Tag Archives: immigration

the staffing crisis

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This article in Longreads blames the degradation of hotels and restaurants in Yosemite National Park on the Aramark corporation. I think it is part of a larger trend of absolute bare-bones staffing in the U.S. service industry which has been going on at least since the pandemic. Something just seems out of whack when workers are barely getting by, prices seem so high, and service seems so poor. Like it or not, a drop in migrant workers during and since the pandemic is part of the story, whether those pre-pandemic restaurant and hotel workers were undocumented or not. In the U.S. childcare industry, where minimum staffing levels are highly regulated, prices are out of reach of even the upper middle class. In more competitive and less regulated hospitality industries, staffing levels are just cut to the bone. In Asia where I happen to be at the moment, staffing levels at tourist attractions are much higher. This works because tourists are willing or able to pay higher prices than what the local economy alone would otherwise support, and because higher-income countries bring in workers from lower-income countries. Since this will probably never be palatable in the United States, and rents and overhead costs are not going anywhere but up, we are probably stuck with shitty service and miserably overworked restaurant and hotel staff for the foreseeable future.

Trump, detention camps, and deportation

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Trump is talking about incarcerating and detaining all the undocumented immigrants in the United States, which would be about 11 million people. Snopes does a good job of fact checking the specific things he has said about this.

A November 2023 New York Times investigation found that Trump was planning “an extreme expansion” of his first-term immigration policies, including rounding up undocumented people in the United States and putting them in detention camps before expelling them from the country…

Trump had made similar comments in September 2023, saying he would carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He also said he would be, “Following the Eisenhower Model” for such deportations, referencing a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican migrants named for an ethnic slur—Operation Wetback.

In sum, in December 2023 speeches, Trump did call for mass deportations and emphasized that such migrants come from all over the world, using rhetoric that echoed past speeches. Furthermore, reporting confirms that there are indeed plans for a future Trump administration to build huge detention camps to hold migrants.

Snopes

It is not hearsay that Trump is talking about these things – he gave an interview to Time (covered here, confusingly, by CNN) in which he talked about this explicitly. He says he plans to round 15-20 million people up into detention camps and deport them.

Some people say the Trump-Hitler comparisons are overblown, but it is worth remembering that Hitler had schemes to deport Jews to Madagascar, Alaska, and/or Siberia among other places, before he gave up on those and came up with his “final solution”. The other parallel is that he managed to bring local police and security forces under his central control, which echoes Trump’s discussion of using the National Guard and military here.

The human rights abuses this would engender are fairly obvious, but there are also many practical issues. Citizens of the United States are not required to carry papers proving their citizenship, so who do you choose to detain and how do you go about proving that they are undocumented? It would likely be done on the basis of (perceived) ethnicity, which brings to mind the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the mistaken deportation of Mexican Americans in the 1950s. You could swoop in and interrogate inmates of jails and prisons, which is probably what would actually happen, but this would not add up to millions of people. The other thing you can do, and the U.S. government has done, is swoop into work places and demand to see papers. This is actually somewhat practical since workers are in fact required to prove they are eligible to work. However, being ineligible to work does not automatically mean your presence in the country is illegal. So now people might be swept up and held in detention camps without due process while courts try to figure out who they are. Even if a legal proceeding determines that an individual is in the country illegally, there is the problem of where to deport that person to (once again, see Hitler). Again, people could be held for years without due process while this plays out.

Finally, if you want to make inflation worse, deporting a huge chunk of the low-wage work force is a great way to do that. It would be much more humane and pro-business to expand work permits and temporary visas to let people in who want to work, but put some restrictions on how long they can stay and who they can bring along. This would be a win for human rights and would be business friendly, which at least traditional Republicans are nominally in favor of. The other side of this coin is to encourage U.S. business investment in Latin America, which would have the twin benefits of reducing migration pressure and producing cheap stuff to import, which also helps to hold down prices.

April 2024

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Peter Turchin’s description of a “wealth pump” leading to stagnation and political instability seems to fit the United States pretty well at this moment. The IMF shows that global productivity has been slowing since the US-caused financial crisis in 2008. In Turchin’s model, our November election will be a struggle between elites and counter-elites who both represent the wealthy and powerful. That sounds about right, but I still say it is a struggle between competence and incompetence, and competence is a minimum thing we need to survive in a dangerous world. In early April I thought things were trending painfully slowly, but clearly, in Biden’s direction. As I write this in early May I am no longer convinced of that.

Most hopeful story: Some tweaks to U.S. trade policy might be able to significantly ease the “border crisis” and create a broad political coalition of bigots, big business, and people who buy things in stores.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: If the singularity is in fact near, our worries about a productivity slow down are almost over, and our new worries will be about boredom in our new lives of leisure. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to count on this happening in the very near future, and therefore stop trying to solve the problems we have at the moment. This would be one of those “nice to have” problems. If it does in fact materialize, the places to be will be the ones that manage to shut down Peter Turchin’s wealth pump and spread the newfound wealth, rather than the places where a chosen few live god-like existences while leaving the masses in squalor.

free trade vs. migration

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“Free trade” seems to have gone out of fashion at the moment. But this article in The Conversation makes the point that easing trade restrictions with countries sending large numbers of migrants to the U.S. could help. And not just at the margins – the study this article says that reducing restrictions on just textiles from just six countries could potentially reduce migration to the U.S. by two-thirds. This seems like a political win-win to me – there is something in it for the anti-immigration racists, the pro-cheap-labor big business interests, and the average Joes who just want cheap stuff. This worked brilliantly when we were trying to support our Cold War allies in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan back when they were developing countries. It worked when we were trying to rebuild Western Europe. It can work again.

immigration by the numbers

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This post on a blog called Demography Unplugged is a nice piece of data journalism. I have been trying to figure out if there is really a “border crisis”, or if challenges that are typical at the border are being exaggerated and cherry picked in an election year.

Measuring immigration is tricky, and this article explains how people try to do it. Basically, you want to know net migration, which is determined both by people coming in and people leaving, which both happen constantly. The Census Bureau surveys the foreign born population periodically and changes in this number are one way to do it.

Immigration really is up significantly over the past year or so. This is partly post-pandemic recovery, but it is also up significantly compared to what it has been historically even in comparably good economic times. They are coming to work. They are not coming disproportionately to commit crimes, although take a large enough group of people and there are going to be some crimes that can be cherry picked and publicized by disingenuous media outlets and political campaigns. There is no evidence I am aware of that terrorists are trying to sneak across the southern border, although of course we need to be alert for this at all ports of entry.

Some are sneaking in, but many are legally applying for asylum, after which most are allowed to enter the country while they wait for a decision on their case. This can take years, and even after a decision is made, there typically are not aggressive efforts made to find and deport them.

They are probably not taking a lot of American jobs that Americans would actually want. They are taking low wage jobs, paying taxes, and not receiving government benefits in return. Unemployment is low. Remember the labor shortage during and after the pandemic, when immigration was mostly shut off. And remember how prices shot up at least partly as a result of that labor shortage? I suspect the uptick in immigration is one factor holding wages and prices down now. The business community loves low wages, which presents somewhat of a dilemma because they also hate taxes, and the same party that advocates for low taxes also advocates for low immigration. This party generally is fine with having a dysfunctional immigration system as long as they can pin the blame on the other party.

So if you want to decrease immigration, you can let people apply for asylum at the border but not let them in until/unless their cases are decided in their favor. That exports the problem to Mexico and creates a humanitarian dilemma, which is what Trump chose to do and will do again if he gets the chance. Eventually word would get out and people would stop coming in such large numbers, but people would (and were) hurt in the meantime. You could drastically scale up whatever processes allow people to apply at U.S. embassies in their home countries. And finally, you could just try to help those countries solve some of their issues that make people want to leave, which would also be solving some of your own issues at home.

Also remember, these are relatively good economic times, and the climate change shit has not really hit the migration fan yet.

RAND solves the border crisis!

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RAND has all the answers on what we need to do at the border.

While politically challenging, a holistic update to U.S. immigration laws based on a better understanding of American immigration needs and the factors that are driving people to make the dangerous trek to cross the border would help reduce the numbers of migrants arriving daily to the U.S.-Mexico border and the challenges migration poses to receiving localities. This would require building on the current efforts to provide lawful pathways, easing the burden on host communities, matching immigration policies with the needs of the labor market, and addressing root causes of migration, while adhering to American legal and humanitarian responsibilities.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/02/the-crisis-at-the-border-a-primer-for-confused-americans.html

There you go. This sounds like a decade-long project at least, so politicians with 2-4 year election cycles would need to sell voters with 20 minute attention spans on it now, then competently implement it over the course of a generation.

August 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

climate change, migration, and right-wing politics

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Climate change is already causing displacement in poorer countries in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East, and this is clearly already fueling the rise of anti-immigration politics in developed countries including the United States and western Europe. The rational response, beyond dealing with climate change, is two-fold and fairly obvious. (1) Rational immigration policies based on the economic needs of the more developed countries, and (2) the more developed countries ponying up to help people in the less developed ones where they live.

The labor-market shortages in advanced economies are not some temporary or short-run phenomenon. In the US, a recent Brookings Institution study documents a shortfall of 2.4 million workers as of December 2022, relative to the 12-month average ending in February 2020. Most of this decline would have happened without the pandemic, owing to changes in the age and education of the population. But there was also a decline in the average weekly hours worked, producing an additional labor-supply shortfall equivalent to another 2.4 million people…

A well-designed immigration policy that allows for the controlled entry of willing workers, and that helps integrate them into host countries, would go a long way toward easing labor-market tightness and preventing humanitarian tragedies caused by smugglers’ shameless exploitation of migrants and refugees. But policymakers will need to look beyond the next election cycle and rise above partisan political interests.

At the same time, it is neither possible nor desirable to move the entire populations of low-income countries to America and Europe, so it is imperative to reject short-sighted economic nationalism. Advanced economies must do more to address the huge imbalances that still exist across the world economy. Reducing global inequality is essential to a sustainable future.

Project Syndicate

This is rational and fairly obvious, and yet politically very, very difficult. Anti-immigrant sentiment and fears over job displacement are common. And anti-immigrant sentiment is not just among people who consider themselves “native born” for several generations. Recent immigrants do not always support the idea of more people following them, especially if they perceive that the more recent immigrants might have an easier path or that they may have to compete with them. Combine that with legitimate fears of job loss and low wage growth among the general population, and sprinkle in some right-wing assholes, and the general apathy toward foreign aid when we have plenty of problems at home, and you have a pretty potent coalition. On the other side, big business generally favors immigration because they like low wages. So maybe there is something there you can work with, but unfortunately on this one issue it seems like politicians pay serious attention to the perceptions of voters and not just deep-pocketed big business. Maybe big business could divert some of their propaganda efforts from voters to support war and pollution and instead work on this issue. Or what about declaring war on climate change. That worked for drugs and poverty, right…ruh-roh!

more free time at home = more babies?

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The answer is no. Early in the pandemic, I heard people suggesting that having healthy young couples home more with time on their hands would result in a baby boom. The data show that the opposite is true. On aggregate, people actually make somewhat rational economic decisions about having children. When times are uncertain, a fraction of people decide to postpone plans they might have had to have children, and a certain fraction of those people either miss their window or just change their minds. This shows up in the data.

The article acknowledges that immigration is a potential answer to this. But it is difficult politically, and even if you can convince your population that it is a good idea, you need a good plan to make sure the immigrants can make a positive economic contribution, and you need a plan to ease them into your culture. This doesn’t mean erasing their culture, religion, or language, of course, but nor do you want your culture, religion, or language to change massively in a short time or your country may lose its sense of national identity. Having a sense of national identity while still being relatively trusting and tolerant is a balancing act, and my thought is that you want to allow change but try to make it slow and gradual. Maybe we need a Federal Reserve of Cultural Change to manage this rate.

As a working parent, I also recognize that spending more time at home does not mean more free time for everyone. Working from home full time and taking care of young children who are also home all the time, with no babysitters or minimal support from grandparents and extended family, has been very difficult for many people, including yours truly. If you are not in this situation, those of us who are may chafe a bit when you tell us how “bored” you are. But I also recognize there have been no happy mediums, with part of the population stressed out of their minds and half bored out of their minds, and some of the people who are bored (like grandparents) wishing they could help more but unable to.

climate, conflict, and migration

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A new paper explores causal links between climate change effects (like drought, famine, and high food prices), violent conflict, and mass migration. And yes, the conclusion seems to be that climate change can be a big driver when the seeds of social and economic instability are already in place.

Climate, conflict and forced migration
Despite the lack of robust empirical evidence, a growing number of media reports attempt to link climate change to the ongoing violent conflicts in Syria and other parts of the world, as well as to the migration crisis in Europe. Exploiting bilateral data on asylum seeking applications for 157 countries over the period 2006–2015, we assess the determinants of refugee flows using a gravity model which accounts for endogenous selection in order to examine the causal link between climate, conflict and forced migration. Our results indicate that climatic conditions, by affecting drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, played a significant role as an explanatory factor for asylum seeking in the period 2011–2015. The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010–2012 during when many countries were undergoing political transformation. This finding suggests that the impact of climate on conflict and asylum seeking flows is limited to specific time period and contexts.