Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

The children’s section of our local bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts features books on the political issue that will have the biggest impact on young folks’ lives:

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This chart shows that, as of 5-10 years ago, the experience of living in California would involve finding an immigrant family in every fourth house (3 native-born families and then 1 immigrant).

The experience of living in Ohio, on the other hand, would involve finding 1 immigrant family per every 25 houses. In West Virginia it would be 1 per every 70 families.

(These per-house numbers need to be tweaked since fertility and family size are different for immigrant and native-born Americans, but I was too lazy to do the arithmetic. There is some state-by-state data available on this.)

(All of these percentages are likely higher in 2018 due to historically high levels of immigration continuing; see Pew Research for the trend since 1990. My home state of Massachusetts went from 9.5 percent immigrant to 15.1 percent over a 22-year period. My birth state of Maryland went from 6.6 percent to 14.1.)

I wonder if this partly explains why Americans feel that they don’t have as much in common as they used to. When it comes to encountering immigrants as co-workers, neighbors, friends, competitors for jobs and real estate, etc., they really don’t have that much in common, especially if we were to zoom down to the county level. Americans are essentially living in different countries, one of which is substantially made up of immigrants and one of which is substantially made up of native-born people.

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…. but 1+ million migrants per year is good for the U.S.?

“Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists” (Guardian):

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

Clinton’s remarks are likely to prove controversial across Europe, which has struggled to form a unified position ever since more than 1 million migrants and refugees arrived in the EU in 2015.

The EU population is 508 million. So 1 million migrants since 2015 is a much lower percentage of the total population than the roughly 1 million immigrants per year into the U.S. (population 330 million).

The apparent contradiction between Hillary’s opposition to Donald Trump in the U.S. and her opposition to migrants in Europe was addressed a day later. “Hillary Clinton calls for reform, ‘not open borders,’ in explaining European migration remarks” (NBC):

“Maybe Hillary has understood the lesson,” Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, told The New York Times. “If you don’t control migration it will affect mostly poor people, people living on the outskirts, working classes.”

The “EU needs a more comprehensive policy that builds societies that are both secure and welcoming,” she continued.

“On both sides of the Atlantic, we need reform. Not open borders, but immigration laws enforced with fairness and respect for human rights. We can’t let fear or bias force us to give up the values that have made our democracies both great and good,” she wrote.

“Can’t just keep doing the same things.”

“There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements.”

But what are the solutions? Hillary is keeping them secret until she is elected President?

I thought about this during a recent trip to Montgomery County, Maryland (DC suburb). All of my Uber drivers were immigrants. None spoke English fluently. One driver had immigrated from El Salvador 13 years ago and didn’t speak English well enough to qualify for legal immigration to Canada, for example. It looks as though a family of four is entitled to welfare (e.g., housing subsidies) if earning less than $89,850 per year (table). If you consider subsidized health insurance to be welfare, the income number for a family of 4 in Maryland is $100,400 per year (March 1, 2018). How are people who don’t speak English going to earn enough to get off welfare? And, if they can’t get off welfare, why will existing taxpayers in Maryland welcome more immigrants at the same skill level?

What is the grand theory supporting the current policy? That the children of someone who couldn’t learn English in 13 years are going to be above-median learners and earners?

Or maybe this is just adverse selection? Immigrants who are really bad at learning languages differentially choose to drive Ubers? The rest of the El Salvadorans who came 13 years ago are executives now?

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“Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Proclamation Targeting Some Asylum Seekers” (nytimes):

A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to resume accepting asylum claims from migrants no matter where or how they entered the United States, dealing at least a temporary setback to the president’s attempt to clamp down on a huge wave of Central Americans crossing the border.

Judge Jon S. Tigar [Obama appointee] of the United States District Court in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order that blocks the government from carrying out a new rule that denies protections to people who enter the country illegally. The order, which suspends the rule until the case is decided by the court, applies nationally.

After the judge’s ruling on Monday, Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U. attorney who argued the case, said, “The court made clear that the administration does not have the power to override Congress and that, absent judicial intervention, real harm will occur.”

My comment:

I’m pleased to hear that the virtuous citizens of San Francisco, including at least this one judge, wish to welcome asylum-seekers and also pay them a $15/hour minimum wage. How about we offer plane tickets to SFO, SJC, and OAK for any asylum-seeker anywhere in the U.S.? My understanding is that San Francisco has an ample supply of public housing and other services for those at the lower end of the wage scale (and/or for those whose skills are not sufficient to command a $15/hour wage). Certainly folks in the Bay Area have big hearts and it wouldn’t be fair either to them or to the asylum-seekers for other states, regions, and cities not to assist the passage of all caravans straight through to Union Square.

I’m happy to pay for some Southwest, JetBlue, and Spirit tickets. All that I ask for in return is a Smartphone [Obamaphone?] photo of the welcoming committee in San Francisco.

This was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but why doesn’t it happen? Californians say that they want immigrants, regardless of documentation status or skill level. Americans in other states don’t want more immigrants. Transportation is inexpensive. Why not make it easy for any asylum-seeker or undocumented immigrant to go to San Francisco?

[Separately, why is the ACLU involved? Its web site says that it is “the nation’s premier defender of the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” but do would-be immigrants have rights under the U.S. Constitution? If so, shouldn’t people in Afghanistan and Iraq have had the right to due process before getting bombed and shot? The ACLU is also recently against “due process” for college students who are accused of sex-related misdeeds. They say that this is because of their concern for “women and girls of color”, but Atlantic says that it is disproportionately “men of color” who are accused and kicked out. From the Atlantic article: “In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who ‘routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases’ said that ‘most of the complaints they see are against minorities.’ (Professor Suk was a source for us on domestic violence and the potential for a one-hearing divorce, custody, and child support victory.) If the ACLU is enthusiastic about African-American men being stripped of the presumption of innocence in university-run sex tribunals, why wouldn’t they also advocate for the removal of what had been considered due process in ordinary criminal courts?]

Related:

• “Unlimited Haitians for communities that prepare to welcome them?”: People in San Francisco, Santa Monica, Manhattan, Boston, etc. are criticizing Trump for voicing his opinion (wrong, by definition!) regarding living conditions in Haiti. They also criticize him for being unwelcoming toward low-skill immigrants from unsuccessful societies in general. What if Trump were to offer immigration proponents an unlimited supply of people, without any preference for those capable of working, on condition that immigration advocates use state and local tax dollars to pay for their housing, health care, food, and walking-around money? So if people in San Francisco want to build a 1000-unit apartment complex for Haitian immigrants, and folks will be permanently entitled to live there by paying a defined fraction of their income in rent ($0 in rent for those with $0 in income), and San Francisco commits to build additional apartment complexes in which any children or grandchildren of these immigrants can live, why should the Federal government stand in the way of their dreams? (Of course, the city and state would also have to pay 100 percent of the costs of Medicaid, food stamps, Obamaphones, and any other welfare services consumed by these immigrants or their descendants.) If there were no numerical limits on immigration, but host communities had to pay for the guests whom they were welcoming, Trump wouldn’t have to be the bad guy anymore. … 

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A Facebook friend with a Ph.D. in Physics posted the following as her status:

All six US science Nobel prize winners this year are immigrants.

Last year, all six US noble [sic] prize winners were also immigrants.

I’m sharing this in case you still think “immigrants are ruining America.”

As part of my campaign to be defriended by everyone, I responded with

Did they all arrive in the same caravan from Honduras or was it six separate caravans?

I then pointed out that nobelprize.org shows 2018 U.S. winners having been born in exotic locales such as Pittsburgh, Norwalk, and New York City. But I helpfully supplied a video from an immigrant Nobel laureate in Physics (he won in the 1970s). Her response:

You can’t possibly feel threatened by 5K women and youth.

Me:

let’s maybe not encourage the caravan women to apply for the Nobel in Literature (see “The ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize”)

One find: Wikipedia says that George Pearson Smith (immigrated to the U.S. from Norwalk, Connecticut) is a “a strong supporter of the Boycott [Israel], Divestment and Sanctions movement”. Now that he is stuffed with Nobel cash, let’s see if he will give up his house to the Native American tribe from which the land was stolen!

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