In an effort to help set the groundwork for some form of legislative amnesty for nearly all illegal immigrants, the Obama administration is stepping up the appearance of enforcing our nation’s existing immigration laws. The appearance is contained in the crackdown on larger employers of illegal immigrants (“More Employers Face Immigration Audits,” Wall Street Journal (November 20, 2010). A small percentage of these employers will be prosecuted as the larger employers of illegal immigrants generally rely on false documents supplied by the hirees. Even more farcical is the fact that any immigrants caught working illegally will not be prosecuted since the Obama administration has in effect decriminalized the act of illegal immigration and all related identity theft and falsifying of declarations and papers. The only resident illegal immigrants that are now deported are those convicted of “significant” crimes while living and working here.
Nearly all illegal immigrants who lose a job as a consequence of any employer crackdown will not return to their home countries where jobs are scarce and low-paying, corruption and crime are rampant, and public healthcare and education are unavailable or of poor quality. They will remain here and obtain other employment. They may start working for small employers who do not come under government scrutiny or they could join their brethren in our vast underground economy by working off the books or as independent contractors who do not report their income. Other options include obtaining their own Social Security number by fraudulent means or buying the name and Social Security number of a citizen from a stolen ID vender which can be used to avoid detection by employers using E-Verify.
For more on this topic see blog of July 9, 2009 entitled "Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy."
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
The Elephants in the Democrats' Back Room
Given that many believe that the interests of lower income Americans are most strongly represented by the Democrats, one might expect that the Democratic Party would be opposed to our illegal and legal immigration consisting largely of poor and little-educated immigrants. This follows from the fact that our poor and blue collar citizens bear a disproportionate burden from our unskilled immigration. (See Blog of June 20 – “Our Immigration Policies Are Hurting Our Poor.”) The burden on our lower income citizens becomes even greater in periods of high unemployment such as the present.
Poor and less-educated Americans have typically been a bastion of support for the Democrats and the better off Democrats have typically supported government programs to help our poor. Yet today’s Democratic Party favors amnesty for most illegal immigrants and no meaningful enforcement of our immigration laws for the foreseeable future. These are the key tenets of current Democratic immigration policy despite the fact that the majority of all voters oppose a general amnesty and an open door for illegal immigrants, and despite the fact that these policies are not in the best interests of our poor and less educated citizens. (For more discussion on the current policy of the Obama administration see blog of July 9 entitled "Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.)
In times past, Democrats have stood tough on illegal immigration. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson the bracero program of Mexican guest farm workers was closed down in the 1960’s on the grounds that it deprived American farm workers of jobs and higher wages. When it became evident that the guest farm workers just changed status to illegal immigrants, President Carter tried to introduce more effective legislation to crack down on illegal farm workers but was single-handedly rebuffed by Senator Eastland of Mississippi who was a champion of agricultural interests at that time.
Traditional allies of the Democrats are the labor unions which at one time uniformly opposed large-scale immigration as increasing the pool of low-wage non-union workers who could compete for jobs. For example, closing down access to illegal immigrant laborers was a key part of Cesar Chavez’s plan to improve conditions for farm workers through the United Farm Workers union. His advances for farm workers were subsequently undone by illegal immigration (footnote 1).
After years of shrinking membership, some unions are beginning to become immigrant advocates with the objective of adding immigrants to their membership. “In February 2000, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO announced it was changing its historic position – it would now support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration laws and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups. Subsequently, AFL-CIO officials publicly explained that the organization was ‘championing immigrant rights as a strategic move to make immigrants more enthusiastic about joining unions.’” (See footnote 2)
Black Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan was chair of the U. S. Commission on Immigration Reform from 1993 until her death in 1996. The Commission made a number of carefully crafted recommendations to reduce illegal immigration and legal immigration of the poor and unskilled. Jordan explained: “in an age in which unskilled workers have far too few opportunities opened to them and in which welfare reform will require thousands more to find jobs, the Commission sees no justification to the continued entry of unskilled foreign workers” (footnote 3). Unfortunately, with Jordan’s death in 1996 the Commission lost political influence and its more significant recommendations were never enacted.
Given that American blacks are disproportionately disadvantaged by the addition of large numbers of poor legal and illegal immigrants to our country, why is it that President Obama and his fellow Democrats do not stand up for the interests of poor blacks and the other poor American citizens? The answer likely lies in the fact that President is very much out of touch with reality and highly motivated by the calculus of back room politics. The bottom line of the latter is that today’s poor and little educated legal and illegal immigrants are tomorrow’s Democrats. And with every year that passes, the numerical importance of the Latino population grows making their voting impact more of a factor in some elections (see prior blog of September 10 entitled "Three Reasons Why the Impact of Our Illegal Immigration Is, Has Been, and Will Be Greater Than One Might Expect").
Moreover, the children of these immigrants and their children also tend to vote for Democrat candidates since their education, income and wealth achievements also tend to be below average and their use of welfare programs tend to be above average. In the words of one researcher: “The undeniable truth is that most Latinos reside in locations that are thoroughly monopolized by Democratic Party operations – places that have been the residence of Democratic voting populations for decades, even generations – typically in dense urban counties….” (footnote 4).
The Democratic Party appears to have an alliance with the tort bar which which has likely used its influence to obtain legislative favors such as not including any meaningful reform of malpractice litigation in the Democratic national health proposals. Similarly, the immigration bar is a prosperous and influential group which naturally favors and lobbies for more immigration, legal and illegal, which in turn leads to higher volumes of profitable business for them. Since the immigration bar's objectives now coincide with those of the Democrats, this attorney group is likely to be contributors to the Democratic Party, its candidates, and its causes, which in turn gives the immigration bar even more influence.
There is also a feeling among many Democrats of the liberal persuasion that we should help the world’s poor by opening our doors wide to them, rich nation that we are. President Obama shows every evidence of being one of this group of left leaning Democrats. In their egalitarian approach, they believe that all immigrants have equal potential to boost our country and that it is noble of us to take in the world’s poor and uneducated – in the inspiring words of Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” The Lazarus poem was, of course, more appropriate for its time -- the 1800s when our economy had a great need for unskilled laborers and there were no government welfare programs. These Democrats will not acknowledge that in today’s economy highly educated and skilled labor has taken the place of unskilled labor as the dominant part of our workforce. Thus certain immigrants, such as the “best and the brightest,” are likely to make more of a contribution to this country and assimilate more easily than the unskilled and little educated, to the advantage of all of our existing citizens.
Moreover, liberal Democrats will usually not acknowledge that the immigration of large numbers of the poor and little educated makes life more difficult for our existing poor citizens. They do not see that it is contradictory policy to make great and costly efforts to eliminate poverty in this country and import much more poverty at the same time. This contradiction is also played out in the distribution of income objectives which many left leaning Democrats focus on -- they want a more even distribution of income in this country and yet they are strongly in favor of high levels of poor and little educated immigration which makes for a less even distribution of income.
Footnotes
1 See Philip L. Martin, “Promise Unfulfilled,” Center for Immigration Studies, January 2004.
2 Quote is from Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., “Immigration Policy and Organized Labor: A Never Ceasing Issue,” Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Immigration, May 24, 2007.
3 U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, “ Statement of Professor Barbara Jordan, Chairman,” News Release, Washington, DC, June 8, 1995.
4 James G. Gimpel, “Latino Voting in the 2006 Election: Realignment to the GOP Remains Distant,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 2007.
Poor and less-educated Americans have typically been a bastion of support for the Democrats and the better off Democrats have typically supported government programs to help our poor. Yet today’s Democratic Party favors amnesty for most illegal immigrants and no meaningful enforcement of our immigration laws for the foreseeable future. These are the key tenets of current Democratic immigration policy despite the fact that the majority of all voters oppose a general amnesty and an open door for illegal immigrants, and despite the fact that these policies are not in the best interests of our poor and less educated citizens. (For more discussion on the current policy of the Obama administration see blog of July 9 entitled "Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.)
In times past, Democrats have stood tough on illegal immigration. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson the bracero program of Mexican guest farm workers was closed down in the 1960’s on the grounds that it deprived American farm workers of jobs and higher wages. When it became evident that the guest farm workers just changed status to illegal immigrants, President Carter tried to introduce more effective legislation to crack down on illegal farm workers but was single-handedly rebuffed by Senator Eastland of Mississippi who was a champion of agricultural interests at that time.
Traditional allies of the Democrats are the labor unions which at one time uniformly opposed large-scale immigration as increasing the pool of low-wage non-union workers who could compete for jobs. For example, closing down access to illegal immigrant laborers was a key part of Cesar Chavez’s plan to improve conditions for farm workers through the United Farm Workers union. His advances for farm workers were subsequently undone by illegal immigration (footnote 1).
After years of shrinking membership, some unions are beginning to become immigrant advocates with the objective of adding immigrants to their membership. “In February 2000, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO announced it was changing its historic position – it would now support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration laws and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups. Subsequently, AFL-CIO officials publicly explained that the organization was ‘championing immigrant rights as a strategic move to make immigrants more enthusiastic about joining unions.’” (See footnote 2)
Black Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan was chair of the U. S. Commission on Immigration Reform from 1993 until her death in 1996. The Commission made a number of carefully crafted recommendations to reduce illegal immigration and legal immigration of the poor and unskilled. Jordan explained: “in an age in which unskilled workers have far too few opportunities opened to them and in which welfare reform will require thousands more to find jobs, the Commission sees no justification to the continued entry of unskilled foreign workers” (footnote 3). Unfortunately, with Jordan’s death in 1996 the Commission lost political influence and its more significant recommendations were never enacted.
Given that American blacks are disproportionately disadvantaged by the addition of large numbers of poor legal and illegal immigrants to our country, why is it that President Obama and his fellow Democrats do not stand up for the interests of poor blacks and the other poor American citizens? The answer likely lies in the fact that President is very much out of touch with reality and highly motivated by the calculus of back room politics. The bottom line of the latter is that today’s poor and little educated legal and illegal immigrants are tomorrow’s Democrats. And with every year that passes, the numerical importance of the Latino population grows making their voting impact more of a factor in some elections (see prior blog of September 10 entitled "Three Reasons Why the Impact of Our Illegal Immigration Is, Has Been, and Will Be Greater Than One Might Expect").
Moreover, the children of these immigrants and their children also tend to vote for Democrat candidates since their education, income and wealth achievements also tend to be below average and their use of welfare programs tend to be above average. In the words of one researcher: “The undeniable truth is that most Latinos reside in locations that are thoroughly monopolized by Democratic Party operations – places that have been the residence of Democratic voting populations for decades, even generations – typically in dense urban counties….” (footnote 4).
The Democratic Party appears to have an alliance with the tort bar which which has likely used its influence to obtain legislative favors such as not including any meaningful reform of malpractice litigation in the Democratic national health proposals. Similarly, the immigration bar is a prosperous and influential group which naturally favors and lobbies for more immigration, legal and illegal, which in turn leads to higher volumes of profitable business for them. Since the immigration bar's objectives now coincide with those of the Democrats, this attorney group is likely to be contributors to the Democratic Party, its candidates, and its causes, which in turn gives the immigration bar even more influence.
There is also a feeling among many Democrats of the liberal persuasion that we should help the world’s poor by opening our doors wide to them, rich nation that we are. President Obama shows every evidence of being one of this group of left leaning Democrats. In their egalitarian approach, they believe that all immigrants have equal potential to boost our country and that it is noble of us to take in the world’s poor and uneducated – in the inspiring words of Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” The Lazarus poem was, of course, more appropriate for its time -- the 1800s when our economy had a great need for unskilled laborers and there were no government welfare programs. These Democrats will not acknowledge that in today’s economy highly educated and skilled labor has taken the place of unskilled labor as the dominant part of our workforce. Thus certain immigrants, such as the “best and the brightest,” are likely to make more of a contribution to this country and assimilate more easily than the unskilled and little educated, to the advantage of all of our existing citizens.
Moreover, liberal Democrats will usually not acknowledge that the immigration of large numbers of the poor and little educated makes life more difficult for our existing poor citizens. They do not see that it is contradictory policy to make great and costly efforts to eliminate poverty in this country and import much more poverty at the same time. This contradiction is also played out in the distribution of income objectives which many left leaning Democrats focus on -- they want a more even distribution of income in this country and yet they are strongly in favor of high levels of poor and little educated immigration which makes for a less even distribution of income.
Footnotes
1 See Philip L. Martin, “Promise Unfulfilled,” Center for Immigration Studies, January 2004.
2 Quote is from Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., “Immigration Policy and Organized Labor: A Never Ceasing Issue,” Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Immigration, May 24, 2007.
3 U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, “ Statement of Professor Barbara Jordan, Chairman,” News Release, Washington, DC, June 8, 1995.
4 James G. Gimpel, “Latino Voting in the 2006 Election: Realignment to the GOP Remains Distant,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 2007.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Three Reasons Why the Impact of Our Illegal Immigration Is, Has Been, and Will Be Greater Than One Might Expect
The influence of illegal immigration on our country is much greater than many believe. This blogger has estimated that illegal immigration since the 1980s accounts for at least 11 percent of our nation’s current total population (see footnote 1). If we do not change certain of our immigration-related laws and continue to not enforce those laws presently in effect, our country will undergo significant changes – all without voter approval.
The majority of voters would never approve of 1) allowing unlimited illegal immigration into this country, 2) legal immigration laws which give significant legal immigration preferences to poor Hispanics, or 3) giving automatic American citizenship to children born here of parents neither of whom is legally residing here. Yet these three situations accurately describe what is happening in the U.S. today and they are contributing to increased poverty and poverty-related problems in our country. Since each of the three are big contributors to the overall impact of illegal immigration they are examined in more detail below.
As a follow-on observation it should be noted that the distribution of income in this country is made less equal by the low average incomes of our current legal and illegal immigration. Moreover, past history indicates that the offspring of our typical legal and illegal immigrants are expected to be characterized by lower than average educational achievement and income as well (more detail below). In general Democrats do not acknowledge this when they attack our current national distribution of income and conclude that government social engineering through changes in taxation and/or other means is required to make for a more level distribution of income. However, as noted on page 120 of the Economic Report of the President: 1994 (President Clinton): "...immigration has increased the relative supply of less educated labor and appears to have contributed to the increasing inequality of income within the nation." Looked at another way -- it makes no sense to devote significant amounts of energy and resources in an effort to reduce poverty in this country and import much more poverty at the same time.
Reason One – Unlimited and Understated Illegal Immigration
For many years our national government has elected to not enforce our laws which prohibit illegal immigrants from working and living in the United States. Certainly, millions of illegal crossers have been stopped at our borders. However, with no penalty for attempting an illegal crossing, those who are returned to their home countries (principally Mexicans) keep attempting to enter in this way until they get by the Border Patrol. It has been estimated that for every person caught trying an illegal border crossing, three get by.
In recent years, there have been a very small number of raids on suspected employers of illegal immigrants affecting just a few thousand illegal immigrants. These raids have been mostly for show since they have involved only a tiny percentage of the millions of illegal immigrants living here. Under President Obama, the enforcement envelope has been pushed back even further with a stated policy of no deportations of “law-abiding” illegal immigrants. (See blog of July 9 – “Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.”)
An estimated 30 to 50 percent of our illegal immigrants do not even illegally cross our border. They enter the U.S. legally on visas and passports from all over the world for such purposes as tourism, visiting relatives, pursuing an education, or conducting business. After arriving in the United States, they overstay the time limits, find employment, and establish themselves as residents of our country. We have no system in place to determine whether visitors to the U.S. overstay the legal time limits of their visits – which reduces the ability to do anything about these violations of our law. In sum, our federal enforcement system has evolved to the point that whoever gets by the Border Patrol or enters the U.S. on passport or visa is allowed to remain here perpetually unless they are convicted of a serious crime while here.
Most of our illegal immigrants have been poor and poorly educated Hispanics. Three million were amnestied in the Immigration and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, a general amnesty in which very large numbers of immigrants fraudulently qualified for the amnesty (see footnote 2). In the 1990s another 3 million were amnestied during the Clinton presidency in a series of limited amnesties. The latter amnesties only applied to subsets of our illegal immigrant population, primarily illegals of certain Latin American countries.
Aside from our periodic amnesties, there has been an ongoing steady stream of our illegal population who have achieved legal permanent residence in other ways such as by marrying a citizen, finding employers who will declare that they cannot find an American to do a particular job (including unskilled jobs) at the "prevailing wage", joining our military, applying for asylum, or some other means. In most instances these alternative methods of becoming legal have been facilitated by being here illegally. They have added up to millions of individuals over time, and they have fattened up an influencial immigration bar.
Today our illegal immigrant population is estimated by the media and the federal government at about 12 million. This number understates illegal immigration’s dimensions because it does not include the 6 million previously given amnesty since 1986 and the many millions more of illegals who have obtained and continue to obtain legal permanent residence in ways facilitated by living here illegally. Additionally, this blogger believes the current U.S. illegal population is many millions greater than this widely quoted current estimate of an illegal population of 12 million (see footnote 2b).
The inflow of illegal immigrants has likely slowed with the current recession. Nevertheless, the illegal population is still growing since prospective illegals perceive that no matter how bad things become economically in the United States, wages, job availability, and quality of life will continue to be worse in their home countries. Those who are just entering the United States and those who have lost jobs here have many friends and relatives here with whom they can live until their situations improve. Moreover, it is widely perceived that an amnesty is coming and that deportations have stopped except for those convicted of serious crimes in the United States.
Reason Two – Legal Immigration Which Largely Mirrors Earlier Illegal Immigration
Our present legal immigration system discourages the immigration of individuals with advanced educational backgrounds and skills that would benefit our country. Instead of giving preferences to the best and brightest immigrants whose talents are in short supply here, since 1965 our legal immigration system gives most preferences to the close relatives of citizens. Since it is the recently legalized citizens, including many millions of formerly illegal immigrants legalized by amnesties and other means, who have by far the largest number of close relatives living outside the United States, the typical characteristics of our legal immigrants are now mirroring that of our illegal immigrants – poor, low-skilled, little educated, and predominately Hispanic. Moreover, the amount of permitted legal immigration, including the admission of refugees and asylum seekers who also tend to be poor and unskilled, has been trending up over time and is now running about twice the level it had been prior to the 1990s. During the 2006-2008 period, for each year there were between 1 million and 1.3 million newly designated legal permanent residents, about two-thirds of whom were classified as receiving family-sponsored preferences.
By today’s immigration laws, citizens who are at least 21 years old are entitled to sponsor parents, siblings and their families, and married children as future legal immigrants, subject to annual limitations on category totals. This can be the start of an extended chain of legal immigration with the spouses of siblings or spouses of married children having entirely different families of their own that they will be able in turn to bring into the United States, all subject to restrictive annual limitations. The annual limits on some categories of family-sponsored preferences has led to a current immigration waitlist of an estimated eight million “overseas” relatives of American citizens, many of whom are living in the U.S. illegally today rather than wait outside the country for what is likely to be many years before it will be their turn to enter legally (see Footnote 3).
It should also be noted that legal immigration has been subject to large-scale fraud as shown by DNA testing. In August 2008 a humanitarian program to allow the reuniting of thousands of African refugees with relatives living in the United States was suspended after it was discovered through DNA tests that a "large portion" of the the relatives from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana were not the blood relatives they claimed to be. "We had high rates of fraud everywhere, except the Ivory Coast," said a State Department official (see footnote 3b).
Who knows how much other legal immigration has been fraudulent? It is well known that many immigrants gain legal residence here through fraudulent marriages to American citizens, sometimes referred to as "green-card marriages." Some Americans participate in green-card marriages out of sympathy for the foreigner, some do it for money, and some are deceived into thinking the foreigner is in love with them. In most of the green-card marriage cases the foreigner is already living illegally in the U.S.
Reason Three – The Children of Immigrants
The American born children of illegal immigrants are automatically granted U.S. citizenship. The effect of our illegal immigration on our national population is thereby multiplied. This is especially true since our largest class of illegal immigrants, the poor from Latin America, have high birthrates. About 10 percent of all new births in this country are to illegal immigrants (see Steven A. Camarota, “Birthrates Among Immigrants in America,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2005). Thus our large base of illegal immigrants who are permitted to live here continually adds to our legal population through childbirth.
Birthright citizenship is the term given to the automatic citizenship granted to children born in the United States. This policy has been applied to the children of illegal immigrant parents since an 1898 Supreme Court interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which was enacted shortly after the Civil War in order to make it difficult for the South to ever again deprive blacks of their citizenship rights.
As applied to the children of illegal immigrants, birthright citizenship has no logical justification – why should children born of parents who are in this country in violation of our laws be rewarded only because their parents are illegally in the country? This practice encourages illegal immigration since it offers foreigners an opportunity to obtain a very valuable life benefit for their newborn children. And under our present immigration law, the children can return the favor when they are 21 and sponsor their parents for citizenship if they have not already become citizens by amnesty or other means. Moreover, birthright citizenship rewards the poor illegal immigrant parents since it enables them to immediately obtain some welfare benefits through their American born children.
Today, few developed countries award birthright citizenship to children whose parents are both illegal immigrants. Great Britain eliminated this practice effective 1983. Australia significantly restricted it effective 1986. Ireland eliminated it effective 2005, followed by New Zealand effective 2006.
Rep. Deal (R-Ga.) with 95 co-sponsors have proposed a bill which would limit automatic citizenship to those cases where at least one parent was a citizen or a legal permanent resident. If such legislation gets enough support to become law, its validity would eventually be argued before the Supreme Court. Then the Supreme Court would either approve it or possibly rule that a new Constitutional amendment would be required to change the present practice of granting automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrant parents.
For many years illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and immigrants who became legal through amnesty or other means have all been largely Hispanic with high birth rates. Thus our immigrants are adding to our population substantially beyond their original numbers through childbirth. It should also be noted that over the years the impact of this childbirth is even greater than the high birth rates alone might lead one to expect because the Hispanic childbirths tend to occur at a relatively early age, thereby increasing the effect of generational compounding.
An estimated 80 percent of our current illegal immigrant population is Hispanic with limited education, an estimated 60 percent not having graduated high school. Calling on the work of a number of different researchers, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has gone to some lengths to document the ways in which our illegal immigrant population and their offspring are likely to impose significant future costs on our society (footnote 4).
The fact that Hispanics in the United States have had a history of high welfare use (footnote 5) contributes to the expectation that today's Hispanic immigrants and their offspring will also come to be characterized as having high welfare usage. The extent of welfare usage of Hispanics in the United States has been attributed to: persistent low incomes related to low educational attainment, high teen birthrates, high rates of births out of wedlock (footnote 6), and cultural factors (footnote 7).
Professor Borjas of Harvard found that "the longer that immigrants live in the United States, the more likely they are to use welfare...." (footnote 7b). Among his observations were that there were “large differences in welfare propensities among national origin groups.” Among the nationalities with high percentages of welfare usage after at least ten years in the United States (1998 data) were Dominican Republic (58 percent of households), Mexico (33.6 percent), Cuba (28.6 percent), and El Salvador (25.9 percent). By contrast Ireland (5.6 percent), India (5.6 percent), Poland (6.8 percent), and Germany (7.8 percent) were at the low end of the range.
Although studies of educational levels achieved by second and third generation Mexicans in the United States show improvements over the educational attainments of the immigrants, they also unfortunately show that educational deficiencies still persist with relatively high percentages dropping out of high school and relatively low percentages attaining college degrees (footnote 8). This does not auger well for the future children of our immigrants.
Rector also notes that additional societal costs will result if the newly amnestied immigrants and their offspring adopt the cited high crime rate of Hispanics in the United States (footnote 9). The fact that most of our Hispanic immigrants come from countries where corruption and lawlessness are widespread may have an influence on their U.S. crime statistics (footnote 10). Illegal immigrants themselves do not have above average crime rates – probably due to a combination of appreciation for their improved economic situation and the knowledge that criminal convictions are the one thing that will get them deported. It is an entirely different story for succeeding generations which have a much higher crime rate. There is evidence that a significant number of the descendents of poor Hispanic immigrants are slipping into the same vicious circle that has trapped too many of our poor citizens: the circle of poverty, low educational attainment, drugs, high numbers of teen births out of wedlock, broken families, gangs, crime, and prison time (footnote 11).
Footnotes
1 The present population of the U.S. recently passed the 300 million mark. The following population sources tied to illegal immigration since the 1980s together account for the author’s rough conservative estimate of 34 million people whose presence in the United States can be traced to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants legalized by seven amnesties enacted since 1986 total more than 6 million (source: Vernon M. Briggs, “Immigration Reform and the U.S. Labor Force: the Questionable ‘Wisdom’ of S.2611,” statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 29, 2006, footnote 4). Illegal immigrant births in the United States were estimated at 380,000 for 2002 (source: Steven M. Camarota, “Birthrates Among Immigrants in America,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2005). Extrapolating for 2000-2008, births of illegal immigrants should have added about 3.2 million in this period. With fewer illegal immigrants here in the 1990s, we estimate 2 million births for that decade, and .5 million for the 1980s. For the decade of the 1990s, the INS estimated that it granted 1.5 million illegal immigrants legal permanent residence for reasons such as marriage to a citizen or job certification. Conservatively, we used that data to estimate 1.5 million from that source for the 2000-2008 period, and .3 million for the 1980s (source: an INS source cited in Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade,” Center for Immigration Studies, December 2005). Illegal immigrants who have awarded legal permanent residence status or been subsequently naturalized have rights to sponsor relatives for legal immigration. For the fiscal year 2006, family sponsored preferences accounted for about 800,000 new legal immigrants according to a statistical publication of the Department of Homeland Security: Annual Flow Report – U.S. Legal Permanent Residents: 2006. Many of these 800,000 must be relatives of former illegal immigrants who were amnestied or were awarded legal permanent residence status since few other Americans would have qualifying relatives living out of the country to sponsor. We conservatively estimate legal immigrants sponsored by individuals who were former illegal immigrants at 3 million for 2000-2008, 1.5 million for the 1990s, and .15 million for the 1980s. Lastly we must estimate the number of children which were born to the 6 million amnestied illegal immigrants, the 3.3 million who obtained legal permanent status in other ways, and the estimated 4.65 million legal immigrants sponsored by former illegal immigrants. We conservatively estimate these births at 1.6 million for the 2000-2008 period, 1 million for the 1990s and .2 million for the 1980s. To the above we add the conservative estimate of 12 million illegal immigrants here at the end of 2007, to come up with a grand total of 34.27 million of our current population that is here illegally today or attributable to immigrants that took up illegal residence here since the 1980s.
2 Our first amnesty for illegal immigrants, The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), was a general amnesty for nearly all illegal immigrants who could prove that they had lived in the United States continuously since January 1, 1982. In addition, as a concession to agricultural interests, the same Act contained an amnesty for those who had worked in perishable agriculture for at least 90 days in the year ended May 1, 1986. IRCA was the subject of massive fraud, especially the agricultural worker component which had an application total that was many times what had been expected. This fraud resulted from our federal bureaucracy being overwhelmed by the number of applicants, giving it little time and resources to determine whether an application was fraudulent or not. As a consequence, an estimated 70 percent of the approximately three million who were granted amnesty under ICRA had applications which were fraudulent in one way or another (See Otis L. Graham Jr., “Amnesty Repeats Itself,” The American Conservative, June 18, 2007). Included were three terrorists are known to have successfully used IRCA to establish legal residence in the United States under the agricultural worker provision! (See Janice L. Kephart, “Immigration and Terrorism,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 2005.)
2b) See chapter entitled "Current Estimated Illegal Immigration Population" beginning on page 34 of Illegal Immigration -- The Myths and The Reality.
3 Mark Krikorian, “Limit Relatives Rights,” USA Today, June 18, 2007 mentions the eight million estimate. This article also mentions that the failed immigration bill of May/June 2007 proposed to eliminate extended family categories of legal immigration as a tradeoff for amnesty, but only after admitting the millions on the waiting list over the next eight or ten years. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a staunch immigrant advocate, is quoted as saying of this proposal: “The day it passes, we’re going to put in legislation to try to fix it [restore extended family preferences in legal immigration].” As part of its recommendations, the Jordan Commission proposed that the level of legal immigration be reduced by eliminating some of the family preferences which can give rise to extended chains of legal immigration.
3b Miriam Jordan, "Refugee Program Halted As DNA Tests Show Fraud," The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2008.
4 Robert Rector, “Amnesty and Continued Low Skill Immigration Will Substantially Raise Welfare Costs and Poverty,” Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 2, 2006.
5 Robert Rector cites Gordon H. Lester and Jan Tin, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Program Participation, 1996 to 1999 Who Gets Assistance?” Household Economic Studies, Current Population Reports, P70-94, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington D.C., January 2004 which shows that for 1999, Hispanics in the United States were almost three times more likely to receive welfare than non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, among families that received aid, the median aid received for Hispanic families was significantly higher than the median for non-Hispanic white families. In addition, Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be long-term welfare program participants than non-Hispanic whites.
6 Hispanic mothers born in the United States had an illegitimacy rate of 50 percent in 2003 (the most recent year of the data used) in contrast to 43 percent for Hispanic immigrant mothers and 24 percent for whites. Data from Steven A. Camarota, “Illegitimate Nation – An Examination of Out-of-Wedlock Births Among Immigrants and Natives,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2007.
7 George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Chapter 6.
7b) Ibid.
8 Rector cites Richard Fry and B. Lindsay Lowell, “Work or Study: Different Fortunes of U.S. Latino Generations,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 28, 2002. A different study which shows a lower high school dropout rate for Hispanics also shows that the third generation has a higher dropout rate than the second, both also being significantly higher than the non-Hispanic dropout rates: Pia Orrenius, “Is the U.S. Still a Melting Pot?” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy, May/June 2004.
9 From Rector: “The age specific incarceration rates in federal and state prisons (prisoners per 100,000 residents in the same age group in the general population) are two to two and a half times higher for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic whites. Relatively little of the higher imprisonment rate of Hispanics seems to be due to immigration violations.” Rector cites Paige M. Harrison, and Allen J. Beck, “Prisoners in 2003,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ 205335, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. November 2004, table 12. Also cited was Thomas P. Bonczar, “The Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population 1974-2001,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ197976, August 2003.
10 Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors, subtitled A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 113, states: “Mexican officials find difficulty in admitting – above all to foreigners – that corruption is essential to the operation and survival of the political system. But the system has in fact never lived without corruption and it would disintegrate or change beyond recognition if it tried to do so.” On 116: “In a sense, the fact that corruption continues to flourish in myriad forms elsewhere [in addition to that found in the upper levels of the Mexican government] confirms that the problem is cultural….”
11 See Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Malanga, The Immigration Solution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). This book extensively documents the social and economic fallout from our current illegal immigration.
The majority of voters would never approve of 1) allowing unlimited illegal immigration into this country, 2) legal immigration laws which give significant legal immigration preferences to poor Hispanics, or 3) giving automatic American citizenship to children born here of parents neither of whom is legally residing here. Yet these three situations accurately describe what is happening in the U.S. today and they are contributing to increased poverty and poverty-related problems in our country. Since each of the three are big contributors to the overall impact of illegal immigration they are examined in more detail below.
As a follow-on observation it should be noted that the distribution of income in this country is made less equal by the low average incomes of our current legal and illegal immigration. Moreover, past history indicates that the offspring of our typical legal and illegal immigrants are expected to be characterized by lower than average educational achievement and income as well (more detail below). In general Democrats do not acknowledge this when they attack our current national distribution of income and conclude that government social engineering through changes in taxation and/or other means is required to make for a more level distribution of income. However, as noted on page 120 of the Economic Report of the President: 1994 (President Clinton): "...immigration has increased the relative supply of less educated labor and appears to have contributed to the increasing inequality of income within the nation." Looked at another way -- it makes no sense to devote significant amounts of energy and resources in an effort to reduce poverty in this country and import much more poverty at the same time.
Reason One – Unlimited and Understated Illegal Immigration
For many years our national government has elected to not enforce our laws which prohibit illegal immigrants from working and living in the United States. Certainly, millions of illegal crossers have been stopped at our borders. However, with no penalty for attempting an illegal crossing, those who are returned to their home countries (principally Mexicans) keep attempting to enter in this way until they get by the Border Patrol. It has been estimated that for every person caught trying an illegal border crossing, three get by.
In recent years, there have been a very small number of raids on suspected employers of illegal immigrants affecting just a few thousand illegal immigrants. These raids have been mostly for show since they have involved only a tiny percentage of the millions of illegal immigrants living here. Under President Obama, the enforcement envelope has been pushed back even further with a stated policy of no deportations of “law-abiding” illegal immigrants. (See blog of July 9 – “Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.”)
An estimated 30 to 50 percent of our illegal immigrants do not even illegally cross our border. They enter the U.S. legally on visas and passports from all over the world for such purposes as tourism, visiting relatives, pursuing an education, or conducting business. After arriving in the United States, they overstay the time limits, find employment, and establish themselves as residents of our country. We have no system in place to determine whether visitors to the U.S. overstay the legal time limits of their visits – which reduces the ability to do anything about these violations of our law. In sum, our federal enforcement system has evolved to the point that whoever gets by the Border Patrol or enters the U.S. on passport or visa is allowed to remain here perpetually unless they are convicted of a serious crime while here.
Most of our illegal immigrants have been poor and poorly educated Hispanics. Three million were amnestied in the Immigration and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, a general amnesty in which very large numbers of immigrants fraudulently qualified for the amnesty (see footnote 2). In the 1990s another 3 million were amnestied during the Clinton presidency in a series of limited amnesties. The latter amnesties only applied to subsets of our illegal immigrant population, primarily illegals of certain Latin American countries.
Aside from our periodic amnesties, there has been an ongoing steady stream of our illegal population who have achieved legal permanent residence in other ways such as by marrying a citizen, finding employers who will declare that they cannot find an American to do a particular job (including unskilled jobs) at the "prevailing wage", joining our military, applying for asylum, or some other means. In most instances these alternative methods of becoming legal have been facilitated by being here illegally. They have added up to millions of individuals over time, and they have fattened up an influencial immigration bar.
Today our illegal immigrant population is estimated by the media and the federal government at about 12 million. This number understates illegal immigration’s dimensions because it does not include the 6 million previously given amnesty since 1986 and the many millions more of illegals who have obtained and continue to obtain legal permanent residence in ways facilitated by living here illegally. Additionally, this blogger believes the current U.S. illegal population is many millions greater than this widely quoted current estimate of an illegal population of 12 million (see footnote 2b).
The inflow of illegal immigrants has likely slowed with the current recession. Nevertheless, the illegal population is still growing since prospective illegals perceive that no matter how bad things become economically in the United States, wages, job availability, and quality of life will continue to be worse in their home countries. Those who are just entering the United States and those who have lost jobs here have many friends and relatives here with whom they can live until their situations improve. Moreover, it is widely perceived that an amnesty is coming and that deportations have stopped except for those convicted of serious crimes in the United States.
Reason Two – Legal Immigration Which Largely Mirrors Earlier Illegal Immigration
Our present legal immigration system discourages the immigration of individuals with advanced educational backgrounds and skills that would benefit our country. Instead of giving preferences to the best and brightest immigrants whose talents are in short supply here, since 1965 our legal immigration system gives most preferences to the close relatives of citizens. Since it is the recently legalized citizens, including many millions of formerly illegal immigrants legalized by amnesties and other means, who have by far the largest number of close relatives living outside the United States, the typical characteristics of our legal immigrants are now mirroring that of our illegal immigrants – poor, low-skilled, little educated, and predominately Hispanic. Moreover, the amount of permitted legal immigration, including the admission of refugees and asylum seekers who also tend to be poor and unskilled, has been trending up over time and is now running about twice the level it had been prior to the 1990s. During the 2006-2008 period, for each year there were between 1 million and 1.3 million newly designated legal permanent residents, about two-thirds of whom were classified as receiving family-sponsored preferences.
By today’s immigration laws, citizens who are at least 21 years old are entitled to sponsor parents, siblings and their families, and married children as future legal immigrants, subject to annual limitations on category totals. This can be the start of an extended chain of legal immigration with the spouses of siblings or spouses of married children having entirely different families of their own that they will be able in turn to bring into the United States, all subject to restrictive annual limitations. The annual limits on some categories of family-sponsored preferences has led to a current immigration waitlist of an estimated eight million “overseas” relatives of American citizens, many of whom are living in the U.S. illegally today rather than wait outside the country for what is likely to be many years before it will be their turn to enter legally (see Footnote 3).
It should also be noted that legal immigration has been subject to large-scale fraud as shown by DNA testing. In August 2008 a humanitarian program to allow the reuniting of thousands of African refugees with relatives living in the United States was suspended after it was discovered through DNA tests that a "large portion" of the the relatives from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea, and Ghana were not the blood relatives they claimed to be. "We had high rates of fraud everywhere, except the Ivory Coast," said a State Department official (see footnote 3b).
Who knows how much other legal immigration has been fraudulent? It is well known that many immigrants gain legal residence here through fraudulent marriages to American citizens, sometimes referred to as "green-card marriages." Some Americans participate in green-card marriages out of sympathy for the foreigner, some do it for money, and some are deceived into thinking the foreigner is in love with them. In most of the green-card marriage cases the foreigner is already living illegally in the U.S.
Reason Three – The Children of Immigrants
The American born children of illegal immigrants are automatically granted U.S. citizenship. The effect of our illegal immigration on our national population is thereby multiplied. This is especially true since our largest class of illegal immigrants, the poor from Latin America, have high birthrates. About 10 percent of all new births in this country are to illegal immigrants (see Steven A. Camarota, “Birthrates Among Immigrants in America,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2005). Thus our large base of illegal immigrants who are permitted to live here continually adds to our legal population through childbirth.
Birthright citizenship is the term given to the automatic citizenship granted to children born in the United States. This policy has been applied to the children of illegal immigrant parents since an 1898 Supreme Court interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which was enacted shortly after the Civil War in order to make it difficult for the South to ever again deprive blacks of their citizenship rights.
As applied to the children of illegal immigrants, birthright citizenship has no logical justification – why should children born of parents who are in this country in violation of our laws be rewarded only because their parents are illegally in the country? This practice encourages illegal immigration since it offers foreigners an opportunity to obtain a very valuable life benefit for their newborn children. And under our present immigration law, the children can return the favor when they are 21 and sponsor their parents for citizenship if they have not already become citizens by amnesty or other means. Moreover, birthright citizenship rewards the poor illegal immigrant parents since it enables them to immediately obtain some welfare benefits through their American born children.
Today, few developed countries award birthright citizenship to children whose parents are both illegal immigrants. Great Britain eliminated this practice effective 1983. Australia significantly restricted it effective 1986. Ireland eliminated it effective 2005, followed by New Zealand effective 2006.
Rep. Deal (R-Ga.) with 95 co-sponsors have proposed a bill which would limit automatic citizenship to those cases where at least one parent was a citizen or a legal permanent resident. If such legislation gets enough support to become law, its validity would eventually be argued before the Supreme Court. Then the Supreme Court would either approve it or possibly rule that a new Constitutional amendment would be required to change the present practice of granting automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrant parents.
For many years illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and immigrants who became legal through amnesty or other means have all been largely Hispanic with high birth rates. Thus our immigrants are adding to our population substantially beyond their original numbers through childbirth. It should also be noted that over the years the impact of this childbirth is even greater than the high birth rates alone might lead one to expect because the Hispanic childbirths tend to occur at a relatively early age, thereby increasing the effect of generational compounding.
An estimated 80 percent of our current illegal immigrant population is Hispanic with limited education, an estimated 60 percent not having graduated high school. Calling on the work of a number of different researchers, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has gone to some lengths to document the ways in which our illegal immigrant population and their offspring are likely to impose significant future costs on our society (footnote 4).
The fact that Hispanics in the United States have had a history of high welfare use (footnote 5) contributes to the expectation that today's Hispanic immigrants and their offspring will also come to be characterized as having high welfare usage. The extent of welfare usage of Hispanics in the United States has been attributed to: persistent low incomes related to low educational attainment, high teen birthrates, high rates of births out of wedlock (footnote 6), and cultural factors (footnote 7).
Professor Borjas of Harvard found that "the longer that immigrants live in the United States, the more likely they are to use welfare...." (footnote 7b). Among his observations were that there were “large differences in welfare propensities among national origin groups.” Among the nationalities with high percentages of welfare usage after at least ten years in the United States (1998 data) were Dominican Republic (58 percent of households), Mexico (33.6 percent), Cuba (28.6 percent), and El Salvador (25.9 percent). By contrast Ireland (5.6 percent), India (5.6 percent), Poland (6.8 percent), and Germany (7.8 percent) were at the low end of the range.
Although studies of educational levels achieved by second and third generation Mexicans in the United States show improvements over the educational attainments of the immigrants, they also unfortunately show that educational deficiencies still persist with relatively high percentages dropping out of high school and relatively low percentages attaining college degrees (footnote 8). This does not auger well for the future children of our immigrants.
Rector also notes that additional societal costs will result if the newly amnestied immigrants and their offspring adopt the cited high crime rate of Hispanics in the United States (footnote 9). The fact that most of our Hispanic immigrants come from countries where corruption and lawlessness are widespread may have an influence on their U.S. crime statistics (footnote 10). Illegal immigrants themselves do not have above average crime rates – probably due to a combination of appreciation for their improved economic situation and the knowledge that criminal convictions are the one thing that will get them deported. It is an entirely different story for succeeding generations which have a much higher crime rate. There is evidence that a significant number of the descendents of poor Hispanic immigrants are slipping into the same vicious circle that has trapped too many of our poor citizens: the circle of poverty, low educational attainment, drugs, high numbers of teen births out of wedlock, broken families, gangs, crime, and prison time (footnote 11).
Footnotes
1 The present population of the U.S. recently passed the 300 million mark. The following population sources tied to illegal immigration since the 1980s together account for the author’s rough conservative estimate of 34 million people whose presence in the United States can be traced to illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants legalized by seven amnesties enacted since 1986 total more than 6 million (source: Vernon M. Briggs, “Immigration Reform and the U.S. Labor Force: the Questionable ‘Wisdom’ of S.2611,” statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 29, 2006, footnote 4). Illegal immigrant births in the United States were estimated at 380,000 for 2002 (source: Steven M. Camarota, “Birthrates Among Immigrants in America,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2005). Extrapolating for 2000-2008, births of illegal immigrants should have added about 3.2 million in this period. With fewer illegal immigrants here in the 1990s, we estimate 2 million births for that decade, and .5 million for the 1980s. For the decade of the 1990s, the INS estimated that it granted 1.5 million illegal immigrants legal permanent residence for reasons such as marriage to a citizen or job certification. Conservatively, we used that data to estimate 1.5 million from that source for the 2000-2008 period, and .3 million for the 1980s (source: an INS source cited in Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade,” Center for Immigration Studies, December 2005). Illegal immigrants who have awarded legal permanent residence status or been subsequently naturalized have rights to sponsor relatives for legal immigration. For the fiscal year 2006, family sponsored preferences accounted for about 800,000 new legal immigrants according to a statistical publication of the Department of Homeland Security: Annual Flow Report – U.S. Legal Permanent Residents: 2006. Many of these 800,000 must be relatives of former illegal immigrants who were amnestied or were awarded legal permanent residence status since few other Americans would have qualifying relatives living out of the country to sponsor. We conservatively estimate legal immigrants sponsored by individuals who were former illegal immigrants at 3 million for 2000-2008, 1.5 million for the 1990s, and .15 million for the 1980s. Lastly we must estimate the number of children which were born to the 6 million amnestied illegal immigrants, the 3.3 million who obtained legal permanent status in other ways, and the estimated 4.65 million legal immigrants sponsored by former illegal immigrants. We conservatively estimate these births at 1.6 million for the 2000-2008 period, 1 million for the 1990s and .2 million for the 1980s. To the above we add the conservative estimate of 12 million illegal immigrants here at the end of 2007, to come up with a grand total of 34.27 million of our current population that is here illegally today or attributable to immigrants that took up illegal residence here since the 1980s.
2 Our first amnesty for illegal immigrants, The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), was a general amnesty for nearly all illegal immigrants who could prove that they had lived in the United States continuously since January 1, 1982. In addition, as a concession to agricultural interests, the same Act contained an amnesty for those who had worked in perishable agriculture for at least 90 days in the year ended May 1, 1986. IRCA was the subject of massive fraud, especially the agricultural worker component which had an application total that was many times what had been expected. This fraud resulted from our federal bureaucracy being overwhelmed by the number of applicants, giving it little time and resources to determine whether an application was fraudulent or not. As a consequence, an estimated 70 percent of the approximately three million who were granted amnesty under ICRA had applications which were fraudulent in one way or another (See Otis L. Graham Jr., “Amnesty Repeats Itself,” The American Conservative, June 18, 2007). Included were three terrorists are known to have successfully used IRCA to establish legal residence in the United States under the agricultural worker provision! (See Janice L. Kephart, “Immigration and Terrorism,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 2005.)
2b) See chapter entitled "Current Estimated Illegal Immigration Population" beginning on page 34 of Illegal Immigration -- The Myths and The Reality.
3 Mark Krikorian, “Limit Relatives Rights,” USA Today, June 18, 2007 mentions the eight million estimate. This article also mentions that the failed immigration bill of May/June 2007 proposed to eliminate extended family categories of legal immigration as a tradeoff for amnesty, but only after admitting the millions on the waiting list over the next eight or ten years. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a staunch immigrant advocate, is quoted as saying of this proposal: “The day it passes, we’re going to put in legislation to try to fix it [restore extended family preferences in legal immigration].” As part of its recommendations, the Jordan Commission proposed that the level of legal immigration be reduced by eliminating some of the family preferences which can give rise to extended chains of legal immigration.
3b Miriam Jordan, "Refugee Program Halted As DNA Tests Show Fraud," The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2008.
4 Robert Rector, “Amnesty and Continued Low Skill Immigration Will Substantially Raise Welfare Costs and Poverty,” Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 2, 2006.
5 Robert Rector cites Gordon H. Lester and Jan Tin, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Program Participation, 1996 to 1999 Who Gets Assistance?” Household Economic Studies, Current Population Reports, P70-94, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington D.C., January 2004 which shows that for 1999, Hispanics in the United States were almost three times more likely to receive welfare than non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, among families that received aid, the median aid received for Hispanic families was significantly higher than the median for non-Hispanic white families. In addition, Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be long-term welfare program participants than non-Hispanic whites.
6 Hispanic mothers born in the United States had an illegitimacy rate of 50 percent in 2003 (the most recent year of the data used) in contrast to 43 percent for Hispanic immigrant mothers and 24 percent for whites. Data from Steven A. Camarota, “Illegitimate Nation – An Examination of Out-of-Wedlock Births Among Immigrants and Natives,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2007.
7 George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Chapter 6.
7b) Ibid.
8 Rector cites Richard Fry and B. Lindsay Lowell, “Work or Study: Different Fortunes of U.S. Latino Generations,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 28, 2002. A different study which shows a lower high school dropout rate for Hispanics also shows that the third generation has a higher dropout rate than the second, both also being significantly higher than the non-Hispanic dropout rates: Pia Orrenius, “Is the U.S. Still a Melting Pot?” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy, May/June 2004.
9 From Rector: “The age specific incarceration rates in federal and state prisons (prisoners per 100,000 residents in the same age group in the general population) are two to two and a half times higher for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic whites. Relatively little of the higher imprisonment rate of Hispanics seems to be due to immigration violations.” Rector cites Paige M. Harrison, and Allen J. Beck, “Prisoners in 2003,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ 205335, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. November 2004, table 12. Also cited was Thomas P. Bonczar, “The Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population 1974-2001,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ197976, August 2003.
10 Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors, subtitled A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 113, states: “Mexican officials find difficulty in admitting – above all to foreigners – that corruption is essential to the operation and survival of the political system. But the system has in fact never lived without corruption and it would disintegrate or change beyond recognition if it tried to do so.” On 116: “In a sense, the fact that corruption continues to flourish in myriad forms elsewhere [in addition to that found in the upper levels of the Mexican government] confirms that the problem is cultural….”
11 See Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Malanga, The Immigration Solution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). This book extensively documents the social and economic fallout from our current illegal immigration.
Monday, September 7, 2009
The High Unemployment Rates of Those Americans Who Most Compete With Immigrants for Jobs
As a result of job competition with legal and illegal immigrants, the little educated and younger Americans, especially those who are disadvantaged minorities, are hurt by having lower wages and benefits and fewer job opportunities than would otherwise be available to them. Our lowest paying jobs in businesses such as restaurants or motels are very appealing to immigrants who find the pay is six to ten times what they could earn in their home countries if they were able to find any employment there at all. Thus the immigrants will do whatever it takes, including doing more work for less compensation and working “off the books” in order to obtain low paying American jobs. As a consequence, in all too many cases employers choose to hire immigrants instead of native Americans. (For more advantages stemming from off the books work see blog of August 9 -- "Illegal Immigration Results in Understatement of U.S. Employment.")
Using data from the June 2009 Current Population Survey, Karen Jensenius and Steven A. Camarota have compiled unemployment and underemployment data for different subsets of native-born Americans who are most likely to be competing with immigrants for jobs(see Center for Immigration Studies piece entitled “Worse Then It Seems,” Backgrounder/Report August 2009 which can be found at their website www.cis.org).
The data show that for June 2009 the unemployment rate for all native-born Americans is 9.7 percent. By comparison, the unemployment rate for native-born Americans with less than a high school education is 20.8 percent. For native-born blacks with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate rises to 27.5 per cent.
For all young (18-29) native-born who have only a high school education, the unemployment rate is 18.5 percent. For all young native-born blacks with only a high school education the unemployment rate is 25.8 percent.
These data become much worse if one includes 1) the underemployed (those working part time who would like to work full time) and 2) those too discouraged to have sought employment in the prior four weeks (none of whom are counted as unemployed in the official statistics). Adding these two categories to the unemployment rate gives percentages of 16.3 percent for all native born and 33.2 percent for all native born with less than a high school education. Similarly, the rate rises to 42 percent for native-born blacks who did not graduate from high school. For the young (18-29) who have only a high school education, the percentage rises to 30.3 percent for all native-born and 37.4 percent for native-born blacks.
Conclusions from the Jensenius and Camarota report: “The [unemployment] situation is particularly bad for minorities, the young, and less-educated Americans. These are the workers who face the most competition from immigrants – legal and illegal.” “…there is no shortage of less-educated [citizen] workers in this country. If the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return to their home countries over time, we have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace these workers.”
Using data from the June 2009 Current Population Survey, Karen Jensenius and Steven A. Camarota have compiled unemployment and underemployment data for different subsets of native-born Americans who are most likely to be competing with immigrants for jobs(see Center for Immigration Studies piece entitled “Worse Then It Seems,” Backgrounder/Report August 2009 which can be found at their website www.cis.org).
The data show that for June 2009 the unemployment rate for all native-born Americans is 9.7 percent. By comparison, the unemployment rate for native-born Americans with less than a high school education is 20.8 percent. For native-born blacks with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate rises to 27.5 per cent.
For all young (18-29) native-born who have only a high school education, the unemployment rate is 18.5 percent. For all young native-born blacks with only a high school education the unemployment rate is 25.8 percent.
These data become much worse if one includes 1) the underemployed (those working part time who would like to work full time) and 2) those too discouraged to have sought employment in the prior four weeks (none of whom are counted as unemployed in the official statistics). Adding these two categories to the unemployment rate gives percentages of 16.3 percent for all native born and 33.2 percent for all native born with less than a high school education. Similarly, the rate rises to 42 percent for native-born blacks who did not graduate from high school. For the young (18-29) who have only a high school education, the percentage rises to 30.3 percent for all native-born and 37.4 percent for native-born blacks.
Conclusions from the Jensenius and Camarota report: “The [unemployment] situation is particularly bad for minorities, the young, and less-educated Americans. These are the workers who face the most competition from immigrants – legal and illegal.” “…there is no shortage of less-educated [citizen] workers in this country. If the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return to their home countries over time, we have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace these workers.”
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Political Smoke Screens
As a part of President Obama's campaign to advance the Democrat's health care legislation, he has publicly stated that illegal immigrants will not receive coverage under it. This is misleading since President Obama knows full well that whether or not a new health care bill is passed most illegal immigrants will continue to receive free health care coverage under present federal law as they have since 1986.
In addition, the Congressional Research Service, the research arm for the U.S. Congress, refutes (in a report entitled "Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200" dated August 25, 2009) the President and other Democrats who insist that House draft of the health care reform bill, America's Affordable Health Care Act of 2009, (H.R. 3200) does not cover illegal immigrants: "H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens participating in the Exchange -- whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present or in the United States temporarily or permanently." It is true that illegal immigrants would generally not be required to participate and they would not be eligible for subsidies based on income; althugh there is no enforcement mechanism for the latter. To view a copy of this Congressional Research Report see the Center for Immigration Studies website: www.cis.org/articles/2009/CRS_Report_on_HR3200.pdf
For a detailed review of HR3200 see Steven A. Camarota, "Illegal Immigrants and HR3200: Estimate of Potential Cost to Taxpayers" Backgrounder, September 2009 at the www.cis.org website.
By the terms the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 all hospitals with emergency rooms are compelled to treat, and hospitalize if necessary, all who enter their emergency rooms irrespective of the ability to pay for services rendered and irrespective of citizenship status. In this way most of our illegal immigrants, being both poor and uninsured, have their health care paid for without limit by our public and private hospitals across the country. Hospitals receive little or no reimbursement from the federal government for providing such services to illegal immigrants who do not pay (see blog of August 19 – Martin Memorial Medical Center Case – for more detail regarding this). In some cases the financial burden from treating immigrants has contributed to hospital closures.
By his actions President Obama has consistently favored easy treatment for the illegal immigrants working and living in this country and favors amnesty for nearly all. Every now and then he talks tough on immigration in order to throw a smoke screen over his real intentions which may be found, for example, in his administration’s unilateral decision to stop taking deportation action against “law-abiding” illegal immigrants who are living and working in this country in defiance of federal law. In addition to living and working here illegally, most immigrants also commit identity fraud for such purposes as helping to obtain jobs or drivers licenses thereby causing headaches for Americans whose identity was assumed (see "Illegal, But Not Undocumented," subtitled "Identity Theft, Document Fraud, and Illegal Employment" by Ronald W. Mortensen. This piece can be found as a June 2009 Backgrounder at the Center for Immigration Studies website http://cis.org/).
This Obama immigration policy has been manifested by public statements and the newly stated policy of going after employers of illegal immigrants without any attempt to detain and deport the illegal workers of those employers. At the same time, it seems likely that few large employers of illegals will ever be prosecuted since most relied on worker-supplied documentation which demonstrated a right to work in the U.S.
Most illegal workers who lose their jobs as a result of an employer crackdown will not give up all of the advantages of living in the U.S. and voluntarily return to their home countries where jobs are hard to find and lower paying. Instead they will find other U.S. employers who will hire them, including smaller employers who may hire them off the books, or they will find work as independent contractors. An estimated 50 percent of illegal immigrants currently work off the books or as independent contractors who most likely do not report their income.
For more information related to the Obama administration’s immigration policies see the July 9 blog entitled “Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.”
In addition, the Congressional Research Service, the research arm for the U.S. Congress, refutes (in a report entitled "Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200" dated August 25, 2009) the President and other Democrats who insist that House draft of the health care reform bill, America's Affordable Health Care Act of 2009, (H.R. 3200) does not cover illegal immigrants: "H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens participating in the Exchange -- whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present or in the United States temporarily or permanently." It is true that illegal immigrants would generally not be required to participate and they would not be eligible for subsidies based on income; althugh there is no enforcement mechanism for the latter. To view a copy of this Congressional Research Report see the Center for Immigration Studies website: www.cis.org/articles/2009/CRS_Report_on_HR3200.pdf
For a detailed review of HR3200 see Steven A. Camarota, "Illegal Immigrants and HR3200: Estimate of Potential Cost to Taxpayers" Backgrounder, September 2009 at the www.cis.org website.
By the terms the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 all hospitals with emergency rooms are compelled to treat, and hospitalize if necessary, all who enter their emergency rooms irrespective of the ability to pay for services rendered and irrespective of citizenship status. In this way most of our illegal immigrants, being both poor and uninsured, have their health care paid for without limit by our public and private hospitals across the country. Hospitals receive little or no reimbursement from the federal government for providing such services to illegal immigrants who do not pay (see blog of August 19 – Martin Memorial Medical Center Case – for more detail regarding this). In some cases the financial burden from treating immigrants has contributed to hospital closures.
By his actions President Obama has consistently favored easy treatment for the illegal immigrants working and living in this country and favors amnesty for nearly all. Every now and then he talks tough on immigration in order to throw a smoke screen over his real intentions which may be found, for example, in his administration’s unilateral decision to stop taking deportation action against “law-abiding” illegal immigrants who are living and working in this country in defiance of federal law. In addition to living and working here illegally, most immigrants also commit identity fraud for such purposes as helping to obtain jobs or drivers licenses thereby causing headaches for Americans whose identity was assumed (see "Illegal, But Not Undocumented," subtitled "Identity Theft, Document Fraud, and Illegal Employment" by Ronald W. Mortensen. This piece can be found as a June 2009 Backgrounder at the Center for Immigration Studies website http://cis.org/).
This Obama immigration policy has been manifested by public statements and the newly stated policy of going after employers of illegal immigrants without any attempt to detain and deport the illegal workers of those employers. At the same time, it seems likely that few large employers of illegals will ever be prosecuted since most relied on worker-supplied documentation which demonstrated a right to work in the U.S.
Most illegal workers who lose their jobs as a result of an employer crackdown will not give up all of the advantages of living in the U.S. and voluntarily return to their home countries where jobs are hard to find and lower paying. Instead they will find other U.S. employers who will hire them, including smaller employers who may hire them off the books, or they will find work as independent contractors. An estimated 50 percent of illegal immigrants currently work off the books or as independent contractors who most likely do not report their income.
For more information related to the Obama administration’s immigration policies see the July 9 blog entitled “Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy.”
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Martin Memorial Medical Center Case
By the terms of a 1986 federal law, illegal immigrants (and uninsured citizens) cannot be denied hospital “emergency” medical care. In practice, this has meant that all hospitals (public and private, profit and nonprofit), fearing lawsuits, examine and treat all who enter their emergency rooms and admit them to the hospital if necessary whether or not such patients have any ability to pay for the services rendered. In some cases the required hospital care can cost millions of dollars and can go on for years. For many hospitals this is a substantial financial burden as well as a burden on the citizens of the community which the hospital serves.
In a widely watched case, on July 27, 2009 a jury in Stuart, Florida found that a local hospital, Martin Memorial Medical Center (located in Martin County, Florida), did not act unreasonably when it chartered a plane at a cost of $30,000 and sent a seriously brain-damaged illegal-immigrant Guatemalan patient to a medical facility in his home country in 2003 after treating him from 2001 to 2003 at a cost of $1.5 million. The jury reached its decision in about one day of deliberations following a three week trial in which Martin Memorial was the defendant in a civil case. This case highlights the Catch-22 problem hospitals have with those indigent patients for whom hospitals receive little or no reimbursement for medical expenses: they cannot legally discharge the patient if the patient still needs medical care and there is no rehab facility or other hospital facility in this country or in the patient’s home country who will agree to take the patient. This Martin Memorial case may be the first to test the legality of cross-border transfers without the consent of patients or their guardians.
Following the jury’s decision the hospital’s chief executive praised the decision and decried the failure of politicians to provide reimbursement to hospitals for unpaid immigrant medical care. Moreover, he noted that: “Unfortunately none of the proposed national health care reform bills currently being debated in Washington address the issue.”
Details related to this case and some general comments about similar hospital cases may be found in Deborah Sontag, “Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals,” New York Times (August 3, 2008) and Deborah Sontag, “Jury Rules for Hospital That Deported Patient,” New York Times (July 28, 2009).
The following is from the April, 2009 testimony of a representative of Martin Memorial given before a committee of the Florida legislature:
“I am Carol Plato. I am from Martin County, and I am Director of Corporate Business Services for Martin Memorial Medical Center. I just have a brief couple of stories to tell you about. In 2001 we had a Guatemalan, an illegal patient, in our hospital. He was there from 2001 until 2003. He had over $1.5 million in healthcare services. We forcibly returned him to his home country of Guatemala at our own cost of $30,000. You ask why am I telling you about a case that happened in 2003? Because today that case is not over; we have spent and are spending up to a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees because his family here in the United States is suing us because they think it was inappropriate for us to return this illegal patient to his home country. Currently, as of today, I have a patient from Mexico who has been in my hospital for 760 days. He has severe brain damage, he has no family, no friends. His charges to date for almost 2 years is $1.5 million and we have contacted the Mexican Consulate four times; we have contacted Immigration, and nobody will help us return this patient to Mexico. We are even willing to spend our own $30,000 to return this patient. We can’t get anyone to help us with that. . . . One of the major problems that healthcare institutions have today that you need to be aware of is ongoing care. If somebody comes into our emergency rooms, we don’t turn them away, but if somebody comes into our emergency room and they have renal failure, and they require dialysis -- right now I have six patients, illegal, undocumented patients that we are seeing every 3 days for renal dialysis. For all of this that I’ve talked to you about, we have received no reimbursement. This obviously affects all of us in this room, our healthcare costs are severely affected by this. I also would like to end with pointing out that a large percentage of the babies born in our facility are from illegal parents.”
Chairman:
“Thank you. I do have one quick question from Representative (?)”
Representative:
“Sorry, I know there are a lot of speakers. Ma’am, when you know that they are illegal and come to your hospital, do you report them to the federal authorities to come get them?”
Carol Plato:
“We have tried and we have been told on numerous occasions that they are only interested if a crime has been committed. And from what I understand it seems like they are not even interested then.”
Representative:
“So the fact that they are illegal is not enough crime.”
Carol Plato:
“Correct”
As noted in Brian Grow and Robert Berner, “Fresh Pain for the Uninsured,” BusinessWeek, December 3, 2007: “When they don’t get paid immediately, hospitals typically recover around 10 cents on the dollar owed, even when they hire collection specialists.” The underlying theme of this article as suggested by its title is that “a growing number of hospitals, working with a range of financial companies, are squeezing revenue from patients with little or no health insurance.” Thus uninsured or underinsured American citizens may have to pay hospitals something after using hospital services, depending on their ability to pay. In the cases of illegal immigrants who have no financial resources or who give hospitals fictitious names and addresses, hospitals are not likely to recover any money at all for services rendered.
Most illegal immigrants do not have health insurance and pay very little in taxes because their incomes are so low and because an estimated 50 percent work “off the books,” and therefore pay no income or social security taxes at all. Moreover, many illegals have parented children here giving rise to still more health bills as well as public education expenses which average about $8000 per pupil per year in public schools. In addition, our poor immigrants access various forms of public assistance and other public services. Most assistance or public services used by immigrants or their families are paid for by citizen taxpayers.
In the case of health care, hospitals receive little or no state or federal reimbursement for immigrant use of hospital services which means that hospitals must pass on these costs through in higher charges to paying patients, primarily users with some form of health insurance, or close their doors. Consequently, users or their employers end up paying more for health insurance policies and/or face higher deductibles and co-pays as a direct result of the unpaid medical expenses of illegal immigrants and their children. In 2007 the passthrough of unpaid hospital expenses was estimated to cost each insured Californian about $455 per year (see an op-ed written by the chief executive of Scripps Health in San Diego County, Chris Van Gorder, “Health Care – The Governor’s Plan,” San Diego Union - Tribune, March 2, 2007). In this same op-ed it is noted that financial pressures contributed to the closure of 65 emergency rooms and 70 acute care hospitals in California during the previous decade. In the words of C. Duane Dauner at the time he was president of the California Hospital Association: "Emergency rooms and hospital doctors are forced to subsidize the lack of immigration enforcement by the federal government." Quote from: Julia Preston, “Texas Hospitals’ Separate Paths Reflect the Debate on Immigration,” New York Times, July 18, 2006.
To date most of the illegal immigrant users of unreimbursed hospital medical services likely work and live in the U.S. and have low incomes and few asssets. Many are working off the books or as independent contractors without health insurance. Others work part-time or are otherwise not covered by any employer health plan.
In the future we may see increasing numbers of non-citizens with serious illnesses visit the U.S. for the primary purpose of obtaining free high quality health care unavailable to them in their own countries. Given the ease of entering the U.S. legally (for example, as tourists, to visit relatives, or for educational or business purposes) or illegally, given our existing law requiring hospitals to treat all who enter their emergency rooms, and given the desperation of seriously ill people of little means in the many countries with inadequate or non-existent health care systems for the poor, it is to be expected that over time we will become the medical salvation for increasing numbers of the world’s poor – all at the expense of American hospitals and American citizens.
Still another set of users of unpaid and unreimbursed hospital medical services are pregnant women who come to the U.S. to have their childbirth within a higher quality medical situation than is available to them in their home country. An additional attraction to these women is the knowledge that under American law any childbirth within the U.S. conveys to the newborn automatic American citizenship irrespective of the status of the parents.
In a widely watched case, on July 27, 2009 a jury in Stuart, Florida found that a local hospital, Martin Memorial Medical Center (located in Martin County, Florida), did not act unreasonably when it chartered a plane at a cost of $30,000 and sent a seriously brain-damaged illegal-immigrant Guatemalan patient to a medical facility in his home country in 2003 after treating him from 2001 to 2003 at a cost of $1.5 million. The jury reached its decision in about one day of deliberations following a three week trial in which Martin Memorial was the defendant in a civil case. This case highlights the Catch-22 problem hospitals have with those indigent patients for whom hospitals receive little or no reimbursement for medical expenses: they cannot legally discharge the patient if the patient still needs medical care and there is no rehab facility or other hospital facility in this country or in the patient’s home country who will agree to take the patient. This Martin Memorial case may be the first to test the legality of cross-border transfers without the consent of patients or their guardians.
Following the jury’s decision the hospital’s chief executive praised the decision and decried the failure of politicians to provide reimbursement to hospitals for unpaid immigrant medical care. Moreover, he noted that: “Unfortunately none of the proposed national health care reform bills currently being debated in Washington address the issue.”
Details related to this case and some general comments about similar hospital cases may be found in Deborah Sontag, “Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals,” New York Times (August 3, 2008) and Deborah Sontag, “Jury Rules for Hospital That Deported Patient,” New York Times (July 28, 2009).
The following is from the April, 2009 testimony of a representative of Martin Memorial given before a committee of the Florida legislature:
“I am Carol Plato. I am from Martin County, and I am Director of Corporate Business Services for Martin Memorial Medical Center. I just have a brief couple of stories to tell you about. In 2001 we had a Guatemalan, an illegal patient, in our hospital. He was there from 2001 until 2003. He had over $1.5 million in healthcare services. We forcibly returned him to his home country of Guatemala at our own cost of $30,000. You ask why am I telling you about a case that happened in 2003? Because today that case is not over; we have spent and are spending up to a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees because his family here in the United States is suing us because they think it was inappropriate for us to return this illegal patient to his home country. Currently, as of today, I have a patient from Mexico who has been in my hospital for 760 days. He has severe brain damage, he has no family, no friends. His charges to date for almost 2 years is $1.5 million and we have contacted the Mexican Consulate four times; we have contacted Immigration, and nobody will help us return this patient to Mexico. We are even willing to spend our own $30,000 to return this patient. We can’t get anyone to help us with that. . . . One of the major problems that healthcare institutions have today that you need to be aware of is ongoing care. If somebody comes into our emergency rooms, we don’t turn them away, but if somebody comes into our emergency room and they have renal failure, and they require dialysis -- right now I have six patients, illegal, undocumented patients that we are seeing every 3 days for renal dialysis. For all of this that I’ve talked to you about, we have received no reimbursement. This obviously affects all of us in this room, our healthcare costs are severely affected by this. I also would like to end with pointing out that a large percentage of the babies born in our facility are from illegal parents.”
Chairman:
“Thank you. I do have one quick question from Representative (?)”
Representative:
“Sorry, I know there are a lot of speakers. Ma’am, when you know that they are illegal and come to your hospital, do you report them to the federal authorities to come get them?”
Carol Plato:
“We have tried and we have been told on numerous occasions that they are only interested if a crime has been committed. And from what I understand it seems like they are not even interested then.”
Representative:
“So the fact that they are illegal is not enough crime.”
Carol Plato:
“Correct”
As noted in Brian Grow and Robert Berner, “Fresh Pain for the Uninsured,” BusinessWeek, December 3, 2007: “When they don’t get paid immediately, hospitals typically recover around 10 cents on the dollar owed, even when they hire collection specialists.” The underlying theme of this article as suggested by its title is that “a growing number of hospitals, working with a range of financial companies, are squeezing revenue from patients with little or no health insurance.” Thus uninsured or underinsured American citizens may have to pay hospitals something after using hospital services, depending on their ability to pay. In the cases of illegal immigrants who have no financial resources or who give hospitals fictitious names and addresses, hospitals are not likely to recover any money at all for services rendered.
Most illegal immigrants do not have health insurance and pay very little in taxes because their incomes are so low and because an estimated 50 percent work “off the books,” and therefore pay no income or social security taxes at all. Moreover, many illegals have parented children here giving rise to still more health bills as well as public education expenses which average about $8000 per pupil per year in public schools. In addition, our poor immigrants access various forms of public assistance and other public services. Most assistance or public services used by immigrants or their families are paid for by citizen taxpayers.
In the case of health care, hospitals receive little or no state or federal reimbursement for immigrant use of hospital services which means that hospitals must pass on these costs through in higher charges to paying patients, primarily users with some form of health insurance, or close their doors. Consequently, users or their employers end up paying more for health insurance policies and/or face higher deductibles and co-pays as a direct result of the unpaid medical expenses of illegal immigrants and their children. In 2007 the passthrough of unpaid hospital expenses was estimated to cost each insured Californian about $455 per year (see an op-ed written by the chief executive of Scripps Health in San Diego County, Chris Van Gorder, “Health Care – The Governor’s Plan,” San Diego Union - Tribune, March 2, 2007). In this same op-ed it is noted that financial pressures contributed to the closure of 65 emergency rooms and 70 acute care hospitals in California during the previous decade. In the words of C. Duane Dauner at the time he was president of the California Hospital Association: "Emergency rooms and hospital doctors are forced to subsidize the lack of immigration enforcement by the federal government." Quote from: Julia Preston, “Texas Hospitals’ Separate Paths Reflect the Debate on Immigration,” New York Times, July 18, 2006.
To date most of the illegal immigrant users of unreimbursed hospital medical services likely work and live in the U.S. and have low incomes and few asssets. Many are working off the books or as independent contractors without health insurance. Others work part-time or are otherwise not covered by any employer health plan.
In the future we may see increasing numbers of non-citizens with serious illnesses visit the U.S. for the primary purpose of obtaining free high quality health care unavailable to them in their own countries. Given the ease of entering the U.S. legally (for example, as tourists, to visit relatives, or for educational or business purposes) or illegally, given our existing law requiring hospitals to treat all who enter their emergency rooms, and given the desperation of seriously ill people of little means in the many countries with inadequate or non-existent health care systems for the poor, it is to be expected that over time we will become the medical salvation for increasing numbers of the world’s poor – all at the expense of American hospitals and American citizens.
Still another set of users of unpaid and unreimbursed hospital medical services are pregnant women who come to the U.S. to have their childbirth within a higher quality medical situation than is available to them in their home country. An additional attraction to these women is the knowledge that under American law any childbirth within the U.S. conveys to the newborn automatic American citizenship irrespective of the status of the parents.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Illegal Immigration Results In Understatement of U.S. Employment
In the final paragraph below is a letter to the editor of The New York Times regarding an article featuring government data indicating that the private sector of the U.S. economy showed about zero job growth over the last 10 years.
It is not widely recognized that the employment data referred to by the Times and related economic data understate the actual employment numbers due to the substantial increase in our “underground” economy which has resulted in large part from the influx of illegal immigrants in recent years. When jobs go underground they are not included in government employment data or tax rolls. The underground economy includes shadow employees or independent contractors who are doing work which generates income that is not reported to the appropriate governmental agencies.
Employers can save substantial money if they hired employees “off the books.” By hiring “off the books,” an employer can save on the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare taxes, and federal and state unemployment insurance taxes as well as workers compensation insurance. The employer also saves on any employer contribution to health insurance as well as vacation, holiday, and sick pay that would otherwise be made to an “on the books” employee. The “off the books” employer may also benefit by being able to ignore laws which protect workers in different ways such as laws related to overtime, the minimum wage, the workplace environment, hiring and firing. Many employers have both “on the books” and “off the books” employees, and those who do hire “off the books” tend to be smaller businesses.
Employees also often like “off the books” working arrangements because they can thereby avoid paying social security taxes as well as any state and federal income taxes that may be due. Moreover, by working "off the books" both illegal and citizen employees can qualify for different kinds of welfare with their lower reported incomes. (For an example of billions of dollars of welfare for illegal immigrants with low reported incomes see blog of May 9, 2010 entitled "Child Tax Credits for Illegal Immigrants.") In addition, those workers who are illegal immigrants can thereby avoid having to come up with social security numbers that are not theirs or filing tax returns to claim income tax refunds against withheld amounts. Illegal immigrants, seeking to maintain a low profile, usually agree to off the books employment if it is offered, especially since in other countries such as Mexico working “off the books” is a widespread practice. An estimated 50% of current illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. are working “off the books” or as independent contractors who are not reporting income.1
The honest employers can be doubly penalized by 1) only hiring their employees “on the books,” and 2) only hiring employees who can legally work here (more expensive and perhaps less productive than illegal immigrant alternatives). For many small businesses, the choice is to violate various laws as their competitors are doing or go out of business. Thus illegal immigration is contributing to a significant growth of our “underground economy.”2 Increases in off the books work has a corrupting influence on our economy and society. Increases in off the books work undermines the basic honesty necessary for our tax system to function well and it tends to draw otherwise honest employers and otherwise honest citizen workers into its illegal workings which offer significant financial advantages to both employers and employees.
1 For obvious reasons it is difficult to obtain hard data on the percentage of illegal immigrants “working off the books.” For a discussion of how a 50 percent figure can be arrived at see Steven A. Camarota, “The High Cost of Cheap Labor,” Center for Immigration Studies, August 2004. Mexicans are very familiar with the concept of “working off the books” as that practice is the backbone of their economy’s “informal sector.” A description of the “informal sector” was given in Robert J. Samuelson, “Mexico’s Missing Prosperity,” The Washington Post, June 28, 2006: “It [the informal sector] consists of thousands of small firms – street vendors, repair shops, tiny manufacturers – that theoretically aren’t legal, because they haven’t registered with the government and often don’t pay taxes or comply with regulations on wages and hiring and firing. Almost two-thirds of Mexico’s workers may be employed in the informal sector, according to one rough estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The sector’s size might suggest great entrepreneurial vitality. The trouble is that these firms are small and inefficient. Because they’re technically illegal, they can’t easily get bank loans and can’t grow too large without being forced to pay taxes or comply with government regulations.”
2 See Robert Justich and Betty Ng, “The Underground Labor Force is Rising to the Surface,” Bear Stearns Asset Management, January 3, 2005.
To the Editor:
Re “Job Growth Lacking In the Private Sector” (August 8):
This article of Mr. Norris does not mention negative effect on the reported employment numbers by the growth of the “underground economy.” Tax avoidance by employers and employees and the willingness of illegal immigrants to work “off the books” for small employers or as independent contractors who do not report income have no doubt distorted the statistics quoted in the article. Moreover, it should be noted that when some employers start hiring “off the books” the financial advantages are so great that it puts considerable pressure on their competitors to also do so.
It is not widely recognized that the employment data referred to by the Times and related economic data understate the actual employment numbers due to the substantial increase in our “underground” economy which has resulted in large part from the influx of illegal immigrants in recent years. When jobs go underground they are not included in government employment data or tax rolls. The underground economy includes shadow employees or independent contractors who are doing work which generates income that is not reported to the appropriate governmental agencies.
Employers can save substantial money if they hired employees “off the books.” By hiring “off the books,” an employer can save on the employer’s share of Social Security and Medicare taxes, and federal and state unemployment insurance taxes as well as workers compensation insurance. The employer also saves on any employer contribution to health insurance as well as vacation, holiday, and sick pay that would otherwise be made to an “on the books” employee. The “off the books” employer may also benefit by being able to ignore laws which protect workers in different ways such as laws related to overtime, the minimum wage, the workplace environment, hiring and firing. Many employers have both “on the books” and “off the books” employees, and those who do hire “off the books” tend to be smaller businesses.
Employees also often like “off the books” working arrangements because they can thereby avoid paying social security taxes as well as any state and federal income taxes that may be due. Moreover, by working "off the books" both illegal and citizen employees can qualify for different kinds of welfare with their lower reported incomes. (For an example of billions of dollars of welfare for illegal immigrants with low reported incomes see blog of May 9, 2010 entitled "Child Tax Credits for Illegal Immigrants.") In addition, those workers who are illegal immigrants can thereby avoid having to come up with social security numbers that are not theirs or filing tax returns to claim income tax refunds against withheld amounts. Illegal immigrants, seeking to maintain a low profile, usually agree to off the books employment if it is offered, especially since in other countries such as Mexico working “off the books” is a widespread practice. An estimated 50% of current illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. are working “off the books” or as independent contractors who are not reporting income.1
The honest employers can be doubly penalized by 1) only hiring their employees “on the books,” and 2) only hiring employees who can legally work here (more expensive and perhaps less productive than illegal immigrant alternatives). For many small businesses, the choice is to violate various laws as their competitors are doing or go out of business. Thus illegal immigration is contributing to a significant growth of our “underground economy.”2 Increases in off the books work has a corrupting influence on our economy and society. Increases in off the books work undermines the basic honesty necessary for our tax system to function well and it tends to draw otherwise honest employers and otherwise honest citizen workers into its illegal workings which offer significant financial advantages to both employers and employees.
1 For obvious reasons it is difficult to obtain hard data on the percentage of illegal immigrants “working off the books.” For a discussion of how a 50 percent figure can be arrived at see Steven A. Camarota, “The High Cost of Cheap Labor,” Center for Immigration Studies, August 2004. Mexicans are very familiar with the concept of “working off the books” as that practice is the backbone of their economy’s “informal sector.” A description of the “informal sector” was given in Robert J. Samuelson, “Mexico’s Missing Prosperity,” The Washington Post, June 28, 2006: “It [the informal sector] consists of thousands of small firms – street vendors, repair shops, tiny manufacturers – that theoretically aren’t legal, because they haven’t registered with the government and often don’t pay taxes or comply with regulations on wages and hiring and firing. Almost two-thirds of Mexico’s workers may be employed in the informal sector, according to one rough estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The sector’s size might suggest great entrepreneurial vitality. The trouble is that these firms are small and inefficient. Because they’re technically illegal, they can’t easily get bank loans and can’t grow too large without being forced to pay taxes or comply with government regulations.”
2 See Robert Justich and Betty Ng, “The Underground Labor Force is Rising to the Surface,” Bear Stearns Asset Management, January 3, 2005.
To the Editor:
Re “Job Growth Lacking In the Private Sector” (August 8):
This article of Mr. Norris does not mention negative effect on the reported employment numbers by the growth of the “underground economy.” Tax avoidance by employers and employees and the willingness of illegal immigrants to work “off the books” for small employers or as independent contractors who do not report income have no doubt distorted the statistics quoted in the article. Moreover, it should be noted that when some employers start hiring “off the books” the financial advantages are so great that it puts considerable pressure on their competitors to also do so.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Dairy Farmers Demand More Cheap Labor
The paragraph after this one is a letter sent by this blogger on July 31 to the editor of The Wall Street Journal. For a more extensive discussion regarding immigrant labor in agriculture see the blog of June 22 entitled "AgJOBS bill of Senator Feinstein." In the WSJ article cited below it was mentioned that a 100 dairy farmers flew to Washington to make a case for Congressional help in obtaining more immigrant laborers, i.e. they cannot attract enough immigrants, legal and illegal, at the current wage. Moreover, some are uneasy about having many illegal immigrant laborers among their workers. The farmers would probably like to see 1) an expanded guest worker program (which would allow a specified number of foreign workers to be hired for a specified time period) for the dairy industry and 2) an amnesty for their illegal employees that would require the employees to stay in agriculture for a certain number of years as a condition for receiving amnesty (this is contained in Feinstein's proposed AgJOBS bill discussed in the June 22 blog). The article goes on to say that one dairy industry study finds that 40% of today's dairy labor force consists of immigrants, a big change from 20 years ago when there were few immigrants doing this work. What follows is the letter the editor of the WSJ:
When dairy farmers hire low-wage illegal immigrants or foreign guest workers as described in “Got Workers? Dairy Farms Run Low on Labor” (July 30, 2009), the effect is the same as that of a direct subsidy of the dairy farmers whose profits are thereby higher than if they were forced to pay market wages and benefits. It is an insidious subsidy because its cost is not explicit in the federal budget. Rather its cost is spread across the country in terms of various free or low-cost public services that the low-income immigrant workers receive, including free education for their children and free health care through hospital emergency rooms. Because their incomes are low, these workers pay little in taxes and they reduce the availability of, and money for, various public services for our poor citizens. Furthermore, at some level of wages and benefits dairy farmers would be able to attract capable American citizens to do such work. This is proven by the large number of Americans who currently do such “dirty” jobs as coal mining and garbage collection in return for decent wages and benefits. In general, agriculture is a “sacred cow” whose government subsidies have yet to be reined in by Congress.
When dairy farmers hire low-wage illegal immigrants or foreign guest workers as described in “Got Workers? Dairy Farms Run Low on Labor” (July 30, 2009), the effect is the same as that of a direct subsidy of the dairy farmers whose profits are thereby higher than if they were forced to pay market wages and benefits. It is an insidious subsidy because its cost is not explicit in the federal budget. Rather its cost is spread across the country in terms of various free or low-cost public services that the low-income immigrant workers receive, including free education for their children and free health care through hospital emergency rooms. Because their incomes are low, these workers pay little in taxes and they reduce the availability of, and money for, various public services for our poor citizens. Furthermore, at some level of wages and benefits dairy farmers would be able to attract capable American citizens to do such work. This is proven by the large number of Americans who currently do such “dirty” jobs as coal mining and garbage collection in return for decent wages and benefits. In general, agriculture is a “sacred cow” whose government subsidies have yet to be reined in by Congress.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
U.S. Immigration Law Is Unenforced and Unenforceable – A Case in Point: Obama’s Kenyan Aunt Zeituni
Attending Obama’s Senate swearing-in ceremony in 2004 was a half-sister of his father, Zeituni Onyango, whom Obama had referred to in his memoir as “Auntie Zeituni.” Onyango had sought political asylum in the United States in 2002. In April 2003, an immigration judge turned down the asylum bid and ordered Onyango deported. After a series of appeals, Oyango was again ordered to leave the country in October, 2004. The order to leave was ignored by Onyango with no consequence. This is the usual case for those denied asylum – a 2003 study found that only 3 percent of those denied asylum left the country or were deported (footnote 1).
A spokesperson for the Housing Authority in Boston said that Onyango had been screened and approved for public housing as an “eligible non-citizen” in 2003. The spokesperson went on to say that the Housing Authority receives no notice of deportation orders. Furthermore, the spokesperson noted that although Onyango entered the system under federal guidelines in a federal development, she now lives in a state funded development. State law forbids the authority from asking about immigration status. Thus, the spokesperson said that the federal deportation order has no bearing on Onyango’s eligibility for the state funded project where she was living in 2008.
On April 1, 2009, the same immigration judge that heard her earlier cases gave Onyango 10 months (of living in the United States) to prepare another appeal against the outstanding deportation order. Onyango is one of many immigrants who seek to have their cases reopened, which can occur repeatedly, according to federal immigration officials.
On February 4, 2010 Zeituni Onyango was back before an immigration judge trying to make a case for asylum. She arrived in a wheelchair and her attorney indicated that medical conditions would be part of her case. Once again President Obama through his press secretary indicated he has no involvement in the case. The closed hearing ended without a decision by the judge who can make one in the coming months or continue the case on May 25.
In May 2010 the immigration judge ruled that asylum should be granted in Onyango's case based on his judgement that a return to Kenya might put her in danger. The danger results from the public disclosure of her identity in an unauthorized leak of confidential government information regarding her case three days before the November 2008 presidential election.
After the news of Zeituni Onyango's status surfaced shortly before the presidential election in the fall of 2008, the Obama campaign issued a statement at the time which said that "Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws be followed."
Other problems that commonly occur with immigrants who are under orders to leave the country are: many of those that voluntarily agree to leave the country never do; and of those that do voluntarily leave the United States or are deported, many subsequently return to the United States as illegal immigrants. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has testified that of those illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County jails, 70 percent had been previously deported but illegally returned to the United States and were then accused of or had committed a crime. For more on the problems surrounding deportation see Michelle Malkin, "The Deportation Abyss" (subtitled: "It Ain't Over 'til the Alien Wins), Center for Immigration Studies, Backgrounder, September 2002.
References:
Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Elliot Spagat, Rodrique Ngowi, and Jay Lindsay, "Obama's Kenyan Aunt in US Ilegally," AOL News, November 1, 2008.
Judy Rakowski, “2010 Deportation Hearing Is Set for Obama’s Aunt,” Washington Post, April 2, 2009.
Devin Dwyer, "Obama's Kenyan Aunt Seeks Asylum Again, Awaits Ruling on Deportation," ABC News, February 4, 2010.
Associated Press, "Immigration judge blasts leak in Obama'a aunt's asylum case," August 18, 2010.
Footnotes
1 “The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Removal of Aliens Issued Final Orders,” Report Number I-2003-004, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, February 2003.
A spokesperson for the Housing Authority in Boston said that Onyango had been screened and approved for public housing as an “eligible non-citizen” in 2003. The spokesperson went on to say that the Housing Authority receives no notice of deportation orders. Furthermore, the spokesperson noted that although Onyango entered the system under federal guidelines in a federal development, she now lives in a state funded development. State law forbids the authority from asking about immigration status. Thus, the spokesperson said that the federal deportation order has no bearing on Onyango’s eligibility for the state funded project where she was living in 2008.
On April 1, 2009, the same immigration judge that heard her earlier cases gave Onyango 10 months (of living in the United States) to prepare another appeal against the outstanding deportation order. Onyango is one of many immigrants who seek to have their cases reopened, which can occur repeatedly, according to federal immigration officials.
On February 4, 2010 Zeituni Onyango was back before an immigration judge trying to make a case for asylum. She arrived in a wheelchair and her attorney indicated that medical conditions would be part of her case. Once again President Obama through his press secretary indicated he has no involvement in the case. The closed hearing ended without a decision by the judge who can make one in the coming months or continue the case on May 25.
In May 2010 the immigration judge ruled that asylum should be granted in Onyango's case based on his judgement that a return to Kenya might put her in danger. The danger results from the public disclosure of her identity in an unauthorized leak of confidential government information regarding her case three days before the November 2008 presidential election.
After the news of Zeituni Onyango's status surfaced shortly before the presidential election in the fall of 2008, the Obama campaign issued a statement at the time which said that "Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws be followed."
Other problems that commonly occur with immigrants who are under orders to leave the country are: many of those that voluntarily agree to leave the country never do; and of those that do voluntarily leave the United States or are deported, many subsequently return to the United States as illegal immigrants. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has testified that of those illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County jails, 70 percent had been previously deported but illegally returned to the United States and were then accused of or had committed a crime. For more on the problems surrounding deportation see Michelle Malkin, "The Deportation Abyss" (subtitled: "It Ain't Over 'til the Alien Wins), Center for Immigration Studies, Backgrounder, September 2002.
References:
Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Elliot Spagat, Rodrique Ngowi, and Jay Lindsay, "Obama's Kenyan Aunt in US Ilegally," AOL News, November 1, 2008.
Judy Rakowski, “2010 Deportation Hearing Is Set for Obama’s Aunt,” Washington Post, April 2, 2009.
Devin Dwyer, "Obama's Kenyan Aunt Seeks Asylum Again, Awaits Ruling on Deportation," ABC News, February 4, 2010.
Associated Press, "Immigration judge blasts leak in Obama'a aunt's asylum case," August 18, 2010.
Footnotes
1 “The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Removal of Aliens Issued Final Orders,” Report Number I-2003-004, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, February 2003.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
A Democrat Sees the Light
The source of the following material is “Blame the Employers” from the Review and Outlook section of the July 16 issue of the Wall Street Journal which discusses E-Verify, a federal data base available for employers to verify the hirability of prospective and actual employees.
“A bigger [than rejecting qualified workers] problem with E-Verify is that it doesn’t catch identity fraud. An illegal alien using legitimate documents that don’t belong to him can go undetected…. Several government raids on businesses in recent years have resulted in the arrests of thousands of illegal workers whom E-Verify had approved.” Consequently, employers argue that it is unfair to punish them for unknowingly hiring unauthorized workers. To address these problems, some lawmakers are now calling for initiating a national system of biometrically based identity cards that would permit the government to identify the status of every worker, including Americans.
“New York Democrat Charles Schumer, who is leading immigration-overhaul efforts in the Senate, told an audience last month that biometric ID cards are ‘the only way’ to stop illegal border crossings. ‘I’m sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card – although….there’ll be all kinds of protections – but we are going to have to do it,’ said Mr. Schumer. ‘The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration.’”
Mr. Schumer’s comments are right on the mark in the opinion of this blogger, but it is hard to believe that any liberal democratic administration is really going to do what it takes to shut the door on illegal immigration, or ever do more than close the door a little. For the rest of President Obama's time in office, we will no doubt continue to allow existing and new poor and little skilled illegal immigrants to live and work in the U.S. while continuing to make it much more difficult for highly skilled and highly educated immigrants to join our country and use their talents for the benefit of all citizens. Even if they are eventually shut out of large employers by some biometric-related data base,the disadvantaged immigrants will continue to find work as independent contractors or off the books at small employers.
“A bigger [than rejecting qualified workers] problem with E-Verify is that it doesn’t catch identity fraud. An illegal alien using legitimate documents that don’t belong to him can go undetected…. Several government raids on businesses in recent years have resulted in the arrests of thousands of illegal workers whom E-Verify had approved.” Consequently, employers argue that it is unfair to punish them for unknowingly hiring unauthorized workers. To address these problems, some lawmakers are now calling for initiating a national system of biometrically based identity cards that would permit the government to identify the status of every worker, including Americans.
“New York Democrat Charles Schumer, who is leading immigration-overhaul efforts in the Senate, told an audience last month that biometric ID cards are ‘the only way’ to stop illegal border crossings. ‘I’m sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card – although….there’ll be all kinds of protections – but we are going to have to do it,’ said Mr. Schumer. ‘The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration.’”
Mr. Schumer’s comments are right on the mark in the opinion of this blogger, but it is hard to believe that any liberal democratic administration is really going to do what it takes to shut the door on illegal immigration, or ever do more than close the door a little. For the rest of President Obama's time in office, we will no doubt continue to allow existing and new poor and little skilled illegal immigrants to live and work in the U.S. while continuing to make it much more difficult for highly skilled and highly educated immigrants to join our country and use their talents for the benefit of all citizens. Even if they are eventually shut out of large employers by some biometric-related data base,the disadvantaged immigrants will continue to find work as independent contractors or off the books at small employers.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Some Recent Developments Which Expand Asylum Possibilities
A qualifying asylum seeker is “unable or unwilling to return to his/her country of origin due to persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution.” The processing of asylum requests takes time and involves some subjective judgment on the part of asylum officers or immigration judges.1 Beyond the many abusers of our asylum system, asylum applicants are a potential weakness of our present immigration system since we can only be the home for a small percentage of all people living under harsh regimes who can legitimately claim some form of persecution.
Only a small fraction of all asylum applicants end up being granted asylum.2 The asylum plea may help them avoid immediate deportation on arrival in the United States3 as well as deportation up to the point of time that a final ruling is made on their case for asylum which may be years later, especially if appeals are filed. Nearly all who are denied asylum cannot be located at the time of denial and officially become illegal immigrants at that point in time.4
Two examples of newly considered areas of persecution which foreign women can use as a basis for successful asylum claims relate to 1) being victims or potential victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) and 2) being victims of domestic violence.
Amnesty International estimates 130 million woman worldwide have had some form of FGM, with more than 2 million new cases occurring per year primarily in Africa.5 For the purpose of asylum claims, FGM is now classified as a form of persecution. Recent U.S. court decisions are pointing toward allowing women who have been victims of FGM as well as women who fear becoming victims of FGM to use FGM as a key part of a successful asylum claim.6
The Obama administration recently took steps to make it easier for battered women to gain asylum in the United States. The qualifying conditions include 1) treatment as inferiors, little better than property 2) living in a country where domestic abuse is common and tolerated 3) must be able to show that protection could not be obtained through resort to existing institutions in their country or by moving to another place in their country.7 There are many countries in the world where women are routinely treated poorly and abused. How many of such women will be able to reach the United States and make a plea for asylum remains to be seen.
1 Julia Preston, “Wide Disparities Found in Judging of Asylum Cases,” New York Times, May 31, 2007.
2 From Julia Preston, “Wide Disparities Found in Judging of Asylum Cases”: In 2005, 13 percent of those who appealed with lawyers won their cases. From Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Mass Immigration and the National Interest, 3rd ed. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 170: “The vast preponderance of the individuals who file asylee applications never show up for their scheduled interviews with INS officials. They simply fade into the local communities and become illegal immigrants.”
3 From Don Barnett, “The Coming Conflict Over Asylum,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 2002: “About a quarter of asylum petitions are made by those who arrive at a U.S. port of entry without valid documents.”
4 A 2003 study found that only 3 percent of those denied asylum were removed: “The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Removal of Aliens Issued Final Orders,” Report Number I-2003-004, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, February 2003.
5 Wikipedia.
6 “A Victory for Women,” (editorial) New York Times, June 22, 2008.
7 Julia Preston, “New Policy Permits Asylum for Battered Women,” New York Times, July 15, 2009.
Only a small fraction of all asylum applicants end up being granted asylum.2 The asylum plea may help them avoid immediate deportation on arrival in the United States3 as well as deportation up to the point of time that a final ruling is made on their case for asylum which may be years later, especially if appeals are filed. Nearly all who are denied asylum cannot be located at the time of denial and officially become illegal immigrants at that point in time.4
Two examples of newly considered areas of persecution which foreign women can use as a basis for successful asylum claims relate to 1) being victims or potential victims of female genital mutilation (FGM) and 2) being victims of domestic violence.
Amnesty International estimates 130 million woman worldwide have had some form of FGM, with more than 2 million new cases occurring per year primarily in Africa.5 For the purpose of asylum claims, FGM is now classified as a form of persecution. Recent U.S. court decisions are pointing toward allowing women who have been victims of FGM as well as women who fear becoming victims of FGM to use FGM as a key part of a successful asylum claim.6
The Obama administration recently took steps to make it easier for battered women to gain asylum in the United States. The qualifying conditions include 1) treatment as inferiors, little better than property 2) living in a country where domestic abuse is common and tolerated 3) must be able to show that protection could not be obtained through resort to existing institutions in their country or by moving to another place in their country.7 There are many countries in the world where women are routinely treated poorly and abused. How many of such women will be able to reach the United States and make a plea for asylum remains to be seen.
1 Julia Preston, “Wide Disparities Found in Judging of Asylum Cases,” New York Times, May 31, 2007.
2 From Julia Preston, “Wide Disparities Found in Judging of Asylum Cases”: In 2005, 13 percent of those who appealed with lawyers won their cases. From Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Mass Immigration and the National Interest, 3rd ed. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 170: “The vast preponderance of the individuals who file asylee applications never show up for their scheduled interviews with INS officials. They simply fade into the local communities and become illegal immigrants.”
3 From Don Barnett, “The Coming Conflict Over Asylum,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 2002: “About a quarter of asylum petitions are made by those who arrive at a U.S. port of entry without valid documents.”
4 A 2003 study found that only 3 percent of those denied asylum were removed: “The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Removal of Aliens Issued Final Orders,” Report Number I-2003-004, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, February 2003.
5 Wikipedia.
6 “A Victory for Women,” (editorial) New York Times, June 22, 2008.
7 Julia Preston, “New Policy Permits Asylum for Battered Women,” New York Times, July 15, 2009.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Letter to the editor -- Wall Street Journal
Below is a letter to the editor submitted to the Wall Street Journal on July 13. It is unlikely to be published since the Wall Street Journal's editorial staff is a bastion of pro-immigration sentiment.
Your Review and Outlook editorial entitled “Mandating Unemployment” (July 13, 2009) makes the point that the very high teenage unemployment in the U.S. will be made worse by a scheduled increase in the minimum wage. Totally ignored in this editorial is the devastating impact on teenage unemployment of the unofficial U.S. policy of allowing poor and little educated illegal immigrants to work and live in the U.S. as long as they do not commit serious crimes. These unskilled immigrants compete strongly for those types of jobs sought by citizen teenagers, especially those who are poor. The immigrants usually win in that competition by a willingness to work harder for lower compensation. The immigrants’ competition also keeps the wages and benefits down for those teenagers and others of our lesser educated citizens who can find employment. Furthermore, many immigrants’ ready willingness to work “off the books” at rates lower than the minimum wage both hurts the employment prospects of citizens and makes a mockery of our minimum wage system.
Your Review and Outlook editorial entitled “Mandating Unemployment” (July 13, 2009) makes the point that the very high teenage unemployment in the U.S. will be made worse by a scheduled increase in the minimum wage. Totally ignored in this editorial is the devastating impact on teenage unemployment of the unofficial U.S. policy of allowing poor and little educated illegal immigrants to work and live in the U.S. as long as they do not commit serious crimes. These unskilled immigrants compete strongly for those types of jobs sought by citizen teenagers, especially those who are poor. The immigrants usually win in that competition by a willingness to work harder for lower compensation. The immigrants’ competition also keeps the wages and benefits down for those teenagers and others of our lesser educated citizens who can find employment. Furthermore, many immigrants’ ready willingness to work “off the books” at rates lower than the minimum wage both hurts the employment prospects of citizens and makes a mockery of our minimum wage system.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Kinder, Gentler Obama Immigration Policy
Since his presidential campaign days, Obama has had a stated policy objective of amnesty for most illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., except he calls the objective anything but amnesty – at times he or his supporters will even say it is not amnesty. As part of the deception, the the amnesty proposal is referred to as the “pay a fine and go to the back of the line” policy. Since the fine is small and the illegals would not have to leave our country and could eventually qualify for citizenship, the effect is indeed the same as an amnesty. The reason the Obama administration will not call this an amnesty is that an amnesty for most illegals would not be popular among many voters making it more difficult to achieve the Obama goal of getting Congress to approve an amnesty bill. As a consequence, the Obama administration officials are making cynical attempts to mislead voters about their immigration policies and objectives, including talking tough on immigration from time to time, all the while going even easier than the Bush administration on illegal immigration in terms of actions. Amnesty would be especially unpopular in today’s period of high unemployment when it is crystal clear that the illegals take jobs that Americans would want, even at low wages.
Voters also understand that an amnesty does nothing to stop future illegal immigration, and in fact, an amnesty actually encourages future illegal immigration by new immigrants who hope to fraudulently qualify for the new amnesty using false documents (easily purchased on the street) to prove earlier residency which never happened, and by those who come anticipating still another future amnesty that they will likely qualify for since it is now the established policy of the U.S. to have periodic amnesties for illegal immigrants. In addition, new immigrants are encouraged by the long-standing U.S. policy, carried even further by the Obama administration, of generally limiting deportations of illegals to those convicted of violent crimes. The latter policy along with liberal issuance of visas to visit the U.S. and no follow-up on visa overstays as well as no deterrent to repeated attempts to illegally cross the border has led to large-scale illegal immigration into the U.S. without limit from all corners of the earth. The immigrants continue to come as they are greatly attracted by all of the advantages of living in the U.S. in contrast to life in their home countries.
The Obama administration is proving that it is, and no doubt will continue to be, unwilling to effectively enforce our laws against illegal immigration. However, as noted above, the Obama administration wants to conceal its pro-immigrant intentions behind the deception of seemingly tough public stances on immigration. Its latest publicized example of this deception is the administration's attack on the corporate employers of illegal immigrants.
American Apparel, Inc., a Los Angeles company involved in the manufacture and sale of clothes was recently singled out as an employer of more than 1,500 illegal immigrants. However, unlike the token “immigration raids” of previous administrations, the new Obama approach did not result in the detention or prosecution of a single illegal immigrant! In other words, worst case for an illegal immigrant working at American Apparel is that he or she would have to find other work in the U.S.
This kinder approach seems to be part of an Obama plan to scale back the detention apparatus of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE)and reserve the remanent for violent criminals only. By completely eliminating the recent very small possibility of any illegal immigrant being caught in a worksite raid, the Obama approach only reinforces the general impression among immigrants that our country regards illegal immigration itself as no crime at all, and that the only illegal immigrants required to leave the country are convicted criminals.
Indeed, this new Obama policy of giving "law-abiding" illegal immigrants a free pass while appearing tough on illegal immigration was recently confirmed in a New York Times article reporting on a speech of Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security which oversees immigration law enforcement through ICE. The last sentence of the New York Times article entitled "Napolitano Focuses on Immigration Enforcement," (August 12, 2009) states: "But Ms. Napolitano said she had shifted the emphasis away from arresting immigrants who have not broken other laws." Napolitano's deputy in charge of ICE, John Morton, echoed the new policy on August 17 when he said that ICE's fugitive operations teams would increasingly focus on finding immigrants with criminal backgrounds, as reported in Amy Taxin (Associated Press), "Feds drop deportation arrest quotas," Tribune (San Luis Obispo August 18, 2009).
Nearly all illegal immigrants who might lose a job through an employer crackdown would not return to their home countries. If they were able to obtain one of the scarce jobs in their native country, they would be paid far less and they would lose the benefits of living in the U.S. such as free quality health care and better free public education possibilities for their children. Thus to the extent that there is an effective crackdown on larger employers who are found to employ illegal immigrants on their books, illegal immigrants will migrate to smaller employers, independent contracting, and off the books work. These would be added to the estimated one-half of today’s illegal immigrants that are already working off the books at small employers or are working as independent contractors for purposes such as laborers, gardeners, nannies, or maids and therefore will not be reached by any employer crackdown. Both small-business employers and employees benefit from off the books work since various tax and other financial obligations can be avoided in this way by both employer and employee.
The government announced that it had sent notices to 652 U.S. companies, including American Apparel, Inc, which were suspected of employing illegal immigrants. It remains to be seen if there will be any follow through by the federal government involving the prosecution of employers of illegal immigrants and the forced firing of illegal immigrant employees. Even if there were an extensive follow through with employers, it would result in very few illegal immigrants actually leaving the country for the reasons cited above.
Going after employers would likely result in the prosecution of very few employers, as most illegal immigrants who are hired by larger employers present the employers with false documents or false information proving citizenship or the legal right to work in the United States. Even employers using today's federal E-Verify system may end up with large numbers of illegal immigrants on their books as noted in "Blame the Employers" from the Review and Outlook section of the July 16,2009 Wall Street Journal: "A bigger problem with the E-Verify system is that it doesn't catch identity fraud. An illegal alien using legitimate documents that don't belong to him can go undetected.... Several government raids on businesses in recent years (prior to the start of the Obama administration which has determined not to arrest any employees while pursuing employers of illegal immigrants) have resulted in the arrests of thousands of illegal workers whom E-Verify had approved." As part of its show of immigrant toughness, the Obama administration wants to make the use of E-Verify required for federal contractors, even though it is known that illegal immigrants can falsely qualify as hirable under today's E-Verify using the stolen identity and Social Security number of a citizen. Moreover, immigrants increasingly will know what they have to do in order to qualify under E-Verify.
While it is beneficial to deport criminal immigrants, it also must also be recognized that like the non-criminals turned back by the Border Patrol and ICE, with our porous borders many return to the United States and continue their criminal ways. Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca has testified before Congress that 70 percent of illegal immigrants in his county jails had been deported previously but returned to the United States are now accused of or have committed another crime.1
The scariest part of the kinder, gentler Obama immigration policy is that his "very wide open door for poor immigrants only" aspect2 is almost certain to continue as long as he is President whether or not an amnesty is passed by Congress. This despite the fact that there is no way a majority of our voters would agree to such a policy and the fact that such a policy would hinder the advancement of the poor in this country (see below the first blog entry of June 20 entitled Our Immigration Policies are Hurting Our Poor).
1 "House hearings on immigration provided insights," Daily Breeze (Torrance), July 13, 2006
2 In contrast to the poor, professionals in this country, such as computer programmers, have more political clout to use in order to help prevent the flooding of immigrant or guest worker competitors into our work force.
Voters also understand that an amnesty does nothing to stop future illegal immigration, and in fact, an amnesty actually encourages future illegal immigration by new immigrants who hope to fraudulently qualify for the new amnesty using false documents (easily purchased on the street) to prove earlier residency which never happened, and by those who come anticipating still another future amnesty that they will likely qualify for since it is now the established policy of the U.S. to have periodic amnesties for illegal immigrants. In addition, new immigrants are encouraged by the long-standing U.S. policy, carried even further by the Obama administration, of generally limiting deportations of illegals to those convicted of violent crimes. The latter policy along with liberal issuance of visas to visit the U.S. and no follow-up on visa overstays as well as no deterrent to repeated attempts to illegally cross the border has led to large-scale illegal immigration into the U.S. without limit from all corners of the earth. The immigrants continue to come as they are greatly attracted by all of the advantages of living in the U.S. in contrast to life in their home countries.
The Obama administration is proving that it is, and no doubt will continue to be, unwilling to effectively enforce our laws against illegal immigration. However, as noted above, the Obama administration wants to conceal its pro-immigrant intentions behind the deception of seemingly tough public stances on immigration. Its latest publicized example of this deception is the administration's attack on the corporate employers of illegal immigrants.
American Apparel, Inc., a Los Angeles company involved in the manufacture and sale of clothes was recently singled out as an employer of more than 1,500 illegal immigrants. However, unlike the token “immigration raids” of previous administrations, the new Obama approach did not result in the detention or prosecution of a single illegal immigrant! In other words, worst case for an illegal immigrant working at American Apparel is that he or she would have to find other work in the U.S.
This kinder approach seems to be part of an Obama plan to scale back the detention apparatus of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE)and reserve the remanent for violent criminals only. By completely eliminating the recent very small possibility of any illegal immigrant being caught in a worksite raid, the Obama approach only reinforces the general impression among immigrants that our country regards illegal immigration itself as no crime at all, and that the only illegal immigrants required to leave the country are convicted criminals.
Indeed, this new Obama policy of giving "law-abiding" illegal immigrants a free pass while appearing tough on illegal immigration was recently confirmed in a New York Times article reporting on a speech of Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security which oversees immigration law enforcement through ICE. The last sentence of the New York Times article entitled "Napolitano Focuses on Immigration Enforcement," (August 12, 2009) states: "But Ms. Napolitano said she had shifted the emphasis away from arresting immigrants who have not broken other laws." Napolitano's deputy in charge of ICE, John Morton, echoed the new policy on August 17 when he said that ICE's fugitive operations teams would increasingly focus on finding immigrants with criminal backgrounds, as reported in Amy Taxin (Associated Press), "Feds drop deportation arrest quotas," Tribune (San Luis Obispo August 18, 2009).
Nearly all illegal immigrants who might lose a job through an employer crackdown would not return to their home countries. If they were able to obtain one of the scarce jobs in their native country, they would be paid far less and they would lose the benefits of living in the U.S. such as free quality health care and better free public education possibilities for their children. Thus to the extent that there is an effective crackdown on larger employers who are found to employ illegal immigrants on their books, illegal immigrants will migrate to smaller employers, independent contracting, and off the books work. These would be added to the estimated one-half of today’s illegal immigrants that are already working off the books at small employers or are working as independent contractors for purposes such as laborers, gardeners, nannies, or maids and therefore will not be reached by any employer crackdown. Both small-business employers and employees benefit from off the books work since various tax and other financial obligations can be avoided in this way by both employer and employee.
The government announced that it had sent notices to 652 U.S. companies, including American Apparel, Inc, which were suspected of employing illegal immigrants. It remains to be seen if there will be any follow through by the federal government involving the prosecution of employers of illegal immigrants and the forced firing of illegal immigrant employees. Even if there were an extensive follow through with employers, it would result in very few illegal immigrants actually leaving the country for the reasons cited above.
Going after employers would likely result in the prosecution of very few employers, as most illegal immigrants who are hired by larger employers present the employers with false documents or false information proving citizenship or the legal right to work in the United States. Even employers using today's federal E-Verify system may end up with large numbers of illegal immigrants on their books as noted in "Blame the Employers" from the Review and Outlook section of the July 16,2009 Wall Street Journal: "A bigger problem with the E-Verify system is that it doesn't catch identity fraud. An illegal alien using legitimate documents that don't belong to him can go undetected.... Several government raids on businesses in recent years (prior to the start of the Obama administration which has determined not to arrest any employees while pursuing employers of illegal immigrants) have resulted in the arrests of thousands of illegal workers whom E-Verify had approved." As part of its show of immigrant toughness, the Obama administration wants to make the use of E-Verify required for federal contractors, even though it is known that illegal immigrants can falsely qualify as hirable under today's E-Verify using the stolen identity and Social Security number of a citizen. Moreover, immigrants increasingly will know what they have to do in order to qualify under E-Verify.
While it is beneficial to deport criminal immigrants, it also must also be recognized that like the non-criminals turned back by the Border Patrol and ICE, with our porous borders many return to the United States and continue their criminal ways. Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca has testified before Congress that 70 percent of illegal immigrants in his county jails had been deported previously but returned to the United States are now accused of or have committed another crime.1
The scariest part of the kinder, gentler Obama immigration policy is that his "very wide open door for poor immigrants only" aspect2 is almost certain to continue as long as he is President whether or not an amnesty is passed by Congress. This despite the fact that there is no way a majority of our voters would agree to such a policy and the fact that such a policy would hinder the advancement of the poor in this country (see below the first blog entry of June 20 entitled Our Immigration Policies are Hurting Our Poor).
1 "House hearings on immigration provided insights," Daily Breeze (Torrance), July 13, 2006
2 In contrast to the poor, professionals in this country, such as computer programmers, have more political clout to use in order to help prevent the flooding of immigrant or guest worker competitors into our work force.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Introduction and Conclusion to Illegal Immigration -- The Myths and the Reality
These revised chapters and the revised book in its entirety may be found at http://immigrationbook.blogspot.com/
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Illegal Immigration Myths
The revised myths and the revised book in its entirety may be found at http://immigrationbook.blogspot.com/
Monday, June 22, 2009
AgJOBS Bill of Senator Feinstein
On May 14, 2009, Senator Feinstein, a faithful servant of California agricultural interests, introduced a revised AgJOBS bill that aids those interests at the expense of U.S. farm workers and taxpayers. The Feinstein bill's main features are 1) an amnesty (route to citizenship) for qualifying existing illegal agricultural workers and 2) changes in U.S. guest worker programs which would expand the use of foreign agricultural guest workers by American farmers. Below are counter arguments to the general thrust of the Feinstein bill.
Part I – Background
Overall, it is estimated that only 3% to 8% (with seasonal variation) of our illegal immigrant work force is currently employed in agriculture today. Immigrant farm labor is concentrated in labor-intensive vegetable, fruit and greenhouse agriculture representing about 20% of the nation’s agricultural sales. The vast majority of our agricultural output involves little immigrant labor.
Today and for many years in the past, fruit and vegetable agriculture in this country has relied heavily on inexpensive illegal immigrant labor, primarily from Mexico. The work is sufficiently grueling for the pay that there is turnover and most new illegal immigrants now bypass it for other types of low-level jobs in the United States that pay at least as much and which have become increasingly available to them. The typical Mexican illegal immigrant no longer wants nor needs to labor in the fields. Consequently, labor intensive agriculture now has some difficulty obtaining the immigrant labor it needs at the wages it wants to pay despite the presence of millions of illegal immigrants in this country and many others arriving daily. One manifestation of the labor shortage is that the fastest growing segment of the farm worker population in California is workers from rural villages in Mexico for whom Spanish is not the primary language (footnote 1).
Part II – Agricultural guest worker programs
All employers need to do to secure federal permission to hire foreign guest workers under the H2A and H2B programs is provide proof that no American wants the job. Once [their] request is granted, companies rely on recruiters of foreigners to do the rest, and the U.S. government stands back. There have been annual ceilings on how many workers can be hired under these programs which has limited their use.
These are questionable low-skilled labor programs because rather than pay what they have to in the U.S. labor market to get the quality of employees they want, companies can just say that they are not getting enough qualified employees at some wage that they would like to pay, which by definition would be a below market wage, and the U.S. government can approve the request on that basis.
Low-skilled guest worker programs deprive Americans at the lower end of the labor pool of employment opportunities and higher wages. Moreover, when foreign recruiters are used to line up the temporary workers in other countries, they may extort fees from the foreign workers who want to sign up for the temporary programs (see, for example, Traci Carl (Associated Press), “U.S. Temporary Worker Program – Poor Migrants Often Extorted by Criminal Network of Recruiters,” Tribune (San Luis Obispo), May 27, 2007; and Nathan Thornburgh/Vass, “How Not to Treat the Guests,” Time, June 4, 2007, and Thomas Frank, “Modern Slavery Comes to Kansas,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2009).
There is no compelling reason why businesses should not pay American workers market wages for their labor needs, no matter how seasonal or otherwise temporary. The cheap labor guest worker programs are in essence an off-budget government handout to the employers involved, just as beneficial to them as giving them money grants or contracts out of the federal budget. Politicians may find advancing the guest worker needs of constituents easier than trying to obtain grants or contracts for them as there is little or no Congressional funding required for a new guest worker program or expanding an existing one.
Moreover, costs of guest workers such as any medical expenses or educational expenses for the workers or their families are neither borne by the employers nor the federal government. They are borne by hospitals or state or local government bodies. In essence guest worker programs represent subsidies to the employers who pay neither market rates for the guest labor nor fringe benefits such as health insurance or other expenses normally associated with hiring full-time employees.
In addition to the above flaws, these programs are not in the public interest because they are also a source of illegal immigrants. There is usually nothing to prevent participants from melting into the general population at any time they are working in the United States and many do.
The impact on consumers resulting from cutting off agriculture’s continuous supply of cheap immigrant labor would be surprisingly small! The agricultural labor part of the supermarket price of fresh fruits and vegetables is so little that a 40 percent wage increase for agricultural workers would lead to only a $10 per year increase that an average family would spend on all fresh fruits and vegetables according to Philip L. Martin, Professor of Agricultural Economics at University of California, Davis. (Philip L. Martin, “Guestworker Programs,” Transcript from Panel Discussion at the National Press Club, March 3, 2006. Available at Center for Immigration Studies website.)
The higher fruit and vegetable prices in the absence of illegal immigration would also be limited by some productivity improvements (that will result when the farm owners have an increased incentive to introduce labor saving devices) and some production being shifted to other countries where wages were lower. To the extent the latter occurs, both our country and the low-wage countries would benefit from increased trade. Even now we purchase large quantities of various fruits and vegetables, some seasonally, from many other countries. The 80% of our agricultural output that employs few laborers would be unaffected by the absence of cheap immigrant labor.
In summary, the words of Professor Briggs:
Both CIR [U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform] in 1997 and the earlier findings of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1981 stated unequivocally that there should not be anymore guest worker programs for unskilled workers. Their views reflected those of virtually every scholar who has studied the issue both in the United States and elsewhere. Such programs have uniformly proven to be administratively difficult to enforce; hard to stop once enacted; depress wages for those employed in impacted occupations; stigmatize certain jobs as being only for foreigners; and inevitably generate more illegal immigration. (Quoted from Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., “Real Immigration Reform: The Path to Credibility,” Statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, May 3, 2007. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was chaired by former member of Congress Barbara Jordan from 1993 until her death in 1996. None of the major recommendations of the Jordan commission were ever acted upon.)
Part III – Illegal Immigrant Agricultural Workers
There is no compelling reason to satisfy labor-intensive industry’s demand for inexpensive immigrant workers by permitting large-scale illegal immigration as our government has done for many years. By gaining the benefits of inexpensive immigrant labor and not paying the associated costs or a higher wage to American citizen employees, employers of illegal immigrants are essentially being subsidized and are beneficiaries of our current immigration policy. Beyond the lost income and job opportunities for our poor, including blacks and earlier Hispanic immigrants, there are the associated costs of poor illegal immigrant employees and their families that are borne directly by various public entities which pay related health, education, welfare, and law enforcement expenses. There also are costs to our citizens, especially the poor, resulting from the diminution of public services and public funds available for them. These are all associated costs of illegal immigrant labor not borne by their employers.
Instead of being allowed access to illegal immigrant labor, why shouldn’t these employers pay higher wages to citizens when faced with labor shortages? In the absence of competing illegal immigrants, the lower end of the American labor force would do the labor intensive work at the higher wages that employers would have to pay. Higher wages would improve the lot of our low-income citizen workers and would result in some productivity improvements from increased mechanization and better utilization of employees.
In addition to providing incentives for increasing productivity, the higher wages which would result from a significant reduction in our illegal immigration would also lead to some production being shifted to other countries where wages were lower. To the extent the latter occurs, both our country and the low-wage countries would benefit from increased trade. The United States would be specializing in the production of what it does best such as high technology and highly mechanized agriculture and trading for the more labor intensive output. In essence, through trade we would be benefiting from the low-cost foreign labor without the laborers coming here and the foreign labors would also benefit from our increased demand for their output. Today, when we purchase the many, many goods in our stores which are produced in foreign countries, both America and the goods-supplying countries are benefiting from trade.
In the past the scenario of rising wages has played out in labor intensive industries in the United States such as the manufacture of shoes and clothing, ending with most production moving out of the country. These industries were not protected by the availability of illegal immigrant labor or special quota immigrant labor and our country has benefited by trading for these labor intensive items instead of producing them. If politicians feel justified in awarding special assistance to fruit and vegetable agriculture, the hospitality industry, meat packers, or any other labor-intensive business they should do it through some form of explicit subsidy (or perhaps tariff, if possible, in the case of agricultural products), not by permitting increased immigration of low-cost laborers which has various hidden costs and consequences not borne by the businesses which are benefiting.
By choosing to not enforce our immigration laws as has been the case for many years in the United States, our government is increasing the profitability of the business employers of illegal immigrants. Like legislating guest worker programs, this is an off-budget way of helping these employers. If a business that has not employed many citizens in recent years suddenly wanted to assemble an American-only work force, not only would it have to pay more on an ongoing basis to attract Americans, market forces would probably require it to pay an extra amount in what might be called a “transition premium” compensation package until our labor market recognized that the new employment opportunity was a permanent one. Raise the wages high enough and not only would businesses get a sufficient number of citizen workers, but they will be able to choose among the applicants.
Of course, from the viewpoint of business, it is a much easier and a much more profitable solution to continue to obtain cheap foreign labor through illegal immigration or guest worker programs. And as we have seen, elected officials are often willing to “go to bat” for their business constituents (completely disregarding their poor laborer constituents) when called on with requests for guest workers or for applying political pressure to have immigration law enforcement deflected.
Again, there is no compelling reason for continuing to satisfy labor-intensive agriculture’s demand for cheap labor with immigrant labor, either by looking the other way with illegal immigrants or by having special immigrant quotas just for agriculture. In the absence of competing new immigrants, the lower end of the American labor force, including earlier Hispanic immigrants, would do the agricultural work at and benefit from the higher wages that employers would have to pay. President Kennedy believed this in the early 1960s when he started the closing down the Bracero program on the grounds that the inexpensive Mexican labor was adversely affecting the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of our own agricultural workers. Closing down access to illegal immigrant laborers was a key part of Cesar Chavez’s plan to improve conditions for farm workers through the United Farm Workers union. His advances for farm workers were subsequently undone by illegal immigration. (See Philip L. Martin, “Promise Unfulfilled,” Center for Immigration Studies, January 2004.)
As noted above in the guest worker section, any restrictions in the supply of cheap immigrant labor for agriculture through limitations in guest worker programs or illegal immigration, would have a surprisingly small effect on the retail prices of fruits and vegetables due to the small part of farm labor in the final cost of those outputs. In other words, large percentage increases in the cost of farm labor would have a small impact on supermarket prices. For the 80 percent of U.S. agriculture that is highly mechanized, the effect would be almost nil.
IV – Amnesty for existing illegal immigrant agricultural workers
Before getting into the general negatives of any amnesty for illegal immigrants, it is important to note that the last time there was a major amnesty specifically for farm workers (that amnesty was contained in a part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 or IRCA) it was the victim of massive fraud (see “Migrants’ False Claims: Fraud on a Huge Scale,” The New York Times, November 12, 1989). Many who failed to meet the minimum residency requirements or who lied about being farm workers were able to use fraudulent documents and/or fraudulent assertions to become legal permanent residents under the amnesty. Altogether it has been estimated that 70 percent of the approximately 3 million who were amnestied by IRCA had applications which were fraudulent in one way or other. (See Otis L. Graham Jr., “Amnesty Repeats Itself,” The American Conservative, June 18, 2007.)
Making millions of counterfeit documents for use in the U.S. is a highly profitable business in Mexico. Proof of farm employment documents will be widely available on streets here for less than $100. And now, as then, the numbers of applicants for any farm worker amnesty will be so large that our bureaucracy will be able to do little more than rubber stamp everything approved. There will be no political motivation to discover fraud and no effective penalty to deter fraud, so another massive fraud is all but a certainty, culminating with many illegal immigrants fraudulently qualifying for citizenship.
It is difficult to justify using an amnesty to both reward people who have broken a number of our laws and allow them to remain in the United States while others are going through the process of obtaining legal immigration papers while living in their countries of origin as required by American law. Moreover, any future amnesty will continue our now established pattern of periodic amnesties. Especially when combined with very limited enforcement of immigration laws within the United States, amnesties only serve to encourage future illegal immigration which anticipates the next amnesty. And the more potential illegal immigrants that believe there will be another amnesty, the more likely a burgeoning illegal immigrant population will make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
An estimated 80 percent of our current illegal immigrant population is Hispanic with limited education, an estimated 60 percent not having graduated high school. Farm workers are no doubt at the lower end of this spectrum. It makes no sense to make major efforts with massive expenditures to eradicate poverty in this country and at the same time import much more poverty through permitting illegal immigration and amnesty.
Calling on the work of a number of different researchers, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has gone to some lengths to document the ways in which our illegal immigrant population and their offspring are likely to impose significant costs on our society over many years if a general amnesty were enacted.114 It is expected that government costs of all types over the lifetimes of amnestied immigrants will be substantially in excess of taxes paid.115 (footnotes 114-126 follow this section)
Once amnestied, low-income immigrants can eventually qualify for citizenship116 and thereby access welfare programs that are unavailable to them as illegal immigrants. The fact that Hispanics in the United States have had a history of high welfare use117 contributes to the expectation that Hispanic immigrants legalized by a future amnesty will also come to be characterized as having high welfare usage. The extent of welfare usage of Hispanics in the United States has been attributed to: persistent low incomes related to low educational attainment, high teen birthrates, high rates of births out of wedlock,118 and cultural factors.119 Also once legalized and possessing a social security number, many low-income amnestied immigrants who file income tax returns will qualify for the earned income credit,120 a form of welfare not available to them as illegal immigrants.
Although studies of educational levels achieved by second and third generation Mexicans in the United States show improvements over the educational attainments of the immigrants, they also unfortunately show that educational deficiencies still persist with relatively high percentages dropping out of high school and relatively low percentages attaining college degrees.121 This does not auger well for the overall contribution to the economy of the offspring of amnestied immigrants.
Rector also notes that additional societal costs will result if the newly amnestied immigrants and their offspring adopt the cited high crime rate of Hispanics in the United States.122 The fact that most of our Hispanic immigrants come from countries where corruption and lawlessness are widespread may have an influence on their U.S. crime statistics.123 Illegal immigrants themselves do not have above average crime rates – probably due to a combination of appreciation for their improved economic situation and the knowledge that criminal convictions are the one thing that will get them deported. It is an entirely different story for succeeding generations which have a much higher crime rate. There is evidence that a significant number of the descendents of poor Hispanic immigrants are slipping into the same vicious circle that has trapped too many of our poor citizens: the circle of poverty, low educational attainment, drugs, high numbers of teen births out of wedlock, broken families, gangs, crime, and prison time.124
Following an amnesty, newly legalized immigrants will be able to legally bring into the country spouses and unmarried children who are not present for the amnesty. In addition, by today’s immigration laws amnestied illegal immigrants who are at least 21 years old and who become citizens will be entitled to sponsor parents, siblings and their families, and married children as future legal immigrants, subject to annual limitations on category totals. This can be the start of an extended chain of legal immigration with the spouses of siblings or spouses of married children having entirely different families of their own that they will be able in turn to bring into the United States, all subject to restrictive annual limitations. These relatives will typically have the same low education and skill characteristics of the amnestied immigrants. Moreover, the parents sponsored by amnestied immigrants will be eligible after five years for Medicaid at an average cost of $11,000 per year for the elderly.125 The annual limits on some categories of family-sponsored preferences has led to a current immigration waitlist of an estimated eight million “overseas” relatives of American citizens, many of whom are living in the U.S. illegally today rather than wait outside the country for what is likely to be many years before it will be their turn to enter legally.126
Foonotes
1 According to a 2005 survey of California farm workers conducted by the EPA, the non-Spanish speaking workers from Mexico's rural areas constituted 16 percent to 20 percent of California farm workers. See Sarah Arnquist, “Study Paints New Challenges Concerning Migrants,” Tribune (San Luis Obispo), August 20, 2006.
Footnotes 114-126 for above text
114 Robert Rector, “Amnesty and Continued Low Skill Immigration Will Substantially Raise Welfare Costs and Poverty,” Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 2, 2006.
115 A study of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that immigrants to the United States who have not graduated high school each cost U.S. taxpayers $89,000 net present cost over their lifetimes without regard to the costs of educating their children. The corresponding number for high school graduates is $31,000 net present cost. For those with a college education the number goes to a positive contribution of $105,000 net present value. See National Research Council, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), p.334.
116 With an amnesty, qualifying illegal immigrants become legal permanent residents. Requirements for citizenship include living in the United States continuously for five years as legal permanent residents and demonstrating an ability to read, write, and speak English and knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and government.
117 Robert Rector cites Gordon H. Lester and Jan Tin, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Program Participation, 1996 to 1999 Who Gets Assistance?” Household Economic Studies, Current Population Reports, P70-94, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington D.C., January 2004 which shows that for 1999, Hispanics in the United States were almost three times more likely to receive welfare than non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, among families that received aid, the median aid received for Hispanic families was significantly higher than the median for non-Hispanic white families. In addition, Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be long-term welfare program participants than non-Hispanic whites.
118 Hispanic mothers born in the United States had an illegitimacy rate of 50 percent in 2003 (the most recent year of the data used) in contrast to 43 percent for Hispanic immigrant mothers and 24 percent for whites. Data from Steven A. Camarota, “Illegitimate Nation – An Examination of Out-of-Wedlock Births Among Immigrants and Natives,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2007.
119 Cultural factors were highlighted by George J. Borjas who studied immigrant usage of welfare. Among his observations were that there were “large differences in welfare propensities among national origin groups.” Among the nationalities of households with high welfare usage after at least ten years in the United States with 1998 data were Dominican Republic (58 percent), Mexico (33.6 percent), Cuba (28.6 percent), El Salvador (25.9 percent). By contrast Poland (6.8 percent), India (5.6 percent), were at the low end of the range. Borjas also found that “the longer that immigrants live in the United States, the more likely they are to use welfare….” See George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Chapter 6.
120 Income tax filers with incomes below defined levels are eligible for the earned income credit. The maximum credit for filers with two qualifying children for the 2006 tax year was $4,536. The 2006 maximum for filers with no qualifying children was $412. If the earned income tax credit exceeds the filer’s tax liability, the IRS will send the filer a check for the difference.
121 Rector cites Richard Fry and B. Lindsay Lowell, “Work or Study: Different Fortunes of U.S. Latino Generations,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 28, 2002. A different study which shows a lower high school dropout rate for Hispanics also shows that the third generation has a higher dropout rate than the second, both also being significantly higher than the non-Hispanic dropout rates: Pia Orrenius, “Is the U.S. Still a Melting Pot?” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy, May/June 2004.
122 From Rector: “The age specific incarceration rates in federal and state prisons (prisoners per 100,000 residents in the same age group in the general population) are two to two and a half times higher for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic whites. Relatively little of the higher imprisonment rate of Hispanics seems to be due to immigration violations.” Rector cites Paige M. Harrison, and Allen J. Beck, “Prisoners in 2003,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ 205335, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. November 2004, table 12. Also cited was Thomas P. Bonczar, “The Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population 1974-2001,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ197976, August 2003.
123 Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors, subtitled A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 113, states: “Mexican officials find difficulty in admitting – above all to foreigners – that corruption is essential to the operation and survival of the political system. But the system has in fact never lived without corruption and it would disintegrate or change beyond recognition if it tried to do so.” On 116: “In a sense, the fact that corruption continues to flourish in myriad forms elsewhere [in addition to that found in the upper levels of the Mexican government] confirms that the problem is cultural….”
124 See Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Malanga, The Immigration Solution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). This book extensively documents the social and economic fallout from our current illegal immigration.
125 Robert Rector.
126 Mark Krikorian, “Limit Relatives Rights,” USA Today, June 18, 2007 mentions the eight million estimate. This article also mentions that the failed immigration bill of May/June 2007 proposed to eliminate extended family categories of legal immigration as a tradeoff for amnesty, but only after admitting the millions on the waiting list over the next eight or ten years. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a staunch immigrant advocate, is quoted as saying of this proposal: “The day it passes, we’re going to put in legislation to try to fix it [restore extended family preferences in legal immigration].” As part of its recommendations, the Jordan Commission proposed that the level of legal immigration be reduced by eliminating some of the family preferences which can give rise to extended chains of legal immigration.
Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act (AgJOBS) -- Features of the Bill
· Undocumented agriculture workers would be eligible for a “blue card” if they can demonstrate having worked in American agriculture for at least 150 work days (or 863 hours) over the previous two years before December 31, 2008.
· The blue card holder would be required to work in American agriculture for an additional three years (working at least150 work days per year) or five years (working at least 100 work days per year), before becoming eligible to apply for a green card to become a permanent legal resident.
· The blue card would entitle the worker to a temporary legal resident status. The total number of blue cards would be capped at 1.35 million over a five-year period, and the program would sunset after five years.
· Before applying for a green card, participants would be required to pay a fine of $500, show that they are current on their taxes, and show that they have not been convicted of any crime that involves bodily injury, the threat of serious bodily injury, or harm to property in excess of $500.
· Employment would be verified through employer issued statements, pay stubs, W-2 forms, employer contracts, time cards, employer sponsored health care or payment of taxes.
· All blue cards would have encrypted, biometric identifiers and contain other anti-counterfeiting protection.
· The bill also would streamline the H-2A seasonal worker program so that it realistically responds to agriculture needs.
· The bill would shorten the labor certification process, which now often takes 60 days or more, and reduce the approval time to 48 to 72 hours.
· The bill also would require that growers first advertise and recruit U.S. workers in the local area by filing job notifications with state employment agencies.
· The Department of Labor would be required to process H-2A applications within 7 days and notify the consulate or port of entry within 7 days of receipt.
· The Adverse Effect Wage Rate would be frozen for three years, to be gradually replaced with a prevailing wage standard.
· H-2A visas would be secure and counterfeit resistant.
Part I – Background
Overall, it is estimated that only 3% to 8% (with seasonal variation) of our illegal immigrant work force is currently employed in agriculture today. Immigrant farm labor is concentrated in labor-intensive vegetable, fruit and greenhouse agriculture representing about 20% of the nation’s agricultural sales. The vast majority of our agricultural output involves little immigrant labor.
Today and for many years in the past, fruit and vegetable agriculture in this country has relied heavily on inexpensive illegal immigrant labor, primarily from Mexico. The work is sufficiently grueling for the pay that there is turnover and most new illegal immigrants now bypass it for other types of low-level jobs in the United States that pay at least as much and which have become increasingly available to them. The typical Mexican illegal immigrant no longer wants nor needs to labor in the fields. Consequently, labor intensive agriculture now has some difficulty obtaining the immigrant labor it needs at the wages it wants to pay despite the presence of millions of illegal immigrants in this country and many others arriving daily. One manifestation of the labor shortage is that the fastest growing segment of the farm worker population in California is workers from rural villages in Mexico for whom Spanish is not the primary language (footnote 1).
Part II – Agricultural guest worker programs
All employers need to do to secure federal permission to hire foreign guest workers under the H2A and H2B programs is provide proof that no American wants the job. Once [their] request is granted, companies rely on recruiters of foreigners to do the rest, and the U.S. government stands back. There have been annual ceilings on how many workers can be hired under these programs which has limited their use.
These are questionable low-skilled labor programs because rather than pay what they have to in the U.S. labor market to get the quality of employees they want, companies can just say that they are not getting enough qualified employees at some wage that they would like to pay, which by definition would be a below market wage, and the U.S. government can approve the request on that basis.
Low-skilled guest worker programs deprive Americans at the lower end of the labor pool of employment opportunities and higher wages. Moreover, when foreign recruiters are used to line up the temporary workers in other countries, they may extort fees from the foreign workers who want to sign up for the temporary programs (see, for example, Traci Carl (Associated Press), “U.S. Temporary Worker Program – Poor Migrants Often Extorted by Criminal Network of Recruiters,” Tribune (San Luis Obispo), May 27, 2007; and Nathan Thornburgh/Vass, “How Not to Treat the Guests,” Time, June 4, 2007, and Thomas Frank, “Modern Slavery Comes to Kansas,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2009).
There is no compelling reason why businesses should not pay American workers market wages for their labor needs, no matter how seasonal or otherwise temporary. The cheap labor guest worker programs are in essence an off-budget government handout to the employers involved, just as beneficial to them as giving them money grants or contracts out of the federal budget. Politicians may find advancing the guest worker needs of constituents easier than trying to obtain grants or contracts for them as there is little or no Congressional funding required for a new guest worker program or expanding an existing one.
Moreover, costs of guest workers such as any medical expenses or educational expenses for the workers or their families are neither borne by the employers nor the federal government. They are borne by hospitals or state or local government bodies. In essence guest worker programs represent subsidies to the employers who pay neither market rates for the guest labor nor fringe benefits such as health insurance or other expenses normally associated with hiring full-time employees.
In addition to the above flaws, these programs are not in the public interest because they are also a source of illegal immigrants. There is usually nothing to prevent participants from melting into the general population at any time they are working in the United States and many do.
The impact on consumers resulting from cutting off agriculture’s continuous supply of cheap immigrant labor would be surprisingly small! The agricultural labor part of the supermarket price of fresh fruits and vegetables is so little that a 40 percent wage increase for agricultural workers would lead to only a $10 per year increase that an average family would spend on all fresh fruits and vegetables according to Philip L. Martin, Professor of Agricultural Economics at University of California, Davis. (Philip L. Martin, “Guestworker Programs,” Transcript from Panel Discussion at the National Press Club, March 3, 2006. Available at Center for Immigration Studies website.)
The higher fruit and vegetable prices in the absence of illegal immigration would also be limited by some productivity improvements (that will result when the farm owners have an increased incentive to introduce labor saving devices) and some production being shifted to other countries where wages were lower. To the extent the latter occurs, both our country and the low-wage countries would benefit from increased trade. Even now we purchase large quantities of various fruits and vegetables, some seasonally, from many other countries. The 80% of our agricultural output that employs few laborers would be unaffected by the absence of cheap immigrant labor.
In summary, the words of Professor Briggs:
Both CIR [U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform] in 1997 and the earlier findings of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1981 stated unequivocally that there should not be anymore guest worker programs for unskilled workers. Their views reflected those of virtually every scholar who has studied the issue both in the United States and elsewhere. Such programs have uniformly proven to be administratively difficult to enforce; hard to stop once enacted; depress wages for those employed in impacted occupations; stigmatize certain jobs as being only for foreigners; and inevitably generate more illegal immigration. (Quoted from Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., “Real Immigration Reform: The Path to Credibility,” Statement before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, May 3, 2007. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was chaired by former member of Congress Barbara Jordan from 1993 until her death in 1996. None of the major recommendations of the Jordan commission were ever acted upon.)
Part III – Illegal Immigrant Agricultural Workers
There is no compelling reason to satisfy labor-intensive industry’s demand for inexpensive immigrant workers by permitting large-scale illegal immigration as our government has done for many years. By gaining the benefits of inexpensive immigrant labor and not paying the associated costs or a higher wage to American citizen employees, employers of illegal immigrants are essentially being subsidized and are beneficiaries of our current immigration policy. Beyond the lost income and job opportunities for our poor, including blacks and earlier Hispanic immigrants, there are the associated costs of poor illegal immigrant employees and their families that are borne directly by various public entities which pay related health, education, welfare, and law enforcement expenses. There also are costs to our citizens, especially the poor, resulting from the diminution of public services and public funds available for them. These are all associated costs of illegal immigrant labor not borne by their employers.
Instead of being allowed access to illegal immigrant labor, why shouldn’t these employers pay higher wages to citizens when faced with labor shortages? In the absence of competing illegal immigrants, the lower end of the American labor force would do the labor intensive work at the higher wages that employers would have to pay. Higher wages would improve the lot of our low-income citizen workers and would result in some productivity improvements from increased mechanization and better utilization of employees.
In addition to providing incentives for increasing productivity, the higher wages which would result from a significant reduction in our illegal immigration would also lead to some production being shifted to other countries where wages were lower. To the extent the latter occurs, both our country and the low-wage countries would benefit from increased trade. The United States would be specializing in the production of what it does best such as high technology and highly mechanized agriculture and trading for the more labor intensive output. In essence, through trade we would be benefiting from the low-cost foreign labor without the laborers coming here and the foreign labors would also benefit from our increased demand for their output. Today, when we purchase the many, many goods in our stores which are produced in foreign countries, both America and the goods-supplying countries are benefiting from trade.
In the past the scenario of rising wages has played out in labor intensive industries in the United States such as the manufacture of shoes and clothing, ending with most production moving out of the country. These industries were not protected by the availability of illegal immigrant labor or special quota immigrant labor and our country has benefited by trading for these labor intensive items instead of producing them. If politicians feel justified in awarding special assistance to fruit and vegetable agriculture, the hospitality industry, meat packers, or any other labor-intensive business they should do it through some form of explicit subsidy (or perhaps tariff, if possible, in the case of agricultural products), not by permitting increased immigration of low-cost laborers which has various hidden costs and consequences not borne by the businesses which are benefiting.
By choosing to not enforce our immigration laws as has been the case for many years in the United States, our government is increasing the profitability of the business employers of illegal immigrants. Like legislating guest worker programs, this is an off-budget way of helping these employers. If a business that has not employed many citizens in recent years suddenly wanted to assemble an American-only work force, not only would it have to pay more on an ongoing basis to attract Americans, market forces would probably require it to pay an extra amount in what might be called a “transition premium” compensation package until our labor market recognized that the new employment opportunity was a permanent one. Raise the wages high enough and not only would businesses get a sufficient number of citizen workers, but they will be able to choose among the applicants.
Of course, from the viewpoint of business, it is a much easier and a much more profitable solution to continue to obtain cheap foreign labor through illegal immigration or guest worker programs. And as we have seen, elected officials are often willing to “go to bat” for their business constituents (completely disregarding their poor laborer constituents) when called on with requests for guest workers or for applying political pressure to have immigration law enforcement deflected.
Again, there is no compelling reason for continuing to satisfy labor-intensive agriculture’s demand for cheap labor with immigrant labor, either by looking the other way with illegal immigrants or by having special immigrant quotas just for agriculture. In the absence of competing new immigrants, the lower end of the American labor force, including earlier Hispanic immigrants, would do the agricultural work at and benefit from the higher wages that employers would have to pay. President Kennedy believed this in the early 1960s when he started the closing down the Bracero program on the grounds that the inexpensive Mexican labor was adversely affecting the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of our own agricultural workers. Closing down access to illegal immigrant laborers was a key part of Cesar Chavez’s plan to improve conditions for farm workers through the United Farm Workers union. His advances for farm workers were subsequently undone by illegal immigration. (See Philip L. Martin, “Promise Unfulfilled,” Center for Immigration Studies, January 2004.)
As noted above in the guest worker section, any restrictions in the supply of cheap immigrant labor for agriculture through limitations in guest worker programs or illegal immigration, would have a surprisingly small effect on the retail prices of fruits and vegetables due to the small part of farm labor in the final cost of those outputs. In other words, large percentage increases in the cost of farm labor would have a small impact on supermarket prices. For the 80 percent of U.S. agriculture that is highly mechanized, the effect would be almost nil.
IV – Amnesty for existing illegal immigrant agricultural workers
Before getting into the general negatives of any amnesty for illegal immigrants, it is important to note that the last time there was a major amnesty specifically for farm workers (that amnesty was contained in a part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 or IRCA) it was the victim of massive fraud (see “Migrants’ False Claims: Fraud on a Huge Scale,” The New York Times, November 12, 1989). Many who failed to meet the minimum residency requirements or who lied about being farm workers were able to use fraudulent documents and/or fraudulent assertions to become legal permanent residents under the amnesty. Altogether it has been estimated that 70 percent of the approximately 3 million who were amnestied by IRCA had applications which were fraudulent in one way or other. (See Otis L. Graham Jr., “Amnesty Repeats Itself,” The American Conservative, June 18, 2007.)
Making millions of counterfeit documents for use in the U.S. is a highly profitable business in Mexico. Proof of farm employment documents will be widely available on streets here for less than $100. And now, as then, the numbers of applicants for any farm worker amnesty will be so large that our bureaucracy will be able to do little more than rubber stamp everything approved. There will be no political motivation to discover fraud and no effective penalty to deter fraud, so another massive fraud is all but a certainty, culminating with many illegal immigrants fraudulently qualifying for citizenship.
It is difficult to justify using an amnesty to both reward people who have broken a number of our laws and allow them to remain in the United States while others are going through the process of obtaining legal immigration papers while living in their countries of origin as required by American law. Moreover, any future amnesty will continue our now established pattern of periodic amnesties. Especially when combined with very limited enforcement of immigration laws within the United States, amnesties only serve to encourage future illegal immigration which anticipates the next amnesty. And the more potential illegal immigrants that believe there will be another amnesty, the more likely a burgeoning illegal immigrant population will make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
An estimated 80 percent of our current illegal immigrant population is Hispanic with limited education, an estimated 60 percent not having graduated high school. Farm workers are no doubt at the lower end of this spectrum. It makes no sense to make major efforts with massive expenditures to eradicate poverty in this country and at the same time import much more poverty through permitting illegal immigration and amnesty.
Calling on the work of a number of different researchers, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has gone to some lengths to document the ways in which our illegal immigrant population and their offspring are likely to impose significant costs on our society over many years if a general amnesty were enacted.114 It is expected that government costs of all types over the lifetimes of amnestied immigrants will be substantially in excess of taxes paid.115 (footnotes 114-126 follow this section)
Once amnestied, low-income immigrants can eventually qualify for citizenship116 and thereby access welfare programs that are unavailable to them as illegal immigrants. The fact that Hispanics in the United States have had a history of high welfare use117 contributes to the expectation that Hispanic immigrants legalized by a future amnesty will also come to be characterized as having high welfare usage. The extent of welfare usage of Hispanics in the United States has been attributed to: persistent low incomes related to low educational attainment, high teen birthrates, high rates of births out of wedlock,118 and cultural factors.119 Also once legalized and possessing a social security number, many low-income amnestied immigrants who file income tax returns will qualify for the earned income credit,120 a form of welfare not available to them as illegal immigrants.
Although studies of educational levels achieved by second and third generation Mexicans in the United States show improvements over the educational attainments of the immigrants, they also unfortunately show that educational deficiencies still persist with relatively high percentages dropping out of high school and relatively low percentages attaining college degrees.121 This does not auger well for the overall contribution to the economy of the offspring of amnestied immigrants.
Rector also notes that additional societal costs will result if the newly amnestied immigrants and their offspring adopt the cited high crime rate of Hispanics in the United States.122 The fact that most of our Hispanic immigrants come from countries where corruption and lawlessness are widespread may have an influence on their U.S. crime statistics.123 Illegal immigrants themselves do not have above average crime rates – probably due to a combination of appreciation for their improved economic situation and the knowledge that criminal convictions are the one thing that will get them deported. It is an entirely different story for succeeding generations which have a much higher crime rate. There is evidence that a significant number of the descendents of poor Hispanic immigrants are slipping into the same vicious circle that has trapped too many of our poor citizens: the circle of poverty, low educational attainment, drugs, high numbers of teen births out of wedlock, broken families, gangs, crime, and prison time.124
Following an amnesty, newly legalized immigrants will be able to legally bring into the country spouses and unmarried children who are not present for the amnesty. In addition, by today’s immigration laws amnestied illegal immigrants who are at least 21 years old and who become citizens will be entitled to sponsor parents, siblings and their families, and married children as future legal immigrants, subject to annual limitations on category totals. This can be the start of an extended chain of legal immigration with the spouses of siblings or spouses of married children having entirely different families of their own that they will be able in turn to bring into the United States, all subject to restrictive annual limitations. These relatives will typically have the same low education and skill characteristics of the amnestied immigrants. Moreover, the parents sponsored by amnestied immigrants will be eligible after five years for Medicaid at an average cost of $11,000 per year for the elderly.125 The annual limits on some categories of family-sponsored preferences has led to a current immigration waitlist of an estimated eight million “overseas” relatives of American citizens, many of whom are living in the U.S. illegally today rather than wait outside the country for what is likely to be many years before it will be their turn to enter legally.126
Foonotes
1 According to a 2005 survey of California farm workers conducted by the EPA, the non-Spanish speaking workers from Mexico's rural areas constituted 16 percent to 20 percent of California farm workers. See Sarah Arnquist, “Study Paints New Challenges Concerning Migrants,” Tribune (San Luis Obispo), August 20, 2006.
Footnotes 114-126 for above text
114 Robert Rector, “Amnesty and Continued Low Skill Immigration Will Substantially Raise Welfare Costs and Poverty,” Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, August 2, 2006.
115 A study of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that immigrants to the United States who have not graduated high school each cost U.S. taxpayers $89,000 net present cost over their lifetimes without regard to the costs of educating their children. The corresponding number for high school graduates is $31,000 net present cost. For those with a college education the number goes to a positive contribution of $105,000 net present value. See National Research Council, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), p.334.
116 With an amnesty, qualifying illegal immigrants become legal permanent residents. Requirements for citizenship include living in the United States continuously for five years as legal permanent residents and demonstrating an ability to read, write, and speak English and knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and government.
117 Robert Rector cites Gordon H. Lester and Jan Tin, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being: Program Participation, 1996 to 1999 Who Gets Assistance?” Household Economic Studies, Current Population Reports, P70-94, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington D.C., January 2004 which shows that for 1999, Hispanics in the United States were almost three times more likely to receive welfare than non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, among families that received aid, the median aid received for Hispanic families was significantly higher than the median for non-Hispanic white families. In addition, Hispanics were more than three times as likely to be long-term welfare program participants than non-Hispanic whites.
118 Hispanic mothers born in the United States had an illegitimacy rate of 50 percent in 2003 (the most recent year of the data used) in contrast to 43 percent for Hispanic immigrant mothers and 24 percent for whites. Data from Steven A. Camarota, “Illegitimate Nation – An Examination of Out-of-Wedlock Births Among Immigrants and Natives,” Center for Immigration Studies, May 2007.
119 Cultural factors were highlighted by George J. Borjas who studied immigrant usage of welfare. Among his observations were that there were “large differences in welfare propensities among national origin groups.” Among the nationalities of households with high welfare usage after at least ten years in the United States with 1998 data were Dominican Republic (58 percent), Mexico (33.6 percent), Cuba (28.6 percent), El Salvador (25.9 percent). By contrast Poland (6.8 percent), India (5.6 percent), were at the low end of the range. Borjas also found that “the longer that immigrants live in the United States, the more likely they are to use welfare….” See George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), Chapter 6.
120 Income tax filers with incomes below defined levels are eligible for the earned income credit. The maximum credit for filers with two qualifying children for the 2006 tax year was $4,536. The 2006 maximum for filers with no qualifying children was $412. If the earned income tax credit exceeds the filer’s tax liability, the IRS will send the filer a check for the difference.
121 Rector cites Richard Fry and B. Lindsay Lowell, “Work or Study: Different Fortunes of U.S. Latino Generations,” Pew Hispanic Center, May 28, 2002. A different study which shows a lower high school dropout rate for Hispanics also shows that the third generation has a higher dropout rate than the second, both also being significantly higher than the non-Hispanic dropout rates: Pia Orrenius, “Is the U.S. Still a Melting Pot?” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Southwest Economy, May/June 2004.
122 From Rector: “The age specific incarceration rates in federal and state prisons (prisoners per 100,000 residents in the same age group in the general population) are two to two and a half times higher for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic whites. Relatively little of the higher imprisonment rate of Hispanics seems to be due to immigration violations.” Rector cites Paige M. Harrison, and Allen J. Beck, “Prisoners in 2003,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ 205335, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington D.C. November 2004, table 12. Also cited was Thomas P. Bonczar, “The Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population 1974-2001,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ197976, August 2003.
123 Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors, subtitled A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 113, states: “Mexican officials find difficulty in admitting – above all to foreigners – that corruption is essential to the operation and survival of the political system. But the system has in fact never lived without corruption and it would disintegrate or change beyond recognition if it tried to do so.” On 116: “In a sense, the fact that corruption continues to flourish in myriad forms elsewhere [in addition to that found in the upper levels of the Mexican government] confirms that the problem is cultural….”
124 See Heather Mac Donald, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Malanga, The Immigration Solution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). This book extensively documents the social and economic fallout from our current illegal immigration.
125 Robert Rector.
126 Mark Krikorian, “Limit Relatives Rights,” USA Today, June 18, 2007 mentions the eight million estimate. This article also mentions that the failed immigration bill of May/June 2007 proposed to eliminate extended family categories of legal immigration as a tradeoff for amnesty, but only after admitting the millions on the waiting list over the next eight or ten years. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a staunch immigrant advocate, is quoted as saying of this proposal: “The day it passes, we’re going to put in legislation to try to fix it [restore extended family preferences in legal immigration].” As part of its recommendations, the Jordan Commission proposed that the level of legal immigration be reduced by eliminating some of the family preferences which can give rise to extended chains of legal immigration.
Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act (AgJOBS) -- Features of the Bill
· Undocumented agriculture workers would be eligible for a “blue card” if they can demonstrate having worked in American agriculture for at least 150 work days (or 863 hours) over the previous two years before December 31, 2008.
· The blue card holder would be required to work in American agriculture for an additional three years (working at least150 work days per year) or five years (working at least 100 work days per year), before becoming eligible to apply for a green card to become a permanent legal resident.
· The blue card would entitle the worker to a temporary legal resident status. The total number of blue cards would be capped at 1.35 million over a five-year period, and the program would sunset after five years.
· Before applying for a green card, participants would be required to pay a fine of $500, show that they are current on their taxes, and show that they have not been convicted of any crime that involves bodily injury, the threat of serious bodily injury, or harm to property in excess of $500.
· Employment would be verified through employer issued statements, pay stubs, W-2 forms, employer contracts, time cards, employer sponsored health care or payment of taxes.
· All blue cards would have encrypted, biometric identifiers and contain other anti-counterfeiting protection.
· The bill also would streamline the H-2A seasonal worker program so that it realistically responds to agriculture needs.
· The bill would shorten the labor certification process, which now often takes 60 days or more, and reduce the approval time to 48 to 72 hours.
· The bill also would require that growers first advertise and recruit U.S. workers in the local area by filing job notifications with state employment agencies.
· The Department of Labor would be required to process H-2A applications within 7 days and notify the consulate or port of entry within 7 days of receipt.
· The Adverse Effect Wage Rate would be frozen for three years, to be gradually replaced with a prevailing wage standard.
· H-2A visas would be secure and counterfeit resistant.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)