Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

Immigrant population down; total number of jobs up; how?

by philg

We’re informed that immigrants come to the United States to work, not to enjoy our cradle-to-grave welfare state for four generations.

We’re informed by the U.S. Census Bureau that the number of foreign-born residents of the U.S. (a.k.a. “immigrants”) is down by almost 3 million. “Census Bureau Survey Shows Total Foreign-Born Down 2.9 Million” (CIS, yesterday):

since January 2025 … the government’s monthly household survey, officially called the Current Population Survey (CPS), shows an unprecedented 2.9 million decline in the foreign-born population — naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, long-term temporary visitors, and illegal immigrants.

Latin American non-citizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for all of the decrease. This population overlaps significantly with illegal immigrants.

Only 44 percent of the decline in the foreign-born are workers; the rest are children, the elderly, and other non-workers. This fact, along with employment gains by the U.S.-born, mitigates the impact on the labor market and may help explain why the survey of businesses does not show a dramatic decline in workers.

The total number of people working in the United States is up (CBS, today):

Here’s a wider picture of steady-then-increased numbers of workers as immigrants departed:

The increase doesn’t seem to have been caused by an increase in the working-age population, which is down slightly over the same time period:

How can this apparent paradox be explained?

One possible explanation is that immigrants displace the native-born in the labor force. When an immigrant with a job leaves, his or her job is sometimes taken over by a native-born American who had been sitting on the couch playing Xbox. If that were true, though, we’d see an increase in the labor force participation rate and/or a decrease in unemployment rate over the same time period, but that hasn’t happened.

Another explanation is that immigrants were working off the books and, therefore, their jobs weren’t counted in most government surveys. If this were true, we’d see a divergence in CPS data, which asks people “did you work for pay?” vs. Current Employment Statistics (CES) data, which asks employers “did you pay someone to work in at least a quasi-legal fashion?” I ran out of brain power and asked ChatGPT to resolve this possibility:

And in the particular January 2025–August 2026 comparison we just calculated, the divergence isn’t enormous once you compare the CPS consistently: CPS total employment is roughly +0.3 million, while CES payroll employment is roughly +0.8 million. So the data could accommodate some loss of informal immigrant employment, but they don’t by themselves demonstrate it.

What’s left as an explanation, given that we can’t abandon the axiom that foreign-born residents of the U.S. are the hardest workers and, certainly, are never on what used to be called “welfare”? We’re living in the Age of Miracles?

Full post, including comments

Did Spain prove via Ceuta that welfare is what pulls in low-skill migrants?

by philg

If the US and the EU shut down their respective cradle-to-grave welfare states, would there still be billions of humans (none of whom are “illegal”) seeking to enter?

“Spain ‘denies Ceuta migrants food and water’ to get them to leave” (The Times, August 3, 2026):

Many of the thousands who remain in the territory after crossing the border from Morocco say they have not been given aid or shelter

It is day five of Ceuta’s migrant crisis, and 60,000 people have crossed the border from Morocco, according to Spain’s interior ministry. Some 3,000 to 5,000 still remain, Ceuta’s leader Juan Jesús Vivas estimated, but many of those who have stayed claim they have not been given food, water or shelter.

The Times understands that Ceutan residents were actively discouraged from providing aid to migrants, in the hope that they would return to Morocco.

The only migrant accommodation in the territory is at capacity and has gone into lockdown. Staff prevented those inside from passing water or food to the hundreds outside the gates, lying on the dirt, including Dfalla Sliman, 21, from Sudan. They have slept here for days. Others are from Yemen, Syria and Eritrea, and they have travelled for months.

“I’m very hungry. They say everything is finished,” said Sliman, who had unbandaged wounds on his arms and legs. “And no water; they say everything is finished. I’ll wait until everyone leaves.”

“We understood that selling them water and food was necessary. It was logical to sell them so [they would not] go hungry. But the police came and said it was better if we didn’t give them anything, no food, no drink, because that’s how they left. The effect of not eating or drinking meant … that voluntarily many left.”

Spain, of course, in its eagerness to deny migrants the asylum hearings to which they’re entitled, seems to have gone beyond a simple “no welfare” approach by also trying to prevent migrants from buying things at retail and trying to block charity.

Related:

  • “Joint statement on the humanitarian situation in Gaza” (official August 2025 Spanish government communication, translated by Google Chrome): “The humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels. Famine is spreading before our eyes. Urgent action is needed to halt and reverse this hunger. … We urge the Government of Israel to authorize all aid shipments from international NGOs … All border crossings and routes must be used to allow a massive influx of aid to Gaza, including food, nutritional supplements, shelter, fuel, drinking water, medicines, and medical equipment.”
  • “Speech by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at the Rome Nutrition Week” (May 26, 2026, translated by Chrome): “Certainly in Gaza, where some intend to win a war by subjecting its people to starvation. These are, incidentally, the same people who last week humiliated, abused, and mistreated the members of a flotilla whose only intention was to deliver humanitarian aid.” (There was no “flotilla of aid” for the starving refugees in Ceuta? It’s a 12-mile trip from mainland Spain, less than one hour in a power boat.)
Full post, including comments

Why didn’t Europe want to be enriched by the Ceuta migrants?

by philg

Europe is home to about 40 million non-European migrants and perhaps 25 million children of non-European migrants. The total is very close to the population of France and, due to the higher migrant fertility rate, will soon exceed France’s population of about 69 million.

Roughly 60,000 migrants entered Ceuta within the past week. Instead of giving each one a proper asylum hearing, the Spanish mostly pushed them out by denying them food and water (they left “voluntarily” rather than die of dehydration and hunger). This is now praised by pro-migrant European politicians, such as Ursula von der Leyen, who uses the hateful term “illegal migrants” (“no human is illegal” is now out the window?).

We can infer that Europe wants 65-70 million non-European migrants because the ones currently residing in Europe aren’t being sent home. Given that Europe considers these 65-70 million to be beneficial somehow (cultural, economic, and religious enrichment), why wouldn’t an additional 60,000 have also been considered beneficial? And if the 60,000 people who came to Ceuta recently aren’t beneficial, why wouldn’t Europe expel the 65-70 million current resident migrants as non-beneficial? Can this apparent inconsistency be turned into something vaguely logical?

(Note that if we were to add the Islamic Republic of Britain to the mix, that would be at least another 15 million and the non-European migrant+children population would be comparable to Germany’s population.)

It’s possible that “family separation” is bad when Donald Trump does it, but good when Spain does it? Those who claim to be under 18 may get whisked away to mainland Spain, while their parents are (illegally?) pushed back across the border:

Here’s a Spanish Member of European Parliament saying that refusing to accept asylum applications is an example of “dignity and respect” and “defend[ing] human rights”. (Also that Israel is the Great Satan (“genocides”) and the U.S. is the Little Satan.)

(Consistent with EU freedom of speech principles, the politician disabled comments on the above post.)

The Prime Minister, February 2026, in the New York Times, says that the migrants are “needed”:

Some additional excerpts:

Last month, my government issued a decree that makes up to half a million undocumented migrants living in Spain eligible for temporary residence permits, with certain conditions, which they will be able to renew after a year.

We have done this for two reasons. The first and most important is a moral one. Spain was once a nation of emigrants. … It is our duty to become the welcoming and tolerant society that our own relatives would have hoped to find on the other side of our borders.

This seems odd. Suppose that the dermatologist neighbor from Sheboygan invites you over for dinner on Saturday night. Do you then have an obligation to reciprocate by inviting someone from Sudan over on Sunday night? Maybe Spain could have a moral obligation to some of the countries that welcomed Spaniards in the past, but did any Spaniards emigrate to Sudan? Also, why make any economic arguments if something is a moral obligation? If one is obligated to do something does it matter whether doing it makes you better or worse off?

The West needs people. Currently, few of its countries have a rising population growth rate. Unless they embrace migration, they will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat. Their gross domestic products will stagnate. … The only option to avoid decline is to integrate migrants in the most orderly and effective way possible.

This is objectively false. See Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan as examples of GDP growth with working population shrinkage. (the Asian countries mentioned exhibit the following combination: shrinking population; more rapidly shrinking working age population; growing aggregate GDP; more rapidly growing per-worker GDP).

Here Pedro Sánchez turns out to be a prophet:

Neither A.I. nor robots will be able to prevent this outcome, at least not in the short or medium term.

How did someone with no technical education come to be more of an expert on the likely trajectory of AI and robotics than all of the AI and robot nerds in California and China?

MAGA-style leaders may say that our country can’t handle taking in so many migrants—that this is a suicidal move, the desperate act of a collapsing country. But don’t let them fool you. Spain is booming. For three years running, we have had the fastest-growing economy among Europe’s largest countries. We have created nearly one in every three new jobs across the European Union, and our unemployment rate has fallen below 10 percent for the first time in nearly two decades.

Spain is a dwarf among midgets, in other words?

Full post, including comments

Ceuta migrant question: Why are some Africans entitled to live in Europe, but not all?

by philg

“After Most Migrants Leave Ceuta, Exhausted Holdouts Find Shelter on Beach” (New York Times):

Sitting on a beach on Saturday in Ceuta, Spain, a Senegalese man called Djibril Mboup … despite his hunger, Mr. Mboup, 30, said he was not going to return across the border to Morocco.

Mr. Mboup was among roughly 400 men, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, who were gathered on this beach on Saturday. Many of them lay on ragged sheets of cardboard, their feet blistered from crossing the border and roaming Ceuta’s streets.

The fate of some of the holdouts “is not the same as that of the Moroccans,” Mr. Mohamed, 26, said. Unlike Moroccans who had joined the exodus to Ceuta on a last-minute whim, some of the sub-Saharan migrants are from war-torn regions and had journeyed for months to get to Europe. “They genuinely have the right to request international protection,” Mr. Mohamed said.

For those on the beach, the best possible outcome as they navigated the complexities of the European Union’s asylum system was to be transferred to the city’s official migrant reception center.

Mr. Mboup grew up in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, earning a diploma in logistics, he said. After struggling to find work in his early 20s, he decided to leave the country in 2018 and made his way to Morocco by navigating the deadly smuggling routes through the Sahara. He settled in Casablanca, a coastal city, where he scraped by working illegally as a taxi driver at the airport.

What makes this enricher more entitled to live in Europe than the 19+ million Senegalese who stayed in Senegal? It can’t be superior knowledge of geography:

Hoping to avoid the police’s attention, Mr. Mboup joined a group of Moroccans swimming toward Ceuta, he said. He reached the Spanish shore after roughly 30 minutes, he said, though he did not feel that he was in Spain until he saw the cars — the “Spanish cars.”

His happiness quickly gave way to disappointment, he said.

“I kept looking for signs toward Madrid and Barcelona,” he said, only to realize that he was still “on an island” and that mainland Europe was far away.

I can understand a policy under which everyone from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe. A policy under which nobody from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe would also make sense. But I can’t figure out why the Europeans run a system in which a person from Senegal is entitled to move to Europe, or at least spend 10 years there waiting for an asylum case to be heard by a court or for an amnesty to be declared by a politician, conditioned on first swimming to Ceuta or arriving on a beach in Lampedusa.

(Same question about the U.S. We are home to about 25 percent of the world’s Mexicans and 10 percent of the world’s Haitians. Why aren’t the other 75 percent of Mexicans and 90 percent of Haitians entitled to move to the U.S.? What did they do wrong?)

Full post, including comments

Can Spain get rich by selling the Ceuta migrants to other EU nations?

by philg

Spain has been in the news lately due to an influx of enrichers via its Ceuta colony in North Africa:

We’re informed that low-skill migrants make any European nation richer both economically and culturally. If that weren’t true, there would be no reason for Europe to accept even one low-skill migrant (acceptance of migrants can’t be based on humanitarian grounds; Sudan has a population of 52 million, for example, and it makes no sense to provide four generations of welfare to a handful of Sudanese in Europe while providing nothing to 52 million Sudanese in Sudan).

After one bounteous day, Spain is now in possession of roughly 60,000 additional migrants (BBC). Can Spain now offer these enrichers to other EU nations for a reasonable processing and transportation fee? At 60,000 migrants per day, even $20,000 per migrant yields a $438 billion/year revenue stream.

Bizarrely, the head of the EU says that enrichers are “unacceptable”! Europe previously wanted to be enriched, which is why some European nations are now 25% migrants or children of migrants, but Europe no longer wants to become culturally and economically richer?

Here’s the same leader saying that €10 billion in tax dollars are going to be spent on data centers because, presumably, private companies are underinvesting in AI?

Could Spain fund a massive collection of data centers by selling migrants to France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and other EU nations? Retail electricity rates in Spain are more than 2X what consumers in the efficient U.S. states pay so it doesn’t seem like the most obvious place for AI cogitation.

“Migrants wreak havoc in Spain enclaves with shops looted, cars on fire & homes ‘broken into’ as city ‘totally invaded’” (The Sun):

Ceuta-based lawyer Manuel Jurado said: “Like the rest of the residents here we’re living through this situation with a feeling of complete uncertainty. There are people everywhere and there’s violence now in the city.

“I understand these young migrants have arrived here looking for a better life but there are legal mechanisms that offer that security both for them and for us.

The “looking for a better life” as a justification for immigration into a welfare state is confusing. By this standard, shouldn’t anyone anywhere in the world whose spending power is less than whatever a welfare state, such as the U.S. or any of the headline EU countries, be entitled to move? If it’s “a better life” to be on welfare in Maskachusetts or Spain than to live in Yemen, for example, shouldn’t at least 40 million Yemenis be entitled to migrate to Maskachusetts or Spain?

Full post, including comments

Congolese refugee life in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

by philg

Continued coverage of the town that supports EAA AirVenture…

“‘I haven’t known happiness’: Congolese refugees in Oshkosh share resettlement experiences” (Oshkosh Northwestern, Feb. 17, 2025):

“I haven’t known happiness since coming here,” Zawadi said in Swahili, still calmly.

“The people are good [here], but the systems are not,” Zawadi said through her daughter Jeannette, who translated in English.

There was also a brief pause on federal grants that was eventually rescinded two days after it was initially issued last month.

For context, refugees like Zawadi and Tuliya, the mother of the second Congolese family, rely heavily on resettlement agencies like Christian humanitarian organization World Relief, which relies heavily on federal grants and funding.

One of the things that makes groups such as World Relief so vital is they pay immigrants’ housing, utilities and other essentials for their first 90 days in the U.S., hoping they will eventually find a job and land on their feet after those initial three months.

How much profit potential is there for World Relief in and around Oshkosh?

World Relief Wisconsin serves 660 immigrants in the Fox Valley area. According to Regional Director Gail Cornelius, World Relief Wisconsin is serving 125 new immigrants in the Fox Valley region alone, having already helped nearly 350 new residents in 2024.

Winnebago County government has since contracted World Relief to handle that initial 90-day resettlement of immigrants in the county, agreeing to reimburse the agency up until April.

But World Relief Wisconsin serves approximately 660 clients through its Fox Valley office alone, and the organization is just one of 10 resettlement agencies in the entire country.

The latter’s family has been in Oshkosh since last August and was settled by World Relief in a house with a monthly rent of $1,800. But Zawadi is still learning to speak English, leaving Jeannette, at 22 years old, as the only working member of the family of eight.

The family is still eligible for Refugee Cash Assistance, a federal program that provides temporary financial relief to refugees who recently arrived to the U.S. But it’s unclear whether the recent executive orders have put a pause to that program, too.

Americans who can’t afford to have children are funding Africans to have at least seven kids (the father was left behind in Africa, so this is a “single mom” with seven children, apparently happy to share one house; see “Densely packed invasive anoles outcompete natives”:”The Cuban newcomers also tolerate much denser living conditions, while green anoles don’t. This allows the invasive species to take over more territory.“).

Some birthright citizenship action in a different family of migrants:

Eventually, she, her husband and two children were resettled in Manitowoc by World Relief in 2021. Now, their family has moved to Oshkosh and grown with the addition of two kids.

A common theme for African refugees is the system’s refusal to acknowledge their qualifications.

Zawadi also speaks Swahili, Kinyarwanda and Kibembe and was a successful entrepreneur while moving her family through Botswana, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

Americans who can’t afford to have children paid an African family to have four children, so far, and then be less happy/successful compared to if they’d stayed in Africa.

How fat do the do-gooders at World Relief get? Based on their Form 990, they take in about $202 million/year in money (nearly all taxpayer funds?) and pay out $93 million to employees.

Note that none of the above-mentioned refugees are seen at the airport during AirVenture. So far all of the people we’ve seen serving as volunteers have been white native-born Americans. This is mostly true of those working at restaurants, picking up trash, servicing porta potties, etc., as well, though there are perhaps some Latinx working at Latinx-themed food kiosks.

Full post, including comments

How many Americans does it take to support one Somali daycare owner?

by philg

¡Hola! as they say here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, directly adjacent to the Zone of Somali Enrichment in Minnesota. (That said, the supermarkets here are also rich in shoppers who are attired in full African-Islamic garb and paying with EBT cards.)

What news from Mogadishu on the Mississippi?

“Minnesota daycare owner pleads guilty to 2 fraud charges” (CBS, July 9, 2026):

A Minnesota daycare owner who prosecutors said tried to flee the United States two days after shutting her center down pleaded guilty to fraud charges on Thursday.

Fahima Mahamud pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, according to court records.

Prosecutors said Mahamud ran Future Leaders Early Learning and pocketed money meant to feed children during the pandemic. Charges said she received more than $850,000 in fraudulent funds as part of the Feeding Our Future scheme, using most of that money to buy real estate. She also filed separate claims for about $4.6 million from the federal Child Care Assistance Program, according to the Department of Justice.

One consistent feature of our journalism heroes is that they answer the question “compared to what?” Fahima Mahamud stole over $5 million in taxpayer funds, but how does that compare to the work that honest Americans must do to supply these funds? ChatGPT to the rescue:

Using a single, childless, under-65 full-time worker earning the current median:

Median weekly earnings: $1,235, or about $64,220 annually.
2026 standard deduction: $16,100, leaving $48,120 taxable.
Federal income tax: approximately $5,526 per year, assuming no special credits or deductions and applying the 10% and 12% brackets.

At 2,080 working hours per year, that worker pays about $2.66 of federal income tax per hour worked.

Therefore, accumulating $5 million of federal personal income-tax payments would require approximately:

1.88 million hours of work

That equals roughly:

905 years working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year
About 22 full 40-year working lifetimes

The answer seems to be that 22 Americans must toil for their entire lives in order to fund our enrichment by one Somali. (Or maybe we could look at this as including chain migration and children of the enricher and then it would be 22 Americans working for a lifetime and receiving $0 in federal government services to enable us to be enriched by 10 or 15 Somalis?)

Full post, including comments

Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan as examples of GDP growth with working population shrinkage.

by philg

American and European peasants are often told by their respective elites that immigration is necessary because a shrinking and/or aging population inevitably leads to an economic crisis.

Let’s look at Taiwan. The working-age population peaked in 2015. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), the economy has grown by more than 50 percent since then. What about right now? It’s growing at a rate of over 10 percent per year.

What does Google AI say about South Korea in two separate queries?

South Korea is experiencing an unprecedented demographic crisis, driven by having the world’s lowest fertility rate.

South Korea’s real GDP grew by an impressive 1.8% in the first quarter of 2026, representing a 3.8% year-over-year increase.

Japan’s labor force has been shrinking since the mid-1990s:

During what we’re told is a demographic catastrophe, Japan’s real GDP has been growing steadily:

(Of course, this means that the real GDP per worker is growing quite robustly.)

How does the religious belief that population shrinkage is an economic catastrophe remain unchallenged given the above examples?

Full post, including comments

Why does birth tourism to middle class foreigners bother Americans, but millions of children of millions of TPS foreigners don’t concern anyone?

by philg

A post on X about birth tourism that turned middle class Hondurans into Americans was exciting enough to get over 750,000 views:

Stories about Chinese birth tourism “rings” also reliably generate interest/outrage. Anyone with enough money to participate in a birth tourism scheme is from at least a middle class family in a foreign country and, therefore, is unlikely to become the founder of a multi-generational welfare dynasty. (Statistically, those who grow up in self-sufficient households are likely to be adults in self-sufficient households.)

Meanwhile, the US citizens being birthed by foreigners here “temporarily” under Temporary Protected Status, some since 1990, aren’t of interest. Neither Gemini nor ChatGPT could even begin to estimate how many foreigners, total, have spent time in the U.S. under TPS. Partly because of that, neither AI could begin to estimate how many children they’ve had, each one with a U.S. passport. The best that the AIs can do is come up with 1.3 million foreign TPS holders in the U.S. right now and possibly 390,000 U.S. citizen children living with them. Gemini estimates that the majority of TPS households with children are on what used to be called “welfare” (“safety-net participation”), but even AI probably can’t see into all of the state-run programs for which immigration status isn’t relevant, e.g., health care in California, public housing in Maskachusetts, etc. Our AI overlords say that the majority of children who in welfare-eligible households will grow up to adults living in welfare-eligible households (i.e., multi-generational welfare is the expectation, though at just over 50 percent). These stats are somewhat complicated by non-welfare welfare programs, e.g., the various below-market-rate rent schemes in New York City that cover more than half of rental units there.

During the entire time that the above-described Honduras-to-US pipeline was running, there was a 26-year “temporary” program to allow some favored subset of Hondurans to live in the U.S. There were over 100,000 Hondurans granted TPS during the program’s launch in 1999. Gemini says that almost no Honduran ever went back before Donald Trump ended their status and that almost none went home after the September 2025 termination either:

The termination of TPS did not grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to summarily deport people. To be removed from the country, individuals who do not leave voluntarily must be issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) and go through the formal immigration court system.

With immigration courts already facing massive multi-million case backlogs, processing thousands of long-term residents with clean criminal histories and significant family equities in the U.S. takes years, effectively leaving them in a prolonged state of legal limbo within the United States.

So a handful of pregnant Hondurans with the family resources (maybe from U.S. relatives) to pay for roundtrip airfare to Boston generates outrage due to the resulting 10+ U.S.-born anchor babies. Not a single one of these kids has ever been on welfare, to my knowledge, unless we consider the taxpayer-funded hospital payments to be welfare. But perhaps 100,000 births to Hondurans here under TPS, nearly all of which were similarly paid for by taxpayers and then resulted in welfare eligibility for at least 18 years, aren’t interesting.

Full post, including comments

Does Gemini (Google AI) think that European elites are adapting to Climate Change (TM) by replacing their peasants with humans imported from hot places?

by philg

Happy World Population Day, except to Elon Musk who says that humans are going extinct and should have more children, while simultaneously Elon refuses to make a Tesla self-driving minivan. In honor of this glorious day, set up after the Earth’s population reached 5 billion in 1987 (due to population collapse, Earth now has only about 8.2 billion humans (or maybe 10 billion)) , let’s take a look at a population on the other side of an ocean from us…

Gemini says Climate Change is real. Prompt and answer:

Is Climate Change real from a European perspective? I.e., is Europe hotter than it was 50 years ago and is it almost certain to become yet hotter 50 years from now?

Yes and yes. From a data-driven, scientific perspective, the physical reality of climate change in Europe matches both of your conditions.

When I asked Gemini “Create a poster for Americans to show solidarity with European heatwave victims by turning their thermostats up from 72 to 74” (no mention of skin color), it produced the following:

Note that the U.S. is a mixture of skin tones while everyone in Europe seems to be nonwhite. Could this reflect Gemini’s belief that European leaders have chosen a Climate Change adaption strategy of replacing their heat-intolerant subjects with imports from Africa and the Middle East who are, presumably, accustomed to hot weather.

Note closely related, but I love the “feels like the inside of a McDonald’s Apple Pie” phrase:

Also, European Union regulations require that animals being transported cannot be exposed to a temperature higher than 30C, perhaps with a +5C tolerance. The European Food Safety Authority, however, says that horses cannot be exposed to temperatures higher than 25C (i.e., about 20C cooler than temps inside upper-floor Paris and Berlin apartments when it was 40C outside?).

Full post, including comments