Thursday, January 2, 2020

BLOOMBERG SQUANDERS $155 MILLION RUNNING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE - BUT THEN HE DIDN'T EARN IT HONESTLY TO BEGIN WITH

OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER

The Rise of Wall Street Thievery

How corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era. Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is, their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and pensions. 
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands. 
And it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings. 
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.

Ryan Cooper


Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.

Michael Bloomberg Has Spent over $155 Million on Political Advertising

Former New York Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg speaks about his plan for clean energy during a campaign event at the Blackwall Hitch restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, on December 13, 2019. (Photo by Olivier Douliery / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images
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Billionaire Michael Bloomberg (D) spent over $155 million on political advertising in 2019 — millions more than billionaire rival Tom Steyer (D), according to data from Advertising Analytics.
New York City’s former mayor made waves last year after making a late entrance into the 2020 race and launching a multimillion-dollar ad blitz. According to Advertising Analytics data, Bloomberg, who is self-funding his campaign, has spent over $155 million on political advertising, the vast majority of which ($136.8 million) went toward “broadcast television time.” He spent $7.7 on cable advertising and another $10.8 million on digital ads, MSN reported.
No other candidate in the presidential field comes close, although Bloomberg and Steyer have spent over $200 million on political advertising combined.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who raised a massive $34.5 million in the fourth quarter, has reportedly spent $19.3 million on political advertising.
Despite millions spent, a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released in December showed that the majority of registered voters did not find Bloomberg’s ads convincing:


Several weeks ago, Michael Bloomberg launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. Have you seen any of Michael Bloomberg’s ads?
Yes 58%
No 40%@Suffolk_U/@USATODAY 12/10-14https://www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suffolk/documents/academics/research-at-suffolk/suprc/polls/national/2019/12_17_2019_marginals_pdftxt.pdf 

Bloomberg is taking a different approach than his political opponents, focusing on Super Tuesday states rather than the first four: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.
The current RealClearPolitics average shows the presidential hopeful in fifth place with 4.8 percent support nationally.


Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.

 

A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.

 

Billionaire ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg takes steps to run for Democratic nomination

 

The New York Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the Democratic Party 2020 presidential nomination.
The newspaper cited Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying: “Mike believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. We need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that.”
Bloomberg reportedly filed on Friday to run in the March 3 Alabama Democratic primary. That contest, one of 14 taking place on what is known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest filing deadline of any state primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the New Hampshire primary, which is the second contest in the primary season, following the Iowa caucuses in February.
Press reports say Bloomberg has not made a final decision on whether he will join the current field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move marks a reversal of statements he made last March ruling out a presidential bid.
As a practical matter, there appears to be little chance of Bloomberg winning the nomination for himself. He would not appear in any debate because his campaign would be entirely self-financed and therefore would not meet the requirement of 200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press reports indicate that he would not seriously compete in the four initial contests in February—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he has no campaign organization and voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could run in the March 3–17 primaries, which will choose nearly two-thirds of the total number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Using his vast fortune for campaign advertising, he could possibly win a sufficient number of delegates to give him leverage in the event of a negotiated or brokered nomination. He would use it to block the nomination of Warren or Sanders.
The very fact that a potential run by a multibillionaire ex-politician garners immediate media attention and is instantly seen as credible testifies to the immense power exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy over American politics. Whether or not he decides to run, Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to shift the Democratic campaign further to the right.
The statement issued by Wolfson is an expression of skepticism toward the prospects of the current leading “centrist” in the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden. While Biden still holds a lead over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in national polls, his margin has shrunk and he is faltering in the initial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s slump and the rise of Warren, who is competing with Sanders to capture growing anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic promises and channel it back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the fears within the ruling elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle. Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.
It is not Warren or Sanders who concern figures such as Bloomberg, Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, all of whom have attacked calls by the two candidates for tax increases on multimillionaires and billionaires. These long-time Democratic Party operatives are known quantities with solid records in defense of the profit system and the global interests of US imperialism. Rather, the oligarchs fear the rising wave of strikes and protests in the US and internationally that these “left”-talking Democrats are seeking to contain and dissipate.
They see in proposals for social reforms paid for by increased taxes on the rich an intolerable infringement on their prerogatives. They also see a danger of fueling popular expectations and encouraging social unrest. They want to block any expression in the 2020 elections of popular anger over social inequality.
Particularly since Warren released her “Medicare for all” plan last Friday, the outpouring of negative comments and warnings from corporate executives and media pundits has increased. In the plan, which Warren is well aware will never be passed by either big-business party, she calls for a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1 billion to fund a government-paid and government-run universal health insurance program.
Dimon complained on the financial cable channel CNBC this week that Warren “uses some pretty harsh words” about the rich, which “some would say vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms) said Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies—I do think you risk that.”
Last January, Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said an earlier proposal by Warren to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent was “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and multimillionaire financier Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week headlined “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise system,” he wrote: “Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your surge in the polls… Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was appointed by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in 2009, where he imposed an across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at GM and Chrysler, along with thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits. He was forced to leave his post on the auto panel when he was cited on corruption charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s political career has demonstrated the fundamental identity between the two corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US two-party system. He has changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was a Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as a Republican to run for mayor of New York City because he could not win the Democratic primary. He was reelected as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as an independent in 2007, and won reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he spent $70 million, a staggering sum for a mayoral race. He remained an independent until October 2018, when he reregistered as a Democrat, although he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and had a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.
Besides spending more than $200 million of his own money to get elected three times in New York, he poured over $110 million into the 2018 Democratic campaign to help the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and he has pledged to spend $500 million in the 2020 elections.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Bloomberg viciously attacked city workers, imposing a five-year wage freeze after the 2008 financial crisis, demanding cuts in pensions and health care for retirees, eliminating more than 6,000 teaching positions, closing 20 fire companies and slashing youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.
He continued the brutal “stop and frisk” policing policy imposed by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and imposed concessions on school bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the man praised by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program. Hahn, now a “liberal” radio host, called Bloomberg an “excellent mayor for the city of New York,” and added that he “might be just what the doctor ordered to shake this thing up right now.”

Michael Bloomberg: Government Should Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
 26 Nov 201932
4:25
Democratic 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg says he will recruit “an awful lot more” immigrants “to take all the different kinds of jobs” in the U.S. economy.
The immigrants can “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy,” Bloomberg told reporters without naming the American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues that would be improved.
Bloomberg’s comments reflect the views of wealthy investors who gain stock market wealth when the government imports more workers, welfare-aided consumers, and extra renters into communities created by Americans and their children.
In his comments, Bloomberg echoed the 1960s claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country build by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg, who owns roughly $55 billion in assets, has long supported mass migration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians pushed for passage of the Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
In 2019, the group is pushing for the S.386 law that would help investors by encouraging many more Indian graduates to take white-collar jobs from American graduates.
Bloomberg’s group is also pushing for legislation that would provide an endless supply of H-2A visa workers to investors in the agriculture sector. The wage-capped workers would likely displace Americans, reduce pressure on investors to buy high-tech farm machinery, and convert many agriculture towns into “company towns” dominated by a single employer.



NC GOP @SenThomTillis wants to reward India's workers who take US jobs from American graduates. He's backing @SenMikeLee's @S386 bill which gives citizenship to Indians for taking Americans' jobs. Big subsidy for US investors, big loss for NC graduates. http://bit.ly/2rp19J3 






The U.S. already imports many immigrants — roughly one million per year, even as four million Americans turn 18 and prepare to join the workforce.
“We need an awful lot more immigrants rather than less,” Bloomberg told reporters after he filed the paperwork needed to join the Democratic Party’s primary in Arizona:
We have to go out and actually try to recruit immigrants to come here. We need immigrants to take all the different kinds of jobs that the country needs – improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy.
Bloomberg — who has a personal wealth of roughly $55 billion — then blasted President Donald Trump’s campaign to block the wave of Central American migrants sparked by the establishment’s tacit support for mass migration:
I think what Donald Trump has done, of ripping kids away from their [migrant] parents, is a disgrace. I think of what we’re done, where we don’t know who we’re taking in, and we don’t help people when we’re here, is a disgrace. I think talking about deporting 11 million people is so outrageous to try to explain to your kids what that was all about. Our immigration system is broken and we’re not doing anything to fix it.
In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
In contrast, Trump’s opposition to Central American migrants and to amnesty bills sought by the establishment has helped to nudge up wages for blue-collar Americans, especially in the midwest battleground states, according to a November 26 report posted by Bloomberg’s news service:
Personal income growth has been surging in some political U.S. battlegrounds, including a third of the counties in Pennsylvania — which Donald Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election next year.
In the president’s first two years in office, a total of 325 counties representing nearly 6% of the U.S. population experienced their best annualized income gains since at least 1992, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. And 127 of those are located in perennial swing states, including Ohio and Iowa.



Good news: GOP Reps. voted against wage-cuts and job outsourcing.
Bad news: GOP Reps only voted against the cuts b/c they were wrapped in a farmworker amnesty which would cut GOP jobs in 2026.
Good News: The same standoff is protecting US grads from #S386http://bit.ly/2s4Lf6I 








Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers

President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.

“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”

Record 44.5 Million Immigrants in 2017

Non-Mexico Latin American, Asian, and African populations grew most


By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on September 15, 2018

Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.

On September 13, the Census Bureau released some data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) that shows significant growth in the immigrant (legal and illegal) population living in the United States. The number of immigrants (legal and illegal) from Latin American countries other than Mexico, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa grew significantly, while the number from Mexico, Europe, and Canada stayed about the same or even declined since 2010. The Census Bureau refers to immigrants as the "foreign-born", which includes all those who were not U.S. citizens at birth. The Department of Homeland Security has previously estimated that 1.9 million immigrants are missed by the ACS, so the total number of immigrants in 2017 was likely 46.4 million.1
Among the findings in the new data:
·         The nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010, and 13.4 million since 2000.
·         It is worth noting that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), released the same week but collected in March 2018, shows 45.4 million immigrants, an increase of 1.6 million over the prior year. While the CPS is smaller than the ACS, the newer survey may indicate the pace of growth has accelerated.
·         As a share of the U.S. population, the ACS (used in the remainder of this report) shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.7 percent or nearly one out of seven U.S. residents in 2017, the highest percentage in 107 years. As recently as 1980, just one out of 16 residents was foreign-born.
·         Between 2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and natural mortality of about 290,000 annually among the existing immigrant population.2 As a result, growth in the immigrant population was 4.6 million from 2010 to 2017.3
·         In addition to immigrants, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children with an immigrant parent in 2017, for a total of 61.6 million immigrants and their children in the country — accounting for one in five U.S. residents.4
·         Of immigrants who have come since 2010, 13 percent or 1.2 million came from Mexico — by far the top sending country. However, because of return migration and natural mortality among the existing population, the overall Mexican-born population actually declined by 441,190.5
·         The sending regions with the largest numerical increases from 2016 to 2017 in the number of immigrants living in the United States were South America (up 233,696); East Asia (up 226,728); South Asia (up 216,495); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 149,846); the Caribbean (up 121,120); and Central America (up 71,720).6
·         Looking longer term, the regions with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were East Asia, (up 1,118,937); South Asia (up 1,106,373); the Caribbean (up 676,023); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 606,835); South America (up 483,356); Central America (up 474,504); and the Middle East (up 472,554).
·         The decline in Mexican immigrants masks, to some extent, the enormous growth of Latin American immigrants. If seen as one region, the number from Latin America (excluding Mexico) grew 426,536 in just the last year and 1.6 million since 2010 — significantly more than from any other part of the world.
·         The sending countries with the largest numerical increases in immigrants in the United States between 2010 and 2017 were India (up 830,215); China (up 677,312); the Dominican Republic (up 283,381); the Philippines (up 230,492); Cuba (up 207,124); El Salvador (up 187,783); Venezuela (up 167,105); Colombia (up 146,477); Honduras (up 132,781); Guatemala (up 128,018); Nigeria (up 125,670); Brazil (up 111,471); Vietnam (up 102,026); Bangladesh (up 95,005); Haiti (up 92,603); and Pakistan (up 92,395).
·         The sending countries with the largest percentage increases in immigrants since 2010 were Nepal (up 120 percent); Burma (up 95 percent); Venezuela (up 91 percent); Afghanistan (up 84 percent); Saudi Arabia (up 83 percent); Syria (up 75 percent); Bangladesh (up 62 percent); Nigeria (up 57 percent); Kenya (up 56 percent); India (up 47 percent); Iraq (up 45 percent); Ethiopia (up 44 percent); Egypt (up 34 percent); Brazil (up 33 percent); the Dominican Republic (up 32 percent); Ghana (up 32 percent); China (up 31 percent); Pakistan (up 31 percent); and Somalia (up 29 percent).
·         The states with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were Florida (up 721,298); Texas (up 712,109); California (up 502,985); New York (up 242,769); New Jersey (up 210,481); Washington (up 173,891); Massachusetts (up 172,908); Pennsylvania (up 154,701); Virginia (up 151,251); Maryland (up 124,241); Georgia (123,009); Michigan (up 116,059); North Carolina (up 110,279); and Minnesota (up 107,760).
·         The states with the largest percentage increases since 2010 were North Dakota (up 87 percent); Delaware (up 37 percent); West Virginia (up 33 percent); South Dakota (up 32 percent); Wyoming (up 30 percent); Minnesota (up 28 percent); Nebraska (up 28 percent); Pennsylvania (up 21 percent); Utah (up 21 percent); and Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Iowa (all up 20 percent).
Data Source. On September 13, 2018, the Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2017. The ACS is by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and includes over two million households.7 The Census Bureau has posted some of the results from the ACS to its American FactFinder website.8 It has not released the public-use version of the ACS for researchers to download and analyze. However, a good deal of information can be found at FactFinder. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this analysis comes directly from FactFinder.
The immigrant population, referred to as the "foreign-born" by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers, and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, or those born in outlying U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of illegal immigrants respond to the ACS. Thus all the figures reported above are for both legal and illegal immigrants.