Immigration, The Right, and American Jobs

7 03 2010

Lately I have begun to notice an odd strain of thought in much of my fellows on the Right when it comes to the issue of immigration and jobs.

Simply put, many people who otherwise consider themselves strong, consistent conservatives (and occasionally, but much less often some self-described libertarians) are quite vocal about the importance of protecting “Americans jobs” from the threat of being held by immigrants (most of the time illegal, but in some cases legal as well).

Frankly this mystifies me. Most of these people would readily agree on how much the were opposed to using government stimulus money to try and stop unemployment or what a terrible idea it would be to bring back the WPA. Now, I’m not endorsing either, I think they are bad ideas as well, but I fail to see how it makes sense to be for defending “American jobs” from being held by non-Americans but against defending “American jobs” from being held by no one.

Likewise, to paraphrase Don Boudreaux, if it is so important to ensure that only Americans hold “American jobs,” then why isn’t there an equally loud outcry to take actions to prevent Virginians or Delewareans or Pennsylvanians from holding “Maryland jobs.” After all, if the economic logic that it is better for an American to do a job, even if it costs more, is true, then the same will hold true at smaller levels.

If the Right truly cares about the free market like it claims to, then it is necessary that it support the free market in everything, including labor. You don’t get to pick and choose and still say you support the free market.





More on the Problem with E-Verify

25 02 2010

Several weeks ago I did some statistical analysis of the E-Verify system and the impact a mandate of its use in Maryland would have.

Using two different sets of numbers, one very favorable to E-Verify proponents and one a bit more realistic (but probably still tiled in their favor) I found 4% and 11.9% of all positives being false positives.

Well a new report has come out on the effectiveness of the E-Verify system, so I want to update my numbers using it’s information.

The online tool E-Verify, now used voluntarily by employers, wrongly clears illegal workers about 54 percent of the time, according to Westat, a research company that evaluated the system for the Homeland Security Department.

So, using this new info we find the following:

  • The accuracy of the test in identifying illegals as illegals drops from .999/.995 to .46

Therefore, the new formula is (still using the more generous population numbers)

.46(.044)/[.46(.044)+.01(.956)]=.679

1-.679=.321=32.1%

Now continuing to rely on the DHS stated rate of 5.8% positives for illegal status, that gives us a total of 163,374 positives in Maryland. If 32.1% of those positives are in fact false positives it means that 52,443 Marylanders would unjustly be denied the opportunity to work.

The false positive rate was too high before and it’s clearly too high now. We don’t have any business mandating E-Verify use in Maryland or America.

H/T: Greg Siskind





The Myth of Immigrant Lawlessness

17 02 2010

As a general rule I try and avoid doing posts that do little besides link somewhere else. However Ron Unz’s article from The American Conservative is quite well done and at least ought to be a significant contribution to the immigration debate, so I’m going to do just that.

Please, go and leave my blog now and read up on why claims of Hispanic proclivities towards criminal behaviour are misguided.

And then preferably come back here to read other things. I like having you here.





Roy Beck’s Curious Vision of Big Government

12 02 2010

Roy Beck, founder and CEO of anti-immigration group NumbersUSA certainly has an interesting take on the idea of big government.

Discussing his talk at the Nashville Tea Party Convention, he explains:

I went to observe and make my case that for those who want to shrink government it isn’t possible without reducing overall immigration (especially LEGAL) immigration

In the actual discussion of his talk he says he emphasized that:

If not for our system of mass immigration over the last decade, there would have been virtually no growth in the uninsured…Just one more example of how current immigration policies create huge pressures for larger and larger government programs and expenditures.

Now, nevermind that it’s grossly inaccurate to describe our current immigration policies as allowing mass immigration and that economists like Keith Hennessy have pegged non-citizens as about only 9.3 of the 45.7 million uninsured. Let’s get to the real fun part of Beck’s claim.

I would love to know what world he lives in where you can have a more restrictive immigration system without:

  • Hiring thousands, if not tens of thousands of additional border guards
  • Mandating a Kafka-esque verification system
  • Requiring everyone to carry a national ID card
  • Empowering (if not outright forcing) local law enforcement officers to demand to see “Your papers, please!”

If this isn’t big, intrusive government, I don’t know what is.

As insane as I think it is, I can accept that some people think these are good policies. What I won’t tolerate is the outright false claim that anti-immigration policies are not big government.





America Can Not Afford To Enforce Immigration Law

9 02 2010

As I have said before, enforcing America’s current immigration laws is logistically impossible.

The United States and Mexico share 1,969 miles of border, and the Small Business Administration reports there are over 29.6 million businesses in America, employing almost 120 million people. You will never have enough border guards to cover that much territory, and even if you could police that many businesses, the steps necessary would be an intolerable violation of civil liberties.

Well now we can also add that it’s economically impossible.

In Texas the cost of prosecuting illegal immigrants is threatening to shut down the court system:

The increased caseload is severe enough that federal judge in Austin issued an opinion last week putting prosecutors on notice that they would have to justify to the court every prosecution of a migrant without a criminal history. “The expenses of prosecuting illegal entry and re-entry cases on aliens without any significant criminal history is simply mind-boggling,” wrote Judge Sam Sparks.

Anti-immigration activists really ought to think about this sort of thing and revise their stance on “enforcing the laws.” Maybe they’d figure out the answer is to reform the laws so they are actually enforceable.





Jeff Werner, Meet James Madison

5 02 2010

Jeff Werner is one of the particularly loud voices agitating for greater action against illegal immigrants. And, unsurprisingly, a lot of the statements he makes reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the issue.

Take this one for example;

Remember, Illegal Aliens have no rights, they are breaking the Laws.  If they don’t like it, they can leave on their own terms without being arrested.  We feel no shame or pity for the families being broken up, they have brought this on themselves. By the way, what due process do Illegal Immigrants have?  What rights do they have?

Hate to break it to you Jeff, but they actually do have rights. Let me refer you to the words of President Madison;

Again, it is said, that aliens not being parties to the Constitution, the rights and privileges which it secures cannot be at all claimed by them.

To this reasoning, also, it might be answered, that although aliens are not parties to the Constitution, it does not follow that the Constitution has vested in Congress an absolute power over them. The parties to the Constitution may have granted, or retained, or modified the power over aliens, without regard to that particular consideration.

But a more direct reply is, that it does not follow, because aliens are not parties to the Constitution, as citizens are parties to it, that whilst they actually conform to it, they have no right to its protection. Aliens are not more parties to the laws, than they are parties to the Constitution; yet, it will not be disputed, that as they owe, on one hand, a temporary obedience, they are entitled in return to their protection and advantage.

If aliens had no rights under the Constitution, they might not only be banished, but even capitally punished, without a jury or the other incidents to a fair trial. But so far has a contrary principle been carried, in every part of the United States, that except on charges of treason, an alien has, besides all the common privileges, the special one of being tried by a jury, of which one-half may be also aliens.

And to add to that, courtesy of Eugene Volokh (also the source of the Madison quotation):

The Supreme Court has endorsed Madison’s view at least since Wong Wing v. U.S. (1896) as to the criminal procedure provisions, and in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) (also unanimously) as to the Equal Protection Clause racial equality principle. Aliens might be deportable for their speech (see here for more on that question), but they can’t be otherwise punished for it, nor can they be criminally prosecuted in the civil justice system without the normal constitutional protections.

So yeah, immigrants, even illegal ones do have rights. And those rights include Due Process. Sorry to break it to you.

In all seriousness though, people like Jeff Werner are an embarrassment and an albatross hanging on the neck of the Right. I really hope conservatives figure out soon that they need to give up on the immigrant hate, stop trying for enforcement of current law (a logistical impossibility), and embrace reforms of our Byzantine immigration law that make it easier to come legally.





The Problem with E-Verify

1 02 2010

NOTE: Due to a misunderstanding on my part, there’s problems with my initial conclusion, see updates below body of post.

I have an op-ed I’m hoping will get published in some of the local papers soon dealing with immigration and one of the issues I touch on is the movement to make E-Verify mandatory for all employers in America. Since it is still being considered, I won’t publish any of it here, but I want to expand on the E-Verify point.

Even as anti-immigration activists seek to make E-Verify mandatory at the national level, they are pushing hard to get states to mandate it in the meantime. Simply put, this is a horrible idea.

I could point to a lot of different reasons why:

But I want to focus on one in particular. False positives.

For those unfamiliar, a false positive is when a test finds a person positive for something when they should be negative. You hear it a lot with regards to medical tests, like AIDS for example.

Since the E-Verify system is essentially a check to see whether you have the condition of being here illegally, it means it too is subject to false positives.

After pulling some numbers for Maryland and doing a Bayesian inference I found the following:

Using the most generous numbers I could for E-Verify supporters, 6.3% 6.1% of positives in Maryland would be false positives, equating to 354,916 343,649 people.

However, as I said, that’s being generous. I also ran a more realistic version of the numbers, using the changes listed below:

  • My source for Maryland population was the U.S. Census Bureau. Their figure is 5,633,597. According to Help Save Maryland the number of illegals in the state is 250,000. In my generous calculation I treated this as a subset of the total state population. However, realistically, illegals are unlikely to be part of Census numbers so I have added them to the population number for a total of 5,883,597.
  • For my generous calculations I was operating using a standard of 99.9% test accuracy for finding illegals as illegals.  For my realistic one I downgraded to the 99.5% accuracy cited by the Center for Immigration Studies (still pretty generous in my opinion).
  • In the first calculation I relied upon the .3% false positive rate cited by E-Verify supporters. As Jim Harper has noted, a number this low is suspect considering E-Verify’s previous track record, so I moved it up to 1%, still short of his 1.24%

So, running the numbers using these adjusted figures, the rate of false positives increases from 6.3% to 18.6%, or 1,094,349 people incorrectly being denied work (1,047,849 if you apply the percentage to the unadjusted population number).

When the stakes are as serious as they are with E-Verify, an error rate that impacts so many people is inexcusable. Maryland has no business mandating E-Verify and I encourage everyone to reach out to your state representatives and let them know that.

UPDATE 1:

As my good friend Tim Andrews has pointed out, I really should include the calculations.

First version:

.999(.044)/[.999(.044)+.003(.956)]=.939

1-.939=.061=6.1%

Second version:

.995(.042)/[.995(.042)+.01(.958)]=.814

1-.814=.816=18.6%

The .999/.995 refers to the accuracy of the test in identifying illegals as illegals.

The .044/.042 refers to the percentage of illegal immigrants in the Maryland population.

The .003/.01 refers to the percentage of false positives.

The .956/.958 refers to the percentage of persons in Maryland that are not illegal immigrants.

Hope that clears up any confusion.

UPDATE 2:

It has been pointed out to me by a friend far better at statistics than I that I mis-applied the result of the Bayesian inference and that it should have been applied to the number of total positives and over-sized the total sample by using a portion of the population to approximate the working portion (his recommendation was half). So here are my corrected calculations and results (all data say the same except the general population number has been halved and the illegal immigrant population is 84% of its previous total; this was derived by applying national demographic info from Pew’s Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States report to state numbers.)

.999(.075)/[.999(.075)+.003(.925)]=.96

1-.96=.04=4% of all positives being false positives

.995(.069)/.995(.069)+.01(.931)]=.881

1-.881=.116=11.9% of all positives being false positives

If we accept the 5.8% rate of positives cited by the DHS is accurate (I’m skeptical the system won’t turn up more positives, especially false ones, as more strain is put upon it), that still comes out to 6534 Marylanders being unjustly denied employment because of E-Verify under the most generous model and 20,891 under my realistic model (18,951 if you use the realistic percentage but the generous population number).

Obviously this isn’t as strong a point as I initially thought I had, but I think even 6534 people improperly denied employment because of E-Verify is too many – and when you consider that there’s no reason to think things would be as ideal as that forecast, the problem becomes even more pressing.





Christmas and the Border

23 12 2009

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – why are the immigration hawks not outraged over the ease with which Santa crosses the United States border?

Supposedly NORAD has been tracking him on Christmas Eve for years. And now Google is getting in on the action. With this level of surveillance on his movements it shouldn’t be hard to stop him and take him to task for illegally entering the country.

And come on. If migrants crossing the border to get a job is a huge threat to our national security, just think about the danger from jolly old St. Nick – the corpulent Big Brother who watches us all year and sneaks into our homes every year. Sure, he’s always brought presents before, but what’s to say what he might bring if Al Qaeda took Mrs. Claus hostage?

And while we’re on the topic of Santa, why haven’t I heard anything about the Consumer Product Safety Commission taking action against Kringle to make sure his elf-made toys are in line with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

And now that I think about it, Santa does all his work at the North Pole. Maybe I missed it, but why hasn’t President Obama stepped in to stop American industry from being undercut by cheap foreign labor? He already did it with tires, so what makes toys different? Are we going to see a Christmas bailout for the toy-makers?

Now, just to make sure you all know, I’m not actually suggesting people start doing what I noted above. I do however think they should learn a bit from Santa. He’s an excellent way of expressing the benefits of a free society. Santa makes everyone wealthier and better off by freely moving across borders, producing goods without having to worry about the costs imposed by foolhardy regulations, and voluntarily exchanging them for good behaviour by children. If that’s not a free market parable I don’t know what is.





McDonough Should Review Immigration Stance and Allies

9 12 2009

Over at monoblogue Michael posted a press release from Delegate McDonough citing a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform that purports to show just how much illegal immigration is costing Marylanders.

Now a new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (F.A.I.R.) has exposed the fact that illegals are costing Maryland citizens more than 1.4 billion dollars annually.

I’ve gone and read over the study and the fact is its claim is nowhere near as sound as one would believe.

The primary flaw of the study a heavily slanted accounting of the costs of illegal immigration. Any honest accounting of the costs of immigration must necessarily be balanced against the benefits of immigration, both legal and illegal.

FAIR’s study doesn’t do this. While they at least took the time to acknowledge there is a receipt of taxes from illegal immigrants, they gloss over the point, suggesting that any contributions made by illegal workers would be balanced out by new contributions by legal workers.

This point is demonstrably false. As a Cato Institute study released this summer notes, increasing security to limit illegal immigration would in fact have a deleterious net impact on the economy:

Our simulations show that the difference between the long-run welfare effects for U.S. households of the worst and best policies that we considered is about $260 billion a year in current dollars. This is the welfare gap between the tighter-border-enforcement policy in Simulation 1 (a welfare loss of 0.55 percent) and the liberalized policy with an optimal visa charge in Simulation 7 (a welfare gain of 1.27 percent).

These economic impacts come in part through tax receipts, but also manifest in the form of increased wages to remaining illegal immigrants, reductions to average wages as a result of changing occupation-mix of employment of U.S. workers, tightening capital, decreased employment, all of which outpace the relatively meager reductions in public expenditure on illegal immigrants.

The effect of this problem becomes bigger when one considers the relative inputs and outputs of illegal immigrant economic activity. The only welfare programs they have access to are emergency medical care and K-12 education (with some additional public expenditure coming in the form of law enforcement and incarceration costs). When you consider that the first two will logically have an inverse correlation to the third, any cost savings from reducing illegal immigration will likely be lower than what FAIR sells them as.

With economic impacts like these it is careless at best, and downright deceptive at worst to willfully leave out the economic benefits of immigration when doing an accounting of its costs, particularly when Cato has already done such a thorough study on the topic.

Understanding just who FAIR is makes me lean towards downright deceptive. Looking at the About page on their website, it is quite clear that the organization’s interest isn’t public expenditures, nor is it remittances to families in immigrants’ native countries, concern for rule of law, or any of the other items noted in the study.

The motivation for the Federation for American Immigration Reform is simple. It is crass xenophobia. They’re honest about it. In their stated purpose they advocate for a moratorium on all immigration and in their principles they state that immigration should be:

at the lowest feasible levels consistent with the national security, economic, demographic, environmental and socio-cultural interests of the present and future.

When a group is this open about their bigotry there’s little reason to wonder about the worthlessness of its study. FAIR is a perfect example of what Shikha Dalmia was talking about when she noted “The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don’t want here in the first place.”

Delegate McDonough and Michael are both good people. They’re both honestly concerned about the amount of taxpayer money the state is spending. But they, and others in the GOP, need to think carefully about their stances on immigration. Republicans need to reject the bigotry espoused by the likes of FAIR, acknowledge how broken our immigration system is, and embrace substantive reform that makes the path to legal residency simple, quick, and inexpensive.

UPDATE: Frequent monoblogue commenter Marc posted several more links taking issue with FAIR’s study. I’m re-posting them here as well,

As far as the study, here’s a partial rebuttal: http://immigrationimpact.com/2009/12/04/fair-blames-immigrants-and-children-for-maryland%E2%80%99s-budget-deficit/.

The problem with many of these studies is that they are ideologically-driven. FAIR isn’t going to put out anything that is in any way fair to illegal immigrants. If it produces a study, it’s going to show illegal immigrants hurt the US. Finding good, unbiased data on this subject is difficult. Here’s something from 1994: http://migration.ucdavis.edu/MN/more.php?id=298_0_2_0.

A CBO report from 2007 looked at the impact of illegal immigrants on state and local expenditures and finds that they do cost state local governments money and that their taxes don’t offset their costs, but that they only impose a small burden: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8711/12-6-Immigration.pdf. This study doesn’t include taxes paid to the federal government.





Immigration Outrages

27 08 2009

This is completely unacceptable. In the space of 5 minutes I just got two stories that truly make me wonder what the hell is happening to America.

First story: Apparently not content with harassing businesses and seizing peaceful, hardworking men and women that happen to be here illegally and unsatisfied with all the violence and crime we already have in America as a result of the War on Drugs, the U.S. government thinks it’s a great idea to import dangerous drug cartel members to serve as informers. And not tell the local government or police forces of the areas they get put.

gangland-style slaying is no big news across the river in Ciudad Juarez, the bloodiest city in Mexico, where more than 1,300 people have been killed this year and only a handful of cases have been solved, despite the presence of 10,000 soldiers and federal police officers as part of President Felipe Calderón’s war on drug cartels.But in El Paso, where local leaders boast how safe their city is and the 12 homicides this year have almost all been solved, the González slaying was as disturbing as it was sensational. For people here, the blood splashed on a pretty American street was a jarring sign that Mexico’s drug violence is spilling across the border into U.S. suburbia.

Most unsettling for many, especially El Paso police officials, was that both González and the man accused of ordering his killing turned out to be ranking drug traffickers from the notorious Juarez cartel, as well as informers for the U.S. government.

“So this is how these people end up in our country,” said El Paso police Lt. Alfred Lowe, the lead homicide detective and a 29-year veteran whose team made the arrests in the González case. “We bring them here.”

HT: Cato@Liberty

Second story: Did you know that not speaking English is grounds for the government to take away your baby? Neither did I, until 5 minutes ago, when I read this story.

Cirila Baltazar Cruz comes from the mountainous southern state of Oaxaca, a region of Mexico that makes Appalachia look affluent. To escape the destitution in her village of 1,500 mostly Chatino Indians, Baltazar Cruz, 34, migrated earlier this decade to the U.S., hoping to send money back to two children she’d left in her mother’s care. She found work at a Chinese restaurant on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

But Baltazar Cruz speaks only Chatino, barely any Spanish and no English. Last November, she went to Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Miss., where she lives, to give birth to a baby girl, Rubí. According to documents obtained by the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, the hospital called the state Department of Human Services (DHS), which ruled that Baltazar Cruz was an unfit mother in part because her lack of English “placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future.”

I don’t think I can possibly put into words how much this infuriates me. There is no possible logic by which a lack of capacity in English can be any real danger to the child – and a serious, grave, real threat to a child’s well-being is the only time when the government should ever even consider taking a child away from his or her parents.

Reading stories like this make me really, really want to know how my country could have ever gotten to such a point.