As of this writing, seemingly nothing can stop Trumpmentum. Republican voters apparently aren't discouraged by his frequent, bombastic attacks on his 2016 competitors via Twitter. They're fine with his very public feud with their beloved conservative outlet, Fox News, and its popular commentator, Megyn Kelly. And they'll tolerate him making light of 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain's service as a prisoner of war ("He's not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured," said Trump at a summit in July). Indeed, the only consequences Donald Trump has faced for his combativeness is to see himself rise higher in the polls. In many respects, his candidacy is the culmination of the tea party movement: an unelected outsider who not only opposes the Republican establishment, but outright mocks it with 4th-grade rate insults.
"He's not a politician. I won't vote for an established politician," remarked one potential voter in a recent focus group moderated by political consultant Frank Luntz. "He's voiced what everyone else is saying. America is a brand and the brand has been hurting a very long time, and it takes somebody like Trump to bring that brand back," said another participant. For these supporters, Trump's image as an outside agitator isn't a harmful distraction - it's the entire point.
Perhaps the issue that has most galvanized his fans, however, is the issue of immigration, which is the subject of this blog post.
In his presidential announcement speech, Mr. Trump served up this steaming pile:
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people who have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."Most Republicans at least remember to make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens when they verbally beat up on our neighbors to the south. Trump, however, did not feel the need to make such a distinction when he implied that the "good" Mexicans amongst this horde of drug-peddling rapists were the exception to the rule.
He defended these remarks in subsequent statements by suggesting that he's the only presidential candidate who will not bend to the crushing might of "political correctness" for simply speaking truth to power. But "political correctness" isn't the issue. In fact, my primary concern with Donald Trump is that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about (that's the most "politically correct" way I can put it).
Virtually all of the empirical evidence leads to the conclusion that immigrants are less violent, and are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. So in a roundabout way, Mr. Trump was correct to say that Mexicans coming over the border are unlike the rest of us, even if his understanding of the facts is the exact opposite of reality. Per the American Immigration Council:
"The evidence that immigrants tend not to be criminals is overwhelming. To begin with, there is an inverse relationship between crime and immigration. Crime rates in the United States have trended downward for many years at the same time that the number of immigrants has grown. Second, immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than the native-born. And, third, immigrants are less likely than the native-born to engage in the criminal behaviors that tend to land one in prison. No matter how you look at the issue, the inescapable conclusion is that immigrants are, on average, less prone to criminality than the U.S. native-born population."This is just as true for immigrants who are more likely to be undocumented, such as people from Mexico, Guatemala, or El Salvador:
"The 2010 Census data reveals that incarceration rates among the young, less-educated Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men who make up the bulk of the unauthorized population are significantly lower than the incarceration rate among native-born young men without a high-school diploma."
"Research also indicates that such statistics are not simply the product of an effective immigration-enforcement system that removes immigrants from the country rather than holding them in U.S. prisons. According to a study by economists Kristin Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, the "evidence suggests that deportation and deterrence of immigrants' crime commission from the threat of deportation are not driving the results. Rather, immigrants appear to be self-selected to have low criminal propensities and this has increased over time." The study begins by using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses to demonstrate that immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the native-born for quite some time, and that this effect has been growing more pronounced with each passing decade. But the study then goes on to answer the question of whether these decreasing incarceration rates are the result of harsh immigration policies enacted in the 1990s, either because more immigrants were deported or because more were deterred from criminal behavior because of the threat of deportation. The answer to this question proved to be a "no.""The American Immigration Council is a pro-immigration think tank. However, their research is backed up by the Congressional Research Service, which also concluded that the vast majority of undocumented aliens are not the violent rapists Mr. Trump suggests they are, and that they make up a smaller percentage of the incarcerated population in state prisons/jails compared to their percentage to the total population.
Mr. Trump's rhetoric is nothing new. As Jon Stewart once so succinctly put it, "we have always been a nation of immigrants who hate the newer immigrants." Today's newer immigrants, or rather, that dreaded "other" who are coming here to steal our jobs, soak up our welfare, and undoubtedly rape our white women happen to be Hispanics. And Donald Trump is simply the latest standard-bearer for those who actually believe such nonsense.
The first significant anti-immigration law enacted by the federal government was the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by President Arthur in 1882, which outright banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. The law was passed to placate Americans on the West Coast who believed that Chinese migrants were depressing their wages. Typically, hostility to immigration reaches a fever pitch when the economy is performing poorly.
Indeed, as strange as it may seem today, white Europeans from varying regions of the continent also found themselves on the receiving end of the anti-immigrant backlash in the early 20th century, which was a time frame notable for a mass influx of such immigrants:
Throughout the 1920's, southern and eastern Europeans became the hot new group to hate:
"Discriminatory immigration policies aimed at southern and eastern Europeans figured into the quota-based policies of the 1920s. With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act or Johnson-Reed Act, the U.S. used restrictive immigration policies in the 1920s based on the 1890 proportions of foreign-born European nationalities. Since the 1890 census reflected higher numbers of northern Europeans, immigrants from those countries had greater opportunities to emigrate. The arguments, outlined in Madison Grant's 1916 book The Passing of a Great Race, held that older immigrants were skilled, thrifty, hardworking like native born Americans and recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were unskilled, ignorant, predominantly Catholic or Jewish and not easily assimilated into American culture."Unskilled. Ignorant. Not easily assimilated. The dreaded "other" may change, but the rhetoric never does. This rhetoric, though, does have consequences. For example, a homeless Hispanic man was recently attacked by an apparent Trump supporter in Boston. "Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported," claimed Scott Leader, the man allegedly responsible for the assault. When asked about the incident, Trump suggested that his followers are "very passionate," and that they "want this country to be great again." I guess part of that vision includes ruthlessly assaulting homeless men.
Chants of "white power!" were recorded by attendees at an Alabama rally this Summer. "Hopefully, he's going to sit there and say, 'When I become elected president, what we're going to do is we're going to make the border a vacation spot, it's going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill," remarked Jim Sherota at the same rally, apparently describing his ideal method of border control. Unfortunately, Jim didn't tell us what his preferred weapon for killing families attempting to make a better life for themselves was; a followup interview might be in order.
Former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke also firmly believes that Mr. Trump is "the best of the lot" of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates. "Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: it's time to deport these people," proclaimed the most viewed neo-Nazi website in America, the Daily Stormer, in their stirring endorsement of the man. White men may finally have the chance to "vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests." Of course, their definition of "most Americans" may need some recalibrating; public polling on the issue indicates that more Americans actually prefer a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented over mass deportation. As it turns out, neo-Nazis are fucking idiots. Who knew?
To be sure, he can't control what every idiot supporter says or does in public. But let's not pretend that any of this is a coincidence. When you speak the language of white supremacists, it shouldn't be shocking when actual no-shit white supremacists speak favorably of you. And Mr. Trump has backed up his rhetoric with actual policy proposals, such as building a massive wall along the southern border, and compelling the Mexican government to pay for it. He also insists that his hypothetical administration will round up all estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants and boot them out.
Even if we put aside the logistical difficulties (there happen to be mountains, rivers, and tribal land along that border) and costs of building a 1,900 mile long wall, we would then need to continuously pay the costs of maintaining and manning said wall with border agents. And for what? For one, it is estimated that nearly half of the undocumented entered the country legally, and are simply overstaying their visas. Obviously, a giant wall would do nothing to address this. Furthermore, the Pew Research Center has concluded that the number of undocumented workers in the U.S. has leveled off in the past several years, thus rendering the money-sink of a wall even more pointless:
The belief that we're going to successfully make Mexico pay for such a wall is inherently stupid.
A policy of mass deportation is stupider still. The specter of the Feds being dispatched throughout the heartland to forcefully capture 11 million people in a nation that has nearly as many guns as it has people is the stuff of horror films. It's easy to screech "deport them all!" when thinking of the undocumented in the abstract. It would become a different thing entirely if Americans were exposed to nightly newscasts of men, woman, and children being tearfully dragged away from their loved ones.
And then there's the costs of such an endeavor, which are significant:
"After running the numbers, CAP estimated the cost for deporting 10.8 million undocumented immigrants in America would be $200 billion over five years. DHS would also need $17 billion each year thereafter for continued enforcement. But there are more undocumented immigrants currently in the United States than when CAP produced its report. The DHS's most recent report, from January 2012, estimates there are 11.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Adjusting for that increases the costs to $216 billion.
Yet even that understates the cost, because those numbers are not adjusted for inflation. Doing so brings the five-year cost of a mass deportations program to $239 billion, before factoring in the money for sustained enforcement to ensure a new wave of undocumented immigrants does not enter the United States. To put that in perspective, the federal government spent $265 billion on Medicaid in 2013. The Department of Homeland Security's annual budget is only around $60 billion. A mass deportations program would require a massive increase in funding."In other words, one can not coherently proclaim to be a small government conservative while simultaneously supporting a policy of mass deportation. The point about deportation being nearly as costly as the entirety of federal spending on Medicaid is a point worth making in a country where people seemingly believe the undocumented are showered with government freebies. They aren't, of course, but even if they magically were, deporting all of them would still cost significantly more money than said government freebies.
Perhaps the most contentious issue regarding immigrants is their broader effect on the economy. The conservative argument goes something like this: (1) legal and undocumented immigrants alike soak up an unsustainable amount in government welfare, and (2) reduce wages and the number of jobs available for native born Americans.
Both talking points are false. As I've written previously, our country doesn't spend shit on welfare for citizens, let alone non-citizens. Combined federal spending for SNAP (food stamps) and TANF (cash assistance) amounts to 2-3% of our annual budget. That number climbs up to 15-16% if you we count our 10 largest means-tested programs, including the most expensive one, Medicaid. But the undocumented are completely ineligible for these programs, while legal immigrants must, in some cases, reside here for 5 years before becoming eligible:
"The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 cut back on welfare extended to immigrants. It categorized green card holders and refugees granted asylum as "qualified," and all other immigrants - including undocumented workers and many people lawfully here in the United States - as "not qualified" and therefore ineligible for welfare. But the law stipulated that even qualified immigrants had to spend five years in the United States before they could apply for benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, or cash assistance for families with children. Since that major welfare reform, some states have responded by providing for immigrants with programs that offer health care to the children of immigrants or pregnant mothers, and a few states - like California and New York - offer nutritional or cash assistance. But those efforts are mostly limited to qualified residents, while all other immigrants are still almost universally banned from receiving welfare.
Groups like the American Immigration Council have long argued that, contra conservative depictions of "moocher," immigrants have long given more to the welfare system than they take from it. "In one estimate, immigrants earn about $240 billion a year, pay about $90 billion a year in taxes, and use about $5 billion in public benefits," a 2010 report by the Council found. "In another cut of the data, immigrant tax payments total $20 to $30 billion more than the amount of government services they use." And a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2013 found that "more than half of undocumented immigrants have federal and state income, Social Security, and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from their paychecks." Those immigrants are essentially helping to underwrite the welfare system, providing an enormous subsidy to it every year without being able to reap any of the benefits."Non-citizens aren't draining our government of welfare; in many respects, they're keeping it afloat. In the event that they do manage to find a way to receive benefits, such as by using someone else's SSN, they are committing a crime, and thereby risking prosecution and subsequent deportation. Those elderly protesters confined to mobility scooters at the local tea party rally may wish to reconsider their feelings towards those brown people they regard with such disdain. After all, they're the same people funding the very Social Security and Medicare benefits that keep them alive.
The impact of immigration on our economy as a whole is more complex, but largely beneficial. Per the authors of a take down of Trump's immigration plan at FiveThirtyEight:
"The notion that immigration, and particularly illegal immigration, drives down wages and pushes up unemployment is a widely held belief. It also makes intuitive sense: If there are thousands of immigrants willing to work for low wages, it seems logical that native-born workers would be unable to complete.
Economic research, however, has consistently demonstrated that this simplistic framework fails to account for the full effects of immigration. Immigration increases the supply of workers, but it also increases demand for products and services. Economists on both the left and right generally agree that immigration has made the U.S. economy more productive and has benefited the average American worker, according to a University of Chicago survey of leading academics.
Benefiting the "average worker," however, is not the same as benefiting all workers. It's possible that immigration could benefit the economy as a whole while still hurting the less educated native-born workers who compete most directly with immigrants for jobs. Economists are divided on this question: Some research finds that immigration tends to hurt less skilled workers, while other research finds that it benefits workers across the educational spectrum. The University of Chicago survey found that a narrow majority of economists believed that immigration of low-skilled workers can negatively affect less educated native workers."More recent research does seem to indicate that diversity within a city's workforce is beneficial to lower, middle, and higher wage earners alike within that city:
"Take a new discussion paper by researchers Thomas Kemeny of the University of Southampton, in the U.K., and Abigail Cooke of SUNY-Buffalo. Their analysis of Census labor data from 1991 to 2008 tracked changes in wages alongside those of diversity at both the city and individual workplace levels. What they found is that more immigrant workers made everyone richer: as diversity rose one standard deviation in a workplace, wages rose 1.6 percent; a similar rise in the city as a whole increased wages nearly 6 percent."Given this, it would seem that a sound immigration system that welcomes new Americans to our country and expedites their assimilation would only help propel our workforce to its full economic potential. Alas, the current legal process is a convoluted mess. Reason, a libertarian magazine and website, has compiled a chart that best explains this mess for would-be new American citizens (an enlarged chart is viewable at the link):
The current conservative mantra is that those who are here illegally should simply "get in line" so that they may become legal citizens, just as our grandparents and great grandparents did. What they fail to realize is that legal immigration in those days consisted of getting aboard a ship, arriving at Ellis Island, and passing a simple medical examination. And that was it. Today, legal immigration is a much more arduous process in which success largely depends on one's family connections and ability to obtain gainful employment. As the Reason chart demonstrates, this can potentially take decades. For many, there is no actual line to get in, as they lack the family connections or education to qualify for a permanent visa, no matter how long they wait.
The most recent crack at immigration reform passed the Senate in the Summer of 2013 with a 68 to 32 majority. The House, however, has refused to even put the bill to a vote, thus rendering the work of a bipartisan group of senators (including 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who has since disavowed his work on the bill in order to get back in good graces with the Republican base) irrelevant. Which is a shame. In addition to putting an end to the exploitation of millions of workers living in the shadows by finally providing them with a pathway to citizenship, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that it would be largely beneficial to our economy:
- Implementation of the law would have boosted GDP by 3.3 percent in 2023, and by 5.4 percent in 2033, due to the expanded labor force and subsequent higher demand for goods and services.
- Average wages for the entire American workforce would have decreased by 0.1 in 2023, but increase by 0.5 percent in 2033. The CBO estimated that there would initially be a decrease due to the influx of new workers outpacing the amount of capital available to them, but that "the rate of return on capital would be higher under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades."
- Federal deficits would have decreased by $197 billion from 2014 to 2023 and by $700 billion from 2024 to 2033. There would also be discretionary costs of about $22 billion the first 10 years, and $20 billion the next 10, which obviously wouldn't offset the deficit reductions.
Alas, not all politicians are in favor of sound immigration policy. Some of them, particularly at the state level, are more interested in implementing shitty immigration policy. This is certainly true of certain Alabama state legislators, who were responsible for passing H.B. 56 in the Summer of 2011. The law was one of the most stringent anti-immigrant measures of its time, enabling law enforcement and school administrators to request proof of citizenship of anyone they suspected of being here illegally. It ended up being a fucking disaster. Per the Washington Post:
"The backlash was massive - a legal assault that chipped away at the law, and a political campaign that made Republicans own its consequences. Business groups blamed the tough measures for scaring away capital and for an exodus of workers that hurt the state's agriculture industry.
Asked about the law, Alabama voters rarely say that it worked. Large farms spent millions training new workers. The Byrds conceded that the agriculture sector suffered after some immigrants fled the state. "Most of them left and didn't come back," said Terry Darring-Rogers, who works at a Mobile law firm specializing in immigration."As it turns out, those Hispanics that conservatives so readily accuse of costing their respective states revenue are actually pretty damn important economic contributors.
Time and time again, they wind up eating their own words. Donald Trump's shtick is nothing new. As Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker writes, "Trump is not offering anything that was not offered before him, often in identical language and with a similarly incoherent political program, by Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot, by George Wallace or Barry Goldwater, or way back when by Father Coughlin or Huey Long." Otherizing a group of people in an effort to get the average joe to blame them for all of their woes is a strategy as old as the concept of politics itself.
They are stealing from us. They are lazy and shiftless. They are murderers and rapists. They will never learn to speak English. They have religious beliefs that are incompatible with ours. They. They. They.
The targets may change, but the rhetoric never does:
"A century ago, a prominent sociologist lamented the scourge of immigrants in American society, luridly describing a nation of drunken Poles, doltish Italians who "lack the conveniences for thinking," morally "warped" Jews, and "inferior" Irish, who, compared with other immigrants, "have twice their share of insanity." Edward Alsworth Ross, a faculty member at Stanford and the universities of Nebraska and Wisconsin at Madison, went on to warn that immigrants had become so numerous, driving up rates of illiteracy, crime, disease, promiscuity and foul manners, that "[t]he Middle Ages are beginning to show among us.""How many times, exactly, can we be wrong about "them"?
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