BERLIN (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives are calling for a broader debate and changes to immigration law after criticism that her government has not done enough to explain to Germans the need for immigrants and let too many unskilled workers in.
The call comes at a time when hostility toward foreigners and Muslims is on the rise, with a new movement named PEGIDA — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West — holding weekly protests against the influence of Islam.
In an interview, Peter Tauber, general secretary of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called Germany an “Einwanderungsland”, or country of immigration, but said work was needed to bed this idea down among the population and to ensure the right kinds of immigrants were being lured.
“We need to talk about a new immigration law that spells out what immigrants must bring with them in terms of skills, education and willingness to engage in our country in order to become Germans,” Tauber said.
In the decades after World War Two, West Germany encouraged immigration as a way of dealing with labor shortages, but it described those who came from countries like Turkey, Italy and Greece as “Gastarbeiter” or “guest workers”.
Although many ended up staying permanently, many Germans do not see their country as a melting pot.
With a demographic crisis looming, the government is trying to change that. With one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, Germany’s working-age population is expected to shrink by 6.3 million over the next 15 years. Increasing the inflow of immigrants is seen as crucial for the future of the economy.
Germany has made previous attempts to reform its immigration policies and in 2012 introduced a “Blue Card” scheme for highly-skilled workers and academics, but its impact has been limited.
Only 18,000 have been granted residency under the scheme and most were already living or studying in Germany.
In a recent newspaper editorial Hans-Werner Sinn, head of Germany’s influential Ifo economic research institute, criticized the government for lacking an immigration plan.
He also dismissed the notion that all immigrants were a “gain” for Germany, estimating that on average, each immigrant was costing the state 1,800 euros.
Bemoaning the lack of qualified immigrants, he cited OECD data showing less than a quarter of foreign-born immigrants to Germany in 2013 were highly educated, compared to 57 percent in Canada, 46 percent in the UK and the OECD average of 31 percent.
Other senior members of Merkel’s CDU backed Tauber’s suggestion.
“It is important to find a solution for the immigration of non-EU citizens and I think that the Canadian points system is the best solution for that,” deputy parliamentary floor leader Michael Fuchs told Reuters.
(Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Noah Barkin)
The series of executive actions, which the president announced in November, provides a legal reprieve to parents of US citizens and permanent residents who have lived in the country for at least five years. It also allows immigrants who arrived as children to apply for deportation postponement. About two-thirds of the plan’s potential beneficiaries are from Mexico. Obama hosted Peña Nieto at the White House in a bid to strengthen relations with the Latin American nation.
The Mexican leader’s statement adds another talking point to the debate on US immigration, an issue that grows more divisive even as it becomes relevant to a growing sector of the American public. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the US foreign-born population hit a historic high of 41 million in 2012. And while 28 percent – about 11 million – of those were Mexican natives, the demographics have grown increasingly diverse: The number of migrants from China, India, and the Philippines each hovered close to 2 million, while those from Vietnam, Cuba, and South Korea tallied around 1 million apiece.
These immigrants have settled across the United States, with the majority living in California, New York, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey respectively. About 11.5 million are undocumented, according to Migration Policy Institute data.
Along growing diversity is a starker divide on the issue of immigration and how to address it, especially along party lines. A Pew Research Center study released last month found that 50 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s executive action, narrowly surpassing the 46 percent who agree with the decision. The same study found that 82 percent of Republicans surveyed said they disagree with the president, while 71 percent of Democrats said they approve – a divide mirrored in the stalemate on immigration policy between the White House and Congress.
The Washington Post articulated the problem in a Jan. 5 editorial: “Like the Republicans, we worry that Mr. Obama’s executive order attempts to accomplish what should be done through legislation … [But] rather than take the challenge, Republicans now appear intent on confirming their image as the party of no solution to the immigration dilemma.”
For some, the solution lies in finding a tenable middle ground. In his book “American Dreams,” to be released next week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) outlined a series of bills aimed at addressing the issue piecemeal, arguing against the sweeping methods that the president has tried to employ. Mr. Rubio, a potential candidate in the 2016 presidential elections, himself previously tried to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in the last Congress.
He writes, “We must begin by acknowledging, considering our recent experience with massive pieces of legislation, [that] achieving comprehensive immigration reform of anything in a single bill is simply not realistic.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will offer U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron a compromise on immigration, pledging support for welfare curbs so long as Europe’s freedom-of-movement rights are not called into question.
Merkel agrees with Cameron that European Union countries must be more effectively shielded from abuse of benefits, if necessary by changing EU laws, according to a German government official who asked not to be named discussing strategy. The chancellor will seek common ground with Cameron on the matter today during a visit to London, the official said.
Consensus on one aspect of EU immigration is unlikely to defuse a subject that’s put the two leaders at odds. Merkel publicly criticized Cameron’s plans last year to clamp down on immigration, saying that the fundamental right to freedom of movement in the EU is unassailable. If he chooses not to heed that warning, she cannot help him any further in the EU, the German official said.
“Our red lines have been long known to the British government,” German Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Roth said in a phone interview two days ago. “We would welcome it if difficulties with the EU were to be identified concretely — and it was made clear what the U.K.’s expectations of the EU are.”
Merkel is making her first visit to London since giving a speech last February to both houses of Parliament calling for a stronger EU. She arrives in the U.K. four months to the day before a general election in which Britain’s future in Europe has become a core campaign issue.
Labour Referendum
The talks at the prime minister’s office will focus on ways to boost economic growth and reduce bureaucracy for business, Merkel and Cameron said in a joint statement e-mailed by the chancellery in Berlin. They will pursue “long-term” plans to consolidate budgets, according to the statement.
Cameron is struggling to fend off both the main opposition Labour Party and a challenge to his Conservatives by the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party. With UKIP advocating Britain’s exit from the EU, Cameron has pledged to hold a referendum on British membership in the 28-nation bloc by 2017 if he wins a second term on May 7, and has hinted he might bring that vote forward.
While Labour says it doesn’t plan to hold a ballot on EU membership, Merkel sees it as inevitable that the party leader, Ed Miliband, will have to put it on his agenda because of the strong euroskeptic sentiment in Britain, according to the German official. That’s a scenario increasingly alien to policy makers in Germany, where no mainstream party campaigns on an anti-EU platform.
‘Not Working’
Merkel doesn’t plan to meet Miliband or any other opposition leaders in London since she is visiting the U.K. in her capacity as chairwoman this year of the Group of Seven nations and not to discuss German policy, according to two German officials.
Talks with Cameron will mainly focus on the G-7 agenda, for which Germany will host a summit in the Bavarian Alps in June, the officials said. At the same time, they acknowledged that Merkel will be unable to avoid the debate over Europe and immigration.
“We’ve been providing employment for a lot of people around Europe; now I want to change that,” Cameron said in a BBC Television interview Jan. 4. “If we’ve got a Europe that isn’t growing, a European Union that isn’t working, migration arrangements that don’t work for countries like Britain, we’ve got a problem, and I believe in confronting and dealing with problems rather than just putting them off.”
Cameron has pledged to reform the EU, including a block on welfare payments to Europeans under certain conditions, before holding a referendum. That raises the prospect of Britain’s exit from the EU unless he’s able to win backing from European leaders for his aims. Merkel, the head of Europe’s biggest economy and dominant power, is key to Cameron’s goals.
Persuading Britain
The German chancellor has made repeated calls for the U.K. to remain in the bloc. She said in November that she has “very good German reasons” to stand by Britain, citing the U.K’s dynamism and global perspective.
“We need the U.K.,” Merkel said on Nov. 17 after a speech at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. “I’ll do everything I can and I hope that we will be able to persuade them to remain members of the European Union.”
Germany‘s talks with the U.K. on immigration have sought to find domestic changes to current European law that could resolve the differences, said Roth, who is the minister responsible for European matters. Movement of labor in the EU’s single market has been a “great success story,” he said.
Merkel has recently championed openness to immigration, particularly in response to anti-Islamist rallies centered in the eastern city of Dresden by a group known as Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida.
She used her New Year’s address to urge Germans to spurn the demonstrations, saying the organizers “all too often have prejudice, coldness, and yes, hatred in their hearts.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) writes in a new book that immigration reform should happen through piecemeal bills, not the kind of massive compromise legislation that he sponsored in the last Congress.
The potential 2016 presidential candidate nods to conservative critics of his big bill, which passed the Senate but never got a vote in the House. But he does not apologize or recant.
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He does advocate a new process for letting people who entered the country illegally stay, but it would not include a pathway to citizenship, something that was included in the Senate bill after negotiations with Democrats.
Rubio’s book, “American Dreams,” comes out next week, but POLITICO obtained an early copy of the chapter that addresses immigration.
The 43-year-old Rubio writes that it is “not nativism” for people to fear those in the country illegally could take the jobs of American citizens. But he criticizes activists on both sides who he believes are responsible for “stalemate” on the divisive issue.
“Some on the right know it needs to be done, but they want someone else to do it,” he writes. “Some on the left have concluded that having the issue is more politically valuable than solving the problem. Groups on both sides use it to raise money.”
The only mention of immigration in the book comes during the final pages of the second chapter. The rest of the book outlines Rubio’s domestic policy agenda, including on taxes and health care.
Immigration is the single biggest issue working against Rubio’s presidential hopes. He hoped that shepherding the bill into law in 2013 would give him a signature achievement to run on, but activists on the right mobilized to help block it. And polling showed an uptick in concern about illegal immigration.
As he weighs whether to run for president or reelection to the Senate, Rubio knows he will need to address the issue head on. The book tour, which starts next week, will offer a window into whether there is space for him in the crowded 2016 field.
Rubio presents himself as someone staking out a sensible middle ground.
“On the one hand, calls to grant amnesty to twelve million people are unrealistic and quite frankly irresponsible,” he writes. “On the other hand, not a single opponent of the Senate bill I helped author proposed that we try to round up and deport twelve million human beings.”
The senator criticizes President Barack Obama for executive action and argues the tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who entered the country last year shows how insecure the border is.
The senator calls the immigration status quo “chaotic” and says doing nothing hurts the middle class the most. He complains that star basketball players get to stay in the country but world-class scientists are forced to leave.
“Making our legal immigration system a merit-based system that encourages innovators will have broad benefits for our economy,” he writes, adding that it will “help immigrants assimilate more quickly.”
Rubio acknowledges widespread fear of “loopholes and unintended consequences.”
“We must begin by acknowledging, considering our recent experience with massive pieces of legislation, achieving comprehensive immigration reform of anything in a single bill is simply not realistic,” he writes. “Having tried that approach, I know this to be true firsthand.”
Rubio notes that the last immigration reform bill, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, legalized more than three million people, “but the enforcement measures were never fully implemented.”
“A significant percentage of Americans simply don’t trust either party in Washington to address other aspects of immigration reform before illegal immigration has been brought under control, and for good reason,” writes Rubio.
He argues that just enforcing the laws already on the books is not enough. He calls for more investment in electronic monitoring and personnel. He calls for a program that allows employers to more easily check if someone is legally in the country. And he wants more enforcement to prevent people from overstaying their visas.
“Building more fencing alone will not be enough to address illegal crossings,” he writes.
“Each year about one million people permanently immigrate here legally,” adds Rubio. “But when people here that we have over twelve million people here illegally, they feel as if we are being taken advantage of. They see how hard it is to find and keep a steady and well-paying job, and they worry that more people will mean more competition for already scarce work. That’s not nativism. That’s human nature.”
The first piecemeal bill he wants to pass would include better enforcement measures.
The second bill would be to make the legal immigration process more merit-based, transitioning from “family-based immigration” toward “work-and-skill-based immigration.” This would include a limited guest worker program for seasonal workers and allowing more high-tech visas.
The third bill would then address the 12 million people who entered the country unlawfully. Here, he offers a three-prong approach to dealing with the undocumented.
First, those in the country illegally would have to register. “If they have committed serious crimes or have not been here long enough, they will have to leave,” he writes.
Next, those who qualify would apply for “temporary non-immigrant visas.” These would require a fine, a background check and learning English. “To keep it, they will have to pay taxes,” he explains, and they could not collect government benefits.
Finally, those who receive the visas would have to wait at least a decade to apply for permanent residency.
“Of course,” he writes, “there will be detractors.”
More than 8000 public servants at the Immigration Department face being breathalysed and drug tested in their offices under a tough new workplace regime.
There will also be a crackdown on second jobs, social media use and sloppy appearances among the department’s public servants as the Customs agency hierarchy tightens its grip on Immigration.
Immigration’s 8500 public servants were told just before the Christmas break that they will be subject to the same “integrity framework” as their new colleagues in Customs as the two departments merge to form the “Australian Border Force”.
Among the 18 major new workplace policies sent out for consultation were drug and alcohol rules allowing managers to carry out either random or targeted tests for alcohol or narcotics on Immigration bureaucrats as they work.
Public servants will be in trouble if caught with a blood alcohol reading above .02 or if they are found to be “impaired” by illegal or prescription drugs while on duty.
“The portfolio has zero-tolerance for the possession, use of trafficking of prohibitive drugs and DIBP and ACBPS are alcohol free workplaces,” workers were told in a fact sheet.
“Workers found to be in breach of this policy can expect to face serious consequences including code of conduct investigations that can lead to the imposition of sanctions including the termination of employment.”
Public sector union the CPSU says in a bulletin sent out to members that the new rules, due to come into force in March, are causing “significant concern” among workers at Immigration with public servants at the department due to begin holding meetings from mid-January to discuss their bosses’ decision.
However, a departmental spokeswoman said on Monday that the new framework was necessary to reflect Immigration’s new “mission”.
“In the context of the new department individual staff will be exposed to a broader range of vulnerabilities and risks,” she said.
“Our integrity must be of the highest order and our behaviour consistent with the laws we enforce.
“While the vast majority of our combined workforce displays exemplary integrity, we must do everything we can to protect our workforce and our organisation from criminal influence and actions.”
The framework has already been adopted by Customs as part of its ongoing battle to get on top of its internal corruption problems but is seen by Immigration public servants as another step in what is being referred to internally as the “Customisation” of their department.
A new mandatory reporting regime will require Immigration officials to dob-in colleagues they suspect of misconduct, even if it occurs away from the workplace.
Any work undertaken outside the department, even volunteering for not-for-profit organisations, must be reported to a public servant’s bosses and a tough new social media policy will be imposed to prevent both security breaches and embarrassment to the merged department.
“Inappropriate use of social media, social networking services, or official email, instant messaging or online platforms could compromise DIBP staff and Customs workers and potentially their family and friends as well as jeopardise their careers,” a briefing note stated.
There will also be a crackdown on sloppily dressed public servants with “dress-down” days banned and a prohibition placed on jeans, non-uniform shorts and revealing mid-riff tops while on the job.
Thongs, casual trainers and ugg boots also make the banned list with Immigration public servants also ordered to go easy on the make-up, cover tattoos and keep the hairstyles conservative.
Laying down the law: Immigration’s new integrity framework
Random drug and alcohol testing
Compulsory “dob-in” for suspected misbehaviour
Crackdown on Facebook, Twitter and other social media
Ban on dress-down days and stricter dress and appearance codes
Tighter controls on second jobs and voluntary work
About 4000 Department of Immigration and Border Protection staff could be shifted out of Belconnen in a move that would be economically “disastrous” for the town centre.
The large department wants 80,000 square metres of building space in one precinct within a 10-kilometre radius of Capital Hill so it can consolidate its 5500 staff throughout the territory.
Tender documents show the department will use Canberra’s weak commercial real estate market, which includes high amounts of empty office space, to push building owners for a free fit-out and fewer rent increases.
All new building space for the move would be needed by the end of 2017.
At present in Belconnen, 4000 Immigration staff are in half a dozen buildings accounting for more than 60,000 square metres.
About another 1500 Customs and Border Protection employees work in five buildings totalling 35,000 square metres in Civic.
The department did not want more than 400 metres between the entries of any two buildings in the new precinct it inhabited.
Fraser MP Andrew Leigh said spending millions of dollars to move public servants around the city was “completely out of order”.
“It’s another example of the government getting its priorities wrong when it comes to the public service,” Dr Leigh said.
“The Abbott government is operating with a complete disregard for Canberra’s economy and the people who live and work in this city.
“If it takes thousands of workers out of the Belconnen town centre that will hurt all of the shops, cafes and services in the area.”
Although a location had not yet been chosen, Dr Leigh said there was little doubt some Belconnen businesses would go to the wall as a result of the decision.
“One of Canberra’s great strengths as a city is that people can work in town centres close to where they live,” he said.
ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja said he had lobbied department secretary Mike Pezzullo and former minister Scott Morrison for the department to stay in Belconnen.
In recent days he had sent a message to new Immigration Minister Peter Dutton to organise a meeting so he could repeat the sentiment.
“I think it would be a big blow to the Belconnen town centre [if the department moved out],” Senator Seselja said.
“A lot of businesses there have come to rely on the department’s significant presence.”
It appears as though Tuggeranong would not have a chance of hosting the Immigration Department because it falls just outside the 10-kilometre radial line of Capital Hill.
If the department ended up consolidating all ACT staff at Belconnen, it would mean a significant increase in jobs in the town centre.
But real estate observers were unsure whether enough vacant space at a single location existed at Belconnen, although the option of constructing a new building has been left open. It was clear from tender documents the department was open to offers at Civic, Woden and at Brindabella Business Park near Canberra Airport where there was considerable vacant space.
ACT Combined Community Councils secretary Robyn Coghlan said shifting the department outside of Belconnen would be a disaster.
She said moving it to Civic would undermine the city’s original design, which aimed to promote the flourishing of satellite townships within the territory.
Ms Coghlan said the Westfield shopping centre in Belconnen was hurting retail outlets outside the centre.
The department’s negotiations with preferred tenderers was due to happen by March.
The department’s current leased area in Chan Street, Belconnen, which may be considered for consolidation, comprises: the Blue Building (5758sqm), the Magenta Building (3908sqm), the Aqua Building Chan Street (6567sqm), the Purple Building (4516sqm), the Orange Building (17,314sqm), and 6 Chan Street (28,320sqm).
The first four leases expire in February 2016. The latter two expire in September 2018 and November 2019 respectively.
Customs and Border Protection currently leases 20 Allara Street (2499sqm), 5 Constitution Avenue (12,838sqm),
48-56 Allara Street (9325sqm), 2 Constitution Avenue (9913sqm) and 50 Collie Street (830sqm).
Most of these leases expire before 2017. Temporary accommodation is expected to be used until the new precinct is ready.
The job news is increasingly good: 321,000 jobs created in November. Yet the national economic mood remains grimly bleak.
Many Americans feel a sharp distinction between what’s said about “the” economy and what they experience in “their” economy. At the top of the income distribution, wages are rising. In the middle and bottom, wages stagnate. Jobs are created, yes—but native-born Americans are not hired for them.
Last month, the Center for Immigration Studies released its latest jobs study. CIS, a research organization that tends to favor tight immigration policies, found that even now, almost seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans are working than in November 2007, the peak of the prior economic cycle. Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are 2 million more immigrants—legal and illegal—working in the United States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since November 2007 have gone to immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of native-born Americans, especially men, have abandoned the job market altogether. The percentage of men aged 25 to 54 who are working or looking for work has dropped to the lowest point in recorded history.
Labor Force Participation Rate Among Men Aged 25 to 54, 2004-2014
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Bureau of Labor Statistics
It’s said again and again that immigrants do not take jobs from natives. Here’s National Journal, reporting just last year, under the headline “Left and Right Agree: Immigrants Don’t Take American Jobs”:
That immigrants take the jobs of American-born citizens is “something that virtually no learned person believes in,” Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said at a Thursday panel. “It’s sort of a silly thing.”
Most economists don’t find immigrants driving down wages or jobs, the Brookings Institution’s Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney wrote in May. In fact, “on average, immigrant workers increase the opportunities and incomes of Americans,” they write. Foreign-born workers don’t affect the employment rate positively or negatively, according to a 2011 analysis from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. And a study released Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress suggests that granting legal status to undocumented workers might even create jobs.
So there you have it. Experts say it’s impossible. Can’t be happening. And if actual observed data from the real economy seem to suggest that the impossible is happening—well, Albert Einstein himself answered that one. If the material universe doesn’t support the theory: “Then I’d feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.”
Before deciding whom to trust on this issue, the economists or your lying eyes, it helps to understand how the economists reached their conclusion.
Since the time of Adam Smith, economists have agreed that the secret of economic growth is specialization. Rather than everyone baking his or her own bread and sewing his or her own clothes, everyone chooses one occupation and then trades for the products others make. The more individuals specialize, the more productive everyone becomes. The more people trade, the more widely the benefits of productivity are shared.
Immigration economists apply this insight to the domestic labor market. One of the most eminent specialists in the field of immigration economics, Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Davis, offers this homely analogy:
An extreme example of this would be if you have an engineer and you add a construction worker. With the engineer by himself you’re not going to do much. But with an engineer plus a construction worker, you can build a building. Therefore, the productivity of the engineer goes up a lot. And the wages for both workers increase.
The technical term for the situation Peri is describing is “complementarity.” The labor of the engineer and the labor of the construction worker each complement the other. Immigration economists argue that immigrant labor likewise complements native-born labor. As Peri assured readers in a 2010 paper for the San Francisco Federal Reserve, “Immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity. Consistent with previous research, there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.”
So long as everyone imagines that low-wage immigrant workers are paired off with high-wage natives, such assurances seem credible. The foreign-born nanny enables her college-educated employer to return to the workforce earlier, raising wages for both nanny and employer. The foreign-born gardener mows the lawn, freeing his accountant employer to spend Saturday morning billing clients.
Even as the encounter between low-paid immigrants and highly paid natives becomes more distant and abstract, the complementary relationship of their labor seems to hold. Immigrant labor enables middle-class Americans to buy a roasted chicken and pre-washed salad at the supermarket or to check a box and have their holiday presents arrive at their door already gift-wrapped. Upper-income Americans live easier and more efficient lives thanks to millions of low-paid immigrant workers they never see and whose names they never know.
But what about everybody else? The promise of the immigration economists is not that some Americans, the already successful, would be enriched even further. The promise is that all Americans would be made better off, even if they don’t employ nannies, even if they mow their own lawns, even if they can’t afford the rotisserie chicken, even if they shop at the thrift store rather than Amazon. How can that be possibly be true?
The answer embedded in the economic models is that immigration prods even less affluent natives to shift away from immigrant-dominated economic niches and find new work that pays better. The immigrant groundskeeper can’t speak English very well, so the lawn service hires a bilingual Mexican-American to supervise him. The rising numbers of immigrant nannies call forth specialized payroll firms that hire native-born workers to process checks and pay taxes. More supermarkets operating more chicken rotisseries causes local governments to hire more health officers to confirm the chicken meets sanitary standards. More immigrants wrapping presents in L.L.Bean’s warehouses mean more native-born UPS drivers delivering presents.
Everybody wins!
Yet three things have to be said about the above story.
First: The story about immigration benefiting all (or almost all) native workers could be true. But that doesn’t mean it is true. Economists prove their claims about immigrant law by drawing regression curves that compare ratios between data sets based upon the number and the pay of immigrant and native workers. Have they drawn their data sets correctly? Did they choose the correct basis for comparison?
These technical decisions at the beginning of the calculation have huge impacts on the final conclusion at the end. Between 1990 and 2006, the wages of non-college-educated Americans declined. The less education the worker had, the steeper the decline. How much was immigration responsible? The data the economist chooses to look at will determine the answer.
Let’s go to the fine print, relying on a critique of Giovanni Peri’s work by George Borjas, of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Aggregate high-school dropout and high-school graduates together, and immigrant labor accounted for 13.2 percent of the increase in hours worked between 1990 and the onset of the Great Recession: big, but not cataclysmic. But if you take more care to compare like with like, you begin to see huge supply shocks. Among high-school dropouts only, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of the increase in hours worked between 1990 and 2006. Among high school dropouts in their 30s and 40s, immigrants accounted for over one-third of the increase in hours worked.
Here’s what that means for economic modeling. If you assume that all low-education workers are potential substitutes for each other—the 23-year-old recent arrival from Guatemala with the 53-year-old who proceeded from high school to the Army—then your model will show a less dramatic effect of immigration on wages. If, however, you assume that the 23-year-old Guatemalan is competing with 20- and 30-something native-born workers who lack diplomas, then your model will show a very big effect.
A model based on unrealistic assumptions can still achieve perfect internal consistency. It just won’t describe the real world very accurately. Which seems to be precisely what is happening with immigration economics.
Second: If the economists are right about the complementarity of immigrant and native labor, it’s important to understand how and why. Back in the 20th century, there were presumably many accountants who would have preferred to spend Saturday mornings finishing their work rather than mowing the lawn. There were many new mothers who would have returned to work if nanny services had been more widely available. What changed between, say, 1970 and 2005? The short answer is that the cost of employing people in these immigrant-dominated niches plummeted, in real terms. Because the cost plummeted, more hiring occurred in those niches, enabling the mothers to return to work, the accountants to spend Saturday mornings at the office.
Economic popularizers passionately deny that immigration causes wage declines and job displacement. From the point of view of several actual economists, however, these reassurances are so much uninformed propaganda. As the technical economists understand, wage cuts and job displacement are the exact and only ways that immigration confers any benefits on native workers at all. It is wage decline and job displacement that drives natives to shift to higher-paid sectors. No wage cuts, no job displacement. No jobs displaced, no benefit to natives. Here’s Peri saying just that: “Large inflows of less educated immigrants may reduce wages paid to comparably-educated, native-born workers. However, if less educated foreign- and native-born workers specialize in different production tasks, because of different abilities, immigration will cause natives to reallocate their task supply, thereby reducing downward wage pressure.”
When economists minimize the impact of immigration on wages, they aren’t denying that immigration pushes wages down in the jobs that immigrants take. They concede that immigration does do that. They celebrate that immigration does that. Instead, they join their celebration of immigration’s wage-cutting effects with a prediction about the way that the natives will respond.
But what if the prediction is wrong? What if natives respond to immigrant competition by shifting out of the labor market entirely, by qualifying for disability pensions? The proportion of the population receiving disability pensions doubled between 1985 and 2005 and jumped by another 20 percent during the Great Recession. 14 million Americans now receive disability pensions. The evidence is compelling that disability applications rise when the job market weakens.
Why? Economists talk too blithely about natives shifting to more skilled and remunerative work. Up-skilling costs time, effort, and money. It can oblige a worker to move away from family and friends. It forces older workers to begin again at a time in their lives when they felt settled, to risk failure at a time in life when risk is not appreciated. It’s not highly surprising that many displaced workers would opt to give up on work altogether instead.
The exit of native-born men from the workforce—at least arguably because of immigration—has the curious side effect of tilting the immigration models in a pro-immigration direction. Remember, the models are based on ratios of hours worked and wages paid. If a native-born janitor earning $18 an hour is displaced by an immigrant and then shifts to a $12 an hour retail job, the models capture that change as a harm to native-born workers. But if the displaced native-born janitor exits the labor force, he disappears from the model altogether, and with him, the evidence of the harm. It may seem crazy, but it’s the way the model is built.
Third: Economists habitually regard the free movement of investment, goods, and people as the natural order of things. They don’t feel much need to explain such movements, any more than lawyers ask why people violate contracts or doctors ask why people fall off ladders.
Yet immigration is inescapably a political act. Nations can regulate immigration, can make choices about which immigrants they allow and how many, about how strictly labor laws will be policed and what will be done with lawbreakers.
Theoretically, a nation could determine that high-skill labor is complementary to low-skilled labor and make decisions such as the following:
“If we admit a lot of foreign-born surgeons, we could hugely drive down the cost of major medical operations. American-born doctors would shift their labor to fields where their language facility gave them a competitive advantage: away from surgery to general practice. This policy would hugely enhance the relative purchasing power of plumbers and mechanics, enabling them to eat out more often and buy more American-made entertainment, increasing GDP and creating jobs.”
Or: “The ratio of CEO pay to other workers has skyrocketed. Obviously we are suffering from a glut of workers and massive CEO scarcity. We should issue work permits automatically to any executive with a job offer that pays more than $500,000 a year. Americans with organizational skills will be pressed to shift to the public sector, improving the quality and lowering the cost to taxpayers of government services.”
But that’s not how things are done. In the United States, the hypothesis of native-immigrant complementarity is deployed to justify policies that intensify competition for the lower and middle echelons of the society, rarely near the top. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way, yet somehow it always is.
“If Republicans stand united in January or February and use the constitutional check and balance, the power of the purse, to stop President Obama’s illegal amnesty, nobody will be happier than I,” Sen. Ted Cruz said in a recent interview. | AP Photo
President Barack Obama’s immigration allies have a message for Republicans eager for a fight over Department of Homeland Security funding: Bring it on.
Republicans voted during the lame-duck session to fund the agency only through the end of February, punting a fight over Obama’s executive actions on immigration into the new year when their party controls both chambers of Congress.
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But immigration advocates say they aren’t worried. They’re banking on the funding fight to turn into another game of brinksmanship that will be good politics for them – and bad politics for the GOP.
“The idea that a partial shutdown of DHS is going to get Obama to cave on a signature second-term accomplishment is fantasy,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice. “It’s much more likely that the politics will blow up in the face of Republicans, and that they’ll be seen by Latinos and immigrants as hostile.”
Republicans, meanwhile say the funding fight will make their point.
“If Republicans stand united in January or February and use the constitutional check and balance, the power of the purse, to stop President Obama’s illegal amnesty, nobody will be happier than I,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a recent interview.
Regardless of which sides comes out ahead, the stage is set for a dramatic few months in the GOP-controlled Congress over immigration.
The first attempt to unravel Obama’s actions could come early in 2015. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), the chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee, has indicated that legislation to block Obama’s executive actions could come for a vote in January. Such a bill would almost certainly be vetoed Obama if it reaches the White House, and Congress would not have enough votes to override it.
The focus then shifts to the battle over DHS funding, which runs out Feb. 27.
One potential avenue would be to attach a forthcoming border-security bill from House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) to the overall DHS funding bill – an option that has already been floated in some corners of the Capitol. Doing so would allow Republicans to stress that toughening up border security is a top priority.
But that tactic is almost sure to upset Republican hardliners, who were already rankled that GOP leaders didn’t use the government funding bill that averted a shutdown in December to undo Obama’s executive actions. Conservatives are likely to push for tougher language that effectively bars the administration from carrying out Obama’s controversial executive actions.
A congressional impasse over DHS funding past Feb. 27 would, in theory, force the agency to shut down. But a vast majority of the department will continue to operate because its employees are either considered essential, or they are paid by funds not appropriated by Capitol Hill.
Roughly 85 percent of DHS employees continued to work during the October 2013 shutdown for those reasons, according to the Congressional Research Service. For employees whose jobs were considered essential – or “necessary for the preservation of the safety of human life or the protection of property” – their paychecks were withheld until the shutdown was over.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that will implement the heart of Obama’s executive actions – deferred deportations and new work permits for potentially millions of undocumented immigrants – is almost entirely fee-funded, so its staffers will continue working right through a shutdown.
“Will the House majority really be willing to let front-line agents and officers at [Customs and Border Protection] and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] work without pay?” North Carolina Rep. David Price, the top Democrat on the House panel that oversees DHS funding, testified in December. “Would the House majority be willing to let Coast Guard military personnel continue to risk their lives at sea without compensation?”
Another key question will be whether any legislation undoing Obama’s executive action could reach the president’s desk.
Senate Republicans will control 54 votes next year – six away from 60-vote threshold to break a legislative filibuster that Democrats will surely mount against measures killing the immigration actions.
But though a vast majority of Senate Democrats are expected to hold firm against any legislation blocking Obama’s actions, advocates are watching several moderate Senate Democrats from GOP-leaning states who could come under pressure to vote with Republicans on such a bill.
The wildcard factor in all this is a lawsuit filed by 24 states, led by Texas Gov.-elect Greg Abbott, challenging Obama’s executive actions. (Tennessee has also indicated that it plans to join the case). A hearing will be held Jan. 9 on the states’ request for a preliminary injunction.
While advocates believe the legal rationale behind Obama’s sweeping actions will ultimately withstand court challenges, the judge on the case, George W. Bush appointee Andrew Hanen, has previously questioned the Obama administration’s policies on immigration enforcement – putting opponents of executive action on potentially more favorable turf.
A ruling in that case could come as the Obama administration prepares to open up the applications for the new immigration programs. An expansion of an existing program for young undocumented immigrants – Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – will begin taking new applications by Feb. 20. Immigrants who qualify for the broader program, aimed at undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and green-card holders, will be allowed to start submitting their applications no later than May 20.
“What happens in the Texas lawsuit is going to shape the conversation,” one immigration advocate said. “I think if we get a bad order out of the judge, that will embolden a broader faction of the Republican Party to be aggressive … That’s going to shape the politics around the funding fight.”
Meanwhile, the Obama administration and its allies are continuing to promote the executive actions and ensure that eligible immigrants are prepared to apply.
Advocates have held informational workshops, warned of potential fraud and have been in touch with DHS as the agency crafts the application form for the deferred-action programs. Making sure implementation goes smoothly will be one of the key hurdles for backers of executive action.
“The best defense of this action is getting people informed about what they’re going to be eligible for and making implementation as accessible as possible,” said Kelly Rodriguez, assistant to the executive vice president at the AFL-CIO, where more than 250,000 of its members and their families could qualify for the executive actions. “Once people realize what they have right now, it’s going to be really hard to try to take it away.”
WASHINGTON/HONOLULU (Reuters) – Republicans take full control of the Congress this week with an agenda of trying to force approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and push back on President Barack Obama’s sweeping policy shifts on Cuba and immigration.
After years of battles over the budget and other issues, further clashes loom as Republicans who already control the House of Representatives take over the Senate majority on Tuesday after wins against Obama’s Democrats in November’s midterm elections. Angry over the president’s moves last year to bypass Congress on issues such as immigration, Republicans have promised to fight him on a range of issues.
Obama has vowed to use his veto pen if Republicans pass legislation he opposes, but he has said he believes he may be able to forge common ground with them in some areas, including free trade, overhauling the tax code and boosting infrastructure spending.
Reaching deals won’t be easy amid deep mistrust on both sides.
“To suddenly claim you’re going to work with members of Congress after years of ignoring them is rather ludicrous,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner.
Republican Mitch McConnell, who will become the Senate majority leader, said the American people expect compromise on key issues despite divided government.
“They want us to look for things to agree on and see if we can make some progress for the country,” he said in a pre-recorded interview aired on CNN’s State of the Union program on Sunday.
But issues facing Congress will likely be contentious.
McConnell has said the first item on his agenda will be legislation to force approval of TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline, which has been under review by the Obama administration for years, would help transport oil from Canada’s oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Many Democrats see the project as a threat to the environment but supporters say it will create jobs and increase North American energy security.
A similar bill on Keystone failed late last year and it is unlikely that Republicans, even with their new majority, could muster the votes needed to overcome an Obama veto. The new Senate Energy Committee Chairwoman, Lisa Murkowski, plans a vote on Thursday by her panel on the issue.
As the new Congress convenes, Obama will set out on a three-day road trip on Wednesday to Michigan, Arizona and Tennessee to tout his economic record and highlight his own agenda for 2015.
Republican aides said efforts to weaken Obama’s signature healthcare law were also high on their priorities.
Another early legislative fight will come when Congress considers funding for the Department of Homeland Security. A $1.1 trillion government spending bill passed in mid-December funds government through September, except for the DHS, which is funded only until Feb. 27. That was an effort by conservative Republicans to block money for implementation of Obama’s executive order that grants temporary relief from deportation to some undocumented immigrants.
Republicans have also discussed using the fight over the homeland security agency as a vehicle for challenging Obama’s landmark move last month to normalize ties with Cuba.
(Additional reporting by Robert Rampton, Timothy Gardner and Patrick Rucker in Washington; Writing by Patricia Zengerle, Editing by Caren Bohan/Frances Kerry/Susan Fenton)
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Source Article from http://news.yahoo.com/republicans-look-challenge-obama-energy-cuba-immigration-121029004.html Republicans look to challenge Obama on energy, Cuba, immigration http://news.yahoo.com/republicans-look-challenge-obama-energy-cuba-immigration-121029004.html http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=immigration immigration – Yahoo News Search Results immigration – Yahoo News Search Results
In this nation’s never-ending debate over immigration, those who demand strict enforcement of existing laws are armed with a simple rejoinder: What, they ask, do you not understand about “illegal”? To them, the solution to illegal immigration is to identify those who are here illegally and deport them.
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FOR THE RECORD:
A Jan. 2 editorial said that some immigrants’ status is determined by judges and prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Prosecutors are now employed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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It’s a reasonable point. A law should be enforced. But the argument can’t be isolated from the realities of immigration, which is propelled by regional economic imbalances, familial connections and the basic human desire to live a better, safer and richer life. Those are powerful forces, unlikely to be thwarted by stepped-up deportation. Instead, under those pressures, our immigration system has crumbled, and strict enforcement has become impractical, even impossible. Congress can and should, but probably won’t, fix it. That leaves pragmatism — which President Obama exhibited with his recent directives offering deportation reprieves for some 5 million immigrants here illegally.
Modern immigration policies date to the Reagan-era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants who had arrived in the country before Jan. 1, 1982. The law also introduced some sanctions on employers who hire undocumented workers, among other reforms. Subsequent revisions made bureaucratic changes and sought to toughen up enforcement. Despite that, illegal immigration has more than doubled since the law was adopted.
Currently, the immigration system rivals tax codes for complexity. Under the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection is responsible for ensuring that only people with legal authority enter the country; Citizenship and Immigration Services processes applications for legal status; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement tracks down and begins deportation proceedings against those here illegally. The Department of Health and Human Services takes responsibility for the welfare of detained unaccompanied minors until decisions on their status are reached. All other immigrants caught by enforcement agents are overseen by ICE either in detention centers or under monitored release until their status is determined by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which includes both the prosecutors and the judges. Detainees are allowed legal help but must obtain it on their own (more than half do so, often for free from nonprofit organizations).
Those agencies are responsible for a population that is scattered across the United States, immersed in all aspects of American society. Who are the undocumented? Since it’s difficult to count people who are trying to hide, the scope of the issue is hard to quantify. The most reliable, nonpartisan estimates put the number at more than 11 million people, of whom about 2.5 million live in California. Just over half the national total are from Mexico, with an additional 1.7 million from Central America, and together they account for more than two-thirds of all illegal immigration. An additional 12% are from Asia, primarily China. Again, accurate data are hard to come by, but reports suggest that anywhere from one-quarter to one-third entered the country legally, often on tourist or student visas, but never left.
No matter how you parse it, all those people are here in violation of federal law, and are thus subject to deportation. Yet the size of that population is precisely what makes deportation on a grand scale impractical.
Department of Homeland Security officials have testified before Congress that their budget is sufficient to deport 400,000 people per year. Some analysts question that figure and point out that different types of deportation demand different levels of resources. For example, an undocumented immigrant turned away at the border is deported for relative pennies. The pursuit and capture of an illegal immigrant hiding somewhere in the country’s interior is much more expensive.
The Congressional Research Service estimated two years ago that ICE’s National Fugitive Operations Program, which tracks down people who don’t leave after being ordered to do so, spent about $5,820 for each case it handled in 2011. Under ICE’s Secure Communities program, which is being reinvented as part of President Obama’s recent executive actions, the cost was about $2,500 per case. Taking those per-case averages as (squishy) highs and lows, the cost of merely identifying those here illegally and removing them would fall somewhere between $31.4 billion (nearly the total annual existing budget for the Department of Homeland Security) and $65.2 billion. And that range is probably low, since once the government started to hunt the undocumented, many would hide even deeper underground, making it harder and more expensive to find them.
Moreover, those estimates also don’t include new costs for detention (currently about $1.8 billion a year to house 32,000 people per day) or adjudication (now a staff of 1,800 people and a $330-million budget) that would come with trying to deport more than 11 million people. The Center for American Progress advocacy group estimated in 2010 that removing all the undocumented would exceed $285 billion. Add to that the economic hit of removing so many workers — an estimated 8.4 million wage-earners, who pay local taxes and often contribute to Social Security.
The bottom line: It’s easy to say, “deport them all,” but to do so would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention disruptive for employers and, of course, wrenchingly hard on those who would be swept up.
