(What’s Left of) Our Economy: And the Labor Shortage/Immigration Beat Goes On

Tags

CNN.com, fake news, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Immigration, labor shortages, productivity, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Here’s yet another Open Borders- and amnesty-friendly article from the Mainstream Media that simply doesn’t add up – this time from CNN.com. In this story about a small San Francisco-area manufacturer who claims that he lost a tenth of his employees due to a 2011 government raid in search of illegal immigrant workers, one whopping inconsistency in particular stands out. It concerns the wages paid by the employer Emerald Packaging of Union City, California.

Emerald’s owner, claims that the company is still suffering from the personnel losses because he can’t find adequate replacements. And the CNN reporters’ sympathy for his supposed plight – and the obvious difficulties encountered by his illegal workers – was made clear by the article’s melodramatic headline: “RAIDED: Immigration agents showed up at Kevin Kelly’s factory and he lost his star workers.”

RealityChek regulars know by now that such claims of labor shortages due to restrictive immigration policies are usually open and shut tip-offs that the business in question is paying inadequate wages, or has refused to automate and become more productive. As I’ve noted repeatedly, mainstream economic theory teaches that when the demand for anything – including labor – exceeds the supply, the price of that commodity (in this case the wage and/or non-wage benefits) tends to rise until a new equilibrium is restored. Alternatively, businesses tend to substitute capital (typically in the form of technology) for what they view as overly expensive labor.

Kelly emphatically denied to the CNN reporter that he’s been skimping on wages by using illegal workers: “When people say these companies are hiring illegal labor because they want to keep their costs down… in our case that argument is complete bulls–t.”

In fact, according to Kelly, the jobs that illegals were filling – and that in some cases have remained unfilled – “aren’t cheap positions.” He added that “They range from $15 an hour entry-level jobs to $35 an hour for experienced mechanics. ‘With overtime of $27 to $35 an hour, you can make pretty good money of $75,000 to over $100,000 a year.’”

But his claims started to fall apart – not that CNN picked up on this – the instant he started discussing in detail the employee whose departure he felt most keenly – an assistant foreman named Miguel Gonzalez.

As the CNN article tells it, “Gonzalez had worked for Emerald Packaging for over 20 years. He started as a box handler, moving and storing product pallets and factory supplies, and worked his way up to assistant foreman. He was a gifted mechanic and Kelly relied on him to help keep the factory running.” Further, he could:

>”walk into my office and tell me what’s going on in the facility.”

>Gonzales was “Keen to learn and move up the ranks [and] routinely took on extra work and hours. He also rarely missed work, even returning to the factory floor just two days after his first child, Casandra, was born.”

>Soon after Gonzalez’ hiring, “he showed initiative by tinkering with and fixing up the machines on the factory floor on his own time to help them operate better. Two years into the job, he was promoted into a role where he learned to set up, repair and maintain the factory equipment.”

>”Over time, [he] taught himself every aspect of the business, including payments and shipping.”

>In Kelly’s words, “He was the single best machine mechanic we had.”

>”Losing him had an immediate impact on production because there just wasn’t anybody of Miguel’s caliber to replace him. There just wasn’t,” said Kelly.

And what was this supremely talented “star worker” making in 2011, after twenty years of superlative performance? Twenty-two dollars per hour. (He also received healthcare and retirement benefits.) According to the Labor Department’s data, that wage is somewhat ($2.50 per hour) more than the average hourly wage (before inflation) for all workers in the plastics packaging manufacturing sector that year, and a little over six dollars an hour more than non-supervisory workers alone make. (It’s not clear whether an assistant foreman qualifies in the Labor Department’s eyes as a supervisory or a non-supervisory worker.) But that $22 per hour is also about $13 dollars an hour less than what Kelly said he pays “experienced mechanics” nowadays (five years later).

There’s no doubt that some businesses that hire illegal immigrants need every body they can get, and there’s no doubt that some illegal immigrants are earning good wages largely as a result. But when a news organization plainly convinced of the desperate need for illegal workers touts a single alleged example of this dire situation that’s so full of gaping holes, Americans are more than entitled to start wondering whether this narrative as a whole is fake news.

Im-Politic: Fakeonomics on Illegal Immigration From CNN

Tags

California, CNN, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Octavio Blanco, Sanctuary State, taxes, welfare

When I was learning the journalistic ropes, one of the first lessons taught was never to present a piece of information totally devoid of context. So, for example, if you were writing about how much a national economy grew during a given time period, you’d also include something about how that growth compared with that country’s past performance, or with the performance of other countries. How else could the reader take anything useful away from such a report?

Apparently, however, CNN doesn’t always follow this practice. Or maybe more accurately, it doesn’t follow this practice when it covers immigration issues, and especially when even minimal context would cast doubt on widespread claims that America’s illegal immigrants are so valuable that Trump-like restrictionist policies are tantamount to economic suicide. How else could one interpret the May 18 post by Octavio Blanco on new legislation aimed at establishing California as a sanctuary state?

Blanco, for example, properly reported the claim of the bill’s sponsor that the illegal workforce “contributes some $180 billion to the state’s GDP.” I’d have liked some verification of this figure, or even a source, but at least Blanco associated the contention with a figure who’s clearly taken one side of the issue.

Other omissions are less justifiable. Is this a net figure? That is, does it include any costs resulting from the state’s illegal workforce, or families of these workers? The author doesn’t say. And what about some perspective about that $180 billion figure? Obviously the legislator who fed it to Blanco hoped to convey the impression that it’s a staggering sum. Yet it begs the question of how big that state GDP actually is. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, last year, it was a little over $2.6 trillion (unadjusted for inflation – and that took me four seconds to look up.) So if the $180 billion is unadjusted for inflation as well (something else the author doesn’t tell us), the illegal immigrant share is about 8.2 percent.

That still sounds like a lot. Except as the author also notes, another source pegs illegals as nearly 10 percent of the California workforce. So even if the $180 billion figure is accurate, that would mean that the state’s illegal workers are punching below their weight in terms of productivity.

That, however, wouldn’t be the last word, either. The $180 billion figure would be more impressive if it was a growing share of state output, and less impressive if it was shrinking or stagnant. But Blanco’s article gives readers no way to know.

Another statistic cited by Blanco sheds a little light on these questions, but not nearly enough, because it suffers the same shortcomings. The author reports that a “Washington, D.C.-based research group,” the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), has determined that “In 2014, almost $3.2 billion of California’s state and local taxes came from undocumented immigrants….”

Again, that “billion” word sounds like a major sum – but sharp-eyed readers might notice something that’s apparently eluded Blanco. If both ITEP and the lawmaker who introduced the Sanctuary State bill are right, then the tax revenue generated by California’s illegal workers amounts to about 1.78 percent of their contribution to the state economy. That looks distinctly unimpressive.

Just as unimpressive: the share of the state’s total annual tax haul represented by illegal immigrants, if ITEP is right. For according to the state government, the $3.2 billion claimed by ITEP for 2014 would come to 4.83 percent of personal income tax revenue. Remember – this is from nearly 10 percent of the state’s workforce, so that’s disproportionately low.

A least as important, when talking about illegal immigrants – the $3.2 billion figure is clearly not a net figure, in terms of the impact of this population on the state’s resources. Specifically, it omits illegal the use of state services by illegal immigrants and any family members who are legal (e.g., anchor children). This issue will keep looming larger and larger as the state pushes to extend eligibility for welfare and other state resources to illegals – which has already happened with in-state tuition to and financial aid for California public universities.

It’s true that income tax revenue isn’t the sum total of state tax revenue. The state government says the share was 65 percent in 2014. The remainder comes from corporate income taxes, sales taxes, and an “other” category. Illegal workers (and their families) are probably paying some of those types of taxes, too, but the article doesn’t provide any information on that score, either.

Give Blanco some credit: He reports that “not everyone agrees on the sanctuary state bill.” If only his article focusing on the legislation’s economic impact gave readers any sense that not every fact portrays it as an economic winner, either.

Im-Politic: Mainstream Media’s Pro-Open Borders Bias Remains Widespread

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assimilation, civil religion, CNN, Donie O'Sullivan, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Irish-Americans, Mainstream Media, national identity, National Public Radio, Open Borders, Samuel P. Huningtom, Seymour Martin Lipset, The Washington Post, Tom Gjelten

The pro-Open Borders slant of the Mainstream Media has become so pervasive that the last few days alone have served up no less than two major instances by leading news organizations. One should be painfully obvious – at least to anyone familiar with the history of immigration in the United States and the nation’s (until unquestionably successful) approach towards assimilating newcomers. The other is more difficult to detect. Both also entail telling failures of professional judgment by writers and editors alike. You decide which (if either) is the most worrisome.

The obvious example of bias came from a Washington Post piece Sunday by National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten. If you ignore the lessons Gjelten claims flow from that American immigration history, you can learn a lot from his article about (or be usefully reminded of) the various efforts made from the early 19^th to the mid-20^th century to address the various social and cultural issues large inflows from regions outside Britain (though still mainly from Europe) in particular posed. Of course, far too many were products of simple bigotry.

But Gjelten then ventures deeply into a dangerous fantasyland when he discusses those lessons and what they mean today. He all but explicitly states that, given the more recent waves of immigrants, now dominated by non-Europeans, Americans should not only reject race and ethnicity or religion the bases of their national identity. They should also reject using what’s long been called a “civil” or “political” religion – a group of political beliefs and values that can surely be argued over around the edges, but that surely closely approximates a formula developed by political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset. As Gjelten summarizes it: “liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and a laissez-faire approach to governance and daily life.”

Since I’d add separation of church and state, another common definition of Americanism – advanced by another political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington – is more problematic. “Anglo-Protestant culture and political values.” But if you think about it, it’s not that much more problematic, especially since the overlap between Lipset and Huntington is so substantial.

Moreover, look at the matter from the opposite perspective. How many other peoples and contemporary regions have created political values in particular (“cultural values” is a concept that’s much too sweeping and much too prone to intolerant abuse for me) that most Americans today would want to live under? Latin America? East Asia? The Middle East? Please. So if you employ a little common sense, and substitute something like “European Enlightenment” for “Anglo-Protestant,” you arrive at a basis for American identity that not only should offend no one, but that, more important, has underlain much of the nation’s extraordinary success.

But Gjelten seems not to agree. In response to Huntington’s (poorly formulated) contention that successful assimilation has entailed “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants [becoming] Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values,” he maintains:

“Whether that had really happened or was even possible was debatable. ‘A nation of more than 130 cultural groups cannot hope to have all of them Anglo-Saxonized,’ argued Molefi Kete Asante in his book ‘The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism.’ Trying to do so, he argued, would only alienate minorities and deepen disunity.”

Yet having apparently dismissed civil religion as well as (rightly) race and ethnicity as the source of America’s national identity, does Gjelten come up with any viable alternatives? None that I can see. In fact, at this point, his article dissolves into an endorsement of concepts like “nondiscrimination,” “diversity,” and “multiculturalism” that are not only gauzy but lacking in any particular content.

The author maintains that what he terms “nondiscriminatory immigration” based on these empty principles has succeeded in America by making it “more resilient.” But his evidence can’t possibly impress: that “In comparison with Western European countries that have also received large numbers of immigrants, America has proved to be more capable of absorbing and successfully integrating a diverse population.” Of course, this observation practically defines “low bar.”

It’s Gjelten’s right to believe in a definition of national identity evidently distinguished only by what it isn’t – though he sure didn’t provide any examples of countries that have been held together adequately simply by ideals such as multiculturalism and diversity. It’s also his right to believe – as actually seems to be the case – that the idea of a national identity is either pointless or undesirable. But he should have the intellectual honesty to say so. Further, his editors should have had the competence to challenge his case more than they obviously did.

The other troubling instance of journalistic failure by a reporter and editors alike – this CNN post noting that a significant chunk of America’s illegal immigrant population is Irish. That’s unquestionably useful information. But neither author Donie O’Sullivan nor his editors had anything direct to say about the real significance of the article: It powerfully undercuts claims that President Trump’s immigration policies, and even his focus on illegal immigration, stem largely from racism.

Starting with its headline, the article does point out that the illegal Irish have a major advantage over much of the rest of the nation’s illegals – their ability to pass more easily for native-born since they’re white. So obviously, enforcement of immigration law nowadays will inevitably be affected to some extent by race and ethnicity. (At the same time, the article helpfully observes that there are many fewer Irish illegals than Mexican illegals in particular.)

O’Sullivan makes abundantly clear how much fear the administration’s policies have struck among the illegal Irish, and even presents some evidence that these fears have some basis in reality, their physical appearance edge notwithstanding. He quotes an official at an organization providing support services for all Irish newcomers as stating that “it seems that the ICE [immigration law enforcement] agents are using their discretion in a much greater capacity now than ever before.”

But it’s absolutely astonishing (or is it?) that the author says absolutely nothing about the screamingly obvious implication of this claim: It’s a sign that immigration law is being enforced in a race- and ethnicity-blind way. And even though the racism charge has deeply colored the national immigration debate especially since President Trump’s harsh description of some Mexican immigrants when he declared his candidacy for the White House, it’s equally astonishing (or is it?) that none of O’Sullivan’s editors at CNN apparently noted this fact’s omission or importance, either.

Bias-free journalism admittedly is difficult to produce, and the challenge is made all the more formidable by the numerous forms bias can take, and how difficult many can be to spot. All the same, these Washington Post and CNN offerings stand as vivid reminders of how far the Mainstream Media that still dominate news dissemination in our democracy remain from meeting it.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Wages Data Still Belie Amnesty Advocates’ Labor Shortage Claims

Tags

illegal immigrants, Immigration, Jobs, labor shortages, productivity, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Pew Research Center is out with its latest estimates of the role played by both immigrants and illegal immigrants in the American job market. So that has enabled me to crunch some reasonably reliable numbers to find out whether illegals-friendly immigration policies like some form of amnesty are, as often claimed, desperately needed if the nation is to avoid a crippling labor shortage.

When I performed this exercise roughly a decade ago, I found that similar claims being made in that period were wildly overblown at best. Why? Because the data showed that real wages in the industries employing the most illegal immigrants were generally stagnant or going down. That’s exactly the opposite of what should happen if economists (and common sense) are right in contending that when anything – including workers – is scarce relative to demand, the price of that thing should go up.

And the verdict for 2014 – the year for which Pew’s latest statistics come? Labor shortage claims are still mainly hokum.

According to Pew, the sectors where illegal aliens make up the greatest share of workers are (in order of the total immigrant share of their workforces: private households; textile and apparel manufacturing; agriculture; accommodation; food manufacturing; computer and electronics manufacturing; personal and laundry services; administrative and support services; construction, and miscellaneous manufacturing.

Are there many signs of the kinds of labor market tightness that should be sending pay soaring out of sight? I couldn’t find data for domestic workers, but here are the current-dollar wage figures for the other sectors during the current recovery so far. That means from June, 2009 through February, 2016, except where noted. They cover non-supervisory workers, on the assumption that few illegal aliens are finding managerial jobs in these parts of the economy:

Private sector overall: +17.78 percent

Construction: +15.93 percent

Computer and electronic manufacturing: +12.55 percent

Miscellaneous manufacturing: +16.55 percent

Food manufacturing: +17.31 percent

Textile mill manufacturing: +14.93 percent

Textile products mill manufacturing: +24.76 percent

Apparel manufacturing: +18.05 percent

Administrative and support services (through January): +14.33 percent

Accommodation (through January): +7.56 percent

Personal and laundry services: +21.61 percent

Farm workers: +24.53 percent

I sure don’t see any broad-based wage explosion in these statistics. In only four of the eleven illegal alien-heavy sectors have wages even been rising faster than those in the overall private sector – which hasn’t been terribly fast given that the current recovery is more than seven years old. Two of them, moreover, are in labor-intensive manufacturing industries that have been so decimated by foreign competition for so long that what’s left of them might indeed be facing labor shortages. The reason? Who in his or her right mind would assume they have much of a future in this country?

But what about more recent developments? Can signs of widespread labor shortages be seen in the current stage of the recovery? You be the judge, based on these February (or January, where noted above) year-on-year developments:

Private sector overall: +2.48 percent

Construction: +3.38 percent

Computer and electronic manufacturing: +2.73 percent

Miscellaneous manufacturing: +3.13 percent

Food manufacturing: +3.70 percent

Textile mill manufacturing: -1.07 percent

Textile products mill manufacturing: +8.04 percent

Apparel manufacturing: -3.02 percent

Administrative and support services (through January): +4.13 percent

Accommodation (through January): +1.50 percent

Personal and laundry services: +3.88 percent

Farm workers: +3.00 percent

Bottom line: The illegal immigrant-heavy sectors have seen some wage acceleration since last year. But two of the manufacturing sectors where wages had separated themselves from the pack are now experiencing wage decline. And it’s important to keep two other considerations in mind for many of the rest: First, their wages have been boosted artificially during this period by numerous sizable minimum wage increases in major states and localities. That’s not to say that such hikes per se are undesirable in any way. Indeed, I personally don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be much more tightly linked to inflation nationwide than they’ve been till now.

When it comes to the labor shortage claims, however, they greatly distort the picture – because they represent wage developments based not on the labor supply and demand situation in these parts of the economy, but on political decisions.

Second, if the relatively strong wage increases that have taken place continue much longer, expect the sectors in question to start automating fast — or faster. That’s been a major feature of American economic history. And if economists are right, the resulting technological progress will wind up simply being delayed (perhaps partly accounting for the economy’s recent sluggish productivity growth?), rather than stopped, by the continuing easy availability of illegal immigrant labor.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Illegal Immigrants Look Like U.S. Productivity Killers

Tags

automation, construction, illegal immigrants, immigrants, Immigration, labor shortage, Marketwatch.com, productivity, restaurants, Steve Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Steve Goldstein of Marketwatch.com (an excellent business and economics site for which I’ve been pleased to write) has just done a good job of indicating why you can’t trust everything you read – even when it comes from a fancy-dan economic consulting firm. Check out how he threw some cold water over a new report contending that illegal immigrants have been partly responsible for America’s recent productivity slowdown. As Goldstein notes, for example, this conclusion seems to proceed at least to some extent on a misunderstanding about whether illegals are counted in certain key government economic data.

At the same time, we’ve just gotten additional evidence from The Wall Street Journal suggesting that the notion that illegals exert a drag on productivity growth is on target after all.

The first comes from a Journal article that spotlights a study from another fancy consultancy. It found that heavy use of illegal immigrants is one factor that’s held back productivity growth in the American construction industry. In the words of the Journal piece:

“The sector’s fragmentation makes it hard to adopt industrywide standards. Much of the construction industry relies on volatile government contracting, which makes it difficult for firms to plan very far ahead. Regulatory requirements can also reduce incentives to invest in productivity-boosting improvements. And much of the construction sector relies on low-skilled workers—including undocumented immigrants—who tend to be lower-paid and less productive than their skilled counterparts.”

To be fair, the article notes that lagging productivity performance is a worldwide, not simply an American, phenomenon. And it’s not obvious that the construction sectors of other countries rely as heavily on illegal workers as does America’s.

Nonetheless, this analysis might also understate the productivity-killing role played by illegal construction workers in one important sense. It fails to mention that the availability of so much cheap labor greatly reduces construction firms’ incentives to buy labor-saving machinery, or figure out other ways to manage their operations more efficiently.

This article does note the sector’s sluggish adoption of automation – and attributes it to its characteristically tight profit margins, which supposedly make such expenditures inordinately risky. But I can’t help but wonder if the article has causation backward. Maybe its low degree of automation – and the resulting inefficiencies explain some of construction’s weak productivity growth.

The second Wall Street Journal example underscoring the connection between illegal immigrant employment and the productivity slowdown came in a report on a new trend in the restaurant industry: offsetting the impact on their bottom lines of mandated minimum wage hikes by adding “labor surcharges” to checks. Evidently, the idea is that customers will be more willing to pay this extra fee than higher prices for menu items.

I have no idea whether this is true. But I do know that restaurants rely heavily on illegal immigrant labor, that the abundance of these workers has helped keep the wages they pay very low, and that the sector has a long history of crying “Labor shortage!” to justify keeping the legal immigration floodgates wide open and the border porous – thereby ensuring that its potential workforce will in fact remain in surplus. I also know that restaurateurs like to insist that their sector’s profit margins generally are “razor thin,” which means that containing labor costs is especially important.

Add all of these factors and their influence up, and you have a classic portrait of an industry that’s skimped on productivity-enhancing, labor-saving devices because illegal immigration helped it keep labor costs at rock-bottom levels. Indeed, a senior executive at the National Restaurant Association has all but acknowledged this sorry situation: “Productivity growth in the restaurant industry has really been quite minimal over the past decade. Sales per employee in the industry is still low not only compared to other retailers, but it’s low compared with other industries.”

Finally, here’s more indirect confirmation for an illegal immigrant-productivity connection in these two sectors. For all its illegal immigrant usage, construction is a relatively high wage industry. Its average hourly wage ($28.52 according to the latest government data) exceeds that of the typical private sector job ($26 even). Therefore, it’s not vulnerable to the recent minimum wage hikes – and there’s no reason to think that its productivity-enhancing investments are on the rise.

Restaurants, on the other hand, are not only relatively low paying – with average wages of $13.69. They employ lots of minimum wage workers, and are very worried about the spreading movement in states and localities to raise minimum wages. So even though their major illegal immigrant employers, too, the prospect of higher payrolls is generating considerable new interest in automation.

Imagine how much more such investment would be made by both industries if their illegal immigrant crutch was removed, or greatly shrunk, as well. And since productivity growth is widely viewed as the most important key to raising American living standards on a sustainable (as opposed to bubble-ized) basis, imagine how welcome that development would be for the entire economy.

Im-Politic: Is the Open Borders Crowd Signaling ‘Criminals First’ Priorities?

Tags

border security, Congress, Constitution, crime, Democrats, Department of Homeland Security, equal protection, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Joint Address, Open Borders, Trump, VOICE

Democrats in Congress, many of whom apparently never read the Obamacare legislation before they passed it, seem to be similarly out to lunch on another critical issue – illegal immigration. That’s a charitable explanation for why they so conspicuously groaned last night during the president’s address to lawmakers when Mr. Trump spoke of directing “the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American victims. The office is called VOICE — Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by special interests.”

The concern both in and out of Congress is that the administration plans to spotlight crimes committed by all non-native born Americans – and maybe even turn these misdeeds into law enforcement priorities. That would of course be completely unacceptable, since the Constitution grants everyone on American territory, including illegal immigrants, equal protection under the law.

But the Trump-haters on Capitol Hill, and elsewhere, evidently stopped listening at that point. For immediately afterwards, President Trump made clear that he was talking about crimes committed by illegal aliens. The next four paragraphs of his speech singled out family members of Americans killed by immigrants who were not only undocumented (as the favored euphemism calls them) but who had major prior criminal records.     

Even worse, the boo-birds have ignored the statement of administration policy that makes the focus on criminal illegal aliens crystal clear. Which was issued five weeks ago. In a January 25 Executive Order, Mr. Trump has mandated creation of “an office to provide proactive, timely, adequate, and professional services to victims of crimes committed by removable aliens and the family members of such victims. This office shall provide quarterly reports studying the effects of the victimization by criminal aliens present in the United States.”

In other words, if you’re not a criminal who’s in the country illegally (and therefore “removable”), you have nothing to fear from this new initiative. Conversely, if you’re a criminal but you’re a legal resident – native-born or not – you have nothing to fear, either. You don’t even have a problem if you’re an illegal immigrant but not a criminal.  Special treatment is to be reserved only for criminals whose illegal presence in the United States clearly signals a shameful failure to enforce federal immigration law with even minimal concern for the well-being not only of citizens, but of all law-abiding residents, including the foreign-born.         

Before his speech, the president told reporters, “The time is right for an immigration bill if both sides are willing to compromise.” That will be hard to believe if the Open Borders crowd keeps categorically – and even self-righteously — insisting on what looks like a Criminals First immigration policy.    

Im-Politic: The Last Gasps of Immigration Snake Oil?

Tags

border security, Cheap Labor Lobby, crime, felons, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Migration Policy Institute, Norman Matloff, Obama, Open Borders, Trump, Washington Post

What if someone told you and the rest of the country that Washington has just decided to admit into the country a large group of foreigners and that you knew for sure that 7.45 percent of them would be convicted for crimes and that more than a third of these (2.73 percent of the total) would be felony convictions. In absolute terms, this works out to 820,000 and 300,000 illegal residents, respectively.

If you have a lick of common sense, you’d be outraged. Yet this is the exactly the case with America’s illegal immigrant population in recent decades. Along with another news item I’ve just found, reveals just how completely and dangerously loony America’s immigration policy has become under the Open Borders-obsessed leaders of the last two administrations, and why at least from this standpoint, Donald Trump’s election as president was so urgently needed.

Supporters of more lenient immigration policies might respond that, compared with the U.S. population overall, illegal immigrants look even more law-abiding. A 2010 academic report, for example, claimed that a total of 8.6 percent of the adults in the United States has been convicted for a felony – more than three times the above rate for illegals. Moreover, the number of these felons is growing faster than the population as a whole, so the gap could well be even bigger today.

Yet here’s where you need to look at the numbers intelligently – and make sure you’re comparing apples versus apples. First, the Census Bureau counts illegal immigrants when it gauges the population every ten years. So illegal immigrant felons have been contributing to the overall numbers.

Second, the first illegal immigrant felon figures I provided were for the entire illegal population. The illegal immigrant felon figures are for adults illegally living in the country. According to a widely accepted source of information about the illegal population – the Pew Research Center – some 28 percent of this group is outside the nation’s workforce, meaning those Americans who either are working, or unemployed but looking for work. So we can safely assume that most of these illegals are either minors or seniors – demographic sectors where you don’t find many convicted felons.

When you do the math, it turns out that the share of illegal immigrant adults with felony convictions equals some 3.79 percent. That’s still considerably lower than the share for the total American population, but closer.

Here’s the rub, though, and it’s based on a crucial point raised recently by one of America’s best thinkers on immigration policy today, Professor Norman Matloff, a computer scientist at the University of California-Davis who specializes in both immigration and the U.S. high-tech workforce, and the Asian immigrant community in northern California.

As Matloff has noted, the purpose of American immigration policy is supposed to improve the country. As a result, why has Washington looked the over way for so long as literally millions of foreigners, including large numbers of undesirables, made their way into the country? Even worse, felons pose especially clear and present dangers to pubic safety. No wonder so many voters were outraged by the federal government’s record on this count.

In addition, all the figures I’ve provided for illegal immigrant crime rates come from the Migration Policy Institute. Its website specifies that it favors “rights-based immigration and refugee policies” – which raises an orange flag concerning its objectivity to me. And that orange flag should turn bright red for everyone after reading through its list of donors – which includes the hitherto immigration-friendly U.S. government, the Mexican government, the foundation run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (a strong supporter of immigration policies that have undercut wages in the U.S. tech sector), and WalMart (a long-time pillar of the nation’s corporate cheap labor lobby). So it’s entirely possible that the real numbers for illegal immigrant felons are considerably higher.

Meanwhile, much stronger evidence for the abject failure of current American immigration policy comes from a new Washington Post report finding that “Central American families are flowing into the United States in growing numbers….” Not surprisingly, this Mainstream Media article tries to put the blame on Mr. Trump and his supporters:

“Trump has pledged to build a towering border wall and deport millions, proposals that have been sketched out so far only in broad terms.

“By winning the election, Trump may have inadvertently made his job even harder. His plans have become a selling point for the smugglers urging people to cross the border before a wall goes up, according to migrants and officials in the United States and Mexico.”

Even less surprisingly, the authors missed the real news here: Throughout his administration, President Obama has been making statements to the effect that “Overall, the border is less porous than it’s been any time since the 1970s.” So did Mr. Trump’s main general election opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But as the Post article makes painfully obvious, both of them, as well as the Open Borders crowd generally, were blowing smoke.

Trump will no doubt face daunting obstacles towards keeping his immigration promises. But so far, it’s clear that none of them will involve the self-inflicted handicaps of cockeyed priorities and deliberately wishful thinking.

Im-Politic: Sadly Poetic Justice for California Open Borders Enthusiasts

Tags

ACA, Affordable Care Act, border security, California, Disney, H1B, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Norman Matloff, Obamacare, Open Borders, San Francisco, Sanctuary Cities, tech workers, University of California

As I’ve mentioned previously, computer scientist Norman Matloff is a great source of information and analysis on immigration issues – and especially on the visa system that lets businesses replace high paid domestic tech workers with low-paid foreigners. Late last week, the University of California-Davis professor once again showed his chops. Thanks to him, I learned about a stunning instance of poetic justice for a leading national center of Open Borders policies and enthusiasm.

Surely everyone knows by now that, as a municipality, San Francisco is proud to be one of America’s most ardent cheerleaders and enablers of dangerously permissive immigration policies. Its sanctuary city status directly resulted in the murder of a young woman by an illegal immigrant criminal that it released from custody rather than comply with an extradition request from the federal government. And of course the entire Bay Area’s zeitgeist is strongly influenced by the Silicon Valley tech companies whose profits depend heavily on continually driving down labor costs by hiring relatively young and extremely cheap immigrant programmers and the like and getting rid of older, more expensive native-born employees.

In addition, these descriptions also apply to the entire state of California – which has been charged with moving ever closer to become a full-fledged sanctuary jurisdiction.

So although it’s always unfortunate when someone loses a job, some smirking is surely understandable in response to the news – summarized in this September 8 post by Matloff – that the University of California’s San Francisco branch is pink-slipping 80 of its tech workers and some of the vacant positions will be filled with H1Bs supplied by an Indian outsourcing company. Worse, at least some of the cashiered employees at this public university believe they will need to train their imported replacements – as with a widely publicized case involving the Disney Corporation two years ago.

As made clear in this comprehensive account, the university’s decision could well spread throughout its numerous branches and potentially affect thousands of tech workers. And as Matloff explains, these government tech workers

“are highly sophisticated, aggressive people who know how to pull strings. It becomes especially important in light of UC’s generous defined-benefit pension plan. If someone has worked, say 10 years, at UCSF and had planned to work 25, they are having enormous future pension sums snatched away from them. So it’s real money” they’ll be losing.

A final point worth considering. According to the executive in charge of information technology services at the University of California-San Francisco:

“the campus is facing ‘difficult circumstances’ because of declining reimbursement and the impact of the Affordable Healthcare Act, which has increased the volume of patients but limits reimbursement to around 55 cents on the dollar….”

California, of course, is a major Democratic Party stronghold, in part because its (immigrant happy) public employee unions are so enormous and so powerful. I wonder how many more state university workers will be replaced by immigrants – and how long it will take the broader state government to adopt these practices – before the Golden State’s politics begin to change.

Im-Politic: More Anti-Trump Media Bias – Including One Example That’s Homophobic

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amnesty, Bloomberg.com, deportation, Donald Trump, Gang of 8, Hillary Clinton, homophobia, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigration reform, Jobs, John McCain, John Micklethwait, Labor Force Participation Rate, labor markets, LGBT, living standards, Mainstream Media, Mark Zandi, Max Ehrenfreund, media, media bias, part-time, productivity, The Washington Post, Vladimir Putin, wages

I sure hope all you RealityChek readers have had a great Labor Day weekend. Unless it was a complete disaster, it had to be better than the last few days’ performance just registered by the Mainstream Media.

On Sunday, I reported on a truly contemptible smear of white working-class Americans delivered by Time magazine uber-pundit Joe Klein. But published this weekend along with this display of mass character assassination was a swipe at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that can only be reasonably interpreted as homophobia, and an example of outright ignorance of the basic economic concept of productivity, and of recent U.S. labor market trends. For good measure, this second piece left out information on its main source that strongly suggests major political bias.

The homophobia was delivered courtesy of no less than John Micklethwait, the current Editor-in-chief at Bloomberg.com who previously held this post at The Economist. Think I’m exaggerating? See for yourself. In the course of an otherwise informative interview with Vladimir Putin, Micklethwait pressed the Russian president in this way for his views of Trump and his Democratic counterpart, Hillary Clinton:

“[Y]ou are really telling me that if you have a choice between a woman, who you think may have been trying to get rid of you, and a man, who seems to have this great sort of affection for you, almost sort of bordering on the homoerotic, you are really going to go for, you are not going to make a decision between those two, because one of them would seem to be a lot more favorable towards you?”

I had to go over this passage several times before convincing myself that I’d actually read it correctly. Even giving Micklethwait’s language the most charitable interpretation it deserves – that the journalist meant it simply as a joke – what exactly distinguishes it from the kind of sniggering locker-room-level humor that’s now recognized as demeaning and hurtful? Therefore, is it remotely plausible to doubt that Micklethwait himself believes that such emotions are fundamentally shameful, and that his attribution of such feelings toward Trump reveal a positively vicious bias against the maverick politician?

Here’s hoping that gay activist organizations come down hard on Micklethwait’s bigotry – and insist that his resignation is needed to guarantee the integrity of Bloomberg’s coverage of both American politics and LGBT issues.

The second major media stumble came in a Saturday Washington Post Wonkblog item spotlighting a claim that Trump’s immigration policies “could put Americans out of work.”

That’s of course an entirely valid and important possibility to report on, but author Max Ehrenfreund (and his editors) failed to fulfill a fundamental journalistic obligation by omitting from his article the unmistakable anti-Trump bias of Mark Zandi, the economist who came up with this finding. Yes, the piece mentioned that Zandi is a former aide to Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. But what it didn’t tell you is that McCain was a charter member of the “Gang of 8” – the bipartisan group of Senators that several years ago launched a powerful push for an amnesty-focused immigration reform bill. Nor did Ehrenfreund mention that Zandi has also contributed to Clinton’s presidential campaign – which has been pushing immigration reform proposals even more indulgent than the Gang’s.

As for the Zandi-Ehrenfreund case that Trump’s immigration policies would backfire powerfully on the U.S. economy, it could not have been more ignorant or incoherent economically. As Ehrenfreund explained it, “deporting [millions of] undocumented immigrants would increase costs for employers, because they would have to compete for the workers remaining in the United States, causing wages to rise.”

Full stop: Amnesty supporters have maintained for years that most illegals are simply filling “jobs that Americans won’t do.” Now they’re saying that if a the supply of American labor shrank due to deportation, increasing wages would summon forth replacements who are either native-born or legally residing in the country? Do tell! Ehrenfreund and Zandi might also have mentioned that robust wage increases have been one of the most conspicuously absent developments during the weak current U.S. recovery since it technically began some seven years ago.

Just as strange was the claim that “Already, the labor force has been shrinking as older workers retire, and the unemployment rate is under 5 percent, which suggests relatively few workers are looking for jobs.” Don’t Ehrenfreund and Zandi know that much of this shrinkage has taken place among working age women and especially men? Or that the number of Americans working part-time involuntarily still remains above pre-recession levels? In other words, there’s an enormous population in the United States that would bid for better-paying jobs.

Perhaps strangest of all is the Zandi-Ehrenfreund contention that “To compensate, businesses would have to increase prices. Some firms would lose customers and could be forced out of business. ‘Asking these folks to leave is going to put a hole in the economy that’s going to cost jobs,’ Zandi said. ‘It’s going to cost the jobs of American citizens.'”

That is, Zandi and Ehrenfreund have either omitted or ruled out the possibility that many companies will eventually respond instead by either automating and/or by otherwise improving their efficiency in ways that boost their productivity – thereby laying the ground for sustainable prosperity and living standard increases going forward. These two pessimists might believe that this venerable maxim of economics no longer holds, and that “this time it will be different.” But maybe they could do readers the courtesy of explaining why?

This Washington Post article’s descent into fakeonomics hardly stops here. But the above reasoning should be enough to establish its silliness – and to prompt the question if comparably doofy pro-Trump studies would ever see the light of day in the paper.

I closed my last post by asking why recent polls show Americans’ confidence in the media has stayed even in the low double-digits on a percentage scale. These Bloomberg and Washington Post pieces don’t merit even single-digit approval.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Economic Data Journalism That’s Missing Key Data

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border security, Central America, child migrants, China, furniture, Hickory North Carolina, Honduras, illegal immigrants, Immigration, manufacturing, migrants, Obama, Reuters, Sonia Nazario, statistics, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Trade, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, {What's Left of) Our Economy

“Data journalism” is supposed to have been all the rage in the press recently. Why, then, do so many reporters keep ignoring crucial statistics when covering economic and other trends? Several major news organizations have combined to provide two examples of how much needless confusion these oversights can create.

The first instance concerns illegal immigration, and specifically the ongoing heart-breaking story of children fleeing rampant gang-related violence in Central America. Last week, The New York Times carried an article by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author that described a promising ray of light in this grim picture. According to author Sonia Nazario, new U.S. government programs have been largely responsible for “a remarkable reduction in violence” in the neighborhoods in Honduras in which they’ve been introduced. And as a result, even though the situation in the rest of the country remains dire, “fewer children are coming to the United States from Honduras.”

Further, Nazario writes, this success “offers a striking rebuke to the rising isolationists in American politics. A Pew Research Center poll in April found that most Americans think the United States should ‘deal with its own problems’ while others deal with theirs “as best they can,” a sentiment that’s at the core of Donald J. Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan and ‘build a wall’ campaign. Many seem to have lost their faith in American power.”

To her credit, Nazario has done extensive local reporting on the issue, and the encouraging developments she has apparently found on the ground deserve to be taken seriously. At the same time, the sources she cites for the numbers she presents all have a strong stake in portraying the aid programs as a success – specifically, America’s ambassador to this forlorn country, U.S. aid and narcotics control officials along with contractors administering these programs, and local Honduran recipients of the funds and other resources.

This possibility alone should have tipped her or her editors off to that some independent verification was needed. And it was all the more essential because the U.S. government data has just reported that, over the past fiscal year, the number of child migrants and entire families from Honduras caught trying to enter the United States illegally is up, not down. (Hat tip to The Washington Times for breaking this story.)

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has stated that for the entirety of fiscal 2015, a total of 16,080 Honduran illegal border crossers were apprehended – 10,671 “family units” and 5,409 unaccompanied children. Through this July – two months before the end of the current fiscal year – the total jumped to 23,270, or by a total of 44.71 percent. The number of family units hit 15,142 (41.90 percent higher) and the number of unaccompanied children reached 8,128 (50.27 percent higher).

It’s possible that the total number of Honduran leavers is down, and that most aren’t caught. But the burden of proof is on Nazario and The Times to make this case.

Another recent development undercutting Nazario’s thesis: Late last month, the Obama administration announced (as reported in The New York Times) “a substantial expansion of a program to admit Central American refugees to the United States, conceding that its efforts to protect migrants fleeing dangerous conditions had left too many people with no recourse.”

Nazario could claim both that the administration is simply bowing to the continuing humanitarian tragedies in El Salvador and Guatemala, where the programs she touts haven’t been introduced. But the president’s decision certainly doesn’t seem to reflect much optimism concerning their potential. She could also point to her observation that the Honduran programs have run into opposition in Congress, and contend that the president decided to take the path of least resistance. Yet lawmakers are even less likely to support more admissions.

What is clear is that she either chose not to seek out statistics that undercut her hopeful narrative, or that she didn’t know they exist. Neither possibility should inspire confidence in her credibility.

The second example of failing to consult the data was provided by The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, which recently published dueling articles on the state of American manufacturing and its recent record of coping with Chinese competition. Their special focus was the same, too – Hickory, North Carolina, a supposedly typical long-time American manufacturing center.

The Journal piece seemed to focus more on Hickory’s continuing challenges; the Reuters article “accentuated the positive.” Both articles provided plenty of numbers about manufacturing job loss and recent recovery, too. But neither publication told readers anything about the most important Hickory- and manufacturing-related figures of all – those on production. For without healthy levels of production, healthy levels of employment (however you define that term) are impossible to sustain over any length of time. And the figures show that, in Hickory, both in manufacturing overall and in furniture production (the area’s signature sector), activity remains severely depressed.

A good baseline year is 2002. That was the first full year of Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization, and therefore the first full year in which it enjoyed substantial immunity from U.S. laws and other policies aimed at combating its still widespread predatory trade practices.

In 2002, furniture and related industries comprised fully 30 percent of the Hickory metropolitan area’s total manufacturing output (after adjusting for inflation), with a total output of $1.339 billion. The latest furniture-specific figures available for Hickory only go up to 2013, but they show a sharp inflation-adjusted production decline – to just $816 million. In fact, the hit to Hickory’s real furniture output (39.10 percent) was greater than for total furniture production in American metropolitan areas (31.03 percent).

Hickory’s furniture performance looks better since 2009. From that recession year through 2013, the sector’s real production rose by 26.71 percent. That’s more than three times faster than the rate for all of America’s metro areas (7.73 percent).

But contrary to the Reuters piece, this achievement hasn’t translated into a notable broader manufacturing upswing in the region. From 2009 to 2014, overall U.S. Metro area manufacturing output advanced by 10.69 percent in real terms. For Hickory and environs, the real growth was only 9.45 percent.

Like Nazario in Honduras, the reporters who worked on these Hickory manufacturing stories clearly spent considerable time in the area surveying the manufacturing scene. And since the data is a little dated, no one should rule out the chance that Hickory’s manufacturing output has experienced a true surge since then. But that would mean that industry in Hickory has escaped the fate of industry nation-wide. Because around that time, after-inflation production growth in America began slowing dramatically. Indeed, for most of this period, it’s been in recession.

Reality certainly is too complicated to be reduced to numbers alone, and data itself can be methodologically flawed, incomplete, out of date – and intentionally distorted. But used properly and with integrity, data can be a useful check that can prevent simple anecdotes from being confused with genuine trends. So although journalists shouldn’t be slaves even to the very best numbers available, there’s no reason or excuse to ignore them.