Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Immigration and the economy
#11
How does this help?

Quote:Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) issued a statement calling President Trump's immigration policies "cruel and arbitrary" on Thursday, following a report that an Oakland, Calif. family had been separated by a deportation order. “The cruel and arbitrary nature of President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies is captured in the heartbreaking story of the Sanchez family," Feinstein said in the statement.

Immigration officials told Oakland nurse Maria Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband Eusebio on May 23 that the couple, who illegally entered the U.S. 23 years ago, that they had three months to make arrangements to return to Mexico, according to a San Francisco Chronicle storyThe couple will depart for Mexico on Tuesday along with their 12-year-old son, but must leave their 3 older daughters, aged 16, 21, and 23, behind in the U.S.

Maria and Eusebio Sanchez have lived in this country for more than 20 years. They are hardworking parents raising four children, three citizens and one protected by DACA. They have no criminal records. They pay taxes, own their home and contribute to this country. These are the kind of people we should welcome into the United States with open arms," Feinstein said.
Feinstein: Trump immigration policies 'cruel and arbitrary' | TheHill
Reply
#12
Quote:Hundreds of business titans are joining forces to urge President Donald Trump to maintain protections for immigrants who are covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program, better known by the acronym DACA, is an Obama-era policy that shields immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the US illegally as children

Executives from General Motors, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other companies echoed other business leaders in their letter to Trump. "All DACA recipients grew up in America, registered with our government, submitted to extensive background checks, and are diligently giving back to our communities and paying income taxes." their joint letter said.

"Our economy would lose $460.3 billion from the national GDP and $24.6 billion in Social Security and Medicare tax contributions," if DACA recipients lose their protections and face deportation, the letter continued, calling those recipients, also known as Dreamers, "vital to the future of our companies and our economy."
Buffett, Zuckerberg, business titans urge Trump to preserve DACA - Business Insider
Reply
#13
Quote:The lingering uncertainty around DACA's future under the Trump administration has roiled the immigrant community for months, and left DACA recipients panicked and unsure of what steps to take in the meantime. "They're in panic mode," said Reaz Jafri, an immigration attorney at the law firm Withers Bergman, whose clients include DACA recipients and their employers. "DACA invited people who were in the shadows to come forth, get biometrics taken, get put in the system, get a social security number, get a job, take out a loan, open a bank account, get a credit card," Jafri told Business Insider. "They're wondering, 'Now that I'm no longer protected, can ICE now come and find me? Because ICE now knows where I live, where I work.' 

A recent study by the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) and the lobbying group FWD.us found that if DACA were repealed, roughly 700,000 workers would lose their jobs over the next two years, and the estimated loss of their labor could cost the country $460.3 billion in economic output over the next decade

"Ending DACA would place severe economic strain on businesses around the country, putting them into the impossible and extremely costly position of having to fire productive employees for no other reason than an arbitrary change in federal policy, potentially resulting in backlash from other employees or their broader community," the report said.
What is DACA? 'Dreamers' are in 'panic mode' awaiting official announcement on Obama-era immigrant program - Business Insider
Reply
#14
But there are always even harsher people in the Nasty Party..

Quote:Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Sunday said it would be "Republican suicide" if President Trump followed through on a report that he was planning to end DACA with a six-month delay, insisting that the program instead needed to be ended immediately. “Ending DACA now gives chance [to] restore Rule of Law. Delaying so [Republican] Leadership can push Amnesty is Republican suicide,” King tweeted.
GOP rep: Delaying the end of DACA is 'Republican suicide' | TheHill
Reply
#15
Krugman about killing the dreamers program:

The Very Bad Economics of Killing DACA

Trump’s decision to kill DACA — never mind the attempt to obscure things with that meaningless delay — is, first and foremost, a moral obscenity: throwing out 800,000 young people who are Americans in every way that matters, who have done nothing wrong, basically for racial reasons. But it’s also worth noting that Jeff Sessions just tried to sell it with junk economics, claiming that the Dreamers are taking American jobs. No, they aren’t, even if we leave aside the question of who’s an American. DACA is very much a boon to the rest of the U.S. population, and killing it will make everyone worse off.

To see why, first note that whatever you think about the economics of less-educated immigrants — most of the evidence suggests that they don’t depress wages, but that’s another discussion — none of it applies to DREAMersTheir educational and behavioral profile, as Cato notes, doesn’t resemble the average immigrant, let alone the average undocumented immigrant; they look like H-1B visa holders, that is, skilled immigrants we have specifically allowed in because they help the economy.

Beyond that, DREAMers are young — which means that they help the economy in not one but two big ways, because they mitigate the economic problems caused by an aging population. One of those problems is fiscal: as the population ages, there are fewer working-age members contributing taxes to pay for Social Security and Medicare. A cohort of relatively high-wage, highly motivated people mostly in their 20s, likely to pay lots of taxes for decades, is exactly what the doctor ordered to make that issue less severe.

Meanwhile, I’m one of those who worries about secular stagnation — persistently weak spending, making episodes in which monetary policy can’t achieve full employment even with zero interest rates much more likely. Several factors contribute to this risk, but probably the most important is demography: a sharp slowdown in the growth of the working-age population, which means less incentive to invest in structures, factories, and more. (The demographic issue is why Japan, with low fertility and great hostility to immigration, entered a zero-rate regime a decade before the rest of us.) And what would make secular stagnation more of a problem? Hey, let’s expel hundreds of thousands of young people from the current and future work force.

So this is a double blow to the U.S. economy; it will make everyone worse off. There is no upside whatever to this cruelty, unless you just want to have fewer people with brown skin and Hispanic surnames around. Which is, of course, what this is really all about.
Reply
#16
From Noah Smith at Bloomberg:


Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a startling and blatantly incorrect claim:
Quote:[The DACA program] denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.
Hundreds of thousands? How did Sessions arrive at this number? It appears that he simply counted the number of adult Dreamers (as the program’s beneficiaries are known) and assumed that each one of them had denied a job to an American. That’s terrible economics. It’s a classic application of a well-known fallacy called the Lump of Labor -- the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs in the world, and those jobs get divvied up among people.

How do we know this is a fallacy? It’s obvious that the number of jobs in the world isn’t fixed. Imagine if the United States deported every single American except for Jeff Sessions. Would Sessions then have his pick of any job? No, he’d be in the forest trying to eat berries to survive. Kicking people out doesn’t just reallocate jobs from one person to another. It also destroys them. Another way to see this is population growth. Suppose the number of jobs in the U.S. were fixed. In that case, unemployment would rise as more Americans reached adulthood. The U.S. population has almost doubled since 1960. But the percent of Americans with jobs has actually gone up since then:

This is because jobs don’t just appear out of the sky. People give each other jobs. When new people arrive, either by being born or by immigrating, businesses expand -- to take advantage of the new labor, and to sell things to the newcomers. Also, new businesses get started. Often, newcomers start the businesses themselves -- immigrants and young people are both overrepresented among the ranks of entrepreneurs.

Now, it’s possible that immigration or population growth could temporarily put some people out of work. Economists have found that with some changes, like trade and automation, there are long-term gains but short-term pain as the economy rearranges itself. It takes time to start new businesses, and for existing businesses to expand, so it’s theoretically possible that a big surge of immigrants or a baby boom could temporarily raise unemployment.

But in practice, this doesn’t happen with immigration (or, probably, with baby booms either). Study after economic study has found little or no short-term impact of immigration on native-born employment levels. A small number of papers have found otherwise, but the methods they use are highly questionable. So even in the short term, jobs don’t look like a fixed pot to be divvied up. Every good economics class teaches the Lump of Labor fallacy, and warns students to avoid falling into its seductive clutches. But judging from the number of people who still make the mistake of thinking that 100,000 immigrants means 100,000 American jobs lost, the fallacy seems to be going strong. Why?

One reason is that in our daily lives, jobs look and feel like a fixed resource. Companies offer job openings, and we compete to get them. If a particular job doesn’t go to me, it goes to someone else -- maybe a young person or an immigrant. But this process isn’t the same as what’s going on in the economy overall. Overall, the presence of immigrants and young people raises the number of job openings that I can apply to in the first place. That process is invisible to most job applicants, but it’s happening nonetheless.

Another reason people keep believing in the Lump of Labor fallacy is that unscrupulous politicians and thought leaders keep telling them to believe it. By convincing Americans that they’re in a zero-sum competition for jobs, leaders can divide the populace, setting some segments against others. Appealing to the Lump of Labor fallacy probably helps Sessions and Trump gin up anti-immigrant sentiment, ultimately helping Trump at the ballot box. This is definitely one case where Americans should ignore Sessions and Trump, and pay attention to economists. Economists have lost a lot of respect and status since the financial crisis, and it’s certainly true that the discipline has not always made good recommendations. But in this case, they know what they’re talking about. Immigrants don’t take jobs away from native-born Americans.
Reply
#17
There is no immigration crisis:
Quote:The administration has said that the country is in danger of being “overwhelmed” by “massive increases in illegal crossings” that will bring “horrible crime,” “unbelievably great taxpayer expense” and the loss of American jobs.


None of those claims are true. Below, we've compiled some of Wonkblog's coverage highlighting the latest data and research shedding light on erroneous beliefs about immigration in the United States.
There’s no immigration crisis, and these charts prove it - The Washington Post

  1. The numbers of immigrants are way down
  2. Immigrants are, on average, less criminal
  3. There is no correlation between immigration and unemployment in rich countries
  4. Immigrants are less likely to use public assistance
See link for details and evidence..
Reply
#18
Once again misstating the facts..

Quote:President Donald Trump didn’t miss a chance to vilify undocumented immigrants during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. Once again, he painted unauthorized immigrants as a huge burden to the United States — a burden that working-class Americans pay for. And once again, he blamed them for “a depleted social safety net.” None of this is true. If anything, undocumented immigrants help keep the safety net solvent with the payroll and income taxes they pay. But let’s just focus on Social Security..
State of the Union 2019 fact check: immigrants aren’t depleting safety net - Vox
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)