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. ■
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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
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
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.”
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.
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.
Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden issued what was widely hailed as a landmark executive order calling for the U.S. government to study and plan for the impact of climate change on migration. And less than a year later, his administration released the first U.S. government assessment of the vast rippling effects of a warming Earth on international security and displacement of people.
Advocates praised both moves as bold steps toward the world finally recognizing the need to offer refuge to people fleeing not just wars and persecution but also climate calamities such as drought and rising seas.
Since then, however, the Biden administration has done little more than study the idea, advocates say.
The government has been slow to implement recommendations made a year ago by its own agencies, including the National Security Council, on how to address climate migration.
Key to progress on the issue was creation of an interagency working group to coordinate government response to both domestic and international climate migration.
But the group, which was supposed to oversee policies, strategies and budgets to help climate-displaced people, still has not been established, according to a person with knowledge of the administration’s efforts who was not authorized to speak publicly. The person said the group is expected to hold its first meeting later this fall. The administration declined to identify which agencies will participate in the working group.
Meanwhile, Biden’s report to Congress about his plans for refugee admissions to the U.S. in the 2023 budget year made scant mention of climate change.
Advocates once energized by the administration’s promises to embrace climate-displaced people say they have grown disillusioned.
“It’s been really disappointing,” said Ama Francis, climate migration expert at the International Refugee Assistance Project, a New York-based advocacy group. “We want to see real action. There are needs right now. But all we see is the administration move more slowly and staying in an exploratory phase, rather than doing something.”
That’s despite the government’s reports by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, National Security Council and Director of National Intelligence that highlighted “the urgency of expanding current protections and creating new legal pathways to safety for climate-displaced people,” Francis pointed out.
Each year, natural disasters force an average of 21.5 million people from their homes around the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And scientists predict migration will grow as the planet gets hotter. Over the next 30 years, 143 million people are likely to be uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported this year.
National security officials also recommended increasing U.S. aid to countries regularly pummeled by extreme weather and strengthening support for U.S. climate scientists and others to track these events.
To that end, the government recently released plans to work with Congress to provide billions of dollars annually to help countries adapt and manage impacts of climate change, especially to those vulnerable to the worst effects.
At the U.S.-Pacific Islands Summit, Biden announced $22 million in funding for climate forecasting and research, and setting up early warning systems in places like Africa, where 60% of nations lack such systems. The administration said it plans to announce more such funding to close that gap at the global COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November.
Environmental disasters now displace more people than conflict within their own countries, though no nation in the world offers asylum to climate migrants.
The White House’s 37-page Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration was the first time the U.S. government outlined the inextricable links between climate change and migration.
Released in October 2021 as Biden headed to the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the report recommended steps, such as monitoring the flows of people forced to leave their homes because of natural disasters and working with Congress on a groundbreaking plan that would add droughts, floods, wildfires and other climate-related reasons in considering refugee status.
The report came a year after the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees published legal guidance that opened the door for offering protection to people displaced by the effects of global warming.
The guidance said climate change should be taken into consideration in certain scenarios when it intersects with violence, though the document stopped short of redefining the 1951 Refugee Convention, which provides legal protection only to people fleeing persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group.
The U.N. refugee agency acknowledged that temporary protection may be insufficient if a country becomes uninhabitable because of drought or rising seas, and suggested certain climate-displaced people could be eligible for resettlement.
Last month, more than a dozen humanitarian organizations sent a letter to the White House urging the government to give priority to refugee populations currently affected by climate change. The people include: South Sudanese and Ethiopians in Sudan where recurring drought and floods exacerbated by climate change threaten refugee camps. And Rohingya in Bangladesh where refugee camps are also at risk due to flooding.
But the Biden administration has not responded to the request, the organizations said.
“It was a positive step that the administration recognized that they should work on this issue, which is a first, so now they should make good on … that promise,” said Kayly Ober of Refugees International.
Migration is part of humanity’s adaptation to climate change and will become one of many tools for survival, so governments need now to plan accordingly, advocates say.
Humanitarian organizations provided the administration with reports on how to train immigration officers to do a better job at taking climate change into account when interviewing people for asylum or refugee status. They also offered analysis of possible legal pathways, such as expanding temporary protective status and humanitarian parole, which have allowed people fleeing natural disasters and conflicts in a limited list of countries to live and work in the United States for a few years.
The U.S. should establish a resettlement category for migrants who do not meet the refugee definition but who are unable to return safely to their homelands due to environmental risks, according to experts.
Worsening weather conditions are exacerbating poverty, crime and political instability, fueling tensions over dwindling resources from Africa to Latin America. But often climate change is overlooked as a contributing factor for people fleeing their homelands. According to the U.N. refugee agency, 90% of refugees under its mandate are from countries “on the front lines of the climate emergency.”
But so far there has been slow progress in the U.S. adopting policies recognizing them.
“Where we have some movement unfortunately is only in the uptick of people forcibly displaced in the world,” said Amali Tower, founder of the advocacy group Climate Refugees.
After her mother died when Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier was just four years old, she was put into a Native American boarding school in South Dakota and told her native Lakota language was “devil’s speak.”
She recalls being locked in a basement at St. Francis Indian Mission School for weeks as punishment for breaking the school’s strict rules. Her long braids were shorn in a deliberate effort to stamp out her cultural identify. And when she broke her leg in an accident, Whirlwind Soldier said she received shoddy care leaving her with pain and a limp that still hobbles her decades later.
“I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred,” Whirlwind Soldier testified during a Saturday event on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation led by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, as the agency confronts the bitter legacy of a boarding school system that operated in the U.S. for more than a century.
Now 78 and still living on the reservation, Whirlwind Soldier said she was airing her horrific experiences in hopes of finally getting past them.
“The only thing they didn’t do was put us in (an oven) and gas us,” she said, comparing the treatment of Native Americans in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.
“But I let it go,” she later added. “I’m going to make it.”
Saturday’s event was the third in Haaland’s yearlong “Road to Healing” initiative for victims of abuse at government-backed boarding schools, after previous stops in Oklahoma and Michigan.
Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the U.S. enacted laws and policies to establish and support the schools. The stated goal was to “civilize” Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, but that was often carried out through abusive practices. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal funding and were willing partners.
Most closed their doors long ago and none still exist to strip students of their identities. But some, including St. Francis, still function as schools — albeit with drastically different missions that celebrate the cultural backgrounds of their Native students.
Former St. Francis student Ruby Left Hand Bull Sanchez traveled hundreds of miles from Denver to attend Saturday’s meeting. She cried as she recalled almost being killed as a child when a nun stuffed lye soap down her throat in response to Sanchez praying in her native language.
“I want the world to know,” she said.
Accompanying Haaland was Wizipan Garriott, a Rosebud Sioux member and principal deputy assistant secretary for Indian affairs. Garriott described how boarding schools were part of a long history of injustices against his people that began with the widespread extermination of their main food source — bison, also known as buffalo.
“First they took our buffalo. Then our land was taken, then our children, and then our traditional form of religion, spiritual practices,” he said. “It’s important to remember that we Lakota and other Indigenous people are still here. We can go through anything.”
The first volume of an investigative report released by the Interior Department in May identified more than boarding 400 schools that the federal government supported beginning in the late 19th century and continuing well into the 1960s. It also found at least 500 children died at some of the schools, though that number is expected to increase dramatically as research continues.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says it’s tallied about 100 more schools not on the government list that were run by groups such as churches.
“They all had the same missions, the same goals: ‘Kill the Indian, save the man,’” said Lacey Kinnart, who works for the Minnesota-based coalition. For Native American children, Kinnart said the intention was “to assimilate them and steal everything Indian out of them except their blood, make them despise who they are, their culture, and forget their language.”
South Dakota had 31 of the schools including two on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation — St. Francis and the Rosebud Agency Boarding and Day School.
The Rosebud Agency school, in Mission, operated through at least 1951 on a site now home to Sinte Gleska University, where Saturday’s meeting happened.
All that remains of the boarding school is a gutted-out building that used to house the dining hall, according to tribal members. When the building caught fire about five years ago, former student Patti Romero, 73, said she and others were on hand to cheer its destruction.
“No more worms in the chili,” said Romero, who attended the school from ages 6 to 15 and said the food was sometimes infested.
A second report is pending in the investigation into the schools launched by Haaland, herself a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico and the first Native American cabinet secretary. It will cover burial sites, the schools’ impact on Indigenous communities and also try to account for federal funds spent on the troubled program.
Congress is considering a bill to create a boarding school “truth and healing commission,” similar to one established in Canada in 2008. It would have a broader scope than the Interior Department’s investigation into federally run boarding schools and subpoena power, if passed.
While the U.S. grapples with questions of immigration reform, border security, and an ever-increasing visa backlog, neighboring Canada is experiencing immigration-related changes of its own.
Unlike the U.S., where population growth has steadily declined for decades, Canada is seeing the fastest population growth since 1957 — a demographic shift driven entirely by immigration. A significant percentage of this growth in recent years can be attributed to an increase in asylum claimants entering the country along the U.S.-Canada border. According to official government data, the number of asylum seekers crossing into Canada at informal entries along the country’s U.S. border reached the highest level since 2017.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) statistics show 23,358 asylum seekers have crossed into Canada at unofficial border points since the beginning of the year. While asylum seekers who enter Canada at official land border crossings are typically sent back to the U.S. for processing, migrants who cross elsewhere along the 5,500-mile border may remain in the country and file asylum claims with the Canadian government instead. These types of unauthorized crossings shot up during the Trump administration and have not slowed since President Biden took office.
Unofficial entries have become a common way for migrants to seek refuge in Canada and avoid being returned to the U.S. based on a decades-old agreement between the two countries. Ratified in 2004, the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) was designed as a way to manage U.S.-Canada land border crossings. Under the STCA, asylum seekers must request protection in the country where they first arrive, so migrants who enter Canada at official entry points are sent back to the U.S. — and vice versa. The idea underpinning the agreement is that both Canada and the U.S. are equally “safe” for refugees and offer access to fair asylum systems.
The pact has drawn widespread criticism from rights groups in recent years, with its future now being considered by Canada’s Supreme Court. Many in Canada argue that the U.S. is no longer a safe country for refugees, and therefore the U.S. government is unable to uphold its end of the agreement. Immigration advocates claim the policy forces asylum seekers to take increasingly dangerous journeys in order to cross the border, and migrants that do manage to cross are put at risk of immigration detention or deportation upon return to the U.S.
Canada’s asylum system and border policies are not the only areas to be impacted by grim immigration realities in the U.S. The sentiment that Canada may be a safer country for immigrants has rippled into other facets of the Canadian immigration system, namely the study and work permit sectors.
International student enrollment at Canadian colleges and universities doubled between 2016 and 2020 based on new analysis from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). By comparison, Boundless’ data report on international students found that U.S. schools experienced a 72% decrease in international student enrollment in 2020 compared to the previous year. NFAP’s analysis cited Canada’s friendlier immigration policies as a possible explanation, as the lack of reliable paths to a green card in the U.S. could also make Canada a seemingly safer immigration choicefor prospective international students. International graduates in Canada jump through far fewer hoops to obtain temporary work visas and permanent residence than their counterparts in the U.S.
In addition to losing international students, many highly skilled foreign nationals are choosing employment opportunities in Canada over the U.S. In 2021, House Immigration Chair Rep. Zoe Lofgren warned that the U.S. is losing immigrant talent to Canada because of “outdated and restrictive U.S. immigration policies.”
There is no numerical limit on how many work visas can be issued under Canadian immigration law. In contrast, it has become increasingly more difficult to get an H-1B work visa, which is typically the only practical option for immigrants to work in the U.S. long-term. The H-1B system itself is plagued with complex requirements and yearly caps that applicants and sponsoring employers must navigate. For example, in March 2021, sponsoring employers filed around 308,000 H-1B applications and over 72% of petitions were rejected.
Unlike the U.S., Canada also does not have a per-country limit on permanent residence, and immigrant workers are generally able to declare immigrant intent after working in temporary status for one year, regardless of country of origin. Meanwhile, the employment-based green card backlog stood at around 1.4 million in 2021, with applicants from certain countries like India estimated to wait several years to a decade before becoming eligible for a green card.
The trend of individuals selecting Canada over the U.S. for future immigration plans, regardless of which visa category they may fall under, is likely to continue with increased incentives from the Canadian government. Prime Minister Trudeau’s government announced plans to roll out new policies and programs to better recruit immigrant workers in industries suffering the most from labor shortages. Trudeau also set an ambitious target to bring in a record number of new permanent residents (more than 1.3 million) over the course of the next three years.
Can College Level the Playing Field: Higher education in an unequal society’ by Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson is published by Princeton University Press. ISBN: 978-0691-171-807
No doubt, Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, authors of Can College Level the Playing Field: Higher education in an unequal society, were pleased by United States President Joe Biden’s recent announcement that the US government was forgiving US$10,000 of student debt held by people earning less than US$125,000 and US$20,000 of debt held by those who received Pell Grants, which are made to the nation’s poorest students – and by the plan to increase Pell Grants from by over US$2,000 to US$8,670.
Likewise, New Mexico’s recent decision to make the first two years of higher education free to its residents fits well within their recommendations.
Their scepticism about online education, especially for less prepared students, has become a leitmotif in the news because the impact of online education during the many COVID-19-caused shutdowns of universities, colleges and schools becomes clear.
For readers outside the United States, however, the strength of this book is not so much in its common sense recommendations but, rather, in its devastating portrait of inequality – in education, achievement and incomes – in America today.
The Gini coefficient, a figure used by political scientists to show inequality, is 0.390 in the United States. The closer a country is to 1.0, the more its economy is inequitable; accordingly South Africa’s number, 0.623, indicates it is 62% more inequitable than is the US. By contrast, Canada’s number is 0.300 while Norway’s is 0.264.
“The correlation between socioeconomic background and educational attainment has more serious implications in the United States than in many other nations because not earning a four-year college degree has more significant implications for lifetime earnings than it does elsewhere,” write Baum and McPherson.
Baum is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center on Education Data at the Washington DC-based Urban Institute and emeritus professor of economics at Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, New York), and McPherson is a non-resident fellow at the Urban Institute, former economics professor and former president of Macalester College (St Paul, Minnesota).
Among the other studies Baum and McPherson use to show that the “American Dream”, which holds that the next generation will climb higher on the socio-economic ladder, has become a nightmare, is the aptly named “Gatsby Curve”.
At its top is the United States (closely followed by Britain and Italy). This visual representation is deceiving, for the higher the country is on the Gatsby Curve the less intergenerational improvement there is. At the top of the league table, so to speak, are Finland, Norway and Denmark, countries not normally associated with dynamic social change.
The higher education premium
Readers of this publication are used to seeing figures showing the premium higher education provides. The median income for a high school graduate in the United States is US$37,000 a year, or US$18 dollars an hour, a dollar over the minimum wage in New York. For someone with a bachelor degree it is US$62,000 and for those with advanced degrees it is US$82,000.
However, as Baum and McPherson show, the benefits of higher education accrue to a minority of Americans. This fact, incidentally, is one of the reasons the Republicans oppose Biden’s plan to forgive student debt.
95% of whites and 89% of blacks complete high school. However, only 40% of white people and 26% of black people hold bachelor degrees. Accordingly, the pay received by 60% of white people and 75% of black people are in jobs where they earn around the minimum wage.
In fact, in reality, the income of black people is even worse than it appears. For the “median earnings of black 35- to 44-year-old bachelor degree recipients are about $14,000 less than the median for whites”. Instead of earning US$62,000, therefore, blacks with bachelor degrees earn US$48,000 a year, or US$23 per hour.
More than half of white students whose parents hold bachelor degrees go on to graduate from a four-year college or university. The figure is even more striking for children of doctorate holders: 70% of them go on to earn a doctorate. Only 5% of those whose parents graduated from a two-year community college go on to earn a doctorate.
A meritocratic class
While perhaps predictable, what these figures show is that within families education builds on education, creating a meritocratic class quite separate from the majority of Americans.
Like the “sorting hat” that assigns students to their house at Hogwarts (Harry Potter), a number of America’s high school graduates are sifted by family income and race. 53% of students with very high scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) are admitted to highly selective schools like Harvard or University of Chicago.
These are the same students who, Baum and McPherson show, tend to come from families in which the parents hold degrees.
They are also the students who come from families with the financial means to have sent them to private school – or to live in wealthy areas where public schools are well-funded – and to provide extras such as travel, a bookish home environment and SAT preparatory courses. Not surprisingly, only 31% of students with middling scores are admitted to highly selective schools.
When looked at through the prism of race, Baum and McPherson show the figures are even more striking. Of the admissions to highly selective schools, 89% are Asian, 78% are white, 38% are Latinx and 25% are black. The order, it is worth noting, is the same as it is on charts they show indicating the income of each group.
Growing inequality
One of the most interesting parts of Can College Level the Playing Field is the graph Baum and McPherson use in their discussion of growing inequality, a topic which has been much discussed in the media in recent years.
Since 1969 the bottom 20% of American households (by earnings) saw the percent of their income, relative to the national income, drop from 6% to 4%. The next fifth dropped from 12% to 9%. The third fifth also dropped three percentage points to 15%. The fourth fifth remained at 24%. The highest fifth saw the percentage of their income rise from 41% to 48%; the top five percent, who are part of the highest fifth, saw their incomes rise from 16% to 20%.
At first glance, the drop in income for the poorest Americans from 6% to 4% does not seem that much. It is, however, a 33% decline. While large, when set against the fact that between 1969 and 2019 the US economy grew almost five-fold, from US$4.9 trillion to US$19.4 trillion, it might seem as though this lowest quintile is still doing fairly well economically.
However, the cumulative inflation rate over the six decades beginning in 1969 is eight-fold: what cost US$100 in 1969 would have cost US$800 in 2019. Accordingly, the poorest Americans have absorbed approximately a 50% decrease in their buying power.
Lowering admission requirements
In the chapter titled, “What Can Colleges and Universities do?” Baum and McPherson make several suggestions. The first is for the elite schools to enroll more poor students. They urge elite schools to lower the SAT expectations from 1,600 to 1,250 for poor students.
To those who would howl that the schools would be selling out to lower expectations, Baum and McPherson point out that elite schools routinely make such arrangements for star athletes – the ones who will fill these schools’ expensive stadia. Further, they note, such arrangements are routinely made for what’s known as “legacy applicants”, many whose parents just so happen to have made large donations to the alma mater their son or daughter is applying to.
Baum and McPherson urge other state universities to adopt a programme similar to the Texas Top Ten Percent rule. In the “Lonestar State”, the top 10% of high school graduates – even from poor areas where the high schools are lower on the league tables – are guaranteed admission to the state’s public universities, including the state’s flagship institution, the University of Texas at Austin.
“Outcomes were no worse for the students they replaced, who attended less selective institutions but did not have lower enrollment rates, graduation rates, or earnings than they would have otherwise had,” they write.
For several decades, the United States Supreme Court has whittled away at the affirmative action efforts colleges and universities have used to address the racial imbalance on America’s campuses. In simplified terms, the court has said that quotas cannot be used to address historic or present discrimination – because doing so discriminates against the plaintiff.
Baum and McPherson propose an interesting way around the court’s rulings. Instead of affirmative action based on race, colleges and universities can create affirmative action programmes based on economic class.
These would “not [be] vulnerable to a legal challenge based on the Fourteenth Amendment” and, since black people and Latinx Americans make up a disproportionate share of poor people, programmes aimed at the economic class would benefit a large number of them.
Academic support
Their recommendation for mid-tier universities, which educate the vast majority of America’s higher education students, includes increasing state grants that will keep tuition as low as possible.
Larger state grants will also allow these colleges and universities to provide academic support services that are needed by a disproportionate number of poorer students (because the schools they went to were themselves poorly funded).
Absent from Biden’s announcement about changes to Pell Grants was something Baum and McPherson consider important : however necessary for student success, remediation classes use up Pell Grant room and do not count towards graduation.
In other words, if students need 64 classes to graduate, but have taken four remediation classes, they will have to take a total of 68 classes to graduate because the remediation classes do not count towards graduation.
The effect of this is that many poor students have to remain an extra semester to graduate, with the attendant economic costs and no further Pell assistance.
Multicultural Meanderings 