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[Immigration] Give us your peoples, worldwide edition!
Pat_McRoch
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Edit: I figure this would be better off as a more broad immigration debate rather than focusing on just the U.S.; so go forth my peoples!
Right now there is a bill going through the senate dealing with immigration reform...surprisingly attached to it is a massive hike on the amount of border patrol agents and UAVs.
Article from Reuter
Just the facts:
Double the amount of border agents going from 18,500 to 38,500
Triple the amount of UAVs from 6 to 18
Completing 700 miles of fence
Other gizmos and doodads such as night vision, sensors, and more
Cost expected to be between 533-667 billion pesos or 40-50 billion dollars
Now the immigration reform part of the bill is expected to offer the following:
A pathway of the 11 million undocumented/illegal immigrants in this country
New system to verify employees of their legal status to work within the country
New biometric system to monitor those leaving the country
New system for allocation of visas for high tech vs low tech workers as well as a guest worker program for agricultural workers
How is this all going to be paid for? Fines and back taxes (presumably by those who didn't have citizenship before but then pursue it)
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All of this is, of course, assuming that the Republican opposition is willing to arbitrarily declare the country "safe enough" n terms of border security. If they don't, the green card process never comes along, waiting on "more guards, more drones, more fence" for the next twenty years of budgetary concessions.
So basically this is not a very good bill if your actual goal is to solve the problem of illegal immigrants.
Not only that, but there's nothing dealing with the "demand" side - no real crackdowns on employers using undocumented workers.
That'd be silly.
Job creators!
Edit: I do wonder how much of the "they do the jobs we don't want" thing is kind of chicken-and-egg with the incredibly bad pay and backbreaking labor. 4$ an hour to ruin your back and knees ain't exactly great.
http://www.oecd.org/migration/migrationpickingupbutrisingunemploymenthurtingimmigrants.htm
13/06/2013 - Migration has started to pick up again, driven largely by people moving within the European Union, after three years of continuous decline during the crisis. But the employment prospects for immigrants have worsened, with around one in two unemployed immigrants in Europe still looking for work after more than 12 months, according to a new OECD report.
The 2013 International Migration Outlook says that migration into OECD countries rose by 2% in 2011 from the previous year, to reach almost 4 million. Recent national data suggest a similar increase in 2012.
“Governments must do everything they can to improve immigrants’ job prospects,” said OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría, presenting the report in Brussels, with EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion László Andor and EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström. “Tackling high and long-term unemployment now is essential. Continuing to help immigrants integrate will also ensure they can play their part in driving growth as the global economy recovers.”
Migration within the European Union rose by 15%, following a decline of almost 40% during the crisis. The trend of people leaving countries hardest hit by the crisis is accelerating, up by 45% from 2009 to 2011.
The number of Greeks and Spaniards moving to other EU countries has doubled since 2007, reaching 39,000 and 72,000 respectively. Germany saw a 73% increase of Greek immigrants between 2011 and 2012, close to 50% for Spanish and Portuguese nationals and 35% for Italians.
Migration to the United States remained steady in 2011, rising by 2%. Italy saw a fall of the number of immigrants of 11% and immigration levels there are now 44% lower than in 2007.
But the job market situation has worsened sharply for immigrants, with unemployment rising by almost five percentage points between 2008 and 2012, compared with a 3 point jump among the native-born. Immigrant youth and the low-skilled have been worst hit. The impact was strongest on migrants from Latin America and North Africa.
Long-term unemployment has risen sharply among migrants. The share of unemployed immigrants in OECD countries who have been out of work for more than a year increased from 31% in 2008 to 44% in 2012. Cash-strapped governments should avoid cutting systematically on integration programmes, but concentrate on measures that provide the largest pay off, such as language and professional training, and focus on the most vulnerable groups, such as migrant youth, says the OECD.
The report analyses the fiscal impact of immigration. It says that raising the employment levels of migrants to that of the native-born would generate significant economic returns, especially in countries such as Belgium, France and Sweden with large, established immigrant populations. It also finds that the current impact of the cumulative waves of migration of the past fifty years is close to zero on average in the OECD. Work is the main determinant of migrants’ fiscal contribution, it says.
Fighting discrimination is essential to achieve this, says the OECD. The report assesses the level of discrimination across countries and finds its extent much higher than previously thought. Generally, a person with an immigrant-sounding name, for example, has to send at least twice as many applications to get a job interview than one with a non-immigrant name.
Yeah, racism is what keeps immigrants out, and it's what keeps them an underclass when they're finally in.
The last name thing I can certainly attest to anecdotally anyway. I've had friends back home in NZ and in the UK who have had much more trouble getting interviews for no other obvious reason and when I first arrived in the UK an agent felt able to tell me she found it much easier to place me because I didn't seem foreign (Anglo surname, NZ etc) than some of her other immigrant clients. At my workplace too, the people with the most foreign names/accents seemed to get the most negative feedback from our clients too - usually (not always) hard to determine what the problem being complained about. Yup, the world is a bit shit
Yeah I have some cousins who I've 'hidden' on Facebook because they kept saying racist shit abut immigrants. Everyone in my generation of the family is an immigrant or child of immigrants, but because we're white immigrants, everyone seems to forget this.
Then something turned me on to the humanitarian aspect, and it quickly crowded out essentially every other humanitarian priority I could think of. Everything else just seemed second-best to migration as a means of making the world better for people. I still support other things, but with the exception of the expense of transportation and housing (that could be worked around in any number of ways), and possible exceptions that I'm not remembering at this moment, they all seem relatively worse than allowing and/or enabling people to migrate.
Examples:
1) Earthquake in Haiti: Allowing/encouraging/enabling Haitians to migrate to America or essentially anywhere else is strictly superior to essentially any form of aid that could be delivered there.
2) Helping people in Africa (or wherever) to escape disease and warfare and genocide and starvation: Letting them/encouraging them/enabling them to move elsewhere is essentially strictly superior to essentially any form of aid.
3) Helping people in Iraq escape sectarian violence...
4) Helping people in Afghanistan...
5) Helping poor people in poor places to not be poor...
Am I wrong in thinking that if people are concerned about doing less harm and doing more to help people, they should support policies that allow for and encourage and enable more migration to occur?
The UK is still going through a long national debate on the topic, which would be in part similar to debates in any country, but also a little different, what with the EU Freedom of Movement and the legacy of Empire. The long and the short of it is that migration categories from outside of the EU are being restricted where possible and the former are being looked at closely to see if there is any legal way to do the same. There probably isn't so long as Britain is fully in the EU.
I'm still largely on the side of a generous immigration regime (would be deeply hypocritical not to be for one!) but it certainly is interesting to live in a London that has been the test bed of such a generational policy. The sheer range of communities here is quite fascinating and largely it works. That being said, London has not been in hard times for a while and if it does, it will be interesting to see if the multicultural nature of the city makes the slump any different than it has been in past slumps. You know, worker riots, increase in property and other crime.
There are a lot of second or third generation communities here that are well and truly British but now are sitting alongside fresh immigration from similar communities who have not been anglicised as yet, or if they have, by other means. So there are for example large, often well integrated (in a manner of speaking) West Indian/African communities from the immediate post war era, scattered across the city. Then in the last decade the West African immigrants have become a huge community - 300-500k or so apparently. Many of them are very Anglicised in the sense that they may have come from the educated middle classes in ex British West Africa, often going to universities modelled on the British system. They are very well represented in my particular profession anyway.
I absolutely agree that there should be more open-mindedness about immigration. I'm an immigrant myself, and the child of immigrants.
But I worry that the way you think about it is a bit like libertarians about the Invisible Hand and lassez-faire. As a panacea.
Large-scale immigration does create problems. Language issues and cultural clashes. Sudden immigration produces sudden unemployment increases. Sectarian violence can be brought to the new country too - my work used to be affected by violence between Turkish and Kurdish gangs in North London. And I lived in a shitty town (Slough) troubled by violence between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. And large-scale emigration has a negative effect on the people left behind - the old, the sick, the weak, and the violent. Brain drain has been a massive issue in the poorer countries of the world, and sure, that's good for the people leaving, but it's damaging for the area they are leaving.
So I want more immigration, but not unlimited immigration. And most importantly, I want the non-xenophobic, immigration-positive types to admit that there are downsides to immigration as well as upsides, and create policy to mitigate those negatives.
Indeed. We all need to be committed to the idea of lots of spending and effort spent on mitigation strategies - integration etc. Language classes, regular social interaction etc. Hard work though and in a recession people don't want to commit to new spending
While some haitains/whateverans would doubtless jump at the chance for a free ticket to nowheresville, USA, I doubt that free immigration could do anything like replacing the humanitarian effect of emergency aid. Yes, some might want to immigrate, but do most people living in Port Au Prince particularly want to live in nowheresville, USA? If the answer is no, then free immigration isn't going to solve disaster relief. There will still be all the stationary folk dealing with all the rubble.
For most people, the prospect of being an ex-patriate somewhere is lonely and alienating. Even if they could earn substantially more elsewhere, or enjoy a higher material quality of living, they would prefer to be close to friends and family, to live in a place they identify with, to speak the language fluently, and so on. And this is not obviously irrational--the social factors in life contribute enormously to its overall quality (one can check either classic literature or recent happiness research, depending on one's bent). For eminently rational reasons, most people don't want to jump countries.
There are two things to note about illegal immigration to the United States: the first is that it often originates from conditions of extreme deprivation; the second is that, for everyone who does go, there are a thousand more who choose to stay. A great deal of Irish came over because they were compelled by famine, but orders of magnitudes more stayed home.
So: although I do feel compelled by the humanitarian argument for loosening immigration restrictions (especially on low-skilled workers), I strongly disagree with the idea that looser immigration all on its own is the hammer that turns everything into a nail with respect to humanitarianism.
If only similar free movement arrangements were possible in North America. Or across the Atlantic. All developed liberal democracies should have free movement, at least.
Right but the extent of the development varies between countries. It's one of the reasons for why the EU has had so many troubles. The economies in the different countries are very different. We have countries with a higher GDP per capita than the US and countries with a lower GDP per capita than Mexico.
Migration from Romania to Norway is not at all like moving from Ohio to Texas. Aside from big differences in the economies, there are also lots of differences in culture.
1. Jobs are finite. I'll be the first on this board to say that most businesses do a piss poor job with hiring practices and probably should hire more people than they currently do, but at the end of the day there are only going to be X number of jobs and it'll take time for a population explosion to cause a few new ones to get created. You're more likely to get a ghetto when you get huge influxes of migrants from other areas looking for work or work that pays better than what they currently make all arriving around. Doesn't anyone any good to spend massive amounts of money moving in hopes of getting a better job, but ultimately end up unemployed.
2. Even when people are on the ball with infrastructure, that still takes time and resources to manage. A huge influx of new people can overwhelm the current infrastructure and it's going to be a while before it catches up. You also run the risk of creating future Detroits, where a city is forced to expand, but ultimately lose enough of it's population that it can sustain itself (huge chunks of the population leaving when the oh so promising city doesn't have work and your wealthy people start moving out to the suburbs or elsewhere because they don't want to live near the new ghettos and urban blight).
3. You don't want other people's assholes having free access to enter your nation when they so chose; especially, if they also want to bring down your government. I know it isn't full proof and some of assholes still get through, but controlled immigration means you're more likely to keep criminals, terrorists, gangsters and nationalist asshole settlers (think of the assholes from Israel, that create illegal settlements in Palestinian territory) out.
I agree the immigration system is broken, but unlimited immigration doesn't really address anything. I predict that the immigration bill is going to crash and burn because the GOP isn't acting in good faith. What little positive signs they show on this front is more a reaction to the fact that they have to acknowledge that non-white votes are important to winning elections, but they have little interest in changing their stance on many issues that have alienated those groups. I will not be surprised if they scream about the price being too high and that was why they didn't let anything pass, while claiming bigotry had nothing to do with the issue.
A decenter chance, maybe. As linked by Kalkino, moving to a country with a lower unemployment percentage doesn't work if the unemployment is still high.
I do see it as a panacea. I'll happily stake out an extreme position on this issue.
1) Large-scale immigration does create problems, but are they problems relative to the problems that they solve? There are always trade-offs, downsides, but you bring up language issues and cultural clashes, I'm talking about getting people away from disaster/disease/war-ridden areas and escaping poverty. Sectarian violence can be brought to a new country, but when has it been comparable to clashes in the developing/undeveloped parts of the world?
2) In regards to the negative effects of emigration on the sending country, (a) so what if it's damaging for the area that they're leaving? Keeping people locked in an impoverished area isn't an answer to mitigating human suffering, it's a cause of it. (b) Keep in mind that remittances are a massive source of aid to developing countries. Remittances worldwide far surpass foreign aid. That is, people go abroad and they support the people they leave behind. (c) I'm unsure about this, but isn't brain drain likely to be caused by migration restrictions? If only skilled people can immigrate to a country, that means the unskilled who can't follow the brains are still trapped in the now brain-drained place.
There is a wide range of things that are better than the status quo; I'm supportive of many restrictive policies even if I don't regard them as optimal. To the extent that additional policy can improve on an essentially open borders regime, I would support it. If there is policy that mitigates the migration of residual sectarian violence to receiving countries without an onerous cost, I'd support it. The same with policy that enables people to work around language issues and the like.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's the omni-hammer that makes its own nails, but as I noted above, I think it's typically the first best solution and that other things are less reliable and more costly. They have a place, certainly, but I think that should come after migration strategies are considered and exhausted.
As you note, not everyone wants to leave. To the extent that there are people like that, I believe that's a good use for migration alternatives.
That said, I agree with your conclusion that open immigration is a good thing. I just don't think poverty, disease, and war are things you can simply flee by moving to another country.
Edit- Especially when immigrant communities tend to be economically underprivileged and subject to racism and harassment of various kinds.
I agree that there's nothing inherent to places like Africa or the Middle East that makes them more prone to war or disease or poverty, and that those problems are just a result of the unfortunate position historical events have placed them in.
There's no reason conditions can't improve, but so what? Why wait? Why not just let people leave disease/poverty/oppression/etc if they want to? There's no guarantee that the US or Europe will remain stable and wealthy in the future, but so what? They're stable and wealthy now.
I understand that you don't think poverty, disease, and war are things you can simply flee by moving to another country, but: That's absurd on its face. Wars are location-specific. Malaria happens in specific regions with specific conditions. Poverty is clearly something that can be escaped, considering (a) that people who cross borders can earn orders of magnitude more doing exactly the same job and (b) opportunities are clearly often location- and situation-dependent. Americans don't move to Flint or Detroit to find opportunities.
Haiti has a population of 10 million. How many do you propose to migrate? All of them? They will have essentially no language or job skills, yet require a US-level income to survive and there are only so many completely unskilled labor jobs available. Total annual US immigration is less than 2 million for comparison, including temporary workers and estimated illegal immigration.
Africa has a population of about 1 billion, which is about equivalent to the US + all of Europe, there is no way you could move a non-trivial percentage of them and not massively disrupt the economies of the destination countries
Immigration as aid is fine, but there are limits as to what can reasonably be achieved. If the equivalent cost to what you propose was actually given in aid, I would imagine that some problems could actually be solved
I think it still counts as migration. The EU is not a country after all and while yes, it is a supranational union in close concert the member countries are rather distinct and with different language and cultural groupings. Immigrants may not legally be deemed to foreign, but they are certainly treated that way by locals. Whereas I would expect in the US, internal migrants probably wouldn't be deemed to be foreign by recipient populations. Perception is as important as legal classification in my view. If locals see migrants as foreign then that could make integration more of a challenge than it would be if same language/culture migrants move.
Edit - and tellingly (rightly), EU nationals can only vote in local/EU elections and unless they go through a much more formal residency requirement (5 years?) they cannot vote in national elections for their current home.
I wouldn't "migrate" anyone, but I would like to allow it and encourage it. I'm not sure how many would like to go to America, but I am aware of polling that said 51% would like to leave their country permanently.
Also from that link:
Currently, we allow a trickle of about 21,000 Haitian immigrants, on average, to enter the United States legally each year; most of them are able to come only because they are lucky enough to have a relative already here. What evidence do we have that we could not absorb triple that number, or even more? For years, we have been accepting close to 1 million permanent immigrants annually from around the world, with no lasting effects on the earnings of the average American worker. And while most economic studies find that such immigration may have lowered the wages of U.S. high school dropouts by a few percentage points, many of those dropouts are immigrants themselves, already earning far more than they would in their country of origin. A high school dropout in the United States earns an average of $24,000 a year -- about seven times the wages of a typical Haitian worker.
Beyond permanent immigrants, 498 Haitians entered the United States in 2008 on temporary seasonal worker visas, known as H-2 visas. Even in a time of economic crisis, the gigantic American economy could welcome many times that number of temporary Haitian workers. Guest workers help our economy grow and recover by giving employers greater flexibility in their hiring and investment decisions, particularly in hard-hit sectors such as textiles, transportation and construction.
When you say there are only so many jobs available, I don't think that's the case.
When you say "if the equivalent cost to what you propose was actually given in aid", what cost are you talking about? People would be making money that they would never have made before. One of the massive benefits of migration relative to other approaches to poverty reductions is that migration costs very little, if anything. The CBO has been saying that comprehensive immigration reform would be great for the deficit, for example.
However, Haiti is small scale. What happens if Indonesia gets hit by an earthquake or tsunami again and half of them want to migrate?
I am not sure what the figures are here, but I would suspect it is about volume, ability to slip in and incidences. The UK, having large locally born populations originally sourced immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is obviously a familiar and welcoming place for people from the same, if just for family or connections.
Apparently visitors from the White Commonwealth or the US also have a high incidence of over-staying too, although that is rarely discussed. Some are obvious others perhaps simply due to volume.
The UK seems to be taking its lead from a similar Australian policy
It's a far less-than-perfect comparison as far as a surge of immigrants goes, but consider the Mariel Boat Lift and its effect on Miami. About 60,000 Cuban immigrants decided to stay in Miami rather than further migrating to other places. There was no apparent ill effect on the labor market even though there was a 7% increase in the number of workers there. Considering 5 million Haitians against the population of the US is an even smaller ratio.
I think that it's certainly possible to have too many migrants causing some harmful disruption, but I don't think that making comparisons to the status quo for visa issuances is particularly useful in seeing when that might occur. I also think that if an economy structures itself to accept new immigrants, a lot of the ill effects could be mitigated without a great cost.
There is actually more economic diversity between US states than there is between EU member states. Europe is very urbanized and very densely connected. I would be cautious to underestimate cultural differences (and indeed legal) between American states and overestimate differences between EU member states. You're right though, a major readjustment is required in the Eurozone at least, of which free movement is a part, but much more is required. We've long passed the point where the need for a full Federal system - and equal treatment for all union citizens - has become obvious.
"Country" is a meaningless term in a political sense. State is far more precise. Or nation if you are speaking culturally. Personally I detest the word foreign and treat people as individuals. Europeans often speak multiple languages (rarely needing to use something other than English) and rarely have trouble communicating or associating, in my experience. I know people from all kinds of different places that get on fine living in all kinds of different places. Choosing to emphasize differences doesn't help perceptions. It IS telling that our national central political systems are inadequate for the current economic reality, they have shown themselves unable to provide both democratic representation or good governance, whilst dragging their heals on creating the necessary institutions that could.
But yeah it comes down to perception, and I like to focus on what people have in common. I've got a lot more in common with someone from the other side of the planet of the same generation and interests who posts on penny arcade, than someone from down the road of a totally different generation with totally different political views, who is computer illiterate and who would find my life totally alien/bizarre.
I'm not sure we are even really talking about the same thing here, except towards the wider point of discussions of perception, yours and mine. I do perceive that in the places I've lived in the UK, British and foreign born residents (where-ever we come from, in my case, NZ), seem to get on well enough that it is not an issue in our lives. That is a fine thing. But London is in a good state of existence and has been for a long while, which is perhaps why it is so attractive to foreigners and British from other parts of the country. Will this peaceable state carry on if London gets hit by a sustained financial crisis? Hopefully. It may not though and certainly in other parts of the country, where perhaps the economy is not so healthy, the differences between groups may become more of an issue.
Short version, courtesy of Reuter
Long version, that covers some of the amendments, both obnoxious and pork, that were included. Courtesy of LA Times.
To be honest, I'll be somewhat surprised if it does die in the US Senate. It still has to go through the US House of Representatives, where it's prospects are less certain. Most of the republicans are still opposes, so the question is will Boehner have the balls to bring it to a vote and are there enough votes to get it passed, even if a majority of the republican representatives don't vote in favor of the bill.
I'm still on the fence on whether it still has more good than bad at this point. I'm thinking if the bill doesn't pass, it's probably going to do the GOP pretty badly with voters that care about immigration reform now that several obnoxious amendments have been added to appease them.
This is the US Congress though so who am I kidding.
Imagine that.
Well, the Romanian "immigration" isn't really immigration, but three-month trips where they come to the Nordic countries to beg and burglarize at the behest of organized crime, because the southern countries are used to it and that shit doesn't work too well any longer. It's more of a case of abuse of the system, than an example of it. Personally I think that the free movement should be limited to either having a legitimate job waiting for you, spouse, education, or asylum. Limited time for travel too.
Also, within Europe, there can be very significant cultural/ethnic/whatnot differences between countries, so the situation isn't directly comparable just due to geographical scale of the movement.