Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

Counting “undetected” undocumented immigrants

by philg

“Biden Administration Has Admitted One Million Migrants to Await Hearings” (New York Times, today):

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — At a modest hotel a few miles from the ocean here, most of the rooms have been occupied this summer by families from African countries seeking asylum — 192 adults and 119 children in all.

They are among the more than one million undocumented immigrants who have been allowed into the country temporarily after crossing the border during President Biden’s tenure, part of a record-breaking cascade of irregular migration around the world.

Distinct from the hundreds of thousands who have entered the country undetected during Mr. Biden’s term, many of the one million are hoping for asylum — a long shot — and will have to wait seven years on average before a decision on their case is reached because of the nation’s clogged immigration system.

It is the text that I have highlighted above that is the subject of this blog post. If the folks who have “entered the country undetected” were not detected, how can anyone purport to begin to estimate their number?

There are some less-interesting tidbits in the article:

The million who have been allowed in since Mr. Biden took office — a figure that comes from internal Homeland Security data and court filings — are from more than 150 countries around the globe. With few pathways to enter the United States legally, crossing the border without documentation is often the only option for those fleeing crime and economic despair.

The U.S. is bordered by only two countries, Canada and Mexico. How is the U.S. then the “only option” for people “from more than 150 countries”? If people have the right to claim asylum anywhere in the world, why is it a journalistic fact, not an opinion, that their only option to cross multiple borders before taking up residence in Portland, Maine?

“Since we can’t go back in time and convince Americans to have more babies, we’ll need immigrants to fill out the labor force,” said Amon Emeka, a sociology professor at Skidmore University. “It will be critical that immigrants be integrated in the U.S. labor market to make up labor shortfalls in the years to come.”

This is the opposite of the perspective that I heard in Oslo last week. Rather than additional migrants, Norwegians with whom I spoke said they would rather have open space and elbow room, even if it means counter-service restaurants (“Panera-style”) are destined to be the norm rather than table-service. It would not be an improvement, from their perspective, to grow Norway from 5 million population to 10 million, especially not with low-skill immigrants.

Who benefits when Metro Portland’s population is expanded and rents consequently go up? As predicted in this article by a Harvard professor, folks who own businesses and apartment buildings:

Ben Conniff, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Luke’s Lobster, said his business relies heavily on immigrants. About one-third of the employees at the company’s processing plant in Saco are asylum seekers, and he is desperate to hire more.

What’s the timeline?

Currently, it takes between five and seven years for asylum cases to be decided. If an application is denied, there are opportunities to appeal, adding more years to an immigrant’s time in the country.

If a child is born at the beginning of an asylum-seeker’s residence in the U.S., in other words, he/she/ze/they could be 18 years old before the end of the legal process and therefore able to get the rest of the family in via chain migration (the parents, e.g., will have an automatic right to a Green Card because the adult child is a U.S. citizen via birthright citizenship).

Maria Zombo, an Angolan asylum seeker and mother of six who lives outside of Portland, recently opened an African grocery store in the revitalized downtown of Biddeford. She came to the country on a tourist visa eight years ago, and has yet to receive an initial response to her application for asylum. She has started a business, purchased a home and had a child.

Her experience is not atypical, said Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a nonprofit.

“People are having their entire life here happen before they get an answer,” Ms. Cruz said.

In U.S. family courts, having even one child is considered a disabling condition for a plaintiff identifying as a “mother” with respect to the world of employment yet this mother of six is hard at work running a money transfer shop (photo: Kirsten Luce):

Maybe the folks who say that low-skill migrants are an economic boon are right? (Or possibly, the NYT happened to feature this migrant rather than hundreds who were not working?)

Circling back to the main topic of this post… how do we know how many migrants are in the U.S. if many are “undetected”? “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates” (2018) describes an attempt: “After running 1,000,000 simulations of the model, the researchers’ 95% probability range is 16 million to 29 million, with 22.1 million as the mean.”

Related:

Full post, including comments

Residents of Connecticut welcome immigrants…

by philg

…. so long as they’re not going to live in Connecticut.

Here’s CT Senator Chris Murphy on immigration:

“President Trump’s so-called immigration framework is a total non-starter. It uses Connecticut Dreamers as a bargaining chip to build a wall and rip thousands of families apart,” said Murphy. “It looks like President Trump has no intention of actually working on a bipartisan deal that protects Dreamers and makes sensible changes to our immigration laws. He’s trying to turn our nation against immigrants – preying on the worst kind of prejudice and ignoring the fact that immigration boosts our economy and grows jobs.”

And CT’s other Senator, Richard Blumenthal:

“This proposal is immigration hostage taking. Hundreds of thousands of young people are being held hostage in the name of the far right’s repulsive and repugnant anti-immigrant fantasy. The party of so-called family values has revealed itself to care more for its nativist political base than the actual families that would be cruelly ripped or kept apart under this proposal. One of its most heartless provisions would send refugee children back to the countries they have fled without even a fig leaf of due process – a proposal almost certain to send children to their deaths,” Blumenthal said.

Since these are the only two senators that the state has, it seems safe to infer that the majority of folks in Connecticut support the expansion of U.S. population via immigration. This support is not conditional on whether immigrants have work skills or have any practical chance of working (e.g., a 75-year-old chain migrant).

What if some of those new Americans want to live in Connecticut? “Town After Town, Residents Are Fighting Affordable Housing in Connecticut” (New York Times, today):

In the town of Fairfield, Conn., nearly 2,400 residents have signed a petition opposing a project proposed for downtown that could bring 19 units of affordable housing.

In nearby New Canaan, homeowners have raised about $84,000 for a legal fund to fight a proposed apartment complex downtown on Weed Street that would include 31 rent-restricted units for households with moderate incomes.

And in Greenwich, a developer recently withdrew an application to build a project that would include 58 apartments priced below market rate, after residents living in nearby luxury condominiums objected and said the buildings that would be demolished were historically significant.

Throughout Fairfield County, Conn., local residents and elected officials are seeking to block large housing projects that include units affordable to low- and moderate-income households, warning that the increased density could change the character of their towns. The 32-year-old law that enables such projects has always generated some pushback, but the opposition has grown more fierce as the number of proposals has increased in recent years.

The NYT article says that migrants might be welcome if they can afford $2.2 million for a house. How well is the U.S. set up for a population expansion, from an infrastructure perspective?

His daily commute on Interstate 95, while only 14 miles, “can take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes,” he said. “That seat time takes its toll.”

It’s a “fact that immigration boosts our economy and grows jobs” (Senator Murphy, above) and yet the good citizens of Connecticut are fighting against the prospect of these beneficial immigrants living anywhere near them. Existing residents don’t want a boosted economy and more jobs, but they want to change federal law so that the economy and jobs can be boosted in other states?

From a 2009 helicopter trip (Los Angeles to Boston), a section of the Connecticut coast:

Related:

Full post, including comments

8 million Progressives welcome 4,900 asylum-seekers

by philg

“A Migrant Wave Tests New York City’s Identity as the World’s Sanctuary“ (New York Times, August 20):

New York wants to welcome new immigrants. Its economy and vibrancy depend on them. But an influx has strained a social safety net already on the brink.

The influx of migrants to the city this spring and summer, most fleeing crime and cratering economies in Central and South America, has tested New York’s reputation as a world sanctuary. And it shows no sign of slowing, thanks in part to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, whose decision to send busload after busload to Washington and New York to goad Democrats on border policy has helped turn the normal north-flowing river of humanity into a wave.

New York City has long been powered to a large extent by the sweat and toil of immigrants, but its ability to help them get on their feet has been increasingly strained.

The delivery of 129 migrants to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Wednesday was the biggest one-day total so far in Mr. Abbott’s campaign. But it was just part of the larger migration of thousands: According to the city, the shelter system now houses 4,900 asylum seekers.

Never mentioned in this article: New York City is home to more than 8 million people, nearly all of whom evince a Progressive political point of view, which includes #NoHumanIsIllegal. If we consider the metro area, the total size of the welcoming committee is 20 million. Given the above numbers, there should be roughly 5,000 New Yorkers assisting each asylum-seeker. How do the 4,900 compare to the overall flow across the border? Here are the numbers for the subset of migrants who are apprehended by La Migra:

The Progressives of New York City, in other words, are currently hosting 1/400th of the total quantity of apprehended migrants so far in FY2022.

Department of possibly low skill, but certainly not low intelligence:

“Imagine that we came all this way walking,” said Carolina Flores, 31, who fled Venezuela with her husband and four children and has settled with them at a shelter in Brooklyn. “Everything is very good, a hotel and house for free — that is something that would never happen in our country.”

The above comment raises a question: Why did she and her children have to walk? If we are are eager to provide asylum to those who need it, why do we insist that the asylees and refugees be fit enough to walk to the U.S.? Why not send a daily Airbus A380 to Caracas to pick up those who say that they need asylum? Mkm, a reader from NYC, asked the same question in a comment:

Why not just run free flights from Central America to JFK. Cut out all the misery in between.

From a reader in Harvard Square:

It seems much of the ire aimed at illegal immigrants is their getting something for free and straining local economies. Interesting that no one comments on the true freeloaders: the wealthy who proportionally pay significantly less in taxes than the middle class and the working class. But their venality is camouflaged by propaganda.

Wonder what all those taxes could do to repair our infrastructure and to create a safety net that serves all who deserve aid. No one seems to complain about the skimming done by the 10 percent. But give a poor person a break, and people scream.

If only the rich would pay their fair share, all of our dreams would come true and, also, all of the dreams of every non-working migrant who chooses to come through our open borders. But what stops New York City from being a shining example of fair taxation? Even many of the richest New Yorkers identify as Progressive and espouse Progressive political points of view. There are no Republicans in positions of power in NYC. Nothing would stop New York City voters from imposing higher property taxes, higher income tax rates, and/or a straight-up wealth tax. (Same question for San Francisco! With no Republicans in the way, what stops the implementation of every Progressive dream, including universal housing and health care?)

Circling back to the “unrich” (as our kids say), employers in New York City depend on migrants to keep wages low:

The city’s desire to absorb these migrants as it has earlier waves reflects the fundamental fact that New York has always relied on immigrants in every sector of the work force, from restaurants and health care to the arts, technology and finance. When New Yorkers move away, immigrants take their places, often working essential low-wage jobs that others do not want.

Progressives claim to follow Rainbow Flagism, but have neglected to build housing specifically for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ migrant community:

The newcomers’ reviews of the shelter system have been unenthusiastic. “I don’t feel good at the shelter because I’m gay,” said Pedro Gutierrez, 30, who arrived from Venezuela on Aug. 4 and was assigned to a shelter on Wards Island. “Some people there are saying bad things about me, harassing me.”

From the reader comments, Lucia Gutiérrez of New Jersey:

I work in a domestic violence shelter and now refugee women from South America are coming more and more frequently to use ours services and we are straying from our original mission to help true survivors of domestic violence. As a member of the middle class and wife to a legal immigrant, whom we had to wait 2 years for the whole process to proceed, it’s frustrating to see all these people shamelessly coming through the border and asking for services, like subsidized housing, free school supplies, free healthcare, etc., all at tax payers’ expense. The worst part of all is that they lie about their employment status. Many do work but for cash, which makes it easy to hide their income, and hence qualify for services. As a person who’s always followed the rules, it’s so unfair. The worst part of all is that if we even mention any hint of criticisms towards these migrants, we are viewed as racists and non compassionate.

Meena, from California:

I cannot believe I am agreeing with Trump era policies.

Hazelmom:

Welcome to our reality in Texas! I can’t believe y’all are whining about a measly few thousand migrants-some months we get 60K crossing the border. Good to share the burden.

Sue from NJ:

But wait, I’ve heard time and again that migrants don’t cost American taxpayers anything. And yet now NY is saying they need federal dollars to house, feed, provide medical care for the influx. Oh, and also need to find room for 1,000 kids (so far) to enter the school system.

A physician echoes Milton Friedman on whether a open borders and a welfare state are compatible:

I run a mid size ICU in Iowa currently. 2-10% of our ICU patients are undocumented. … every hospitalization runs between $15,000 -$250,000. … The cost is passed on the paying patients. The labor & Delivery dept. also has its share of undocumented who deliver newly minted US citizens who qualify instantly for Medicaid. In New York, the hospitals rent apartments to keep patients who cannot be discharged home( strokes, brain injury)and Nursinghomes wont take these non citizens. They stay in the apartments indefinitely. … can we sustain this welfare state model?

From Nevada:

The spend per student in NYC public schools is $25,000 and even more for special needs and ESL students as most of these students will be. The cost of the hotel room or apartment is at least $4k per month. The cost of health care is at least $25K for a family (even if they don’t have actual insurance they do get cared for and that care costs money). So a family with 3 kids creates a minimum $150K public spend. No amount of labor will ever pay this back. And the tragedy is $150K per year could provide basic education health care and and housing for an entire village in Guatemala or El Salvador. This does not make sense.

Gulf Coast Cynic:

The only change I would make to Abbott’s policy is having the busses unload at the front door of the New York Times & Washington Post.

From Gotham:

In 1986, we were promised that if we accepted a ONE TIME ONLT amnesty, immigration issues would be effectively addressed with workable, humane legislation, strict enforcement with sufficient BP staff and a robust employer verification system. Well, we got the amnesty but none of the rest.

(The above is unfair, in my opinion. The U.S. welfare state, as it has evolved since the mid-1980s, made the employer verification system irrelevant because there is no longer any need for a migrant to work or, certainly, to work a non-cash job.)

Joe (from Arizona) and I can team up:

I would be willing to pay for the airfare to fly an immigrant family of four back to their own (country of origin) or to any sanctuary city in the USA.

(He will pay for transportation to the sanctuary city and I will pay for food from Costco for any migrant family that a Progressive homeowner wishes to host in his or her home for at least one year.)

From a variety of commenters:

Why aren’t New Yorkers sending their own buses down to Texas to pick up more immigrants?

I’m unclear as to why we have immigration laws.

A poem on a statue is not a reason to keep expanding our society beyond carrying capacity.

Full post, including comments

When will Governor Abbott send buses full of migrants to Atherton, Californa?

by philg

“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his,” said Ronald Reagan. I wonder if there is something similar going on with low-skill immigration. It was a minor, but certainly manageable, problem when millions of migrants walked across the southern border and settled into Texas to wait for the decades-long process of resolving an asylum claim (during which time multiple generations of U.S. citizens might be born to the asylum-seekers and their descendants). Any time that a bus full of migrants arrives in a Progressive neighborhood, on the other hand, it is a crisis. See Welcoming migrants in our nation’s capital and Progressives in Maine want U.S. to admit more low-skill migrants… and, for a more recent example, “Seeking Asylum in Texas; Sent to New York to Make a Political Point” (NYT, August 6, 2022):

Gov. Greg Abbott chartered a bus to send a group of migrants to New York, where Mayor Eric Adams said asylum seekers were overwhelming the city’s homeless shelters.

Since April, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has been shipping newly arrived asylum seekers to immigrant-friendly Democratic cities on the East Coast to try to pressure the Biden administration into cracking down at the border. Mr. Abbott’s press office said the bus that arrived in Manhattan on Friday, which left Eagle Pass, Wednesday afternoon, held “the first group of migrants bused to New York City from Texas.”

Like Washington, New York is “the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement on Friday. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.”

Last month, after the city violated the right-to-shelter law by failing to provide rooms for some people who had come to the family intake shelter in the Bronx, Mr. Adams blamed asylum seekers sent from Texas and Arizona.

(If anyone who is human has a legal right to shelter, why is the mayor of New York is “blaming” people for claiming this right?)

The Silicon Valley titans who control public discourse in the U.S. continue to support low-skill immigration into Texas and low-income neighborhoods around the U.S. I wonder what would happen if the rich Progressives were to personally encounter some low-skill migrants. “The billionaire famous for his early investment in Facebook wants America to build again—just not housing in his backyard” (Fortune):

In 2020, when the pandemic was going strong, billionaire Marc Andreessen turned heads by publishing an essay on his company website titled “It’s Time to Build.”

“I expect this essay to be the target of criticism,” he wrote while expressing a mindset that has come to be called YIMBY, for “yes in my backyard.”

“You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities,” he wrote. “We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential — which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future.” Then he expressed dissatisfaction with the state of urban architecture. “We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?”

Andreessen also lives in Atherton, California, America’s richest town,

Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is known for being an early investor in major tech companies including Meta, GitHub, Skype, and Twitter. In June, Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote an email expressing their opposition to a proposal that would increase zoning capacity for multi-family home construction in Atherton.

“I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”

Previously, “the venture capitalist said any proposal to “choke off” immigration “makes me sick to my stomach” (from “Asked why he supports Clinton over Trump, Marc Andreessen responds: ‘Is that a serious question?’”). What would happen if a Greg Abbott caravan of migrants showed up in front of Mr. Andreessen’s house and asked for the housing that is their legal and moral right?

Separately, the robot geniuses behind Twitter and Facebook are showing me a lot of information about Beto O’Rourke, running to replace Governor Abbott in Texas. I’m wondering if real estate owners in Florida should be donating to Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign. What could possibly be better for Florida real estate values than a true believer in the tax-and-spend-and-lockdown religion taking power in Texas? Imagine if all of the California businesses that have moved to Austin, Dallas, and Houston (HP!) in the past few years had instead moved to Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. Here’s Mr. O’Rourke promising to spend more money on government programs that are already among the most expensive (Medicaid and unionized public schools) while farcically promising that taxes will be reduced at the same time that spending is increased.

Here’s Mx. O’Rourke’s 2021 demand to Follow Science by keeping Texas locked down:

Full post, including comments

Progressives in Maine want U.S. to admit more low-skill migrants…

by philg

…. who will live somewhere other than in Maine. “Maine’s open door for refugees meets a housing shortage” (Christian Science Monitor):

Yet the city [Portland, Maine] that has been one of the most benevolent in America toward outsiders now finds itself with 1,200 newcomers, most from Africa and the Caribbean. They have come to Portland because they heard it had received fellow travelers humanely. Most speak no English; they have no money, no relatives or friends to house them; and they are not allowed to work for a living as their appeals for asylum slowly crawl through the system.

Its shelter filled, the city has put them up in motels while COVID-19 and winter created vacancies. But now the innkeepers want their rooms back for tourists, and Portland has no place to put them.

And still they keep coming.

Portland’s city health director took the extraordinary step in May of emailing agencies working on the southern U.S. border, telling them that immigrants “are no longer guaranteed shelter upon their arrival” in the city. The adjoining municipality of South Portland sent a similar message, and 79 local aid organizations followed with letters to the state of Maine and the federal government saying they were stretched too thin.

Judging by real estate prices, Portland has never been wealthier. Apartments and single-family houses have been bid up to a median price of over $500,000 (Zillow). What stops people rich enough to pay $500,000 for an apartment from paying up to house their refugee brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters?

… most pushback is framed in terms of the cost of services to newcomers at a time of inflation and rising expenses, says Ms. West, the city manager. “When you increase taxes, that’s really difficult for a lot of people in Portland to handle,” she says.

Aha! As with California Progressives, housing is a human right, but so is a Progressive’s right to save Mother Earth by buying a new Tesla rather than funding housing for the unhoused (whose right to housing remains undiminished by their lack of housing).

Related:

Full post, including comments

Welcoming migrants in our nation’s capital

by philg

“G.O.P. Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to East Coast” (New York Times, yesterday):

Lever Alejos arrived in the nation’s capital last week on a bus with dozens of fellow Venezuelans who had journeyed more than 1,300 miles from their broken country to the United States. Most had braved poisonous plants and thugs as they trudged through dense jungle on the Colombian border and waded in water up to their chins to cross the Rio Grande into Texas, some clutching babies.

After being processed by U.S. border authorities, the undocumented migrants were released into South Texas, free to go where they wanted. Mr. Alejos, 28, said he was offered two options: a $50 bus ride to San Antonio or a free bus ride to Washington, D.C., paid for by the State of Texas. “I wanted San Antonio, but I had run out of money,” said Mr. Alejos, who has no family in the United States. “I boarded the bus to Washington.”

With no money and no family to receive them, the migrants are overwhelming immigrant nonprofits and other volunteer groups, with many ending up in homeless shelters or on park benches. Five buses arrived on a recent day, spilling young men and families with nowhere to go into the streets near the Capitol.

Since April, Texas has delivered more than 6,200 migrants to the nation’s capital, with Arizona dispatching an additional 1,000 since May. The influx has prompted Muriel E. Bowser, Washington’s Democratic mayor, to ask the Defense Department to send the National Guard in. The request has infuriated organizations that have been assisting the migrants without any city support.

“The infrastructure in New York is not built for this,” she said. “We are not on the border.”

The situation has become acute in recent weeks with the arrival of so many Venezuelans, who cannot be expelled under Title 42 because Mexico will not take them and their own government does not have an agreement with the United States to accept deportation flights. And unlike most migrants from Mexico and Central America who have family and friends in the United States, Venezuelans often arrive with no money and nowhere to go.

The “migrants welcome” lawn signs all over Northwest D.C. were not sufficient, apparently, to handle even 1 percent of the undocumented migrants who come to the U.S. (compare the 7,200 migrants mentioned above to the roughly 22 million who lived in the U.S. as of 2018 (Yale)).

From April 2022 in D.C., No Human Being is Illegal:

Related:

Full post, including comments

Mighty brains of academia and non-profit figure out why Americans are homeless

by philg

There is a new book from some of America’s smartest people. First, the credentials…

GREGG COLBURN is an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. … Gregg holds a PhD and an MSW from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Northwestern University. … Gregg is also a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Family Homelessness Evaluation Committee and co-chair of the University of Washington’s Homelessness Research Initiative.

CLAYTON PAGE ALDERN is a neuroscientist turned journalist and data scientist based in Seattle. … A Rhodes scholar and a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.

What have these mighty brains learned? From Homelessness is a Housing Problem:

the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness.

The higher the rent, the higher the rate of people who can’t afford the rent:

In other words, we aren’t wealthy enough to build and maintain the housing to which we believe ourselves entitled.

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 people come over the southern border every month to claim asylum (US CBP stats) and common decency demands that, regardless of whether any can or do work, all be provided with reasonable quality housing. According to a book that I recently finished, The Swamp, there may be a limit to how many of these newcomers can come to South Florida. From a legal point of view, we can’t keep robbing the federally-protected Everglades of water. Our abuse of the animals who live there has some limits.

From a newspaper that passionately advocates for expanded low-skill immigration… “The Housing Shortage Isn’t Just a Coastal Crisis Anymore” (NYT, July 14):

What once seemed a blue-state coastal problem has increasingly become a national one, with consequences for the quality of life of American families, the health of the national economy and the politics of housing construction.

Freddie Mac has estimated that the nation is short 3.8 million housing units to keep up with household formation.

It is not an expanding population due to immigration that drives up prices in an Econ 101 supply and demand curve intersection, but rather inequality:

Other forces like widening income inequality also worsen housing affordability, said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. That’s because more higher-income households compete for limited housing (prompting builders to build high-end homes).

Our brightest minds are working on this:

The Biden administration also released a long list of ideas this spring for boosting housing supply.

The word “immigration” does not occur in this article.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Abortionomics: Migrant infants make us richer; native-born infants make us poorer

by philg

We are informed by our leaders and our media that immigrants, including infants, make the U.S. wealthier, no matter how low their skill level and no matter how low their parents’ and grandparents’ skill level (see The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications).

We are now informed that native-born infants make us poorer and, for maximum economic growth, should be eliminated from the U.S. population via abortion care. “Fall of Roe will have immediate economic ramifications, experts say” (Axios):

The U.S. will see devastating economic consequences from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, experts warned on Friday.

Why it matters: The landmark Turnaway Study found that women who have to carry an unwanted pregnancy were four times as likely to struggle with poverty years later. Raising a child costs over $230,000 on average, according to the Department of Agriculture.

What they’re saying: “This decision will cause immediate economic pain in 26 states where abortion bans are most likely and where people already face lower wages, less worker power, and limited access to health care. The fall of Roe will be an additional economic barricade,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement.

The big picture: In an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court last year, 154 economists wrote that there is “a substantial body of well developed and credible research that shows that abortion legalization and access in the United States has had — and continues to have — a significant effect on birth rates as well as broad downstream social and economic effects, including on women’s educational attainment and job opportunities.

Replacement theory has been proven wrong by science. But science also tells us that the only way we can prosper is if we provide abortion care to all pregnant people who are U.S. citizens and import infants and children via migration.

Related:

Full post, including comments

A foreigner forgets to ask for asylum and is deported

by philg

“Australian traveller strip-searched, held in US prison and deported over little-known entry requirement” (Guardian):

An Australian traveller was denied entry to the US, cavity searched, sent to prison alongside criminals and subsequently deported 30 hours after arriving, due to a little-known entry requirement for the US.

The Victorian student Jack Dunn applied for a visa waiver for his trip to the US in May and planned to travel on to Mexico. He had been warned about the need to prove his plan to exit the US, but was unaware of the rule that requires those entering on the waiver to have booked either a return flight or onward travel to a country that does not border the US.

After arriving in Honolulu Dunn was refused entry to the US and detained at a federal prison until he could be put on a return flight to Australia.

Dunn, 23, had spent more than half a year saving for his trip, and by May had enough for a three- to four-month adventure. He planned to start in the US to see the NBA playoffs, then spend most of his trip backpacking across Mexico and South America.

After landing at 6am on 5 May, he was interrogated by a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, who refused him entry after determining that he had not booked onward travel beyond Mexico.

He was put in an interrogation room with no wifi. Because he did not have a local sim card, had no access to the internet.

At one point, Dunn claims, an airline worker offered him his phone to book a flight from Mexico to a third country.

Dunn tried booking a flight to Panama, but did not have enough money in his debit card account, and as his own phone was not connected to the internet, he could not transfer money from his savings account, which held several thousand dollars. He then tried to book a cheaper flight to Guatemala, but the CBP officer re-entered the room and ordered the airline worker to take the phone back, Dunn claimed.

It’s a sad story because he would have been able to stay if he’d simply said “My parents are beating me up and I request asylum” or “there is a gang in my neighborhood that has targeted me for execution” (see “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies”: “Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew key rulings that his predecessor issued in 2018 limiting asylum for victims of domestic violence and gang threats.”).

What were the consequences of this failure to claim asylum?

Dunn said about six hours after landing he was handcuffed and taken to the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu, where he was told to strip naked and was twice searched under his scrotum and anus for contraband before being admitted.

Separately, I’m not sure why we need this rule. Since anyone can stay in the U.S. more or less indefinitely merely by saying “I don’t feel safe at home,” why are Australians whose trip terminates in Mexico or Canada a threat to our society?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Great Replacement Theory in the New York Times

by philg

From May: Is the New York Times the primary promoter of white replacement theory?

From June 6, a NYT article regarding migrants with a “high reproductive output”:

Lionfish are native to the Pacific and Indian oceans. But in the past few decades, the animal has established itself in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, where its invasive presence poses a serious threat to tropical Atlantic reefs and their associated habitats.

The effects are staggering. One study by scientists from Oregon State University found that, in only five weeks, a single lionfish reduced the juvenile fish in its feeding zone by 80 percent. And their reproductive output is remarkably high: Females can release around 25,000 eggs every few days. In some places, including the Bahamas, the density of lionfish may well be causing the most significant change to biodiversity of reef habitats since the dawn of industrialized fishing.

Noted!

Full post, including comments