Working Immigrants

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch obtained copies of 900 emails between Stephen Miller and a Brietbart editor, Katie McHugh, sent in 2015-2016.

The SPLC writes,White nationalist Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. Roof’s attack triggered a national conversation about racial hatred in the United States. In response, Amazon.com and other retailers made efforts to pull the Confederate flag from their websites and stores.

Miller sought to create a counternarrative to this news through Breitbart, the emails show. He emailed McHugh with the subject line “defies modern comprehension” on June 23, 2015, following the news about the retailers, and highlighted a statistic about the deaths of Confederate soldiers with a link to history.com:

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:10 p.m. ET: “‘22.6 percent of Southern men who were between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 lost their lives because of the war.”

McHugh told Hatewatch that she and Miller spoke on the phone about the subject of Amazon yanking Confederate flag merchandise after the email. Miller appears to refer to that call in his next email and suggests that McHugh write about how Amazon was selling “commie flags.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:31 p.m. ET: “That’s a really, really, really good point.

Have you thought about going to Amazon and finding the commie flags and then doing a story on that? I think you’ve hit on something potentially profound.”

On August 17, Trump tweeted: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

The Center for Immigration Studies reports and adds nuances to the dramatic differences among regions in immigrant experience, by tracking households who speak a language other than English at home.

In 1990, the distribution of foreign born in the U.S. was very roughly the same as in 1920: mainly California, the Northeast, and old industrial cities in the Midwest. Since then, immigrant populations spread out. States with the largest percentage increase in those speaking a foreign language at home from 1980 to 2018 are Nevada (up 1,088%), Georgia (952%), North Carolina ( 802%), Virginia (488%), Tennessee (459%), Arkansas (445%), Washington (up 432%), South Carolina (398%), Florida (393%), Utah (383%), and Oregon (380%).

A few states account for the great majority of non-English-at-home speakers. The states with the largest share of their populations speaking a foreign language at home in 2018 were California (45%), Texas (36%), New Mexico (34%), New Jersey (32%), New York and Nevada (each 31%), Florida (30%), Arizona and Hawaii (each 28%), and Massachusetts (24%).

On October 30, 24 Democrats ad 20 Republicans in the House filed legislation to bring unauthorized farm workers into legal status. The revival of a push to advance farm workers, a staple of immigration reform proposals since the early 2000s, can be seen as a sign that Congress is ready to challenge Trump’s immigration policies. Protection of the farm workforce is a priority of many politicians with large farming constituencies.

According to the Wall Street Journal, The accord also would provide a path to citizenship for the more than one million farmworkers estimated to be already living in the U.S. illegally. Farmworkers who can show they have spent at least three months in the previous two years working in agriculture can apply for a new five-year visa, which would require continued work in the sector for the visa’s duration.

Workers who have lived in the country for at least 10 years could apply for a green card if they work four more years in the industry. If a farmworker has been in the industry for less than 10 years, they must put in an additional eight years to become eligible for a green card. Green-card holders are eligible to become U.S. citizens, typically after five years.

In exchange, the agriculture industry would be required to use E-Verify, an electronic system that allows employers to check applicants’ immigration status. The industry has strongly resisted such a requirement, as about half of farmworkers aren’t legally authorized to work in the U.S., according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, which is run by a Labor Department agency.

A new approach is needed to handle the refugee situation—one that recognizes the contemporary realities of “survival migration” and relies on international cooperation rather than unilateralism.

The crisis in the Americas—like the European one before it—has raised questions about the usefulness of conventional categories such as “refugees” and “economic migrants.” The UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention defined a refugee as someone who has “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” In the 1980 Refugee Act, the U.S. Congress enshrined that description in U.S. law, as well. But the 1951 definition was written to address the upheavals of the early Cold War, especially the emigration of Soviet dissidents.

Today, most migrants are not fleeing powerful regimes that are out to get them. Nor are they simply seeking better economic opportunities. Rather, they are running from states that have failed or that are so fragile that life has become difficult to bear for their citizens.

What Europe saw in 2015 and what the Americas are witnessing today are not simply refugee flows or market-driven population movements but rather “survival migration”—a term I initially coined to describe the exodus of Zimbabweans from Robert Mugabe’s regime in the early years of this century. Between 2003 and 2010, around two million Zimbabweans fled to South Africa and other neighboring states. Most of them wanted to escape hyperinflation, banditry, and food insecurity—the economic consequences of the underlying political situation—rather than political persecution per se.

From How Governments in the Americas Are Bungling the Migration Crisis, by Alexander Betts November/December 2019