This table shows the size of the foreign born population, that population’s share of the entire metropolitan area population and share of the country’s entire foreign born population. Note how the % of metrpolitan population hovers around 20-30% except of course for Tokyo, and that central metropolises contain 1/4 of the nation’s foreign born.

In the June 19 issue of the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins wrote a 10,000-word description of migrant movement across the Mexican border. His reporting includes interviews with Columbians and Venezuelans who crossed the border, Border Patrol officers, politicians on the U.S. side of the border, human smugglers, former members of the Trump and Biden administration, advocates in opposing camps, and current Biden appointees. He writes that besides the very many persons who have crossed to apply for asylum, there were an estimated 1.6 million persons who crossed escaping detection in a 26 month period.

The picture he paints is of systems of border management and asylum management that are already severely stressed, and Biden and his early pro-immigrant aides who made the situation much worse. One gets the impression that during the 2020 campaign and after Biden and his aides, in effect, recklessly encouraged persons to cross the border to seek asylum. Applying for asylum virtually guarantees residency in the U.S. for five years or more due to court backlogs. And, once in, an asylum applicant can disappear. Sharp intelligence among would-be border crossers and smugglers saw, and continue to see, an opportunity.  The primary drivers of border crossing are the chance of staying in the U.S. for years (he says at one point ten years) due to asylum court backlog; insufficient border law enforcement, and clever smugglers.

Missing from the article is a close analysis of the politics of immigration reform.  Filkins implies that the political prospects for constructive reform are so poor as to not merit inspection.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total employment in the U.S. will grow by only 6% between 2023 and 2031, or about 0.5% a year compounded. Some jobs will decline, such as lower level administrative jobs.  Some will increase, such as math and science jobs by 15%. The fastest growing jobs are in healthcare. The single fastest growing job is nurse practitioner (46%).  Healthcare support occupations, such as PT and OT assistants and home health aides, will grow by 18%.

24% of foreign-born workers were employed in healthcare and social assistance occupations, compared to 17% of U.S.-born workers.  (Go here and here for an overview of foreign-born worker participation in healthcare jobs.)

Black Africa immigrants are compared to other immigrant groups relatively more concentrated in healthcare jobs and thus will disproportionately benefit from the surge in healthcare jobs. These workers tend to be from Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya.

Nigerian immigrants in the United States are particularly likely to work in healthcare occupations, with over 17% of Nigerian immigrant men (vs. 8% of all male workers) and 34% of Nigerian immigrant women (13% of all female workers) working in healthcare-related fields. The report also found that Nigerian immigrants were more likely to have a professional degree than any other immigrant group, and were more likely to work in high-skilled occupations such as medicine and law.

Because the Black African immigrant population is relatively small –only 2.1 million or about 5% of all 46 million foreign-born persons – African born workers are a small portion of all workers in any work sector.  But within 2.1 million is the highest percentage of healthcare workers of all other immigrant groups defined by origin.

Any serious proposal to reform immigration laws needs to have a universal, all employer mandate to verify legal status of the applicant or actual worker.  Both parties in Congress have their own reasons not to endorse this.  The federal government has been working on an electronic verification system for close to 30 years.

The 1986 immigration reform act (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986) mandated that employers verify that their employees are authorized to work in the U.S. As a result of the 1986, the federal government launched an initiative to provide employers a means to electronically check federal databases to verity legal status. It took ten years (1996) to launch a pilot. It did not become routinely available, voluntarily, and as e-Verify, until the mid 2000s. Starting with Arizona in 2011, some states began to require use of e-Verify.

Alabama (2012), Arizona (2007), Georgia (2011), Mississippi (2008), North Carolina (2012), South Carolina (2012), and Utah (2010, currently have universal mandates that require all or nearly all employers to use the system to Screen new hires.

A Fed Reserve Bank of Dallas study in 2016 estimated that the unauthorized workforce in five states the authors studied declined by these percentages:  Alabama 57%, Arizona 33%, Mississippi 83%, Utah 34%, Georgia 14%. In South and North Carolina, there was statistically now change. Tennessee (2016) and Utah (2017) mandated universal use of e-Verity too late to be included in the study. Florida introduced a law this year (Senate 1718).

The Bank wrote, “E-Verify, a federal database, is largely achieving its goals of reducing the number of unauthorized immigrants living and working in states that require all employers to use it….. The report looks at both changes in working-age population and employment of likely unauthorized immigrants using a method that compares what might have occurred in the state without the policy change with what actually occurred. It is the first study [and I believe only study – PFR] to apply this method to multiple states with similar E-Verify mandates.”

I first posted on e-Verify in 2008.

Go here and here.