On Assimilation of Immigrants

Tom Brokaw got himself in trouble this weekend by comments on immigration.

When people talk about assimilation of immigrants, I think of two things:

• examples of immigrants to America who have not "assimilated", at least if defined as speaking English and abandoning their language of origin:  the Pennsylvania "Dutch", aka Amish and some related communities, and some Hasidic Jewish communities, along with Native American tribes, Cajuns (I think), etc.  
• Switzerland.  A long time democracy with at least  3 definite language communities.

So my message is relax:  have faith in American soft power and its ability slowly to permeate the norms of people living here, as well as those living elsewhere.

George Washington on Refugees

Washington wrote to a recent immigrant from Ireland in 1783, who was representative of a number of such immigrants:

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights & previleges, if by decency & propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

Diversity at the Founding

J. L. Bell in Boston 1776 discusses the deliberations which led to the Great Seal (and Franklin's turkey).  The various proposals included this one, from a Swiss artist who was consulted by the Continental Congress:

 Du Simitière:

For the Seal he proposes. The Arms of the several Nations from whence America has been peopled, as English, Scotch, Irish, Dutch, German &c. each in a Shield. On one side of them Liberty, with her Pileus, on the other a Rifler, in his Uniform, with his Rifled Gun in one Hand, and his Tomahauk, in the other. This Dress and these Troops with this Kind of Armour, being peculiar to America…

The Americans involved seem to have favored classical themes and references, but the outsider was struck by our diversity.

Robotic Farms?

Technology Review writes about a hydroponics lettuce farm in San Francisco using robots to do some (much?) of the work.  I understand the logic, but as the article observes, such enterprises require a lot of capital upfront. Maybe there's a lot of capital sloshing around the world, enough to get a robotic farm up, running, and profitable.  We'll see. 

Part of the pitch for the robots is the difficulty of getting labor, especially with the current administration's crackdown on immigration.

"Iowans with better food" and Dairy

That, I'm sure, is a grossly unfair characterization of Iowan food.

It's a quote from an Esquire article on Rep. Devin Nunes, and his family's dairy farm in Iowa (not California where it used to be).  The dairy farms in the county are paranoid about the possibility of ICE raids because apparently most of their labor consists of undocumented immigrants.  On a dairy farm, the cows have got to be milked every day, either twice a day or in some cases three times a day. When you have 2,000 cows there's no way to handle the sudden jailing of 10 or 15 employees for even a day.  You have a lot of very unhappy cows (should PETA lobby against ICE raids on dairies) and a hit to production.  When a mammal's milk remains in the mammary gland, it's a signal to the body the milk's no longer required; start to switch energy to body building.

The quote comes from a person in town, commenting on the significant presence of Latinos now living there.

White Anxiety and Spelling Bees, etc.

Usually discussion of white anxiety focuses on growing economic inequality, the decline of the middle class, and the influx of immigrants resulting in a minority-majority country (not that I necessarily agree with these).  But I think there's another source of anxiety which isn't often discussed: white stupidity.

What I mean is whites look around and see that South Asians are dominating the National Spelling Bee (19 of the last 23).  I don't have an article to link to but I believe that students with immigrant backgrounds are also out competing "whites" in what used to be the Westinghouse Science Competition.  The new suit charging Harvard discriminates against Asian students forces "whites" to recognize their grip on claims to superiority in test-taking is slipping away.

To rub salt into "white" dreams of superiority Asian women have dominated the LGPA.

DOJ Says TRump Lies?

That's the gist of this post at lawfareblog.com.

Do Away with ICE?

I believe it was Noah Smith or Matt Yglesias who asked for a piece on whether we need a federal internal police force focused on immigration.

This is the way I'd analyze it:

Question:  do we want federal laws on immigration or not?

Answer: if we do, then you have to deal with the situation where people violate the laws and are inside the U.S.

Options: 

1. Have the laws but don't enforce them (similar to laws on prostitution, speeding, etc.)--not acceptable to public opinion now, though it might work in a less frenetic environment.
2. Have state and local police enforce the laws--as long as immigrant is a fraught issue probably not a good option because you'd have great variation in enforcement (i.e., sanctuary cities) 
3. Have the FBI or other existing federal police body enforce the laws.  This would shake things up, but in the long run the causes that ICE may have developed into an organization with a culture and standard operating procedures some, like liberals, find offensive likely would recreate the same problems.  (IMHO, any situation where there's power on one side and no power on the other is very likely to devolve into something bad--"power corrupts, etc."
4. Reorganize ICE under new authorities and new leadership.  That's what will happen if the Dems win in 2020.

Import Brains (Continued)

Via Marginal Revolution an article on the amazing success of Nigerian-Americans. 

Some points which occur to me:

• importing immigrants who succeed is good foreign aid--they tend to return to the country of origin and/or send remittances.
• I wonder what happens to the children.  There's research, mostly I think on Hispanic immigrants, which show the children as losing the advantages of immigrants and gain the disadvantages of American children (obesity, crime, etc.)
• such success is complicating the task of American racism in finding support for their stereotypes.
• I write all this despite having had negative feelings towards African/Caribbean immigrants in FSA some 25 years ago--there were a couple with whom I had some interactions.  It was easy to doubt their ability to contribute when they had no background in US agriculture (though looking back on it I suspect I was being unfair.)

Import Brains, Export Ideas

That's my formula to keep America great.

One quote, from AEI:

There is a stunting statistic that I almost always have to give these days since hearing it. If you look at all of the PhDs in the US in the STEM fields, 56 percent were foreign born. So we are able to attract very smart people from abroad, keep them here, and have them work.

Yes, a handful of those brains may spy for their original homeland, more of them will return "home" at some time or the other, but many of the brains will spend their most productive years in the U.S., years in which they do good science, create innovations and innovative enterprises, and generally make the  U.S. better, most importantly by making it a place where others want to come, to learn and maybe work. 

Other things being equal, it's better to export ideas and things, and to import people.

How To Do an Immigration Deal

Ross Douthat in the NYTimes has a column arguing, if I've got it right, that any deal on immigration must have Stephen Miller at the table. Two paragraphs:

The present view of many liberals seems to be that restrictionists can eventually be steamrolled — that the same ethnic transformations that have made white anxiety acute will eventually bury white-identity politics with sheer multiethnic numbers. 

But liberals have been waiting 12 years for that “eventually” to arrive, and instead Trump is president and the illegal immigrants they want to protect are still in limbo. So maybe it would be worth trying to actually negotiate with Stephen Miller, rather than telling Trump that he needs to lock his adviser in a filing cabinet, slap on a “beware of leopard” sign, and hustle out to the Rose Garden to sign whatever Durbin and Graham have hashed out.

I think he's got a point, at least if we want a deal before November.  There might be a case for delaying a deal until after the 2018 elections, figuring the Democrats may take the House.  That runs the risk of the Trump administration deporting Dreamers.  The counter argument would be that there wouldn't be significant numbers deported between March and November and the risk is worth it.

Personally I've no big problem with the current system, either in the levels of legal immigration or in the ways they come.  The idea of spreading immigration across a variety of methods appeals to me; it minimizes the extent of problems in any one method.

Having a large number of immigrants living and working on the margins of society because they lack legal documentation isn't good, but going to draconian methods to reduce the numbers is costly.

IMHO I'd go with E-Verify (usually a no-no for liberals) and give the restrictionists money for the wall, then bash them for not getting Mexico to pay for it.  With those concessions I'd hope to get agreement for legal status for Dreamers and their parents.  And then I'd work like hell to take control of Congress in 2018 and pass a path to citizenship in 2019.

Why Immigration Is Good for Jobs

Because, at least based on this one piece of evidence, they're more entrepreneurial than natural-born citizens.

"Latino-owned businesses will number 4.37 million this year, as projected by a Geoscape study.
This represents a growth of 31.6 percent since 2012, more than double the growth rate of all businesses in the U.S. (13.8 percent).
The Latino share of new entrepreneurs represents 24 percent of all businesses, compared to 10 percent a decade ago – a 140 percent increase. Latinos are 1.5 times more likely than the general population to start a business, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.
While men owned more than 56 percent of Latino businesses in 2012, women now drive more of the growth. Between 2007 and 2012, the number of female Latino-owned businesses grew an incredible 87 percent.

The Problems with E-Verify

Part of a compromise on immigration has always been E-Verify, the process of bouncing a new employee's data against database(s) to confirm she is legal to work (i.e., has a green card).  Conservatives push it, liberals tend not to be enthusiastic.  (That's sort of weird, because conservatives generally resist government ID programs as an invasion of individual rights and liberals generally believe in government programs--but that's the way the human consistency cookie crumbles.)

So it's interesting when Cato comes out with a piece on the problems the program has in those states which have made it mandatory.   Cato is libertarian enough that their results deserve a bit of salt, but the study shows relatively low compliance rates and a significant rate of false positives. 

My uninformed analysis would suggest that a mandatory program by the feds could be much more effective, but others might disagree.

Where Are the Immigrants When You Need Them?

Those happy few who watched David Simon's Treme on post-Katrina New Orleans will remember a bit, not quite a subplot, about immigrants coming into New Orleans to participate in the cleanup and rebuilding.  I thought of that when I saw this piece.  

Though it focuses on labor shortages and wage rates, it doesn't mention the incentive for increased immigration.  But the higher the wages in the construction industry, the more benefit to immigrating.

The Changing Dairy Sector

"Since 2000, milk production has doubled in Idaho,"

"Idaho dairy industry representatives estimate that between 85 to 90 percent of on-site dairy workers in the state are foreign-born."

Two excerpts from a long piece  at Politico on the complexities and tensions created by the trends, particularly the handling of undocumented immigrants.

Americans Won't Do This Work?

That's the common refrain among business owners and farmers, ranging from Trump's Mar-a-Lago operation to a medium size dairy operation.  Liberals like me tend to buy the statement, because we're usually in favor of immigration, so the statement operates as justification. 

When you think about it, though, it's unusual for liberals to trust Trump or other business owners.  :-)

Why should we think the statement is true, why are immigrants willing to work off-hours and the worst jobs?  I think one reason is found in reference group theory, which is the sociologist's jargon for saying "everything is relative".  Immigrants compare their work and working conditions in the U.S. with what they faced in their home country and find it not so bad.  The American-born compare the same jobs with other jobs, and know they're the worst. 

There's also the relativity of compensation: immigrants will find that the salary and possibly fringe benefits far exceed that of their origin country.  I suspect there's a human tendency to focus on the rewards and not the cost of living.  The American-born will find the salary toward the bottom of the scale. 

There's also the standard of living: an immigrant can see  crowded living conditions in a less-desirable neighborhood as still being a step up from home.  The American-born would likely find the conditions among which some immigrants live as not desirable.

And finally there's the time frame:  the American-born looks at the less desirable job as a dead-ender. The immigrant can view it as a step up for the future, whether it's moving from dishwasher to prep work to sous-chef or simply saving money to buy goods to take back home (see Sam Quinones "Dreamland").

Among those who want to reduce immigration the standard reply to the statement is: "raise your pay."
I think that's wrong, pay being only one of the factors which makes a bad job acceptable to an immigrant.  My advice to those who would reduce immigration is this: look to the military.

The military is a case where they offer bad jobs (I'm talking basic training, which is likely worse than any normal "bad job") and attract people to them.  An E-1 gets about $17,000 a year, before taxes.  How do they attract people?  Basically it's the promotion and the fringe benefits, the retirement and education benefits.  So immigration restrictionists should come up with a program where the government provides good benefits and the possibility of advancement to the crap jobs.  Tell the high school drop out, spend x months doing this job and you'll earn tuition for college, have health insurance, etc. etc.    Is that proposal naive?  Perhaps, but I'd like to see it tried.

Immigrants and Produce Production

When I was young during the summer when we'd drive to Greene for livestock feed, we'd see an old bus parked by the fields bordering the Chenango river, fields in which grew green beans, a bus which provided transport for those Negroes (as we said then) who picked the beans.  It was a moment of quickly passing contact with another world, strange to a child of dairy/poultry farmers. I've no idea where the pickers spent the night, presumably a tent or the bus.

These days the people who harvest our fruits and vegetables are almost all immigrants, mostly undocumented.  That leads to multiple issues, as described in this good Tamar Haspel piece for the Post.  If undocumented immigrants are deported and Trump's wall is built and is effective (big "ifs"), will citizens fill their places?  Could higher wages attract enough workers? Or would innovation come to the rescue, providing machinery and robots to do the harvesting, perhaps at the cost of changing the nature of the produce?

Immigration: Surprising Facts

From a post originating from the National Academy of Sciences report on immigration:

" Indeed, today’s immigrants are more likely to have education beyond college than the native-born."
"We are a debtor nation — that’s what the existence of the widely discussed budget deficit means. This in turn means that the “average American” is a fiscal burden, receiving more in benefits than he or she pays in taxes."  [so both new babies and new immigrants cost the government more than they contribute in taxes.  However, that's true only if you give each person a per capita share of defense and interest payment costs, which don't actually increase with each new addition.]

The Future Is California

An excerpt from a David Brin post:

From the Los Angeles Times: Californians are 30% less likely to die a violent death today than other Americans. Since 1980, California’s rate of reported crime overall has fallen by 62%. The state’s criminal arrest rates, too, have fallen considerably, by 55% overall, and by 80% among people younger than 18 — a population, it is worth noting, that is now 72% nonwhite. 

Violent crime in California has fallen by an impressive 50% in the same period. This includes drops in robberies (65%), homicide (68%), and rapes and assaults (more than 40%). That last figure is even more remarkable when you consider that the legal definitions of both assault and rape were expanded during these years.

Americans Share What?

Pew Research has a recent report on what people in different countries see as the keys to being of their nationality--is it shared language, birthplace, shared customs and values, faith, etc.  Interesting variations among the different countries surveyed, mostly Western countries plus Japan

I saw a reference to this earlier, then was struck by a talking head on Fox arguing that we should only admit immigrants who share our values.

Some random thoughts:

• there's no universal rule applicable.  Canadians believe you need to speak either English or Franch, but Americans wouldn't agree to an English-Spanish rule.  Greeks are strong on religion, but that's no longer that important in most other countries.
• adding some other countries, such as China, Russia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc. would have further expanded our horizons.
• in the past, many didn't believe that Irish Catholic immigrants could be good Americans: they shared neither birthplace, religion, nor customs with the then-current Americans.  That was even more true when the time came to admit immigrants from eastern Europe and Italy. 
• when we look in detail at current "Americans" we find groups which don't share our customs and values but share the language (i.e. Old Order Mennonites,Hasidic Jews) and some which don't share the language but are somewhat closer in values, if not customs (some Latinos)

My bottom line is--if the adults work and pay taxes, and abide by the laws, fine.