WASHINGTON, DC (May 31, 2016) — An analysis of new government data by the Center for Immigration Studies shows more than 3 million new legal and illegal immigrants settled in the United States over the course of 2014 and 2015 – a 39 percent increase over the prior two-year period. (The Census Bureau groups data like this to preserve anonymity.) The number of arrivals fell to a low in 2010-2011, but has dramatically rebounded and is now above pre-recession levels. The Center estimates that 1.1 million of the arrivals are new illegal immigrants and 2 million are new legal immigrants. Cutbacks in enforcement, an improved economy, and the expansive nature of our legal immigration system likely have all contributed to the rebound.
The Center for Immigration Studies’ Director of Research and the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Camarota, observes, “The numbers show that Mexican immigration has rebounded somewhat and there has been a dramatic rise in immigration from Asia and the rest of Latin America.” Camarota also points out that, “Given the enormous number of immigrants settling in the country, it is certainly understandable that immigration levels are a central issue in the presidential election.”
View the entire report at: http://cis.org/New-Data-Immigration-Surged-in-2014-and-2015.
Among the findings in the new study:
The Center for Immigration Studies’ Director of Research and the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Camarota, observes, “The numbers show that Mexican immigration has rebounded somewhat and there has been a dramatic rise in immigration from Asia and the rest of Latin America.” Camarota also points out that, “Given the enormous number of immigrants settling in the country, it is certainly understandable that immigration levels are a central issue in the presidential election.”
View the entire report at: http://cis.org/New-Data-Immigration-Surged-in-2014-and-2015.
Among the findings in the new study:
- New data collected by the Census Bureau shows that 3.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) entered the country in 2014 and 2015, an average of more than 1.5 million annually.
- In 2012 and 2013, 2.3 million immigrants arrived, or about 1.1 million annually. In 2010-2011, 2.1 new immigrants arrived, or about 1 million annually.
- All of these numbers are based on publically available information in Census Bureau data; no adjustments have been made for those missed by the bureau. But even without adjusting for undercount, the scale of new immigration is enormous.
- The big increase in new arrivals in the last two years was driven by a rise in immigration from Latin America (particularly countries other than Mexico), South Asia (e.g. Pakistan and India) and East Asia (e.g. China and Vietnam).
- Of the 3.1 million immigrants who arrived in the last two years, we estimate about one-third – 1.1 million, or 550,000 annually – were new illegal immigrants, a 57 percent increase from the 700,000 (350,000 annually) who entered in 2012-2013.
- The above estimate of illegal immigration represents the flow of new illegal aliens surreptitiously crossing the border or overstaying a temporary visa or released into the country after a short detention, such as families from Central America. The numbers do not represent the net increase in the total illegal immigrant population.
The available evidence also indicates that the number of new legal immigrants arriving from abroad has increased, both temporary and permanent. Our best estimate is that the arrival of legal immigrants increased about 30 percent, from 1.6 million in 2012-2013 to 2 million in 2014-2015.
We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within
our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan”
or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New
Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico.
our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan”
or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New
Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico.
THE LA RAZA MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE half the prison population in CA and half the murders are by MEXICANS
The Narrative Collapse on
Immigration
The numbers of arrivals, legal and illegal alike, are rising, not falling.
By Mark Krikorian
National Review Online, June 2, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436138/immigration-rising-legal-illegal-2016-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-republicans?target=author&tid=982
‘The immigration crisis that has roiled American politics for decades has faded into history.”
That was the lede of a New York Times op-ed four years ago that neatly summarized the preferred narrative of supporters of amnesty and unlimited immigration. This was reinforced by a Pew study that found “More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.” (though it arrived at that headline only by counting the U.S.-citizen children of the immigrants as “Mexicans”).
The storyline was that mass immigration was a phase we’d now finished with. Thus any continued agitation about amnesty or border enforcement or job competition could only be naked racism.
Oops.
The newest data from the Census Bureau show a surge in total immigration over the past two years. In 2014 and 2015, 3.1 million new foreign-born people moved here, or about 1.5 million per year. This is up from the 2.3 million in the prior two-year period, and 2.1 million in 2010–2011.
Of the 3.1 million who immigrated over the past two years, about a third were illegal aliens — about 550,000 per year (up from 350,000 illegals entering per year in 2012–13). Two-thirds, or 1 million a year, were legal, up from about 750,000 a year in the prior two-year period.
(The total number of immigrants grows inexorably, but not by as much; new arrivals are always partly offset by departures and deaths, and the number of specifically illegal immigrants is also checked by the number who attain legalization.)
One element of the narrative remains true: Mexican immigration is way down. From a million new arrivals from Mexico, legal and illegal, in 2004–05, the number for the past two years has fallen to about a third of that. But that hasn’t translated into a drop in immigration overall, because there’s a whole world of potential migrants beyond Mexico; the number of arrivals from the rest of Latin America has more than doubled since 2010–11, and the number from Asia has risen nearly 40 percent.
The Census Bureau data doesn’t tell us why immigration has increased so dramatically, but it’s probably been caused by the combination of modest improvement in the U.S. economy and Obama’s dramatic cutback in enforcement.
Several conclusions flow from these new numbers. First, the illegal-immigration problem isn’t magically going away on its own. The assumption that it was led to the argument for tying up the remaining loose ends with an amnesty and forgoing enforcement measures such as border fences, E-Verify, and the rest. The claim was never plausible to begin with, but a lot of amnesty-pushers seem to have actually believed it. Even the slowdown in immigration from Mexico isn’t necessarily permanent; it’s up about a third from the low point of 2010–11 and will probably jump a lot more the next time there’s an economic crisis there, unless we put in place the necessary preventive measures now.
Second, immigration is not a purely economic phenomenon driven simply by the business cycle. The weakest recovery in generations, with record numbers of Americans having dropped out of the labor market altogether, is still accompanied by dramatic growth in new immigration. As Europe is also discovering, there are hundreds of millions of people abroad who want to get to the civilized world regardless of the state of the economy there.
Finally, a related myth that is debunked is the claim by supporters of increased immigration that, if only legal admissions were increased, illegal ones would drop. The new numbers show that illegal settlement rose dramatically in 2014–2015 at the same time as the number of legal arrivals did. Legal and illegal immigration are complements, not competitors. The only way to really get rid of illegal immigration is to abolish immigration limits altogether — that way, everyone who wants to come will be able to do so. This scenario, unlimited immigration, is implicit in all “market-driven” immigration proposals, but their backers won’t admit to it because they know that the public would recoil. In fact, there is no plausible level of legal immigration that can eliminate illegal immigration.
These numbers suggest how narrow the debate over immigration is in the presidential campaign. While Trump’s written immigration platform is pretty sophisticated, in his public appearances he focuses almost exclusively on the “wall,” when most immigration is actually legal, and even most of the new illegal immigration comes from visa overstays, not border jumpers. Hillary, of course, is hopeless, embracing what amounts to Angela Merkel’s immigration platform by explicitly saying that she would deport no one who hasn’t been convicted of a violent crime.
Whatever the outcome of the campaign, these immigration numbers make clear that we can never “put the issue behind us” or “get it off the table” or whatever cliché timorous Republican politicians turn to next. As much as tax policy and foreign policy, immigration policy is a permanent feature of political debate.
40% of Federal Criminal Cases in 2013 Were in
Districts on Mexican Border
Districts on Mexican Border
Border Surge Solution: Send ‘Em to Camp
David!
By Michelle Malkin
Human Events Online, February 17, 2016
. . .
As Brandon Judd of the National Border Patrol Council testified on Capitol Hill recently: “The cartels understood that the unaccompanied minors would force the Border Patrol to deploy Agents to these crossing areas in order to take the minors into custody. I want to stress this point because it has been completely overlooked by the press,” he told the House Judiciary Committee. The unaccompanied minors could have walked right up to the port of entry and requested asylum if they were truly escaping political persecution or violence. “Why did the cartels drive them to the middle of the desert and then have them cross over the Rio Grande only to surrender to the first Border Patrol Agent they came across?” Judd challenged.
“The reason is that it completely tied up our manpower and allowed the cartels to smuggle whatever they wanted across our border.”
This is just another maddening example of Obama’s warped priorities at work. Instead of building effective walls and enforcing our borders to prevent the coming illegal immigration waves manufactured by criminal racketeers, this administration rushes to build welcome center magnets that shelter the next generation of Democrat voters.
. . .
U.S. Failed Three Times to Deport Illegal
Alien Who Murdered Woman
Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles,
February 18, 2016
. . .
Here’s what we already know from local media reports in Norwich, the city of about 40,000 residents where the murder occurred; the DHS agency responsible for deporting illegal immigrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), failed to remove Jacques at least three times dating back to 2002. As if this weren’t atrocious enough, Jacques spent 17 years in prison for attempted murder before authorities released him—instead of deporting him—in January of 2015, the Norwich Bulletin reports. Six months later the 41-year-old illegal alien convict stabbed 25-year-old Casey Chadwick to death. Police said Chadwick died of sharp forced injuries to the head and neck. Jacques is being held on a $1 million bond.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. In the last few years illegal immigrants with lengthy criminal histories have been allowed to remain in the U.S. despite being repeat offenders. Judicial Watch has investigated several of the cases and obtained public records from the government. For instance, back in 2008 JW launched a California public records request with the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department to obtain he arrest and booking information on Edwin Ramos, an illegal alien from El Salvador who murdered three innocent American citizens. Ramos was a member of a renowned violent street gang and had been convicted of two felonies as a juvenile (a gang-related assault on a bus passenger and the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman) yet he was allowed to remain in the country.
. . .
JUDICIAL WATCH
DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads of Illegal Aliens Away from Border
The Obama administration is a menace to the rule of law and our nation’s sovereignty. A strong statement but, arguably, a charitable one in light of today’s exclusive report on the border chaos from our Corruption Chronicles blog:
In 1980, Miami low-skilled wages (blue line) were already trending at 94% of those in the rest of the USA. (orange line). Then Miami wages were hammered down by the Mariel boatlift. If that event had not occurred, Miami wages presumably would have followed the gold line (Reference), which is 94% below wages outside of Miami. If so, we get the following wage gap (Gap) between the gold (Reference) and blue (Miami) lines:
Gap = (Miami - Reference) / Reference
The wage gap (Gap, blue line) hits -0.35 in 1986, which means wages dropped 35% below where they would have been if the Mariel event had not happened. Then the Gap closes back up near zero by 1990.
The red line is the output of my Gap predictor, which I described in a previous article. Also, see my notes. The simple Gap predictor assumes an immediate reaction in wages, but in reality the reaction takes several years to occur (6 years in this case). The predictor also assumes almost all the resident low-skilled workers will take a 39% pay cut without moving out of the job market. That is not going to happen for long in an American city like Miami, surrounded by higher-paying job markets.
The Gap predictor works fairly well for the US as a whole because there is no foreign country where a low-skill worker can get enough of a pay raise to make it worth the move. So, the wages stay depressed for about 40 years, until the immigrant workers retire.
It is easy to say that immigrants can upgrade their schooling and training and thus reduce the surplus of low-skill labor. In practice, it is usually very difficult, especially while raising kids. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s father spent his career mostly as a hotel bartender. He was also a street vendor, security guard, apartment building manager and crossing guard. Rubio’s mother worked as a maid and Kmart store clerk.
They stayed in low-skill jobs over their entire working careers. Their children did very well, however. If the children of immigrants do as well as the children of natives, then the depression of low-skill wages goes away unless more low-skill workers are brought into the country.
If the children and grandchildren of a large class of immigrants remain low-skill workers like their parents, then my simple Gap predictor no longer works and we are left with a persistent underclass of people who continue to cause a surplus of low-skill workers and thus continue to depress low-skill wages.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most of the illegal immigrants that are continuing to pour into the country.
Another Permanent Underclass?
If the illegals are allowed to stay, the effects will be dire, according to the findings of Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. “Immigration to the United States … rarely changes one’s social status,” he concludes after extensive study and many published works. His recent book is about the tendency of descendants within a family to stay in the same social class as their ancestors.
Clark writes,
This means that my simple wage formula will underestimate the negative wage effects of illegal immigration, because the formula assumes that the effect is limited to the 40-year career of immigrants but not their descendants. A society over-loaded with low-skill workers will have lower wages in that category until the surplus disappears, which in this case might be generations away.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
The Justice Department is resisting a judge’s order to provide ethics training for its lawyers and is objecting to turning over to the court the names of illegal aliens who were granted what amounts to administrative amnesty (“deferrals”) in stark violation of an injunction issued by the court.
On May 19, Judge Andrew Hanen of the of the Southern District of Texas issued an order imposing sanctions on the Justice Department and its lawyers for unethical conduct, which included repeatedly lying to him in court.
U.S. v. Texas is the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states against the Obama administration over its plan to provide deferrals, work permits, and other government benefits to almost 5 million illegal aliens. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction in February 2015 preventing implementation of the plan.
His decision was upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Hanen issued his sanction order because of the misbehavior of Justice Department lawyers when the case was before him. He severely rebuked the DOJ for claiming that the president’s plan was not being implemented prior to his issuing his injunction order when the government knew that it was being implemented—to the tune of over 100,000 aliens. When he found out, he ordered the government to reverse its behavior and void these deferrals.
Amongst the sanctions Hanen ordered on May 19 was yearly ethics training for five years for every DOJ lawyer stationed in Washington who appear in any of the courts of the states who filed the lawsuit. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to provide him (under seal) with a list of all of the aliens who had been given benefits under the amnesty plan in violation of his injunction.
However, on May 31, the Justice Department filed a motion with Hanen asking him to stay (or suspend) his sanctions order while DOJ appeals his decision to the 5th Circuit. The Justice Department claims in its brief that with regards to the required ethics training, Hanen’s determination that the DOJ’s lawyers engaged in “intentional misrepresentation” was reached “without proper procedural protections” and that there was not “sufficient” evidence of the misrepresentations.
Given the extensive evidence that Hanen cited in his order of the misrepresentations made by the government lawyers, as well as the extensive opportunity he gave the DOJ to present its side in the briefs it filed with the court, the claim that the DOJ was somehow unfairly judged or unable to present its defense is extremely dubious.
The DOJ also claims that the “sanctions imposed exceed the court’s authority.” Given the severity of the violations of the code of professional conduct that govern lawyers, including government lawyers, this is another problematic claim by the department.
Given that the judge could have imposed even more severe sanctions, such as dismissing the defensive pleadings filed by the government (which would have caused them to lose the case) or making the government pay the attorneys’ fees of the states, the sanctions imposed seem almost mild.
Of course, they are highly embarrassing given what they reflect about the behavior of DOJ lawyers. But according to the Justice Department, Hanen is interfering “with the attorney general’s executive authority” in imposing ethics training and the other requirements that Hanen laid out, such as filing a comprehensive plan within 60 days “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.” Apparently, that is too much to ask of the attorney general.
The strangest claim made by the Justice Department is that Hanen’s order to produce a state-by-state list of all of the illegal aliens unlawfully granted deferrals would “breach the confidence of these individuals (and of others who submit information to USCIS) in the privacy of such records.”
An affidavit filed by León Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, claims this would violate the internal privacy policy of DHS even though he admits the federal Privacy Act “does not apply to non-U.S. persons.”
Not only does the Privacy Act not apply to “non-U.S. persons” (Illegal aliens), but federal law (8 U.S.C. §1373) specifically requires the federal government to provide “citizenship or immigration status” information on any individual in response “to an inquiry by a federal, state, or local government agency.” And this requirement applies “notwithstanding any other provision of federal, state, or local law.”
Thus, states are statutorily entitled to this information and the DOJ’s claim that it is confidential has no basis in the law whatsoever. Of course, this very inconvenient federal provision is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s brief.
This action by the Justice Department makes it clear it intends to appeal Hanen’s sanctions order. Whether he will grant the requested stay is unknown, but he had ordered a hearing on the DOJ’s request for June 7.
So far in this litigation, the Justice Department and the Obama administration have had a steadily losing hand. We will have to see if that continues.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
(The pictures are available here. )
The OTMs are from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala and Border Patrol officials say this week’s batch was in custody for a couple of days and ordered to call family members in the U.S. so they could purchase a bus ticket for their upcoming trip from Phoenix. Authorities didn’t bother checking the identity of the U.S. relatives or if they’re in the country legally, according to a Border Patrol official directly involved in the matter. American taxpayers pick up the fare for those who claim to have a “credible fear,” Border Patrol sources told JW. None of the OTMs were issued official court appearance documents, but were told to “promise” they’d show up for a hearing when notified, said federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the operation.
A security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is called G4S and claims to be the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida. Judicial Watch is filing a number of public records requests to get more information involving the arrangement between G4S and the government, specifically the transport of illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to other parts of the country. The photo accompanying this story shows the uniformed G4S guard that transported the OTMs this week from Tucson to Phoenix.
Outraged Border Patrol agents and supervisors on the front lines say illegal immigrants are being released in droves because there’s no room to keep them in detention. “They’re telling us to put them on a bus and let them go,” said one law enforcement official in Arizona. “Just move those bodies across the country.” Officially, DHS denies this is occurring and, in fact, earlier this year U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske blasted Border Patrol union officials for denouncing this dangerous catch-and-release policy. Kerlikowske’s scolding came in response to the congressional testimony of Bandon Judd, chief of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union that represents line agents. Judd told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee that illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions can be released immediately and disappear into the shadows. Kerlikowske shot back, telling a separate congressional committee: “I would not stand by if the Border Patrol was — releasing people without going through all of the formalities.”
Yet, that’s exactly what’s occurring. This report, part of an ongoing Judicial Watch investigation into the security risks along the southern border, features only a snippet of a much broader crisis in which illegal aliens are being released and vanishing into unsuspecting American communities. The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest addressed this issue just a few weeks ago in a hearing called Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases – The Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration. Judd, the Border Patrol Union chief, delivered alarming figures at the hearing. He estimated that about 80% of apprehended illegal immigrants are released into the United States. This includes unaccompanied minors who are escorted to their final destination, family units and those who claim to have a credible fear of persecution in their native country. Single males that aren’t actually seen crossing into the U.S. by Border Patrol agents are released if they claim to have been in the country since 2014, Judd added.
The rule of law has collapsed on our border and the Obama administration, along with a do-nothing Congress run by Republicans, is responsible for it. Innocent Americans, taxpayers, the victims of human trafficking, and our nation’s sovereignty all suffer as a result. Through our investigations, lawsuits, and independent journalism, your Judicial Watch will continue to stand for the rule of law and for honest Americans who want the government to enforce the law, not to subvert the law.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
Illegal Immigration and the Wage Gap
There is a close long-term correlation between low-skill wages and illegal immigration. An influx of low-skilled labor drives down wages at the bottom of the income scale, aggravating the wage gap and social divisions, providing fodder for left wing demonization of the prosperous and successful.
The normal equilibrating capacity of a market economy is short circuited when the influx of low-skill illegal immigrants is nationwide. If American workers could easily escape to another country offering higher wages, then wages in the USA would quickly recover from a surge of immigrant workers, and employers would gain only a short-lived benefit. So, it might not be worth paying off politicians to import cheap labor from poor countries.
The normal equilibrating capacity of a market economy is short circuited when the influx of low-skill illegal immigrants is nationwide. If American workers could easily escape to another country offering higher wages, then wages in the USA would quickly recover from a surge of immigrant workers, and employers would gain only a short-lived benefit. So, it might not be worth paying off politicians to import cheap labor from poor countries.
Miami Wages after the Mariel BoatliftHarvard professor George J. Borjas has been called "America’s leading immigration economist" by BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal. The good professor recently surprised himself and outraged many of his pro-immigration colleagues with a study measuring the dive in wages for low-skill natives in Miami after the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Private boats brought more than 100,000 Cubans to Miami within 5 months. The data displayed in the graph below shows what happened.
Gap = (Miami - Reference) / Reference
The red line is the output of my Gap predictor, which I described in a previous article. Also, see my notes. The simple Gap predictor assumes an immediate reaction in wages, but in reality the reaction takes several years to occur (6 years in this case). The predictor also assumes almost all the resident low-skilled workers will take a 39% pay cut without moving out of the job market. That is not going to happen for long in an American city like Miami, surrounded by higher-paying job markets.
The Gap predictor works fairly well for the US as a whole because there is no foreign country where a low-skill worker can get enough of a pay raise to make it worth the move. So, the wages stay depressed for about 40 years, until the immigrant workers retire.
It is easy to say that immigrants can upgrade their schooling and training and thus reduce the surplus of low-skill labor. In practice, it is usually very difficult, especially while raising kids. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s father spent his career mostly as a hotel bartender. He was also a street vendor, security guard, apartment building manager and crossing guard. Rubio’s mother worked as a maid and Kmart store clerk.
They stayed in low-skill jobs over their entire working careers. Their children did very well, however. If the children of immigrants do as well as the children of natives, then the depression of low-skill wages goes away unless more low-skill workers are brought into the country.
If the children and grandchildren of a large class of immigrants remain low-skill workers like their parents, then my simple Gap predictor no longer works and we are left with a persistent underclass of people who continue to cause a surplus of low-skill workers and thus continue to depress low-skill wages.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most of the illegal immigrants that are continuing to pour into the country.
Another Permanent Underclass?
If the illegals are allowed to stay, the effects will be dire, according to the findings of Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. “Immigration to the United States … rarely changes one’s social status,” he concludes after extensive study and many published works. His recent book is about the tendency of descendants within a family to stay in the same social class as their ancestors.
Clark writes,
“... the social status of Latinos, even those born in the United States, is persistently low… they are often the people who found themselves in such desperate economic circumstances at home that they preferred to live as illegal immigrants in the United States. (Latinos constitute nearly half of the foreign born in the United States, but four in five of illegal migrants.) The effects have been dire: there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States.”Professor Clark suggests a less disastrous immigration policy:
“To avoid having a substantially poorer and less educated Latino underclass for many future generations, [the US] should considering policies to increase the number of highly educated Latino immigrants.”But if current immigration policy is continued, the “United States is likely to soon have the unprecedented situation of fostering a semi-permanent underclass.” This lack of social mobility from one generation to the next is a result that no government uplift program has been able to erase, according to Clark’s study of government efforts in Sweden, the US, and elsewhere.
This means that my simple wage formula will underestimate the negative wage effects of illegal immigration, because the formula assumes that the effect is limited to the 40-year career of immigrants but not their descendants. A society over-loaded with low-skill workers will have lower wages in that category until the surplus disappears, which in this case might be generations away.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
There is a close long-term correlation between low-skill wages and illegal immigration. An influx of low-skilled labor drives down wages at the bottom of the income scale, aggravating the wage gap and social divisions, providing fodder for left wing demonization of the prosperous and successful.
The normal equilibrating capacity of a market economy is short circuited when the influx of low-skill illegal immigrants is nationwide. If American workers could easily escape to another country offering higher wages, then wages in the USA would quickly recover from a surge of immigrant workers, and employers would gain only a short-lived benefit. So, it might not be worth paying off politicians to import cheap labor from poor countries.
The Mariel Boatlift event provides a demonstration of this. Wages were hammered down in a local economy (Miami) by a flood of refugees and then recovered as workers scattered to surrounding areas with higher wages. The whole process took 10 years.
Miami Wages after the Mariel Boatlift
Harvard professor George J. Borjas has been called "America’s leading immigration economist" by BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal. The good professor recently surprised himself and outraged many of his pro-immigration colleagues with a study measuring the dive in wages for low-skill natives in Miami after the Mariel boatlift of 1980.
Private boats brought more than 100,000 Cubans to Miami within 5 months. The data displayed in the graph below shows what happened.
In 1980, Miami low-skilled wages (blue line) were already trending at 94% of those in the rest of the USA. (orange line). Then Miami wages were hammered down by the Mariel boatlift. If that event had not occurred, Miami wages presumably would have followed the gold line (Reference), which is 94% below wages outside of Miami. If so, we get the following wage gap (Gap) between the gold (Reference) and blue (Miami) lines:
Gap = (Miami - Reference) / Reference
The wage gap (Gap, blue line) hits -0.35 in 1986, which means wages dropped 35% below where they would have been if the Mariel event had not happened. Then the Gap closes back up near zero by 1990.
The red line is the output of my Gap predictor, which I described in a previous article. Also, see my notes. The simple Gap predictor assumes an immediate reaction in wages, but in reality the reaction takes several years to occur (6 years in this case). The predictor also assumes almost all the resident low-skilled workers will take a 39% pay cut without moving out of the job market. That is not going to happen for long in an American city like Miami, surrounded by higher-paying job markets.
The Gap predictor works fairly well for the US as a whole because there is no foreign country where a low-skill worker can get enough of a pay raise to make it worth the move. So, the wages stay depressed for about 40 years, until the immigrant workers retire.
It is easy to say that immigrants can upgrade their schooling and training and thus reduce the surplus of low-skill labor. In practice, it is usually very difficult, especially while raising kids. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s father spent his career mostly as a hotel bartender. He was also a street vendor, security guard, apartment building manager and crossing guard. Rubio’s mother worked as a maid and Kmart store clerk.
They stayed in low-skill jobs over their entire working careers. Their children did very well, however. If the children of immigrants do as well as the children of natives, then the depression of low-skill wages goes away unless more low-skill workers are brought into the country.
If the children and grandchildren of a large class of immigrants remain low-skill workers like their parents, then my simple Gap predictor no longer works and we are left with a persistent underclass of people who continue to cause a surplus of low-skill workers and thus continue to depress low-skill wages.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most of the illegal immigrants that are continuing to pour into the country.
Another Permanent Underclass?
If the illegals are allowed to stay, the effects will be dire, according to the findings of Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. “Immigration to the United States … rarely changes one’s social status,” he concludes after extensive study and many published works. His recent book is about the tendency of descendants within a family to stay in the same social class as their ancestors.
Clark writes,
“... the social status of Latinos, even those born in the United States, is persistently low… they are often the people who found themselves in such desperate economic circumstances at home that they preferred to live as illegal immigrants in the United States. (Latinos constitute nearly half of the foreign born in the United States, but four in five of illegal migrants.) The effects have been dire: there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States.”
Professor Clark suggests a less disastrous immigration policy:
“To avoid having a substantially poorer and less educated Latino underclass for many future generations, [the US] should considering policies to increase the number of highly educated Latino immigrants.”
But if current immigration policy is continued, the “United States is likely to soon have the unprecedented situation of fostering a semi-permanent underclass.” This lack of social mobility from one generation to the next is a result that no government uplift program has been able to erase, according to Clark’s study of government efforts in Sweden, the US, and elsewhere.
This means that my simple wage formula will underestimate the negative wage effects of illegal immigration, because the formula assumes that the effect is limited to the 40-year career of immigrants but not their descendants. A society over-loaded with low-skill workers will have lower wages in that category until the surplus disappears, which in this case might be generations away.
DOJ Wants to Hide the Names of Illegal Aliens Granted Amnesty
Hans von Spakovsky /The Justice Department is resisting a judge’s order to provide ethics training for its lawyers and is objecting to turning over to the court the names of illegal aliens who were granted what amounts to administrative amnesty (“deferrals”) in stark violation of an injunction issued by the court.
On May 19, Judge Andrew Hanen of the of the Southern District of Texas issued an order imposing sanctions on the Justice Department and its lawyers for unethical conduct, which included repeatedly lying to him in court.
U.S. v. Texas is the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states against the Obama administration over its plan to provide deferrals, work permits, and other government benefits to almost 5 million illegal aliens. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction in February 2015 preventing implementation of the plan.
His decision was upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Hanen issued his sanction order because of the misbehavior of Justice Department lawyers when the case was before him. He severely rebuked the DOJ for claiming that the president’s plan was not being implemented prior to his issuing his injunction order when the government knew that it was being implemented—to the tune of over 100,000 aliens. When he found out, he ordered the government to reverse its behavior and void these deferrals.
Amongst the sanctions Hanen ordered on May 19 was yearly ethics training for five years for every DOJ lawyer stationed in Washington who appear in any of the courts of the states who filed the lawsuit. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to provide him (under seal) with a list of all of the aliens who had been given benefits under the amnesty plan in violation of his injunction.
However, on May 31, the Justice Department filed a motion with Hanen asking him to stay (or suspend) his sanctions order while DOJ appeals his decision to the 5th Circuit. The Justice Department claims in its brief that with regards to the required ethics training, Hanen’s determination that the DOJ’s lawyers engaged in “intentional misrepresentation” was reached “without proper procedural protections” and that there was not “sufficient” evidence of the misrepresentations.
Given the extensive evidence that Hanen cited in his order of the misrepresentations made by the government lawyers, as well as the extensive opportunity he gave the DOJ to present its side in the briefs it filed with the court, the claim that the DOJ was somehow unfairly judged or unable to present its defense is extremely dubious.
The DOJ also claims that the “sanctions imposed exceed the court’s authority.” Given the severity of the violations of the code of professional conduct that govern lawyers, including government lawyers, this is another problematic claim by the department.
Given that the judge could have imposed even more severe sanctions, such as dismissing the defensive pleadings filed by the government (which would have caused them to lose the case) or making the government pay the attorneys’ fees of the states, the sanctions imposed seem almost mild.
Of course, they are highly embarrassing given what they reflect about the behavior of DOJ lawyers. But according to the Justice Department, Hanen is interfering “with the attorney general’s executive authority” in imposing ethics training and the other requirements that Hanen laid out, such as filing a comprehensive plan within 60 days “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.” Apparently, that is too much to ask of the attorney general.
The strangest claim made by the Justice Department is that Hanen’s order to produce a state-by-state list of all of the illegal aliens unlawfully granted deferrals would “breach the confidence of these individuals (and of others who submit information to USCIS) in the privacy of such records.”
An affidavit filed by León Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, claims this would violate the internal privacy policy of DHS even though he admits the federal Privacy Act “does not apply to non-U.S. persons.”
Not only does the Privacy Act not apply to “non-U.S. persons” (Illegal aliens), but federal law (8 U.S.C. §1373) specifically requires the federal government to provide “citizenship or immigration status” information on any individual in response “to an inquiry by a federal, state, or local government agency.” And this requirement applies “notwithstanding any other provision of federal, state, or local law.”
Thus, states are statutorily entitled to this information and the DOJ’s claim that it is confidential has no basis in the law whatsoever. Of course, this very inconvenient federal provision is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s brief.
This action by the Justice Department makes it clear it intends to appeal Hanen’s sanctions order. Whether he will grant the requested stay is unknown, but he had ordered a hearing on the DOJ’s request for June 7.
So far in this litigation, the Justice Department and the Obama administration have had a steadily losing hand. We will have to see if that continues.
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