USA: The black-white wage gap can be explained in a word: discrimination : NPR

2016/09/26 Leave a comment

The latest of studies showing the impact of discrimination:

Racial discrimination, it seems, is like the salt that’s left in a pot after water boils away — much easier to identify in the absence of the other things.

That was one of the big takeaways from a report released this week by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Researchers were studying the longstanding black-white wage gap, and their findings were grim: The distance between what white Americans and black Americans earn is larger than it’s been in almost 40 years.

I talked to Valerie Wilson, who analyzes race and the economy for the institute. She told me that the wage gap has grown and shrunk over the years and has lingered in both boom and lean times. While it once varied by region — smallest in the Midwest and largest in the South — the gap is now more or less uniform across the country. It’s been a chronic blemish on our economy.

And the major reason, Wilson said? Not education. Not work experience. Not whether you live on a farm or in a downtown apartment complex. It’s discrimination, and it’s borne out in the data.

I was curious when she said this. How would you even measure discrimination when the people doing it don’t tend to advertise it, and the people being discriminated against often don’t know it’s happening? How do you detect something that is essentially invisible?

“The way that we measure discrimination in this report,” Wilson said, “is that it’s the portion of the gap that remains after we control for all the other factors that would reasonably influence one’s earnings.”

Here’s the crux of the matter via the report:

“During the early 1980s, rising unemployment, declining unionization, and policies such as the failure to raise the minimum wage and lax enforcement of anti-discrimination laws contributed to the growing black-white wage gap. During the late 1990s, the gap shrank due in part to tighter labor markets, which made discrimination more costly, and increases in the minimum wage. Since 2000 the gap has grown again.”

The researchers didn’t try to describe the ways widespread discrimination caused the wage gap, but we have some ideas. There’s the much-cited 2003 study where applicants with resumes boasting “black-sounding” names — Lakisha, say, or Jamal — were less likely to get callbacks for jobs. And then there’s this 2014 study by three prominent economists that analyzed the job searches of nearly 5,200 newly unemployed people in New Jersey:

“First, black job seekers were offered significantly less compensation than whites by potential new employers. Second, blacks were much more likely to accept these lower offers than their white counterparts.”

Interestingly, the economists also found that the racial gap in pay narrowed over time if employees stayed at the same company; that is, once the company became more comfortable with those black hires. But that also means that black folks have to stay with one employer longer to catch up with the wages of their white coworkers.

That finding dovetails with data from the EPI study, which pointed out that black college graduates enter the workforce making less than white college graduates. Taken together, black people are starting their work lives with potential employers deciding whether their names disqualify them, with fewer job prospects and with lower entry-level wages. Discrimination, then, is part of the experience of black workers long before and long after they’re hired.

Source: The black-white wage gap can be explained in a word: discrimination : Code Switch : NPR

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Immigrants Aren’t Taking Americans’ Jobs, New Study Finds – The New York Times

2016/09/23 Leave a comment

Worth noting, but unlikely to convince those who believe otherwise:

Do immigrants take jobs from Americans and lower their wages by working for less?

The answer, according to a report published on Wednesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is no, immigrants do not take American jobs — but with some caveats.

The question is at the heart of the furious debate over immigration that has divided the country and polarized the presidential race. Many American workers, struggling to recover from the recession, have said they feel squeezed out by immigrants.

Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has called for a crackdown on illegal immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers.” He promises to cut back legal immigration with new controls he says would “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.”

Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, takes an upbeat view, saying immigrants contribute to the economy whether they are here legally or not, by providing labor for American employers and opening businesses that create jobs for Americans rather than taking them.

The report assembles research from 14 leading economists, demographers and other scholars, including some, like Marta Tienda of Princeton, who write favorably about the impacts of immigration and others who are skeptical of its benefits, like George J. Borjas, a Harvard economist. Here’s what the report says:

• “We found little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term,” said Francine D. Blau, an economics professor at Cornell University who led the group that produced the 550-page report.

• Some immigrants who arrived in earlier generations, but were still in the same low-wage labor markets as foreigners just coming to the country, earned less and had more trouble finding jobs because of the competition with newer arrivals.

• Teenagers who did not finish high school also saw their hours of work reduced by immigrants, although not their ability to find jobs. Professor Blau said economists had found many reasons that young people who drop out of high school struggle to find work. “There is no indication immigration is the major factor,” she said.

• High-skilled immigrants, especially in technology and science, who have come in larger numbers in recent years, had a significant “positive impact” on Americans with skills, and also on working-class Americans. They spurred innovation, helping to create jobs.

“The prospects for long-run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants,” the report said. It did not focus on American technology workers, many of whom have been displaced from their jobs in recent years by immigrants on temporary visas.

The report asked another question Americans are debating: Do immigrants burden government budgets?

That answer is “more mixed,” Professor Blau said.

• The first generation of newcomers generally cost governments more than they contribute in taxes, with most of the costs falling on state and local governments, mainly because of the expense of educating the children of immigrant families.

For those governments, total annual costs for first-generation immigrants are about $57 billion. But by the second generation in those families, immigrants, with improved education and taxpaying ability, become a benefit to government coffers, adding about $30 billion a year. By the third generation, immigrant families contribute about $223 billion a year to government finances.

• In the last two decades, the number of immigrants in the country increased 70 percent to about 43 million people; they are now 13 percent of the population. One in every four Americans is either an immigrant or the child of one. And since 2001, about one million immigrants have come legally to the United States each year.

The report called immigration “integral to the nation’s economic growth” because immigrants bring new ideas and add to an American labor force that would be shrinking without them, helping ensure continued growth into the future.

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Jersey hospital selling U.S. citizenship with ‘AmeriMama program’ – Trump was right about abuse! | BizPac Review

2016/09/13 Leave a comment

While I don’t believe that the numbers show that birthright citizenship abuse is so widespread (certainly not in Canada), it is not surprising that there are some institutions and consultants that ‘market’ birthright citizenship.

In general, better data collection and  regulatory approaches are needed before abandoning birthright citizenship:

Donald Trump called attention to abuses of birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants early on in the Republican primary and a story out of New Jersey shows just how right the GOP nominee is on the issue.

A New Jersey hospital is tempting pregnant women in Russia to come to America to deliver their babies, and for a paltry sum of $10,000 or less, not only will they get superior medical care, but their children are born American citizens with all the privileges that come with it, Fox News reported.

“Childbirth in New York is the best investment in the future of your family!” reads the Russian-language AmeriMama website.

The “AmeriMama” program at Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center, first reported by NJ Spotlight, is part of a lucrative and controversial business called “birth tourism,” the practice of soliciting pregnant women from other countries to deliver their children in the U.S. — automatically making them American citizens — before they return home.

But the Secaucus, N.J., hospital has taken it to a brazen new level, say immigration experts.

For fees ranging from $8,500 to $27,500, the Russian-language website for AmeriMama promised to secure citizenship papers, passports, and travel visas for the baby, according to NJ Spotlight, which reported on the program in August.

The Center for Immigration Studies says this may be the first American for-profit hospital to openly market U.S. citizenship.

“They claim they’re selling their hospital services, but the unspoken benefit of this is that the child gets a U.S. passport and U.S. citizenship,” explained Jessica Vaughan, the center’s director of policy studies.

“This is essentially U.S. citizenship up for sale,” she added. “And this is the first time I’ve seen a hospital itself market to this customer base.”

The AmeriMama website and its Facebook page were removed soon after being exposed last month by NJ Spotlight.

Source: Jersey hospital selling U.S. citizenship with ‘AmeriMama program’ – Trump was right about abuse! | BizPac Review

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US temporarily freezes EB-1 citizenship visa for China and India as applicants hit the limit – Firstpost

2016/08/23 Leave a comment

Does appear to be shortsighted and the number of 7 percent maximum per country arbitrary:

A sought-after visa that offers a speedy path to US citizenship is temporarily closed to Chinese and Indian nationals. The US State Department announced it would stop processing EB-1 applications from Indian and Chinese nationals until later in October.

Immigration lawyers explained that the EB-1 visa is available to three categories of candidates: people with extraordinary abilities in arts, science and business; researchers and professors; and multinational business executives and managers.

EB-1 visas are typically limited to 40,135 for this fiscal year, and no more than 7 percent can go to immigrants from any one country. Currently, we have a problem because there are too many Indian and Chinese trying to get their hands on the EB-1, exhausting the limit. The last time this happened was back in 2007.

Representational image. Reuters

Representational image. Reuters

“Why do we continue to artificially limit this program?” asked immigration lawyer David Parker. “It defies logic that we are turning away extraordinary and outstanding artists, scientists and business people from India and China,” he added.

The EB-1 visa typically results in a green card in less than a year — one of the quickest pathways to receive one. And unlike many visas, some kinds of EB-1 visas don’t require applicants to be sponsored by employers. This is a godsend as it gives talented artists and brilliant scientists frustrated with the more traditional path to US citizenship, like the H-1B visa, a speedy alternative.

The H-1B is one of the most heavily used visas by Indian techies and professionals. Demand far exceeds the annual allotment. The H-1B requires workers to be sponsored by an employer and leaves applicants at the whim of lotteries. This year demand for H-1B visas surpassed the entire year’s allocation within five days and the US government ultimately awarded H-1Bs through a computer generated random lottery.

“A lot of people saw the EB-1 as the light at the end of the tunnel,” Shah Peerally, who heads up an immigration law firm in Newark, California, told CNN.

Source: US temporarily freezes EB-1 citizenship visa for China and India as applicants hit the limit – Firstpost

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Study: The Growing, Disproportionate Number Of Women Of Color In U.S. Jails : NPR

2016/08/20 Leave a comment

In Canada, 15 percent of those admitted to provincial/territorial prisons are women. For Indigenous peoples, the number is 20 percent for federal admissions, 24 percent for provincial/territorial admissions (Indigenous females accounted for a higher proportion of female admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody (36%) than did Aboriginal males (25%):

To be sure, the jail population is mostly male. Women represent 15 percent of the jail population in smaller counties, and slightly less in larger counties. But according to the study, the overall population of women in jails has ballooned since the 1970s, from just under 8,000 to nearly 110,000 nationwide in 2014, with low-income women of color disproportionately represented — 64 percent of women in jails across the country are women of color.

And while local jail populations are among the fastest growing correctional populations for both men and women, the U.S. Department of Justice reports that from 2000 to 2010, the female jail population grew at a faster rate than the male population.

….Swavola said existing research does not clearly explain the fast growth of the women’s population in small-county jails, but she pointed out that smaller counties can have fewer resources for social services, mental health resources and employment opportunities. “In those communities, they rely on incarceration to deal with people with mental and behavioral challenges,” says Swavola.

Laurie Garduque, director of Justice Reform for the MacArthur Foundation, which funded the study, says in many places around the country, jails have essentially become warehouses for the poor. Like men, most women in jail ended up there for nonviolent offenses. The study found that in Davidson County, Tennessee, for example, 77 percent of women were booked into jail on misdemeanor charges. The most common charge was failure to appear after receiving a citation.

“Much of the problems that bring women into the criminal justice system…tend to be low-level offenses or nuisance behavior that do not pose a risk to public safety,” says Garduque.

In their analysis, the researchers also found that 32 percent of women in U.S. jails suffer from serious mental illness, including major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Garduque says the trauma of being in jail can make it harder to cope with existing mental health problems. She says police officers, corrections officers and other employees in the criminal justice system need better training on how to interact with people with mental illnesses, and that this new research shows that mental health programs need to be more accessible outside of jail.

“Our aim here is not to improve mental health programs in jails,” says Garduque. “Our aim is to provide those resources on the community-based level to prevent women from penetrating the system.”

What’s more, many women enter the jail system having already experienced significant trauma. “There is a history of physical and domestic abuse for a lot of our moms,” says Samuel Luddington, deputy director of programs at Children of Inmates in Miami, which helps incarcerated parents stay connected with their children. Luddington says the current system wasn’t set up to provide that sort of care.

As for life after jail, re-entry programs that are developed with gender in mind are among the most effective, says Swavola, the co-author of study. For instance, Connecticut tried out a pilot probation program along those lines from 2007 to 2010. The project was based on the Women Offender Case Management Model developed by National Institute of Corrections. It was designed to take into account risk factors that girls and women tend to face at higher rates, such as domestic violence and mental illness. and partner abuse. It also encouraged women to have a voice in their own case management.

A review of women on probation who participated in the Connecticut program found those women were about 11 percent less likely to be arrested again after one year compared to women who did not participate in the program.

Source: Study: The Growing, Disproportionate Number Of Women Of Color In U.S. Jails : Code Switch : NPR

Filed under Aboriginal, gender Tagged with ,

Helping College-Bound Native Americans Beat The Odds : NPR

2016/08/16 Leave a comment

Not as familiar with similar initiatives in Canada as I should be, but university graduation rates for Indigenous peoples in Canada are 13 percent, half of the average rate for all Canadians:

Native American students make up only 1.1 percent of the nation’s high school population. And in college, the number is even smaller. More than any other ethnic or racial group, they’re the least likely to have access to college prep or advanced placement courses. Many get any little or no college counseling at all. In 1998, College Horizons, a small nonprofit based in New Mexico, set out to change that through five-day summer workshops on admissions, financial aid and the unique challenges they’ll face on campus. Its director, Carmen Lopez, sat down with NPR to talk about the obstacles that bright, talented Native students face.
You say there’s an implicit bias among college admissions officials who seldom, if ever, deal with Native American students. Is that why you’ve partnered with 50 top-tier institutions, to “educate them” by inviting them to the student retreats?

Something happens when you’re sitting face to face with a teenage native student and you’re hearing their story.

We give counselors an appreciation for what Native students experience, the inequities they face. Admissions counselors realize, “My gosh, you have only two AP classes you’ve been offered! Your school has never offered any test preparation or you’re not getting any advising!”
After spending time at one of your retreats, I noticed that you repeatedly told students: “You are desirable. Colleges want you. You’re not a number.” But don’t admissions officers rely heavily on GPA, class ranking and standardized test scores?

I want you to want my students because they’re going to contribute to your institution.

A test score, the GPA, the ranking, are things that an admissions officer doesn’t remember. l’m not just looking for a diamond in the rough or the hard-knock life. They’re not always in crisis. They’re doing beautiful, amazing things. And I want colleges to recognize that.

Source: Helping College-Bound Native Americans Beat The Odds : NPR Ed : NPR

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USA: “Islands” That Separate Education Haves From Have-Nots : NPR

2016/07/21 Leave a comment

Fortunately, Canadian school system funding (at least in Ontario) is funded at the provincial level, ensuring relatively equal funding levels between schools (although parental fundraising etc means some differences):

The school district of Freehold Borough, N.J., has a 32 percent poverty rate. It is fully surrounded by another school district, Freehold Township, which has a 5 percent poverty rate.

Freehold Borough is what a new report calls an “island district” — and it’s not alone. The report, from a nonprofit called EdBuild, maps 180 of these islands around the country: Districts that, by historical accident or for political reasons, lie completely inside other systems with a disparate poverty rate and often different funding levels.

And that can correlate with very different outcomes for students — something educators in Freehold Borough have long struggled with.

“Surrounding communities are able to provide a better education than we are,” says Rocco Tomazic, superintendent of the K-8 district. “It’s not supposed to be that way per the state constitution.”

Source: Education Week, U.S. Census Bureau

As we noted in our School Money project, around half of school funding in the U.S., on average, comes from local property taxes. That means districts with high poverty often struggle with limited resources, a one-two punch.

“We have a mismatch between the way we’re funding schools and what we’re expecting schools to deliver,” says Rebecca Sibilia, the founder and CEO of EdBuild, which focuses on school finance.

Though they are rare, Sibilia argues that these island districts serve as vivid examples of a larger pattern that holds true in many places throughout the country: The resources available to your local public school may depend on your zip code, or sometimes even your specific address at birth.

Source: “Islands” That Separate Education Haves From Have-Nots : NPR Ed : NPR

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The US has cut off the path to citizenship for India and China’s most exceptionally talented people — Quartz

2016/07/16 Leave a comment

Good opportunity for Canada?:

For the first time in nine years, the cap on a prized US visa for the most skilled Chinese and Indian workers is set to be reached.

 On July 11, the US State Department announced that it would soon stop accepting applications for the EB-1 visa, from Indian and Chinese nationals. This change could cause some highly-skilled immigrants to lose their current US work authorization.

The EB-1 is for immigrants of extraordinary ability, outstanding professors or researchers, and certain executives at multinational companies. In effect, it’s intended for the world’s “best and brightest” who wish to become permanent US residents, and even eventually citizens. Preliminary figures from the US State Department show that 12,253 Indians and 6,239 Chinese were granted EB-1 visas in 2015. The State Department was not able to provide how many of these visas have been issued so far this year.

The_US_has_cut_off_the_path_to_citizenship_for_India_and_China’s_most_exceptionally_talented_people_—_Quartz

As of July, the “priority date” for EB-1 approvals was “current”—meaning that all applications are being considered immediately. However, come August, the priority date will be set to Jan. 1, 2010, for EB-1 applications from Indian and Chinese nationals. That means applicants must have submitted their applications before Jan. 1, 2010, to be considered for the EB-1, this year.

Backdating the deadline, known as “retrogression,” is an administrative maneuver to keep the application queue orderly and manageable when there aren’t enough visas to go around. Since 1991, the priority date for EB-1 has retrogressed from “current” for India three times and for China six times.

Only a limited number of EB-1 visas are available each year, although the exact cap per country is hard to state with certainty because caps depend on a number of shifting factors. A surge in EB-1 applications from one country’s citizens, for example, could cause a decline in the number available to another nation.

For years, it was considered the fastest and most reliable way to gain authorization to permanently stay in the US for work. “The conventional wisdom is try to get into the EB-1 because you don’t have to worry about it,” Susan Cohen told Quartz. “It’s fastest employment-oriented way. Historically it’s always been the fastest.” Cohen is the chair of the immigration practice at Boston-based law firm Mintz Levin.

In the past, Cohen and others in the industry have advised clients to do everything they can to become eligible for an EB-1. A years-long strategy to obtain US citizenship can include getting published in more prestigious publications, working at more highly respected companies, or getting promoted to a managerial position outside the US, before applying. Cohen suspects this last tactic—savvy multinational companies promoting workers they want to transfer to the US—may have caused an increase in demand for the EB-1. [See this article on how Microsoft has adopted this strategy:

The implication for businesses on the whole should be small, since applicants for the EB-1 typically are already in the US, working on another, shorter-term authorization, according to Cohen. There are still risks, however. Employees currently working in the US on a non-extendable, time-limited visa who have been waiting for EB-1 approval could potentially find themselves forced to leave the US when their time runs out. Switching to permanent residency is desirable because it means not needing employer sponsorship of a visa and never having to renew or extend a visa. It also offers the first step toward becoming a US citizen.

Read more of this post

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Broken Melting Pot Is No Alternative To Canadian Multiculturalism | Jack Jedwab

2016/07/15 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Jedwab.

Reality in many parts of USA is closer to multiculturalism than melting pot, given strong ethnic communities and identities, despite political discourse and posturing:

Those driving the melting pot rhetoric might argue that it refers to the immigrant experience and is therefore not about the American-born black population. That observation however makes illusory the melting pot objective of creating a harmonious whole. As regards immigrant acceptance in the American melting pot, the success of Donald Trump’s campaign has also served as a reminder of the high levels of anxiety and hostility towards immigration and diversity. Then again, perhaps the melting pot theorists were thinking about melting white European and not Hispanic immigrants. Well, so much for the idea that the American model of diversity seeks to make one out the many.

In a thoughtful essay in a 2012 edition of the journal National Identities , northeastern University political science professor David Michael Smith notes that the success of the melting pot rhetoric is attributable to the concept’s ambiguity. It simultaneously represents both uniformity in its end product and the presence of diversity which it must somehow incorporate. Smith observes that “…in the first instance, attention is focused on the creation of a ‘new race” or ”new compound’ which is nonetheless homogeneous in character.” It by virtue of this ambiguity that the concept it used across a spectrum of Americans that rally those who are favorable to immigration and those opposed to it.

Paradoxically, when it comes to describing cultural pluralism in the United States, the trend amongst several American thinkers is towards some variant on the idea of multiculturalism. For some time, the tired melting pot adage has been giving way to a depicting the country as a “salad bowl” with a mixture of various ingredients that keep their individual characteristics. Even the most ardent American proponents of the melting pot acknowledge that it is increasingly difficult to defend the idea.

Sure Canadian multiculturalism has historically and continues to confront a set of important challenges, but it’s difficult to give credibility to misinformed critics that point south of the border to offer a better alternative.

Source: Broken Melting Pot Is No Alternative To Canadian Multiculturalism | Jack Jedwab

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Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings – The New York Times

2016/07/13 Leave a comment

Surprising_New_Evidence_Shows_Bias_in_Police_Use_of_Force_but_Not_in_Shootings_-_The_New_York_TimesUnderlying bias and discrimination remains of concern, but useful nuance to current debates:

A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California.

The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold after the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

The study did not say whether the most egregious examples — those at the heart of the nation’s debate on police shootings — are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones.

The counterintuitive results provoked debate after the study was posted on Monday, mostly about the volume of police encounters and the scope of the data. Mr. Fryer emphasizes that the work is not the definitive analysis of police shootings, and that more data would be needed to understand the country as a whole. This work focused only on what happens once the police have stopped civilians, not on the risk of being stopped at all. Other research has shown that blacks are more likely to be stopped by the police.

Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard. Erik Jacobs for The New York Times 

Mr. Fryer, the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard and the first to win a John Bates Clark medal, a prize given to the most promising American economist under 40, said anger after the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others drove him to study the issue. “You know, protesting is not my thing,” he said. “But data is my thing. So I decided that I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on when it comes to racial differences in police use of force.”

Source: Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings – The New York Times

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