House passes bill to add citizenship question to U.S. Census

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

While a citizenship question, like we have in Canada, makes sense,  the blatant politicisation and political purpose of the initiative does not given how it would further reinforce the political weight of rural states compared to more urban ones:

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would add a citizenship question to the next U.S. Census in 2030, preventing non-citizens or illegal immigrants from being counted toward the allocation of representatives and federal electors in each state.

The Equal Representation Act passed the House by a vote of 206 to 202, along party lines. It now moves to the Senate.

Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., who introduced the bill in January, called it “commonsense” that only U.S. citizens be counted when it comes to representation. Currently, anyone who participates in the census every 10 years — including non-citizens and undocumented immigrants — is counted for redistricting.

“One of the lesser acknowledged, but equally alarming, side effects of this administration’s failure to secure the southern border is the illegal immigrant population’s influence in America’s electoral process,” Edwards said on the House floor Wednesday.

“Though commonsense dictates that only citizens should be counted for apportionment purposes, illegal aliens have nonetheless recently been counted toward the final tallies that determine how many House seats each state is allocated and the number of electoral votes it will wield in presidential elections,” Edwards added.

The White House has been “strongly opposed” to putting a citizenship question on the census, saying it would be too costly.

“The bill would increase the cost of conducting the census and make it more difficult to obtain accurate data,” the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said in a statement this week.

“It would also violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires that the number of seats in the House of Representatives ‘be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state,'” the White House added.

“It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and non-citizens are counted toward congressional district apportionment and our electoral map,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.

“While people continue to flee Democrat-run cities, desperate Democrats are back-filling the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress or their electoral votes for the presidency, hence artificially boosting their political power and in turn diluting the power of Americans’ votes.”

Before Wednesday’s vote, Democrats blasted the effort as unconstitutional and a waste of time given its prospects in the Senate.

“This bill is an affront to the great radical Republicans who wrote the original Constitution and the 14the Amendment, which has always made persons, not voters, the basis for reapportionment,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “This bill would destroy the accuracy of the census, which may have something to do with its real legislative motivation.”

Source: House passes bill to add citizenship question to U.S. Census

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Global Housing Shortages Are Crushing Immigration-Fueled Growth

2024/05/07 Leave a comment

Of note, Canada not alone (but doesn’t excuse the policy and program mistakes….). Money quote: “Canada’s experience shows there’s a limit to immigration-fueled growth:”

For decades, the rapid inflow of migrants helped countries including Canada, Australia and the UK stave off the demographic drag from aging populations and falling birth rates. That’s now breaking down as a surge of arrivals since borders reopened after the pandemic runs headlong into a chronic shortage of homes to accommodate them.

Canada and Australia have escaped recession since their Covid contractions, but their people haven’t with deep per-capita downturns eroding standards of living. The UK’s recession last year looked mild on raw numbers but was deeper and longer when measured on a per-person basis.

All up, thirteen economies across the developed world were in per-capita recessions at the end of last year, according to exclusive analysis by Bloomberg Economics. While there are other factors — such as the shift to less-productive service jobs and the fact that new arrivals typically earn less — housing shortages and associated cost-of-living strains are a common thread.

So is the immigration-fueled economic growth model doomed? Not quite.

In Australia, for instance, the inflow of roughly one million people, or 3.7% of the population, since June 2022 helped plug a chronic shortages of workers in industries such as hospitality, aged care and agriculture. And in the UK — an economy near full employment — arrivals from Ukraine, Hong Kong and elsewhere have made up for a lack of workers after Brexit.

Skills shortages across much of the developed world mean more, not fewer, workers are needed. Indeed, the US jobs market and economy are running hotter than many thought possible as an influx of people across the southern border expands the labor pool — even as immigration shapes up as a defining issue in the November presidential election.

While the US has seen a widely-covered surge in authorized and irregular migration, the scale of the increase actually pales in comparison to Canada’s growth rate. For every 1,000 residents, the northern nation brought in 32 people last year, compared with fewer than 10 in the US.

Put another way: Over the past two years, 2.4 million people arrived in Canada, more than New Mexico’s population, yet Canada barely added enough housing for the residents of Albuquerque.

Canada’s experience shows there’s a limit to immigration-fueled growth: Once new arrivals exceed a country’s capacity to absorb them, standards of living decline even if top-line numbers are inflated. The Bank of Nova Scotia estimates a productivity-neutral rate of population growth is less than a third of what Canada saw last year, which would be more in line with the US pace.

So even as that record population growth keeps Canada’s GDP growing, life is getting tougher, especially for younger generations and for immigrants such as 29-year-old Akanksha Biswas.

Biswas arrived in Canada in the middle of 2022, just as per-capita GDP started plunging amid the start of the post-pandemic immigration boom and the Bank of Canada’s aggressive interest-rate tightening cycle.

The former Sydneysider moved to Toronto for what she believed would be a better life with a lower cost of living and greater career prospects. Instead, she faced higher rent, lower pay and limited job opportunities.

“I actually had a completely different picture in my mind about what life would be like in Toronto,” said Biswas, who works in advertising. “Prices were almost similar, but there’s a lot more competition in the job market.”

Canada’s working-age population grew by a million over the past year but the labor market only created 324,000 jobs. The upshot: The unemployment rate rose by more than a full percentage point, with young people and newcomers again the worst hit.

Biswas spends more than a third of her income on the monthly rent bill of C$2,800 ($2,050), splitting the cost with her partner. She’s dining out less and making coffee at home instead of going to the cafe. She’s also pushing back plans to have children or buy a home.

“I don’t see my future here if I want to raise a family,” she says.

While millions of Americans also face a housing affordability crisis, their real disposable income growth has stayed above the rise in home prices over much of the past two decades. Not so in Canada. The median price for homes in Toronto is now C$1.3 million, nearly three times that of Chicago, a comparable US city.

The chronic underbuilding of homes and decades of continuous rises in prices has drained funds from other parts of the economy toward housing. That lack of investment in capital — combined with firms’ focusing instead on expanding workforces due to cheaper labor costs — has driven down productivity, which the Bank of Canada says is at “emergency” levels.

Growing anxiety around the housing crunch forced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to scale back on its immigration ambitions, halting the increase of permanent resident targets and putting a limit on the growth of temporary residents for the first time.

Canada’s goal is now to cut the population of temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum claimants by 20%, or roughly by half a million people, over the next three years. That’s expected to slash the annual population growth rate by more than half to an average of 1% in 2025 and 2026.

Meantime, Biswas and her partner are calling it quits on their Canada experiment and moving to Melbourne, where they reckon they can afford a two-bedroom apartment for less than what they paid for a one-bedroom space in Toronto.

But life won’t be easy Down Under either as many of the same strains are playing out, with Australia facing its worst housing crisis in living memory.

Building permits for apartments and town houses are near a 12-year low and there remains a sizable backlog of construction work, largely due to a lack of skilled workers. The government has tried to plug the labor supply gap by boosting the number of migrants, only to find that’s making the problem even worse.

Just like Canada’s experience, the ballooning population is not only exacerbating housing demand, it’s also masking the underlying weakness in the economy.

GDP has expanded every quarter since a short Covid-induced recession in 2020, yet on a per-capita basis, GDP contracted for a third consecutive quarter in the final three months of 2023 — the deepest decline since the early 1990s economic slump.

In absolute terms, Australia’s per-capita GDP is now at a two-year low — a “material under-performance” versus the US and an outcome that could spur higher unemployment, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Angst about the lack of housing, soaring rents and surging home prices has prompted Anthony Albanese’s ruling Labor government to crack down on student visas.

“It has been proven over many many years that there’s a positive to Australia from a high migration intake,” said Stephen Halmarick, chief economist at the nation’s biggest lender Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “But in the very near term, you can see that it’s putting upward pressure on rents, house prices and clearly that’s a concern for many and the demand for some services is seeing sticky inflation.”

Neighboring New Zealand is grappling with a similar headache.

The government there last month made immediate changes to an employment visa program, introducing an English-language requirement and reducing the maximum continuous stay for a range of lower-skilled roles, citing “unsustainable” net migration. The changes were part of a plan to “create a smarter immigration” that is “self-funding, sustainable and better manages risk,” Immigration Minister Erica Stanford said in the statement at the time.

Calvin Jurnatan, 30, moved to Sydney from Indonesia in December to study construction design as a gateway to becoming a permanent resident. Months later, he still doesn’t have a job. One reason is that migrants face long and expensive processes to get their qualifications recognized.

Jurnatan’s failure to find a part-time role in construction comes despite the sector being high on the skills shortage list, especially after the government set an ambitious goal of building 1.2 million new homes by 2029. That target looks increasingly unachievable, industry players say.

Frustrated, Jurnatan has stopped looking for construction jobs and is instead scouting the retail sector where roles are easier to find. He’s doing some freelance photography to eke out a living and says he wouldn’t recommend Australia to his family and friends back home.

“People are struggling,” he said. “I’m struggling. It’s not cheap and everyone needs to work really, really hard here. So, when people call me and ask, ‘hey, how is living in Sydney right now?’ I tell them the truth.”

Independent think tank the Committee for Economic Development of Australia found in a recent report that the hourly wage gap between recent migrants and Australian-born workers increased between 2011 and 2021. On average, migrants who have been in Australia for 2 to 6 years earn more than 10% less than similar Australian-born workers.

“There are big costs from not making the best use of migrants’ skills,” according to CEDA’s senior economist Andrew Barker.

Over in Europe, its largest economy, Germany, also saw a per-capita recession that comes against a backdrop of rising political tensions over a large number of asylum seekers, housing shortages and a misfiring economy. Bloomberg Economics analysis shows that France, Austria and Sweden are also among those who have suffered per-capita recessions.

In Britain, too, record levels of migration have begun to weigh on the economy. A technical recession in the second half of last year saw headline GDP slip 0.4%, yet the slump was longer and deeper when adjusted for population. Per-capita GDP has contracted 1.7% since the start of 2022, falling in six out of the seven quarters and stagnating in the other.

With Britain close to full employment and over 850,000 dropping out of its workforce since the pandemic, immigration has helped employers fill widespread worker shortages, not least in the health and social care sectors.

“A very good bit of the growth that we saw through the 2010s was down to net migration,” said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “In terms of the overall size of the economy, it’s been really important. What’s really hard to say is what impact the net immigration has had on the per-capita numbers.”

UK GDP has expanded 23% since the start of 2010. On a per-person basis, growth in output has been far less impressive at 12%.

Over the same period, the population has surged, growing an estimated 11%, or almost 7 million, to 69 million. The Office for National Statistics expects it to hit close to 74 million in 2036 in updated population projections that now predict faster growth. Over 90% of the increase in the population expected between 2021 and 2036 will come from migrants, it said in January.

“If we hadn’t had such high immigration, housing would be cheaper than it is at the moment, possibly quite significantly,” Johnson said. “But the converse of that is that the problem has been that we simply haven’t built enough houses, given what we know is happening to the size of the population.”

The UK’s post-Brexit immigration system aimed to stop cheap labor from Europe and prioritize high-skilled workers. However, the government allows some foreign workers easier access if they are in shortage-hit sectors.

“Those shortages really are pretty much always caused by poor paying conditions, although the employers will tell you it’s all skills,” said Alan Manning, labor market economist at the London School of Economics. “Then they start complaining about ‘we can’t afford higher wages and so we have to have migrants so we can keep our existing wages.’”

The growing pressures on housing and stretched public services are prompting a backlash among voters against Rishi Sunak’s ruling Conservative government ahead of a general election expected later this year. It has hemorrhaged support to the right-wing populist Reform UK party, which is promising “net zero immigration,” while the Tories are polling in single digits among 18- to 24-year-olds who put housing as their second-most important issue.

The opposition Labour party has promised a “blitz” of planning reforms to unlock construction, as well as restraint on immigration as it heads toward what’s widely anticipated to be a sweeping election victory.

A shortage of properties for the bigger population has sent house prices to over eight times average earnings in England and Wales, and 12 times in London. In 1997, they were 3.5 times earnings and four times, respectively. A lack of supply has also caused rental costs to rocket at a record pace in the last 12 months, worsening a cost-of-living crisis for young Britons especially.

Official figures show that 234,400 homes were added to the UK housing supply in 2022-23, well below the levels needed to meet huge demand and the 300,000-a-year target the Tories promised to reach by the mid-2020s at the last election.

“If we’re looking to grow GDP by throwing more people at it, then we need more housing,” said Peter Truscott, chief executive of FTSE 250 housebuilder Crest Nicholson.

However, UK housebuilders and the government have struggled to boost construction of new homes to the levels needed. A restrictive planning system has been used by Nimbys — “not in my back yard” — to block local developments and efforts to overhaul the system by the ruling Conservatives were scuppered by concerns of a backlash in their rural southern heartlands.

“We have a completely utterly dysfunctional planning system in the UK,” said Truscott. “Forty years in house building, it’s never been so bad, and the rate of decline in planning has been quite incredible over the last couple of years.”

While encouraged by Labour plans, he cautions that it will take two parliamentary terms to make a difference as supply chain constraints will prevent an instant “flood” of new homes.

The longer voters in the UK, Australia, Canada and similar economies see their living standards go backwards, the more their opposition to rapid immigration programs will harden. A lasting fix requires government policies, especially in housing, that convince both would-be migrants and the existing populations of the benefits of immigration-led economic growth.

Source: Global Housing Shortages Are Crushing Immigration-Fueled Growth

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Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Of note:

Thanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.

Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.

Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”

“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.

The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.

The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.

Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.

“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”

The racial and ethnic disparities were most drastic when injuries were isolated from other causes of death. For example, Black children died by homicide at 10 times the rate of white children between 2016 and 2020. When the study’s lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, an associate professor of pediatrics at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, compared accidents with intentional injuries, the sobering realities of the mental health crisis came into focus.

Native American children died by suicide at more than twice the rate of white children, whose rate was already high.

“As a pediatrician, that really took my breath away,” she said.

Gun-related deaths, including accidents, homicides and suicides, were two to four times as high among Black and Native American youths than among white youths, and the risk of dying from a gun-related injury more than doubled among Black and Native American youths between 2013 and 2020.

The researchers also drew attention to disparities in other causes of death: Native American children died from pneumonia and the flu at three times the rate of white children, for example, and Black children died from asthma at almost eight times the rate of white children.

This particular study did not examine all of the variables that contribute to the causes of childhood illness, injury and death. Dr. Wolf said she hoped the paper would serve as a “wake-up call” and galvanize researchers to scrutinize the underlying factors.

Understanding the reasons for the increase in car accident deaths, for example, could determine whether redesigned intersections or targeted seatbelt campaigns would be the most effective intervention for a specific group.

For other childhood deaths, access to care is a likely factor, given that Black children with circulatory diseases are less likely to be referred for transplants and less likely to have a successful procedure compared to white children. Asthma-related disease and death are likely to be affected by access to interventions such as inhalers, as well as socioeconomic and environmental factors like air pollution.

At the same time, Dr. Woolf said, policymakers should not “wait for more research to identify the obvious next steps,” including mental health support for children and stricter gun laws. The public perception of gun violence among children is often focused on school shootings, he said, but statistically speaking, “the vast majority occur in communities across our country — day by day, one by one.”

Source: Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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Five Key Facts About Black Immigrants’ Experiences in the United States

2024/04/13 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis. Would be interesting to compare Black immigrants with native African Americans (others may have done):

Black immigrants are a growing share of the country’s population and make up 8% of all immigrants. Nearly half (47%) of Black immigrants in the U.S. are from the Caribbean, while about four in ten (43%) are from sub-Saharan Africa, with smaller shares coming from South America and Europe (3% from both regions). Most Black immigrants are U.S. citizens (68%), while one in five (21%) has a valid visa or green card and about one in ten (8%) is likely undocumented. Like immigrants overall, Black immigrants come to the U.S. seeking more opportunities for themselves and their children, and most report improved educational opportunities, employment, and financial situations as a result of moving to the U.S. However, Black immigrants report disproportionate levels of unfair treatment and discrimination in their workplaces, communities, and when seeking health care, reflecting the intersectional impacts of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Below are five key facts about their experiences, drawing on the 2023 KFF/LA Times Survey of Immigrants, with its sample size of 3,358 immigrant adults (18 and older), including 274 Black immigrant adults.

Three in four (76%) Black immigrants are working, and most say their situations are improved as a result of coming to the U.S.

Like immigrants overall, the primary reasons Black immigrants say they came to the U.S. are for better economic and job opportunities (87%), better educational opportunities (81%), and a better future for their children (80%), and most say that moving to the U.S. has made them better off in terms of educational opportunities for themselves and their children (85%), their financial situation (74%), and their employment situation (74%). About two thirds (65%) also say they are better off in terms of their safety (Figure 1).

Black immigrants face disproportionate financial challenges, including in paying for health care.

About four in ten (44%) Black immigrants have lower incomes (household income less than $40,000 per year), reflecting that most employed Black immigrants are working for hourly pay (69%). Reflecting these lower incomes, half (50%) of Black immigrants say they or someone in their household had trouble paying for at least one basic necessity in the past 12 months, including rent/mortgage, food, health, health care, or utilities or other bills, about twice the share of White (27%) and Asian immigrants (20%) who say the same (Figure 2). Specifically, three in ten (30%) Black immigrants report that their household had problems paying for health care in the past 12 months compared to about one in six White immigrants (17%) and about one in eight Asian immigrants (12%).

Most (56%) employed Black immigrants say they have faced at least one form of discrimination or unfair treatment at work asked about in the survey.

A majority of employed Black immigrants (56%) report experiencing at least one type of discrimination or form of unfair treatment at work, similar to the share of employed Hispanic immigrants who report this (55%), and higher than the shares of employed Asian (44%) and White immigrants (31%) who report the same. Among employed Black immigrants, about half (47%) say they were given fewer opportunities for promotions or raises than people born in the U.S., three in ten (31%) say they were paid less than people born in the U.S. for doing the same job, a quarter (25%) say that they had worse shifts or less control over their work hours or than people born in the U.S., and about one in five say they were not paid for all of the hours that they worked or not given overtime pay (22%) or were harassed or threatened by someone at their place of work because they were an immigrant (22%) (Figure 3). Beyond experiences with mistreatment, about one in three (34%) Black immigrants with less than a college education say they are overqualified for their job, saying that they have more skills and education than the job requires, with this share rising to about half (53%) of those with a college degree or higher.

Black immigrants report disproportionate levels of unfair treatment in social and police interactions.

Most (55%) Black immigrants say they have experienced worse treatment than people born in the U.S. in at least one of the following places: a store or restaurant, in interactions with the police, or when buying or renting a home, higher than the shares who report this among Hispanic (42%), Asian (36%), or White immigrants (22%). Specifically, about four in ten (38%) Black immigrants report experiencing worse treatment in police interactions, about a third (35%) report this in a store or restaurant, and about a quarter (26%) report worse treatment when buying or renting a home (Figure 4). Moreover, roughly one in three (34%) Black immigrants say they have been criticized for speaking a language other than English, and about four in ten (45%) say they have been told they should “go back to where you came from,” higher than the share of Hispanic (34%), Asian (32%), or White (25%) immigrants who report this experience.

Among those who have received health care in the U.S., Black immigrants are more likely than other immigrant groups to report being treated unfairly by a health care provider.

About four in ten (38%) Black immigrants who have received or tried to receive health care in the U.S. report being treated differently or unfairly by a health care provider, higher than the shares of Hispanic (28%), Asian (21%), and White immigrants (18%) who say this. The share of Black immigrants who report unfair treatment by a health care provider includes about a quarter (25%) who say they were treated unfairly because of their race, ethnic background, or skin color, 23% who say they were mistreated because of their health insurance or ability to pay, and about one in six (16%) who say that they were treated differently due to their accent or ability to speak English (Figure 5).

Source: Five Key Facts About Black Immigrants’ Experiences in the United States

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What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80,000 Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

2024/04/10 Leave a comment

Not that surprising and mirrors earlier Canadian studies (Can we avoid bias in hiring practices?):

A group of economists recently performed an experiment on around 100 of the largest companies in the country, applying for jobs using made-up résumés with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed applicants’ names to suggest that they were white or Black, and male or female — Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.

On Monday, they released the names of the companies. On average, they found, employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.

Yet this practice varied significantly by firm and industry. One-fifth of the companies — many of them retailers or car dealers — were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to white and Black applicants.

Two companies favored white applicants over Black applicants significantly more than others. They were AutoNation, a used car retailer, which contacted presumed white applicants 43 percent more often, and Genuine Parts Company, which sells auto parts including under the NAPA brand, and called presumed white candidates 33 percent more often.

In a statement, Heather Ross, a spokeswoman for Genuine Parts, said, “We are always evaluating our practices to ensure inclusivity and break down barriers, and we will continue to do so.” AutoNation did not respond to a request for comment.

Known as an audit study, the experiment was the largest of its kind in the United States: The researchers sent 80,000 résumés to 10,000 jobs from 2019 to 2021. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.

“I am not in the least bit surprised,” said Daiquiri Steele, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who previously worked for the Department of Labor on employment discrimination. “If you’re having trouble breaking in, the biggest issue is the ripple effect it has. It affects your wages and the economy of your community going forward.”

Some companies showed no difference in how they treated applications from people assumed to be white or Black. Their human resources practices — and one policy in particular (more on that later) — offer guidance for how companies can avoid biased decisions in the hiring process.

A lack of racial bias was more common in certain industries: food stores, including Kroger; food products, including Mondelez; freight and transport, including FedEx and Ryder; and wholesale, including Sysco and McLane Company.

“We want to bring people’s attention not only to the fact that racism is real, sexism is real, some are discriminating, but also that it’s possible to do better, and there’s something to be learned from those that have been doing a good job,” said Patrick Kline, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the study with Evan K. Rose at the University of Chicago and Christopher R. Walters at Berkeley.

The researchers first published details of their experiment in 2021, but without naming the companies. The new paper, which is set to run in the American Economic Review, names the companies and explains the methodology developed to group them by their performance, while accounting for statistical noise.

Source: What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80,000 Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

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ICYMI: Trump’s immigration rhetoric makes inroads with some Democrats. That could be a concern for Biden

2024/04/05 Leave a comment

Of note (even if immigrants, particularly irregulars and illegals, tend to commit less crime):

The video shared by former President Donald Trump features horror movie music and footage of migrants purportedly entering the U.S. from countries including Cameroon, Afghanistan and China. Shots of men with tattoos and videos of violent crime are set against close-ups of people waving and wrapping themselves in American flags.

“They’re coming by the thousands,” Trump says in the video, posted on his social media site. “We will secure our borders. And we will restore sovereignty.”

In his speeches and online posts, Trump has ramped up anti-immigrant rhetoric as he seeks the White House a third time, casting migrants as dangerous criminals “poisoning the blood” of America. Hitting the nation’s deepest fault lines of race and national identity, his messaging often relies on falsehoods about migration. But it resonates with many of his core supporters going back a decade, to when “build the wall” chants began to ring out at his rallies.

President Joe Biden and his allies discuss the border very differently. The Democrat portrays the situation as a policy dispute that Congress can fix and hits Republicans in Washington for backing away from a border security deal after facing criticism from Trump.

But in a potentially worrying sign for Biden, Trump’s message appears to be resonating with key elements of the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to win over this November.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of how Biden is handling border security, including about 4 in 10 Democrats, 55% of Black adults and 73% of Hispanic adults, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 45% of Americans described the situation as a crisis, while another 32% said it was a major problem.

Vetress Boyce, a Chicago-based racial justice activist, was among those who expressed frustration with Biden’s immigration policies and the city’s approach as it tries to shelter newly arriving migrants. She argued Democrats should be focusing on economic investment in Black communities, not newcomers.

“They’re sending us people who are starving, the same way Blacks are starving in this country. They’re sending us people who want to escape the conditions and come here for a better lifestyle when the ones here are suffering and have been suffering for over 100 years,” Boyce said. “That recipe is a mixture for disaster. It’s a disaster just waiting to happen.”

Gracie Martinez is a 52-year-old Hispanic small business owner from Eagle Pass, Texas, the border town that Trump visited in February when he and Biden made same-day trips to the state. Martinez said she once voted for former President Barack Obama and is still a Democrat, but now backs Trump — mainly because of the border.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “It’s tons and tons of people and they’re giving them medical and money, phones,” she said, complaining those who went through the legal immigration system are treated worse.

Priscilla Hesles, 55, a teacher who lives in Eagle Pass, Texas, described the current situation as “almost an overtaking” that had changed the town.

“We don’t know where they’re hiding. We don’t know where they’ve infiltrated into and where are they going to come out of,” said Hesles, who said she used to take an evening walk to a local church, but stopped after she was shaken by an encounter with a group of men she alleged were migrants.

Immigration will almost certainly be one of the central issues in November’s election, with both sides spending the next six months trying to paint the other as wrong on border security.

The president’s reelection campaign recently launched a $30 million ad campaign targeting Latino audiences in key swing states that includes a digital ad in English and Spanish highlighting Trump’s past description of Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists.”

The White House has also mulled a series of executive actions that could drastically tighten immigration restrictions, effectively going around Congress after it failed to pass the bipartisan deal Biden endorsed.

“Trump is a fraud who is only out for himself,” said Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz. “We will make sure voters know that this November.”

Trump will campaign Tuesday in Wisconsin and Michigan this week, where he is expected to again tear into Biden on immigration. His campaign said his event in the western Michigan city of Grand Rapids will focus on what it alleged was “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”

The former president calls recent record-high arrests for southwest border crossings an “invasion” orchestrated by Democrats to transform America’s very makeup. Trump accuses Biden of purposely allowing criminals and potential terrorists to enter the country unchecked, going so far as to claim the president isengaged in a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”

He also casts migrants — many of them women and children escaping poverty and violence — as “ poisoning the blood ” of America with drugs and disease and claimed some are “not people.” Experts who study extremism warn against using dehumanizing language in describing migrants.

There is no evidence that foreign governments are emptying their jails or mental asylums as Trump says. And while conservative news coverage has been dominated by several high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally, the latest FBI statistics show overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

Studies have also found that people living in the country illegally are far less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.

“Certainly the last several months have demonstrated a clear shift in political support,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigrant resettlement group Global Refuge and a former Obama administration and State Department official.

“I think that relates to the rhetoric of the past several years,” she said, “and just this dynamic of being outmatched by a loud, extreme of xenophobic rhetoric that hasn’t been countered with reality and the facts on the ground.”

Part of what has made the border such a salient issue is that its impact is being felt far from the border.

Trump allies, most notably Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have used state-funded buses to send more than 100,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities like New York, Denver and Chicago, where Democrats will hold this summer’s convention. While the program was initially dismissed as a publicity stunt, the influx has strained city budgets and left local leaders scrambling to provide emergency housing and medical care for new groups of migrants.

Local news coverage, meanwhile, has often been negative. Viewers have seen migrants blamed for everything from a string of gang-related New Jersey robberies to burglary rings targeting retail stores in suburban Philadelphia to measles cases in parts of Arizona and Illinois.

Abbott has deployed the Texas National Guard to the border, placed concertina wire along parts of the Rio Grande in defiance of U.S. Supreme Court orders, and has argued his state should be able to enforce its own immigration laws.

Some far-right internet sites have begun pointing to Abbott’s actions as the first salvo in a coming civil war. And Russia has also helped spread and amplifymisleading and incendiary content about U.S. immigration and border security as part of its broader efforts to polarize Americans. A recent analysis by the firm Logically, which tracks Russian disinformation, found online influencers and social media accounts linked to the Kremlin have seized on the idea of a new civil war and efforts by states like Texas to secede from the union.

Amy Cooter, who directs research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, worries the current wave of civil war talk will only increase as the election nears. So far, it has generally been limited to far-right message boards. But immigration is enough of a concern generally that its political potency is intensified, Cooter said.

“Non-extremist Americans are worried about this, too,” she said. “It’s about culture and perceptions about who is an American.”

In the meantime, there are people like Rudy Menchaca, an Eagle Pass bar owner who also works for a company that imports Corona beer from Mexico and blamed the problems at the border for hurting business.

Menchaca is the kind of Hispanic voter Biden is counting on to back his reelection bid. The 27-year-old said he was never a fan of Trump’s rhetoric and how he portrayed Hispanics and Mexicans. “We’re not all like that,” he said.

But he also said he was warming to the idea of backing the former president because of the reality on the ground.

“I need those soldiers to be around if I have my business,” Menchaca said of Texas forces dispatched to the border. “The bad ones that come in could break in.”

Source: Trump’s immigration rhetoric makes inroads with some Democrats. That could be a concern for Biden

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Next U.S. census will have new boxes for ‘Middle Eastern or North African,’ ‘Latino’

2024/04/01 Leave a comment

Overdue. Good discussion of some of the issues involved:

On the next U.S. census and future federal government forms, the list of checkboxes for a person’s race and ethnicity is officially getting longer.

The Biden administration has approved proposals for a new response option for “Middle Eastern or North African” and a “Hispanic or Latino” box that appears under a reformatted question that asks: “What is your race and/or ethnicity?”

Going forward, participants in federal surveys will be presented with at least seven “race and/or ethnicity” categories, along with instructions that say: “Select all that apply.”

After years of research and discussion by federal officials for a complicated review process that goes back to 2014, the decision was announced Thursday in a Federal Register notice, which was made available for public inspection before its official publication.

Officials at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget revived these Obama-era proposals after they were shelved by the Trump administration. Supporters of these changes say they could help the racial and ethnic data used to redraw maps of voting districts, enforce civil rights protections and guide policymaking and research better reflect people’s identities today.

“These revisions will enhance our ability to compare information and data across federal agencies, and also to understand how well federal programs serve a diverse America,” Karin Orvis, U.S. chief statistician within OMB, said in a blog post.

Most people living in the U.S. are not expected to see the changes on the census until forms for the next once-a-decade head count of the country’s residents are distributed in 2030.

But a sea change is coming as federal agencies — plus many state and local governments and private institutions participating in federal programs — figure out how to update their forms and databases in order to meet the U.S. government’s new statistical standards.

Federal agencies that release data about race and ethnicity are required to each turn in a public action plan to OMB by late September 2025 and get all of their surveys and statistics in line with the new requirements by late March 2029.

The “White” definition has changed, and “Latino” is now a “race and/or ethnicity”

OMB’s decision to change its statistical standards on race and ethnicity for the first time in more than a quarter-century also marks a major shift in the U.S. government’s definition of “White,” which no longer includes people who identify with Middle Eastern or North African groups such as Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli, Jordanian, Kurdish, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian and Yemeni.

That move sets up “Middle Eastern or North African” as the first completely new racial or ethnic category to be required on federal government forms since officials first issued in 1977 standards on racial and ethnic data that the Census Bureau and other federal agencies must follow.

For more than three decades, advocates for Arab Americans and other MENA groups have campaigned for their own checkbox on the U.S. census and other government forms, and recent research suggests that many people of MENA descent do not see themselves as white, a category that the federal government previously considered to include people with “origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”

Studies by the bureau show that the government’s previous standards have also been out of step with many Latinos. Those standards required asking about a person’s Hispanic or Latino identity — which the federal government considers to be an ethnicity that can be any race — before asking about their racial identity.

Combining a question about Hispanic origins with a question about race into one question, while allowing people to check as many boxes as they want, is likely to lower the share of Latinos who mark the “Some other race” categoryon census forms, the bureau’s research from 2015 suggests.

Recent research, however, suggests it’s not clear how someone who identifies as Afro Latino is likely to respond to a combined race-ethnicity question. According to the Federal Register notice, about half of participants in a recent study for OMB selected only the “Hispanic or Latino” box when presented with a combined question after previously selecting both the Latino and Black categories.

This new question format, along with the addition of a “Middle Eastern or North African” box, could also decrease the number of people who mark the “White” box.

Other changes coming to federal forms

Among the other proposals OMB has greenlit is a general requirement for federal agencies to ask for detailed responses about people’s identities beyond the seven minimum racial and ethnic categories. This change, advocates say, will produce more insightful statistics about differences in health care outcomes and socioeconomic disparities within the minimum categories.

OMB has also approved removing from its standards outdated language about allowing “Negro” as a term to describe the “Black” category and “Far East” to describe a geographic region of origin for people of Asian descent, which, according to the U.S. government’s revised definition, now includes individuals “with origins in any of the original peoples of Central or East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia.”

The federal government’s new definitions of the seven minimum racial and ethnic categories list the six largest groups, based on 2020 census results, that the government considers to be part of that category. For example, its definition of “Black or African American” now reads: “Individuals with origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa, including, for example, African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, and Somali.”

For the standards’ official description for “American Indian or Alaska Native,” OMB is removing a phrase about maintaining “tribal affiliation or community attachment.” The revised definition says: “Individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of North, Central, and South America, including, for example, Navajo Nation, Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana, Native Village of Barrow Inupiat Traditional Government, Nome Eskimo Community, Aztec, and Maya.”

OMB decided not to move forward with calls to require agencies to gather data to better understand the descendants of enslaved people originally from Africa, which included suggestions to use “American Descendants of Slavery” or “American Freedman” to describe the group. OMB said in the Federal Register notice that “further research is needed,” adding that there was opposition to this proposal from civil rights groups and others because of concerns over “the difficulty of verifying that identification is accurate, the usefulness or necessity of the data, the exclusion of other groups of historically enslaved people, and the creation of confusion that could make the Black or African American community harder to count.”

A changing conversation about race and ethnicity

OMB says it plans to create a standing committee to formally review these standards at least once a decade going forward. Among the key questions OMB says the committee may review is how to encourage people to select multiple categories when appropriate so that there are complete and accurate estimates about groups such as Afro Latinos.

While the revised standards go into many minute details about how surveys and data tables should be presented, there are many unanswered questions.

It’s not clear, for example, how the federal government will consider people who identify as MENA when monitoring and enforcing civil rights. OMB’s previous guidance, which was rescinded Thursday, used the earlier “White” definition, which included people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa and was not categorized as a “minority race” that would face “disparate impact or discriminatory patterns.” The new standards offer no new guidance about which specific groups the government considers to be a “minority race.”

Still, changes to how the government asks about people’s identities could also reset the national conversation about race and ethnicity.

Some critics of using one question to ask about both a person’s race and ethnicity, including researchers behind a campaign called “Latino Is Not A Race,” have raised concerns about blurring the distinctions between the two concepts.

In response to OMB’s decision, the AfroLatino Coalition called for the Census Bureau to do more research about how these changes will affect how Afro Latinos report their identities, including those in Puerto Rico.

“By listing Latino ethnicity as co-equal with racial categories, Latinos are inaccurately portrayed as a population without racial differences despite all the research showing how Black Latinos are treated differently from other Latinos,” the coalition said in a statement. “Separating ethnicity from race is essential for making visible the actual and intersectional racial disparities that exist within a racially diverse ethnic group like Latinos in access to important public goods such as access to education, employment, housing, medical services, etc. Without it, systemic racism, especially when discussing Latino populations, is rendered invisible.”

The introduction of a “Middle Eastern or North African” category may reopen unresolved questions and tensions over the fact that the Middle East and North Africa are regions with no universally agreed-upon borders and with transnational groups.

OMB received public feedback in support of including Armenian, Somali and Sudanese among MENA groups, but it said in its Federal Register notice that the Census Bureau’s research has found that most people who identify with those groups did not select a MENA checkbox when presented with one. “Additional research is needed on these groups to monitor their preferred identification,” OMB added in the notice. Many advocates of a MENA category, including the Arab American Institute, have criticized the bureau’s previous research for not specifically testing “Middle Eastern or North African” as an ethnic category whose members can be of any race.

Maya Berry, the Arab American Institute’s executive director, says after decades of campaigning for a MENA checkbox on federal forms, OMB’s announcement made Thursday “a pretty significant and big day.”

“The fact that Arab-Americans have been rendered invisible and other populations from MENA have been rendered invisible without that checkbox has really been harmful to communities,” Berry says.

But at the same time, Berry says she is concerned that the example groups representing the MENA category in OMB’s new definition for “Middle Eastern or North African” do not represent the full racial and geographic diversity of MENA communities in the U.S., including those from Black diaspora communities. That, in turn, could discourage some people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa from selecting the MENA box, Berry worries.

“I didn’t want to go from being rendered invisible to being undercounted,” she adds.

How OMB decided which groups have to be represented in the checkboxes under the racial and ethnic categories on forms has also drawn criticism from Meeta Anand, senior director of the census and data equity program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“We are concerned that the Office of Management and Budget has already specified the required detailed categories prior to engaging in the due diligence, research, and testing as to what would elicit inclusive and accurate responses for those who identify with more than one racial or ethnic category,” Anand said in a statement.

More work is needed, says Arturo Vargas, a longtime census watcher, who is the CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.

“There is going to be a significant need for a public education effort going forward by the Census Bureau and all federal agencies that collect data on race and ethnicity so that all respondents to surveys understand what is being asked,” Vargas adds. “The Census Bureau needs to continue testing to see how people are interpreting this question so that the question can be improved over the short term, so that we have the best ideal question possible when we get to the 2030 decennial.”

OMB announced the last major changes to its standards in 1997, when it approved allowing survey participants to report more than one race and splitting the “Asian or Pacific Islander” category into “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” which OMB has now shortened by removing the word “Other.”

Source: Next U.S. census will have new boxes for ‘Middle Eastern or North African,’ ‘Latino’

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Racial disparities in voter turnout have grown since Supreme Court ruling, study says

2024/03/07 2 Comments

Interesting study and intuitively makes sense:

The turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters in the U.S. is growing fastest in jurisdictions that were stripped of a federal civil rights-era voting protection a decade ago, according to a new study.

The protections in Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act required some states and localities with a history of voting discrimination to obtain federal approval before they could make any changes to their voting laws or procedures.

It most recently covered nine states, most of them in the South, as well as certain counties and towns in a handful of other states.

In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively gutted Section 5 in Shelby County v. Holder — clearing the way for states to pass laws for measures like redistricting, changing poll locations and adding restrictive voter ID requirements without federal review.

A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that advocates for expanded voting access, measured the impact of the Shelby Countydecision between 2012 and 2022.

The researchers looked at nearly a billion voter records and compared the rate at which white and nonwhite Americans vote in elections. The study refers to the difference between white voters and other groups as the “turnout gap.”

The gap can be wide: In three elections from 2018 to 2022, 43% of eligible white voters cast their ballots every time, while that figure for Black voters was 27%, 21% for Asian American voters and 19% for Hispanic voters, according to the Pew Research Center.

Understanding the effect of any voting law can be difficult because a number of factors can alter turnout, including how competitive the election is and who’s on the ballot.

And across the U.S., the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters is increasing for various reasons.

But the think tank found that the turnout gap was growing faster in places formerly covered under Section 5 and that it was growing fastest between white and Black voters in those areas.

“What we found was that these jurisdictions fell back into their pattern of adopting laws and policies that made voting difficult for people of color,” says Kareem Crayton, the center’s senior director for voting rights and representation….

Source: Racial disparities in voter turnout have grown since Supreme Court ruling, study says

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How NIMBYs are helping to turn the public against immigrants

2024/02/20 Leave a comment

Overly simplistic as factors influencing housing prices not merely NIMBY-driven. But useful comparison between Canadian and American situations:

…The problem arises when governments effectively prohibit the supply of housing from rising in line with demand. Between 2012 and 2022, Americans formed 15.6 million new households but built only 11.9 million new housing units. As a result, even before the post-lockdown surge in migration, there were more aspiring households than homes in America’s thriving metro areas.

This was largely a consequence of zoning restrictions. Municipal governments have collectively made it illegal to erect an apartment building on about 75 percent of our country’s residential land. In large swaths of the country, there are households eager to rent or buy a modest apartment, and developers eager to provide them, but zoning restrictions have blocked such transactions from taking place.

This creates a housing shortage. You can house 32 families much more quickly and cheaply by building a single apartment building than by erecting 32 separate houses. To require all of your community’s housing units to be single-family homes isn’t all that different from prohibiting the manufacture of all non-luxury cars. In both cases, you end up with artificial scarcity and unaffordability.

If private builders were allowed to respond to rising demand — while the government ensured the provision of housing to those unable to pay market rents — we could have large increases in immigration without any uptick in housing insecurity. In our current reality, the rise in asylum seekers has coincided with a record spike in homelessness and persistently high housing costs. 

It is hard enough to sustain popular support for large-scale immigration when there aren’t major economic downsides to that policy. Add legitimate concerns about housing costs to perennial anxieties over cultural change, and it becomes difficult for even the most pro-immigration societies to avoid a nativist backlash. Or at least, this is what recent events in Canada suggest.

Why Canada is getting colder on immigration

Canada has long been considered an exceptionally pro-immigrant country. Yet it has struggled to sustain popular support for liberal immigration policies amid its deepening housing shortage. Canada’s experience therefore serves as a cautionary tale for American progressives: If we allow municipalities to suppress housing construction, then ridding our nation’s mainstream politics of Trumpian xenophobia and electing a vigorously pro-immigrant administration will not be enough to avert popular demands for restricting immigration. 

Until recently, Canada’s immigration politics were the envy of US cosmopolitans. In 2016, while many other nations were trying to repel Syrian refugees, the Canadian government couldn’t find enough displaced families to meet the public’s demand for sponsoring them. Since 2019, the country has welcomed more refugees than any other nation, and done so with minimal public outcry. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to capitalize on his country’s multicultural openness by putting immigration expansion at the center of his vision of economic growth. Canada welcomed 471,550 new permanent residents in 2023, up from 300,000 in 2015.

And that figure does not include foreign students, temporary workers, and refugees, who together constitute an even larger group of new arrivals. In 2025 and 2026, the government aims to admit 500,000 new permanent residents each year.

But in recent months, the political sustainability of Trudeau’s plan has come into question, in no small part because immigration’s impact on housing costs has come under scrutiny. 

Rents have soared across Canada in recent years. From 1990 to 2022, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the country increased at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent. In 2023, it rose by 8 percent. The government estimates that it will need to add 3.5 million extra housing units by 2030 to make shelter affordable. But a recent report from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce suggests that this underestimates the housing shortage by 1.5 million units, a shortfall driven by an undercount of nonpermanent immigrants, who have been entering the country in massive numbers.

Trudeau has sought to promote housing construction in various ways. But his administration’s efforts have yet to offset the impact of years of highly restrictive zoning in many of Canada’s largest population centers.

As Canadians bid against each other for an inadequate supply of housing units, they’ve soured on immigration. 

In a 2022 poll from the Environics Institute for Survey Research, Canadians disagreed with the statement that there was too much immigration in their country by a margin of 42 points. One year later, that margin had shrunk to 7 points, the largest single-year shift in the survey’s history. Among Canadians who said immigration levels were too high, the most commonly cited reason by far was that immigrants drive up housing prices. 

In response to these changing political winds, the Trudeau government has sought to restrict admissions of international students while imploring universities to provide dedicated housing for their enrollees. But this minor concession to the nation’s restrictionist mood appears insufficient. The prime minister’s approval rating has sunk in recent months, with 64 percent of Canadians now disapproving of his performance. Meanwhile, Canada’s Conservative Party has ridden the housing and immigration issues to a strong advantage over Trudeau’s Liberals in the polls. 

Abundance is possible, but scarcity seems popular 

There are many parallels between the politics of immigration reform and those of housing policy. In both cases, countries have the power to swiftly increase their collective prosperity by tolerating some short-term disruptions. When cities let developers build more housing, they not only reduce rent inflation but also increase their tax bases, which makes it easier to fund robust social services. When rich nations let prime-age immigrants settle within their borders, they increase their productive capacity, which makes it more affordable to support retirees. 

And yet, in both of these policy areas, we routinely opt to make ourselves poorer for the sake of avoiding change. 

America does not need to choose between expanding immigration and reducing housing costs. But there is a risk that we’ll choose to do neither.

Source: How NIMBYs are helping to turn the public against immigrants

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Douglas Todd: What Canada can learn from the U.S. migration crisis

2024/02/12 Leave a comment

Noting that Canadian migration issues largely the result of flawed government policies:
In Canada the big migration issues are different. Because of our relatively secure sea and land borders we’re not overwhelmed by would-be refugees, even though increasing numbers, now about 140,000, are showing up annually.Unlike in the U.S., Canada’s worst example of policy failure is entirely self-made.

It relates to how a record number of new permanent and non-permanent residents, 1.25 million, were brought into Canada in a recent one-year period. And to how the average Canadian is realizing the heightened demand is placing intense pressure on home prices and rents.

Newcomers themselves are among those suffering, especially the record number of almost one million international students admitted in 2023, who arrived in Canada at a per capita rate six times higher than in the U.S.

Many are squeezing into overpriced apartments. A story emerged out of Brampton this week of 25 foreign students living in one basement. Many are also paying exorbitant fees to often marginal private schools, while being exploited by employers seeking not only low-wage employees, but meek ones. A report this week found 91 students from India had died in the past five years in Canada, some by suicide.

And while nine of 10 foreign students arrive with the dream of becoming permanent residents, according to Statistics Canada, experts say most will never win the immigration prize, which ends up being a kind of lottery.

It is only last month that the Liberal government said it would put a cap on study visas.

There are huge political implications to migration policy. And, for different reasons, Canada’s Liberals and America’s Democrats are losing votes over it.

In Canada it’s looking like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, which since 2015 has championed ever-rising migration levels as the key to national prosperity, is finally realizing their ways are hurting them electorally. Trudeau’s Liberals have welcomed a record number of migrants and pushed the narrative that Canada’s French and English populations are rife with bigotry.

Within the span of just eight months last year the number of Canadians saying there are too many refugees coming to the country almost doubled, to 46 per cent, according to surveys by Jack Jedwab of the Metropolis Institute. Half of Canadians also now think there are too many immigrants, with that figure rising to 61 per cent among those with lower incomes.

The Liberals, as a result, are scrambling to turn around a decade of messaging.

This week immigration minister Marc Miller said he would curb the country’s dependence on the “cheap labour” supplied by foreign workers and international students. Last month he introduced a limit on foreign student visas, cutting them by 35 per cent for this year.

Miller will announce further changes soon to restrict students’ off-campus work hours and he’s also reviewing the country’s temporary foreign worker program. That’s on top of the Liberals this month declaring they would extend their ban — which is full of loopholes — on foreign home ownership.

It remains to be seen if anything actually comes of Ottawa’s announcements. But the hard reality is the polls are making the Liberals, and the Democrats, open their eyes to how more balanced migration policy, and a more orderly system, are key to electoral success.

What does that mean for the U.S.? It points to the need for Biden to move to the middle — to tighten border security, and streamline the official immigration process.For Canada it means the minority Liberal government, propped up by the NDP, has to learn, as economists have long warned, to stop claiming that having the highest migration rates in the world will be an economic panacea.

Achieving prosperity for all, including newcomers, is far more complex than that.

Source: Douglas Todd: What Canada can learn from the U.S. migration crisis

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