On February 9 the Department of Homeland Security released an estimate which showed that the illegal immigrant population declined by about 1 million in the two years from January 2007 to January 2009. However, there is no direct government or other reliable survey of the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States, and any conclusion that DHS draws from other data is subject to misinterpretation.
It is no doubt true that the current rate of illegal immigration inflow is lower than it has been (but not negative!) because jobs are scarcer due to our severe economic downturn. However there is no logical reason to expect that the reduced availability of jobs will cause many illegal immigrants to give up all the advantages of living in the U.S. and return to their native countries where the job prospects are even worse than in the U.S., where corruption and crime are rampant, where public services are poor or are absent, where public welfare is very limited or unavailable, and where public education and the life prospects for their children are dismal.
If anything, the reduced availability of jobs is pressuring some illegal immigrants to move to those sections of our country where there are fewer competing illegal immigrants in order to obtain low-end jobs. For those immigrants who are temporarily out of work, there is also the possibility of doubling up in living space with their many friends and relatives also living here. In either case, more immigrants would be on the move but they would not be moving out of the country!
To quote from a March, 2009 publication of The Inter-American Development Bank entitled "Remittances in times of financial instability": "Evidence from focus groups and surveys commissioned by the MIF [multilateral Investment Fund] and the Inter-American Dialogue suggest that immigrants are extremely capable of coping with adversity. These coping strategies include reducing the amount of money they spend on themselves, working longer hours or multiple jobs in the face of decreasing wages, shifting sectors because of declines in sectors such as manufacturing and construction, moving to areas with higher labor demand.... migrants, especially the undocumented, move from one state to another in response to local enforcement measures. Despite the cumulative effects of the economic, housing, and credit crises, it is only as a last resort that immigrants will return to their home countries. They will first exhaust all other options." [blogger's emphasis added]
It should also be noted that there are some strong motivations for the Obama administration to underestimate the extent of the illegal immigration problem. Understating the extent of illegal immigration helps to convey the impression that the Administration is enforcing our immigrations laws when in fact the opposite is true (see November 21 blog entitled “Obama’s Immigration Law Enforcement Farce”). It also makes it seem that illegal immigrants will deprive fewer less educated Americans of low-end jobs if there are fewer illegal immigrants in the country. The administration would also like to further these deceptions in an effort to get Congress and the public go along with its major objective of getting Congress to approve an amnesty for nearly all of today’s illegal immigrants. As noted in the October 2 blog entitled “The Elephants in the Democrats’ Back Room” there are a number of unstated political reasons for the Democrats to favor amnesty and non enforcement of our immigration laws.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Australian Immigration Policy
Following Great Britain’s 1983 legislation to eliminate birthright citizenship, in 1986 Australian significantly curtailed birthright citizenship by illegal immigrants. After 1986 to qualify for Australian citizenship at birth a newborn had to have at least one parent who was an Australian citizen. If neither were, a child born in Australia could still obtain citizenship on his 10th birthday if he spent the first 10 years of his life in Australia.
Ireland eliminated birthright citizenship in 2005 and New Zealand in 2006. Today few developed countries other than the United States automatically award birthright citizenship to children whose parents are both illegal immigrants.
On February 8th the Internet edition of the Wall Street Journal carried an article with an Associated Press byline entitled “Australia Tightens Immigration Rules.” The gist of the article is that the current administration in Australia is imposing new immigration rules to more favor immigrants whose skills are in short supply in Australia. The opening line of the article states: “Australia tightened its migration rules Monday in favor of English speakers and professionals [whose skills are needed], saying the country has been attracting too many hairdressers and cooks and too few doctors and engineers."
The present U.S. 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, and little educated. 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. The American born children of illegal immigrants, after they reach 21 years of age, also have the right to sponsor foreign relatives for legal immigration into the U.S.
When will the government of the U.S. wake up and largely restrict legal immigration to those having the skills we need, as well as shut off the illegal immigrant magnet of automatic birthright citizenship?
Ireland eliminated birthright citizenship in 2005 and New Zealand in 2006. Today few developed countries other than the United States automatically award birthright citizenship to children whose parents are both illegal immigrants.
On February 8th the Internet edition of the Wall Street Journal carried an article with an Associated Press byline entitled “Australia Tightens Immigration Rules.” The gist of the article is that the current administration in Australia is imposing new immigration rules to more favor immigrants whose skills are in short supply in Australia. The opening line of the article states: “Australia tightened its migration rules Monday in favor of English speakers and professionals [whose skills are needed], saying the country has been attracting too many hairdressers and cooks and too few doctors and engineers."
The present U.S. 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, and little educated. 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. The American born children of illegal immigrants, after they reach 21 years of age, also have the right to sponsor foreign relatives for legal immigration into the U.S.
When will the government of the U.S. wake up and largely restrict legal immigration to those having the skills we need, as well as shut off the illegal immigrant magnet of automatic birthright citizenship?
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Haitian Immigration
Without a vote of Congress, President Obama has unilaterally* extended special immigration status to all Haitians living illegally in the United States. Haitians receiving the status known as temporary protected status will be able to obtain documents allowing them to live and work here legally for a period of 18 months. According to the New York Times of January 15 at least 100,000 Haitians are believed to be living in the U.S. illegally in addition to 30,000 living here who have been ordered deported in the past (but who did not leave the U.S.). Those ordered deported (probably consisting primarily of Haitians denied asylum) will also be eligible for temporary protective status.
The temporary protective status may open up some new job opportunities for the Haitians who are granted the status. But most are little-educated, making it likely that they are seeking low-level jobs that can be obtained just as easily, or possibly more easily, as illegal immigrants.
The “temporary” part of the temporary protective status is misleading. All children born in the United States to those covered by temporary protective status will be granted automatic citizenship as usual and if the past is any guide, those covered by this temporary status will never be forced to leave the U.S. and will eventually be given extensions of their status and finally amnesty.
It is likely that the 130,000 estimate significantly understates the number eligible to take advantage of the temporary protective status (many of those eligible will just continue with their illegal immigrant status). Along with other goals like seeming to make a humanitarian gesture and getting one step closer to the objective of amnesty for all illegal immigrants, the Obama administration’s announcement is trying to perpetuate the fiction that it is enforcing our country’s immigration laws. In reality, early on the Obama administration established the de facto policy of not deporting illegal immigrants found living in the United States unless they were convicted of substantial criminal activity in the U.S. (see November 21 and October 2 blogs).
Part of creating the appearance of immigration enforcement were these statements in the Times article: "'To send Haitians back to that country right now would be nothing short of inhumane,' said Senator Charles E. Schumer." and "On Wednesday Ms. Napolitano [Secretary of Homeland Security] suspended deportations of Haitians." While the Obama administration and its devotees try to further the fiction of immigration enforcement, the truth is that prior to the earthquake in Haiti no Haitians or any other illegal immigrants found living in the U.S. were being sent back to their home countries except certain convicted criminals.
Ms. Napolitano, is quoted by the Times as saying that the status would only be extended to those Haitians already in the U.S. as of Tuesday January 12 – another piece of the immigration enforcement charade. It is likely that for some time all fleeing Haitians who make it to U.S. soil will be eligible for the temporary protective status since there will be no way of proving that they arrived here after January 12. In any event, as long as Obama is President, no illegal immigrants of any nationality will be forced to leave the U.S. unless convicted of a significant crime here.
* The Times notes that: "The administration's decision followed a rising chorus of calls for temporary status after the earthquake on Tuesday. On Friday, 80 representatives and 18 senators, including Democrats and Republicans, sent appeals to the administration to grant the status, as did the conference of Roman Catholic bishops."
The temporary protective status may open up some new job opportunities for the Haitians who are granted the status. But most are little-educated, making it likely that they are seeking low-level jobs that can be obtained just as easily, or possibly more easily, as illegal immigrants.
The “temporary” part of the temporary protective status is misleading. All children born in the United States to those covered by temporary protective status will be granted automatic citizenship as usual and if the past is any guide, those covered by this temporary status will never be forced to leave the U.S. and will eventually be given extensions of their status and finally amnesty.
It is likely that the 130,000 estimate significantly understates the number eligible to take advantage of the temporary protective status (many of those eligible will just continue with their illegal immigrant status). Along with other goals like seeming to make a humanitarian gesture and getting one step closer to the objective of amnesty for all illegal immigrants, the Obama administration’s announcement is trying to perpetuate the fiction that it is enforcing our country’s immigration laws. In reality, early on the Obama administration established the de facto policy of not deporting illegal immigrants found living in the United States unless they were convicted of substantial criminal activity in the U.S. (see November 21 and October 2 blogs).
Part of creating the appearance of immigration enforcement were these statements in the Times article: "'To send Haitians back to that country right now would be nothing short of inhumane,' said Senator Charles E. Schumer." and "On Wednesday Ms. Napolitano [Secretary of Homeland Security] suspended deportations of Haitians." While the Obama administration and its devotees try to further the fiction of immigration enforcement, the truth is that prior to the earthquake in Haiti no Haitians or any other illegal immigrants found living in the U.S. were being sent back to their home countries except certain convicted criminals.
Ms. Napolitano, is quoted by the Times as saying that the status would only be extended to those Haitians already in the U.S. as of Tuesday January 12 – another piece of the immigration enforcement charade. It is likely that for some time all fleeing Haitians who make it to U.S. soil will be eligible for the temporary protective status since there will be no way of proving that they arrived here after January 12. In any event, as long as Obama is President, no illegal immigrants of any nationality will be forced to leave the U.S. unless convicted of a significant crime here.
* The Times notes that: "The administration's decision followed a rising chorus of calls for temporary status after the earthquake on Tuesday. On Friday, 80 representatives and 18 senators, including Democrats and Republicans, sent appeals to the administration to grant the status, as did the conference of Roman Catholic bishops."
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Obama's Immigration Law Enforcement Farce
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."
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."
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.”
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