Tag: U.S. immigration

Minnesota Will Suffer from a Crackdown on U.S. Immigration  

Today “Minnesota is home to about 480,000 foreign-born residents, comprising about 8.5% of the population, according to the state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Those residents tend to be younger than Minnesota’s native-born population, and most are in their prime working years, filling jobs from agriculture to education to health care. Between 2011 and 2021, immigrants comprised half the state’s labor force growth, though they made up less than 11% of the workforce.”  This includes an estimated 81,000 undocumented residents, 53,000 of whom are civilian workers age 16 or older.[1]

Yet “Minnesota’s [current] unemployment rate is lower than the U.S. as a whole, and employers are struggling to fill nearly 200,000 open jobs. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Minnesota’s labor shortage is among the country’s more severe, with just 51 workers for every 100 open jobs.”

Minnesota’s need for more workers is especially important in agriculture and health care.

  • The State has rich farmland and relies upon immigrant workforces to tend to livestock or process animals. Many farms hire guest workers through the H-2A visa program, but efforts to increase the number of such visas and to make them available to dairy farm workers have been unsuccessful.
  • Health care’s need for workers has been increasing with :a wave of baby boomer retirements and increasing numbers of older residents needing such care. And foreign-born health-care workers bring an outside perspective that has been shown to improve patient outcomes.

According to Minnesota’s State Demographer Susan Brower, “People don’t understand sometimes that there is no other option for growing the workforce other than international immigration or a change in domestic migration patterns, which for 20 years have not worked in the favor of Minnesota. We’d have to see, really, a very drastic change both in domestic migration patterns but also in the level of international immigration to even begin to scratch the surface of meeting the current labor force needs that we have.”

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[1] Nelson & Vondracek, A promised immigration crackdown if Trump wins re-election could cripple Minnesota workforce, StarTribune (May 2, 2024), This blog has published many posts about the low U.S. fertility rate and the overall U.S. need for more immigration and reforms of our immigration laws. (E.g., U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low (April 25, 2024) (and prior posts cited in note 2 thereto); More Thoughts on U.S. Low Fertility Rate (May 1, 2024).

U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low 

On April 25, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its report on U.S. fertility rates that showed the total fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from the prior year and the lowest rate since the government began tracking that data in the 1930’s.[1]

This is attributed to women having fewer children, later in life; to women having fulfilling careers and more access to contraception; young people being more uncertain about their futures and spending more of their income on home ownership, student debt and child care.

The total number of children born in the U.S. in 2023 was approximately 3.59 million.

This phenomenon is partially offset by increasing immigration of people from other countries. In short, the U.S. benefits from increasing immigration.[2]

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[1] Calfas & DeBarros, U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Record Low, W.S.J. (April 25, 2024)

 [2] See, e.g., the following dwkcommentries.com posts: Naturalized U.S. Citizens: Important Contributors to U.S. Culture and Economy,(June 7, 2015); Iowa State Government Encouraging Refugee and Migrant Resettlement (Feb. 3, 2023); Other States Join Iowa in Encouraging Immigration to Combat Aging, Declining Population (Feb. 22, 2023); Wall Street Journal Editorial: U.S. Needs More Immigrants (July 25, 2023); U.S. Has Long-Term Labor Crisis (Sept. 26, 2023); Migrants from All Over Flocking to U.S. (Nov. 4, 2023);U.S. States That Could Have the Greatest Benefit from Immigrant Labor (Feb. 28, 2024); Another Documentation of the U.S. Need for Immigrants (April 12, 2024).

 

 

Another Documentation of the U.S. Need for Immigrants   

Just yesterday this blog published a lengthy post about how the problems in the U.S. asylum system were promoting increases in U.S. immigration that were benefiting the U.S. economy.[1]

Now the New York Times has published a lengthy article focusing on the positive impact of new immigrants to this country with its declining and aging population.[2]

The Example of the State of Maine

The State of Maine has the oldest population in the U.S. with a median age of 45.1. Its “native-born employees either leave the work force or barrel toward retirement.” This especially presents  a problem for the State’s annual $1 billion business of catching, cleaning and selling the lobsters off its Atlantic coast. As Ben Conniff, a founder of the State’s lobster processing plant (Luke’s Lobster), put it, “Folks in Maine are generally not looking for manufacturing work, especially in food manufacturing.”

In response, the founders of this company started Lift All Boats “to supplement and diversify the fast-aging lobster fishing industry. It aims to teach minorities and other industry outsiders how to lobster and how to work their way through the extensive and complex licensing process, and about half of the participants have been foreign-born.” And Maine’s state legislators are creating an Office of New Americans to attract and integrate immigrants into the work force.”

The Rest of the U.S.

“Nationally, even with the barriers that prevent some immigrants from being hired, the huge recent inflow has been helping to bolster job growth and speed up the economy. . . . The new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a rapid pace without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been insulated against the slowdown and even recession that many economists once saw as all but inevitable as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.”

“Ernie Tedeschi, a research scholar at Yale Law School, estimates that the labor force would have decreased by about 1.2 million people without immigration from 2019 to the end of 2023 because of population aging, but that immigration has instead allowed it to grow by two million.” In the longer run, “economists think the immigration wave could also improve America’s labor force demographics . . . even as the native-born population ages, with a greater share of the population in retirement with each year.”

“In fact, immigration is poised to become increasingly critical to America’s demographics. By 2042, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, all American population growth will be due to immigration, as deaths cancel out births among native-born people. And largely because immigration has picked up so much, the C.B.O. thinks that the U.S. adult population will be 7.4 million people larger in 2033 than it had previously expected.”

“Immigration could help reduce the federal deficit by boosting growth and increasing the working-age tax base.”

However, “nobody knows how long today’s big immigration flows will last. Many are spurred by geopolitical instability, including economic crisis and crime in Venezuela, violence in Congo, and humanitarian crises across other parts of Africa and the Middle East.” This, as we in the U.S. know, has sparked a lot of political unrest over this development.

Nor does anyone know about the future course of the U.S. economy. If it slows, “fewer immigrants might want to come to the United States, and those who did might struggle to find work . . . [and] compete against American workers for jobs, particularly those with lower skill levels.” However, “recent economic research has suggested that immigrants mostly compete with one another for work, since they tend to work in different roles from those of native-born Americans.”

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[1] Problems in U.S. Asylum System Help Promote Increases in U.S. Immigration, dwkcommentaries.com (April 11, 2024).

[2] Smialek, Immigrants in Maine Are Filling a Labor Gap. It May Be a Prelude for the U.S., N.Y. Times (April 12.2024).

U.S. States That Could Have Greatest Benefit from Immigrant Labor

This blog has published many posts about the U.S. need for immigrant labor.[1] Now a Washington Post article supplies a national statistical analysis of that need.[2]

The article opens with the following general statements:

But this “shortage is not distributed evenly across states.” Here is a list of the 15 states with the most shortage measured by unemployed workers for every 100 job openings:

Rank State Unemployed Workers for Every 100 Job Openings
1 South Dakota 29
2 Maryland 32
3 North Dakota 36
4 Vermont 37
5 New Hampshire 40
6 Nebraska 40
7 Alabama 40
8 Maine 43
9 Massachusetts 43
10 South Carolina 43
11 Montana 47
12 Virginia 47
13 Tennessee 50
14 Colorado 50
15 District of Columbia 50

“Generally, it is the states with fewer immigrants that are experiencing the most severe labor shortages.” Many of them also suffer from an aging population and thus a native labor force that is hardly growing. Yet the state with the greatest need for workers, South Dakota, has a governor, Kristi Noem, who “ is doing all she can to keep foreigners out, sending troops from the state National Guard to ‘stand alongside’ troops from Texas at the ‘war zone’ at the southern border.”

It also is instructive to look at the following list of the top U.S. industries with foreign-born workers.

Industry Share of Foreign-Born Workers
Construction 30%
Transportation & warehousing 25%
Accommodation & food services 24%
Manufacturing 21%
Wholesale trade 19%
Health care & social assistance 18%
Real estate & rental 17%
Information 17%
Retail trade 16%
Finance & insurance 16%
Educational services 14%
Arts, entertainment & recreation 13%

“Of course for migrants to help, they must be legally allowed to work, and the U.S. laws and bureaucracy for same is drastically in need of reform, and Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives have been blocking that effort.

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[1] See, e.g., these posts to dwkcommentaries.com:Washington Post Editorial: Improving U.S. Asylum Law and Procedures (Nov. 28. 2023);Migrants from All Over Flocking to U.S. (Nov. 4, 2023);100,000+ Cubans Obtain Humanitarian Parole in U.S. (Oct. 23. 2023); Congressional Dysfunction Hampers U.S. Immigration Policies and Actions (Oct. 7, 2023); U.S. Has Long-Term Labor Crisis (Sept 26, 2023);Overwhelmed U.S. Immigration Court System (Sept. 1, 2023); Increasing Migrant Crossings at U.S. Border Call for Legal Change (Aug. 16, 2023); Wall Street Journal Editorial: U.S. Needs More Immigrants (July 25, 2023);Iowa State Government Encouraging Refugee and Migrant Resettlement (Feb. 3, 2023); Other States Join Iowa in Encouraging Immigration to Combat Aging, Declining Population (Feb. 22, 2023).

[2]  Porter & Zhou, Here’s which states could benefit most from migrant labor, Wash. Post (Feb. 14, 2024),

 

Cuba’s Current Economic and Political Crises

Introduction[1]

At least by early December 2023, it was evident that Cuba was experiencing a horrible economic crisis. One commentator put it this way: “Cuba is going through the worst crisis it has experienced in decades, with widespread shortages of food and medicines, rolling blackouts and a sky-high 400% annual inflation rate. The calls on the communist leadership to open up the economy to the market are getting loud, even from close political allies.”

t also was a Cuban political crisis on how to respond to this economic crisis.  As John Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council based in New York City, said in early December, Cuban “bureaucrats have become more reluctant to take risks since there is uncertainty about who is really in charge.” They are “either frightened or untrusting, and certainly not risk-takers.”

The most vivid criticism of this situation came from Roberto Alvarez-Quinones, a Cuban journalist, economist and historian who after working in Cuba for Granma and Cuban television stations has been doing that work in Los Angeles, California. He said, “Never in the history of the entire West has there been such an overwhelming economic and social crisis that it has affected practically 99% of the total population of a country, without having been caused by a natural catastrophe or a war, but by the Government of the nation.”

Cuban Government’s Response[2]

 At a December 20-22, 2023, meeting of Cuba’s National Assembly, the Minister of the economy and planning, Alejandro Gil Fernandez, reported that for 2023 Cuba’s GDP fell almost 2%; exports were $770 million below predictions; food production was less than that for 2022;  tourism, although more than the prior year, had a yield only 69% of the 2019 figures; overall production was down; there were shortages of supplies and fuels; and health care and education sectors where harmed by loss of workers to emigration.

Fernandez attributed Cuba’s inflation to international price hikes, the government’s release of money to finance its budget deficit, fewer goods being produced, the agricultural sector being burdened by labor shortages, high costs and low yields and Cuba being forced to import over 70% of the food that [was] being consumed.

Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said the government’s lack of control over production and distribution “adversely affects production by state entities and lets currency exchanges on the illegal market determine the pricing of products from the non-state sector.”

President Diaz-Canel, of course, criticized the U.S. embargo (blockade), but admitted that the Cuban government had made some errors in the “design and implementation of currency unification,” “approving new economic actors without performance norms having been established” and “the complexity of making decisions in a context of extreme tension [and of] commitment to preserving social conquests.”

All of these “difficult realities” were summarized by W.T. Whitney, Jr. (an U.S. political journalist focusing on Latin America) as “the adverse effects of diminished tourism, inflation, and emigration; social inequalities based on varying access to resources; production stymied by shortages of resources; inadequate food production; lack of buying-power for most Cubans, and for importing necessary goods; and the near impossibility of securing foreign investment.”

To meet these problems, Whitney said, Cuba was preparing these responses: “further decentralization of political and economic administration; cutbacks on the expenditure of central government funds; reduced subsidies for the purchase of water, fuel, transport, and electricity by business entities; adjustment of import tariffs to favor the availability of resources for production; capturing more tourist dollars; protecting state-operated production entities; fixing prices; and producing more food.”

Moreover, Whitney said, the U.S. needs to cancel its embargo (blockade) of Cuba and remove Cuba from the U.S. list of countries that are sponsors of international terrorism.

Criticism of Cuban Government Responses[3]

Javier Perex Capdevila, Doctor of Economic Sciences and Professor at the University of Guantanamo, said the Government measures are based on cutting subsidies, but “there are no measures to get out of economic stagnation and . . . to reduce inflation, accompanied by a fiscal deficit that entails generating more liquid money which does not stimulate the economy, but rather inflation. The measures that have been announced in a confusing and ambiguous manner are supposed to achieve macroeconomic stabilization, but that is not a real solution . . and there is no guarantee that they will work.”

In addition. Capdevila noted that increases in long-distance transportation rates will adversely affect many people who have to use such transportation to reach competent medical personnel. He said, “You cannot save a country if you do not save the people.”

Pedro Monreal, a Cuban economist, criticized the purported justification for increasing black market prices for currencies by saying the government had not designed that market. Monreal said this was “a fig leaf to cover up the poor design of the ‘organization that made this informal market necessary.’”   The Cuban State did something worse in 2020 when “it designed a defective official exchange market with an overvalued [peso].” Monreal also “predicted more inflation” this year with a government deficit of 18.5% of gross domestic product.

Cuban economist Emilio Morales commented on the continued emigration of Cubans in 2023 while there was a 3.3% decrease in remittances to those on the island due to the need for those now in other countries to pay for their outbound transportation and expenses of living in other countries on their “march for family freedom.” Morales concluded that this result shows “the systemic crisis demands radical reforms and the entrenchment of the mafia regime in its totalitarian model blocks any possibility of survival. History teaches that bayonets cannot sustain a regime for long, indefinitely without fundamental reforms.”

The most recent news about Cuba’s laws affecting private enterprises was the January 16th announcement of new income tax regulations. Now “private sector employees will have to pay a 20% income tax on earnings above 30,000 Cuban pesos, about $109 per month. That’s a 15% tax rate increase from the previous scale set up in 2021, which imposed a 5% income tax for earnings over 9,510 Cuban pesos. Business owners must automatically deduct the tax payments monthly, the decree says.”

This recent announcement is in addition to the tax burden on Cuban private businesses: 35% tax on profits, a 10% tax on sales or services provided, a 5% payroll tax, a one percent revenue tax to support local governments and contributions to social security equal to 14% of workers’ salaries. Owners of the [private businesses] also have to pay up to 20% taxes on dividends.

Such private businesses “cannot hire more than 100 employees, they cannot be involved in economic activities handled by the state, such as telecommunications, and must import products and supplies through state companies working as intermediaries. According to the new regulations published this week, they can also be hit with price controls at any time ‘when circumstances advise it to achieve more favorable prices for the population.’”

At about the same time as this announcement of new taxes on private enterprises, the Cuban government announced a new “’ethics code’ for government officials and members of the Communist Party and similar organizations that mandate them to ‘be faithful to socialism,’ fight against the ‘genocidal’ U.S. embargo and ‘be loyal to the Cuban Communist Party, the Revolution… and to the Revolution´s Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro.”

Conclusion[4]

This blog consistently has advocated for U.S. repeal of the embargo (blockade) of Cuba and the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. However, all of the blame for Cuba’s current crises cannot be attributed to these U.S. measures. Indeed, the U.S. now is the sixth largest exporter to Cuba.

Moreover, now the U.S. is preoccupied with the Israel-Hamas and the Russia-Ukraine wars, problems with Iran, North Korea, China, Yemen and the Red Sea and the problems created by large number of immigrants at our southwestern border. As a result, the U.S. does not have the time and resources to devote to Cuba’s problems and U.S. policies regarding same.

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[1] Analysis of Cuba’s Current Economic Crisis, dwkcommentaries.com (Dec. 5, 2023); Almost All Cubans Suffer Worst Economic Crisis in the History of the Western Hemisphere, dwkcommentaries.com (Dec. 11, 2023);

[2] Whitney, A revolution in trouble: Cuba’s government, People’s World (Jan 8, 2024).

[3] ‘You can’t save a country if you don’t save the people.’ a Cuban economics doctor explodes in response to the package, Diario de Cuba (Jan. 13, 2024); Another rise in the price of the dollar and the euro on the Cuban black market, Diario de Cuba (Jan. 15, 2024); Emigration grows, but remittances to Cuba sink, Diario de Cuba (Jan. 16, 2024);Through resolutions, the Castro regime intends to stop the astronomical fiscal deficit that it approved, Diario de Cuba (Jan. 17, 2024); Reyes, The economic package opens a political crisis in the Government of Cuba, Diario de Cuba (Jan. 17, 2024); Torres, As the economy craters, the Cuban government hits private-sector workers with tax hike, Miami Herald (Jan. 18, 2024).

[4] E.g., posts listed in sections “Cuba: State Sponsor of Terrorism?” and “U.S. Embargo of Cuba” in List of Posts to dwkcommentaries—Topical: CUBA [as of 5/4/20]; Cuba Still on U.S. List of State Sponsors of Terrorism, dwkcommentaries.com (Dec. 2, 2023);U.S. Senators and Representatives Demand Ending of U.S. Designation of Cuba as State Sponsor of Terrorism, dwkcommentaries.com (Jan. 12, 2024); COMMENT: Another Congressman Calls for Ending Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, dwkcommentaries.com (Jan.13, 2024); U.S. Increasing Exports to Cuba, dwkcommentaries.com (Jan. 12, 2024).

U.S. Border Crisis Blocks U.S. Immigration Reform   

Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist, asserts that the U. S, border crisis is blocking needed reform of U.S. immigration law and procedures.[1] Here is a summary of that argument.

First, “porous borders compromise homeland security. The world is a dangerous place, as recent events have reminded us, and the government needs to know who’s entering the country. Increasingly, the southern border has become a portal not only for Central Americans but also for tens of thousands of foreign nationals from as far away as Asia and Africa. A large majority are economic migrants in search of employment and better living conditions. Still, the possibility that some small percentage is coming here to do us harm deserves more attention than it’s getting from the White House.”

“So long as the border problem persists at crisis levels, the debate over how to repair our immigration system for admitting people legally is going nowhere.”

“[D]espite heightened levels of undocumented immigration, the country still has far more job openings than job seekers. The real problem is a labor shortage that hasn’t gone away even as wages have risen. According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office, demographic trends are to blame, and more legal immigration should be part of any solution.”

A major reason for this labor shortage is “the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, [which] is swelling the ranks of retirees entering the large entitlement programs that rely on labor taxes for their funds, raising the specter of a future of smaller cohorts of workers paying higher taxes in a slower-growing economy,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin writes in a new paper. ‘The reform of employment-based immigration can address the near-term scarcity of labor, as well as the looming demographic crisis created by low fertility and the retiring Baby Boom generation.’”

As a result, “Mr. Holtz-Eakin calls for is a less-restrictive H-1B visa program for skilled workers. The number of visas, which often go to graduates of U.S. universities, has been capped at 85,000 since 2004, even though more than 480,000 people are currently seeking one. Visa holders aren’t permitted to switch jobs or start businesses. In addition to the low cap, no country may receive more than 7% of the annual allotment, a rule that stymies nationals from populous countries such as India. ‘The result is long wait times for skilled workers and an inflexible system for employers.’”

“Mr. Holtz-Eakin stresses that our inefficient migrant policies are noticed by other countries and have put us at a competitive disadvantage in the international competition for human capital. Earlier this year Canada announced that it was offering 10,000 work permits to foreigners residing in the U.S. on H-1B visas. Within 48 hours of the program’s launch, all the slots were taken. ‘At present,’ Mr. Holtz-Eakin writes, ‘the near-term outlook for labor is scarcity, the long-term trend is slowing population growth, and the United States’ global competitors are more successful in attracting high-skill immigrants.’”

Mr. Riley concludes, “You can support more legal immigration and better border security at the same time, and polling shows that most Americans do. They understand that allowing more people to come lawfully will help reduce unlawful entries. Moreover, there is agreement among Democratic and Republican lawmakers that the system is dysfunctional and outdated. There is no reason we can’t upgrade our policies in a way that accommodates the aspirations of migrants and satisfies the demands of a 21st-century economy. But don’t expect to see bipartisan appetite for constructive reform so long as illegal immigration rages unchecked.”

Conclusion

This blogger agrees that U.S. immigration law and procedures are “dysfunctional and outdated” and need to be changed to accommodate “the aspirations of migrants and [satisfy] the demands of a 21st-century economy.”

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[1] Riley, The Border Crisis Stymies Needed Immigration Reform, W.S.J. (Dec. 5, 2023)

 

 

U.S. Has Long-Term Labor Crisis  

The Wall Street Journal has set forth a detailed analysis of the U.S. long-term labor crisis.[1]

“Work experts have warned for years that the combination of baby boomer retirements, low birthrates, shifting immigration policies and changing worker preferences is leaving U.S. employers with too few workers to fill job openings. While the labor market is softening, none of those factors are expected to change dramatically in the coming years.”

“The U.S. birthrate—the number of births per 1,000 people—has been falling for decades, declining by about half since the 1960s.”

“Labor shortages can be eased by funneling more people into the labor force or making the current workforce more productive. That can be done through immigration; outsourcing more work overseas; tapping underutilized labor pools such as people with disabilities and the formerly incarcerated; and improving productivity through automation, training and refining business and production processes.”

“Offshoring, the scourge of the U.S. manufacturing workforce in the last decades of the 20th century, has lost favor with some business leaders after the pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities of a global supply chain. Reshoring—bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.—is gathering momentum, backed by billions of dollars in government subsidies.”

“Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT could help, but the technology is too new to know exactly where large language models can be reliably applied in business or work settings.”

“That leaves immigration. After falling during the pandemic because of Covid-related policies, immigration has come back strongly. But it remains a divisive issue, and business leaders say the lack of a coherent, stable policy is contributing to the labor problem.”

Conclusion

 This blogger agrees that U.S. should significantly revise its immigration laws to encourage the immigration of people who could be productive workers in our economy.[2] But the U.S. Congress currently is dysfunctional on many issues, including immigration.

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[1] Weber & Pipe, Why America Has a Long-Term Labor Crisis, in Six Charts, W.S.J. (Sept. 21, 2023).

[2] See, e.g., the following posts to dwkcommentaries.com:  U.S. Afghan Special Visa Program Still Facing Immense Problems (Sept. 2, 2023); Overwhelmed U.S. Immigration Court System (Sept. 1, 2023):Increasing Migrant Crossings at U.S. Border Call for Legal Change (Aug. 16, 2023);Wall Street Journal Editorial: U.S. Needs More Immigrants (July 25, 2023); Other States Join Iowa in Encouraging Immigration To combat Aging, Declining Population (Feb. 22, 2023);More Details on U.S. and Other Countries’ Worker Shortages (Feb. 9, 2023);Iowa State Government Encouraging Refugee and Migrant Resettlement (Feb. 3, 2023).

Increasing Migrant Crossings at U.S. Border Call for Legal Changes

This July more than 130,000 migrants were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. The fastest growth in this immigration, with 40,000 of the total, was in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which comprises most of Arizona, which was the most since April 2008. U.S. authorities attribute this increase to smugglers now guiding migrants to the border across the most remote and harsh stretches of the Arizona desert between Yuma and Tucson to avoid detection. [1]

Crossing in desert areas in the summer can be deadly, with ground temperatures well exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit at times, officials say. Such extreme conditions have led to a spike in 911 calls.  Agents responding to such calls for help routinely find dozens or even hundreds of migrants in need of aid and trying to surrender to arriving border agents.

Cuba is experiencing growth in out-migration. Social-media advertisements on the island have recently increased offering door-to-door transportation to the U.S. through flights from Cuba to Nicaragua and ground travel across Central America and Mexico. Although new Biden policies require Cubans to have a U.S. citizen-sponsor for legal entry to the U.S., many Cubans do not have such sponsors and some officials say, “For ordinary Cubans, finding a sponsor who has money in the U.S. is Mission Impossible.”[2]

Another indication of this migrant pressure is the recent guilty plea by the owners of a Williamsburg, Virginia cleaning business who operated a “labor trafficking enterprise” that smuggled over 100 migrants from El Salvador, including minors, and forced them to work in U.S. under threats of violence and deportation.[3]

Recommended Changes

 Andrea R. Flores, who served as an immigration policy adviser in the Obama and Biden administrations, says, “Until Congress finds the political will to act, the president should use his authority to relieve pressure on our asylum system and give migrants the ability to legally work once they reach the United States.”[4] To that end, she recommends the following:

  • “While far from perfect, the Biden administration’s parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans could serve as a model for what is possible. This policy provides safer options to people who are unlikely to meet the legal requirements for asylum, but who still have urgent humanitarian reasons to flee their homes.”
  • The President should “use his authority to grant Temporary Protected Status to the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who lack work authorization, which would be a boon for immigrants and the communities that welcome them. A 2023 analysisby FWD.us, a bipartisan group founded by American business leaders that favors more humane immigration reform, found that T.P.S. holders contribute $22 billion in wages annually to the U.S. economy.”
  • “The administration should also act quickly to increase the number of appointments at ports of entry; add new countries eligible for parole; lift caps on countries with urgent resettlement needs, as it did for Ukraine; and invest resources in adjudicating asylum cases expeditiously.”

Noted commentator, Fareed Zakaria, points out the obvious: “America’s immigration system is broken.” [5]Therefore, he says the following: “The laws and rules around asylum must be fixed so that immigration authorities can focus on the small number of genuine asylum seekers while compelling the rest to seek other legal means of entry. At the same time, it’s important to note that the United States is facing a drastic shortfall of labor and must expand legal immigration in many areas for just that reason. We urgently need to attract the world’s best technically skilled people so that they can push forward the information and biotech revolutions that are transforming the economy and life itself. With unemployment rates around 50-year lows, it is obvious that we need more workers in many sectors of the economy, from agriculture to hospitality. If this is done in a legal and orderly manner, Americans will welcome the new workers.”

Therefore, he says Biden “should propose an immigration bill that is genuinely bipartisan and forces compromises from both sides. It would be one more strong dose of evidence that policy can triumph over populism.” Good luck on doing that.

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[1] Perez & Caldwell, Migrant Crossings on the Rise Again at U.S. Border,W.S.J. (Aug. 12, 2023); Miroff & Sacchetti, Border arrests surged in July, a blow to Biden immigration plan, Wash. Post (Aug. 1, 2023).

[2] Perez & Caldwell, Migrant Crossings on the Rise Again at U.S. Border, W.S.J. (Aug. 12, 2023).

[3] Paul, Laundry company owners guilty of trafficking migrants, minors for labor, Wash. Post (Aug. 13, 2023).

[4] Flores, We Know What Doesn’t Work at the Border. Here’s a Better Solution, N.Y. Times (Aug. 10, 2023).

[5] Zakaria, Immigration can be fixed. So why aren’t we doing it?, Wash. Post (Aug. 11, 2023).

 

Are Anti-Trumpers “the Bad Guys”?

This is the question posed in a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times.[1]

 He starts out with the admission (or confession) that he is an anti-Trumper who believes that members of this group are “the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment” while the “Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians” who see Trump as “the embodiment of their resentments.”

At least for purposes of argument, however, Brooks considers whether the anti-Trumpers are the bad guys by creating the “modern meritocracy” system.

Such a system started in the 1960s “when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where . . . [the educated class] lived.”

The latter is “the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.”

“Everybody else is forced into a world down there. . . . Today middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then . . . [the modern aristocracy]  blames those who lose a competition for income and status that even when  everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

“Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we [members of the modern aristocracy] support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.”

“We [the members of the modern aristocracy] also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.”

“After this social norm was eroded, . . . [m]embers of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.”

As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent, ‘Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because ‘the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.’”

Brooks believes that most of our class [the modern aristocracy] are “earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions  have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject [others].”

“It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Brooks understands that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.”

“If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.”

“Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, Brooks says, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.”

Therefore, for sociologist Digby Baltzell and David Brooks, “the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?”

Reactions

In this column, Brooks does not provide an answer to his “real question.” Maybe there will be a future column in which he does so.

This blogger, however, believes at least part of the “real answer” for the State of Minnesota and many other states lies in the declining and aging population of rural parts of the State and the resulting negative impacts on their economies and visions of the future.[2] This problem suggests the need for more immigration to help solve the need for more labor with immigrant visas requiring the recipients to live and work in the areas with declining population.

Another part of the answer for this State and others, therefore, this blogger believes, is developing a system to promote and maintain intimate social contacts between people in the two parts of the states and thereby developing better understanding of the two sectors and programs for addressing the needs of the people in the rural parts of the states. Such a system requires everyone to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other[3] and to recognize our failings (sins) and request forgiveness from God and those whom we have wronged.[4]

Readers are invited to provide comments to this post with other ideas for answering the “real question” posed by Brooks.

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[1] Brooks, What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?, N.Y. Times (Aug. 2, 2023). 

[2] See, e.g., these posts in dwkcommentaries.com: Another Defining Challenge of the 21st Century (Jan. 28, 2023);Skepticism About Douthat’s Defining Challenge of the 21st Century (Jan. 30, 2023); COMMENT: Developments in Africa and Italy Accentuate Douthat’s Concerns (Jan. 31, 2023); Iowa State Government Encouraging Refugee and Migrant Resettlement Feb. 1, 2023); COMMENT: National Worker Shortages in U.S. (Feb. 3, 2023); Migrant Workers Being Paid Premium Wages in U.S. Tight Labor Market (Feb. 8, 2023); More Details on U.S. and Other Countries’ Worker Shortages (Feb. 9, 2023);Your Longevity Is Important for Many Reasons (Feb. 12, 2023); Other States Join Iowa in Encouraging Immigration To Combat Aging, Declining Populations (Feb. 22, 2023); COMMENT: More Support for Immigrants’ Importance for U.S. Economy (Feb. 23, 2023); U.S. High-Tech Layoffs Threaten Immigrants with Temporary Visas (Feb. 25, 2023); U.S. Needs To Ameliorate Brutal Jobs Endangering Immigrant Workers (Feb. 26, 2023); COMMENT: Layoffs in Overall U.S. Economy Are Rare (Feb. 27, 2023); COMMENT: Many Undocumented Immigrants Leaving U.S. (March 1, 2023); Protections for U.S. Child Labor Need Improvement (APRIL 22, 2023; Wall Street Journal Editorial: U.S. Needs More Immigrants (July 25, 2023); COMMENT: Americans in Their Prime Are Flooding Into the Job Market (July 26, 2023:COMMENT: Dire Shortages of Workers in U.S. Public Sector (July 27, 2023).

[3] E.g., Minneapolis’ Westminster Presbyterian Church: Presbyterian Principles: It is our duty to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other, dwkcommentaries.com (May 19, 2023).

[4] E.g., The Prayer Jesus Taught: “And forgive us for our debts as we forgive our debtors,” dwkcommentaaries.com (May 9, 2023).

 

Wall Street Journal Editorial: U.S. Needs More Immigrants

The Wall Street Journal on July 24, 2023, published an editorial calling for increased U.S. recruitment and admission of immigrants.[1] Here are its reasons for that conclusion.

“The U.S. has a people problem. The birth rate has been sliding for years, and it’s about to translate into a shrinking labor force. By 2040, according to a study out this week, America could have more than six million fewer working-age people than in 2022. The only way to counter the domestic trend is by attracting workers from abroad.”

According to the editorial, “’The working-age U.S. population has peaked absent additional immigration,’ writes Madeline Zavodny, in a forthcoming paper from the National Foundation for American Policy. ‘New international migrants are the only potential source of growth in the U.S. working-age population over the remainder of the next two decades.’ Ms. Zavodny is an economics professor at the University of North Florida, and her analysis is based on data from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

“At a time when some Americans view foreign workers as cheap competition, she offers a prescription for growth and vigor. In particular she notes that, although foreign-born workers accounted for nearly half the gain in U.S. employment from January 2021 through May 2023, ‘employment among prime-aged U.S.-born workers also soared during this period.’”

“Unemployment has been historically low, she adds, and difficulty of finding good workers will increase if the pool of working-age people shrinks.”

“The domestic trend lines aren’t good, for two big reasons. The declining birthrate is one. The other is Baby Boomers are both living longer and aging out of the work force. Anyone who imagines that a shrinking population is pleasant should spend some time in Japan and Italy. As these countries are finding, decline means fewer people to produce goods and services, as well as less innovation. Even China’s Communists now admit that owing to their pursuit of a one- child policy, they now face, as Milton Friedman predicted, a huge worker shortage that will challenge economic growth.”

“So far the U.S. has been able to compensate via immigration, which was ‘the sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022,’ Ms. Zavodny says. But this isn’t guaranteed. She suggests a future of competition among countries hit by the double whammy of a declining birth rate and aging society. Canada recently rolled out a new work permit to lure away foreigners in the U.S. on high-skill H-1B visas. The target of 10,000 applicants was met in two days.”

“Amid Donald Trump’s talk about a wall and Joe Biden’s chaos at the southern border, it’s hard to imagine any solutions from Congress before 2025. But Ms. Zavodny identifies labor-force trends that will have damaging consequences if they aren’t addressed. Someone needs to make the case that admitting foreign workers is good for Americans.”

In her underlying  paper for the National Foundation for American Policy, Zavodny adds, “Technological change, including ongoing advances in generative AI, is unlikely to eliminate the need for additional workers. In the long run, technological progress raises labor demand by increasing productivity and incomes. In the short to medium run, domestic workers are unlikely to be sufficient to meet labor demand as federally funded infrastructure projects roll out and domestic semiconductor production ramps up. The U.S. will need workers with specialized skills that are in short supply and take years of education and training to acquire. Now and in the future, the U.S. will still need workers, and it risks not having enough of them, particularly those with desired skills, absent additional immigration.”[2]

Comment

 This blog agrees with this W.S.J. editorial as evidenced by many blog posts and comments regarding U.S. immigration.[3]

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[1] Editorial: America’s Choice: Immigration or Bust, W.S.J. (July 24, 2023).

[2] Zavodny, Why the United States Still Needs Foreign-Born Workers, Nat’l Foundation for American Policy (July 2023).

[3] E.g., Posts and Comments to dwkcommentaries.com: Iowa State Government Encouraging Refugee and Migrant Resettlement (Feb. 3, 2023); Comment: National Worker Shortages in U.S. (Feb. 3, 2023); Comment: Economists Surprised by January New Jobs Data (Feb. 4, 2023); Comment: Migrant Workers Being Paid Premium Wages in Tight U.S. Job Market (Feb. 8, 2023); More Details on U.S. and Other Countries’ Worker Shortages (Feb. 9, 2023); Other States Join Iowa in Encouraging Immigration to Combat Aging, Declining Population (Feb.22, 2023); COMMENT: More Support for Immigrants’ Importance for U.S. Economy (Feb. 23, 2023); U.S. High-Tech Layoffs Threaten Immigrants with Temporary Visas (Feb. 25, 2023).