losing 1 of 27 seats. (Data on unauthorized populations from here.)
What states might benefit? 16 states are marginally more likely to gain or lose seats before this new factor is taken into account. Brookings demographer William Frey estimated that Texas could gain three seats. Florida could gain two seats; thus the provision would lower the prospects of these two states. North Carolina, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and Oregon could each gain one seat. Alabama, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia could each lose a seat. (from CNN here.)