(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Biden’s Immigration-Enabling Goals Couldn’t be Worse Timed

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asylum seekers, California, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Department of Labor, Eduardo Porter, illegal aliens, illegal immigration, Immigration, Jobs, Joe Biden, NAFTA, North American Free Frade Agreement, Open Borders, path to citizenship, Pew Research Center, recession, refugees, services, The New York Times, The Race to the Bottom, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Apparent President-elect Joe Biden emphatically and repeatedly told the nation that he’s determined to increase the flow of immigrants to America – whether we’re talking about his promises that will greatly strengthen the immigration magnet (like creating a “roadmap to citizenship” for America’s illegal alien population, tightly curbing immigation law enforcement activities, and offering free government-funded healthcare to anyone who can manage to cross the border lawfully or not), or his promises to boost admissions of refugees, speed systems for processing applications for asylum and (legal) green card applications, and generally “to ensure that the U.S. remains open and welcoming to people from every part of the world….”

During normal recent times such pledges – and the fallout of pre-Trump efforts to keep them – had proven troublesome enough for the U.S. economy and for working class Americans in particular. Inevitably, they pumped up the supply of labor available to U.S.-based businesses, and created surpluses that enabled companies to cut wages with the greatest of ease – exactly as the laws of supply and demand predict.

During the CCP Virus pandemic and its likely economic aftermath, however, this quasi-Open Borders strategy looks positively demented, as emerging trends most recently described by New York Times economics writer Eduardo Porter should make painfully obvious.

According to Porter in a December 1 piece, “The [U.S.] labor market has recovered 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost from February to April. But many positions may not return any time soon, even when a vaccine is deployed.

“This is likely to prove especially problematic for millions of low-paid workers in service industries like retailing, hospitality, building maintenance and transportation, which may be permanently impaired or fundamentally transformed. What will janitors do if fewer people work in offices? What will waiters do if the urban restaurant ecosystem never recovers its density?”

What’s the connection with immigration policy? As it happens, the service industries the author rightly identifies as sectors apparently vulnerable to major employment downsizing are industries that historically have employed outsized shares of immigrant workers (including illegals). And along with other personal service industries, they’re kinds of sectors whose modest skill requirements would continue to offer newcomers overall their best bets for employment.

The charts below, from the Pew Research Center, show just how thoroughly dominated by both kinds of immigrants these sectors, and present similar data broken down by occupation. (The U.S. Department of Labor tracks employment according to both kinds of categories.)

Twenty years ago, in my book The Race to the Bottom, I wrote about news reports making clear that

“immigrants were flooding into California in hopes of landing jobs in labor-intensive industries such a apparel and electronics assembly that NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] had steadily been sending to Mexico — where most of the immigrants come from! In other words, the state was importing people while exporting their likeliest jobs.” 

And not surprisingly, wages throughout the southern California in particular stagnated.  

If a Biden administration proceeds with its stated immigration plans as quickly as it’s promised (with many actions scheduled for the former Vice President’s first hundred days in office), this epic blunder will wind up being repeated — but this time on a national scale.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Im-Politic: How Polls Skew Their Results on Immigration and Amnesty

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amnesty, attrition, Central America, chattering class, Cheap Labor Lobby, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, legalization, magnet effect, Mainstream Media, Open Borders, path to citizenship, polls, The Washington Post

The Washington Post editorial board seems pretty confident that if U.S. immigration policy faithfully reflected the views of the majority of the American people, it would come down decisively for the first option in the “bottom line question – should illegal immigrants stay or go.” Too bad the Post writers either didn’t read the collection of polls they cited, or decided to cherry pick the results. For these same surveys show how crimped the debate permitted by them and their Mainstream Media and chattering class colleagues has been. Moreover, many of their findings point to immigration policy perceptions and priorities that are much more Trump-ian than the Post and other amnesty supporters would like.

The Post is correct in noting that most respondents in most polls asking the question support either (a) granting illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, provided that certain conditions are met (like paying fines and back taxes, and learning English); or (b) awarding them legal status short of citizenship (also usually with conditions). But it’s stunning to see how completely polling organizations have ignored two major anti-amnesty considerations in the choices they present.

In particular, of the 70 surveys in the set used as evidence by the Post, none indicates to Americans that amnesty, active deportation efforts, or simply continuing the illegal immigration status quo are far from the only options available to policymakers. In fact, not a single one of these polls mentions attrition as a strategy for dealing with the illegals problem.

It’s true that such an approach would leave many illegals resident in the United States. But measures like denying these immigrants most government benefits – including driver’s licenses and access to the financial system – and enforcing existing laws against hiring them (which is overwhelmingly backed by Americans) – would undoubtedly reduce their numbers significantly. The more sluggish the U.S. economy and its creation of all manner of jobs remains, moreover, the more effective attrition would be. And this policy would arguably be much cheaper than at least one condition typically attached to amnesty-like proposals – conducting “background checks” on all illegals who apply. Just to remind, their total numbers are pegged at about 11 million.

Equally important, only one of the 70 surveys in this compilation even mentioned to respondents a major anti-amnesty argument: the likelihood that such lenient American policies would create a powerful magnet effect and lure many more immigrants into the country. This survey was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in late-July, 2014, and focused on the surge of Central American child migrants that began trying to cross U.S. borders in spring and summer of that year.

One of the first questions the Institute asked was whether Washington “should offer shelter and support [to the children] while beginning a process to determine whether they should be deported or allowed to stay in the U.S. [or whether America] should deport them immediately back to their home countries.” “Shelter and support” while investigating their circumstances beat “deport them immediately” by a wide 70 percent to 26 percent margin. But then, quite a few questions later, respondents were asked whether they agree that “The U.S. should NOT allow children coming from Central America to stay because it will encourage others to ignore our laws and increase illegal immigration.” Fifty-nine percent “completely” or “mostly” agreed; only 39 percent “completely” or “mostly” disagreed – a big turnaround.

It’s also worth noting that children are understandably an immigrant group that’s bound to elicit considerable sympathy. Imagine how the public might respond when told by pollsters that citizenship or legalization offers could greatly boost inflows of all kinds of immigrants.

Also supporting the notion that mentioning the magnet effect would dramatically change poll answers on amnesty-like policies: This group of 70 polls consistently shows that large majorities of Americans favor reducing legal immigration or keeping the annual numbers where they are, rather than increasing it. So it seems logical that the U.S. public would reject citizenship or legalization policies if it learned they may well greatly increase the country’s overall foreign-born population. (At the same time, these polls make just as clear that most Americans believe that immigration’s benefits to the country – in terms of diversifying it and adding talent – outweigh costs such as lost jobs or greater welfare payments or diluted traditional values.)

No wonder, then, that Open Borders types in the Mainstream Media and in politics are so upset at Trump and others who favor more restrictive immigration policies. And no wonder they work so hard at sliming them as racists, nativists, and know-nothings. If Americans ever found out their real options on immigration policy, the demand for approaches that prioritize the interests of most of the native-born population first – rather than those of the Cheap Labor Lobby, Democratic Party wannabe ballot-stuffers, elitist liberal guilt-mongers, and self-righteous one-world-ers – could become irresistible.

Im-Politic: Both Trump and Media Critics Need to Get Real on Immigration

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2016 elections, amnesty, attrition, Bill O'Reilly, deportation, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latin America, legalization, Mainstream Media, path to citizenship

Among the biggest news emerging from this presidential campaign is that Donald Trump is not a model of verbal precision or restraint. Because loose lips can be dangerous in a president, whose words can move markets, shake governments, and even trigger war (and “sink ships”), it’s entirely proper for the media to cover the flood of factual blunders, hyperbole, illogic, canards, and half-baked ideas the Republican hopeful generates.

But an even bigger insight about the Trump phenomenon is being almost entirely missed so far: In an important way, journalists’ coverage of Trump’s statements has been just as juvenile, downright silly, and obtuse as this rhetoric himself. And nowhere is this problem worse than in coverage of the two issues on which Trump has most forcefully opposed the establishment consensus that too many Mainstream Media journalists either actively support or implicitly accept: immigration and trade. The former has of course generated the biggest headlines, so let’s confine our discussion today to that subject. And to keep this relatively short, let’s focus on “mass deportation.”

As I’ve noted, Trump is largely responsible for the uproar over this option. Although deportation was never mentioned in his immigration plan, he did endorse the idea, and surely out of stubbornness, has refused to back down. The media – including Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly – have proceeded to rake Trump over the coals, characterizing his position as everything from delusional to racist, xenophobic, and fascistic.

There’s no doubt that mass deportation is wildly impractical, for reasons ranging from economic to humanitarian. And that’s why nothing even remotely like it will happen, even under a Trump administration. Indeed, that’s likely why such deportation was absent from his plan (though I have no evidence to support this claim). But it’s not necessary even to insist that journalists concentrate on the plan – which is full of proposals strongly endorsed by many immigration specialists in academe, and even strong bipartisan majorities in Congress (e.g., expanding the E-Verify program) – to recognize the immense bigger picture the Big Media is missing.

Thoughtless as their content is, Trump’s deportation remarks were necessary push-back against strong bipartisan insistence that America has no choice but to accept that the roughly 11 million illegals estimated to be living here. Thus, both Democrats and Republicans in their parties’ mainstreams have worked overtime to insure that what immigration debate is permitted is limited to whether illegals will be granted a path to citizenship or not.

But however reasonable these views seem, they overlook (or cleverly define out of existence?) a huge likely downside: Any form of legalization will become a powerful magnet for still more illegal immigration, no matter how circumscribed legal status is, how strict the conditions for securing it, or how well the border is secured. Disagreeing amounts to accepting two related propositions that make mass deportation look like the essence of realism:

>That populations in Latin America in particular will react by thinking, “The U.S. government has just decided that if we can get into the United States, we’ll be allowed to stay forever. Therefore, we’ll just keep living here in [Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. – including, more recently, collapsing Venezuela?].”

>That when Latin populations begin coming north, Washington will decide to leave them stranded in the Mexican desert.

That’s why it’s time for journalists to start doing some thinking to try to figure out what Trump is really saying – and why it’s resonating so strongly even beyond Republican ranks. Roughly translated, it’s “Legalization looks like a disaster. As a result, it would be off the table in my administration. And something else is urgently needed.” And indeed, not so surprisingly, Trump’s plan points unmistakably to the alternative: an “attrition” strategy that aims at denying illegals both jobs and government benefits.

Clearly, this might leave a large illegals population still in the country. But eliminating most payoffs for unauthorized border crossing is likely to both prompt some outflows (much evidence indicates that the U.S. recession convinced many illegals to pick up stakes and return home) and, at least as important, deter inflows. Trump himself of course could help clarify matters enormously by shifting his own emphasis. But some minimal smarts by the media wouldn’t hurt, either.

Fortunately, some evidence of genuine thought is starting to emerge in its ranks. Is it delusional to hope that we might get at least a tad more?