Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

CDC says that not-tested-for-COVID-19 migrants are a low risk while U.S. citizens who travel are a high risk

by philg

“CDC revokes U.S. authority to expel migrant children” (CBS/Yahoo, 3/12/2022):

The Biden administration announced late Friday it is ending a Trump-era border deportation policy as it pertains to unaccompanied migrant children in response to a court ruling that could’ve forced officials to expel those minors without an asylum screening.

The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which first authorized the migrant expulsions in March 2020, terminated the government’s ability to expel children who enter U.S. border custody without their parents. U.S. border officials can still use Title 42 to expel single adult migrants and families traveling with children to Mexico or their home countries.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman said the administration could no longer exempt unaccompanied children from Title 42, arguing that Texas, which challenged the exemption, was financially harmed by the placement of migrant children in the state due to medical and schooling costs.

In a notice Friday, CDC officials said they recognized the “unique vulnerabilities” of unaccompanied minors.

“In the current termination, CDC addresses the court’s concerns and has determined, after considering current public health conditions and recent developments, that expulsion of unaccompanied noncitizen children is not warranted to protect the public health,” the agency said.

(Note the headline. It is the Covidcrats who decide the size and composition of the U.S. population by determining immigration policy.)

The CDC (Science personified) says that an undocumented unmasked unvaccinated untested migrant who says “I am under 18” (by definition there is no way to verify such a claim since he/she/ze/they is undocumented) does not present a risk to public health. But the same agency tells us that U.S. citizens returning from the world’s most vaccinated countries, e.g., Portugal, are such high risks that they can’t legally begin a trip home without first getting a COVID-19 test and wearing a mask in the airports, airliner, Ubers, etc. (except while eating or drinking all of the food and beverages served by the airline, of course!)

Science is truly marvelous!

Speaking of Science, here’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s web site captured on 3/12/2022:

They say that they’re “following guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), New York State, and New York City” yet didn’t all of these experts on Science recently say that masks aren’t required? (except for kids in preschool)

How about the Getty in Los Angeles?

Vaccine papers are checked and masks are required because of the Department of Public Health’s Science-informed orders. Yet the referenced Department of Public Health ended its mask order on March 4. See “LA County’s indoor mask mandate ends as COVID metrics improve. Here’s what you need to know” (ABC):

Indoor mask-wearing will no longer be mandatory in Los Angeles County starting Friday thanks to revised data released by federal health officials showing a decreased impact of COVID-19 on the county’s health care system.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday officially moved the county out of its “high” virus activity category and into the “low” category. The CDC updates its county-level data every Thursday.

The CDC designations are based largely on the number of new virus-related hospital admissions and on the percentage of hospital beds being occupied by COVID-positive patients, along with a county’s overall rate of new COVID cases.

County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that given the CDC revision of the county’s classification, a new Health Officer Order will be issued that removes the county’s long-standing mandate for people to wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status. That move will put the county in alignment with the state, which dropped its mask mandate on Tuesday.

It is possible to Follow the Science even while doing the opposite of what Science says to do.

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The Guardian promotes open borders and decries 40 percent rent inflation

by philg

“Renters across US face sharp increases – averaging up to 40% in some cities” (The Guardian):

According to an analysis conducted by RedFin, rents in the US jumped 14% in December 2021 to $1,877 a month, the largest rise in more than two years.

Some of the most affected cities included Austin, Texas, with a 40% increase in rental prices compared with a year previous, New York City at a 35% increase, and several metro areas in Florida exceeding over 30% increases in rental prices.

Members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community are the worst-afflicted, according to The Guardian:

His $1,500-a-month rent was already a struggle for him to pay, and if late on rent payments he incurs a $100 fee. With the latest rental increase of nearly $450, he worries about his future in Sarasota, a community he’s lived in and helped build as a promoter and organizer for LGBTQ events over the years.

“Now, I can’t even afford to live in the community that I helped to create,” added Beadle. “This is not OK, There needs to be an answer for the young, single people who are trying to survive and thrive. We can’t just be happy with being able to pay rent one more month not knowing if we will have a place to live next month.”

One week before his wedding in January 2022, Joey Texeira and his partner received a lease renewal from their landlord in New York City, with a 30% increase to rent of $750 a month for a one-year lease renewal or a 41% rent increase of $1,050 a month for a two-year lease renewal for an apartment they have lived in since December 2020. The lease renewal would start on 1 May.

“We’re very stressed and don’t know exactly what we plan to do yet,” said Texeira.

His husband was also unexpectedly laid off recently and their neighbors downstairs were recently priced out of the apartment building with a rental increase of $250 to $500 added to their monthly rent.

How is it possible that the market-clearing price for housing is going up? Let’s look at the demand curve:

Why does the demand curve rise? Partly this is due to the no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce revolution, which creates more households per capita (the typical U.S. state’s family law takes people out of the workforce (successful plaintiffs face a huge disincentive to work because W-2 wages might result in a reduction of the family court gravy train), which reduces GDP available to build housing). But mostly the demand growth is due to immigration: “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065” (Pew 2015).

A larger population might not result in a housing crisis if every new addition to the population had sufficient skills to earn enough to afford a new house, but even Americans at the median cannot afford to live in a new apartment (see City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion for some numbers).

Leading up to the shock and horror of the 40 percent rent increase story, The Guardian has been advocating for increased low-skill immigration to the U.S. Here’s an example explicitly calling for “open borders” … “Why Democrats should support open borders” (Reece Jones, February 2018):

… the Republican leadership has already settled on an extreme position that will substantially reduce all immigration to the United States. … In the face of this recalcitrance, the Democrats must rethink their current incoherent immigration policy and argue robustly for more open borders.

Open borders could have an enormous positive impact on GDP worldwide.

The concern that some citizens might lose jobs to immigrants is not supported by research. One study found migrant and native workers are employed in different sectors of the economy, another showed that migrants create 1.2 additional jobs beyond the job they do because they rent an apartment, buy a car, and frequent local businesses.

How many people would actually move if borders were open? A 2011 Gallop survey found that 14% of the world population would like to move to another country, with perhaps 100 million wanting to go to the US. These numbers may alarm some, but these movements would happen over years, or even decades.

… there is not a moral or ethical reason to justify restricting the movement of other human beings at borders.

I disagree with Professor Jones that there are only 100 million people who would want to come to the world’s 2nd most generous welfare state (measured by percentage of GDP devoted to welfare). The U.S. offers free unlimited health care via Medicaid and/or simply going into a hospital for “charity care.” Why wouldn’t anyone on Planet Earth who has a serious illness want to come to the U.S. for pull-out-all-the-stops treatment? The cruel National Health Service in the UK won’t spend money if the bureaucrats don’t think it is worth it (explanation). But if you’re 80 years old and think that you might benefit from some joint replacements, why not pop over from the UK to the US and get the $300,000 of surgery that the UK’s NHS is denying? Since the borders are open, it will always be possible to migrate back.

On the other hand, I agree with Professor Jones that, under the ethics and morality professed by a majority of Americans, there is no reason to deny people from the world’s poorest countries free housing, health care, food, and smartphone here in the U.S. If “housing is a human right” is our reason for providing taxpayer-funded housing to an American who chooses not to work, an undocumented migrant should be equally entitled to a free house since the migrant is equally human.

Maybe that “open borders” headline is an outlier? Let’s sample “opinion plus US immigration” in The Guardian. “The Biden administration has ended use of the phrase ‘illegal alien’. It’s about time” (Moustafa Bayoumi, April 2021):

Real immigration reform must follow. Paths to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people who are living in the shadows must be made into law. Unaccompanied minors must be afforded the same levels of safety and dignity we would want for our own children. And asylees must be admitted at far higher numbers than currently permitted.

Every asylum-seeker needs a place to live, presumably. And someone who claims to be an unaccompanied minor (there is no way to verify the age of an “undocumented” person since one cannot ask for his/her/zir/their passport) can’t have a safe and dignified lifestyle without a taxpayer-funded apartment.

“Calls to end inhumane border conditions aren’t enough. Ice must be abolished” (Natascha Elena Uhlmann, September 2019):

… where are we as a society if we cannot dream bigger? What does it mean that some of our most beloved writers – who have laboriously envisioned new and radical worlds – didn’t imagine a future that respects the right to human movement?

It is by refusing to concede to a rightwing vision of possibility that unimaginable prospects become reality.

With our imagination we can turn currently vacant land into 7 million houses/apartments for “extremely low-income renter households” (the “gap” as of March 2021).

“‘Australia’s loss is America’s gain’: the Nauru and Manus refugees starting anew in the US” (Anne Richard, January 2019):

Australia had stopped thousands of asylum seekers from reaching its shores and had arranged to detain them on islands in the South Pacific; the US had agreed to resettle some in America. … As the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration in the US, I had signed the deal in September 2016. Had our team said no to the Australians, it might have kept the pressure on them to change their policy, but reports about the dire conditions on the islands worried us and my sense was the refugees would be better off restarting their lives elsewhere as soon as possible.

I met Sri Lankan parents of three children – including a baby born under difficult circumstances in the Pacific Island nation of Nauru – who are now living on the US west coast, happy that their children will receive an education, have a good future and experience freedom. The father, however, fears the earnings from his job at an Indian restaurant will not be sufficient to pay the rent for a two-bedroom apartment and other bills.

… three young men told me they had fled their village in Pakistan … One is working the graveyard shift at a convenience store and another, who had earlier studied medicine, is now a landscaper.

(Would the profiled 2SLGBTQQIA+ folks afflicted with 30-40 percent rent increases have preferred to pay their old rent and pulled a few weeds themselves and perhaps waited until 7 am for the convenience store to reopen?)

“Ice is a tool of illegality. It must be abolished” (Zephyr Teachout, June 2018):

On Sunday, Trump doubled down and took direct aim at our constitutional order when he tweeted: “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”

This is a direct affront to the most foundational principles of public morality and law. Our constitution insists that “no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law”. It should not need saying, but undocumented immigrants are persons.

“Why Trump thinks domestic violence victims don’t deserve asylum” (Jill Filipovic, June 2018):

What else, other than out-and-out hostility and a desire to hurt the most vulnerable, justifies Sessions’s decision to remove asylum protections from women suffering violence at the hands of their partners?

In other words, anyone willing to spin a tale of domestic suffering, which cannot possibly be verified from 1,000+ miles away, is entitled to live in the U.S. forever.

Going back to the happy days before the Trump dictatorship… “Bernie Sanders is wrong on open borders: they’d help boost the economy” (Cory Massimino, August 2015):

Bernie Sanders has come out against open borders, claiming they are a “right-wing proposal” that “would make everyone in America poorer.” He argues that, while we have a “moral responsibility” to “work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty… you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.”

In other words, Bernie predicted, 6 years in advance, that non-immigrant Americans would become poor via rent increases! And some of the haters who comment here say that Comrade Bernie does not understand economics!

Related:

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Ukrainians on the Ukraine situation

by philg

The situation in Ukraine is bewildering to those of us who received parochial American educations. The Wall Street Journal attempts to explain it in “Putin’s Endgame: Unravel the Post-Cold War Agreements That Humiliated Russia”:

The Russian leader is trying to stop further enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose expansion he sees as encroaching on Russia’s security and part of the West’s deception and broken promises. He wants NATO to scale back its military reach to the 1990s, before it expanded east of Germany.

In sum, Mr. Putin seeks to undo many of the security consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, an event the Russian leader has called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Looking back, many current and former Western officials say it is clear that the U.S. and its allies handled relations with Moscow poorly in the 1990s, and that the triumphalism over winning the Cold War was excessive.

“Although I think that Western diplomacy was arrogant and incompetent in the 1990s, and we’re paying the price now, that is not a reason for Putin to put himself in a posture that makes other people think he’s about to launch a war,” said Rodric Braithwaite, who was British ambassador to Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Yet in 1994, Russia joined with the U.S. and U.K. in committing “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against it, a security guarantee that helped persuade Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons.

Where are the US and the UK today with their “security guarantee”? (See the Budapest Memorandum.)

A successful friend who grew up in Ukraine:

Overheard young Swiss on a chairlift:
Guy 1: All this stuff with Ukraine is crazy. If World War III happened, it would be kind of cool. But also kind of not cool.
Guy 2: Yeah, it would not be. But you know, if we [Switzerland] manage to repeat what we did in WW2, we should be fine.

An American on the European response (putting the amazing new undersea pipeline on hold):

Man the Germans are sticking it to Putin. They are only going to buy half of their natural gas from him.

A Deplorable American with a Ph.D. in biology:

New sanctions are going to be about as effective against Putin and Russia as cloth masks were against the coronavirus.

From an aircraft mechanic:

If Putin takes over the Ukraine does Hunter still get his board of director payments?

An American passionate about free speech:

I am curious to see how long it takes for Twitter to suspend Putin’s account for spreading misinformation. Or does suspension apply only to “mean tweets”?

One question is whether the 44 million people who live in the Ukraine can qualify for asylum in the U.S. A person who says “my spouse is hitting me” qualifies for permanent residence in the U.S. and, if he/she/ze/they does not wish to work all that much, a lifetime of associated means-tested subsidies for housing, health care, food, and smartphone. As fearsome and difficult to escape as a domestic partner might be, a shooting war involving the powerful Russian Army is surely scarier. (Note that the New York Department of Health actually spends more than what the Russians spend on their entire military.)

I asked a friend who gets a paycheck from the refugee-industrial complex what would stop all 44 million Ukrainians from going to Mexico, walking across the Rio Grande, and saying “I request asylum”. His response:

They might qualify, but due to Trump policy that courts have not let Biden rescind, asylum seekers are being sent back across the border to wait in Mexico. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case. They might have a better chance of getting asylum if flew into NY on a tourist or other visa and then got a lawyer and filed asylum claim.

Me: “I don’t see how one can argue that Ukraine is not a dangerous place to be right now.”

Covid rule is different. That’s called “Title 42” and allows for immediate deportations due to health crisis. It also depends which city your hearing is held in. Rate along southern border is much lower than in NY. And if you have a lawyer, about 10x better chance. I would agree those fleeing Ukraine have a decent claim, but you’d still have to convince asylum judge. Being a political dissident or member of religious minority is better than just saying “I’m scared of war”. If Russians or Separatists declare that they’re looking for you that would help. You need to be able to convince a judge that you have a reasonable fear of persecution. Asylum seeker must show that they have a “well-founded fear of persecution in their home country on account of either race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.” That’s the legal principle.

He pointed out that Temporary Protected Status would also be an option for Ukrainians who wished to be far away from any armed conflict.

Haitians had it after earthquake.

(“Temporary” for Haitians began in 2010 and was recently extended to at least 2023. Children born in the U.S. in when “temporary” began are now biologically capable of having children themselves.)

The question of 44 million Ukrainians being entitled to come here makes me wonder a bit about what kind of society the U.S. is building by giving immigration priority to those who say that they are at risk of being attacked somewhere else. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, people migrated to the U.S. because they liked the idea of living in the U.S. Now we are filling the U.S. to a Chinese/Indian density with people who say that they don’t want to live wherever they’ve been living. It isn’t that they are attracted to what they perceive as American cultural values, for example, but they are repelled by threats against life and limb wherever they are. They might find American cultural values, such as hatred of Asians and discrimination against Blacks and those who identify as “women”, abhorrent, as Eileen Gu does, but living in the U.S. is nonetheless preferable to suffering inescapable domestic or gang violence in their home countries.

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The Boulder County fire

by philg

In January, I visited the site of the 2021–2022 Boulder County fires. The section that I visited is directly behind a huge fire station:

More shocking than the inequality that AOC and Bernie Sanders highlight, here’s an undamaged house right next to one that burnt down.

(A friend in the area said that homeowners of undamaged houses have nonetheless been able to get insurance companies to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars per house to address carcinogenic chemicals that got onto and into their houses.)

These cars were likely insured, but they’re going to be tough to replace given the perennial “chip shortage.”

There is a community center with gym and pool directly across the street from this scene of destruction:

Miscellaneous images:

My friend who lives in a burned neighborhood (but his house was spared) said that people got away in their pajamas and had no time to rescue anything from within their homes. “I told my neighbor, who is about the same size, to just come and grab anything that he wanted from my closet,” he said.

Builders are quoting $500 per square foot to rebuild, which translates to $1 million for a modest 2,000 square foot house. Hardly anyone is insured to that extent, so it is unclear what will happen (government bailout?).

The cost of building a house in Colorado raises the question of how the U.S. will house the next 103 million migrants and their children (see “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065” (Pew, 2015) for a calculation that 73 million folks who needed housing were added “due to 1965-2015 immigration”). Americans who earn at the median wage cannot afford the construction cost of a new house (see City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion for how this was true in 2019, before the inflation of 2021). Colorado itself is not handling immigrants, whether from other states or foreign nations, gracefully. Everyone with whom I talked said that the state had become overcrowded and was a far more pleasant place to live 15 or 20 years ago (4.1 million people lived in CO in 2000; it is currently nearly 6 million). Traffic in Denver was jammed from about 3 pm to 7 pm on a Friday. From 4:39 pm:

Colorado apparently cannot afford to build the highway network that it needs to support the population that it currently has, but is adding more people by the day.

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Encanto: Latinx migrants get a free house

by philg

The heart-warming story of the movie Encanto begins with Latinx migrants fleeing violence (in Colombia) and almost immediately getting a free house (created by a magic candle).

This was a hit with the elementary schoolers in our household, though it lacks a villain (there are no white non-Latinx characters and therefore nobody can be truly bad). Without a villain, a traditional element of drama is missing. The virtuous Latinx characters are essentially fighting with themselves.

It doesn’t seem as though anyone Colombian worked in a senior role on the film and therefore the work is solidly in the Hollywood tradition of cultural appropriation. Partial redemption for this sin is achieved by having the physically strongest character, able to lift an entire church due to a magic gift of strength, be someone who identifies as a young woman.

Students of zoology and geography will be pleased to see that one of the South American animals that is included in a menagerie is identified in the dialog as a “leopard” (i.e., not a jaguar). Loyal reader Toucan Sam will, no doubt, be willing to overlook this issue…

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Politician characterizes immigrant-rich California as “like a third world country”

by philg

At 27 percent, California leads the U.S. in percentage of population who are foreign-born (Wikipedia). Many of these folks migrated from low-income countries where the typical resident is “low-skill” from the perspective of a U.S. employer.

What if a politician referred to California as “like a third world country”? We would cancel him/her/zir/them as a Trump-poisoned hater of low-skill migrants, right?

“Newsom grapples with his ‘third-world country’” (Politico):

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s frustration was palpable on Thursday, as he cleaned up trash-strewn railroad tracks in Los Angeles that have become the site of innumerable package thefts. You may have seen images of the property crimes in question. They’ve permeated California’s media markets and been beamed beyond our borders, where the coverage has often advanced a familiar narrative of California spiraling into dystopia. None of that is lost on Newsom.

“I’m asking myself, what the hell is going on? We look like a third-world country,” Newsom said

Separately, “Newsom has big plans to get rid of California’s massive homeless camps. Will they work?”:

After pouring an unprecedented $12 billion into homeless housing and services last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom now is turning to the massive tent camps, shantytowns and makeshift RV parks that have taken over California’s streets, parks and open spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a never-before-seen effort, the governor is doling out $50 million this winter to help cities and counties clear out camps and house people living outside. San Jose, Richmond and Santa Cruz are among those that might benefit. Newsom hopes to increase that investment 10-fold in the coming year’s budget and add $1.5 billion to house people with behavioral health conditions. In charge of it all will be Newsom’s new state homelessness council, co-chaired by none other than the face of California’s COVID response — Dr. Mark Ghaly.

“This is probably one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime type funding that we’re seeing from the state,” said Michelle Milam, crime prevention manager for the Richmond Police Department and a member of the city’s homelessness task force. “We’ve never seen this kind of investment from the state for encampments.”

If he/she/ze/they is canceled as a result of this hate speech, maybe Mx. Newsom will retire to state-income-tax-free 3-percent-foreign-born Wyoming?

Based on my own travels, I think that Mx. Newsom is incorrect regarding California looking like a third-world country. The major cities in the poorest countries that I have visited do not feature people encamped in tents on sidewalks, people consuming drugs out in the open, etc. See my photos from Haiti, for example (not the tourist Haiti, but the authentic Haiti). A sample:

And, from the Provincetown Public Library, taken shortly after the above photo, some migration-related titles in the Young Adult Non-Fiction section:

Related:

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D.C.-based technocrats decide where to park the Afghan migrants

by philg

“For Afghan Refugees, a Choice Between Community and Opportunity” (NYT, 11/24/2021):

In resettling thousands of displaced Afghans, the Biden administration must weigh their need for support against the needs of the U.S. labor market.

That is the difficult question facing President Biden’s administration and the nation’s nonprofit resettlement organizations as they work to find places to live for the newly displaced Afghans. As of Nov. 19, more than 22,500 have been settled, including 3,500 in one week in October, and 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country, waiting for their new homes.

Initial agreements between the State Department and the resettlement agencies involved sending 5,255 to California, 4,481 to Texas, 1,800 to Oklahoma, 1,679 to Washington, 1,610 to Arizona, and hundreds more to almost every state. North Dakota will get at least 49 refugees. Mississippi and Alabama will get at least 10.

It seems as though the D.C.-based technocrats have decided that the Afghan migrants will not live in Montgomery County, Maryland, Fairfax County, Virginia, Northwest D.C.. or, indeed, anywhere within a two-day drive of Washington, D.C.

Related:

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Manufacturing a U.S. citizen in 9 months

by philg

The phenomenon of anchor babies merits a Wikipedia page: “a child born to a non-citizen mother in a country that has birthright citizenship which will therefore help the mother and other family members gain legal residency.” The term itself is hateful, according to the New York Times, and therefore used by haters such as Donald Trump (a 2015 article). Whatever these new U.S. citizens are called, it is popularly believed that the pregnant mom has to travel to the U.S., thus limiting production.

Would it be possible to produce an anchor baby remotely? The answer turns out to be “yes”.

While chatting recently with a European friend, I learned that many of the things that we cherish are illegal in Europe. Abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, for example, is generally illegal in Germany. Surrogacy is illegal almost everywhere in Europe, but it is not illegal to write a check to the U.S. industrial-reproductive complex and produce a baby via surrogacy here in the U.S. The resulting birthright U.S. citizen will have European genetic parents and be entitled to a U.S. passport.

A combination of a 19th century rule regarding former slaves and 21st century reproductive technology!

Related (mostly showing that I am late to learn about this!):

  • Payment for surrogate mothers: “Per month of pregnancy the surrogate mother is receiving about $2800. … the woman who seeks to get paid for having an abortion gets paid at least $83,333 per month of pregnancy, 30X as much as the woman who gets paid for having a baby.” (the post is from 2014, so it doesn’t highlight that men are just as likely to get pregnant as women.
  • “Whoa, Baby! Why American Surrogates Are in Demand for Chinese Families” (Hollywood Reporter 2016): Of course, any baby born via surrogate in the U.S. has birthright citizenship. “The Chinese couples really like that because a lot of them want to come back and forth,” says Molly O’Brien, a fertility lawyer with offices in Torrance who frequently travels to China to participate in information sessions for would-be parents, often sponsored by doctors offices or assisted-reproduction agencies. “Maybe they eventually want that child to be able to go to college here.”
  • “Coming to U.S. for Baby, and Womb to Carry It” (NYT, 2014): “… the situation is quite different in Portugal — as it is in most of the world where the hiring of a woman to carry a child is forbidden.” (Note the hurtful assumption, in which a prospective pregnant person is presumed to identify as a “woman”)
  • “Made in America” (The New Republic, 2017): “For years, we’ve looked to China for cheap labor. Now Chinese couples are coming to the U.S. for a new form of outsourcing: hiring American women to produce babies.” (Note the hateful language, in which pregnant people are referred to as “women”)
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Jimmy Carter and China’s offer of 10 million migrants

by philg

There was a period in the 1970s when China and the U.S. were expanding trade ties and a sticking point was a requirement that a county couldn’t get low tariffs (“most favored nation”) status unless it was fully open to emigration, a measure that was intended to pressure the Soviet Union.

During a conversation with President Jimmy Carter, however, Deng Xiaoping called the Americans’ bluff:

Vice Premier Deng: On the amendment supported by Senator Jackson, it really has nothing to do with China. The Jackson amendment demands that the Soviet Union allow free emigration. Would you like to import ten million Chinese?

The answer was “Uh, thanks, but no thanks”. The U.S. did not want the offered migrants and, according to the lecture series that I recently finished, the sticking point was removed and tariffs on Chinese products were reduced.

(See “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065” (Pew, 2015) for how the U.S. ended up bringing in 59 million migrants between 1965 and 2015.)

I was reminded of this when reading about the drama currently playing out in Europe. The European welfare states say that migration is a human right and also that every migrant who shows up has a right to housing, health care, food, etc. They also tell the native-born that low-skill migrants are making native-born vastly better off culturally and economically. But it is a different story when they’re offered some actual migrants… “Merkel appeals to Putin to intervene in Belarus border crisis” (Guardian):

In a phone call on a crisis that has escalated dramatically since Monday, when 1,000 people mainly from Iraqi Kurdistan arrived on the border, the German chancellor told Putin that the “use of migrants by the Belarusian regime was inhuman and unacceptable and asked [Putin] to influence the regime in Minsk”, according to the chancellor’s spokesperson, Steffen Seibert, who described the situation as “state-sanctioned human trafficking”.

The arrival of more than 1,000 people, many from Iraqi Kurdistan, at the Polish border on Monday brought the crisis to a head, with the EU accusing Belarus of a “hybrid attack”. Polish border guards said on Wednesday that two groups of several dozen people had breached the borders overnight. They were arrested and expelled, they said. Lithuanian border guards said they had prevented 281 attempts to cross the border illegally on Tuesday.

Charles Michel, the European Council president, said during a visit to Warsaw on Wednesday that Belarus’s actions were unacceptable. “Possible sanctions are on the table … and we want to make sure that we coordinate with all the member states in order to make the best possible choices and to identify what are the best possible tools in order to be effective. It must stop, this hybrid attack against the EU,” he said.

On Tuesday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said western countries including EU member states, and Nato, were the “root” of the crisis. “They were pushing for a western-style better life and democracy the way it is interpreted by the west,” he said, referring to US-led interventions and alleged western backing for the Arab spring.

Asked whether Germany would take in migrants unilaterally, Merkel’s spokesperson said the question was “irrelevant”.

Related:

  • “Blue States, You’re the Problem” (nytimes, 11/9/2021), in which they ask the same question that I often ask here on this blog: since there are no Republicans in the Bay Area, why don’t the rich Democrats there who say that they want to house the unhoused build some housing for the unhoused?
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Does the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill give us some insight into the cost of immigration?

by philg

With the U.S. already having spent more, as a percentage of GDP, on infrastructure than Germany (previous post), how did we get to the point that we needed to spend another $1.2 trillion? (sounds like a lot, but maybe $1.2 trillion will be the price of a Diet Coke by the time some of these projects are completed)

In How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure? I did a rough calculation that every new migrant would cost the U.S. $250,000 in infrastructure expense. At that rate, the $1.2 trillion will build (or repair) enough infrastructure for 4.8 million migrants (as many people as live in Los Angeles+San Jose (the cities themselves) or about four years of legal immigration under the pre-2021 rules).

So, maybe we could look at this as catching up to the costs of the immigrants who arrived since 2017. On the other hand, is the money going to be spent in states where immigrants have settled and/or where population is growing? And on the third hand, why is infrastructure spending federalized? Don’t individual states have a better idea of what infrastructure is required? Wouldn’t it make more sense for states to tax, borrow, and spend on infrastructure as necessary than to send money up to central planners and have them, sitting in Washington, D.C., try to figure out whether a bridge that is 2,500 miles away should be rebuilt?

Here in Florida, infrastructure spending includes some awesome signage:

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico, by a Harvard professor): if we ignore costs such as traffic and school congestion, there are some financial benefits to natives from low-skill immigration, but they all go to the rich at the expense of the poor and working class (i.e., low-skill immigration transfers wealth from American workers to American landlords and corporation owners)
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