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NY TIMES story, front page

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National Push by a Local Immigration Activist: No G.O.P. Retreat

 

D.A. King, center, at a July rally in Washington  against amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Credit…Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

By Julia Preston

ATLANTA — He says the United States is filling up with immigrants who do not respect the law or the American way of life. He refers to Latino groups as “the tribalists,” saying they seek to impose a divisive ethnic agenda. Of his many adversaries, he says: “The illegal alien lobby never changes. It’s the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party joining forces with the Chamber of Commerce, the far left and the Democrats in an effort to expand cheap labor and increase voting for the Democratic Party.”

D. A. King, who quit his job as an insurance agent a decade ago to wage a full-time campaign against illegal immigration in Georgia, is one reason this state rivals Arizona for the toughest legal crackdown in the country. With his Southern manners and seersucker jackets, he works the halls of the gold-domed statehouse, familiar to all, polite and uncompromising.

Now, like other local activists around the country, he is looking beyond Georgia to stop the House of Representatives from following the Senate and passing legislation that would open a path to legal status for illegal immigrants.

As lawmakers return to their home districts for the August recess, advocates like Mr. King are joining forces with national groups that oppose legalization and favor reduced immigration for an all-out populist push.

“These local people live in the middle of these places, they know how to be effective in their districts,” said Roy Beck, executive director of one of the largest national groups, NumbersUSA, who is now holding regular strategy calls with Mr. King and more than 50 other state advocates.

The zeal of militants like Mr. King is a problem for the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, and other Republican leaders, who are hoping to steer their divided caucus to pass a House version of legislation to fix the broken immigration system, which could include legal status for those who lack it — though probably not citizenship.

Mr. King’s “respectful but firm” message for the speaker, he said in an interview, is that “any vote for legalization would be a matter of very great consequence for the people who voted for conservative congressmen from Georgia.”

Mr. King says his wrath grew slowly, beginning in the 1990s with a feud with Mexican neighbors who disrupted the quiet of his leafy street. In Mr. King’s account, they parked fleets of run-down vehicles on their lawn and at one point housed 22 people in a jerry-built warren of rental rooms in the basement.

He took the neighbor to court over code violations, and the conflict boiled for seven years until the family moved away.

A visit in 2004 to the Southwest border convinced Mr. King that the country was facing “what was easily described as an invasion.” Returning to Georgia, he made common cause with the struggling father of a teenage boy killed in a car accident by a reckless driver who was an illegal immigrant. He named his organization the Dustin Inman Society, after the boy.

The mistrust of Mr. Boehner among Mr. King and his allies deepened recently when the speaker rebuked an anti-amnesty hero, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, for commenting that young immigrants here illegally had “calves the size of cantaloupes” from running drugs across the border.

Mr. King in Georgia said he sided squarely with the congressman of the same name, although he might have chosen a milder metaphor. He nonetheless spared little in his description of Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who was one of the authors of the Senate bill, calling him a “smarmy and dishonest” turncoat. During the Senate debate, Mr. King designed and paid for thousands of bumper stickers as well as three large billboards along a commuter highway near Atlanta.

“Help us stop RubiObama amnesty!” one big sign read, with President Obama’s name joined by his hallmark red-white-and-blue letter to that of Senator Rubio.

His billboards instructed drivers to call a senator from Georgia, Johnny Isakson. Mr. Isakson, who supported a comprehensive bill in 2007, voted against the Senate legislation this year.

In Georgia, Mr. King has not been afraid to take on many adversaries, including the farmers and growers, business organizations, labor unions and Latinos. A big-shouldered former Marine, he often shows up with his own placards at rallies called by his opponents — just to let them know he is watching.

“I was taught that we have an American culture to which immigrants will assimilate,” Mr. King said. “And I am incredibly resentful that’s not what’s happening anymore.”

Mr. King, 61, runs his one-man operation from the small guest room of his home on a tree-shaded cul-de-sac in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, equipped with an aging desktop computer and a chair that he acknowledges “needs a new coat of duct tape.” He lives on small donations, and to keep it all going he spent down his savings, ran up his credit cards, refinanced his house three times and “sold the stock my grandmother left me.”

He is unmoved by the protests of Latino and immigrant groups that the Obama administration has already done more than enough enforcement, with more than 1.6 million deportations those groups say have sown fear in their neighborhoods.

Mr. King wants a lot more enforcement before the House does anything else on immigration. He sees the Senate bill as a scheme by Democrats to create legions of new government-dependent voters for their party. He feels certain House Republicans will ultimately reject it.

“The tribalists will not make any difference with any Republican who has enough sense to get on an airplane every Monday and fly to Washington,” Mr. King said.

In his recent meetings in the statehouse, Mr. King huddled with two Republicans, Senator Josh McKoon and Representative Edward Lindsey, who called in by phone. They laid plans for Republicans in the state legislature to send a letter to all the Georgia lawmakers in the House, urging them to focus on enforcement and avoid legalization.

Mr. King is joining a surge of activity among his allies that was spurred by the Senate vote in June. At NumbersUSA, Mr. Beck said, more than 400,000 people signed on to an e-mail list as the vote approached, expanding its followers to more than 1.6 million names. Mr. Beck said a recent conference call he convened with followers was joined by 58,770 people.

But Jerry Gonzalez, a Latino leader in Georgia who is one of Mr. King’s oldest rivals, pointed to new demographics that House lawmakers would have to consider. The number of registered Latino voters in the state grew to 184,000 in 2012 from 10,000 a decade earlier, with more than 200,000 legal immigrants eligible to become citizens.

 

The Dangerous Gambit of the Enforcement Moratorium and Amnesty Legislation

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Image: Rightwingwatch

No one wants to negotiate with a gun to their head

Center for Immigration Studies

By Andrew R. Arthur on January 27, 2021

 

In a January 22 post, my colleague Jessica Vaughan analyzed a 100-day immigration enforcement moratorium put in place by the Biden administration, in one of its first acts. The memorandum laying out that moratorium all but eviscerates immigration enforcement in the United States, as Vaughan noted. It is a dangerous — but perhaps inevitable — gambit, as the new administration pushes a massive amnesty for almost every alien unlawfully present in the United States.

To recap that memorandum announcing a 100-day “pause”, beginning February 1, there will be just three “priorities” for immigration enforcement generally: national security threats, aliens who crossed the border illegally on or after November 1, 2020, and aliens convicted of an “aggravated felony” who are “are determined to pose a threat to public safety”.

That applies not just to removals (aliens who do not fall within one of the priorities will not be removed as of January 22), but to arrests and detentions of aliens who are not a “priority”, as well. That means that nonimmigrant overstays (who make up the majority of aliens illegally present in the United States), aliens who have received due process and are under final orders of removal, and criminal aliens who are not a “priority” will get off scot-free, at least for the next three-plus months, and likely longer.

In other words, in all but the most extreme cases, there will be no immigration enforcement in the United States at all.

But as my colleague Mark Krikorian explained recently, there are no immigration reforms in the proposed amnesty, either. What gives?

Usually, at least a window-dressing of enforcement precedes an amnesty proposal. Why were there almost 370,000 removals in FY 2008? Then-President George W. Bush wanted an amnesty. Why were there almost 410,000 removals in FY 2012? Then-President Obama wanted one, too.

The legislative strategy traditionally has been to show that you are serious about enforcement, and then argue for amnesty for aliens brought to the United States as minors, or for parents of children born here, or for “otherwise law-abiding” aliens illegally present.

Perhaps the Biden administration has decided that this was not a winning tack (there was no Bush or Obama amnesty), and opted to go in the other direction. I am not privy to its deliberations and tactics, but if it has opted to use enforcement (or more precisely, a lack thereof) as a bargaining chip to get a massive legalization bill passed, it will likely backfire.

I have worked on Capitol Hill, and drafted and negotiated legislation that has become law, so I would like to think that I have a certain level of expertise in the crafting of proposals into laws. No one wants to negotiate with a gun to their head, and some Democrats facing tough re-election campaigns in the 2022 off-year elections may have to take a walk on this one.

That said, the Biden administration may have felt that it had no choice except to halt almost all immigration enforcement. If you plan on giving status to everyone except a handful of aliens illegally present as of an arbitrary date, it is inconsistent to arrest — let alone remove — them before that amnesty takes effect.

Why? Because that means that the legislation will either exclude those removed or expressly let them back into the United States (or worse, have the American taxpayers pay to fly them back). In legislative terms, the “optics” of such returns are bad, and hard to defend.

But again, the Biden non-enforcement strategy is risky. Some crimes are victimless in the abstract, but there are a lot of victims of the crimes for which those aliens will not be removed.

Consider, for example, DUI, which is not actually a ground of removability and would — except in the most extreme cases — not fall within one of the new “priorities” for removal. I would regularly see respondents on my docket as an immigration judge who had entered illegally (and therefore were removable) and come to ICE’s attention after a DUI arrest, however. Read the rest here.

 

New Numbers Show Effectiveness of Cancelled 287(g) Program in Two Georgia Counties

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Photo: CIS.org

Elections have consequences

The below excerpt is taken from a recent report for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington D.C. 

Newly elected Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor cancelled the law enforcement partnership on January 1.

  • Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO) accounted for 4,262 foreign-born encounters in FY 2020, 25.2 percent of all 287(g) encounters nationwide (16,903).
  • GCSO has reported 57,911 foreign-born encounters since the inception of the program in FY 2009 through FY 2020.

New Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens has pledged to end the program within his first 100 days in office.

  • Cobb County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) accounted for 1,097 foreign-born encounters in FY 2020, 6.5 percent of all 287(g) encounters nationwide.
  • CCSO has reported 21,984 foreign-born encounters since the inception of the program in FY 2007 through FY 2020.

Nationally in 2020, the 287(g) program encountered approximately:

  • 37 aliens convicted for homicide;
  • 920 aliens convicted for assault;
  • 1,261 convicted for dangerous drugs;
  • 104 convicted for sex offenses/assaults;
  • 377 convicted for obstructing police; and
  • 190 convicted for weapons offenses.

Here are some examples of dangerous individuals who were taken off the streets in Gwinnett and Cobb Counties under 287(g):

  • A citizen of Guatemala charged with felony murder and aggravated assault. The subject illegally reentered the United States on an unknown date and location after having been previously removed in 2012.
  • A citizen of Mexico charged with rape and aggravated child molestation by sodomy with a prior conviction of counterfeiting. The subject illegally re-entered the United States after having been previously removed.
  • A citizen of El Salvador charged with simple battery, disorderly conduct, no driver’s license, and outstanding warrants for two counts of strongarm rape and strongarm sodomy-sexual assault. Previous convictions include concealed weapon carrying, inflicting corporal injury to spouse/cohabitant, aggravated DUI, DUI, and disorderly intoxication. The subject illegally re-entered the United States after having been previously removed twice.
  • A citizen of Mexico arrested for possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, trafficking in methamphetamine, and trafficking in cocaine. The subject entered the United States on an unknown date and location without inspection.
  • A citizen of Jamaica sentenced to 10 years for a conviction of armed robbery, possession of a firearm in commission of a felony, and possession of marijuana. The subject was last admitted into the United States as a conditional lawful resident.

Former Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway is quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as saying, “It [the 287(g) program] has saved people. I certainly think there have been fewer child molestations, rapes, murders, robberies.”

–> Read the complete report from CIS.org here.

Immigration Research: (What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Biden’s Immigration-Enabling Goals Couldn’t be Worse Timed

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Unemployment line, USA 2020 photo: CNBC

“..immigrants were flooding into California in hopes of landing jobs in labor-intensive industries such a apparel and electronics assembly that NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] had steadily been sending to Mexico — where most of the immigrants come from! In other words, the state was importing people while exporting their likeliest jobs.”

From Reality check – so much out there, so little time

Alan Tonelson

Apparent President-elect Joe Biden emphatically and repeatedly told the nationthat he’s determined to increase the flow of immigrants to America – whether we’re talking about his promises that will greatly strengthen the immigration magnet (like creating a “roadmap to citizenship” for America’s illegal alien population, tightly curbing immigation law enforcement activities, and offering free government-funded healthcare to anyone who can manage to cross the border lawfully or not), or his promises to boost admissions of refugees, speed systems for processing applications for asylum and (legal) green card applications, and generally “to ensure that the U.S. remains open and welcoming to people from every part of the world….”

During normal recent times such pledges – and the fallout of pre-Trump efforts to keep them – had proven troublesome enough for the U.S. economy and for working class Americans in particular. Inevitably, they pumped up the supply of labor available to U.S.-based businesses, and created surpluses that enabled companies to cut wages with the greatest of ease – exactly as the laws of supply and demand predict.

During the CCP Virus pandemic and its likely economic aftermath, however, this quasi-Open Borders strategy looks positively demented, as emerging trends most recently described by New York Times economics writer Eduardo Porter should make painfully obvious.

According to Porter in a December 1 piece, “The [U.S.] labor market has recovered 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost from February to April. But many positions may not return any time soon, even when a vaccine is deployed.

“This is likely to prove especially problematic for millions of low-paid workers in service industries like retailing, hospitality, building maintenance and transportation, which may be permanently impaired or fundamentally transformed. What will janitors do if fewer people work in offices? What will waiters do if the urban restaurant ecosystem never recovers its density?”

What’s the connection with immigration policy? As it happens, the service industries the author rightly identifies as sectors apparently vulnerable to major employment downsizing are industries that historically have employed outsized shares of immigrant workers (including illegals). And along with other personal service industries, they’re kinds of sectors whose modest skill requirements would continue to offer newcomers overall their best bets for employment…. More here.

USCIS: Long standing basic principle of U.S. immigration law: Alien must be self-sufficient when admitted to United States

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Photo: Community Service Society.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services

Public Charge Provisions of Immigration Law: A Brief Historical Background

Historical Origins of the Likely to Become a Public Charge (LPC) Exclusion

Note: Related

Strong sentiments opposing the immigration of “paupers” developed in the United States well before the advent of federal immigration controls. During the colonial period, several colonies enacted protective measures to prohibit the immigration of individuals who might become public charges.[1] In the nineteenth century, before the existence of a federal agency responsible for overseeing immigration policies, eastern seaboard states such as New York and Massachusetts enacted state laws that restricted the immigration of aliens deemed likely to become dependent on public institutions such as poor houses. These states also charged steamship companies a “head tax” for each foreign passenger they landed in order to defray the cost of caring for, and sometimes removing, indigent immigrants who ended-up in state-funded facilities.[2]

Steamship companies, merchants, and others who favored open immigration challenged state head-taxes as impediments to free commerce. In response, state charity boards argued for the necessity of the head-tax in funding the care of foreign-born paupers and favored stronger protective laws to prevent additional influxes of destitute immigrants who could not support themselves.[3] The legal dispute over the state head-taxes reached a turning-point in 1875, when a lawsuit challenging the practice brought by a shipping company against the Mayor of New York reached the Supreme Court.[4] The Court decided that the state-imposed head-taxes interfered with Congress’s authority to regulate commerce and struck them down. Fearing the loss of funds needed to administer immigration policies and care for poor immigrants, eastern states began to lobby Congress for a federal immigration head-tax to replace the defunct state taxes.

The eastern states’ concerns about poor immigrants and the cost of caring for them found expression in the first general federal immigration statute of 1882.[5] The 1882 law excluded “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”[6] The 1882 Immigration Act also created a federal immigration head-tax, which was used to defray the cost of regulating immigration and to care for immigrants who arrived in the U.S., including those who fell into economic distress. However, the law did not create a federal immigration agency; instead it authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to enter into contracts with state immigration commissions to administer federal policies. Thus, in many ways, the 1882 federal law depended on state immigration commissions, who enforced the public charge exclusion policy and used money from the federal immigration head-tax fund to pay state and local charities that cared for immigrants.

While the 1882 federal law did not provide any definition of a “public charge” or any guidelines for determining who was likely to become one, state Immigration Commission reports suggest that officials took numerous factors into account, including an immigrant’s willingness to work, when making decisions in LPC cases. For example, in 1884 the Pennsylvania Board of Commissioners of Public Charities reported that a large number of Hungarians who were “poor, pecuniarily” were permitted to land because they were “strong, hearty people, and quite willing to work…”[7] In other cases the state boards landed questionable immigrants upon receiving guarantees from charitable organizations and/or bonds from the steamship companies that would be paid if the immigrants became public charges.

The general Immigration Act of 1891 completed the federalization of immigration regulation by creating the office of the Superintendent of Immigration and a federal Immigration Service to inspect all arriving aliens.[8] The 1891 law also retained the head-tax provision and the exclusion of “paupers or persons likely to become a public charge.”[9] In the Act of March 3, 1903 Congress added “professional beggars” as a class of exclusion.[10] A 1907 law then added additional language that excluded potential immigrants with a “mental or physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such an alien to earn a living.”[11]  The Immigration Act of 1917 added “vagrants” to the LPC provision and this version of it remained substantially unchanged when it was incorporated into the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.[12] The INA left the LPC policy substantively the same, but added language explicitly emphasizing the discretionary authority of administrative officers in the Department of State and the Immigration Service to determine the definition of “LPC.”[13] In sum, a version of the LPC provision has been part of federal immigration policy from its foundations and it consistently remained one of the most common grounds for immigrant inadmissibility.[14]

Brief History of Laws Providing for the Removal of Aliens Who Have Become Public Charges

In addition to providing for the exclusion of likely public charges, U.S. immigration law has long provided for the removal of immigrants who become dependent on public aid. The Immigration Act of 1891 established the federal government’s authority to remove aliens who entered unlawfully, a category that included immigrants who could be shown to have entered when they were LPC.[15] The 1891 Act also provided a deportability period of one year after arrival for immigrants who actually became public charges as the result of a condition that existed prior to their arrival. Congress extended this deportability period to two years in 1903 and three years in 1907[16]. The immigration Act of 1917 altered this provision, stipulating that aliens who became public charges “from causes not affirmatively shown to have arisen subsequent to landing” within five years of arrival were subject to deportation.[17] Additionally, the 1917 law removed the time limit on deportation: if an immigrant was shown to have become a public charge within five years of arrival they could be deported at any time, no matter how long they had resided in the U.S. The 1952 INA retained the provision that aliens who became public charges within five years of their arrival due to causes not affirmatively shown to have arisen since their entry could be deported at any time, and this has remained in the law since.

The Immigration Act of 1917 also provided for the removal at public expense of aliens who “fall into distress or need public aid from causes arising subsequent to their entry and are desirous of being so removed.”[18] Though not formal deportation, this law provided a means for the federal government to remove indigent aliens who desired to return to their home countries. During the Great Depression many aliens departed the United States under this voluntary provision.

There is much more here.

 

Data: New Foreign-Born Voters in Swing States Exceed 2016 Margins of Victory

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Image: Getty, via Breitbart News

“In Michigan, for instance, Trump won the state in 2016 by 10,704 votes against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Between 2014 to 2018, nearly 64,700 new foreign-born voters have entered the electorate in Michigan — including more than 13,500 Iraqi immigrants.”

Breitbart News

September 2, 2020

John Binder

The number of new foreign-born voters, naturalized since 2014, exceeds the 2016 margins of victory in a number of swing states, new data reveals.

Analysis from the National Partnership for New Americans finds that in swing states such as Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, the total number of foreign-born voters who have entered the electorate since 2014 exceeds the margins of victory from the 2016 presidential election.

The margins are large in Florida, a key swing state, as well. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by less than 113,000 votes. Between 2014 to 2018, nearly 415,500 new foreign-born voters have entered the electorate in Florida, almost triple Trump’s margin of victory.

In other swing states like Arizona, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the margins are increasingly close and could be surpassed come election day.

For instance, in Wisconsin, Trump won the state by less than 23,000 votes in 2016. Between 2014 to 2018, more than 19,000 new foreign-born voters have entered the state’s electorate. By 2020, researchers estimate that number could be closer to almost 30,000.

Similarly, in Minnesota, more than 41,200 new foreign-born voters have entered the electorate — primarily from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Mexico. Clinton won the state by almost 44,600 votes. By 2020, the total could be more than 76,000.

The margins would likely be even larger on November 3 if not for a slowdown in naturalizations. Foreign nationals waiting to become naturalized American citizens is growing as the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency grapples with a backlog spurred by the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

The Washington Post interviewed a number of foreign nationals hoping to vote in the 2020 election — nearly all suggesting they will cast their ballot for Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden:

“I decided to become a citizen for my voice to count and for the Latinos and all the minorities to be counted, and to be one more in this country,” said Rutilia Ornelas, 65, who applied for naturalization 20 years after becoming a permanent resident in hopes of voting for the Democratic nominee this November. [Emphasis added]

…

But with his application stalled, Muhammad said he is finding other ways to make his voice heard. Inspired by the recent Black Lives Matter protests and the push to fight systemic racism, he has marched alongside protesters with a homemade sign carrying quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. and donated to racial justice groups. He said he has begun to see grass-roots activism as a powerful way to speak out — perhaps even more powerful than electing any one politician into office. [Emphasis added].. More here from Breitbart.

Stopping Birth tourism in the United States and Canada – CIS

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Photo: Library of Congress

“President Trump took action in January 2020 to limit birth tourism by specifying that giving birth in the U.S. is not a legitimate grounds for obtaining a visitor visa.”

Washington, D.C. (August 10, 2020) – A new report by the Center for Immigration Studies examines the practice, and negative impacts, of birth tourism in the United States and other developed countries, and recommends policies to minimize the practice of selling citizenship.

The U.S. and Canada are the only G7 nations with birthright citizenship policies; these have been exploited and contributed to the birth tourism industry, which encourages the practice of pregnant foreign mothers travelling to the United States or Canada on legal visas, received through fraudulent claims, with the sole intention of delivering their children on American or Canadian soil in order to secure citizenship for their newborns.

The Center for Immigration Studies estimates 20,000 to 26,000 possible birth tourists in the U.S. annually. In Canada, between 2010 and 2018, the number of children born to foreign mothers soared by 202 percent with 75 percent of births to foreign mothers occurring in just 25 hospitals. These numbers do not include the large number of illegal immigrants who migrate to North America to take advantage of the birthright citizenship policies. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that, in 2014, roughly 297,000 children were born to illegal aliens in the United States, costing up to $2.4 billion annually in Medicaid taxpayer dollars.

President Trump took action in January 2020 to limit birth tourism by specifying that giving birth in the U.S. is not a legitimate grounds for obtaining a visitor visa. The State Department has stopped issuing temporary visitor visas to pregnant female applicants who are planning to deliver their babies in the U.S. This report provides other policies that this administration or the next can take to limit the number of foreign nationals coming to the U.S. to give birth to a child who in later years can return to the U.S., at great expense to U.S. taxpayers, to take advantage of free public schools, in-state college tuition, low-interest student loans, federal education scholarships, and eventually sponsor family members through chain migration policies. In addition, these actions will also reduce the burden presently placed on the American healthcare system, both financially and physically, as hospitals are routinely abused by birth tourists… Read the rest here.

CIS: There Are No Jobs Americans Won’t Do

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Image: CIS.org

A detailed look at immigrants (legal and illegal) and natives across occupations

By Steven A. Camarota, Jason Richwine, and Karen Zeigler on August 26, 2018

Download a PDF of this Backgrounder.

An Excel file with information on all occupations is available here.

Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center. Jason Richwine, PhD, is an independent public policy analyst based in Washington, D.C., and a contributing writer at National Review.

If immigrants “do jobs that Americans won’t do”, we should be able to identify occupations in which the workers are nearly all foreign-born. However, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal). Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.

Notable findings:

  • Of the 474 civilian occupations, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans still comprise 46 percent of workers in these occupations.
  • There are no occupations in the United States in which a majority of workers are illegal immigrants.
  • Illegal immigrants work mostly in construction, cleaning, maintenance, food service, garment manufacturing, and agricultural occupations. However, the majority of workers even in these areas are either native-born or legal immigrants.
  • Only 4 percent of illegal immigrants and 2 percent of all immigrants do farm work. Immigrants (legal and illegal) do make up a large share of agricultural workers — accounting for half or more of some types of farm laborers — but all agricultural workers together constitute less than 1 percent of the American work force.
  • Many occupations often thought to be worked overwhelmingly by immigrants (legal and illegal) are in fact majority native-born:
    • Maids and housekeepers: 51 percent native-born
    • Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 54 percent native-born
    • Butchers and meat processors: 64 percent native-born
    • Grounds maintenance workers: 66 percent native-born
    • Construction laborers: 65 percent native-born
    • Janitors: 73 percent native-born
  • There are 65 occupations in which 25 percent or more of the workers are immigrants (legal and illegal). In these high-immigrant occupations, there are still 16.5 million natives — accounting for one out of eight natives in the labor force.
  • High-immigrant occupations (25 percent or more immigrant) are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.
  • In high-immigrant occupations, 54 percent of the natives in those occupations have no education beyond high school, compared to 30 percent of the rest of the labor force.
  • Natives tend to have high unemployment in high-immigrant occupations, averaging 9.8 percent during the 2012-2016 period, compared to 5.6 percent in the rest of the labor force. There were a total of 1.8 million unemployed native-born Americans in high-immigrant occupations.
  • The stereotype that native-born workers in high-immigrant occupations are mostly older, with few young natives willing to do such work, is largely inaccurate. In fact, 34 percent of natives in high-immigrant occupations are age 30 or younger, compared to 29 percent of natives in the rest of labor force.
  • Not all high-immigrant occupations are lower-skilled. For example, 38 percent of software engineers are immigrants, as are 28 percent of physicians.
  • A number of politically influential groups face very little job competition from immigrants (legal and illegal). For example, only 7 percent of lawyers and judges and 7 percent of farmers and ranchers are immigrants, as are at most 9 percent of English-language reporters and correspondents.1 Much more here.

 

How much of the Covid is coming to Texas from Mexico?

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The Texas Covid Crisis

Revamp Trump’s emergency border closure and pull data for policy-making — right now

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By Todd Bensman on July 6, 2020

 

AUSTIN, Texas — The national narrative about the current State of Texas Covid-19 crisis (and Arizona’s and California’s) goes like this: Fault for the escalating spike in hospitalizations that have overwhelmed Texas care facilities falls entirely to Gov. Greg Abbott’s phased reopening and the cavalier partying of bar patrons and spring-break revelers, all exclusively inside the state. The governor and local officials are succumbing to the narrative by reinstituting closures as a guard against future youthful stupidity.

But my Border Patrol sources, Mexican media reports, and obscure local media reporting at the border tell a Texas story at sharp variance with that narrative. Taken all together, the collection of reporting persuasively suggests that some percentage of the Texas Covid-19 hospitalizations, likely a significant one, comes from an ongoing influx of seriously ill patients who caught the virus in Covid-exploding Mexico and are legally and illegally crossing the border to flee that country’s completely overrun health system. Refusal to acknowledge this ground truth and to excavate the data necessary to inform the right policy choices presents a danger to life that is more real than any imagined political offense by stating that Mexico is a source.

Strong Evidence: “Hundreds” of Sick Border Patrol Agents, and Much More

Enough evidence is now on hand that severely ill patients are pouring over from Mexico and adding to the American counts of hospitalization and death, probably coinciding with regular community spread resulting from recent mass protests. What’s needed now is acknowledgement that there are at least two merging streams, not to be conflated with one another.

The most convincing evidence emerged from national reporting back in May, before widespread second-wave spikes generating the current panicked and uninformed policy responses. These are no longer cited in context of the crisis that much more recently developed: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and most recently, to its rare credit, CNN on June 29, have established a credible anecdotal baseline that Covid-19 patients have been flooding through California and Arizona border ports of entry from Mexico (some illegally) — by the thousands — since at least mid-May as the virus struck our southern neighbor a month or two behind the United States. It was no coincidence that at the same time the Baja and Sonora state hospital systems were seizing up in worst-case scenarios of deadly convulsions.

The CNN report confirmed other reports that American expatriates and Mexican visa-holders were coming up to California ports of entry aboard ambulances, or calling ambulances as they were crossing on foot. The CNN story, for instance, quoted Carmela Coyle, president and CEO of the California Hospital Association, calling what is underway “an unprecedented surge across the border”. The same June 29 story quoted California’s emergency medical services authority head Dr. David Duncan describing “the steady stream” coming into Imperial County as “gas on the fire” that will “continue to escalate and fuel the Covid pressures that we see.”

None of these reports, however, mention the highly similar circumstances in Texas or the fact that Mexico’s Tamaulipas state hospitals right across from the Texas ones are seizing up, in Matamoros, across from Brownsville; in Reynosa, across from McAllen; in Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo; and in Juarez, across from El Paso.

On Friday, a Border Patrol agent who works the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas told me his leadership had informed agents that more than 350 of their ranks had been pulled off the line in just that sector and placed in quarantine, including 120 confirmed agent cases, because at least in part “the number of illegals we catch with positive Covid are increasing.” This tracked with CBP Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan telling a Senate committee hearing on June 25, that “several hundred” of his agents were infected with the virus due to “high-risk contact” with infected migrants they apprehended.

Please read the rest here from the Center for Immigration Studies