Go here. Compares the three sources, 2006 – 2013.

 

Virginia is increasingly a contested state in presidential elections, in part due to the rise of non-white eligible voters. This November, the percentage of eligible voters who are minority (Hispanic, Black and Asian), will be around 30% compared to 26% in 2008.

Between 2008 and 2014, eligible Hispanic voters as a share of all eligible voters rose from 3% to 4.6%. Eligible Asians rose from 3% to 5%. Eligible Blacks remained at 20%. Combined, eligible non-whites rose from 26% to 29%.

According to the NY Times, during the 2012 presidential election, when 71% of Virginia’s voters went to the polls, Obama carried 93% of the black vote, 64% of the Hispanic vote, and 66% of the Asian vote, according to exit polls.

Hispanics in Virginia are on average more formally educated than Hispanics in the country, notably in a much smaller share without a high school diploma (13% vs. 22%) and higher share of those with a college degree (27% vs. 16%). As for household income, 42% of Hispanic households in Virginia had incomes of $100,000 or more, vs. 23% nationwide.

Also, the potential Hispanic voting power has sharply increased. In 2014, Hispanics accounted for 4.6% of the eligible voters. 38% of the Hispanic population was eligible to vote, compared with 42% of the entire Hispanic population in the country. This is a marked improvement in Hispanic voting power in the state from 2008, when 2.7% of eligible voters were Hispanic, and 32% of Hispanics were eligible to vote. 32% of eligible Hispanic voters are naturalized citizens, rather than citizens at birth. (This is higher than Hispanics nationwide, at 25%).

In 2010, 6.4% of Virginians spoke Spanish as the primary language at home. Among Asians (Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine), 2.5% spoken their native language at home.

 

The Migration Policy Institute reports that foreign-born workers account for at least one quarter of employment in three major high skilled job groupings:

computer/mathematical, 32%

physicians/dentists/surgeons 26%

other sciences/engineering 24%

Of the state’s entire skilled workforce in 2008, 30% in California were foreign born, and 24% in New York.

But for many highly skilled foreign-born workers, the job market isn’t rosey. MPI also reported on the brain waste of highly educated immigrants working at jobs beneath their skill level. The main reasons: non-recognition of foreign academic and professional credentials and limited English proficiency.

MPI’s data (as I understand it) suggest that on the order of half of immigrants with a college degree earned outside the U.S. take jobs below their skill level. Among those foreign born who got their education in the U.S., a much higher share are employed in high skilled jobs.

The Pew Research Center for U.S. Politics and Policy released in late March results of polling voters about immigrant among other issues. Summary results are here, more in depth analysis here. For the complete poll report, go here.

Since the early 1990, Pew’s polls show that positive views were initially a minority but in about 2006 positive views exceeded negative views. What appears to have happened is that Republican views did not change much but Democratic sentiment swung very positive stating in about 2006. (See graphs here).

Are immigrants a burden? Trump supporters say yes, Clinton’s, no.

Overall, Pew reports, 57% of all registered voters say that immigrants in the United States today strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents, while 35% say they are a burden because they take jobs, housing and health care. Among those who support Trump, 69% say immigrants are a burden. Among Clinton supporters, 17% say that immigrants are a burden.

Legal path for undocumented immigrants: Trump supporters no, Clinton’s, yes.

Even when most Republican registered voters say immigrants are a burden on the country, 57% also say there should be a way for undocumented immigrants currently in the country to stay legally, if certain requirements are met. Among Trump supporters, 52% say undocumented immigrants should not have a path to legal status. Among Clinton supporters, 87% say there should be a path

On deportation: Trump supporters five times more likely to call for systematic deportation.

Among Trump supporters, 42% say there should be a national law enforcement effort to deport all immigrants who are now living in the U.S. illegally. Among Clinton voters, 8% agree.

Growing diversity in the country today: not helpful for Trump supporters, helpful for Clintonites.

Among all voters, 59% say an increasing number of people from many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities in the U.S. makes the country a better place to live; 31% say increasing diversity does not make much difference either way, 8% say increasing diversity makes the U.S. a worse place to live.

For Donald Trump supporters, 39% say that diversity makes the U.S. a better place to live, 42% say it does not make a difference, and 17% say it makes it worse. Among Clinton supporters, 72% say that diversity helps, 25% – plus say it does not matter, and hardly any say it makes it worse.

Agricultural business and technology have driven the importation of foreign, that is, Mexican farm labor, for generations. This gave rise to the large undocumented population in the U.S. Here is a 70 year snaphot.

Agricultural productivity in the U.S. after World War Two has risen at a faster pace than manufacturing productivity (1.9% vs. 1.3% annually, from 1948 through 1999). Inside this productivity gain was growing use of unskilled Mexican labor.

Between 1942 and 1964, the Bracero guest worker program brought in 4.6 million farm workers. As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times observes, investment in technology generally happens when the immigrant spigot is shut, and relaxes when immigration increases. After the bracero program ended and some farm wages began to rise, machines were developed top pick tomatoes. Within a few years, by 1970, tomato harvest jobs were by by two-thirds.

But farmers still wanted more cheap hired labor. The shift from family to corporate farming after World War Two sharply increased the demand for the hired worker. In 1950, only 25% of farm labor was hired labor; by 2008, that grew to 60%. This hired labor force was filled by Mexicans.

Before the 1986, perhaps a quarter of farm workers in California were undocumented. The Act legalized over 1.1 million farm workers, known as Special Agricultural Workers. The undocumented percentage of farm workers dropped to 10%. But many of these now-legal workers moved off the farm and into better paying urban jobs. (See a 2013 analysis by Philip Martin here).

The farms were saved by a flood of new undocumented workers in 1990s. As a prior post showed, it was easy to get into the U.S. illegally. The share of California crop workers who were undocumented shot up from 10% in the late 1980s to over 50% in the late 1990s. This depressed wages. Farmers’ investments in labor-saving technology all but froze. Farmers’ capital investments fell 46.7% from their peak in 1980 through 1999.

In 2010, the average earnings of crop workers were about $9 an hour, and median weekly earnings were 60% of those of workers in comparable private-sector nonfarm jobs. The undocumented status of these workers surely accounts for much of this wage disparity. They are captive to low skilled, low paying jobs.

According to the Brookings Institute, about 60% of immigrants in farming, are “miscellaneous agricultural workers, including animal breeders,” but only 20% of native born farm workers. These workers require little more than on-the-job training, largely planting and harvesting crops, operating farm equipment, and raising animals. The higher level ”farmers and ranchers” jobs are 97% native born, only 3% foreign-born.

English proficiency has risen markedly among young Hispanics, an indication of greater integration of the Hispanic population and, perhaps, access to better jobs.

According to Jens Manuel Krogstad of the Pew Research Center, this is due to more young Hispanics being born in the U.S. rather than in their country of origin.

Why this matters:

The Hispanic population has always been younger than other ethnic/racial groups in the U.S. Like all groups, the Hispanic population in the U.S. has gotten older, but with the top line growth of this population a very large share of young people are Hispanic.

Thus, English language proficiency among young Hispanics is an important barometer of immigration integration (1st, 2nd and 3rd generation).

“Of the 74 million children in the United States today, 17.5 million are Hispanic. They are the largest racial/ethnic minority group of children, and also the fastest-growing. Today, one U.S. child in four is Hispanic; by 2050, it will be more than one in three.” (This from a Pew report on Hispanic  children.)

Krogdstad reports,

When asked about their language use and English proficiency in 2014, some 88% of Latinos ages 5 to 17 said they either speak only English at home or speak English “very well,” up from 73% who said the same in 2000.

And among Latinos ages 18 to 33, the share who speak only English at home or say they speak English “very well” increased from 59% to 76% during this time…A greater share of young Hispanics ages 5 to 17 are growing up in households where only English is spoken – 37% in 2014 compared with 30% in 2000.

By comparison, English proficiency among older Latinos has changed little since 2000. For instance, among Latinos ages 34 to 49, 55% spoke English very well or only spoke English at home in 2014 – nearly unchanged from 2000, when the share was 53%. Among Latinos ages 69 and older, just 43% said they spoke English proficiently in 2014, compared with 42% in 2000.

When will half of Hispanic households speak only English?

A big study of immigration published recently by the National Academy of Sciences noted that immigration policy has contributed to the rise on undocumented people in the U.S.  Now about 11 million, their numbers tripled since the mid 1980. How did that happen?

Douglas Massey and colleagues published an article in March, 2016, “Why Border Enforcement Backfired.”

According to Massey, undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States was largely a circular phenomenon, but the rise of aggressive border enforcement in the 1980s disrupted this pattern, imposing no effective controls on people coming into the U.S but deterring people from leaving.

The Immigration and Control Act of 1986 awarded green cards to 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, including one million farm workers. The Act also introduced tougher enforcement. Employers were required to check on legal status – but did not. Border enforcement budgets began to rise sharply.

“Our estimates reveal that the rapid escalation of border enforcement beginning in 1986 had no effect on the likelihood of initiating undocumented migration to the United States but did have powerful unintended consequences, pushing migrants away from relatively benign crossing locations in El Paso and San Diego.”(pg. 1590). Crossing deaths multiplied (figure 6). Coyote charges rose from $500 in 1990 to $2,000 in 2000 (figure 4). But the chance of successfully crossing the border albeit with multiple attempts was close to 100% until after about 2005 (figure 5). What greater enforcement did was to discourage undocumented residents from circulating back outside. “The probability of returning from a first trip fell sharply after the 1980s, going from a high of 48% in 1980 to zero in 2010.” “The shift from sojourning to settling as a prevailing migration strategy” took place.

Massey estimates that if border enforcement had remained at its 1986 level (as measured by the spending budget) there would have been 9.7 million undocumented persons in the U.S. in 2010 instead of the actual number of 14 million (pg. 1593).

A more open border policy would have produced less permanent immigration. “Now is the time to shift from a policy of immigration suppression to immigration management” (pg. 1595). The authors say that the times of large scale immigration is over, what with demographic changes and economic improvements in Mexico and tepid job growth in the U.S.

In his first year in office, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin flew in 2011 to Miami to promote a real estate / business project funded by so-called EB-5 investors. On April 8 of this year, according to the Vermont Digger, Shumlin’s general counsel asked the state’s tech department to delete “all archived email” for five people who worked in the governor’s office prior to January 2013 and were associated with this project. The employees included the governor’s former campaign manager and top aide and former chief of staff.

Here is what we know now about the biggest scandal in Vermont for years. Much of this information is found in reportage by the Vermont Digger, a non-profit daily news service.

What is EB-5?

Congress created the EB-5 program to stimulate investment in geographic areas needing development funds. Foreign nationals can earn green cards when they invest one million dollars and create or preserve 10 jobs. If they invest in a so-called Targeted Employment Areas (TEA), they need only invest $500,000 and create 10 new jobs to earn green cards. The program was stalled for many years in part due to Washington bureaucracy, but in the late 2000s, with some revisions in regulation, it took off. The Bookings Institute, which published a study in 2014, reported that during the 2010-2012 period, on average, 13% of immigrants and their family members were admitted under employment-based preferences. And of these employment-based visas 3% were for EB-5 visa investors and their immediate family members. This sums roughly to well under a legal limit of 10,000 EB-5-related visas a year.

According to Brookings, So far, EB-5 financing has been used for projects that include large commercial-property developments, assisted-living facilities, and manufacturing plants. (See the Brookings report here.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy has been the leading advocate of the EB-5 program in the Senate. He has allied with Senator Charles Grassley to renew the EB-5 program with reformed rules. The renewal date was supposed to be in September 15, 2015 but has been pushed off into 2016.

Why is it controversial?

A Washington Post editorial on Sept 5, 2015 said that the program is a “flop.” “It’s corporate welfare, enabling certain businesses to attract capital more cheaply than others based on a government-conferred sweetener — namely, a visa. Perhaps inevitably, the EB-5 has channeled funding to areas such as hotel ventures that suit the needs of EB-5 seekers and their myriad highly paid consultants — but not necessarily those of local communities.”

The editorial did to point fingers at particular parties, but one element in the is the involvement of firms that sought out EB-5 investors and got a large commission for placing these investors into projects. Rapid Visa is an example. It was part of the Jay Peak project until the relationship soured in 2012.

The Vermont project

Ariel Quiros and Bill Stenger began as partners to create a succession of EB-5 projects along the Vermont – Canadian border. Initially, the projects focused on Jay Peak, a prominent though rather remote ski resort, frequented by Americans and Canadians. In 2009, the Tram Haus Lodge was opened, funded by EB-5 investors. In 2011 a spectacular (for New England) all year indoor water park opened.

According to data collected by Vermont Digger, as of now the Quiros-Stenger partnership projected $500 million in diverse projects involving mainly ski resorts and downtown development in Newport, Vermont. All the projects were located in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom.” So far, 439 investors were granted permanent green cards and 134 granted conditional green cards. Presumably, these awards are for well more than 573 individuals as families may be involved. Assuming that each award gave an average of two persons access to permanent residency, that would come to over 1,000 individuals. And, the Quiros-Stenger projects are not by any means completed.

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During 2015, warning signals about problems with this multi-phased project began to go off. They concerned primarily a stalled project in Newport and shortage of approved funds for a hotel at Burke Mountain, another area ski resort. When the investigations are completed, it will probably become clear that many insiders knew in 2015, if not before, that entire undertaking was corrupted by the promoters.

On April 14, Vermont Digger reported that the SEC filed complaints against the operation. “In the 82-page SEC complaint, the federal regulatory body said it was taking action to “stop an ongoing, massive eight-year fraudulent scheme” in which Quiros and Stenger “systematically looted more than $50 million of the more than $350 million that has been raised from hundreds of investors” to construct resort facilities and a biomedical research facility. ‘The alleged fraud ran the gamut from false statements to deceptive financial transactions to outright theft,’ said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a news release.

Some of Shumlin’s former colleagues have been working on the project and were in a position to know that something was amiss. They include Alex MacLean, the governor’s former campaign manager and top aide, and head of communications for Jay Peak between 2012 and 2015.

I interviewed Ana in January, 2016, in Medford, Massachusetts. Earl Dotter took photos.

Martinez is one of twelve children raised in a family of coffee and corn planters in El Salvador. As a young adult, she slipped over the American border in 1988 for one reason: to escape poverty. For the first month in America, she slept in a laundromat in Los Angeles. She worked as a clothes trimmer for eight years. She returned to El Salvador to bring her two young girls, walking for forty days, some of them in the desert. She paid off the coyote over seven years.

Today she is an American citizen, working in the Whole Foods Bakehouse in Medford, Massachusetts. One of her daughter works at the same facility. She owns a three family house in Chelsea, Massachusetts and a home in El Salvador. “To come here and succeed, you have to work”, she told us.

Martinez’s story uncovers some causes and consequences of immigration since passage of an historic immigration reform law in 1965. One way that her story is typical is that she is Hispanic (or, as some prefer, Latino). Without the surge in Hispanic immigration since 1965, there would be about 20 million persons in America who self-identify as Hispanic today. In fact,57 million self-identify that way. Roughly half of foreign-born Hispanics in America today are here without authorization.

She lives in a residential portal for low wage immigrants, Chelsea. In 2010, 38% of its population was foreign-born. Many low wage immigrant workers live in concentrations of similar immigrants.