Immigration Can Offset US Population Decline | Cato at Liberty Blog

2021/08/04 Leave a comment

Cato Institute’s reply to the CIS post highlighting the limits of immigration in addressing an aging population ( Immigration and the Aging Society ). Not convinced. And like all immigration debates, the question is one of balance and understanding the limits of immigration in addressing ongoing policy and demographic issues:

The U.S. population is growing slowly and the average age of Americans is increasing as a result. Although the United States is not as old as other countries and likely to age better, the future looks demographically grim. Some social scientists and commentators think that boosting immigration can help delay or reverse those trends. Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, makes a series of silly argumentsagainst the notion that immigration can slow the aging of the U.S. population. Camarota’s points below are in quotes and my responses follow.

In reality, a significant body of research shows that the impact of immigration on population aging is small. While immigration can certainly make our population larger, it does not make us dramatically younger.

Camarota might be correct that the current and historically low rate of immigration to the United States doesn’t much lower the average age of the population, but that does not mean that immigration could not lower the average age if it were expanded. He merely shows that current U.S. immigration policy, which is very restrictive and much closer to his ideal level than mine, cannot much affect the average age. We shouldn’t expect a restrictive immigration system that allows in, at least prior to the immigration restrictions adopted by President Trump and partly maintained by President Biden (so far), a number of immigrants roughly equal to 0.3 percent of the population annually to have a big effect on the average age of the population. In 2018, 32 OECD countries had higher immigration flows as a percent of their populations and only five had lower flows, relative to the United States. Camarota’s point does not rebut the argument that expanded immigration would lower the average age and expand U.S. population.

But demographers have known for a long time that, absent truly gargantuan and ever‐​increasing rates of immigration, it isn’t actually possible for immigrants to undo or dramatically slow the overall aging of society. As Oxford demographer David Coleman observes, ‘it is already well known that [immigration] can only prevent population ageing at unprecedented, unsustainable and increasing levels of inflow.’

Do demographers know that? I looked up the source of the quote by David Coleman, former British MP and member of the Galton Institute. Camarota clipped a portion of a longer quote that makes a slightly different point. Coleman’s full quote is: “Although immigration can prevent population decline, it is already well known that it can only prevent population ageing at unprecedented, unsustainable and increasing levels of inflow, which would generate rapid population growth and eventually displace the original population from its majority position [Camarota’s quote italicized].”

Coleman agrees that immigration can prevent population decline. He identifies two problems with more immigration: It would “generate rapid population growth and eventually displace the original population from its majority position.” Rapid population growth is one of the many goals of those of us who favor liberalized immigration, so I have no argument with Coleman there. We simply disagree as I believe that population growth is positive and he thinks it’s negative. When it comes to “displace the original population from its majority position,” Coleman means that immigrants and their descendants would eventually become the majority of the population in the United Kingdom at a high level of immigration.

There’s no good reason for Camarota to find that shocking as it has happened at least once in U.S. history. As sociologist Charles Hirschman pointed out, the population of the United States today would only be about 100 million if immigration had stopped in 1800. Since the current population is about 330 million, that means most Americans are immigrants or the descendants of post‐​1800 immigrants. That doesn’t mean that boosted immigration would be “unprecedented” or “unsustainable.” It sounds like a return to immigration normality for Americans.

There are four broad reasons why the demography doesn’t support the political credo. First, not all immigrants arrive young — in fact, a growing share are arriving at or near retirement age. Second, immigrants age just like everyone else, adding to the elderly population over time. Third, immigrant fertility rates tend to converge with those of the native born. Fourth, to the extent that immigrants do have higher fertility rates than the native born, their children add to the dependent population — those too young or old to work.

Camarota’s first point is a curious criticism of the current restrictive immigration system. If this is his concern, why not just increase legal immigration opportunities for younger immigrants? Camarota’s second point somewhat answers that criticism – because “immigrants age just like everyone else, adding to the elderly population over time.” After all, newborn babies age too and will one day retire, which is a particularly poor argument against having children or increasing immigration.

Camarota’s third point is that immigrants assimilate. While a surprising admission from Camarota given his research, immigrants and their children still increase the population, and it takes time for immigrant fertility to approach that of natives – which he admits in his next point. Camarota’s fourth point is that immigrants have higher fertility rates that produce children who are also dependents.

To sum up, Camarota thinks that our current immigration system doesn’t help reduce the ratio of dependents to workers, immigrants age like everybody else, immigrant fertility shrinks too rapidly, and immigrant fertility doesn’t shrink fast enough.

The Census Bureau also estimates that, in 2060, 59% of the population will be of working age. Again, this is based on the assumption that net migration will amount to an average of 1.1 million each year. Under a zero‐​immigration scenario, just under 57% of the population would be of working age. In other words, while immigration is projected to add 75 million people to the American population by 2060, it will only increase the working‐​age share of the population by about two percentage points. Even if annual net immigration were expanded by 50% above what the Census Bureau projects, so that it averaged about 1.65 million a year, it would still only increase the working‐​age share of the population by three percentage points.

In other words, Camarota writes that the U.S. can increase immigration by 50 percent and have a working‐​age share of the population in 2060 similar to what it would otherwise be in 2027 or, on the extreme other side, 2060 America will look like Japan will in 2032. The percentage point spread is small, but the social, economic, and fiscal impacts are larger than they appear. Japan’s looming population collapse is terrifying and a few percentage points difference caused by expanded legal immigration can delay it for decades or longer. Even better, expanding legal immigration is a lot cheaper than birth subsidies.

You can read the rest of Camarota’s piece as it merely expands upon his points, offers some politically correct suggestions for reforming entitlement programs, and adds more figures. Nowhere does Camarota contest the obvious counterargument that immigration’s currently small effects on America’s age distribution result from very restrictive immigration policies.

The U.S. fiscal imbalance is a serious problem created by a poorly designed entitlement system. Declining U.S. fertility exacerbated the problem of the fiscal imbalance in a way that a well‐​designed system would not face. In addition to that, a growing population is correlated with increasing prosperity over the long term. More people mean more ideas, workers, consumers, investors, as well as potential friends, neighbors, and family members.

The worldwide and American increase in economic output from expanded legal immigration would be large and much of it could be captured to resolve the fiscal imbalance – at least for a few more generations. According to some estimates, massively expanded immigration would place the United States in an unassailable economic position. Allowing Americans and immigrants to interact as they see fit would also be a more ethical policy. In short, there are many reasons to support expanding legal immigration, and reversing expected US population decline is one of them, despite what Neo‐​Malthusians say.

Source: Immigration Can Offset US Population Decline | Cato at Liberty Blog

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Is American Economic Freedom Determined by Ancestry, Ethnicity, and Immigrant Countries of Origin?

2021/07/15 Leave a comment

Interesting study and methodology by Cato Institute that counters some of the populist and academic rhetoric:

The best potential counter argument against vastly expanding legal immigration is that immigrants might bring the less-efficient economic institutions, political systems, or cultural mores of their homelands with them to the United States. Ultimately, the United States and other rich countries are prosperous because of our economic and political institutions with some variation potentially explained by culture.

Most immigrants come from poorer countries with worse economic institutions, especially as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index. My co-author Benjamin Powell and I investigated whether immigrants worsened domestic economic institutions in our new book Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, and we found it either to be unsupported by the evidence or that the evidence suggests that more immigration can sometimes increase economic freedom and improve institutions. There’s not much worry that immigrants would kill the institutional goose that the lays golden eggs of economic growth.

Some supporters of the so-called deep roots hypothesis, that events many thousands of years ago affected culture, genes, or both in such a way that our economic outcomes were basically determined long ago, are also worried that immigrants could undermine our institutions. Proponents of this view argue that it’s impossible for immigrants to not bring support for the bad economic institutions of their ancestral homelands with them. Although economic institutions have changed substantially over time, even recently in some countries, and the deep roots theory can’t explain why economic institutions change, it’s still a thoughtful counter argument.

To test whether there is support for it, we created a predicted economic freedom index for a hypothetical United States whose economic freedom is entirely a product of the economic freedom of the countries where immigrants and their ancestors came from. In other words, a native-born American of Irish descent and a native-born American of Italian descent would each support economic freedom in the United States to the extent that economic freedom exists in Ireland and Italy, respectively. For example, if half of a country’s population were of Irish ancestry and half were of Italian ancestry then the predicted economic freedom score of that country would be 7.82 ((8.13+7.51)/2) under this theory. Thus, we created an average weight of the U.S. population by ancestry, attributed the economic freedom scores of those countries to those Americans, and then took the weighted average of economic freedom for the United States in 1980 and 2019. The former date was the first year that the U.S. Census asked about ancestry.

We obtained ancestry data from the American Community Survey (ACS). We used the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index to gather data on the economic freedom of the United States and other countries over time. The EFW estimates a country’s economic freedom by looking at five variables: size of government, legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulation.

The ACS data is reported using either demonyms, broader regional terms, or ethnic terms. As a result, we had to interpret some proportionally. For example, if an ACS respondent said that he was “Eastern European,” we calculated his inherent EFW score as coming from all Eastern European countries proportionally. Similarly, we combined some terms together. For example, both English and Scottish were combined into British. We then applied the EFW score for the United Kingdom to them, since EFW is reported by country. The biggest challenge was apportioning the ancestry of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. We know the general area where they came from but not the specific countries. Thus, we followed the general methods here for allocating black American ancestry. The different allocations made in this study are listed in Table 1.

In order to perform later calculations, we needed to determine which countries were relevant to the study. To be relevant, ACS and EFW data needed to both be available in each year. Some countries did not qualify, but their exclusions did not impact the final result as they were generally smaller countries with few historical immigrants to the United States. All demonyms and ethnic terms were interpreted by their national association to match the ACS and EFW data, but this was straight-forward.

To predict the ancestry-only EFW score for the United States, we multiplied the proportion of the population of ancestry by the EFW score in that country for that year. We then simply added up the results.

If ancestry alone determined the United States’ EFW score, it would have had a score of 6.32 in 1980 and 7.46 for 2019. In reality, the United States’ EFW was 8.13 in 1980 and 8.22 for 2019 – 1.8 and 0.76 points higher than what the ancestry-only score would predict. The economic freedom of the United States is substantially higher than its ancestry adjusted EFW score would predict if the deep roots theory were correct. For example, if American ancestry determined our EFW score then we should have the economic freedom score of Hungary in 2019 (7.44) rather than the much higher actual score of 8.22.

Interestingly, the average EFW score of the ancestral homelands of Americans and immigrants has increased considerably over time from 6.32 to 7.45. If deep roots really did drive our economic destiny by affecting economic freedom, we should be much less concerned today than in the recent past, as the ancestral homelands of immigrant groups are much freer today than in the past.

Ancestry and country of origin are not destiny, at least not in the United States in these two years.

Source: Is American Economic Freedom Determined by Ancestry, Ethnicity, and Immigrant Countries of Origin?

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USA: The Skill Level of Immigrants Is Rising | Cato at Liberty Blog

2021/07/12 Leave a comment

Of note, despite a relative lack of programs to encourage skilled immigration. Same trend in Canada but more of conscious policy and program choices:

A major immigration debate over the last several years is whether the U.S. immigration policy should be more meritocratic by attracting higher educated workers. President Trump supported such a system if it were pared with many fewer legal immigrants coming in while Democrats are mostly supportive of increasing all types of immigration. Although Congress did not pass a law to create a more meritocratic immigration system, new immigrants to the United States are increasingly skilled. In other words, the U.S. immigration system is becoming more meritocratic on its own.

The United States is an increasingly attractive place for highly educated immigrants. From all regions except for Africa, the share of immigrants arriving with a college degree has risen since 1995 while the share arriving with a high school degree or lower has dropped. Figure 1 shows the change in the proportion of recently arrived immigrants, 5 years in the United States or fewer, in different education groups between 1995 and 2020. Persons under 30 are excluded, as they are more likely to have not completed their education.

Some of these changes are striking. The proportion of recent immigrants from Central America with graduate degrees increased by more than 350 percent in 35 years, from 2 percent of recent immigrants in 1995 to 9.5 percent of recent immigrants in 2020. The share of new immigrants who are high school dropouts has declined or every region or origin from 1995 to 2020.

The same trend is true when comparing individual countries. Figure 2 shows the change in educational attainment from four of the top sending countries in 1995 and 2020. Mexican immigrants, who are often criticized as being low‐​educated and low‐​skilled, are now 2.4 times more likely to have received a bachelor’s degree at arrival than they were just 35 years ago.

Figure 3 shows that immigrants have higher high school dropout rates than natives, but immigrants who come here at a younger age (younger than 10) typically end up getting more education eventually.

Native‐​born Americans are not the only ones who benefit from more highly educated immigrants. The children of immigrants consistently earn more education than their parents, and since 2010, more than native‐​born Americans (Figure 4). Again, persons under 30 are excluded from analysis to avoid over‐​counting individuals with less than a high school education.

Congress did not create a merit‐​based immigration system as President Trump wanted, but we seem to be getting one nonetheless as immigrants become more skilled over time.

Source: The Skill Level of Immigrants Is Rising | Cato at Liberty Blog

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The United States Should Welcome Immigrants from China

2021/06/12 Leave a comment

Interesting counter-intuitive take by Cato Institute. Not sure whether parallel with Cold War refugees fleeing communism but worth thinking about given Canadian concerns:

Competition with China is dominating America’s foreign policy discourse in a way reminiscent of Cold War hysteria. Our politics haven’t descended into McCarthyite crusades to purge federal departments of alleged communist infiltrators, but there are already examples of making policy out of paranoia.

In addition to fueling wasteful defense spending, fear of China has led policymakers to push for cuts to Chinese immigration. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) believes dramatically reducing immigration from China is necessary to protect against Chinese spies stealing American secrets. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) went so far as to block a bill allowing for Hong Kongers to get work permits and become refugees because he’s afraid of spies. President Biden has maintained the anti-Chinese immigration policies adopted by the Trump administration.

To the extent that China poses a serious threat to the United States, policymakers should be clamoring to liberalize immigration with China rather than restrict it. At the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, American politicians ignored the Know-Nothings of their time and encouraged refugees from communist countries.

Starting with President Truman, who ordered the admission of 80,000 refugees from Soviet-occupied Poland, the Baltic countries, and from areas of Southern Europe where communist insurgencies were active in 1945, and ending with the Lautenberg Amendment of 1990, the U.S. government consistently liberalized refugee and asylum policy for those fleeing communism. They let in millions of refugees and asylum seekers from countries as varied as Hungary, China, Greece, the Soviet Union, and Cuba – the birthplace of Senator Cruz’s father.

Welcoming immigrants from communist countries produced important economic, political, moral, and propaganda victories during the Cold War that showcased the superiority of individual liberty and capitalism over communism. But modern policy makers are ignoring those victories today.

U.S. policymakers are worried about Chinese technology. One obvious response is to channel the most productive and educated Chinese citizens to our shores. Why don’t today’s policymakers learn from the past and liberalize Chinese immigration? Espionage is the main excuse, but immigration restrictions would do little to mitigate this threat and would produce negative unintended consequences down the road for America’s competition with China.

From 1990 to 2019, there were 1,485 people convicted of espionage or espionage-related crimes spying on U.S. soil. Of those, 184 were from China. Chinese-born spies stole economic secrets or intellectual property from private firms two-thirds of the time. Of the 46 firms that were the victims of economic espionage committed by Chinese spies on U.S. soil, 16 were the victims more than once – meaning that they decided that their expected espionage-related costs of hiring Chinese workers were lower than the benefits of hiring them.

Rarely were the stolen secrets related to national security. Chinese immigrant Xiaorong You was indicted for stealing a formula for a coating for the inside of Coke cans. Last year, Xin Wang, a Chinese-born visiting researcher at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) was arrested for the espionage-related crime of visa fraud because he did not inform U.S. immigration officials that he was still a medical technician in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said that Wang’s case “is another part of the Chinese Communist Party’s plan to take advantage of our open society and exploit academic institutions.” At UCSF, Wang was researching obesity and metabolism, not weapons.

Some instances of espionage are serious, but many don’t have a connection to Chinese immigrants. American-born John Reece Roth, for instance, exported data on specialized plasma technology for use in drones that he had developed under a U.S. Air Force contract. We shouldn’t let the occasional case of Chinese espionage blind the government to the benefits of liberalizing immigration for those fleeing Communist China.

In contrast, Chinese immigrants are making huge contributions to research and development that will unlock economic and technological innovation going forward. In all STEM fields, there are around 46,000 Chinese undergraduates, about 41,000 master’s students, and an estimated 36,000 PhD students at U.S. universities. Immigration restrictions to deal with the manageable threat of espionage guarantees that many of them will return to China and that fewer will come in the future.

The federal government should use the Cold War immigration playbook to liberalize immigration with China. Congress should update the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974, which liberalized trade with non-market economies if they allowed emigration. That would end the Trump-era trade restrictions on China in exchange for the Chinese allowing the free emigration of Uighurs, other persecuted ethnic and religious minorities like Christians and Tibetans, and Hong Kongers. For the long term, expanded asylum options, green cards for all Chinese graduates of American universities, and allowing all educated Chinese immigrants to come here without restriction should all be on the table.

Liberalizing immigration with China is a net benefit for the United States and may even give America an edge in its competition with Beijing. Moreover, providing a safe haven for those fleeing totalitarian communism in China will be a tremendous moral victory for the United States.

Americans understood this during the Cold War. It’s time their children applied that lesson today.

Source: The United States Should Welcome Immigrants from China

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New Cato Survey Helps Reframe the Debate Over Legal Immigration

2021/05/07 Leave a comment

Cato Institute’s summary of the key takeaways of their survey that will inform their future work, featured earlier:

My colleagues Emily Ekins and David Kemp just released an excellent new survey on how Americans view immigration and identity. We all worked together on crafting the questions for several months prior to publication and the results are very interesting. Below are some findings and some lessons that folks who support immigration should take to heart.

First, the survey shows that most people know almost nothing about immigration. Even basic facts elude them. About 14 percent of the U.S. population is foreign‐​born but the average respondent thinks that 40 percent of the country’s population is foreign‐​born. Immigrants were the most likely to think that the immigrant population of the United States is high, estimating that 56 percent of the country is foreign‐​born, while third generation and higher Americans estimated 36 percent.

The differences likely result from where the respondents reside in the United States. Immigrants live close to other immigrants and native‐​born Americans live close to other native‐​born Americans. For instance, about 27 percent of California’s population is foreign‐​born compared to just 1.5 percent in West Virginia. Those who live closer to other immigrants are probably more likely to overestimate the immigrant percentage of the population. Using those two states as examples, immigrants in California overestimated the foreign‐​born share of the population by about a factor of two, while third generation and higher Americans in West Virginia were off by a factor of 24. Regardless, native‐​born Americans and immigrants both overestimate the share of immigrants.

Second, focusing on understandable metrics when communicating how the legal immigration system functions is more effective. Americans can better conceptualize the handful of years it takes to wait for a green card than the borderline abstract large quantity of visas issued per year. For example, one of the survey questions asked how long it should take to immigrate to the United States. Eighty percent of respondents said that it should take five years or less to immigrate, and they may have chosen that number because the question prompted them with a mention of a five‐​year average. However, 52 percent of respondents said it should take less than five years. However, responses to another question revealed that 61 percent of respondents said they wanted fewer than one million immigrants a year – probably because one million is a large and abstract number that is difficult to visualize even though it’s a relatively small number of people compared to the roughly 330 million people living in the United States. By comparison, everybody understands what five years feels like and 80 percent of respondents answered that immigrants should wait five years or less for a green card. One lesson is that we should talk about immigration restrictions in terms of waiting times rather than numbers of visas. On the policy side, a maximum wait time for a visa without regard to the numerical caps would increase the number of visas issued without increasing the numerical caps on paper and be more rhetorically appealing. Fortunately, Cato proposed just such a reform in 2020.

Third, Americans care much less about job protectionism than we all thought. Two‐​thirds of respondents said that businesses should be “allowed to hire whoever they believe is best qualified for the job regardless of nationality.” This is great news because wage and job‐​protection regulations are responsible for a large percentage of the regulatory costs for sponsoring immigrants for employment‐​based green cards and other temporary work visas such as the H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B. Removing those regulations would face less popular backlash than many of us assumed.

Fourth, most Americans think that restrictive immigration laws cause illegal immigration. Forty‐​one percent said illegal immigration is caused by the legal immigration system being too restrictive and 19 percent said illegal immigrants were ineligible to apply. Most respondents are primed to understand that restrictions and government bureaucracy are the causes of illegal immigration.

Fifth, 56 percent said that simplifying the legal immigration process is a better way to deal with illegal immigration than building a border wall or increasing border security. This is incredibly good news for those of us who want to expand and liberalize legal immigration. Some findings in the field of political psychology suggest otherwise, that perceptions of chaos along the border influence voters to oppose immigration liberalization. Apparently, most people see chaos and their instinct is to support more enforcement and government control rather than liberalization. This creates a Catch‐​22 because the only way to get sustainable control over the border is through liberalization but liberalization can only be politically sustainable if voters think the border is under control. On the contrary, this survey result indicates that respondents are more open to liberalization as a means of border control than the political psychology literature suggests.

There are many other fascinating findings in this Cato survey on immigration and identity and I recommend that you read and digest it all. However, the above findings are those that we will seek to most incorporate into our work.

Source: New Cato Survey Helps Reframe the Debate Over Legal Immigration

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CATO Poll: 72% of Americans Say Immigrants Come to the United States for Jobs and to Improve Their Lives

2021/04/29 Leave a comment

The top level finding, with the report having a wealth of detail, with some of the same characteristics as in Canada such as age, education, political affiliation in terms of support or not for immigration:

The Cato Institute 2021 Immigration and Identity National Survey, a new national survey of 2,600 U.S. adults, finds that nearly three‐​fourths (72%) of Americans believe immigrants come to the United States to “find jobs and improve their lives” while 27% think immigrants come to obtain government services and welfare.

READ THE FULL SURVEY REPORT HERE

Support for More Immigration Is on the Rise

Support for more immigration has tripled from the mid‐​1990s when about 10% of the public supported more immigration and two‐​thirds wanted less. Today 29% of Americans want more, 38% want to maintain current levels, and 33% want less.

Chart 1

 

Democrats’ views largely account for this shift. Starting around 2008–2010, Democratic support for more immigration rose from about 20% to 47% today.

….

Source: Poll: 72% of Americans Say Immigrants Come to the United States for Jobs and to Improve Their Lives

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Biden Rescinds Immigrant Visa Ban, Keeps Worker Ban: Who Benefits?

2021/02/27 Leave a comment

Useful data and analysis, along with practical recommendations to streamline processes:

President Joe Biden rescinded Donald Trump’s presidential proclamation banning new immigrant visas for most new legal permanent residents coming from abroad. Trump justified the ban based on old, disproven economic protectionist arguments. He claimed immigrants would take jobs. During his campaign and in this proclamation, President Biden rejected this idea. Yet incongruously, he’s keeping an identical ban on temporary work visa holders.

The State Department issued nearly 290,000 fewer immigrant visas in the categories that the ban targeted during the year that it was in effect. If they are not from a country on which Biden has imposed a countrywide entry ban—mostly Europe, South Africa, Brazil, China, and Iran—these immigrants will now be able to immigrate to the United States. This is great news for them and for the Americans with whom they plan to associate.

Altogether, the banned categories saw a 90 percent decline in visa issuances over the last year. The family‐​sponsored categories saw an average decline of 94 percent, while employees of U.S. businesses were least affected (partly due to a favorable court decision that exempted employees of members of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce). 83 percent of the banned immigrants were family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens were exempt from the ban, but they also saw a decline in the number of visas issued due to the travel restrictions. According to a government filing this month, the State Department had nearly 473,000 documentarily qualified family‐​based immigrant visa applicants—presumably some of these cases will ultimately turn into denials, but this will be a huge undertaking for the consulates to process.

Four ideas to help with this backlog (mostly borrowed from our one‐​time Cato author David Kubat):

  1. The government should use “parole‐​in‐​place” authority to waive the requirement to travel to consulate abroad for certain applicants who would otherwise be eligible to adjust in the United States if not for the fact that they initially entered without inspection (illegally).
  2. It should adjudicate applications for waivers on grounds of inadmissibility before conducting the interview to save time and streamline the process. Under the current process, the State Department waits until after they’ve taken your fingerprints, medical evaluation, and other documents and then get denied. Only then do you restart the many months‐​long process of trying again.
  3. It should allow for remote or virtual interviews to speed the interview process. Remote immigration court hearings are already happening.
  4. It should waive as many interviews as possible for applicants with no red flags and a history of travel to the United States.

As Figure 1 shows, the number of immigrant visas had already declined by more than a quarter before the pandemic. This means that even without the visa bans, the new administration will have to go further to rescind the numerous restrictions on legal immigration that led to that decline.

Of course, the other major visa ban—on the most common nonimmigrant work visa categories for skilled and seasonal nonagricultural workers—is still in effect. President Biden states in his order revoking the immigrant visa ban, “The suspension of entry…. does not advance the interests of the United States. To the contrary, it harms the United States including…. industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world.” These lines apply just as much to the nonimmigrant visa ban, yet Biden has chosen to keep it.

The nonimmigrant visa ban and immigrant visa backlog are just two of the numerous issues that Biden will have to address to get the legal immigration system back to what it was pre‐​Trump. There are also country‐​specific entry bans on Europe, South Africa, Brazil, China, and Iran that lack any health basis. The public charge rule to keep out low‐​income immigrants is also still in force. USCIS has not reinstated its prior deference memo and so is still relitigating past approved petitions and applications in order to increase denials. The immigration forms still contain the bogus, vague, time‐​consuming, and expensive “extreme vetting” questions based on a faulty reading of the data on vetting failures. At the border, Border Patrol is still “expelling” asylum seekers under a political CDC order. The immigration courts and asylum process generally is still in chaos.

With this action, the president makes his first real attempt to reinstate the system to how it once was, but he’s not even 10 percent of the way there. Still, it’s a great first step.

Source: Biden Rescinds Immigrant Visa Ban, Keeps Worker Ban: Who Benefits?

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President Trump Reduced Legal Immigration. He Did Not Reduce Illegal Immigration

2021/01/26 Leave a comment

Usual solid analysis by Cato Institute:

President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent. Trump was wildly successful in reducing legal immigration. By November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non‐​immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term through November 2020. President Trump also entered the White House with the goal of eliminating illegal immigration but Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population. Thus, Trump succeeded in reduce legal immigration and failed to eliminate illegal immigration.

Figure 1 shows the monthly number of green cards issued to immigrants outside of the United States. In most years, about half of all green cards are issued to immigrants who already reside in the United States on another visa. Thus, the number of green cards issued to immigrants abroad is a better metric of the annual inflow of lawful permanent residents than the total number issued. Trump cut the average number of monthly green cards issued by 18.2 percent relative to Obama’s second term, but that average monthly decline hides the virtual end of legal immigration from April 2020 onward.

In response to the recession and the COVID-19 outbreak, President Trump virtually ended the issuance of green cards to people abroad. In the last 6 months of the 2020 fiscal year (April‐​September 2020) the U.S. government only issued about 29,000 green cards. In the same period in 2016, the U.S. government issued approximately 309,000 green cards. Compared to the last half of FY2016, the number of green cards issued in the last half of FY2020 fell by 90.5 percent (please see note at the end of this blog post for how I estimated these figures).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic during the period from January 2017‐​February 2020, the average number of green cards issued per month was only down about 0.5 percent under Trump compared to from January 2013‐​February 2016 under the Obama administration with cumulative numbers down just over 3.2 percent. Beginning in mid‐​to‐​late March, the Trump administration virtually halted the issuance of green cards to people abroad. Without the COVID-19 immigration restrictions unilaterally imposed by the President, the issuance of green cards to foreigners abroad would have barely declined relative to the second term of the Obama administration.

Figure 2 shows the monthly number of non‐​immigrant visas (NIVs) issued abroad. NIVs include tourist visas, work visas, student visas, and others that do not allow the migrant to naturalize. Trump cut the monthly average number of NIVs by about 27 percent relative to Obama’s second term, but that decline obscures the virtual end of NIVs from April 2020 onward.

As with immigrant visas, President Trump virtually ended NIV issuance in response to the recession and the COVID-19 outbreak. In the last 6 months of the 2020 fiscal year (April‐​September 2020) the U.S. government only issued 397,596 NIVs. In the same period in 2016, the U.S. government issued more than 5.6 million NIVs. Compared to the last half of FY2016, the number NIVs issued in the last half of FY2020 fell by almost 93 percent (please see note at the end of this blog post for how I estimated these figures).

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the period from January 2017‐​February 2020, the average number of monthly NIVs issued was down about 12 percent under Trump compared to the January 2013‐​February 2016 period under the Obama administration and the cumulative numbers were down by just over 14 percent. Beginning in mid‐​to‐​late March, the Trump administration virtually halted the issuance of NIVs to people abroad. The COVID‐​19‐​related restrictions were the most severe and impactful part of Trump’s immigration policy.

Looking at the decline in the number of visas issued abroad under Trump through November 2020 compared to the second term of the Obama administration, Trump reduced the number of green cards issued by approximately 418,453 green cards and the number of NIVs issued by about 11,178,668. That’s a roughly 18 percent decline in the number of green cards issued abroad and approximately a 28 percent decline in the number of NIVs issued during Trump’s only term relative to Obama’s second term.

Although Trump succeeded in cutting legal immigration more than he initially planned, he oversaw the collapse of interior immigration enforcement. In 2020, the removal of illegal immigrants from the interior of the United States was the lowest as an absolute number and as a share of the illegal immigration population since ICE was created in 2003 (Figure 3). Trump failed to increase removals because local jurisdictions refused to cooperate with his administration, continuing a trend begun during the Obama administration in response to their deportation efforts. As a result, the population of illegal immigrants remained about the same as when he took office (Figure 4).

Source: President Trump Reduced Legal Immigration. He Did Not Reduce Illegal Immigration

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The Good and Bad of Biden’s Plan to Legalize Illegal Immigrants

2021/01/19 Leave a comment

Of note:

Recent news reports suggest that Joe Biden will propose a series of immigration bills for Congress to consider early in his administration. The bill with the most details reported so far would legalize the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. According to the quick news summaries of the possible bill, it is a simple legalization that would grant lawful status, the ability to earn a green card in five years, and citizenship in an additional three to virtually all illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. That is a vastly simpler and cheaper way for illegal immigrants to legalize compared to the expensive and complex schemes of earlier failed reform efforts.

The Good

The good part about this bill is that mass legalization would be very positive for the United States. The United States would benefit from quickly legalizing illegal immigrants who aren’t real criminals and putting them on a path toward permanent residency and citizenship. In the short run, many opponents of immigration will be upset, but the vast reduction in the population of illegal immigrants and their successful assimilation will reduce social perceptions of chaos and increase the perception that the government has immigration firmly under control, all long term benefits for the immigration debate and the country as a whole.

Further, the usual complaints about immigration liberalization would not apply to legalizing illegal immigrants because they are already here. The lower crime rates of illegal immigrants relative to native‐​born Americans and possibly compared to legal immigrants means that we’re not going to see a surge in crime from legalization and may even see a drop in crime as a result. Also, illegal immigrants are already working in the United States with generally higher labor force participation rates than other groups, so legalizing them won’t increase wage competition with American workers because they are already here working.

Furthermore, wages would increase for illegal immigrants after they’re legalized. Work by my former colleague Andrew Forrester and I found that illegal immigrants initially faced a hefty wage penalty of about 11.3 percent relative to legal immigrants during the 1995–2017 period. Although illegal immigrant wages did converge with legal immigrants during that time, and more recent illegal immigrants entered with lower wages penalty than those that came in the past, legalization would hasten illegal immigrant and overall immigrant wage convergence with native‐​born Americans.

The bigger potential effects could be on the government’s finances. Illegal immigrants have limited access to few means‐​tested welfare programs but they already have access to public education. Legalization will increase their access to these programs once they naturalize, but it won’t increase their access to the most expensive outlays like public education. At the same time, their wages will also increase due to legalization and their U.S.-born children will have much higher levels of education and, thus, will likely pay more in taxes than receive in benefits. Therefore, it’s unclear what the net‐​fiscal impact would be and it depends on the time‐​horizon for analyzing those effects.

The good political part of this bill is that Democrats are finally playing hardball on immigration as they will not be presenting legislation already laden with compromised positions. Instead, they will start with a cleaner and simpler bill and then ask what other senators and congressmen need to get on board, which will no doubt be a lot of expensive security signaling along the border. Also, Democrats have finally learned that any pro‐​immigration piece of legislation that they introduce will immediately be called “amnesty” by its opponents, so there isn’t a political downside to introducing a real amnesty. After all, what are proponents going to say? “This time it’s a REAL amnesty” doesn’t carry the same weight.

The Bad

The policy downside of this bill is huge because it has no chance of becoming law in its current reported form. Moderate Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema aren’t likely to support it, to say nothing of the ten Republican senators necessary to pass it. A more moderate legalization is obviously better than no legalization at all. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that we should be less strategic when thinking about immigration reform – if there is an opportunity to legalize some people or expand legal immigration then pro‐​immigration politicians must seize it at that moment rather than trying to think of how doing so makes passing other immigration reforms more difficult. Nobody knows the answer to the long term political consequences, they never have, and we should all stop pretending that we do and instead support policies that we know will be good when we can.

If the hypothesized Biden bill fails then it would also open up other possibilities. Politically, it would be a marker bill that shows where the Democratic Party stands and would be a starting point for future negotiations. That probably doesn’t have much value, but that’s the conventional strategic wisdom that I just told you to disregard in the previous paragraph.

More important is that a failure to legalize illegal immigrants in Congress will give more of a political justification for a Biden administration to take sweeping executive actions to legalize all illegal immigrants by granting them Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Under current statute, a president has the power to grant TPS to any immigrant in the United States if their home country faces a disaster.

Importantly, the statute explicitly mentions “epidemic” as such a disaster, and since all countries are suffering from COVID-19, then‐​President Biden could grant all illegal immigrants TPS. Immigration attorney and former deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation at the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil division Leon Fresco thinks this will be legally sound, and he’s probably correct. A universal grant of TPS could be undone by a future president but, at minimum, it would allow some current illegal immigrants to adjust their status to a green card and thus shrink the pool of illegal immigrants.

The major structural legal change to the immigration system under Trump is that the President now has the power to stop all legal immigration from abroad for any reason. The failure of the immigration legalization bill in Congress would allow Biden to test the power of the president to at least legalize illegal immigrants using broad existing statutory authority. Beyond that, there are many smaller actions that Biden could follow that will reduce the illegal immigrant population as detailed here by my colleague David Bier. No president should be making policy by executive decree but no president is likely to give up the power that Congress unwisely granted it, so you should expect many executive and agency actions from Biden here.

Other Legalization Ideas that Congress Should Consider

There are many ways to legalize illegal immigrants. One reform that should be included in the bill regardless of anything else is a rolling legalization that would allow long‐​term illegal immigrant residents and lawful residents without green cards to be granted green cards on an ongoing basis without an application cutoff date and based entirely on how long they’ve resided here without committing any crimes. We proposed just such a reform here based on a portion of British immigration law. This will reduce the potential for the illegal immigrant population to grow in the future.

Another way is to create a tiered legalization system that lets illegal immigrants choose whether they want to be a temporary resident, a quasi‐​permanent resident, or be on a pathway toward citizenship. The less‐​permanent means to reside here should be easier to acquire while the path toward citizenship should be harder. As evidenced by the Reagan amnesty, only 41 percent of the illegal immigrants who got a green card decided to naturalize. There’s no reason to make most current illegal immigrants who don’t want citizenship to be on that track. This proposal is less positive than legalizing all non‐​violent illegal immigrants but will likely be closer to what eventually becomes law.

Beyond legalizing illegal immigrants, the best way to guarantee that the reduction in illegal immigration that an amnesty would accomplish won’t be undone by future waves of illegal immigration is to increase lawful immigration. There’s little evidence that amnesties attract illegal immigrants. The overwhelming evidence is that expanding legal immigration reduces illegal immigration. From 2000–2018, a 1 percent increase in the number of H-2 visas for Mexicans is associated with a 1.04 percent decline in the number of Mexican illegal immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol – a finding that is statistically significant at the 1 percent level. Even nativists agree that legal immigration decreases illegal immigration. Channeling potential illegal immigrants into the legal immigration system will do the most to reduce illegal immigrant inflows in the future that will guarantee that the stock of illegal immigrants doesn’t grow.

The Biden administration has a lot of work ahead of it to undo the large number of immigration executive actions implemented by the Trump administration. Much of that work won’t earn headlines but it will be important for creating a better immigration system. On top of that, it’s heartening to see the Biden administration getting ready to hit the ground running even if their first bill has virtually no chance of becoming law as it is currently envisioned.

Source: The Good and Bad of Biden’s Plan to Legalize Illegal Immigrants

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Biden Has No Reason to Back Down on Immigration Now

2020/11/09 Leave a comment

From the libertarian Cato Institute which continues to provide good analysis of US immigration:

After Joe Biden won the Democratic Party nomination, he made no adjustments to his aggressively pro‐​immigration agenda. Some ideas—a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants—have long been standard Democratic Party positions, but Biden’s ideas went farbeyond this. Biden’s platform was probably as pro‐​immigrant as any winning candidate since Abraham Lincoln. Yet despite repeated attacks by President Trump, Biden stuck to his message—even on border and asylum issues which many see as the most difficult politically. With public opinion on immigration even further on his side than the presidential vote count, he has absolutely no reason to back down now.

Biden Stuck to a Pro‐​Immigrant Message

The most remarkable moment in this campaign for me as an immigration analyst was when President Trump attacked Biden in the second presidential debate for the Obama‐​Biden administration allowing what he calls “catch and release” of immigrants at the border. Rather than pivoting back to normal Democratic attacks about Trump’s child separation policy, Biden took Trump’s bait and launched into an extended defense of exactly what Trump was attacking him for—even going so far as to counter‐​attack Trump for forcing Central American asylum seekers to live homeless in dangerous cities in Mexico.

Without Trump’s anti‐​asylum policies, it is inevitable that the United States will have a very significant increase in immigrants requesting asylum. Of all the Trump policies, I believed—as many analysts still do—that these asylum restrictions would be the most difficult politically for Biden to end. Yet Biden took his few minutes on a national debate stage to assert that he’s willing to embrace greater acceptance of asylum seekers as a good thing. If the new administration accepts them all at ports of entry, grants them status and employment authorization, there will not even be the issue of immigrants breaking the law to create any potential political liability.

Little Reason to Change

Now that he appears to have beaten President Trump, will Biden suddenly reverse? It’s possible. It wouldn’t be the first time that Biden has flipped on immigration. But he absolutely no political reason to change. He won on a pro‐​immigrant message. House Democrats won on a pro‐​immigrant message.

Moreover, Biden is assuming office at a time when the public has never been more sympathetic to the pro‐​immigrant cause. For the first time in its 55‐​year history, Gallup’s immigration poll found more support for increasing than decreasing immigration (Figure 1). Support for immigration grows when Gallup only asks about legal immigration. More than three quarters tell Gallup that they believe immigration is a good thing. Pew Research Center pollsfind that large majorities reject that the arguments immigrants increase crime, that they tax the welfare state, and that they do not assimilate. Trump has actually lost ground even among Republicans on his anti‐​immigration message, as I explained here.

Even the old President Obama advisors who oversaw the most deportations ever and will likely resurface in a Biden administration understand that they have a mandate from Biden to gut and replace Trump’s anti‐​immigrant agenda in a way that they did not until very late in Obama’s term. I fully expect that the agencies will go beyond reversing them and create even better processes for immigrants—legal or otherwise. He will also push aggressively for Congress to enact legislation to create a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants and expand legal immigration.

Potential Problem Areas

The most likely problem areas for Biden are on guest worker visas. Biden said he wanted to make the H-2A and H-2B guest worker programs for lesser skilled seasonal jobs less “cumbersome, bureaucratic, and inflexible.” Moreover, Biden “will support expanding the number of high‐​skilled visas.” But in both cases, he also falls into the erroneous labor union narrative that these visas can hurt U.S. workers and calls for strong enforcement of the “prevailing wage”—a made‐​up governmental minimum wage for foreign workers.

In the case of the H-1B skilled worker visa, Biden specifically calls for greater restrictions on “entry level wages”—which could effectively stop the hiring of foreign college graduates by U.S. companies. Since nearly all employer‐​sponsored foreign workers enter first on temporary visas, restricting them would do very significant harm to both employers, foreign workers, and U.S. workers in complementary positions.

Conclusion

Overall, Biden has given immigrant advocates a reason for optimism. He faced down President Trump’s attacks and doubled down on his pro‐​immigrant positions. He may impose new restrictions on guest workers and not follow through on every campaign promise, but he will restart a legal immigration system that has almost entirely been stopped by this administration, and he will generally make positive reforms beyond that.

Source: Biden Has No Reason to Back Down on Immigration Now

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