Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

A Massachusetts town spends its tax dollars telling residents how to dodge La Migra

by philg

Our former home of Lincoln, Maskachusetts:

(I tried to Zoom in for the meeting, but the link resulted only in an “Invalid meeting ID. (3,000)” error message.)

The town spent money producing its own guide to dodging La Migra (ICE). Excerpts:

A former “illegal alien” is no longer “undocumented” but rather “with uncertain immigration status”:

What if the worst happens and a “Massachusetts man” who arrived in the U.S. a few days earlier is being hauled away?

Note that, due to the two-acre zoning minimum, the typical neighborhood in Lincoln, MA is home only to those undocumented migrants who have at least $1 million to spend on a vacant lot. The town does, however, have a small public housing development in which those who don’t work, regardless of immigration status, can live at taxpayer expenses.

Here’s a friend’s photo from near the Town Hall:

In addition to the advertisement for the event, the photo includes a righteous hater of inequality who has bought him/her/zir/theirself an expensive Audi. He/she/ze/they could have made due with a Camry and donated the extra $40,000 to the worthy poor, but apparently that wasn’t an option. The photographer’s comment:

paint is coming off the house, ugly pipes on the ground and ugly wiring

(As a Floridian I’ve become allergic to the sight of utility poles and exposed wires and boxes like the ones in the photo.)

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Science proves that the U.S. needs immigrant workers; U.S. companies say that they don’t need more workers

by philg

It’s Veterans Day. Historically, one of the things that U.S. society tried to do was ensure that good jobs were available for those who left the military and returned to civilian life. This was a matter of great concern around the end of World War II. See for example “JOBS FOR VETERANS REPORTED FEWER; Full Impact of Discharges Is Yet to Come, Says Commerce Bureau” (New York Times, December 20, 1945):

Veterans are beginning to encounter difficulties in finding employment, with the full impact of discharges upon the labor market yet to be felt, the Department of Commerce said today in this month’s issue of its Survey of Current Business.

With Army surveys showing that at least 75 per cent of the returning veterans would be job-seekers, the article concluded that the country faced a “primary problem” of developing a labor demand sufficient to provide employment for the returning veterans,” along with the additional problem of “finding jobs satisfactory to the veteran with previous training, newly acquired skills and generally high expectations.”

Ever since we opened our borders in 1965 we’ve forced veterans to compete with an ever-larger group of immigrant workers. We’re informed that it is a Scientific fact that an open border enriches every American, including veterans, because immigrant workers are critical to the U.S. economy and there are more than enough jobs to go around. For this post let’s ignore that our immigration policy doesn’t select for immigrants who are able to work; someone who is 2 years old or 85 years old or disabled or completely unskilled has the same entitlement to lifetime residence/citizenship under our asylum-based system or under our family relation-based system as someone who is of working age. Let’s assume that, in fact, immigration does bring in mostly people who are capable of working and who want to work (an irrational desire in a cradle-to-grave welfare state!). Does the assumption that there are ample jobs both for new veterans and new immigrants still make sense?

“More Big Companies Bet They Can Still Grow Without Hiring” (Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2025):

American employers are increasingly making the calculation that they can keep the size of their teams flat—or shrink them through layoffs—without harming their businesses. Part of that thinking is the belief that artificial intelligence will be used to pick up some of the slack and automate more processes. … “If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people,” Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, said in an interview. “I see a lot of companies pre-emptively holding the line, forecasting and hoping that they can have smaller workforces.”

Many companies seem intent on embracing a new, ultralean model of staffing, one where more roles are kept unfilled and hiring is treated as a last resort. At Intuit, every time a job comes open, managers are pushed to justify why they need to backfill it, said Sandeep Aujla, the company’s chief financial officer. The new rigor around hiring helps combat corporate bloat.

“Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots” (New York Times, October 21, 2025):

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

“Amazon to Lay Off Tens of Thousands of Corporate Workers” (WSJ, October 27, 2025):

The latest round of job cuts would be the largest since 2022, when Amazon eliminated around 27,000 roles. That layoff occurred in waves.

The company views the cuts in part as an effort to correct an aggressive hiring period during the pandemic, the people said. During that period, a boom in online shopping led Amazon to double its warehouse network over a two-year period.

Amazon CEO Jassy has sought to find ways for the company to do more with less. In June Jassy sent a note to employees that said increasing use of artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for certain jobs. He called generative AI a once-in-a-lifetime technological change that is already altering how Amazon deals with consumers and other businesses and how it conducts its own operations, including job cuts.

“​​As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said at the time. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”

Veterans are above-average in health, intelligence, and education and they come from richer-than-average families. Nonetheless, I wonder if the combination of AI and a continued inrush of legal immigrants (somewhere between 1.2 and 2.6 million annually, according to ChatGPT) will make it almost impossible for tomorrow’s veterans to get decent jobs.

Related: The Bobs.

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Replacementocracy

by philg

American-born New Yorkers said that they would vote for Andrew Cuomo (October 18 poll). Foreign-born New Yorkers said that that they would vote for Mayor Mamdani (charts below). What do we call the system of government that brought Mayor Mamdani to power? It doesn’t seem like “democracy” since many of the voters, like the new mayor himself, are only recently arrived. How about “replacementocracy” for when an election result is determined by the votes of immigrants? The neologism is literally “rule by replacements”.

The actual election results seem to be consistent with the above poll. Screen shot from last night:

Separately, it was interesting to watch Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 and 2021 compete against Florida Realtor of the Year 2026.

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An immigrant will take a Black man’s job today?

by philg

Eric Adams, who identifies as African-American, is on track to be replaced by an immigrant, Zohran Mamdani, today, just as predicted by this 2007 Harvard-NBER paper:

I’m sure that it is painful for some to see New York’s Blacks reduced to political irrelevance, but academics might be celebrating a successful prediction.

Separately, while I was on a JetBlue PBI-PVD flight recently a friend texted to ask my whereabouts. The reply: “Above the Mamdani Caliphate.”

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Immigration kills pride in paying income tax?

by philg

It’s National Immigrants Day, perhaps known to Native Americans as “National Steal All the Land Day”.

Before the personal income tax Americans enjoyed a feeling of pride in their private charitable and community efforts. When a natural disaster occurred (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood for an 1889 example) people knew that there was no FEMA and therefore they voluntarily contributed money, materials, and time to relief efforts and felt pride in helping their fellow Americans. One of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s “eliminate private property” proposal was that humans enjoy feeling generous and if you don’t have the option of voluntarily donating property then you are denied an opportunity to feel good.

In the 20th century we switched to a system of forced extraction for good works, especially during the Lyndon Johnson administration when Medicaid, food stamps, and other cradle-to-grave welfare programs were introduced. To the extent that these welfare programs were being spent on people for whom a taxpayer had some fellow feeling it might have been possible to feel pride in paying tax. Irving Berlin was famous for enjoying his role in contributing to American society via paying tax and the Treasury Department promoted a song that he wrote on the subject:

Some of the lyrics that today’s pro-Hamas Americans might not appreciate…

You see those bombers in the sky,

Rockefeller helped to build them,

So did I.

A thousand planes to bomb Berlin.

They’ll all be paid for, and I chipped in,

That cert’nly makes me feel okay.

Ten thousand more, and that ain’t hay!

I wonder if open borders has finished the process of killing any joy a typical American might feel in sending his/her/zir/their money to the IRS. Almost all of us agree that it is worth paying taxes to finance infrastructure construction, e.g., gasoline tax to build and maintain the Interstates. Some of us agree that it is worth keeping an American underclass on welfare for four generations or more. Very few of us, however, seem to be excited about providing migrants with taxpayer-funded housing, food, health care, etc. Some Americans would rather help the world’s unfortunate in situ at a vastly lower per-person cost (if we spend $1 trillion/year on welfare for immigrants and their descendants, for example, that’s $1 trillion that we can’t spend on relatively low-cost-per-person programs that would save vastly more lives if spent on poor people in poor countries). Some Americans are haters and don’t want to help foreigners other than via voluntary trade.

Lack of pride in paying taxes seems to be a factor in state-to-state moves. Quite a few of our neighbors say that they moved from California or the Northeast because they didn’t agree with what their state and local governments were spending money on, e.g., race discrimination (“DEI”), gender-affirming surgeries for teenagers, a fully funded work-free lifestyle for migrants, etc. Without taking the dramatic step of renouncing U.S. citizenship, though, and paying the associated exit tax, none of us can escape paying federal income tax (exception: moving to Puerto Rico). Therefore, the shift in government spending in favor of migrants wouldn’t motivate Americans to move but it could result in less life satisfaction.

Speaking for myself, the taxes that I most enjoy paying are the following:

  • property tax, despite the epic quantity, because Palm Beach County and Jupiter do great jobs with the schools, the roads, public safety, etc.
  • aviation fuel tax because I love airports and air traffic control
  • gasoline tax because I value being able to get from Point A to Point B on smooth roads without traffic jams (Florida accomplishes the smoothness, but nearly every part of the U.S. seems to be plagued with traffic jams)

I’m sure that there are some progressives in Maskachusetts who actually do love paying state and federal tax that funds a work-free lifestyle for migrants, but my suspicion is that overall our decision to open U.S. borders in 1965 was one that has made us significantly less happy with the 30-50% of our working lives that we spend working for the government’s benefit. Running an asylum-based immigration system has perhaps made the situation worse because tens of millions of the migrants currently resident in the U.S. never expressed any affinity for the U.S. or American culture. They just said that they were afraid of being killed or attacked in their home countries.

Related:

  • “The downside of diversity” (New York Times, 2007): “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The [Harvard] study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”

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Multiculturalism comes to the old neighborhood

by philg

As we get our houses ready for National Immigrants Day (October 28), from a friend in Maskachusetts:

I just drove on Sandy Pond Rd in Lincoln. A Somali (I assume, since he was black with lighter skin and curly hair) took out a prayer mat, oriented it toward Mecca and was doing a midday prayer on the side of the road (there’s no sidewalk). Right in front of a house belonging to a family with a last name of Goldstein.

(Note the hateful failure to capitalize “Black”, but the friend who used the hateful language is an immigrant and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to criticize him while he is enriching us with his presence.)

A July post from the church in the middle of town:

In April, we posed–and eventually distilled–a question in response: What if we activated one of our spaces–the parsonage–to provide urgently needed temporary housing to refugees?

We wish to state clearly that using the parsonage for refugee housing is not necessarily what will be proposed at a special congregational meeting on September 29, but the “what if” of this hypothesis (some might even call it a lightning rod) is what we are working with to ground our debate, open our hearts, and stretch our imaginations.

*The recommendations for length of stay per family vary from several months to about a year.

In Massachusetts, appropriate housing is hard to find and expensive. Newly arriving refugees are often put up in a crowded hotel room for up to 90 days while they are connected with essential services and look for other housing. Some families are transferred to shelters.

A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is at the bottom of every page of the church’s web site:

(See Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?)

The July post had estimated the cost to the church of helping out migrants at roughly $48,000 per year, mostly in foregone rent. I contacted a friend who is a member of the church to ask whether this expenditure had been approved by the congregation:

That issue was put to rest before the meeting, thank Heaven. … What we voted on is a $7 million improvement of the stone church, which I favored. 95% of the Church agreed. Progress!

So the Righteous voted to spend $7 million on themselves and nothing on the migrants whose cause they champion.

Related:

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How was the immigration of Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi supposed to benefit Americans?

by philg

The U.S. has arrested a “Louisiana man” for purportedly participating in the Gazans’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli civilians. New York Times:

This was an unavoidable situation, apparently, because he supposedly lied to Biden administration immigration officials about his level of effort in globalizing the intifada, achieving river-to-the-sea liberation, etc. Let’s ignore for the moment the question of why Americans believe that government bureaucrats who don’t speak Arabic would be able to separate truth from fiction. The question for this post is what was our theory for how Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi’s presence in the U.S. was going to make the U.S. a better place for existing Americans.

(I personally think that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi may well have told the truth. The U.S. has an honor system in which a prospective immigrant is asked “Have you participated in terrorism?” and, by the standards of a significant percentage of Americans (especially the young/progressive and, certainly, almost every resident of Dearborn, Michigan), what the Gazans did on October 7, 2023 was a legitimate military action by oppressed indigenous Arabs, not “terrorism”. The October 7 attack was organized by a democratically elected and popularly supported government (Hamas), certainly, and, even after the Israelis counterattacked, was supported in opinion polls by the majority of Gazans.)

From The Guardian:

In June 2024, al-Muhtadi submitted an electronic US visa application in Cairo. In the application, he denied serving in any paramilitary organization or having ever engaged in terrorist activities. His application said he intended to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and work in “car repairs or food services”. He entered the US in September 2024.

Let’s leave aside the question of why a “Louisiana man” (NYT) such as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi would intend to live in Oklahoma. Why was opening the border to someone who was going to work in “food services” going to make the U.S. a better place to live? Oklahoma was already critically short of health care workers (2024 KFOR) so bringing in one more person who would be a customer for health care rather than a provider would make it tougher for existing Oklahomans to access medical care. Maybe one individual restaurant owner would benefit from the cheap labor that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi could potentially provide, but we’re told that advancements in robotics will soon render low-skill humans obsolete. That would leave U.S. taxpayers on the hook for multiple generations of welfare in the event that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi either ceased working or never earned enough to get over the threshold for public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, Obamaphone, etc.

What is our rationale, in other words, for operating an immigration system under which Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi was eligible for permanent U.S. residency and eventual citizenship?

If the majority of American voters can agree that Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi moving from Egypt to Oklahoma wouldn’t have made the U.S. better off, even if Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi hadn’t been part of the October 7 attacks, why doesn’t Congress change U.S. immigration rules so as to prevent a future Biden/Harris-style administration from admitting more “Louisiana men” like Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi?

Related:

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Immigrants expand our economy, but millions of immigrants exiting the U.S. don’t shrink our economy

by philg

Immigration Logic 101 requires us to believe that low-skill immigrants expand the U.S. economy (aggregate GDP growth) and make everyone in the U.S. richer (per-capita GDP growth).

We’re informed that the U.S. economy is growing or, at least, not shrinking.

We’re informed that, apparently contradicting the two items above, that the U.S. is becoming impoverished in immigrants (not as enriched by enrichers). “Immigrant Population in U.S. Drops for the First Time in Decades” (New York Times):

An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population declined by nearly 1.5 million. … experts predict looming negative economic and demographic consequences for the United States if the trend persists. Immigrants are a critical work force in many sectors, and the country’s reliance on them is growing as more baby boomers retire.

Covering a somewhat longer time period and announced with a bit more color, DHS says that 2 million migrants are no longer among us:

If immigration makes us rich how is it possible that de-immigration doesn’t make us poor?

Related:

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“Inhuman treatment” of immigrants in the U.S.

by philg

Taxpayer-funded NPR:

Pope Leo XIV weighed in on U.S. politics, saying that Catholic politicians must be judged on the full range of their policy positions and suggesting that the country’s treatment of immigrants is “inhuman.”

“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life,” Pope Leo said. “And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

Immigrants suffer “inhuman treatment” in the United States, according to this expert. Also, millions of humans voluntarily show up every year seeking this inhuman treatment. Center for Immigration Studies:

The government’s January 2025 Current Population Survey (CPS) shows the foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025 — both new record highs.

(Note that the size of the “illegal population” is difficult to estimate and see also Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?)

Fans of logical conundrums may also appreciate this communication from someone on a selfie yacht who communicated that the Israeli Navy disabled his communications:

Loosely related, “Foreign Ministry: Flotilla to Gaza had no humanitarian supplies” (Jerusalem Post). In other words, the selfie yachts were literally carrying nothing more than selfie subjects.

Finally, nobody can accused JetBlue of treating immigrants inhumanely. From a recent flight, in which they invite customers to watch movies specifically related to Hispanic Heritage Month:

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Immigrants don’t commit crime because criminals aren’t “immigrants”

by philg

State-sponsored NPR assures us that “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, studies find”. The state-sponsored news organization in the UK demonstrates a brilliant method of proving this Scientific fact.

“What we know about synagogue attacker Jihad Al-Shamie” (BBC):

The Manchester synagogue attacker was Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent.

“Syrian descent”? Meaning that his ancestors came to England after the Second Crusade besieged Damascus? (before the country of “Syria” existed)

Al-Shamie, who lived in Prestwich, Manchester, is understood to have entered the UK as a young child and was granted British citizenship in 2006 when he was around the age of 16.

So… Jihad wasn’t born in the UK and then lived in the UK with a UK passport. The article never describes Jihad as an “immigrant” or uses the word “immigrant” or “migrant”. So, to the extent that stabbing and running over Jews on Yom Kippur are crimes in the UK there is no immigrant guilty of those crimes. Jihad was not an “immigrant.”

Separately, would it make sense to grant immediate British citizenship to anyone named “Jihad”?

Finally, how about a movement regarding this noble enricher who was unjustly killed by police with “His name was Jihad; Say His Name” signage? From Grace Lutheran Church in Wisconsin:

Tweak it to “Jihad Al-Shamie. Listen to his name. Say his name aloud. Hear yourself saying his name.” I asked Grok to work on this:

ChatGPT:

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