Im-Politic: Biden’s Latest Americans Last Immigration Policy

Tags

America First, Biden, Border Crisis, border security, Central America, Chobani, cities, corruption, crime, El Salvador, foreign aid, gang violence, governance, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, inequality, Kamala Harris, Mastercard, Microsoft, migrants, Northern Triangle, racial economic justice, urban poverty

As known by RealityChek regulars, I’m deeply skeptical that the Biden administration can bring migrant flows from Central America (or similar regions) under control by adequately improving the miserable local conditions that (understandably) drive so much flight northward to begin with. But the first detailed description of this policy that I’ve seen not only ignores all of the intertwined institutional, governance, and cultural obstacles to turning regions like Central America’s Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) into even approximations of success stories. It also casts real doubt on the seriousness of the vaunted domestic social justice and inequality commitments made both by President Biden and by at least some of the U.S. corporate sector.

As argued by a White House Fact Sheet released yesterday, support for economic development in these long-impoverished, abusively ruled countries will “require more than just the resources of the U.S. government.” Also essential “to support inclusive economic growth in the Northern Triangle” will be the “unique resources and expertise” of the private sector.”

It’s true that only three completely private, profit-seeking American companies have responded so far to the “Call to Action” for business involvement issued by Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s the administration’s designated czarina for dealing immigration-wise with the Northern Triangle. But let’s say lots more get involved.

Why would anyone capable of adult thinking believe that their efforts will succeed? After all, the administration acknowledges that economic success in the region depends on overcoming its “long-standing impediments to investment-led growth.” And it specifies that these obstacles include governments that simultaneously either can’t or won’t carry out their duties in corruption-free ways, and are unable to provide minimal levels of security for their populations against criminal gangs.

Meaning that private businesses will be keen even on setting up the kinds of training and business incubator and internet connectivity programs that predominate in their Northern Triangle plans while threats of violence and extortion remain omnipresent? Maybe they’re planning to cope by hiring massive  private security forces – but such precautions were never mentioned in the Call to Action announcement.

Just as important, here’s another major head-scratcher, especially given the flood of promises over the last year or so from U.S. business circles about promoting racial economic and financial equality. If companies are willing to wade into dangerous environments to educate populations, build or strengthen the infrastructure needed for significant economic progress, and foster new businesses in Central America, why aren’t they focusing their efforts on America’s own inner cities, or at least focusing more tightly on these efforts first? It’s not like their needs aren’t pressing. And although the Northern Triangle countries have actually made some noteworthy progress in fighting violent crime lately, they’re still much more dangerous places than even most of America’s homicide capitals.

Consequently, for companies concerned overall with actual results, it would make far more sense to take an America First approach. Not that Microsoft, Chobani, and Mastercard have ignored their disadvantaged compatriots in practice. But even as their U.S. efforts remain pretty modest (Microsoft, e.g., to date has only launched its digital skills and access improvement program in Atlanta and Texas, and Chobani’s incubator program still seems pretty small scale), they’ve decided to head south of the border(s).

Incidentally, the entire Biden Central America and overall immigration policies are vulnerable to a similar criticism. Since however difficult it’s going to be to spur racial and other economic and social progress at home, the challenge will be far more difficult in foreign countries, a President truly committed both to these vital domestic goals and to staunching migrant flows would focus focus his economic development programs on his own country, and deal with the migrants as an immigration issue – by securing the border. Unfortunately for Americans, Joe Biden has been anything but that President.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Is More Immigration Really the Key to America’s Tech Future?

Tags

Cato Institute, China, education, entrepreneurs, Germany, H-1B visa, immigrants, Immigration, India, innovation, Israel, Japan, skills, South Korea, start-ups, Taiwan, technology, Washington Post, Worldometers.info, {What's Left of) Our Economy

One of the most compelling – and most often made – arguments in favor of higher U.S. legal immigration levels has to do with innovation. Supposedly, without encouraging ever more foreign workers to move to America, the nation will never be able to maintain its global technology leadership, and ultimately an acceptable, much less improved, degree of prosperity. (See, e.g., here and here.)

Part of the rationale for a welcoming posture, as indicated above, has to do with policies toward highly skilled and educated immigrants in particular (like those admitted under the H-1B program), and the special visa quotas allotted to them. But as the Washington Post editorial board recently made clear, there’s a more general view that immigration is especially good at providing America with “a steady supply of working-age strivers” and that “This nation’s prosperity, pluck, ambition and effervescent character are the products of more than 100 million immigrants who have sought better lives in the United States since its founding.” In other words, immigrants are far more likely than the native-born population to possess the risk-taking and general entrepreneurial traits that lead to so much technological progress.

I’ve already debunked one aspect of these claims here, but because they keep popping up, I keep thinking more about them, and have come across more data that not only casts further doubt on the technology-related need for more immigrants, but that indicate that the immigration cheerleaders are putting the cart before the horse.

For instance, it’s widely agreed that the U.S. tech sector is considerably healthier than Germany’s. In this vein, a widely followed global innovation index issued each year by a United Nations agency ranks the former third in the world and the latter ninth. Ninth isn’t so bad, but it’s at the least curious in this regard that for decades at least, Germany has admitted many more immigrants as a share of total population than has the United States.

Indeed, in 1990 (a good starting point, since current Germany came into being with the reunification that year of the former Federal Republic that comprised the nation’s western part and the former Communist run east), Germany’s immigrant inflow of 1.256 million represented 1.59 percent of the new country’s 79.054 million inhabitants. The 1.536 million green cards awarded by the United States that year accounted for only 0.60 percent of its 252.120 million people. (My official sources for German and U.S. annual immigration totals are here and here, respectively. For population, I used the reliable Worldometers.info website.)

But maybe Germany has made up some ground on the United States during this nearly three-decade period? Not according to this study last year from the Cato Institute – one of America’s foremost supporters of much more lenient U.S. immigration policies. If you look at Figure 2, you see that in 2018, Germany was lagging the United States just about as badly in the number of patents it received in the United States (still the world’s most important market for technology) as it was in 1990.

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that its relatively large immigration inflows have given Germany much of an edge in entrepreneurship, either. As of 2019, according to this source, Germany’s business start-up rate was less than half that of the United States.

This chart, moreover, makes clear that it’s not just the U.S.-Germany comparison that mucks up the ostensible relationship between tech prowess and entrepreneurship on the one hand, and immigration levels on the other. After all, in 2019, India’s start-up rate was also much higher than Germany’s – even though India is much better known for sending folks abroad than for attracting them. Foreigners aren’t exactly flocking to live in China, either, yet its start-up rate matches Germany’s.

That Cato Institute study provides more complicating international comparisons. That Figure 2 shows that as of 2018, Israel has forged into the lead as the country receiving the largest number of U.S. patents. And its performance started taking off in the mid-1990s. Yet in 1995, when Germany and Israel were roughly on a par in their ability to receive American patents, the 76,361 immigrants Israel admitted in 1995 equalled 1.36 percent of its population of 5.619 million – not far from relatively un-innovative Germany’s figures. By the time it became the international leader, Israel’s immigration rate had fallen to 0.32 percent of its 8.972 million population – much lower than that of Germany, which had become a clear als-ran on the U.S. patent scene – and roughly the same as the recent U.S. rate which has been decried as so woefully inadequate.

And look at the other top performers in Figure 2 other than the United States and Israel. Taiwan hasn’t been anything close to an immigration magnet, either, and ditto for South Korea. As for Japan, it’s long been known as one of the most xenophobic countries in the world (as noted in that Washington Post editorial).

What do the non-U.S. “patent tigers” identified by Cato have in common? As author Jonathan M. Barnett puts it:

“Short on consumers, resources, and labor (and saddled with geographic separation from key consumer markets), the patent tigers (especially Israel and Taiwan) were compelled to specialize in innovation-intensive segments of the global supply chain in which ingenuity, rather than labor or natural resources, conferred a competitive advantage.”

As a result, as widely agreed, they’ve worked hard to create top-notch educational systems for their own populations. German education is highly regarded, too, but it’s often observed that its history and culture in particular have discouraged self-starters.

The lessons for the United States seem pretty clear here.  On the one hand, it’s got lots of the overall population, raw materials and domestic markets that the patent tigers lack.  On the other, unlike Germany, it still enjoys an entrepreneur- and innovation-friendly culture.  If Americans did a much better job of educating their own people, especially in the math, science, and technology fields, they should be able to keep its global technology edge even while controlling immigration more tightly. 

If, however, the nation continues to coddle underperforming school systems, especially at the primary and secondary levels, the argument for relying on immigration to fill the tech gap will look all the stronger.  And in a supreme irony, the ready availability of highly skilled and educated immigrants will keep reducing national incentives to get the national education act together.      

Those Stubborn Facts: Immigration Excuse-Making for California

Tags

Associated Press, Barack Obama, California, Donald Trump, green card holders, green cards, immigrants, Immigration, legal immigration, Mainstream Media, MSM, Those Stubborn Facts

California’s “immigration decline has been particularly fast in the past half decade as President Donald Trump’s administration sharply reduced the number of people legally entering the United States.”

– Associated Press, April 24, 2021

 

Average annual grants of legal permanent U.S. resident status to

immigrants, Trump years: 1,085,181

 

Average annual grants of legal permanent U.S. resident status to

immigrants, second Obama term: 1,060,402

 

(Sources: “Awaiting census count, California ponders slow growth future,” by Kathleen Ronayne, Associated Press, April 24, 2021, Awaiting census count, California ponders slow growth future (apnews.com) & “Table 1. Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2019,” Yearbook 2019, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Immigration Data and Statistics, Department of Homeland Security, Table 1. Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2019 | Homeland Security (dhs.gov))

Im-Politic: Can Biden Really Solve the “Root Causes” Behind His Border Crisis?

Tags

Biden, Border Crisis, border security, CAFTA, Central America, Central America Free Trade Agreement, Colbert I. King, Cold War, Donald Trump, El Salvador, foreign aid, George W. Bush, globalism, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Jorge Castaneda, Kamala Harris, Lawence E. Harrison, migrants, Northern Triangle, race to the bottom, Trade, Washington Post

One of the time-honored practices – and myths – behind globalist U.S. foreign policies has been its faith that turmoil in various parts of the world that allegedly threatens American interests can be either eliminated or reduced to manageable levels with enough foreign aid. The idea is that such assistance will address the social and economic problems thought to be mainly to blame for the instability. So it’s no surprise that the globalist Biden administration has decided that aid programs are the keys to bringing immigration from Central America under control – though not of course right away.

As stated by Vice President Kamala Harris upon being tasked by President Biden to oversee U.S. effort to turn the counties of the region’s “Northern Triangle” into places whose populations won’t be determined to leave, the United States “must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek” northward.

That’s why I sure hope she reads Colbert I. King’s column in Tuesday’s Washington Post before she rolls up her sleeves too far. For as the author notes, the Biden administration plan to turn the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) from clearly failed states into (reasonable) success stories isn’t exactly new in its essentials.

And especially in recent years, when conditions in the region ostensibly worsened dramatically, and therefore fueled especially big migrants flows, there’s been no shortage of U.S. aid, especially considering the tiny size of the three economies.

As King details,

“Congress appropriated more than $3.6 billion to fund a Strategy for Engagement in Central America program between 2016 and 2021. The money was supposed to strengthen rule of law, improve the administration of justice, promote economic prosperity, prevent violence and combat gangs, and empower youth and women.

“>In fiscal 2021 alone, U.S. funding amounted to $505.9 million.

“>Between 2013 and 2018, The U.S. Agriculture Department allocated $407 million to Central America to provide school meals, nutritional programs for women, infants and children, and to train and provide technical assistance to improve agricultural productivity.

“>The Obama administration asked for money to help the region in fiscal 2016, and Congress appropriated $750 million, requiring the countries to improve border security, combat corruption and address human rights concerns.”

Then the author – properly – proceeds to ask “What happened to it all?” And what can the Biden administration do to make sure that the $4 billion it plans to spend in the region will work any better if Congress approves this sum?

Moreover, the case against more Central America aid as a Border Crisis game changer is actually stronger than King describes. Because Washington has not only been pouring money into the region for decades. It’s also granted these three Central American countries (and their regional neighbors) tariff cuts and other trade-related assistance aimed at enabling them to export their way to prosperity.

Indeed, as then President George W. Bush declared while lobbying for passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) – which was eventually expanded to include the Dominican Republic,

“People have got to understand that by promoting policy that will help generate wealth in Central America, we’re promoting policy that will mean someone is less–more likely to stay at home to find a job. If you’re concerned about immigration to this country, then you must understand that CAFTA and the benefits of CAFTA will help create new opportunity in Central American countries, which will mean someone will be able to find good work at home, somebody will be able to provide for their family at home, as opposed to having to make the long trip to the United States. CAFTA is good immigration policy as well as good trade policy.”

Critics can reasonably argue that these U.S. programs failed to achieve their immigration aims because they were poorly designed. On the aid front, it’s true that too much of the assistance provided by the United States during the Cold War was military or other security assistance that largely helped corrupt governments repress their own people – and fight rebels labeled as tools of the Soviet Union and Cuba.

When it comes to trade, globalist U.S. Presidents did Central America no favors, either. For CAFTA simply plunged the region into a frantic race to the bottom in wages and worker safety that had been sparked by the decision to free up trade indiscriminately with all the very low-income countries (including China, India, and Bangladesh) that also produced the apparel products that have represented Central America’s best hope for prospering via globalization.

At the same time, significant U.S. assistance for Central America continued after the Cold War’s end, and more was targeted at economic development. And the Biden administration has said nothing about U.S. trade policy reforms that actually would give the Northern Triangle – or the rest of Central America for that matter, or Mexico – major legs up on non-Western Hemisphere competitors.

All of which could support the conclusion that no amount of aid or trade breaks can make Central America successful. A globalist administration will be particularly loathe to accept this admittedly depressing proposition, but there’s abundant evidence in its favor. The work of development economist Lawrence E. Harrison, to cite one leading example, has compellingly argued that some counties – and entire regions – simply don’t have what it takes to achieve economic success because of the cultures they’ve evolved.

At the same time, as my friend – and noted political scientist and former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda – has argued, the Central American economies are so small that enough smartly spent U.S. money might be able to overcome even these deep-rooted obstacles.

I can’t say that I know the answer. But the analyses of King, Harrison, and Castaneda all point to the overarching conclusion that the kind of business-as-usual version of the address-the-root-causes of Central America’s failings being contemplated by the Biden administration can’t possibly stem the migrant flow. Moreover, until genuinely promising plans are developed, there will be no substitute for re-securing the border by reinstating the type of Trump-ian controls that minimize the strength of the U.S. magnets that influence migrant flows as surely as the problems of sending countries.

 

Im-Politic: Why Progressives (& Mainstream Democrats) May Ditch American Workers For Good

Tags

Bernie Sanders, Biden, budget deficits, Democrats, Donald Trump, economics, Elizabeth Warren, Im-Politic, Immigration, imports, manufacturing, Modern Monetary Theory, productivity, progressives, Stephanie Kelton, The New York Times, Trade, wages, working class

If you want to start a (hopefully verbal only) fight about American politics, one good way is to tell a Democrat that his or her party – and especially its powerful progressive wing – has been abandoning the country’s private sector working class in favor of what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat just called “the winners of globalization, from wealthy suburbanites to Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites….”  (Here’s some polling evidence for this proposition.)

So it’s more than a little interesting that if you take this position, you’ve recently gotten some devastating ammunition from no less than one of progressivism’s leading intellectual lights – economist Stephanie Kelton.

Kelton has achieved renown for her pioneering “Modern Monetary Theory” take on economic policy. As she has explained, it holds that “Governments in nations that maintain control of their own currencies — like Japan, Britain and the United States, and unlike Greece, Spain and Italy — can increase spending without needing to raise taxes or borrow currency from other countries or investors.”

Naturally, Democrats of most stripes have seized on this argument to varying extents to justify running much bigger federal budget deficits to deal much more ambitiously with a whole host of national problems – to engineering an adequate recovery from the CCP Virus-induced recession to remedying major social and economic ills that they believe dangerously plagued the economy before the pandemic.

One aspect of Kelton’s views, though, has been widely ignored, and it’s this stance that led her last week to support explicitly measures with proven records of harming domestic U.S. private sector workers but with which the increasingly elitist Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable over the last decade or so – on trade and especially immigration policy.

The ignored Kelton stance: on inflation. As she has specified (in the column linked above), “Politics aside, the only economic constraints currency-issuing states face are inflation and the availability of labor and other material resources in the real economy.” And in the author’s latest column, she argues that it’s precisely the appearance of these threats today that require the Biden administration to embrace unfettered trade and mass immigration policies.

As Kelton puts it, the combination of (1) President Biden’s massive spending plans and (2) undeniable contraints on the nation’s capacity to supply all the new demand that they’ll create will produce worrisome inflationary pressures. Too many customers will be chasing too few products to buy, thereby forcing up the prices of the latter and possibly generating more economic problems than this new consumption solves.

Among the solutions she offers? Enabling the economy much more easily to satisfy all the new demand by accessing productive capacity from abroad. Thus she suggests both

“Repealing tariffs would make it easier and cheaper for American businesses to buy supplies manufactured abroad and easier for consumers to spend more of their income on products made outside of our borders, draining off some domestic demand pressures” and

“loosening legal-immigration policies, so that even once America nears full employment there would still be an adequate labor pool to meet the increased demand for workers.”

These arguments are entirely consistent with more conventional schools of economic thought – which have long insisted that the freest possible worldwide flows of goods, services, and people will lead to the greatest possible degree of prosperity for the world as a whole.

The problem, though, is that recent decades have taught that when the United States opens its economy wide to a world full of countries that still tightly protect their own markets, and when it opens its borders wide to enormous foreign populations with much lower living standards, American workers take major hits. Abundant research even in the mainstream economics community, for example, has documented the devastating impact of the “China shock” on trade, and the Trump years showed that when immigration curbs helped U.S. labor markets tighten to unprecedented levels, wages for low-income workers, who overall compete directly for employment against illegal aliens, rose especially strongly.   

For many years, Kelton’s fellow Democrats and progressives have been increasingly determined to deny these immigration realities – even when employment levels have been less than stellar. And although private sector labor union-oriented Democrats and even progressives like Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont still champion what might be called America First trade policies, the party’s rank and file has grown much more enthusiastic about the pre-Trump version of economic globalization — as indicated by the below survey results from the Pew Research Center.

Even more curious, and troubling for the economy as a whole: Kelton sorely neglects the concept of productivity, and the importance of continually boosting the economy’s efficiency in order to boost living standards in sustainable, as opposed to bubbly, ways.

Kelton does write that “Over time, the Biden plan’s investments in our physical and human infrastructure will enhance our economy’s productive capacity, leaving us with a better educated and more productive work force, more efficient railways, less congested roadways, improved technologies and much else.”    

But she also adds, crucially, “this can’t happen overnight. It will take years.”  Presumably, then she’d be OK with dropping the open trade policies at least to some degree.  What she misses, however, are the (further) productivity-killing effects bound to emerge during that period of re-enabling imports in sectors like manufacturing – which are central to the nation’s hopes for retaining sufficient productive capacity. 

Indeed, she seems unaware that those manufacturing sectors that have been heavily dependent on artificially cheap imports have been major productiviy laggards. (The same holds for parts of the economy that have leaned heavily on the comparable crutch of immigrant labor – especially low-wage, low-skill immigrant labor).

Kelton of course is only one Democratic party thinker, and as she complained in her latest Times column, too many Democratic leaders – including the President – are still clinging to their supposedly outmoded views on spending and taxing and promoting U.S.-made manufactures.  And as mentioned, even within progressive ranks, her views on trade may not prevail against the Warren and Sanders perspective.

But it’s just as reasonable to believe that progressives hold the whip hand among  Democrats today on many issues, and Kelton played the biggest role in turning their spending-happy views into virtual party orthodoxy.  If her immigration and especially trade positions take the same course, the Democrats’ once unchallengeable identity as “the party of the common man” will become an example of transparently false advertising.       

P.S. Special thanks to my Twitter friend who goes by the handle @RocCityBuilt for first alerting me to the trade and immigration material in Kelton’s latest article.   

Im-Politic: Why Democrats’ Latino Problem is Much Bigger Than They Think

Tags

conservatives, David Shor, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, Equis Research, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latino men, Latinos, New York magazine, Populism, progressives, racism, Republicans, Ruy Teixeira, sexism, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, xenophobia

You know that “Wow!” emoji, with the wide open mouth and eyes? Here’s some political news genuinely deserving that reaction. Remember how all the presidential election exit polls last November showed significant gains by Donald Trump among Latino voters? And how so many analysts attributed this progress to the former President’s “macho” appeal to Latino men – an appeal that was so strong that it overrode Trump’s supposedly obvious anti-Latino racism and xenophobia?

Well, at the beginning of this month, a major survey of Latino voters found that, actually, the Trump Latino vote was driven by women.

“Big deal,” you scoff? Absolutely. Because the results indicate that these voters’ backing for Trump didn’t stem mainly from his personality traits, which are not only pretty peculiar to him, but which repel at least as many voters of all kinds as they attract. Instead, the findings suggest that Latinos’ growing Trump-ism owes more to support for his economic message and record (including on immigration) – which signals big opportunities for other Republican/conservative populists not saddled with Trump’s often -putting character, but who focus on issues that will remain crucial to much of the Latino and overall electorate long into the future.

Examples of the “macho” theory include this piece from the New York Times and a later article in the Washington Post Magazine. And they nicely illustrate how it also reenforced the impression of Trump voters generally as “deplorables” that’s been spread relentlessly by the former President’s opponents of all stripes, and that conveniently strengthens the case for seeking to ignore and marginalize them.

It’s true that both these analyses recognized that Trump’s own business experience and the state of the economy for most of his presidency also attracted many Latino males. But their greater emphasis was on how these voters liked the fact that, as the Times piece put it, Trump is “forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

The Post Magazine article was much more nuanced and even-handed, but the author nonetheless described a not-trivial number of Latino men (using his own father as an example) as “archconservatives” and “conservative talk radio” fans. He also presented plenty of analyses from supposed experts likening them to low-status males desperately clinging to any patriarchical life-saver to preserve their remaining self-esteem, and consequently as prime suckers for any “self-made man” and any other bootstraps-type myths contributing to the brand Trump cultivated.

The Post Magazine piece also contrasted these Latino male views with

“the experiences of Latinas, many of whom are running their households, managing child care or employed as front-line and domestic workers — nurses or caretakers for the elderly. ‘They are making sure their kids are prepared for Zoom school,’ [one expert] explains. ‘I think there’s a fundamentally different experience that Hispanic men and women have in both what they experience day to day and what information they consume.’”

In other words, Latino men: kind of neanderthal and delusional. Latino women: nose-to-the-grindstone essential workers and heroines who are not only staffing the front lines at work, but keeping ther households together. Therefore, even if you were willing to hold your nose and wanted any opponents of conservative populists to reach out more effectively to Latino men, you’d have to admit that many are too unhinged to be reachable.

Significantly, the new findings – by a data firm called Equis Research – don’t dispute that Trump did better among Latino men than among Latino women. Equis did, however, generate data showing that, between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Trump Latino male vote grew by three net percentage points, but his Latina vote grew by eight percentage points. That’s what’s called “statistically significant.” And poll skeptics should note that Equis interviewed 41,000 Latino voters in battleground states, and studied voter file data, precinct returns, and focus groups.

Equis didn’t endorse any explanations for this Latina shift, although a Democratic analyst named David Shor believes that “the concentration of Trump’s gains among Latinas is consistent with his hypothesis that ‘defund the police’ influenced Hispanic voting behavior since, in his polling, women rank crime as a more important issue than men do.”

But to me, the new findings matter most for a more fundamental reason:  They further debunk claims from Never Trumpers in both parties that Trump’s Latino gains resulted from appeals to some Americans’ worst (i.e., most sexist) instincts (as mentioned above), or from simple misinformation, or from the Democrats’ alleged failure to court Latino voters ardently enough – that is, from problems that either shouldn’t be fixed, or that can easily be solved without compromising the party’s strong shift to the hard Left on issues across the board.

Instead, Equis’ report adds to the case that  a huge part of the problem is the shift itself – and with Americans of all races, colors, and creeds.

Special thanks to old friend Ruy Teixeira, a distinguished opinion analyst in his own right, for calling this news to my attention. And for a very good summary and analysis of the findings, see this piece from New York magazine (in which you’ll find David Shor’s arguments).

Im-Politic: An Open Borders Mainstay Shoots His Cause in the Foot

Tags

Biden administration, Border Crisis, Central America, Donald Trump, drug cartels, Emma Lazarus, human trafficking, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Jorge Ramos, Latin America, Mexico, migrants, Open Borders, sovereignty, Statue of Liberty, The New York Times, Univision

The current crisis on the U.S.’ southern border is President Biden’s fault. His predecessors’ immigration policies were working. The new administration’s reliance on stemming the migrants’ tide by Building Back Better in Central America won’t work for the foreseeable future, if at all. When folks like Mr. Biden talk about “fixing a broken system,” they really mean reorienting that system to maximize immigration. And – most damning of all – bolstering America’s well-being and security shouldn’t be the main aims of U.S. immigration policy.

Don’t take my word for it. Take that of Jorge Ramos. Because these dangerously radical and indeed – in one instance, un-American – points were exactly what the Univision anchor and long-time supporter of Open Borders by Any Other Name just admitted openly in a column in last Friday’s New York Times.

On responsibility for the current border crisis? According to Ramos:

“‘The border is not open,’ the U.S. secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, told me in an interview. ‘What we have discontinued,’ Mr. Mayorkas promised, ‘is the cruelty of the previous administration.’”

“Well, apparently, in Central America, people only heard the bit about ‘cruelty’ being over, which is why so many migrants are heading north toward the border. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers, mostly from Central America, have waited for over a year in Mexican border towns and they will not waste this opportunity.”

Don’t think for a minute, incidentally, that the small Central American countries will be the only sending countries – even in the Western Hemisphere. The polling organization Gallup has recently determined that no fewer than 42 million Latin Americans want to move to the United States permanently. And as Ramos makes clear, no one should be startled in the least:

“It should come as no surprise that this [migration flow] is happening along a border that divides one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world from one of its most economically unequal regions. Latin America’s poor and vulnerable — struggling amid a pandemic, the devastation of climate change and the violence of their homelands — are moving north to a safer, more prosperous place. It’s that simple. And this will keep happening for a long time.”

On the effectiveness of President Trump’s policies, Ramos writes that they “reduced annual net immigration to its lowest levels since the 1980s.” It’s true that he denounces them as “racist,” “anti-immigrant,” “inhuman,” and “repressive.”

But as long as he’s being so candid, he and others of his ilk need to ask “compared to what?” As Ramos himself reports,

“According to the head of the U.S. Northern Command, 30 percent to 35 percent of [Mexico] is under the control of ‘transnational criminal organizations.’ This means that any migrants traveling north through Mexico are in immediate danger.”

Indeed, the present U.S. immigration system is now “a dangerous system that encourages human trafficking controlled by drug cartels and other organized crime networks.”

What should U.S. immigration policy aim for? What could be clearer than Ramos’ answer that it “must involve accepting many more authorized immigrants”?

Or than Washington must “create a system that can legally, efficiently and safely absorb more of these immigrants and refugees. They will keep coming; there is no other solution”?

Or than “[T]he United States should start accepting between one and a half and two million authorized immigrants every year. Entry into the United States must be legalized and optimized….”? (At the same time, given the powerful forces Ramos describes as fueling continuing hemispheric migration to the United States, what makes him think that such a U.S. quota would prevent much greater migrant flows from continuing to come to America’s doorstep?)

Nor does Ramos evidently think much of the near-term potential of turning Central America into the kind of place people wouldn’t seek to flee in the first place:

“The $4 billion investment in Central America that President Biden has promised is a good starting point for tackling the origins of migration in the region: poverty and a lack of opportunity. That project, however, will take years to yield results.”

But the key to understanding Ramos’ position, and possibly those of many other supporters of more lenient U.S. immigration policies, is recognizing that U.S. interests – safeguarding the nation’s security and prosperity – isn’t his top priority.

Thus the author’s argument that “It’s clear that America’s immigration system is broken and outdated” because “it doesn’t reflect the new needs of the United States or its southern neighbors.” And why else would he emphasize that “all along the U.S.-Mexico border, the aspirations of new immigrants are colliding with a country reluctant to revamp its way of welcoming and absorbing newcomers.”

Ramos doesn’t neglect the case that ramping up immigration is in America’s interests, too, focusing in particular on familiar arguments that many more newcomers are needed “to support the nation’s beleaguered economy, replace its growing population of retired workers and make up for the country’s low birthrate.”

Although I and others have repeatedly debunked these claims (see, e.g., here and here), they’re entirely legitimate to debate. So is the insistence that America has a moral duty to accept more of the world’s tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free – to paraphrase the (justly) famous Emma Lazarus poem at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

But the judgment about the economic impact of greater immigration flows, and about the country’s moral obligations, must be made by Americans alone. Otherwise, kiss goodbye the country’s sovereignty and independence. Ramos’ suggestion to the contrary should go far toward intellectually (though not legally!) disqualifying him from the American immigration policy debate.

Except he’s did such a great job in this Times column of unwittingly confirming some of the strongest indictments of lax immigration policies and the worst fears of border realists about the agendas of their backers. In fact, to paraphrase a classical Greek general’s reported lament after a costly victory, another such column (or a couple), and the Open Borders cause may be undone.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Labor Shortage-Spurred Tech Revolution in Construction

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3D manufacturing, 3D printing, Biden, CNBC.com, construction, Diana Olick, Donald Trump, housing, illegal aliens, Immigration, labor shortages, Open Borders, productivity, technology, {What's Left of) Our Economy

As known by RealityChek regulars, there’s abundant evidence that behind most claims of lasting labor shortages by U.S. industries, and the resulting insistence tht more immigration is urgently needed, there’s an industry that’s done almost nothing to improve its productivity. (See, e.g., here.)

In other words, precisely because they’ve been able to rely for so long on an ever expanding supply of cheap labor, these industries have had precious little need to keep costs under control by improving productivity – either by developing labor-saving technologies, or adopting more efficient management practices, or some combination of the two. And the result hurts the entire U.S. economy by retarding progress and knee-capping its best chances of fostering lasting prosperity.

That’s why it was so exciting to read a CNBC.com post yesterday describing the beginnings of a possible productivity-improving technological response to labor shortages (and therefore rising labor costs), by one of the nation’s biggest slacker industries – construction.

Correspondent Diana Olick’s report faithfully presented the residential construction sector’s claim that housing has performed well during the CCP Virus period, but that its potential to keep supporting bady needed growth was endangered by constantly rising costs. And she added that, in addition to building materials becoming ever more expensive, so were workers.

What Olick failed to mention was that housing was a quintessential industry that has long enjoyed the option of compensating by becoming more innovative, but gone down the cheap labor road instead. Indeed, an outsized share of its workforce consists of not only immigrant workers, but illegal aliens. And its labor productivity levels are actually down since 1968 – which is no coincidence.

But the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies may finally be forcing home-builders and other construction companies to start using their collective noggins to control costs. As Olick reports, the industry is starting to use 3-D printing technology “in a big way.” According to executives whose companies are using the new technology, it can cut costs by between 10 percent to 40 percent. And one big reason, in Olick’s words, is that “3D-printed homes require very few workers, as the printer does the bulk of the construction.”

Her post also mentions that 3-D-built homes promise to be sturdier and more energy-efficient than their conventional counterparts, and generate less construction waste, too. And business has been so good that one executive told her “The biggest challenge…is we are supply constrained. We have more people asking for us to build houses than we know what to do with now. Every construction system we have is booked up for the next 24 months.”

In fact, from an economy-wide perspective, the biggest, darkest cloud on the horizon is that President Biden’s Open Borders-friendly immigration policies will flood the labor market with low-skill workers again and take the pressure off the construction industry – and other productivity laggards. That result would richly deserve to be called “Build Back Worse.”

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: An Open Borders Mainstay Gets (Kind of) Woke on Immigration

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amnesty, automation, illegal aliens, immigrants, Immigration, Open Borders, productivity, technology, The Economist, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’ve always felt that one of the most convincing ways to win an argument is to  spotlight instances of sources that normally oppose one’s positions actually agreeing with them. And I just stumbled onto an especially startling example that appeared about a year ago in the The Economist.

It’s often valid to view such dated material as old and therefore irrelevant news. But in this case, The Economist‘s February, 2020 feature titled “Immigration to America is down. Wages are up. Are the two related?” really is a landmark still worth examining, and for at least three reasons.

First, if there’s a single set of policies identified with this British magazine it’s staunch support for free trade. In fact, The Economist was founded in the mid-19^th century precisely to convince the United Kingdom to dismantle its longstanding tariffs. Not surprisingly, the magazine has also always backed the freest possible immigration flows.

Second, February, 2020 was just before the CCP Virus and the massive economic shutdowns it triggered swept over the United States. So The Economist was commenting on trends when the economy was normal by most definitions, and after three years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

And third, of course, even though a substantial return to a pre-virus normal economic normality is now widely expected sometime this year (whether or not President Biden’s virus relief bill and other “Build Back Better” programs are fully enacted or not), the new U.S. administration clearly is determined to turn the immigration spigots back on.

So it really was pretty startling to come across an Economist article leading off with this paragraph:

“In both 2018 and 2019 [U.S.] nominal wages rose by more than 3%, the fastest growth since before the recession a decade ago. Americans at the bottom of the labour market are doing especially well. In the past year the wages of those without a high-school diploma have risen by nearly 10%. Intriguingly, this has come as America has turned considerably less friendly to immigrants, who are assumed by many to steal jobs from natives and lower the wages of less-educated folk. The two phenomena may be connected….”

Moreover, in recent years, “It appears instead that the overall decline in the foreign-born population is a result of falling numbers of low-skilled migrants…. That is probably a consequence of policies implemented by President Donald Trump, as well as the off-putting effects of his rhetoric on foreigners.”

Not that The Economist endorsed this proposition wholeheartedly. The article correctly notes that “many factors” lie behind these wage increases. Indeed, that’s true for most trends in the economy and elsewhere in our big, complicated world. But it turns out that most of the reasons for skepticism about immigration policy’s decisive role cited in the piece are pretty flimsy when examined closely.

For example, minimum wage increases – and their benefits – have by definition been enjoyed exclusively by lower-income workers overall in the United States. But the magazine also has found that average wages in occupations that are especially low-skill-immigrant-heavy (e.g., construction and landscaping work) “are rising considerably faster than wages in other low-paid jobs.”

In addition, The Economist cites findings from the Brookings Institution (hardly a restrictionist organization itself) that “five big metro areas saw absolute declines in their foreign-born populations in 2010-18” and its own research showing that “wages in those areas are now rising by 5% a year….”

Perhaps most important, the magazine’s initial conclusion about the connection between fewer low-skilled immigrants and higher wages for the established national low-skill workforce is qualified with the phrase “but only for a while.”

In this vein, The Economist points to research allegedly demonstrating that during and after past “occasions when America has clamped down on immigration,” the results “ultimately [offered] little benefit to native workers—and may even harm them.” Yet some of these historical episodes – e.g., the freeze and follow-on restrictions on immigration from China that began in the late-19^th century, and expulsions of Mexican workers during the Great Depression of the 1930s – seem  marginally relevant at best to the U.S. economy today.

Even odder, the overarching lesson drawn by The Economist from this and related studies supports a claim made by current-day restrictionists (like me) that wide-open immigration policies retard productivity growth by enabling many industries to use cheap labor as an earnings- and profit-making or boosting crutch, rather than innovate their way to greater success.

According to The Economist, “In the short term, native workers may well see a wage boost as labour supply falls. But businesses then reorient production towards less labour-intensive products; natives take jobs previously occupied by foreign-born folk, which may be worse paid; and bosses invest in labour-saving machinery, which can reduce the pay of remaining workers.”

Yet logically, anyone supporting this position logically must also think that improving productivity and promoting technological progress doesn’t ultimately benefit entire economies – including workers initially displaced. Is The Economist really supporting such stick-in-the-mud-ism?

The answer, strangely, as readers learn in the very next paragraph, is “Of course not.” Because the article proceeds to claim that “Both low- and high-skilled migration are linked with higher productivity.” In other words, higher productivity is a long-run economic blessing after all, and it’s improved both by reducing and increasing low-skill immigration. Got that?

Of course, change at a single magazine, no matter how influential, is no guarantee of policy change.  But such publications aren’t often called opinion leaders for nothing.  And although rhetorically, the Biden administration seems as set as ever to supercharge U.S. immigration flows, maybe it’s no coincidence that its recent  stance on the southern border looks every bit as confused as this Economist take on immigration.       

Im-Politic: More Evidence that Trump-ism Has Captured the GOP More than Trump

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Conservative Political Action Conference, Conservative Populism, CPAC, Donald Trump, election 2024, GOP, Im-Politic, Immigration, MAGA, Populism, Republicans, Suffolk University, Trade, USAToday

As known by anyone who closely follows the American politics news, tomorrow is “Trump at CPAC Day.” For everyone else, that means that the former President will be giving his first full-fledged speech as a former President, and his most comprehensive public utterance since he controversially addressed that pre-Capitol Riot rally on January 6.

The conventional wisdom seems to hold that tomorrow’s event will be just the lastest sign that the Republican Party remains Trump’s to command. All the polls appear to support this claim, and it looks almost certain that he’ll receive a rousing welcome at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major annual right-of-center conclave. Moreover, even Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who’s angrily blamed Trump in large measure for the riot, has since stated that he would support a Trump reelection drive if the former President won the Republican nomination in 2024.

I agree that Trump is today’s most popular Republican. But my reading of two new polls adds to my previously stated conviction that the new Trump-ian GOP is less the cult of personality that’s widely supposed, and more a political faction converted to Trump’s nationalist populism. As a result, although the former President himself clearly remains overwhelmingly popular in Republican ranks, there’s potential for other politicians who agree with the “MAGA agenda,” but lack his erratic and often troubling personality, to challenge him successfully in the 2024 primaries.

The most recent of these surveys was conducted by Suffolk (Mass.) University and USA TODAY, and on the surface, it looks like evidence of continuing Republican enthusiasm for Trump. Fully 59 percent wanted him to run for the GOP nomination in 2024 with 29 percent opposed. If he ran, 76 percent would back him in the primaries and 85 percent would vote for him in the general election. Moreover, a strong 80 percent said they’d punish pro-impeachment Republican office-seekers at the polls.

Moreover, by a 46 percent to 27 percent margin respondents said they would leave the GOP and join a Trump-led third party if the former President decided to take this road. And by a roughly similar 54 percent to 34 percent, they voiced more loyalty to Trump than to the party.

But to me, the most revealing result concerns Republican voters’ 2024 nomination preferences. That 59 percent support for a Trump 2024 campaign doesn’t look so overwhelming, and certainly doesn’t scream “personality cult.” Nor does the finding that even fewer – 54 percent – consider themselves Trumpers before Republicans. And don’t forget – fewer than half would follow Trump out of the GOP. Of course, that outcome would gut the current Republican party. But it would also leave Trump with a political rump.

The bigger majorities saying they’d actually vote for Trump in the Republican nomination race and the November election, meanwhile, indicate first and foremost that, in a Trump versus a Democrat race, Republicans would overwhelmingly view the former President as the better choice. That sounds a lot like a “lesser of two evils” or “Anyone But a Democrat” conclusion, not a full-throated endorsement of a political idol, on the part of many Republicans.

Supporting this interpretation is the impressive hostility respondents did display for Democrats in the Suffolk University/USA Today poll. For example, 73 percent don’t regard Joe Biden as the legitimate President, and by a 62 percent to 26 percent margin, they want Congressional Republicans to “do their best to stand up to Biden on major policies, even if it means little gets passed” rather than “do their best to work with Biden on major policies, even if it means making compromises.”

One big shortcoming of the Suffolk University/USA TODAY survey is the absence of questions on specific issues, including MAGA-type issues. That subject, however, is taken care of pretty suggestively by a poll conducted by Echelon Insights. And its overall conclusion was that “’Fight’ and Trump’s Agenda (Not Personality) Key to GOP Voters.”

Echelon’s main evidence? The firm asked Republican voters “When deciding whom to support in future Republican primary elections, how would you feel about a candidate having the following characteristics.”

Of the twelve choices presented, the two most popular by far were “Won’t back down in a fight with the Democrats” (winning 65 percent approval, with 49 percent calling it “Absolutely Necessary for My Support”) and “Supports the Trump/America First agenda (immigration/trade)” (winning 60 percent approval, with 45 percent calling it “Absolutely Necessary”).

And the second least popular choice? “Has a personality that reminds me of Donald Trump.” Here, only 21 percent of respondents clearly viewed this trait favorably in terms of their upcoming votes, and only 13 percent viewed it as a deal-breaker. In fact, even among Republicans describing themselves as “Trump Firsters” and not “GOP Firsters (oddly, the overall percentages weren’t presented), only 19 percent viewed a Trump-ian personality as being “absolutely necessary” for their support.

The main difficulty facing Republicans and especially ideological Trumpers remains the same: Finding a “MAGA”-backing alternative to the former President who shows enough pugnaciousness to excite the Trump base to turn out strongly, but not so much as to turn off the party’s moderates and independent voters.

The CPAC convention is an important first major post-election, post-Capitol Riot, post-second impeachment chance to start establishing this kind of brand. As a result, post-CPAC polls will be important indicators of who, if anyone, has made progress in meeting this challenge.