Gibson: Immigration reform that Republicans can love, or at least vote for

2022/12/07 Leave a comment

We’ll see:

Congress is in the middle of an active lame-duck session. A bipartisan coalition of senators has affirmed marriage equality and 16 Republicans in the upper chamber have signaled they’ll join Democrats in supporting the Electoral Count Reform Act. With the dust settling on the midterm elections and a few retirements around the corner, cooperation is in the air.

Immigration advocates are seizing on this rare burst of bipartisanship to push for legislative possibilities that have been lurking near the finish line for the past two years. While a permanent resolution for Dreamers might grab the most headlines, the pending bill with the potential for broadest bipartisan support is the Farm Workforce Modernization Act.

Having passed the House with the support of 30 Republicans and all but one Democrat, it is now before the upper chamber, where Democrat Michael Bennet of Colorado and Republican Michael Crapo of Idaho have been negotiating a Senate version that could meet the threshold for a floor vote any day.

The House legislation represents hard-fought compromises. It aims to provide a path for legalization for the millions of undocumented agriculture workers currently in the United States. At the same time, it simplifies and enhances the existing “guest worker,” H-2A visa program for the agricultural sector, making it easier for farmers and ranchers to import foreign labor and making improvements in some working conditions for temporary employees.

Broad Democratic support is a given. The party has long sought to address the precarious status of undocumented farm laborers and to reform aspects of the H-2A guest worker program. Some Democrats would prefer more and faster benefits for immigrant farmworkers, but they still delivered an almost unanimous vote in favor of the compromise act.

There are also compelling reasons why 13 Republicans in the House co-sponsored the bill, and their party colleagues in the Senate should join them in supporting it. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act addresses a multitude of conservative values and concerns.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor Consumer Price Index November report, Americans haven’t faced food inflation this high since 1979, with prices rising 11.4% in the last year. Inflation has been front and center for nearly every Republican over the last year and the proposed legislation has the potential to help address rising food costs in a meaningful way.

A September report from the Cato Institute detailed how reforms built into the legislation would reduce agricultural labor costs by about $1 billion in the first year and $1.8 billion in the second, “which would lead to more workers hired, more productivity, and lower prices for consumers.”

Republicans also champion E-Verify, the web-based system that allows employers to confirm that employees are eligible to work in the U.S. This bill makes an E-Verify program mandatory for all agricultural workers 30 days after the executive branch sets the final rules for administering the legislation. It also outlines changes to the verification process, including a photo-matching system, that will likely make it better at identifying unauthorized workers.

Also important to the prevailing Republican position, the legislation underscores that certified agricultural workers remain ineligible for many forms of federally funded public benefits, such as healthcare subsidies, while at the same time, bringing many more agricultural workers into the tax-paying world, increasing revenue for states as well as the federal government.

Finally, it will be rural America, where the GOP thrives, that will benefit most directly from this legislation. In addition to increasing tax revenue in some deeply red states, the legislation will stimulate rental and real estate markets throughout rural communities with 10 years’ worth of farmworker housing vouchers and grants, as well as funding for new housing developments.

Here’s how the legislation passed by the House would work:

Longtime, law-abiding undocumented agricultural workers will be able to apply for certified agricultural worker status, which means they could come out of the shadows and work legally.

CAW candidates would not be subject to deportation while their applications are considered and employers would not be sanctioned for having previously hired them.

Certification would grant 5½ years of legal residency (including for workers’ dependents), with the possibility of an extension. Certified agricultural workers who meet further residency and work history requirements could apply to become permanent legal U.S. residents, and after that, they could apply for citizenship.

Those who don’t qualify for CAW status would be given access to H-2A visas, like newly hired foreign workers. Those already here would not be required to return to their home country to apply for the H-2As, as they are today. This common-sense change would cut down on labor supply disruptions.

The legislation also streamlines the H-2A process for employers, sets wage standards for agricultural workers, and establishes the rate at which those wages can grow — all tools for stabilizing labor costs — in the long term.

Under the new law, H2-A agricultural workers are guaranteed minimum hours, implementation of “heat illness protection” plans to avoid serious injuries while working, and the freedom to leave one employer to work for another — something they’re currently prohibited from doing, which suppresses wages for all workers. Not only is housing addressed for farmworkers, but so is transportation in and out of the fields.

Republicans often emphasize that immigrants should have to “get in line and wait their turn.” The Farm Workforce Modernization Act honors that idea but also acknowledges the crucial undocumented workforce that is already here. Through the proposed CAW program and changes in H-2A visa rules, the legislation establishes serious residency and work requirements before immigrants can gain a safe and stable place in society.

This legislation is an opportunity to address an important piece of our broken immigration system, to fill farm labor gaps and meet priorities for both parties. Because the bill has already passed the House, it creates a special opportunity during the lame-duck session for the Senate. If the upper house does not act, the opportunity dies when the session ends.

DW Gibson is the research director at Ideaspace.com and the author of “14 Miles: Building the Border Wall.”

Source: Op-Ed: Immigration reform that Republicans can love, or at least vote for

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USA: Asylum rates drop as immigration cases are fast-tracked, research finds

2022/12/02 Leave a comment

Balance between speed/efficiency and fairness, there are trade-offs:

Fast-tracked immigration cases appear to be hurting migrants’ chances of being granted asylum, researchers are finding.

“The big takeaway message is that the Biden administration really is trying to speed up cases but data shows when you speed up cases they lose,” Syracuse University professor and researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report as he toured the South Texas border on Wednesday.

Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, orTRAC, one of the nation’s leading researchers on immigration court cases, on Tuesday released a study that found that since July, asylum grant rates have fallen and it “coincides with the extremely rapid increase in expedited cases.”

Although Fiscal Year 2022 had the largest number of individuals granted asylum of any year in immigration court history, in digging into the data, researchers found that the quicker the cases went through the courts, the lower the asylum seekers’ chances.

TRAC found that when asylum cases were completed within three to 18 months, only 31% of cases were granted asylum.

“More asylum cases were granted last year than any other year but the grant rate is actually going down in recent months,” Kocher said.

(TRAC Graphic)

Border Report met up with Kocher on Wednesday as he was on day 5 of his visit to South Texas as part of a seven-week research tour of the entire Southwest border.

He said immigration cases require collecting massive amounts of evidence and documents, and TRAC data has found that migrants who retain lawyers have a higher chance of being granted asylum. He said the rushed cases could be limiting and preventing asylum-seekers from gathering all the data they need to present full cases to the judges, and it could be preventing them from getting legal counsel altogether.

“We definitely know that the Biden administration has tried to accelerate these cases to try to clear out the backlog,” Kocher said. “They really are taking the backlog seriously and they really do want asylum cases to get decided more quickly but the problem is, as the data shows, that if you really speed cases up individuals don’t always have time to get attorneys and they don’t always have time to gather the full application materials that are necessary.”

Kocher crossed into Reynosa, Mexico, early Wednesday, and said he spoke with several migrants there who expressed their lack of resources and lack of legal aid as they wait across the border due to Title 42 restrictions.

Source: Asylum rates drop as immigration cases are fast-tracked, research finds

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In major SCOTUS immigration case, both sides look to academia to untangle three knotty questions

2022/11/30 Leave a comment

Good explainer:

Can the Biden administration issue guidelines setting priorities in the enforcement of immigration law? Do states have standing to challenge these guidelines? And if the guidelines are unlawful, does the Administrative Procedure Act give lower courts the power to vacate them — a universal remedy that goes beyond the parties to the case? These are the three questions before the Supreme Court in United States v. Texas, set to be argued on Nov. 29. Legal scholars have addressed all three issues, and their work is prominently cited in the briefing on both sides.

In her book Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases(NYU Press, 2015), Professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia of Penn State Law observes that discretion in immigration enforcement is unavoidable in a system that lacks the resources to remove more than a few percent of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. The debate over how that discretion should be exercised has created a sharp policy divide between the Obama and Biden administrations, on the one hand, and that of former President Donald Trump on the other.

In 2011, John Morton, then the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, issued a seriesof memos setting enforcement priorities. Morton explained that his agency “only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal alien population in the United States.” Accordingly, he declared that ICE would prioritize apprehension and removal of certain categories of undocumented immigrants, such as those who had committed crimes or were recent arrivals. In contrast, undocumented immigrants without criminal records, who had lived in the United States for many years, and who had U.S. citizen family members were low priorities for removal.

The “Morton Memos” were often ignored by ICE officers, and in any case did not give legal protection from removal to those undocumented immigrants categorized as lower priorities. But if nothing else, they set the tone.

That tone changed abruptly when Trump took office in 2017. Within the first week of his administration, Trump replaced the Morton Memos with an executive order directing immigration officials “to ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States against all removable aliens.” The goal, Trump explained, was to end “exempt[ions] [for] classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” To be sure, the Trump administration also lacked the resources to deport the vast majority of undocumented immigrants. But the new executive order sent the message that no one in the United States without status was safe from removal.

The Trump administration followed an “attrition through enforcement” approach proposed in 2008 by Kris Kobach, who was at that time a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law and later became Kansas’ secretary of state. (Earlier this month, he was elected as Kansas’ incoming attorney general.) Acknowledging the limited resources to remove undocumented immigrants, Kobach advocated for policies that encouraged self-deportation.  Accordingly, he opposed any categorical use of prosecutorial discretion, advocating instead for enforcement policies that would leave all undocumented immigrants in fear that they were imminently removable.

Now, in United States v. Texas, Texas and Louisiana have asked the court to weigh in on this debate. At issue is whether the Immigration and Nationality Act permits the Biden administration to adopt guidelines prioritizing removal of certain categories of undocumented immigrants over others, just as Obama did before him. These states also argue that the guidelines violate the Administrative Procedure Act.

The case is perhaps even more important for its challenge to states’ standing to sue the federal government. A glance at the court’s docket in recent years reveals the rapid rise in state challenges to executive branch changes in policy, with red states taking the lead under Presidents Obama and Biden and blue states doing so during the Trump administration. In April of 2022, Texas issued a press release celebrating its 27th lawsuit against the Biden administration (the number is certainly higher by now). Likewise, California filed 122 lawsuits against the Trump administration during Trump’s four years as president, averaging one new lawsuit every 12 days.

Many of these cases challenged executive branch changes to immigration policy. In United States v. Texas, Texas and Louisiana argue that the new enforcement priorities will increase the number of undocumented immigrants in their states, and so increase their incarceration, education, and health care costs. They claim these higher costs are a cognizable injury that gives them standing to sue.

In its brief, the United States cites University of Virginia Law Professors Ann Woolhandler and Michael Collins’ recent article, Reining in State Standing, which argues in favor of a “return to [states’] traditional disfavored status as plaintiffs.” Under the tripartite requirements for standing, a plaintiff must show an “injury in fact” that is traceable to the challenged action and redressable by a court. But that standard gives states enormous leeway to claim injury on behalf of themselves as sovereigns or to their parens patriae interests (that is, the interests of their citizens), because almost any change to federal policy will have a fiscal impact on a state and its residents. Woolhandler and Collins propose that state standing to sue should be limited to cases in which states are “the direct regulatory objects of federal statutes and regulations,” which would fit more comfortably with states’ traditionally limited role as litigants before federal courts.

Finally, the Supreme Court is asked to decide the scope of the permissible remedy if the guidelines violate federal law. Over the past few years, courts and commentators have debated the power of lower federal courts to enter universal injunctions — that is, injunctions that bar defendants from enforcing a challenged law against anyone, not just the plaintiffs. United States v. Texas raises an offshoot of this question: whether a court’s power “to hold unlawful and set aside agency action” under Section 706(2) of the APA permits courts to vacate agency action such that it cannot be applied to anyone.

The United States cites a recent article by Professor John Harrison of University of Virginia Law arguing that Section 706(2) does not give courts authority to issue universal remedies, but rather only allows courts to decline to enforce unlawful agency action in cases before them. Texas and Louisiana rely on University of San Diego Law Professor Mila Sohoni’s article, “The Power to Vacate a Rule,” asserting that Section 706(2) authorizes (but does not require) vacatur, and citing longstanding precedent in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and other lower federal courts supporting that position.

As Sohoni puts it, perhaps the most “astonishing” aspect of the case is that the scope of Section 706(2)’s remedy remains uncertain nearly 80 years after that statute’s enactment. That uncertainty will likely be resolved by the court’s decision this term.

Source: In major immigration case, both sides look to academia to untangle three knotty questions

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Diversity Initiatives Are Failing the U.S. Muslim Community

2022/11/30 Leave a comment

Interesting new term for me, “crisis diversity:”

Over the past decade, the Muslim community has become included in diversity initiatives in the United States. Hollywood is finally producing shows that feature Muslim characters, such as Hulu’s Ramy, Netflix’s Mo, and Disney+’s Ms. Marvel. Universities are adjusting dining hall hours to accommodate Muslim students who fast during Ramadan, and they are increasing the number of reflection spaces on campus to facilitate Muslim ritual prayer. Nike launched its Pro Hijab, a headscarf for Muslim women athletes, and Olympic medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad became its model. Muhammad also served as the inspiration for the first Muslim Barbie doll.

These initiatives enhance our sense of belonging as Muslims in the U.S.—but they are not enough to actually challenge Islamophobia.

How did Muslims come to be included in diversity plans in the U.S.? My research shows that this happened in the wake of crises, or moments that made it clear that Islamophobia was a problem. Diversity initiatives born out of crisis can produce important social change, but responding to a momentary flare up as opposed to longstanding structural inequality limits the extent of possible change. Social change requires addressing the root of the problem primarily located in a history of U.S. foreign policies that dehumanize Muslims.

Islamophobia, itself, is far from new. Scholars trace forms of it as far back as the 7th century, with the emergence of Islam as a religion. But the term found new popularity in the late 20th century. Many point to the 1997 report published by the Runnymede Trust in the UK as the first influential use of the word Islamophobia, since it was the first to highlight it as a social problem. But the term did not enter the U.S. lexicon until about a decade after 9/11.

Muslims have long been constructed as threats to U.S. national security, but this intensified after 9/11. Think of the USA PATRIOT Act, Special Registration, U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal as prime examples of this.

But in the 2010’s, as the nation grappled with a history of racism and inequality, a new rubric of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” created an opening for Muslims to be seen as a beleaguered minority. Muslims became included in conceptions of diversity and social justice through a series of crises, such as the 2010 “ground zero mosque” controversy, the establishment of the Islamophobia Industry, and Donald Trump’s 2015 announcement to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

These moments led to widespread recognition that Muslims are demonized and targets of individual hate and repressive state policies. This phenomenon is a prime example of crisis diversity—where a precipitating event leads to the recognition of racism or discrimination and an ensuing flurry of concerted action.

Crisis diversity produces a domino effect of responses: The general public becomes aware of a long-standing problem (Islamophobia); people of that particular identity group (Muslims and experts on Islam) are called upon to urgently educate the public and advise leaders on how to make changes; media conglomerates, corporations, universities, and other organizations respond by issuing statements or embarking on new diversity initiatives. The crisis moment then passes, and little attention is paid to the issue until the next crisis emerges, restarting the cycle.

Crisis diversity is not solely a response to Islamophobia. One need only look at how the police killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 led to nationwide protests, reigniting public debate about police brutality and putting anti-Black racism firmly on the agenda of the criminal justice system, as well as universities and a wide array of corporations and industries. That same year, the football team the Washington Redskins was finally renamed the Washington Commanders after decades of refusing to change the name, despite protests from American Indian communities. NASCAR finally banned use of the Confederate flag, and Quaker Oats finally retired its brand based on the Aunt Jemima racial stereotype. At the same time, the number of Black people killed by police has not decreased.

In similar, yet distinct ways, Islamophobia is discovered anew each time an instance of it manages to capture public attention. How much social change is accomplished through these crises-responses is varied and debatable.

For Muslims, crisis gave us Mo and Ms. Marvel. It gave us prayer rooms on college campuses. It gave us Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women in Congress. These progress markers are an important start; however, the crisis-response approach is limiting. While Hollywood sticks it to Trump by finally including Muslims in roles that have nothing to do with terrorism, it does so without acknowledging how the industry itself has demonized Muslims for over a century.

Perpetrators of hate crimes against Muslims are given life sentences, without addressing how the same criminal justice system subjects Muslims to surveillance, deportation, and detention, that fuel hate crime violence. Racial and religious stereotypes are also used to criminalize Muslim men. Prosecutors used Adnan Syed’s identity as Pakistani and Muslim to argue that his religion and culture influenced him to murder his 18-year-old girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, and be prone to violence. In Sept. 2022, after spending over two decades of a life-in-prison sentence for murder, robbery, kidnapping, and false imprisonment, the charges were dropped, and Syed was released.

Crisis diversity focuses our attention on only the most overt, public, and often seemingly sudden expressions of racism, obscuring its longevity and reach well beyond crisis moments. In doing so, it obscures the enduring causes of Islamophobia, rooted in national security policies that demonize Muslims.

Real change requires understanding and approaching the problem as part of longstanding practices that will not evaporate with quick fixes during momentary crises. It requires a paradigm shift in our understanding of the problem and its magnitude. If leaders in Hollywood, corporations, universities, and the government consistently considered the long history of inequality in the U.S. when devising solutions (rather than responding to a momentary crisis), a more just and inclusive future would be possible.

Alsultany is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC’s Dornsife College and the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion

Source: Diversity Initiatives Are Failing the U.S. Muslim Community

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Racial discrimination in mortgage lending has declined sharply in America

2022/11/29 Leave a comment

Of note. For those worried about AI, an illustration of where it can reduce discrimination:

“Atlanta’s black neighbourhoods are under attack.” So wrote the editors of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in May of 1988 upon the release of “The Colour of Money”, a series of articles documenting racial disparities in mortgage lending in Georgia’s most populous city. The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, which analysed $6bn-worth of home loans made over six years, found that Atlanta banks made five times as many loans to white neighbourhoods as black ones, and rejected black applicants four times as often. The reaction was swift. Demonstrators marched through bank lobbies, the naacp urged black residents to withdraw their bank deposits and the Justice Department launched an investigation into discriminatory lending practices. Listen to this story.

Much has changed in the 35 years since “The Colour of Money”, and yet racial disparities in mortgage lending remain. Data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (hmda) show that 15% of black applicants were denied conventional mortgage loans in 2021, compared with just 6% of white applicants, a ratio of more than two-to-one. Black homeowners seeking to refinance their existing loans were rejected 24% of the time, compared with 12% of the time for whites. Some lenders have been singled out. A recent analysis by Bloomberg News found that Wells Fargo, a bank, approved less than half of refinancing applications filed by black homeowners in 2020, compared with nearly three-quarters of those filed by white customers. 

To many Americans, such wide discrepancies in lending are proof of discrimination. A survey conducted in 2020 by the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, found that 49% of American adults—and 86% of African-Americans—believe that black people are treated less fairly than white people when applying for a mortgage. But bankers have long argued that imbalances in mortgage approval rates reflect underlying differences in creditworthiness, not racial bias. Indeed African-Americans fare significantly worse than whites on several key lending criteria. Credit scores of black borrowers, for example, are about 8% lower than those of white borrowers. Their debt-to-income levels, meanwhile, are about 10% higher. Black borrowers have much higher loan delinquency rates, too. 

For decades the conventional wisdom was that both economic factors and discrimination played a role in lending patterns. A seminal study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, published in the American Economic Review in 1996, analysed nearly 3,000 loan applications submitted to Boston-area lenders in 1990. The researchers found that credit histories, debt-to-income ratios, loan-to-value ratios, and other strictly economic factors explained more than half of the difference in denial rates between black and white applicants. But race mattered, too. Even after accounting for their creditworthiness, black mortgage applicants were rejected about 1.8 times as often as whites. 

But new research by economists at the Federal Reserve Board suggests that such discrimination is less widespread than it was 30 years ago.* Using a dataset of nearly 9m loan applications submitted in 2018 and 2019, the authors found that 17% of black applicants were turned down, compared with 8% of white applicants. But after controlling for the results of automated underwriting systems, which reflect the underwriting guidelines of government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and cannot take race into account, this gap was cut in half. After other relevant risk characteristics such as credit scores were controlled for, this figure fell to less than two points—a result that the authors describe as “significant progress”. 

What explains the improvement? Laurie Goodman of the Urban Institute, a think-tank, says that the decline of manual underwriting is one factor. “I’m sure automated underwriting, where very little is done manually, has made a difference because it leaves less discretion.” Stricter enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which prohibit discrimination in lending on the basis of race, is another. Last year the Justice Department launched an effort to crack down on “redlining” by financial institutions—the practice of denying credit to particular neighbourhoods. Since then the department has reported four lawsuits and settlements worth a combined $38m. 

Experts point out that although mortgage underwriting systems are becoming less biased, the data fed into them may still reflect historical discrimination. These data can be improved, says Ms Goodman. “If the issue is credit scores, let’s figure out how to make credit scores better and more reflective of people’s true creditworthiness.” Overall, though, the picture is one of progress. “I think it’s fair to say that there’s still some discrimination, but it’s not very common,” says John Yinger, an economics professor at Syracuse University. ■

Source: Racial discrimination in mortgage lending has declined sharply in America

Filed under discrimination, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Population in the US: as small towns shrink, is immigration the answer?

2022/11/19 Leave a comment

Similar to the situation in many countries:

In late October, the angle of an adjustable ramp connecting the shore of the Mississippi River to a casino riverboat made it easy to see how low water levels had dropped in south-east Missouri. The downward slope also resembled the population decline in the surrounding town, Caruthersville, over the last decade.

The Century Casino Caruthersville provides a crucial source of employment for the town, which lost many of its local businesses and a Walmart, which closed after 42 years in 2019. But two of its decks were closed because of the drought. Even when the river returns to a more normal level and the whole boat reopens, the fortunes of the town may not change.

“Walmart hurt us when it came and it hurt us when it went out,” said Sue Grantham, the mayor of Caruthersville. “You’re not gonna get those mom and pop shops back again.”

Parts of rural America like Caruthersville are emblematic of a larger trend in the United States: a population that in 2021 grew 0.1%, the slowest rate since the founding of the country, according to the US Census Bureau.

Demographers and sociologists who study the trend point to a number of factors, including low fertility, the Covid-19 pandemic and a significant decrease in immigration due to the pandemic and restrictions introduced by the former president Donald Trump.

And while the threat posed by the virus has waned and the birthrate increased slightly in 2021 after falling for more than a decade, if a growing population is necessary to have a healthy US economy and way of life – which not all researchers agree upon – then the country will probably have to rely on immigration.

“Immigration is sort of the extra safety valve we have for population growth in the United States,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It’s unaffected by the ageing of our current population because immigrants tend to be younger, and they also have children, which makes the population younger.”

But immigration remains a divisive topic, with Republicans viewing tightening restrictions on illegal immigration as a greater priority than Democrats, and Democrats more supportive of legal immigration than Republicans, according to polls.

But Social Security, a programme which people across the political spectrum support, will depend on contributions from a younger labor force.

“A lot of the people who are part of [Trump’s] base will suffer the biggest negative consequences if the contributions to Social Security and Medicare and a lot of other federal and state-level programmes” evaporate because of a diminished young labor force, Frey said.

While 2021 saw a record-low increase in population rate, it was not a significant outlier in terms of the last decade. Thirty-seven states grew more slowly in the 2010s than in the previous decade and three states saw population decreases, according to the 2020 census. There were 330 million people in the US that year, a 7.4% increase from 2010, which amounts to the second lowest decade-long increase since the government first conducted the study in 1790.

The fertility rate in the United States has also decreased significantly in recent decades. During the post-second world war baby boom between 1945 and 1964, there were more than 100 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, the number was 56.6.

The trend was particularly evident in rural areas, which saw their population decrease over the last decade for the first time, according to a University of New Hampshire report. Meanwhile, in most of the country’s biggest cities, the population grew at a faster rate in the most recent decade compared with the prior one, a Brookings Institution report states.

Pemiscot County, which includes Caruthersville, saw its population decrease by 15% over the last decade, which was among the sharpest drops in the state, according to a University of Missouri report. During the 1950s, there were more than 8,000 people living in Caruthersville; in 2020, there were about 5,500, the census reports.

Grantham, the mayor, grew up in southern Mississippi. Her mother had a flower shop, which Grantham worked at in the mornings before school. Grantham then attended the University of Mississippi and became an elementary school teacher, but she missed the flowers, so in 1977 she bought Joplin Floral Company in Caruthersville and moved north.

Grantham then watched how parts of the area wilted. In 1991, Brown Shoe Co, one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the country, closed four facilities in rural Missouri, including a warehouse in Caruthersville.

″Style trends in women’s shoes are shifting to more casual shoes and those are best obtained overseas,” a spokesperson for the company, which is now called Caleres and based in St Louis, told the Associated Press.

Local farms also gradually needed fewer people due to technological advances, Grantham said. “It’s a big part of why we don’t have that rush into town and all those people here because there were not jobs,” said Grantham, who in 2020 sold her business, which remains open.

The size of families has decreased too. Grantham was one of six children; none of the next generation had more than three kids. “You can’t provide for six children hardly today,” said Grantham, a 73-year-old mother of two.

Women are also waiting longer to have children. And the number of unintended pregnancies dropped to an all-time low in recent years, according to the Brookings Institution.

“More women are in the labor force than ever before,” said Joseph Chamie, a demographer and former director of the United Nations Population Division. “Delaying childbirth, delaying marriage … and when you delay, you often have fewer children.”

Among the younger generations from places like Caruthersville, there has also been a drive to move to urban areas because there are more opportunities for work and socializing.

The poverty rate in Caruthersville is 29%; in St Louis, it’s 20%; and in St Louis county, it’s 9.1%, according to the census bureau.

Wade Mansfield, 53, started Grizzly Jig Company, a crappie fishing supply business, in 1991 in Caruthersville with his father. The company employs 14 people and has managed to stay afloat despite competition from Bass Pro Shop and Amazon, and technological challenges due to its rural location. Most of its business comes from online sales, Mansfield said.

“We found a niche just like Mack’s Prairie Wings,” which specializes in waterfowl hunting, Mansfield said. “Instead of focusing on the big pie, we focused on one sliver, which was the crappie industry.”

In spite of his company’s success, Mansfield does not expect his two older daughters, who live in college towns in Mississippi, to return to Caruthersville. His youngest daughter is in high school.

Women are more likely to leave rural areas than men, the census bureau reports.

The country’s urban population increased 8.8% over the last decade, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

“I think if I had all boys, it would be a little different just because of the hunting and fishing [opportunities in south-east Missouri]”, Mansfield said. “The girls want to go to movies, go out to eat [and shop].”

But big cities have also seen their annual growth rates slow over the last decade, and from July 2020 to July 2021 large cities saw a 1% population decline, according to the Brookings Institution. Suburbs continued to grow during the pandemic, though at a slower rate than a decade earlier. Over the last decade, the metro areas that saw the largest increases were in the Sun Belt, including Austin, Texas; Orlando, Florida; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Meanwhile, cities such as New York and Los Angeles saw their population decrease significantly during the pandemic after large increases a decade earlier. Cities saw an unusual population gain at the start of the 2010s, as millennials continued to live at home due to the Great Recession; during the pandemic, some people fled cities because they wanted to avoid the tight quarters and public transportation due to the threat posed by the virus, Frey explained.

“I think we’ll get back to somewhat more normal growth in cities than we have seen,” Frey said. “Nobody really knows at this point what the working-from-home trend is going to do.”

Immigration levels also remain an uncertainty. In Pemiscot County, a district in which 71% of voters supported Trump in 2020, Mexican immigrants have filled a variety of roles, and farmers have hired seasonal workers from South Africa, Grantham said.

“The Mexicans that are here are really, really good people. In fact, one of them used to keep my grandchild,” Grantham said.

Frey sees immigration as one of the solutions to the country’s ageing population. He sees the diminishing population as a worrisome trend. That’s not only because of the need for younger generations to contribute to Social Security but also because nursing homes and assisted living facilities will need workers, he said.

And a youthful population means more economic potential and innovation, Frey said.

But Chamie, the demographer and former UN population division director, said he is not “ringing alarm bells” over the trend. “Businesses want this growth. They want more labor. They want more consumption,” he said.

Entities such as the United States Chamber of Commerce “are always complaining about a high shortage of workers because they want to keep wages low, and that’s why they keep pressing for more immigration. I don’t see it necessarily that economic growth depends on population growth. You have many countries that are growing slowly, and their economies are growing.”

Leslie Root, a demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, also does not see the declining fertility as a negative. That’s in part because of the reduced number of unintended pregnancies.

“We know that when people are having births that are intended, health outcomes for the parents and the babies are better,” she said. “Helping people to not have babies that they don’t mean to have is generally, from the public health perspective, a positive thing.”

As to what the declining population trend could mean for a town like Caruthersville, Grantham remains optimistic. The state recently removed a requirement for casinos to float, which means that Century Casinos plans to build a land-based facility in Caruthersville. The company also bought a nearby hotel, which it is renovating.

The comedian and actor Cedric the Entertainer, a Caruthersville native whose film Johnson Family Reunion was set there, has also bought land in his home town. His goal is to bring “more housing, more people and new industry”, he told a local news station.

Grantham thinks the town population could return to levels not seen in decades. “Reaching the levels of the 50s, 60s? If it keeps going, I think we could,” she said. “We’re not but 3,000 behind.”

Source: Population in the US: as small towns shrink, is immigration the answer?

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Anderson: U.S. Immigration Critics Ignore Canada’s Welcome Mat For Immigrants

2022/11/18 Leave a comment

How USA immigration advocates use or abuse Canada as an immigration example. Good analysis of why point systems unlikely to fly in the USA given the inherent politicization and legislative rigidity:

When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) proposed reducing U.S. legal immigration levels by half, he highlighted Canada, a country that admits four times as many immigrants as a percentage of its population as the United States. Canada has announced it will boost its annual immigration level to 500,000 by 2025, illustrating that a high level of immigration compared to other nations is a central feature of Canada’s immigration system.

“Last year Canada welcomed over 405,000 newcomers—the most we’ve ever welcomed in a single year,” said Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, in a press statement. “The Government is continuing that ambition by setting targets in the new levels plan of 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025. . . . This plan helps cement Canada’s place among the world’s top destinations for talent, creating a strong foundation for continued economic growth, while also reuniting family members with their loved ones and fulfilling Canada’s humanitarian commitments.

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The most significant statistic in Canada’s latest report highlights how critical immigration is to the country’s labor force growth: “Immigration accounts for almost 100% of Canada’s labor force growth, and, by 2032, it’s projected to account for 100% of Canada’s population growth,” according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.

In the United States, opponents of immigration have promoted the “lump of labor fallacy,” the notion discredited by economists that there is a fixed quantity of labor needed in an economy. As a result, the focus of immigration restrictionists has been to reduce labor force growth under the mistaken belief that it would help the U.S. economy. Economists note that labor force growth is an essential element of economic growth, which is needed to elevate the standard of living in a country.

As in Canada, immigration is crucial to labor force growth in the United States. Economists note that by reducing immigration—such as when the Trump administration enacted restrictive administrative changes—government officials harm the U.S. economy.

By 2025, Canada will admit 12.5 immigrants per 1,000 residents, compared to the United States welcoming 3.0 immigrants per 1,000 residents in 2025, based on a National Foundation for American Policy projection. In other words, Canada will admit approximately four times as many immigrants as the United States on a per capita basis. If the United States adopted all elements of the Canadian system, the U.S. would admit more than 4 million immigrants a year instead of the approximately 1 million permanent residents admitted in FY 2019, the last year before the Covid-19 pandemic.

By 2025, Canada will admit twice as many family immigrants as the United States as a percentage of population and several times more refugees and humanitarian admissions per capita.

The RAISE Act

In August 2017, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. David Purdue (R-GA) cited the Canadian immigration system in arguing for their new bill the RAISE Act. “The RAISE Act would replace the current permanent employment-visa system with a skills-based points system, akin to the systems used by Canada and Australia,” according to a Cotton-Perdue press release.

Analysis shows Sen. Cotton and others have proposed a point system not to help employers or make the United States more competitive, but to eliminate family immigration categories and reduce immigration. In addition to admitting many fewer immigrants, the RAISE Act would have eliminated approximately 4 million people from family and employment-based immigration backlogs who had waited in line for years.

Cotton and Purdue made what economists would consider a contradictory argument for their bill. The senators argued their legislation would “spur economic growth” while “reducing overall immigration by half.” However, reducing immigration would lead to lower economic growth, not “spur” it. Joel Prakken, senior managing director and co-founder of Macroeconomic Advisers, estimated a 50% reduction in legal immigration would lead U.S. economic growth to decline by 12.5% from its projected levels.

Analysts note that the RAISE Act or similar proposals, by instituting a points-based system and eliminating nearly all family immigration categories, would deprive Americans and business owners of the freedom to sponsor close family members or coveted workers. During a Fox News candidate forum in Ohio, J.D. Vance endorsed the RAISE Act, which would worsen labor shortages by reducing immigration, in response to an Ohio business owner who said he could not find enough workers due to widespread labor shortages.

On February 15, 2018, the U.S. Senate rejected a measure to eliminate most family immigration categories, voting it down on a “cloture motion” 60-39. A Trump presidential proclamationcontained a similar “suspension” of immigrants entering the United States in those categories.

Canadian and Australian Point Systems Unlikely To Work In America

A report from the National Foundation for American Policy and National Immigration Forum explains why a Canadian or Australian-style point system would likely be a poor fit for the United States. (I wrote the report.)

First, after examining the Canadian and Australian immigration systems, the primary conclusion from the report was that a point system wouldn’t work in the United States, except perhaps as a separate add-on that retains the current family and employer-sponsored immigration system. “Evidence indicates that America’s separation of executive and legislative powers makes it unlikely that a point system could operate effectively or in a manner similar to those in Canada or Australia, which have parliamentary systems of government and agencies with the authority to make rapid and unilateral changes to a point system when problems arise,” according to the report.

“That would not be possible under our laws and structure. Moreover, under a point system, as envisioned, U.S. employers would no longer decide which employees are most valued. Instead, admissions would be subject to government-designed criteria.” The report noted awarding points based on highest level of education would ignore the need for workers across the skill spectrum, such as in construction and hospitality or caregivers for seniors.

While Canada’s structure allows for relatively quick adjustments in point criteria, that is unlikely to happen in the United States. Instead, Congress would pass a law and set qualifications that might not change for decades. Ceding greater authority to an immigration bureaucracy would be unlikely to work, since it can take many years for a federal agency to enact a regulation and enact changes.

There is another risk to further empowering an immigration agency, the report and other analyses noted. White House adviser Stephen Miller showed how it was possible for the executive branch to use administrative means to prevent the admission of legal immigrants. After that experience, many would ask if it was wise to hand over even more authority to the executive branch to administer the U.S. immigration system.

Second, in Australia, the point system is largely irrelevant to employers, which has an employment-based immigration system similar to current U.S. law. “The point system is not at all important for corporate immigration in Australia,” said Tim Denney, formerly an attorney with Berry Appleman & Leiden in Sydney, Australia. “The points system comes into play when an individual seeks to migrate to Australia and does not have a business operating in Australia willing to sponsor him or her upfront for either a temporary work visa or permanent residence.”

In Canada, (permanent) immigrants for employers often first work for Canadian employers on temporary visas, similar to the U.S. transition from H-1B status to an employment-based green card. The difference is that Canada awards points for age, language, schooling and work experience in Canada and grants permanent residence each year to those who achieve sufficient points. The system has evolved and been adjusted so that employers can retain highly skilled employees. Another key feature: Canada allows provinces to select immigrants based on unique regional needs, something U.S. point system advocates generally have not favored.

Finally, if members of Congress wanted to admit more immigrants with advanced degrees, they could have supported several proposals in 2021 and 2022 to boost the number of employment-based green cards and eliminate the per-country limit on such green cards to prevent decades-long delays for Indian immigrants.

Neither Tom Cotton nor any other Republican senator intervened before the CHIPS Act passed in 2022 to stop Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) from blocking measures to create an exemption to annual green card limits for foreign nationals with a Ph.D. in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] fields and those with a master’s degree “in a critical industry.”

“The U.S. already has ‘merit-based’ immigration, in the form of a preference system for employment-based visas,” said Lynn Shotwell, an immigration expert and president/CEO of Worldwide ERC. “While current H-1B and green card numbers aren’t sufficient, employers don’t want a system that removes or limits their ability to hire or sponsor a specific individual, across the skill spectrum, or have the federal government set up a point criteria that may not be relevant to employer needs or keep up with changes in the economy.”

Sen. Cotton has argued that eliminating most family categories via the RAISE Act would raise worker wages. Economists would find this implausible. Giovanni Peri, economics chair at the University of California, Davis, concluded, “Decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers.”

Only about 25,000 or fewer people of working age with less than a high school degree immigrate annually in the categories critics have sought to eliminate (i.e., the siblings and unmarried and married adult children of U.S. citizens). Even if the consensus of economists was incorrect about immigrants’ lack of impact on native wages, it is not plausible that stopping 0.01% (25,000) of the 165 million U.S. labor force from entering the country—and living in different parts of the country—would have any impact on U.S. workers’ wages.

A higher annual level of immigration—four times higher than the United States as a percentage of its population—is a central feature of Canada’s immigration system. Analysts would find it unlikely that Sen. Cotton and other U.S. advocates of a Canadian-style point system will support admitting four times as many immigrants each year to the United States.

Source: U.S. Immigration Critics Ignore Canada’s Welcome Mat For Immigrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

USA: Religious groups with immigrant members grew fastest over past decade

2022/11/15 Leave a comment

Similar as in Canada as Douglas Todd has reported on:

A decennial study of U.S. religious life shows what many demographers and others have long known: Participation in congregational services has not kept up with overall population growth. However, religious groups drawing large numbers of immigrants have seen steady growth.

The U.S. Religion Census, conducted every 10 years by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, concluded there were 356,739 religious congregations across the nation, and 161 million adherents, including children, in 2020. (Adherents is the formula researchers used to count those with an affiliation to a congregation, including children and people who attend but may not belong.)

Unlike polling, which asks questions from a small sample of the population and extrapolates to the general population, the religion census gathers information from denominations and other religious bodies and maps out the number of congregations and adherents on a county-wide basis. In the 2020 study, researchers collected data from 372 religious bodies, mostly denominations, but also 44,000 independent nondenominational churches. The count included synagogues, mosques and temples of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and Jain traditions

Courtesy Chart

Courtesy Chart

The study finds that the Catholic Church in the U.S. is the largest religious body, with 61 million adherents in more than 19,000 churches, comprising close to 19% of the U.S. population. That’s a modest growth of 2 million adherents from 2010, when the church had nearly 59 million adherents.

Sociologist who worked on the census said growth is almost entirely made up of Hispanic immigrants.

“If you took away the Hispanic population in the Catholic Church, it would look as bad as mainline denominations,” said Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, who counted independent churches for the census. (Mainline denominations, such as Episcopalian, Lutheran and Presbyterian, have been declining for more than 50 years.)

Perhaps the most striking growth was among Muslims. The number of Muslims who participate in mosque prayer increased from 2.6 million in 2010 to 4.5 million in 2020, a 75% increase. (Pew Research estimates there were 3.85 million Muslims in the U.S. in 2020, but those numbers do not include children.)

That growth is due mainly to immigration, said Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Kentucky, who collected the data for Muslims. Higher birth rates may be a secondary reason.

Bagby estimated the number of U.S. mosques at 2,771, a jump of 871 mosques in just a decade.

He suggested Muslims may be in a kind of golden age in the U.S. They are younger than the American population overall, and the Boomers among them are financially well off and able to contribute to the construction of new mosques. (First-generation mosques were often in retrofitted churches or warehouses.)

Mosques, Bagby said, “have mellowed and matured and become more moderate in their understanding of Islam and that has also been an attraction,” he said. “Many Muslims who had kept away feel more comfortable coming.”

Courtesy Chart

Courtesy Chart

U.S. mosques, like those overseas, do not typically keep memberships. Bagby said he arrived at his estimates by asking for information on weekly Jumah prayers as well as holiday or Eid prayers. (Muslims make up about 2.8% of all religious adherents and about 1.3% of the total population, the study estimates.)

Much of the value of the census is its county-level aggregation, which corresponds to how researchers in other fields, such as population studies and public health, collect and analyze data, said Rich Houseal, secretary-treasurer of the sociological group that conducted the study.

Houseal said the data is also useful to businesses, too. Walmart, he said, has contacted him to help determine what books to stock in their stores based on the dominant religious group in a county.

Among other interesting data points in the study:

  • Southern Baptists have the most churches of any religious group: 51,379.

  • There are some 44,319 nondenominational churches, a jump of nearly 9,000 over 10 years ago, and about 9 million adherents. Still, overall, they account for only 13% of the total number of religious adherents in the U.S.
  • Southern Baptists and United Methodists each lost 2 million members from 2010 to 2020.

“Denominational brands have weakened, and divisions have increased over issues such as female clergy or sexual orientation, Thumma said. “This likely led some adherents to seek or even start new nondenominational churches.”

Source: Religious groups with immigrant members grew fastest over past decade

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with

U.S. removes Trump-era barriers to citizenship-test waivers for disabled immigrants

2022/10/26 Leave a comment

Of note:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has rolled out several changes to make the naturalization process more accessible for applicants with disabilities.

After months of public feedback, the federal agency has shortened and simplified its disability waiver, which is used to exempt immigrants with physical, mental or learning disabilities from the English and civics test requirements.

The revisions largely undo efforts by the former Trump administration to expand requirements for disabled applicants seeking to naturalize.

“The recent policy change is a big step in the right direction and a major improvement over the old policy,” Laura Burdick, who works on disability waiver policies with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, told NPR.

“It takes a much more humane approach,” she added.

In a statement last week, USCIS Director Ur Jaddo said the revisions were part of President Biden’s executive order to restore faith in the U.S. immigration system.

Among the steps to become voting citizens, immigrants are tested on how well they read, write and understand English and how much they grasp U.S. history and government. Since 1994, the federal government has allowed immigrants with disabilities to receive waivers for such requirements.

In 2020, the Trump administration nearly doubled the length of the disability waiver and added unnecessary complexity, Burdick said. USCIS itself has described some parts of the application as “redundant” and has said they “no longer have practical utility.”

Questions such as how the applicant’s disability affects their daily life, a description of the severity of the disability and how frequently they are treated by medical professionals have since been eliminated.

Another policy change gives applicants who did not properly complete their waiver the option to simply resubmit their form with updated information, rather than fill out entirely new paperwork.

Burdick said these policy improvements will remove barriers and create a more efficient pathway to citizenship for people with disabilities.

But there’s more work to do, she added. Among her organization’s concerns are the limited types of medical professionals allowed to certify accommodations.

“Many of the immigrants that we serve receive their primary care from a nurse practitioner, since they are often more accessible than medical doctors, especially in low-income communities,” she said.

In the three quarters from October 2021 through June 2022, about 45,000 immigrants had applied for a disability waiver.

Source: U.S. removes Trump-era barriers to citizenship-test waivers for disabled immigrants

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ICYMI: US Supreme Court declines to consider challenge to racist citizenship laws [America Samoa]

2022/10/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to reconsider the so-called “Insular Cases,” a series of cases decided in the early 1900s that are infamous today for their racist foundation.

The court’s action dashes hopes of American Samoans who were seeking birthright citizenship. It also leaves intact a Tenth Circuit decision that has been seen as “breathing new life” into constitutional distinctions between U.S. states and territories — which former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said establish “a second-class of unequal Americans.”

Attorney Neil Weare, president of the organization representing the plaintiffs in this case, echoed the sentiment: “The Supreme Court’s refusal to reconsider the Insular Cases today … reflect[s] that ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ does not mean the same thing for the 3.6 million residents of U.S. territories as it does for everyone else.”

Who is a citizen?

At issue in this case was the way that people born in various U.S. territories are treated under law when it comes to U.S. citizenship. The Constitution says that anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” is a citizen of the country. But for U.S. territories, eligibility for birthright citizenship in the territories is controlled only by Congress – it is not constitutionally guaranteed.

Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas Islands are deemed U.S. citizens under the Immigration and Nationality Act. But American Samoans are not. Congress has not granted birthright citizenship to residents of American Samoa or Swains Island, both of which are classified only as “outlying possessions.”

It is this disparate treatment that was before the court, after three American Samoans living in Utah brought a challenge to the Immigration and Nationality Act, contending that the statutory denial of citizenship is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

The Citizenship Clause was adopted after the Civil War primarily to protect the birthright citizenship of Black Americans, which was rejected by the Supreme Court prior to the Civil War. However, the meaning of the clause for residents of the territories has historically been contested — as has the force of constitutional protections in the territories altogether. In this case, Fitisemanu v. U.S., the American Samoans contend that the residents of all the territories should be considered “in the United States” for the purpose of citizenship.

While American Samoans who live in the States may apply for citizenship, before they successfully do so they are denied many of the rights attached to citizenship, such as the right to vote, run for office, or serve on juries. The plaintiffs in this case say their career opportunities have been curtailed and that, as non-citizens, they are unable to sponsor immigration visas for their families. Applying for citizenship itself is onerous, can take several years, and is not guaranteed.

A brief history of the Insular Cases

But this case was not just about the reach of the Citizenship Clause. The Constitution’s underlying disparity in treatment between the 50 states and the U.S. territories was enshrined in the Insular Cases, a series of cases decided in the early 1900s after the Spanish-American War. These cases — so called because of their “insular” (island-related) focus — held that full constitutional rights apply only to “incorporated” territories destined for statehood, such as Hawaii, but not to “unincorporated” territories, which then included Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Infamously, the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories rested on explicitly racist stereotypes about individuals from those territories. Opposing Filipino statehood, for example, one senator called Filipinos “unruly and disobedient.” Another called them “mongrels.”

Under the Insular Cases, which were primarily about tariffs and jury trials in the territories, the Supreme Court upheld this suspect “incorporated vs. unincorporated” framework of rights. The Court’s language and reasoning was hardly any better than that of Congress. One case emphasized that “differences of race, habits, laws and customs” in the territories might require action on the part of Congress that wouldn’t be required if the territory were “inhabited only by people of the same race.” Another referred to “savage tribes” which may be “[in]capable of self-government.”

It is this insidious foundation of the Insular Cases that has drawn the condemnation of both liberal and conservative justices. In Vaello-Madero, a case from last term about Puerto Ricans’ eligibility for disability benefits, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a 10-page concurrence calling for the Insular Casesto be overruled — something that is now unlikely to happen any time soon.

Gorsuch did not note any dissent from Monday’s action.

Monday’s action is a victory for both the Biden administration and the American Samoan government itself, though neither party defends the offensive language in the Insular Cases. Nor does the United States affirmatively oppose American Samoan citizenship. The United States rests its argument instead on the text of the Citizenship Clause, which it contends intentionally excludes the territories from birthright citizenship conferred by the Constitution. The U.S. argues that American Samoans have the legislative route to birthright citizenship available to them, and that if there is a consensus in favor of birthright citizenship, they should pursue that through their representative in Congress. Otherwise, however, the United States says it does not want to tread on the self-governance of American Samoans.

To that end, the American Samoan government intervened in the case to argue that U.S. birthright citizenship for American Samoans would undermine the island’s ability to self-govern and maintain cultural autonomy.

Source: Supreme Court declines to consider challenge to racist citizenship laws

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