Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

Lionel Shriver on why an American or European might oppose immigration on nonfinancial grounds

by philg

We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a country rich. If this is true, could there be any rational basis for opposing open borders? From Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life, a conversation between a Honduran and the 27-year-old son in her Brooklyn host family (“Big Apple, Big Heart” program):

“America is rich.”

“America is broke—thirty-three trillion dollars in debt, and a couple trill more every year.”

“Los inmigrantes take small money.”

“Small money adds up.”

“You is crowded? This house, three bedroom with nobody. In Honduras, thirty, forty people live here, no hay problema.”

“Okay, no, I’m not personally crowded.”

“You no pay. You no crowded. Why big feeling?”

“The ‘big feeling’ has to do with home. Home isn’t only a place; home is a big feeling. That you belong. That you can understand the people around you, and they can understand you, because you’re mostly the same.” Nico was struggling for a definition that didn’t stray into the tar pit of race. He resorted to Google’s conversation mode. “It’s about feeling comfortable and welcome and not having to try very hard. It’s a place where people laugh at your jokes, and you laugh at their jokes. You can sing some of the same songs. You watch some of the same TV programs. You know you can trust most people, and you know how to recognize the people you can’t trust. When your home fills up with people from somewhere else. Who speak different languages so you can’t understand each other. Who think different things. Who have no deep connection to your home, no ‘big feelings’ for your home. No history there. Who often . . .” Here he hesitated; this was awkward face-to-face, but he remembered Palermo’s unflattering characterization of her brother as only braving negative sentiments about people behind their backs. “Who often come to your home to take advantage, to see how much they can take. Well, then your home doesn’t seem like a home anymore. It seems like anywhere. It makes you sad.”

Of course, rich people in the U.S. can escape the above by moving, e.g., to an all-white ski town in the winter and an all-white beach town in the summer. The only migrants they’ll encounter are deferential service workers (i.e., servants). It is the middle-class resident of Dearborn, Michigan who might be forced by economics to stay in a neighborhood that has become almost entirely Arab-Muslim. It is the middle-class resident of Elmhurst, Queens who doesn’t have the resources to move away when every other family on the block speaks primarily Mandarin.

(I recently met a reasonably-rich-via-trust-fund older lady who’d moved after decades in Key Biscayne, Florida. It was mostly non-Hispanic white when she moved there. It’s now over 70 percent Latinx. Despite being a lifelong Democrat, she unashamedly said that she’d moved to Florida’s Treasure Coast because she was tired of hearing Spanish spoken all the time and not being able to communicate with everyone she encountered in a shared language (she hadn’t learned significant Spanish). ChatGPT: “Key Biscayne went from almost entirely non-Hispanic in 1960 to a Hispanic-majority community by ~2000, and today is roughly two-thirds Hispanic.”)

Loosely related, a visualization of migration into Europe. It would be interesting to see one for the 70+ million migrants who’ve entered the U.S. since 1976 (Pew).

It is possible to see a visualization of “illegal immigrants” (the undocumented, in other words), but only since 2020. And the people who’ve transformed the U.S. in the most profound ways have been legal immigrants.

Related, legal immigrants admitted by qualified government experts under laws passed by our wisest citizens (Congress):

Full post, including comments

Statistics on taxes paid by the undocumented

by philg

Happy Tax Week for those dumb enough to work and pay federal personal income tax (about half of us, as Mitt Romney famously noted)…

I hope that all of you put extra postage on your tax payments this year since the money needs to go all the way to Somalia and Diego Garcia. Maybe with enough undocumented low-skill migrants our economy will be so rich that none of the native-born will have to pay taxes? There are some statistics hidden in “To File or Not to File: Undocumented Immigrants Face a Tax Return Dilemma” (New York Times):

The federal treasury could take a hit. Many undocumented immigrants have taxes withheld in every paycheck, but experts worry some could shift into under-the-table jobs. Others with less formal earnings may now skip filing a tax return — and therefore not pay federal taxes at all. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.

Yale estimated that we were being enriched by 22 million undocumented migrants in 2016, which would mean a population of approximately 30 million enrichers today without legal immigration status. If we divide $300 billion by 30 million and then by 10 years we get $1,000/year paid by each enricher into a welfare state where each dependent family costs nearly $100,000 per year (some data in pre-Biden dollars). A different study in the same article works out to about $2,000/year paid per undocumented migrant:

Before the agreement between the I.R.S. and ICE, unauthorized immigrants paid roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, according to an estimate by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank. Much of it went to Social Security and Medicare, which are programs that undocumented immigrants cannot benefit from.

(I think the last sentence is factually incorrect, despite the NYT’s claims of checking facts. As soon as an undocumented immigrant’s anchor baby turns 21, the undocumented migrant is immediately eligible for a green card and, thus, immediately eligible to receive Social Security and Medicare.)

The New York Times repeats the absurd statistic that the number of undocumented migrants in the U.S. has barely grown over the past 30 years, even during the Biden-Harris administration’s open border period (see the Yale study: “There’s a number that everybody quotes”):

About 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2023, the latest available estimate, and about 70 percent of them were in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Department of Undocumented Migrants Aren’t Getting Welfare:

But last year’s Republican tax law cut off the child tax credit, which had been available to families if a child was a U.S. citizen.

(A cash handout from federal taxpayers (“the chumps”) isn’t “welfare”, apparently.)

The child tax credit by itself is $2,200, $1,700 of which is “refundable” (i.e., if you don’t owe any tax because you don’t work or have a low income then you get $1,700 anyway). So the child tax credit alone is larger than even the largest estimate of taxes paid per undocumented migrant.

Full post, including comments

Wall Street Journal upset that a place at Duke opens up for an American

by philg

As 18-year-olds and their parents manage their grief over the stack of rejections received from elite colleges, here’s a Wall Street Journal article for those who were rejected by Duke (95 percent rejection rate): “He Had a Full Ride at Duke—Until America Cut Him Off”.

(This article could also be inspiring to Americans graduating next month from Duke with crushing student loan debt. They can sleep easier knowing that some of the money they borrowed and must pay back (unless Kamala Harris is defrosted and elected?) was used to give “a full ride” to a migrant.)

The villain of the article is Donald Trump, of course, referenced 6 times. Here’s a peculiar Trump reference. The South Sudanese are so smart that they thrive at Duke, but they aren’t smart enough to realize that any migrant is an enricher. They refused to accept a migrant on the grounds that he was Congolese rather than South Sudanese:

Trump’s displeasure with South Sudan began when it refused to accept a man being deported by the U.S. The man was Congolese, South Sudanese officials said, but the administration didn’t want to take no for an answer.

South Sudan has a GDP per capita of less than $400. We’re informed that migrants are an economic boon to any nation. Why doesn’t South Sudan want to become richer by accepting migrants from Congo?

A separate question: if migrants enrich the U.S. as a whole, why are migrants at Duke being funded by American students paying tuition at Duke? Shouldn’t full tuition for migrants be paid with federal tax dollars on the grounds that every migrant makes the U.S. better off?

Full post, including comments

Schrödinger’s job market: “strong” and “slow” at the same time (NYT)

by philg

Home page of the New York Times today, the job market is “strong” (top story) and “slow” (just below):

We were informed that Donald Trump’s border closure would destroy the U.S. economy (see U.S. economy defies Science and Immigrants expand our economy, but millions of immigrants exiting the U.S. don’t shrink our economy) and that native-born Americans aren’t willing to work. Yet the number of workers in the U.S. keeps growing even as the number of migrants shrinks and also as the number of federal government jobs shrinks.

Details:

The labor market put in a strong showing in March, as wintry weather receded, strikes concluded and businesses started looking beyond the significant uncertainty of President Trump’s first year in office.

[We had certainty under the capable steady hands of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now we have frightening uncertainty]

  • Health care dominance: Even factoring in the addition of 31,000 jobs from workers ending a strike in California, the sector continued to lead gains, adding 76,000 positions. Manufacturing, which has been trending down for three years, added 15,000 jobs and construction grew by 26,000.
  • Federal government still contracting: The federal government shed another 18,000 jobs in March and is down a total of 355,000 positions, or 11.8 percent, since reaching a peak in October 2024.

Separately, we’ve been told that Donald Trump’s “without any plan” war against Iran would destroy both the world economy and the U.S. economy. Do investors agree with the wise prophets at the New York Times and CNN? Compared to the no-war situation a year ago, U.S. stocks are up 22% in nominal terms (19% in real dollars if we use official BLS CPI):

Full post, including comments

How was the immigration of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

As we solemnly observe International Day to Combat Islamophobia, let’s consider the ways in which the U.S. has been enriched by some Islamic immigrants who’ve recently made the news…

Hezbollah was designed a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. in 1997. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali was a Shiite Muslim from the Lebanon, a country in which nearly all of the Shiite Muslims polled say that they support Hezbollah. If that weren’t enough, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali had at least two brothers who were active Hezbollah fighters (CBS; see below) and “Ghazali was flagged by a government watchlist for his contact with suspected Hezbollah members, but was not said to have been a member himself” (CNN, via Wikipedia). Lebanon is one of the world’s most violent countries and 150,000 Lebanese were killed by fellow Lebanese in neighbor-to-neighbor violence during a civil war that began to wind down in 1990 (“religious diversity” was the cause, according to Wikipedia).

He was admitted to the U.S. by the Obama administration and later given citizenship by the Obama administration. Let’s suppose that Ayman Mohamad Ghazali had never loaded up a truck with explosives and tried to kill 140 preschoolers. How was his immigration to the U.S. supposed to make Americans better off? The rationale doesn’t seem to have been economic. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali’s education and job skills enabled to him to earn only $20,000 per year in 2024.

New York Times:

A Restaurant Worker Was a Quiet Presence. Then He Attacked a Synagogue.

Court records [from his wife’s divorce lawsuit] show Mr. Ghazali was earning about $20,000 a year from his job at Hamido.

CBS:

A freelance journalist working for CBS News in Lebanon learned from sources there the two brothers were both members of a Hezbollah rocket unit in southern Lebanon.

We could ask the same question about Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, who waged jihad in the same month as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali. Mohamed Bailor Jalloh killed a Black Army helicopter pilot, thus directly demonstrating the falsehood of accusations that elites are replacing American Blacks with immigrants. Mohamed Bailor Jalloh was from Sierra Leone, a country that rivals Lebanon for violence. The Sierra Leone civil war claimed up to 70,000 lives and resulted in 2.5 million people being displaced (roughly half the population at the time). Let’s supposed that he hadn’t waged jihad. How was he going to make Americans better off? Why didn’t we denaturalize and deport him after he was convicted and imprisoned for being an ISIS supporter? We thought that he was going to change his mind?

I already asked How was the immigration of Ndiaga Diagne supposed to make Americans better off?, who donned a “Property of Allah” shirt and killed Americans in Austin, Texas a couple of weeks before Ayman Mohamad Ghazali’s jihad.

Finally, we can ask about the parents of Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, two U.S.-born Islamic State jihadists. What skills did the parents bring from Afghanistan and Turkey that we thought the U.S. was going to be improved via their presence?

Related:

Full post, including comments

How was the immigration of Ndiaga Diagne supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

New York Post:

The gunman behind Austin’s possible terror-related mass shooting entered the US and cemented his legal immigration status under Democrat administrations — despite a growing criminal record.

Senegalese national Ndiaga Diagne, 53, arrived in America on March 13, 2000, on a B-2 tourist visa during the Clinton administration, a source familiar with his immigration history told The Post on Sunday.

Diagne — who killed two people and wounded 14 more during his rampage outside a Texas bar early Sunday — then became a lawful permanent resident on an IR-6 visa in June 2006 when he married a US citizen, the source said.

He then went on to lodge a string of other arrests in the Big Apple between 2008 and 2016 — but that didn’t stop him becoming a naturalized US citizen on April 5, 2013 — around the start of former President Barack Obama’s second term, sources said. Those three arrests are sealed, sources said.

Let’s supposed that Ndiaga Diagne had never donned his “Property of Allah” shirt and murdered/wounded people in Austin. In that ideal hypothetical world how was his permanent presence here in the U.S. going to make existing Americans better off? In other words, what is the rational basis for our legal immigration system?

(Maybe the answer can be found in Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?)

Related:

Full post, including comments

Bad Bunny’s nuanced views on immigration

by philg

“Bad Bunny uses Grammy Award win to protest ICE” (CNN, February 2026):

Accepting the award for best música urbana album, Bad Bunny began his speech saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out!”

“How Bad Bunny Did It” (The Atlantic, February 2026):

Bad Bunny is articulating the surreal and sad feeling of seeing his homeland transformed by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s economy has long relied on tourism, but in recent years, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy climate and notoriously loose tax laws has driven rent increases and threatened to wash out the local identity. Bad Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”

(The gringos at The Atlantic characterize Puerto Rico as having “notoriously loose tax laws”, but “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich” (GQ 2018) and other sources make it clear that Act 20 and Act 22 are, in fact, tightly specified.)

Separately, if you want to enjoy Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, but don’t understand el idioma de los conquistadores (or the way that Bad Bunny pronounces this language), here’s a recital in the English language:

The “We Accept EBT” sign on the set was a nice touch. It wasn’t inclusive, however, for viewers in Minnesota. Why not an additional “Waxaan aqbalnaa EBT” or “Halkan EBT waa laga aqbalaa” sign? (the majority of Somali-headed households are on SNAP)

In other NFL news, our home town of Jupiter, Florida was indirectly featured recently by Bill Belichick’s young associate:

Related:

Full post, including comments

In Mr. Biden’s Neighborhood only one of your next-door neighbors is a violent criminal

by philg

Mostly Peaceful Immigrants, Installment #6734… “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows” (CBS):

Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News. … Nearly 60% of ICE arrestees over the past year had criminal charges or convictions, the document indicates. But among that population, the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.

In other words, at least 1 out of 7 of the arrested migrants was a violent criminal (plus some additional migrants who are violent criminals, but had (1) never been arrested by the police, (2) never been charged with a violent crime by local prosecutors, and/or (3) been convicted of a violent crime only in their home country).

CBS spins this as evidence for the irrationality of Donald Trump’s deportation policies. But who would be enthusiastic living among the 400,000 noble enrichers who’ve been arrested? Imagine a realtor telling a potential house buyer, “only 1 out of 7 of your new neighbors will be violent criminals. So if there are two households of 4 people on either side of you, most likely you’ll have a next-door neighbor who is a violent criminal and 4 or 5 next-door neighbors who are non-violent criminals.”

A hater’s response to CBS on X:

Also in Journalism, the New York Times told us that we’re in a “climate emergency” and that Donald Trump was ending democracy. How do the journalists there prepare for these catastrophes? Are they digging tunnels in Nova Scotia and planning their escape before the Trump Dictatorship v2.0 closes the border? No. They spent at least an entire day digging up and watching 25 years worth of old halftime shows:

Full post, including comments

Mask efficacy Scientists move to Cato and prove that immigration makes us rich

by philg

Cato Institute has released a couple of studies recently showing that low-skill immigrants are valuable. (The papers lump together all immigrants, but the majority of immigration in recent decades was low-skill.)

“Immigrant and Native Consumption of Means-Tested Welfare and Entitlement Benefits in 2023” classifies Social Security as “welfare”. The Social Security Administration calculates a real rate of return on taxes paid into the system at 2-4 percent/year for a medium-wage worker and, thus, someone who invested in the S&P 500 and received a 6 percent/year real return would be a “welfare queen”.

“Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023” says that low skill immigrants are the reason that we can afford our magnificent government. Much of the study hinges on birthright citizenship. If a migrant has 10 U.S.-born children and each child costs the Treasury $3 million (public school education, public housing, Medicaid, etc.) the costs of those 10 kids are put into the “native” category. One fun part:

Indirect property tax revenue: The one semidynamic element that we incorporate into the NASEM model is the effect of immigration on housing values. By increasing the demand for housing, immigration increases the value of property, which increases property tax revenues.

In other words, one benefit of open borders is that the tens of millions of people who walk across will drive up the value of residential real estate and, thus, property tax revenue. I.e., contrary to other propaganda in which Econ 101 supply-demand curves don’t apply, the Cato nerds say that a migrant-expanded population drives up housing costs for native-born Americans.

(I don’t think that Cato is correct, incidentally, that more valuable real estate leads to more property tax revenue. The typical city has a budget and then sets a property tax rate sufficient to fund that budget given the total assessed value within the city. If Ayatollah Mamdani drove every successful person from NYC down to Florida and property values in Palm Beach County doubled, the county wouldn’t keep the rates the same and immediately double its spending.)

Cato used to believe in markets. This is plainly no longer true. They didn’t ask the obvious questions, e.g.,

  • If low-skill immigrants are a gold mine, why won’t some other country pay us to send them the migrants whom we are deporting?
  • Why don’t other countries compete with us for migrants, then? If we offer a green card via diversity lottery to a person in Mali, for example, why don’t Australia, Taiwan, Mexico, or Canada jump in and try to persuade that person to go elsewhere? Why don’t Japan and France have offices in northern Mexico offering to fly U.S.-destined migrants to their nations?

What kind of Scientists at Cato could do a study proving Scientifically that every low-skill migrant is worth $1 million despite the fact that no country anywhere in the world has offered to pay even $1 for one of our deported migrants?

The answer arrived via direct message. A rich Democrat who lives in the Boston area recently criticized me for referring to his state as “Maskachusetts” and noted that Science had proven (“data shows”) 500 million to 1 billion lives saved from people wearing their saliva-soaked face rags. How does this relate to Cato’s contrary-to-the-market conclusions regarding immigration?

Nobody right now will pay for Scientific proof that forcing 2-year-olds to wear cloth masks prevents an aerosol respiratory virus from spreading. The Scientists who did that research can now apply their nonbinary selves to proving that low-skill migrants from the world’s least successful and most violent societies are a huge plus for any country wise enough to welcome them.

Full post, including comments

Natives suffer when migrants are deported (NPR)

by philg

State-sponsored NPR on the suffering of native-born Americans when their low-cost migrant laborers depart… “Reporter’s Notebook: He was my fruit vendor for years. I saw immigration agents take him”:

I love sliced fruit, and for seven years, my go-to vendor has been a man named Jesús. I could always find him under two large rainbow umbrellas next to a gas station in my Los Angeles neighborhood, Echo Park.

And that’s when I heard a scuffle. Two large, dark SUVs had rolled up, and I saw masked agents in Border Patrol vests chasing Jesús out from under his rainbow umbrella and across the gas station. He ran between the pumps. That’s where they grabbed and handcuffed him, while he was still wearing his black apron.

Despite sophisticated communications and IT infrastructure, the progressive insurgency couldn’t save this migrant from the Gestapo 2.0:

Within minutes, several activists showed up. They were with a group that tracks Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Echo Park, and they told me a witness had reported it to a rapid-response phone number. As word spread, customers and friends of Jesús started showing up too.

Jorge Mejía, a longtime customer, told me he rushed over when he heard. He told me things I already knew — that Jesús cared about his customers and about quality, and that’s why people loved him.

“I feel helpless,” Mejía said, his eyes filling with tears, his voice breaking. “It angers me that this is happening to people just working and trying to get ahead.”

Undocumented migrants are such a high percentage of the Los Angeles population that small businesses can’t survive without them:

Ariel Padilla met Jesús on the day Padilla moved into the neighborhood a decade ago. It was a hot day and the cold fruit hit just right. Last summer, Padilla organized a fundraiser for Jesús when sales were slow because many of his immigrant customers were too afraid to go outside.

“He was a landmark of this part of the neighborhood,” Padilla told me after he rushed over when he heard the news. “Now I’m trying to think about: How can I help him?”

The neighborhood will never be the same now that people have to slice their own fruit (or pay a higher price to have fruit sliced for them by authorized immigrants; plainly paying for a native-born fruit slicer is not an option):

The next morning I learned, from Padilla, that Jesús had already been removed to Tijuana, Mexico. He had agreed to be deported because he feared languishing for months in LA’s notorious immigration detention center.

Since his arrest, I’ve driven by his corner and struggled to make sense of the fact that someone who brought so much simple joy to my neighborhood for almost 20 years had been whisked away before my eyes. That every time I pass I’ll picture that scene. And that that corner will never be the same.

The reporter won’t do the 2.5-hour drive to Tijuana to meet Jesús and find out if it is possible for a Mexican to live in Mexico (population 133 million)?

In other immigration news, folks on Martha’s Vineyard are reminding everyone that “All are welcome here”:

One initiative on the Island is a newly formed group called Martha’s Vineyard Fourth Amendment (MV 4A). It has created signage for local businesses to put on windows, is conducting constitutional rights training, and has amassed more than 60 volunteers in the past couple of months.

The signs are a neon green color, with bold black lettering, and can be seen in storefront windows at Cronig’s Market, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, and Tisbury Printer, among others. The signs are available through their website. “All are welcome here,” the posters read. “We know our Fourth Amendment rights.” The Fourth Amendment is a part of the U.S. Bill of Rights that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

“Putting up signage is a way for our community to come together. It’s a way to send a message to each other that we care about each other. It says what kind of a community we want to be,” Ladd said. “It also says that we know our Fourth Amendment rights, which in some ways can be a deterrent for somebody who wants to violate your Fourth Amendment rights.”

The MV Times article doesn’t mention that the 50 migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard in September 2022 (the off season when tons of housing was available) by the Deplorable Ron DeSantis were immediately moved “voluntarily” by 125 military soldiers (National Guard was called up) to a fenced military base.

Full post, including comments