Pandemic Wave of Automation May Be Bad News for Workers

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Interesting trend affecting lower skilled workers, one that will likely affect Canada and that needs to be taken into account by the immigration program in terms of levels and mix, particularly those in retail, hospitality, warehousing and manufacturing. This may also increase the productivity gap between Canada and the USA:

When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.

Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.

And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.

An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.

Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.

“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.

The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.

Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.

“Six months ago, all these workers were essential,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. “Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of them.”

Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult — so much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while in high school.

“We really felt like there has to be another solution,” she said.

So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant’s technology began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales’s drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by an automated voice designed to understand their orders — including modifications and special requests — suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the kitchen and the cashier.

The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the system to her three other restaurants.

“We’ll look back and say why didn’t we do this sooner,” she said.

The push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of technology.

Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and stockholders to compete over their share of the income — a game that workers tended to lose. Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting firm.

She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.

“For the first time, we’re seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity, lowering cost, but they’re also increasing flexibility,” she said. “We’re starting to see real momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly.”

Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor without adding much to overall productivity.

In a recent working paper, Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that “a significant portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by automation” — and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.

“If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we would have had a very different trajectory for inequality,” Professor Acemoglu said.

Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn’t looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30 people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.

“Our approach is, this is an assistant for you,” she said. “This allows our employee to really focus” on customers.

Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that she would lose sales — and automation allows her to take another course.

Rob Carpenter, Valyant’s chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking drive-through orders is only part of an employee’s responsibilities. Automating that task doesn’t eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.

“We’re not talking about automating an entire position,” he said. “It’s just one task within the restaurant, and it’s gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks.”

But technology doesn’t have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology could erode workers’ bargaining power.

“Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no more,” Professor Acemoglu said. “It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I’ll get lower wages.”

At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available. Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States, has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require someone to flip burgers — they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press of a button.

“You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier,” said Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. “It certainly widens the scope of who you can have behind that grill.”

With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.

Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

“If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?” Professor Warman said. Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he added.

The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a 375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.

Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop & Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to better serve customers — and that it was a competitive necessity.

“Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers,” she said. “Stop & Shop needs to do the same.”

In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich, Conn. A decade later, he manages the store’s prepared foods department, earning around $40,000 a year.

Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn’t concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon, and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive — like more powerful ovens for rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.

But he worries about other technologies — like automated meat slicers — that seem to enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a career in the industry.

“The business model we seem to be following is we’re pushing toward automation and we’re not investing equally in the worker,” he said. “Today it’s, ‘We want to get these robots in here to replace you because we feel like you’re overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he has to do is push this button.’”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/business/economy/automation-workers-robots-pandemic.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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Biden Administration Unveils Strategy to Remove Obstacles to US Citizenship – Boundless

2021/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note the more pro-active outreach:

The Biden administration unveiled Friday a comprehensive strategy involving numerous government agencies to remove obstacles facing immigrants eligible for U.S. citizenship.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said in a statement that the agency “is committed to empowering immigrants to pursue citizenship and the rights and opportunities available to them as they embark on their journey.”

The government laid out its plans to reduce barriers to naturalization, including:

  1. Outreach: Create a working group with various government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Social Security Administration, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as state and local governments, to notify immigrants when they’re eligible to apply for citizenship.
  2. Partnerships: Expand national, regional, and local partnerships to raise awareness around naturalization. Examples of the types of partnerships include teaming up with the United States Postal Service (USPS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to provide citizenship information at post offices and ports of entry.
  3. Citizenship Education: Relaunch and expand a citizenship awareness and education campaign. Initiatives include creating new multilingual learning materials, increasing outreach to military families and rural communities, and posting more social media content about citizenship-related events, the application process, and study materials.

USCIS said it also plans to collect information on the nationality, age, sex, and zip codes of immigrants eligible for naturalization, and provide this anonymous data to local governments and community organizations seeking to improve outreach to those eligible for citizenship.

Given the massive naturalization interview and oath backlogs, USCIS said it would also continue searching for solutions to speed up the process.

“As the nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, we will seek to responsibly hold in-person events and to use the creative solutions we have already been employing to connect with communities using technology,” said the agency.

Source: Biden Administration Unveils Strategy to Remove Obstacles to US Citizenship – Boundless

Report: full report

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Canada’s tragic residential-school reckoning could be grim harbinger for U.S.

2021/06/29 Leave a comment

Of note. Will reinforce efforts here I suspect:

It took just two weeks for the first Indigenous cabinet member in American history to publicly express her deep personal dismay at the grim residential school revelations emanating from north of the border.

It was only another 11 days before Deb Haaland, one of the first Native Americans ever elected to Congress and President Joe Biden’s newly appointed secretary of the interior, took matters into her own hands.

“The department shall undertake an investigation of the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of residential Indian boarding schools,” Haaland wrote in a memo last week.

“Only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future we are all proud to embrace.”

In geopolitical terms, the time between Haaland’s June 22 memo and May 27 — the day a B.C. First Nation announced the grim discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school — was the blink of an eye.

Rarely do developments on Canadian soil prompt such rapid, dramatic policy decisions in the U.S., a telling measure of magnitude for what Haaland’s investigation may uncover in a country where Indigenous issues are seldom considered front-page news.

“There is a reckoning happening,” said Chase Iron Eyes, a prominent U.S. Indigenous activist and lead counsel for the North Dakota-based Lakota People’s Law Project.

“They don’t teach this in schools — not in Canadian schools, not in American schools — that there are mass graves of children at church-run, government-sponsored residential schools and boarding schools.

“And now we’re no longer able to hide from those truths.”

Haaland’s own heritage doubtless helped move things along.

“My great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania,” Haaland wrote in a moving column in the Washington Post this month that opened with the news out of Canada.

“Its founder coined the phrase, ‘Kill the Indian, and save the man,’ which genuinely reflects the influences that framed these policies at the time.”

It’s a chilling echo of words frequently attributed to Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald — “take the Indian out of the child” — in his 19th century defence of Canada’s residential school system.

The similarities between the systems that existed in Canada and the U.S. likely don’t stop there.

“I think the scale, in terms of sheer numbers, is fairly comparable,” said Circe Sturm, an anthropology professor and Indigenous issues specialist at the University of Texas at Austin.

By the turn of the century, after the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs had taken over Indigenous schooling from the Christian missionaries who started the effort, the department was operating 147 day schools and 81 boarding schools on U.S. reservations, and another 25 boarding schools off-reserve, Sturm said.

In Canada, an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children are believed to have attended one of about 150 residential schools that operated between the 1880s and when the last one closed in 1996.

Haaland’s “Indian Boarding School Initiative” will seek to identify all of the schools that were part of the program, with a particular emphasis on “any records relating to cemeteries or potential burial sites … which may later be used to assist in locating unidentified human remains.”

The department will also liaise with Indigenous communities across the U.S., including in Alaska and Hawaii, on how best to handle any such remains, with plans for a final report by April of next year.

“Many who survived the ordeal returned home changed in unimaginable ways, and their experiences still resonate across the generations,” Haaland wrote.

“The work outlined will shed light on the scope of that impact.”

The potential scale of the situation in Canada took a dramatic turn Thursday when the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of what are believed to be 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School on southern Saskatchewan.

That news generated uncommon media interest Friday in the U.S., where the Post played it on the front page and the New York Times devoted a full inside page to coverage of the discovery, as well as Haaland’s announcement.

Sturm demurred when asked whether she expects broad change in U.S. attitudes toward Indigenous Peoples on a scale comparable to last year’s social upheaval in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

“I suspect that many Americans will struggle with the hard truth about the founding of this country — some by choosing to ignore it, others with guilt and anger,” she said.

“But because we are talking about the senseless death of children, there is a good chance that a significant number of Americans would be moved enough to insist on action.”

If such discoveries are what it takes to finally end public complacency about the plight of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, so be it, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested Friday.

The federal government intends to help with “the healing and the fixing of the generations of trauma that Canadians have all too often turned an eye from, all too often shrugged away from,” Trudeau said.

“And if it took discovering these graves for Canadians to wake up to how much we need to continue to do, then that perhaps gives us a starting point to continue to do even more.”‘

Indigenous leaders in Canada have been pressing Trudeau to secure an apology, on Canadian soil, from Pope Francis himself for the role the Catholic Church played in operating residential schools.

Those demands — which Trudeau repeated again Friday — have so far gone unheeded. But they may carry more weight if, in the fullness of time, Biden is in a position to join the call.

“I think Trudeau and Biden together is a stronger force than either of them alone. I do believe that,” Iron Eyes said.

“We need those calls to come from within the Christian community, because those ‘ideals’ upon which these countries were founded were very much informed by Christian and Western theology and world views.”

Source: Canada’s tragic residential-school reckoning could be grim harbinger for U.S.

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US to review Native American boarding schools’ dark history

2021/06/24 Leave a comment

Of note as USA also confronts this sad part of its history:

The federal government will investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of policies that over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced Tuesday.

The unprecedented work will include compiling and reviewing records to identify past boarding schools, locate known and possible burial sites at or near those schools, and uncover the names and tribal affiliations of students, she said.

“To address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities, we must shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said.

A member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, Haaland outlined the initiative while addressing members of the National Congress of American Indians during the group’s midyear conference.

She said the process will be long, difficult and painful and will not undo the heartbreak and loss endured by many families.

Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the U.S. enacted laws and policies to establish and support Indian boarding schools across the nation. For over 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools that focused on assimilation.

Haaland talked about the federal government’s attempt to wipe out tribal identity, language and culture and how that past has continued to manifest itself through long-standing trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, premature deaths, mental health issues and substance abuse.

The recent discovery of children’s remains buried at the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school has magnified interest in the troubling legacy both in Canada and the United States.

In Canada, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into society. They were forced to convert to Christianity and were not allowed to speak their languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.

After reading about the unmarked graves in Canada, Haaland recounted her own family’s story in a recent opinion piece published by the Washington Post.

Haaland cited statistics from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which reported that by 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations. Besides providing resources and raising awareness, the coalition has been working to compile additional research on U.S. boarding schools and deaths that many say is sorely lacking.

Interior Department officials said aside from trying to shed more light on the loss of life at the boarding schools, they will be working to protect burial sites associated with the schools and will consult with tribes on how best to do that while respecting families and communities.

As part of the initiative, a final report from agency staff is due by April 1, 2022.

Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, which had about 80 boarding schools, called the announcement encouraging and said anything that can be done to address those “troubling chapters of history” is a positive thing.

“I hope we don’t discover gruesome incidents like were discovered in Canada. I just think it’s good in this country to have conversations about what happened to Native American children,” Hoskin said.

Navajo Nation President Nez also offered his support for the initiative, noting discrimination against Native Americans continues today on many fronts — from voter suppression to high numbers of missing and murdered people.

“Last week, Congress and President Biden established ‘Juneteenth’ as a national holiday, in observance of the end of slavery, which I fully support as a means to healing the African American community,” Nez said. “Now, from my perspective as a Navajo person, there are so many atrocities and injustices that have been inflicted upon Native Americans dating back hundreds of years to the present day that also require national attention, so that the American society in general is more knowledgeable and capable of understanding the challenges that we face today.”

This is not the first time the federal government has attempted to acknowledge what Haaland referred to as a “dark history.”

More than two decades ago, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Gover issued an apology for the emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual violence committed against children at the off-reservation schools. Then in 2009, President Barack Obama quietly signed off on an apology of sorts that was buried deep in a multibillion-dollar defense spending bill; the language had been watered down from the original legislation introduced years earlier.

Source: US to review Native American boarding schools’ dark history

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The dip in the US birthrate isn’t a crisis, but the fall in immigration may be

2021/06/23 Leave a comment

Similar argumentation to Canadian increased immigration advocates:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in May 2021 that the nation’s total fertility rate had reached 1.64 children per woman in 2020, dropping 4% from 2019, a record low for the nation.

The news led to many stories about a “baby bust” harming the country. The fear is that if the trend continues, the nation’s population may age and that will lead to difficulties in funding entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid for seniors in the future.

But as a statistician and sociologist who collaborates with the United Nations Population Division to develop new statistical population forecasting methods, I’m not yet calling this a crisis. In fact, America’s 2020 birth rate is in line with trends going back over 40 years. Similar trends have been observed in most of the U.S.‘s peer countries.

The other reason this is not a crisis, at least not yet, is that America’s historically high immigration rates have put the country in a demographic sweet spot relative to other developed countries like Germany and Japan.

But that could change. A recent dramatic decline in immigration is now putting the country’s demographic advantage at risk.

Falling immigration may be America’s real demographic crisis, not the dip in birth rates.

A predictable change

Most countries have experienced part or all of a fertility transition.

Fertility transitions occur when fertility falls from a high level – typical of agricultural societies – to a low level, more common in industrialized countries. This transition is due to falling mortality, more education for women, the increasing cost of raising children and other reasons.

In 1800, American women on average gave birth to seven children. The fertility rate decreased steadily, falling to just 1.74 children per woman in 1976, marking the end of America’s fertility transition. This is the point after which fertility no longer declined systematically, but instead began to fluctuate.

Birth rates have slightly fluctuated up and down in the 45 years since, rising to 2.11 in 2007. This was unusually high for a country that has made its fertility transition, and put the U.S. birth rate briefly at the top of developed countries.

A decline soon followed. The U.S. birth rate dropped incrementally from 2007 to 2020, at an average rate of about 2% per year. 2020’s decline was in line with this, and indeed was slower than some previous declines, such as the ones in 2009 and 2010. It put the U.S. on par with its peer nations, below the U.K. and France, but above Canada and Germany.

Using the methods I’ve helped develop, in 2019 the U.N. forecast a continuing drop in the global birth rate for the period from 2020 to 2025. This methodology also forecast that the overall world population will continue to rise over the 21st century.

The ideal situation for a country is steady, manageable population growth, which tends to go in tandem with a dynamic labor market and adequate provision for seniors, through entitlement programs or care by younger family members. In contrast, countries with declining populations face labor shortages and squeezes on provisions for seniors. At the other extreme, countries with very fast population growth can face massive youth unemployment and other problems.

Many countries that are peers with the U.S. now face brutally sharp declines in the number of working-age people for every senior within the next 20 years. For example, by 2040, Germany and Japan will have fewer than two working-age adults for every retired adult. In China, the ratio will go down from 5.4 workers per aged adult now to 1.7 in the next 50 years.

By comparison, the worker-to-senior ratio in the U.S. will also decrease, but more slowly, from 3.5 in 2020 to 2.1 by 2070. By 2055, the U.S. will have more workers per retiree than even Brazil and China.

Germany, Japan and other nations face population declines, with Japan’s population projected to go down by a massive 40% by the end of the century. In Nigeria, on the other hand, the population is projected to more than triple, to over 700 million, because of the currently high fertility rate and young population.

In contrast, the U.S. population is projected to increase by 31% over the next 50 years, which is both manageable and good for the economy. This is slower than the growth of recent decades, but much better than the declines faced by peer industrialized nations.

The reason for this is immigration. The U.S. has had the most net immigration in the world for decades, and the projections are based on the assumption that this will continue.

Migrants tend to be young, and to work. They contribute to the economy and bring dynamism to the society, along with supporting existing retirees, reducing the burden on current workers.

However, this source of demographic strength is at risk. Net migration into the U.S. declined by 40% from 2015 to 2019, likely at least in part because of unwelcoming government policies.

If this is not reversed, the country faces a demographic future more like that of Germany or even Japan, with a rapidly aging population and the economic and social problems that come with it. The jury is out on whether family-friendly social policies will have enough positive impact on fertility to compensate.

If U.S. net migration continues on its historical trend as forecast by the U.N., the U.S. population will continue to increase at a healthy pace for the rest of the century. In contrast, if U.S. net migration continues only at the much lower 2019 rate, population growth will grind almost to a halt by 2050, with about 60 million fewer people by 2100. The fall in migration would also accelerate the aging of the U.S. population, with 7% fewer workers per senior by 2060, leading to possible labor shortages and challenges in funding Social Security and Medicare.

While the biggest stream of immigrants is from Latin America, that is likely to decrease in the future given the declining fertility rates and aging populations there. In the longer term, more immigrants are likely to come from sub-Saharan Africa, and it will be important for America’s demographic future to attract, welcome and retain them.

Source: The dip in the US birthrate isn’t a crisis, but the fall in immigration may be

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Increased Immigration is Not A Simple Solution for US Population Woes

2021/06/10 Leave a comment

I do not normally agree with the Center for Immigration Studies, with its general anti-immigration work, but this analysis largely mirrors my own concerns regarding the arguments of Canadian advocates for increased immigration:

Conventional wisdom has developed that the United States desperately needs more immigration to address the supposed twin evils of population aging and slowing population growth. The 2020 Census showing the U.S. grew by “only” 22.7 million over the last decade has prompted a new round of calls to expand immigration.

In fact, immigration does not make the population substantially younger unless the level is truly enormous and ever-increasing. Moreover, there is no body of research showing that higher rates of population growth necessarily make a country richer on a per-person basis. Advocates of mass immigration also ignore the downsides of larger populations, as well as the more effective and less extreme alternatives that exist for dealing with an aging society.

Despite this reality, Jay Evensen of Salt Lake City’s Deseret News argues that the slowdown in population growth revealed by the Census “portends a population disaster.” Bloomberg News’ Noah Smith thinks lower population growth creates a “grim economic future.”

Many commentators argue for increasing immigration above the more than one million already allowed in each year to spur population growth and “rebuild the demographic pyramid,” as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush famously put it in 2013. But as the former director of Princeton’s graduate program in population studies, Thomas Espenshade, observed a number of years ago, “the effect of alternative immigration levels on population age structure is small, unless we are willing to entertain a volume of U.S. immigration of historic proportion.”

To illustrate, the Census Bureau’s “low-immigration” scenario produces a U.S. population of 376 million in 2060, compared to 447 million under its “high-immigration” scenario — a 71 million difference. Under its low-immigration scenario, 56 percent of the population will be working-age (18-64) in 2060, compared to 57 percent under its high-immigration scenario. Thus, the addition of 71 million people raises the working-age share by just one percentage point.

One reason the impact is so modest is that immigrants are not uniformly young when they arrive — many now come in their 50s and 60s — and they grow old over time just like everyone else. Moreover, immigrant fertility now only slightly exceeds native-born fertility, and their children add to the dependent population — those too young or too old to work. Of course, these children eventually grow up and become workers, but by then many of their immigrant parents will be at or near retirement age.

Given the inefficiency of immigration as a tool to address population aging, immigration advocate Justin Gest at George Mason University is forced to propose unprecedented levels of future immigration to accelerate population growth and slow population aging. In a piece for CNN and a report for the immigration advocacy group fwd.us, he argues for doubling immigration to the United States to make the country “younger, more productive, and richer.”

Gest’s own projections show that the current level of immigration will make the U.S. population 74 million larger in 2050 than if there was no immigration, while doubling immigration would add another 92 million people by 2050.

Gest emphasizes that making the population 166 million larger increases the aggregate size of the economy significantly. More workers, more consumers, and more government spending does make for a larger GDP. But a larger population means the larger GDP is spread out over more people, so each individual is not necessarily better off. If all that mattered was the overall size of the economy, Bangladesh would be considered a richer country than New Zealand. Of course, what really determines the standard of living in a country is its per capita GDP.

Gest claims that the 74 million additional people that the current level of immigration would add will raise per capita income by 4 percent in 2050, relative to no immigration. He further asserts that doubling immigration would, along with an additional 92 million people, increase average income by another 3 percent. The idea behind this calculation is that if there are more workers — or more specifically, if a larger share of the population is of working-age — the average income of the entire population will be higher.

What is so striking about these numbers is that even if everything Gest argues is true, adding a total of 166 million people to the country — more than the combined populations of France and Germany — in just three decades only modestly improves per capita economic growth. But even this small increase is an overestimate if the new immigrants crowd out some existing workers from the labor force. There is certainly evidence that this happens with teenagers and Black Americans.

In the real world, it is hard to find evidence that population growth actually increases per capita economic growth. For example, if population growth were such an economic boon, then countries like Canada and Australia, which have among the highest rates of immigration and resulting population growth in the developed world, would dramatically outpace a country like Japan, which has relatively little immigration and a declining population. And yet, between 2010 and 2019, Japan’s per capita GDP growth was slightly higher than Canada’s and Australia’s. Among all developed countries, the correlation between population growth and per capita economic growth was actually negative between 2010 and 2019.

One of the reasons population growth is not associated with economic growth is that increasing the supply of workers reduces incentives to improve productivity. Looking across countries, a 2017 study by Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason found that “low fertility is not a serious economic challenge.” Instead, they find that “The effect of low fertility on the number of workers and taxpayers has been offset by greater human capital investment, enhancing the productivity of workers.” There is simply no reason to assume that a larger population will necessarily be richer.

Putting aside economics, making the population 166 million larger or even 74 million larger than it would otherwise be has important environmental implications. While population is not the only factor that determines human impact on the environment, it does have a direct bearing on everything from preventing further habitat loss to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.

One can debate the severity of climate change and how best to address it. But mathematically, if the total population is 166 million (50 percent) larger in 2050 than it would otherwise be, then each person would have to reduce their greenhouse gases admission by roughly one-third just to maintain the current level of emissions, to say nothing of lowering levels. As Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations Population Division, pointed out in The Hill recently, stabilizing America’s population is necessary “to deal effectively with climate change and many other critical environmental concerns.”

In addition to the environment, making the population dramatically larger must also have profound implications for the quality of life. Most Americans aspire to live in areas with a fair amount of open space. A 2018 Gallup poll found, by a two-to-one margin, that Americans want to live in rural areas or suburbs. The rapid suburbanization of immigrants shows that they share this desire. Significantly increasing the nation’s population density is likely to make it more difficult for many Americans to live the way they want to.

There is also the issue of traffic. As a Brookings Institution analysis a number of years ago concluded, “The most obvious reason traffic congestion has increased everywhere is population growth.” Traffic congestion alone has been estimated to cost the American economy $120 billion annually. Both the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Department of Transportation have reported that the nation’s roads are in a state of disrepair and need significant upgrades. It is hard to imagine that adding tens of millions more people in just 30 years would not create even more congestion.

If we are concerned about population aging, there are far less radical ways to address it. Projections by Karen Zeigler and myself show that raising the retirement age by just one year increases the share of the population that is working-age (16-64) about as much as all of the immigration expected by the Census Bureau through 2050. Increasing it by three years improves it more than does doubling immigration. We also found that increasing the share of working-age people who have a job from the pre-Covid rate of 70 percent to 75 percent would do more to improve the overall share of the population who are actually workers in 2050 than would the current level of immigration.

Population boosters assume a larger population would be a boon to the economy, even though there is no clear evidence that this is the case. They also ignore the negative impact on the environment, congestion, traffic, and other qualify of life issues. There are more effective, less radical, and more environmentally sustainable ways to deal with the challenges associated with population aging than using an ever-increasing level of immigration to dramatically increase the population.

Dr. Steven Camarota is director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Source: Increased Immigration is Not A Simple Solution for US Population Woes

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Why The US Is Losing Immigrant Entrepreneurs To Other Nations

2021/06/05 Leave a comment

Interesting longish read on how USA is becoming less attractive given immigration restrictions, and how other countries, including Canada, are benefitting:

John S. Kim, cofounder of Sendbird, which offers real-time chat and messaging for mobile apps and websites, relocated from his native South Korea to San Francisco five years ago.

He wanted to be close to his U.S. customers like Yahoo, Reddit and Headspace,have access to Silicon Valley venture capital, hire American engineers and expand his company here. He easily obtained an L-1 nonimmigrant visa for foreign executives, given that he’d first started the business in South Korea, but by 2019, he had only one extension left. He applied for a green card to get legal permanent residency—and received a letter that he’d likely be denied. “Notice of intent to deny is, ‘We’re going to kick you out; change our mind,’ ” he says. “We had raised $100 million–plus in financing, we had real revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, we were creating jobs. It was a slap in the face, for sure.”

Source: Why The US Is Losing Immigrant Entrepreneurs To Other Nations

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USA: The Brewing Political Battle Over Critical Race Theory

2021/06/03 Leave a comment

Latest iteration of the “culture wars:”

Last month, Republican lawmakers decried critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in American institutions.

“Folks, we’re in a cultural warfare today,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said at a news conference alongside six other members of the all-Republican House Freedom Caucus. “Critical race theory asserts that people with white skin are inherently racist, not because of their actions, words or what they actually believe in their heart — but by virtue of the color of their skin.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., added: “Democrats want to teach our children to hate each other.”

Republicans, who are fighting the teaching of critical race theory in schools, contend it divides Americans. Democrats and their allies maintain that progress is unlikely without examining the root causes of disparity in the country. The issue is shaping up to be a major cultural battle ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Academics, particularly legal scholars, have studied critical race theory for decades. But its main entry into the partisan fray came in 2020, when former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting certain racial sensitivity trainings. It was challenged in court, and President Biden rescinded the order the day he took office.

Since then, the issue has taken hold as a rallying cry among some Republican lawmakers who argue the approach unfairly forces students to consider race and racism.

“A stand-in for this larger anxiety”

Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, described the battle over critical race theory as typical of the culture wars, where “the issue itself is not always the thing driving the controversy.”

“I’m not really sure that the conservatives right now know what it is or know its history,” said Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars.

He said critical race theory posits that racism is endemic to American society through history and that, consequently, Americans have to think about institutions like the justice system or schools through the perspective of race and racism.

However, he said, “conservatives, since the 1960s, have increasingly defined American society as a colorblind society, in the sense that maybe there were some problems in the past but American society corrected itself and now we have these laws and institutions that are meritocratic and anybody, regardless of race, can achieve the American dream.”

Confronted by the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 curriculum, which roots American history in its racist past, Hartman said many Americans want simple answers.

“And so critical race theory becomes a stand-in for this larger anxiety about people being upset about persistent racism,” he said.

Legislative action

States such as Idaho and Oklahoma have adopted laws that limit how public school teachers can talk about race in the classroom, and Republican legislatures in nearly half a dozen states have advanced similar bills that target teachings that some educators say they don’t teach anyway.

There’s movement on the national level too.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has introduced the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act, a bill that would prohibit the armed forces and academics at the Defense Department from promoting “anti-American and racist theories,” which, according to the bill’s text, includes critical race theory.

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said he is co-sponsoring legislation that would prevent federal dollars from being spent on critical race theory in schools or government offices.

“The ideas behind critical race theory and [its] implementation is creating this oppressor-oppressed divide amongst our people,” Donalds told NPR. “And so no matter how you feel about the history of our country — as a Black man, I think our history has actually been quite awful, I mean, that’s without question — but you also have to take into account the progression of our country, especially over the last 60 to 70 years.”

Donalds said the country’s history, including its ills, should be taught, but that critical race theory causes more problems than solutions.

“It only causes more divisions, which doesn’t help our union become the more perfect union,” he said.

A post-racial country?

Nearly half of the speakers at the Republican news conference in May invoked Martin Luther King Jr., expressing their desire to be judged “by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”

But Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociology professor at Duke University, said King’s dream was about the future. “He didn’t say, ‘We are now in a colorblind society,’ ” he said.

Bonilla-Silva, whose book Racism Without Racists critiques the notion that America is now “colorblind,” says he too shares King’s dream, “but in order for us to get to the promised land of colorblindness, we have to go through race. It’s the opposite of what these folks are arguing.”

He says the idea that American society is post-racial is nonsense.

“We are not, because we watched the video of George Floyd, and we are not because we have the data on income inequality, on wealth inequality, on housing inequality,” he said.

As an example, Bonilla-Silva noted the opposition of whites to affirmative action in the post-civil rights era.

“Many whites said things such as, ‘I’m not a racist. I believe in equal opportunity, which is why I oppose affirmative action, because affirmative action is discrimination in reverse,’ ” he noted.

“That statement only works if one believes that discrimination has ended,” he added. “But because it has not ended, claiming that you oppose affirmative action because it’s presumably discrimination in reverse ends up justifying the racial status quo and the inequalities.”

Motivator for the midterms?

The fight over critical race theory will likely continue to be a heated issue ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Although November 2022 seems a long way away, Christine Matthews, president of Bellwether Research and a public opinion pollster, says pushback to anti-racism teaching is exactly the kind of issue that could maintain traction among certain voters.

“I think it’s just one more addition to the culture war that the Republicans really want to fight and it’s what they want to make the 2022 midterms about,” she said.

Matthews noted that Biden’s approval ratings, in the mid-50s, are significantly higher than Trump’s were throughout his term in office, “so Republicans are wanting to make this about othering the Democrats and making them seem as extreme and threatening to white culture as possible.”

“If Republicans can make [voters] feel threatened and their place in society threatened in terms of white culture and political correctness and cancel culture, that’s a visceral and emotional issue, and I do think it could impact turnout.”

These issues could be used to galvanize conservative voters and increase their numbers at the polls.

“We have seen evidence that the Republican base is responding much more to threats on cultural issues, even to some degree more than economic issues,” Matthews said.

But Rep. Donalds said the Republican Party doesn’t need to rally the base to get it to show up to vote.

“When it comes to the ’22 elections, we don’t need additional ammunition,” he said, pointing to what he views as a list of failures from the Biden administration, from budget and taxes to shutting down the Keystone pipeline.

Doug Heye, the former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said in some ways, the attempts to mandate what schools can or can’t teach highlights just how far the GOP under Trump has moved away from traditionally conservative principles — like wanting less federal involvement in schools.

“A lot of what we might have described as conservative policy five years ago, 10 years ago, now just isn’t that case,” he said. “If we’re pushing what is a current priority for the Trump base, that’s defined as conservative, whether or not that’s a federal top-down policy or not. So the old issues of federalism has really been upended under Donald Trump’s reign as the leader of the party.”

Heye said at this point, critical race theory is still politically a “niche issue” among conservative voters, but he expects it to play a larger role in state assemblies, governors races and school boards rather than in national politics.

He said he believes it’s an issue some candidates will raise “to further rile up the base that is already pretty riled.”

“So the question will be then for Republicans: What else are they really emphasizing?” he said.

From a strategy perspective, Matthews says she thinks it will all come down to messaging.

“The Republicans are trying to make it a bad thing,” she said, “but I feel like if the Democrats got the messaging right, they could make it a good thing.”

Both sides have a little more than a year to do that.

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Tribes to Confront Bias Against Descendants of Enslaved People

2021/06/01 Leave a comment

Of interest:

With pressure growing from the Biden administration, two Native American tribes in Oklahoma have agreed to consider reversing their policies of denying citizenship to descendants of Black people who were enslaved by them before the Civil War.

The tribes, the Choctaw Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation, said they would take initial steps to address the long-running demands of the descendants that they be granted equal rights as tribal citizens, an issue that has split their communities and highlighted clashes over identity and racism among Native Americans.

But the two tribes stopped short of a commitment to grant citizenship to the Black descendants, who are known as Freedmen, instead saying they would open discussions about the issue. In February, the Cherokee Nation eliminated from its constitutionlanguage that based citizenship on being descended from “by blood” tribal members listed on a federal census, the biggest step by a tribe so far to resolve the issue.

Those tribes and others, which had originally inhabited the Southeast, purchased enslaved Black people as laborers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and had brought them along when they were forcibly relocated by the federal government in a deadly ordeal known as the “Trail of Tears.”

Post-Civil War treaties in 1866 gave the formerly enslaved people all the rights of tribal citizenship. But in practice they were segregated and their citizenship rights later denied by a requirement that they be descended from non-Black tribal citizens who were on census lists more than a century ago, a situation that prompted increasing protests in recent years.

“Today we reach out to the Choctaw Freedmen. We see you. We hear you. We look forward to meaningful conversation regarding our shared past,” Gary Batton, chief of the Choctaw Nation, said in a letter announcing that the nation would consider “tribal membership for Choctaw Freedmen.”

David Hill, the principal chief of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, also wrote to the tribe’s national council proposing town hall events and a period of public comment to discuss citizenship for Creek Freedmen.

Freedmen said the tribes took action only after being pushed into it.

“Black Indians were a part of this tribe, the Choctaw Nation, they lived in the Choctaw Nation,” said Verdie Triplett, a descendant of both Choctaw and Chickasaw Freedmen, and who lives on the Choctaw reservation in Fort Coffee, Okla.

He added: “For them to do this now, they didn’t do it on their own. This right here is a prime example of pressure.”

The announcement from the Choctaw Nation followed a statement this month from Deb Haaland, the first Native American secretary of the Interior, addressing the Freedmen of Native American nations in Oklahoma and acknowledging their rights as citizens of the tribes that had enslaved them.

“The Cherokee Nation’s actions,” Ms. Haaland said, referring to the tribe’s decision to amend its constitution in February to grant equal status to its Freedmen population, had fulfilled “their obligations to the Cherokee Freedmen.”

“We encourage other Tribes to take similar steps to meet their moral and legal obligations to the Freedmen,” Ms. Haaland said, naming four other Native American nations in Oklahoma — the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Choctaw Nation, the Chickasaw Nation and the Seminole Nation — that had owned slaves and allied themselves with the Confederacy to preserve slavery as an institution.

With those words, Ms. Haaland waded into a painful reckoning within Native American nations in Oklahoma that had historically owned slaves.

Changes to the Choctaw constitution in 1983 and the Muscogee (Creek) constitution in 1979 required that a citizen of the nation must be descended from “by blood” citizens, disqualifying the Freedmen who were counted separately in the federal census known as the Dawes Rolls of 1906. The Cherokee Nation had also previously expelled its Freedmen, and the Seminole Nation currently grants only limited citizenship to its Freedmen.

Equal citizenship in a Native American nation would qualify the Freedmen for a number of tribal services — including housing, health care and education — much of it funded by the federal government. Older Choctaw and Creek Freedmen recall being eligible for these services before they were expelled from the nations.

Funding in the CARES Act distributed to tribal nations recently funded services exclusively available to “by blood” tribal citizens. Seminole Freedmen who applied were denied because of their limited citizenship in the Seminole Nation.

The Choctaw and Creek Freedmen would also be guaranteed civil and political rights within their nations, such as the ability to vote and run for tribal office.

In interviews, descendants of Freedmen described repeated appeals to the tribes for inclusion as equal citizens and repeated denials on the basis of their race.

“It’s heartbreaking. It really is heartbreaking,” the Rev. McKinley Rice, the senior pastor at St. Matthew Baptist Church in Okmulgee, Okla., and a Creek Freedmen, said. “In the day that we live in, and in the time that we live in, we was hoping and praying that racism and discrimination was, you know, gone.”

The letter from Mr. Batton marked a shift by the Choctaw Nation. Mr. Batton wrote to Speaker Nancy Pelosi nearly a year ago condemning efforts by Representative Maxine Waters, the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, to compel the tribe to re-enroll its Freedmen as citizens by withholding federal funding.

“The Freedman issue is a problem caused by the United States, not the Choctaw Nation,” Mr. Batton said at the time, referring to “America’s enslavement of African Americans” while making no mention that the Choctaw Freedmen are descendants of people enslaved by the Choctaw Nation.

In an interview, Mr. Batton said the federal government played a role in facilitating racist policies like the “by blood” requirement for citizenship. He added that the Interior Department ultimately accepted the constitutional changes from the Native American nations that had expelled the Freedmen in violation of Reconstruction treaties.

“My issue with the federal government is because they’ve implemented policies, and we followed those, and now they’re saying that we should not abide by those policies.” Mr. Batton said. “It’s kind of a Catch 22 as far as I’m concerned.”

Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation, who has been a longtime supporter of the Freedmen, said tribes had worked tirelessly to make sure the federal government upholds its treaty obligations. Cherry picking which treaties to uphold undercuts that fight, he said.

“I don’t think any nation is as strong as it can be when it denies its history and suppresses part of its society,” Mr. Hoskin said. “I think that’s what’s happened in respect to the Freedmen.”

The Chickasaw Nation had jointly signed its Reconstruction treaty with the Choctaw Nation, but did not comply with the condition to enroll its Freedmen as citizens. Some Chickasaw Freedmen enrolled as citizens of the Choctaw Nation, but were never included as citizens of the tribe that had enslaved them.

Bill Anoatubby, the governor of the Chickasaw Nation, said in a statement responding to Ms. Haaland’s remarks that “Chickasaw citizenship is a matter of sovereignty and is clearly defined in the Chickasaw Constitution.”

The Seminole Nation did not respond to requests for comment.

LeEtta Osborne-Sampson, a Seminole Freedman who serves on the tribe’s governing council, said she did not expect the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma to follow suit voluntarily. Ms. Osborne-Sampson said the tribe’s position had long been that it would take a ruling by a higher court to compel them to allow Freedmen to be recognized as equal citizens.

Eli Grayson, a Creek citizen with Freedmen heritage, said he was skeptical of the statements from tribal leadership. He noted that the Freedmen barred from citizenship would have no influence over a vote to change the tribes’ constitutions, and predicted the measures would ultimately fail.

“Citizens today do not have a right to vote on an issue that was settled during the Civil War,” Mr. Grayson said. “They’ve already settled this treaty with the U.S. They don’t have a right to change the conditions of that treaty.”

For the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, race was a key motivation for changing the constitution. In a national council meeting in 1977discussing the changes, the principal chief at the time, Claude Cox, expressed fear that the nation would be outnumbered and replaced by its Black citizens over time.

“The full-bloods lost control. That’s what we’re fighting,” Mr. Cox said.

Mr. Hill, the current principal chief of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, said in his proposal that citizenship for Freedmen “is a polarizing issue for our citizens.”

“This deeply personal and highly emotional issue goes to the heart of identity for both Creek citizens and the descendants of Freedmen,” Mr. Hill said. “As a nation committed to truth and justice it is important that we reflect upon this issue with an open heart and seek to understand what is right and equitable.”

Filed under Aboriginal, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Biden Aims to Rebuild and Expand Legal Immigration

2021/06/01 Leave a comment

Good overview:

If President Biden gets his way, it will soon be far easier to immigrate to the United States. There will be shorter, simpler forms and applicants will have to jump through fewer security hoops. Foreigners will have better opportunities to join their families and more chances to secure work visas.

A 46-page draft blueprint obtained by The New York Times maps out the Biden administration’s plans to significantly expand the legal immigration system, including methodically reversing the efforts to dismantle it by former President Donald J. Trump, who reduced the flow of foreign workers, families and refugees, erecting procedural barriers tougher to cross than his “big, beautiful wall.”

Because of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, the average time it takes to approve employer-sponsored green cards has doubled. The backlog for citizenship applications is up 80 percent since 2014, to more than 900,000 cases. Approval for the U-visa program, which grants legal status for immigrants willing to help the police, has gone from five months to roughly five years.

In almost every case over the last four years, immigrating to the United States has become harder, more expensive and takes longer.

And while Mr. Biden made clear during his presidential campaign that he intended to undo much of his predecessor’s immigration legacy, the blueprint offers new details about how far-reaching the effort will be — not only rolling back Mr. Trump’s policies, but addressing backlogs and delays that plagued prior presidents.

The blueprint, dated May 3 and titled “D.H.S. Plan to Restore Trust in Our Legal Immigration System,” lists scores of initiatives intended to reopen the country to more immigrants, making good on the president’s promise to ensure America embraces its “character as a nation of opportunity and of welcome.”

“There are significant changes that need to be made to really open up all avenues of legal immigration,” said Felicia Escobar Carrillo, the chief of staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, of the efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s agenda. “In the same way that they took a broad-stroke approach to closing off avenues, I think we want to take a broad approach toward opening up the legal avenues that have always been available but that they tried to put roadblocks up on.”

Since taking office four months ago, Mr. Biden has struggled with a historic surge in migration by Central American children and teenagers that has prompted some Republicans to accuse the president of flinging open the nation’s borders to people trying to enter the country illegally, a charge the White House rejects.

In fact, Mr. Biden does want to open the country to more immigrants. His ambition, as reflected in the blueprint, is to rebuild and expand the opportunities for foreigners to enter the United States — but to do so legally.

Divided into seven sections, the document offers detailed policy proposals that would help more foreigners move to the United States, including high-skilled workers, trafficking victims, the families of Americans living abroad, American Indians born in Canada, refugees, asylum-seekers and farm workers. Immigrants who apply online could pay less in fees or even secure a waiver in an attempt to “reduce barriers” to immigration. And regulations would be overhauled to “encourage full participation by immigrants in our civic life.”

Even with a more restrictive and slower immigration system, about 1 million people obtained green cards in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. Most had been waiting for years. In the final year of the Obama administration, 1.2 million people received green cards.

But if Mr. Biden accomplishes everything in the document, he will have gone further than just reversing the downward trend. He will have significantly increased opportunities for foreigners around the globe to come to the United States, embracing robust immigration even as a divisive, decades-long political debate continues to rage over such a policy.

Most of the changes could be put into practice without passage of Mr. Biden’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented people living in the United States but has stalled in a bitterly divided Congress. While surveys show that most Americans support increased immigration, many Republican voters have eagerly backed Mr. Trump’s more restrictive policies.

White House officials declined to comment directly on the Homeland Security Department’s blueprint, saying that such documents go through many drafts and that decisions about specific steps to address legal immigration remain in flux. But they said the president remained committed to significantly rolling back the restrictions imposed by his predecessor.

That effort will take time and has not yet caught the public’s attention like the surge of crossings at the southwest border. But conservative activists who have for years demanded lower levels of legal immigration are vowing a fight to stop Mr. Biden and extract a political price for his actions.

“They just want to shovel people in here,” said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general who served as the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services under Mr. Trump. “They are not running an immigration system for the benefit of America, and certainly not for the benefit of ordinary Americans. ”

Most research has shown that legal immigration to the United States has benefits for the country’s economy, especially at a time when the country’s population growth is slowing. But Mr. Cuccinelli and others who favor severe restrictions on immigration say it is obvious to them that letting foreigners compete for jobs — especially when the country is still recovering from an economic downturn like the one created by the pandemic — will hurt the prospects for American citizens.

“The number one job for the immigration services is to make sure that immigration does not hurt Americans,” said Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, a group dedicated to far lower levels of legal immigration.

Motivated by that belief, Mr. Cuccinelli set in motion a transformation of the government’s legal immigration system during the Trump administration — changing his agency from one that confers benefits on foreigners into a “vetting agency,” in part by issuing numerous restrictions on offering asylum for immigrants and trying to raise fees.

The increased vetting, as well as travel restrictions imposed during the pandemic, helped contribute to the result the Trump administration had sought: The influx of immigrants slowed significantly, as winning legal approval to enter the United States became much harder.

With fewer immigrants coming through the pipeline, there has been less money to finance Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is supported almost entirely by fees paid by immigrants. Restoring the agency to full capacity is at the heart of Mr. Biden’s effort to expand legal immigration, according to the document and interviews with administration officials.

A central element of the blueprint is addressing backlogs in the immigration system.

The administration is planning to fast-track immigration applications by expanding virtual interviews and electronic filing, as well as limiting the requests for evidence from applicants. Mr. Biden has tapped Cass R. Sunstein, a former Obama administration official and legal scholar at Harvard Law School, to remake the immigration system so it is “more effective and less burdensome” than it has been in decades by “reducing paperwork and other administrative requirements.”

Mr. Biden wants to restore opportunities for foreign employees through the existing H-1B visa program, which is intended for workers with special skills. The administration also intends to create new pathways for foreign entrepreneurs who wish to “start-up businesses and create jobs for U.S. workers,” according to the document.

Officials are working on a regulation that could allow migrants to win asylum in the United States if they are victims of domestic violence or their relatives were persecuted. During the Trump era, Attorney General William P. Barr moved to end asylum protection for those who claimed they deserved it for those reasons.

Mr. Biden is also aiming to expand immigration opportunities for L.G.B.T.Q. refugees from countries where they are persecuted or where same-sex marriages are not recognized.

In addition, he wants to revamp a program that provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who help law enforcement by cooperating with police or testifying in court.

The waiting list for the U-Visa program has ballooned, leaving crime victims and survivors of domestic abuse vulnerable to abusers who may threaten to report them for deportation if they continue to talk to the police, said Leslye E. Orloff, director of the national immigrant women’s advocacy project at American University.

The Biden administration is considering extending protections to immigrants who cooperate even before they make it on the official waiting list for the visa, according to the document.

“They’re recognizing that there’s danger for these victims,” Ms. Orloff said.

Critics say the Biden administration is ignoring the negative consequences of their efforts. The H-1B program has been attacked as a loophole for tech companies to import cheap foreign workers to compete for jobs. Granting asylum to the victims of domestic abuse could open the door to accepting millions of additional people. And some Republicans say Mr. Biden should not loosen vetting of foreigners, though officials insist they will continue to screen for terrorists and other threats.

As the Biden administration pushes forward with the changes, officials appear willing to use emergency rules and presidential memos to avoid the lengthy regulatory process, in much the same way that Mr. Trump put his own agenda in place. But that could make Mr. Biden’s immigration legacy subject to a similar reversal by a Republican president in the future.

“The question looming over all of this work is how do you do this in a way that isn’t easily so capsized next time around,” said Doug Rand, a founder of Boundless Immigration, a technology company in Seattle that helps immigrants obtain green cards and citizenship.

Change could not come soon enough for Jenn Hawk, 37, who is currently living in with her Argentine husband in Poland, where he works, even though her autistic son is in the Washington area with his father.

Because of delays in processing her husband’s immigration application, she is faced with a choice: stay in Poland with the man she married, or go back to the United States alone to be with her 10-year-old son.

Ms. Hawk filed to sponsor her husband’s immigration to the United States in October of 2020, spending $575 on the application. But they are facing a delay of more than a year and a half before they can even submit their financial and medical information, let alone get an interview with an immigration officer.

“I just want to go home,” Ms. Hawk said. “It seems like they’re doing everything in their power to restrict that from being a possibility.”

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