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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Migrants Face Cold, Perilous Crossing From Canada to New York

2024/02/12 Leave a comment

The numbers that help explain the expansion of the STCA to the length of the border, not only a Canadian concern:

…Officials at the northern border recorded 191,603 encounters with people crossing into the United States in 2023, a 41 percent increase from 2022 — though still a small number in comparison with the more than two million people apprehended on the southern border last year.

And while the vast majority of those migrants presented themselves at official ports of entry to request asylum, a growing number were caught after crossing illegally into the United States, sometimes guided by smugglers.

More than 12,200 people were apprehended crossing illegally from Canada last year, a 241 percent jump from the 3,578 arrested the previous year. Most of them were Mexicans, who can fly to Canada without a visa and may prefer the northern border to avoid the cartels that exploit migrants in their country.

The phenomenon has transformed a 295-mile border area along northern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire into a hot spot of migration: About 70 percent of the illegal crossings in 2023 happened on this stretch, known as the Swanton Sector.

Source: Migrants Face Cold, Perilous Crossing From Canada to New York

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Stop Granting U.S. Citizenship to Children of Foreign Diplomats

2024/02/08 Leave a comment

Interesting distinction that the USA makes between diplomats and administrative and consular staff. Canada does not make that distinction and any child of a representative of a foreign government is not entitled to Canadian citizenship. The only exception, likely rare, if one of the parents is also Canadian citizen or Permanent Residents when the child is born.

However, the Vavilov case indicated that undeclared foreign representatives such as spies, can obtain citizenship for their offspring, based on what was an overly narrow interpretation by the Supreme Court. Any future change to the Citizenship Act should address this gap.

Likely CIS overstates the the risks and the extent of the practise given their overall orientation:

…Under State Department’s complicated rules, babies born in this country to blue-list diplomats are not considered U.S. citizens, while white-list offspring, born from parents who are typically administrative or consular staff, are deemed full Americans. This strange outcome ignores the fact that, in both cases, the foreign parents are temporarily in our country, employed by another government or international organization, and enjoying unique diplomatic privileges or immunities. The State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions (OFM) is charged with keeping up with the distinctions and managing this dubious system.

Categorizing foreign officials on one list or another can be a tricky matter, often manipulated by unscrupulous foreign missions that seek to help a pregnant female staffer birth an American citizen. As the Sobhani case demonstrates, OFM’s important function, if not done right, can result in wrongly handing out U.S. passports.

For years, my colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)have monitored and analyzed this poorly conceived and run system, calling out the vulnerabilities in managing it. No one at the State Department really takes full ownership of supervising the diplomatic lists, as the Sobhani case illustrates, with its administrative headaches and processing confusion. Moreover, it all rests on a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. CIS has rightly called on the State to change the system.

At any given time, there are some 100,000 foreign diplomats and their dependents living in the United States. These officials are accredited to bilateral embassies and consulates as well as a plethora of international organizations, most significantly the United Nations and its satellite entities. Keeping up with these people is a major challenge.

Although many, perhaps most, foreign officials are professionals not interested in exploiting their diplomatic presence, a significant number are out to game their privileges, including scoring U.S. passports for relatives and friends.

Source: Stop Granting U.S. Citizenship to Children of Foreign Diplomats

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Le Devoir Éditorial | L’immigration et les petits calculs politiciens

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Malheureusement:

Si les enjeux d’immigration présentent des défis planétaires de plus en plus aigus et compliqués, ces défis gagneraient indubitablement en clarté si les gouvernements de tout acabit évitaient d’en instrumentaliser les côtés sombres à des fins politiques et électorales. Prenons seulement l’actualité récente en Grande-Bretagne, en France et aux États-Unis. Trois pays dont les gouvernements embrument le débat et cultivent les méfiances xénophobes en cédant aux sirènes du populisme.

Au premier ministre britannique, Rishi Sunak, armé d’un slogan alarmiste (« Stop the boats »), revient la palme de la déshumanisation des migrants pour son projet de transfert de demandeurs d’asile vers le Rwanda. Fondé sur un accord signé avec l’autoritaire Paul Kagame il y a près de deux ans, le projet de loi adopté le 18 janvier dernier par la majorité conservatrice aux Communes vise à décourager les migrants de traverser la Manche — ils ont été environ 30 000 à le faire en 2023, au péril de leur vie. Sunak entend procéder bien que la Cour suprême britannique ait désavoué le projet en estimant que le Rwanda peut difficilement être considéré comme un « pays sûr ». 

Outre qu’il est loin d’être acquis que les expulsions ralentiraient les arrivées par « petits bateaux », les chiffres montrent noir sur blanc que la croisade de M. Sunak, qui est largement menotté par l’aile droite du parti, tient du délire. Le fait est qu’entre juin 2022 et juin 2023, la migration a été essentiellement légale au Royaume-Uni, répondant aux besoins urgents du marché de l’emploi, particulièrement en santé. Les migrants en situation irrégulière ont représenté 7,7 % de la totalité des  682 000 entrées. Qu’à cela ne tienne : à la traîne dans les sondages face aux travaillistes, M. Sunak n’a pas seulement décidé de faire de son « projet Rwanda » le socle de sa politique contre l’immigration clandestine, il compte aussi en faire l’un des ressorts principaux de sa stratégie de campagne aux législatives de janvier 2025.

En France, des mois de controverse autour de la nouvelle loi sur l’immigration ont obéi à de semblables petits calculs, permettant in fine à Marine Le Pen, cheffe du Rassemblement national, de crier à une « grande victoire idéologique » — du moins jusqu’à ce que le Conseil constitutionnel ne censure une grande partie de la législation la semaine dernière. C’est ainsi qu’en cheval de Troie, le concept de « préférence nationale », si cher à l’extrême droite, s’est imposé de façon inédite dans un texte législatif français, avec le soutien de la droite traditionnelle (Les Républicains) et de la majorité macroniste. Résultat : les Français auront vécu une saga où Emmanuel Macron aura moins cherché à penser une politique migratoire réformée avec clairvoyance, à l’abri des dérives, qu’à enregistrer un succès législatif à n’importe quel prix, lui dont la présidence ne va nulle part à six mois du rendez-vous des élections européennes.

Aux États-Unis, Donald Trump s’emploie ces temps-ci à saboter un projet d’accord migratoire entre sénateurs démocrates et républicains pour empêcher coûte que coûte que sa conclusion ne fasse bien paraître le président Joe Biden en cette année de scrutin présidentiel. Sur le fond, le projet repose pourtant sur des mesures étroitement punitives et tout à fait au goût des républicains. Seraient sensiblement élargis, en vertu de cette entente, les pouvoirs d’expulsion manu militari dont disposent les agents frontaliers. Dans l’espoir à courte vue de raplomber sa popularité, M. Biden se trouve ainsi à jouer le jeu de la droite dure anti-immigration. Il est d’autant plus piégé par cette dynamique que le clan trumpiste au Congrès lie l’augmentation de l’aide militaire à l’Ukraine, pièce maîtresse de sa politique étrangère, à l’adoption de mesures radicales de refoulement à la frontière mexico-américaine.

En Europe comme aux États-Unis, sur fond de stagnation législative, la « pression migratoire » ne diminue pas. Ils ont été 267 000 migrants à débarquer aux frontières méridionales de l’Union européenne l’année dernière et 2800 à se noyer en Méditerranée ; ils ont été 300 000 pendant le seul mois de décembre dernier à cogner à la porte des États-Unis. Des nombres records. Des années de politiques d’endiguement et d’externalisation des contrôles n’y ont rien changé, bien au contraire, de la même manière que la fermeture du chemin Roxham — c’était écrit dans le ciel — n’a rien réglé.

À prétendre qu’il y a des réponses simples à des problèmes compliqués ; à faire l’économie des faits et à laisser prospérer les faussetés ; à trop peu investir, en amont des mouvements de migration, dans le développement des pays du Sud ; à faire depuis toujours, aux États-Unis, l’impasse sur une réforme du système d’immigration, on se trouve trop souvent à laisser la réflexion autour des enjeux de géopolitique migratoire, d’une portée pourtant capitale sur la vie des sociétés partout dans le monde, à se conclure sur des décisions politiciennes prises à la petite semaine.

Source: Éditorial | L’immigration et les petits calculs politiciens

Filed under Immigration, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Jump in illegal crossings causes speculation amongst residents of Canada-U.S. border states [southbound]

2024/01/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

The number of apprehensions in the border sector that includes Vermont, New Hampshire and part of New York state rose to 6,925 last year from 1,065 the year before, according to figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. About half of these were Mexican nationals, with significant proportions from India and Venezuela as well.

The totals are still modest compared to those on the U.S. border with Mexico. The entire frontier with Canada saw fewer than 200,000 apprehensions last year, a little more than 6 per cent of the 3.2 million nationwide total.

But the increase has prompted Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley to argue for building a wall on at least part of the Canada-U.S. border. Before quitting the race this month, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis also endorsed such a policy. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced a tenfold increase of state trooper patrols in the area.

Source: Jump in illegal crossings causes speculation amongst residents of Canada-U.S. border states

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 – Cato Institute

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Of interest:

In response to a question about restricting immigration, House Representative Yvette D. Clarke (D‑NY) recently stated, “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.” When a Republican member of Congress askedwhether this was the motivation for other Democrats, including President Biden, to oppose more extreme asylum restrictions during a committee hearing at which I testifiedlast week, former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan stated:

I certainly believe it’s probably associated with the decision to overturn the Trump Census rule, so now [immigrants] will be mandated to be counted in the Census. When we reapportionate [sic] seats, it’s going to have an effect.

Although former President Trump did attempt to exclude some noncitizens from the Census count and from House apportionment, multiple courts foundthose efforts to be illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution is clear: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.” But does this provision of the Constitution—whatever its merits—give Republicans a good reason to oppose immigration?

No, the data are equally clear: recent immigration trends are benefiting Republicans in states where they control the legislature and manage redistricting. About 62 percent of the three‐​million increase in the total immigrant population from March 2019 to March 2023 has occurred in GOP states, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

The American Community Survey (with a larger sample size but slightly older data) attributes 60 percent of the growth in the immigrant population to GOP states from July 2019 to July 2022. These percentages are also similar for the Latin American immigrant population growth.

What about noncitizens who might be excluded by a US citizen‐​only census? For them, an overwhelming 95 percent of the increase in the noncitizen population has been in GOP states from March 2019 to March 2023. Eliminating the growth in the noncitizen population from 2019 to 2023 would have cost Republican states 1.2 million people, or about two seats in Congress (the average congressional district has 760,367 people). Figure 1 shows the net increase in immigrant populations for states under GOP and Democratic control.

Table 1 shows the full data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement for March 2023 and March 2019. The Republican state leading this trend is Texas, which netted 515,970 noncitizens and 833,028 immigrants overall. Other Republican states experiencing significant growth in their immigrant populations include Kentucky (130,061 noncitizens and 146,790 immigrants), South Carolina (102,096 and 157,396), and Florida (102,055 and 178,052). It is certainly likely that these states are attracting immigrants because of their strong job growth.

The argument that recent immigration is boosting Democratic representation in Congress is unsubstantiated. In 2015, I rebutted this same claim about recent illegal immigration. I noted, “Illegal immigration from 2000 to 2010 netted the Republicans about six seats in redistricting. Democrats managed only about 4.5, giving the Republican states yet again more than a seat advantage.” Clearly, immigration has not helped Democrats in terms of apportionment for decades. Yet, this misconception has become so entrenched that the former president tried to unconstitutionally exclude some noncitizens from the Census count.

I have also explained how it is false that Republicans fare poorly during periods when the immigrant share of the population is high. Republicans have controlled at least one chamber of Congress 85 percent of the years when the immigrant share of the population exceeded 10 percent, while not controlling either chamber 83 percent of all other years. This is a staggering disparity that has been completely overlooked in current political discourse. Republicans should not fear immigration based on unfounded political concerns.

Source: Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 – Cato Institute

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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