🇺🇸👍🏼🗽😇THE FUTURE WILL BELONG TO NATIONS THAT WELCOME IMMIGRANTS: Getting Rid of Trump, Miller, Cotton, & The Other GOP Racist Restrictionists Is A Key First Step To A Better America For All!

https://apple.news/ApxPyJV3cSBOtEU7c4Xlk4A

Frida Ghitis @ CNN:

The only way the United States can remain the world’s most prosperous, powerful country is by embracing immigration. That’s the inescapable conclusion from a new study published on Tuesday in the Lancet that predicts the world’s population will peak far sooner than anticipated, and start shrinking before the end of this century.

There is, however, no guarantee that the US will embrace immigration, even to save itself. Domestic politics, currently inflamed by divisive nativist leaders, have turned immigration into a contested topic. A country that rose to historic heights of influence and prosperity by welcoming immigrants, is now led by a President who has weaponized the issue with unfathomable cruelty.

One example: At this moment, hundreds of migrant families held in detention facilities face the wrenching choice of whether to let their children be released to third parties, or stay together in detention. This awful decision comes as the result of court order last month that called for the children’s release in light of the coronavirus pandemic — and it is essentially a new version of the family separation policy that tore apart thousands of children from their parents earlier in the Trump administration.

Such heartless political measures flout America’s founding principles — but are also out of step with public opinion on immigration: an overwhelming majority of Americans — 77%, according to a recent 2020 Gallup poll- say it is good for the country. The prospect of falling birth rates predicted by study — from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine — may be a thumb on the scale in favor of more immigration. After all, businesses will need workers. Even the military will likely feel the pressure of contracting numbers of people of military age.

The new study shows how far off the mark earlier assumptions about exploding population growth fell. Some among you, my dear readers, may remember when intellectuals were gripped by the fear of a “Malthusian catastrophe,” fear that population growth would outpace our ability to feed ourselves. But it turns out that Thomas Robert Malthus, the 18th century economist and demographer, got it all wrong.

Not only did agricultural advances undercut his thesis, it turns out the world’s population will start contracting before long, with powerful economic, geopolitical and environmental implications.

. . . .

The result will be increased friction over immigration, with the arguments of immigration advocates bolstered by demographers, economists and a business community anxious to see consumption increase and workers available.

The present may be blazing with the demagogues’ sturm und drang about keeping immigrants out. But the future belongs to the country that welcomes them.

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Read the complete article at the link.

Immigration is both an unstoppable human force and good for America. The sooner we end the current regime’s cruel and stupid White Nationalist policies and develop a robust, thoughtful, inclusive, realistic approach to legal immigration (including refugees), the better off we will be as a nation.

An immediate benefit would be a sharp reduction in the amount of resources and goodwill wasted on counterproductive and often both illegal and immoral restrictionist enforcement gimmicks. That would actually align immigration enforcement with the national interest, rather than undermining it as is now the case with many of the misguided enforcement efforts, particularly “civil” imprisonment and deportations of refugees and long time residents.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

07-17-20

U.S. CENSUS BUREAU CONFIRMS WHAT MANY OF US ALREADY KNOW: Trump Regime’s White Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant Policies Are As Stupid & Counterproductive As They Are Vile!

Marissa J. Lang
Local Reporter
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/us-population-will-decline-faster-without-steady-immigration-census-report-says/2020/02/13/1ccff6d6-4ea7-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html

Marissa J. Lang

Feb. 13, 2020 at 8:15 p.m. EST

Limiting immigration over the next four decades would do little to stop the racial diversification of the United States — but it could push the country into a population decline, according to a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

For the first time in a decade, the federal agency gamed out how varying degrees of immigration could impact the U.S. population in terms of growth, age and racial diversity and its labor force.

Its conclusions, experts said, underscore the important role immigrants play in keeping the U.S. population trending upward.

“We desperately need immigration to keep our country growing and prosperous,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the Census numbers this week. “The reason we have a good growth rate in comparison to other developed countries in the world is because we’ve had robust immigration for the last 30 to 40 years.”

Virginia poised to help undocumented immigrants get driver’s licenses

The Census compared population estimates based on immigration levels from 2011 to 2015 and ran several “what if” scenarios to see how changing the flow of immigrants could impact the population as a whole.

Analysts compared the status quo with a “high immigration” scenario in which immigration would increase by about 50 percent; a “low immigration” scenario in which immigration would decline by about 50 percent; and a “zero immigration” scenario that demonstrates what would happen if immigration ground to a complete stop.

Immigration fluctuations between now and 2060 could make the difference of as many as 127 million people in the U.S. population, the Census found.

If immigration declines by 50 percent, the United States would still add about 53 million people over the next four decades, the report says.

But if immigration is stopped altogether, the population would stall out in 2035, after which it would slide into a decline. By 2060, under a zero-immigration scenario, the Census found the population could reach a low of 320 million people with a large and rapidly aging senior population.

The population of American seniors — aged 65 and older — is expected to surpass the population of children under the age of 18 in every scenario, though higher immigration patterns would delay the inevitable: In the zero-immigration plot, seniors outpace children by the year 2029; in the high-immigration pattern, seniors don’t overtake children until 2045.

Immigration has, of course, been shaped by the policies and rhetoric of President Trump, whose rise to power in 2016 and subsequent immigration policies are not accounted for in the Census report.

Last month, the president added six countries to his administration’s travel ban list, which already prohibited nearly all citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea from immigrating to the United States.

The new ban, which takes effect on Feb. 22, would bar immigrants from Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country — as well as Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan. It would also prevent people from Tanzania and Sudan from applying for the visa lottery, which issues up to 50,000 visas annually to countries with historically low migration to the United States.

Nigerian official expressed confidence country will be dropped from U.S. travel-ban list

Most of the people affected by the policy hail from predominantly black and Muslim nations, a fact that has prompted Democrats and other critics to call the ban an exercise in racism and xenophobia.

But according to census data, eliminating all forms of immigration altogether would not prevent the United States from becoming increasingly nonwhite.

“The fastest-growing racial group in this country is people who identify as multiracial,” Frey said.

Without any new immigrants coming to the United States, the non-Hispanic white population would still fall by about 17 percent over the next four decades, the Census reports. That means that by 2060, white people would make up just barely more than half of the country — 51 percent, with that number expected to decline further in the future.

In all other scenarios, the United States is projected to become majority-minority well before then: by 2041, if immigration increases; by 2045, if immigration remains constant; and by 2049, if immigration is cut in half.

Among young people below age 30, the change is more rapid, and is expected to tip the scales in this decade.

“You could stop immigration tomorrow, and this country would still become more racially diverse,” Frey said.

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It would make more sense if we had a thoughtful, honest Government that worked to achieve the full potential of inevitable immigration rather than fighting a costly, rancorous, counterproductive, and ultimately fruitless “war” against that which made America great in the first place.

The latest regime “scam on America:” sending “elite Border Patrol Tactical Squads” (who obviously lack any real, meaningful law enforcement assignment) to “sanctuary cities” to round up more undocumented individuals to aimlessly throw into a failing and mismanaged “court” system that’s already backed up for years. There has to be a more intelligent and efficient way to prioritize and conduct immigration enforcement.

“We can diminish ourselves as a nation (and are in the process of doing that on many fronts), but it won’t stop human migration.”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-15-20

MAWA IS DOOMED: Demographics & Mutual Dependency Make Trump’s White Nationalist Racist Assault On Minorities Both Economically Stupid & Ultimately Futile – “Through his rhetoric and actions, Mr. Trump stands for keeping America white, appealing to his base by implicitly promising to preserve the racial status quo. But Mr. Trump’s supporters, and the country in general, must not ignore the generational dependency between older whites and younger minorities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/opinion/trump-cant-win-the-war-on-demography.html

William H. Frey writes in the NY Times:

Opinion

Trump Can’t Win the War on Demography

A proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census reveals the dependency between older white voters and America’s growing young minority population.

By William H. Frey

Mr. Frey, a demographer, is the author of “Diversity Explosion.”

Sept. 30, 2018

Image
A press conference held last April, when New York State filed suit against the Trump administration over the proposed changes to the 2020 census form.CreditCreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images

Since the early days of his campaign, from his proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border to his discredited committee on voter fraud, President Trump has declared war on America’s changing demography. His administration has followed through on that strategy with a proposal to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship. If the question remains on the form, millions of households, particularly Hispanic and Asian-American, could skip the census, leading to an overrepresentation of white Americans during this once-a-decade count.

Six lawsuits seeking to remove the proposed question are moving through the federal courts, with the first trial likely to take place this fall.

If it is added to the census form, the citizenship question will distort our understanding of who resides in the country. What this selective underenumeration will not do is make America’s growing racial minority populations disappear. The losers from this undercount include members of Mr. Trump’s older white base, who will suffer from lost investments in a younger generation, whose successes and contributions to the economy will be necessary to keep America great.

The demographic trends make this plain. America’s white population is growing tepidly because of substantial declines among younger whites. Since 2000, the white population under the age of 18 has shrunk by seven million, and declines are projected among white 20-somethings and 30-somethings over the next two decades and beyond. This is a result of both low fertility rates among young whites and modest white immigration — a trend that is not likely to change despite Mr. Trump’s wish for more immigrants from Norway.

The likely source of future gains among the nation’s population of children, teenagers and young working adults is minorities — Hispanics, Asians, blacks and others — most of whom are born in the United States.

Indeed, the only part of the white population that is growing appreciably is older people, the same group to whom Mr. Trump is appealing. Thanks to aging baby boomers, the older retirement-age white population will grow by one-third over the next 15 years and, with it, the need for the government to support Social Security, Medicare, hospitals and the like. Revenue for these programs will have to come from the younger minority population. If the census does not accurately count this population, then all the services that support children and future workers, such as public education, Head Start, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicaid, will be shortchanged.

Although the slowly growing, rapidly aging white population will be accurately counted, the fast-growing minority school-age and young adult populations that represent the nation’s future will not get their due — demographically, politically or economically.

An in-house Census Bureau analysis based on 2010 survey data found that the inclusion of a citizenship question reduced the response rate among households that have at least one noncitizen individual. While 7 percent of United States residents are themselves noncitizens, 14 percent live in households that include one or more noncitizens. The latter figure rises to 46 percent among all Hispanics and to 45 percent among Asian-Americans, compared with just 8 percent among blacks and 3 percent among whites.

Let’s assume that one in three people in Hispanic and Asian noncitizen households refuses to answer the census. If that’s the case, the Hispanic share of the United States population would drop by 2.1 percentage points (from 17.3 to 15.2 percent) and the total white population share would rise by 2.2 percentage points (from 62 to 64.2 percent).

This imbalance would influence congressional reapportionment, hurting large, immigrant-heavy states. It will also shape how congressional and state legislative districts are drawn, favoring rural and small areas at the expense of large metropolitan areas, since noncitizen households are far more prevalent in the latter.

The underenumeration of racial minorities would also misallocate billions of dollars in state and federal funds for housing assistance, job training, community development and a variety of social services that should be distributed on the basis of census counts. It would provide a faulty framework for surveys that will inform thousands of policy and business decisions, such as where to locate schools, hospitals, employment sites or retail establishments catering to different population groups, over the next decade.

Through his rhetoric and actions, Mr. Trump stands for keeping America white, appealing to his base by implicitly promising to preserve the racial status quo. But Mr. Trump’s supporters, and the country in general, must not ignore the generational dependency between older whites and younger minorities. Forcing an inaccurate accounting of who resides in the nation will have long-term negative consequences for everyone.

William H. Frey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.”

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Yup! Racist bias and bigotry are always the enemies of truth, justice, and intelligent actions.

As Willie Nelson says “Vote ‘Em Out!”

PWS

10-01-18

THE HILL: RUTH ELLEN WASEM ON HOW THE WHITE NATIONALIST IMMIGRATION AGENDA IS PREVENTING US FROM HAVING REALISTIC DISCUSISONS ABOUT FUTURE IMMIGRATION!

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/406876-our-policies-on-immigration-should-be-forward-thinking

Ruth writes:

. . . .

In addition to inflating the number of immigrants, the political rhetoric coming from the right issues ominous warnings about immigrants from Mexico in particular. The nativist right fabricates a narrative that Mexican migration is a problem to be solved. While Mexico continues to be the largest single source country for immigrants, its relative share of the flow is diminishing.

In fiscal year 2000, immigrants from Mexico made up 20 percent of all people who became legal permanent residents (LPRs) of the United States. That percentage had fallen to 14.7 percent in fiscal year 2016. What characterizes Mexican immigration to the United States is that 68 percent in FY 2016 were the immediate relatives (spouses, minor children and parents) of U.S. citizens, the top priority of U.S. immigration laws since the 1920s.

A closer look at the recently released census data shows other trends that are positive for our nation. For example, foreign-born residents who are naturalized citizens have a median household income of $72,140 that compares favorably to native-born citizens’ median household income of $72,165. This income parity results in no small way from the growing number of Asian immigrants working in professional and managerial occupations and who are employed by educational and health sectors of the economy.

Although first-generation foreign-born families have higher poverty rates (15.7 percent) than the national overall rate (10.4 percent), second-generation families have lower poverty rates (9.3 percent) than the national rate.

This pattern of immigrant success, based on the talent and diligence of immigrants themselves, also has roots in the Immigration Amendments Act of 1990, which sought to increase avenues for “the best and the brightest” immigrants. By more than doubling the number of visas for persons of extraordinary ability, outstanding professors and researcher, or certain multinational executives and managers, and of persons with advanced degrees, immigrants with these traits have come to the United States in substantial numbers since its enactment.

The 1990 law also rewrote the H-1B visa for temporary professional specialty workers, which has been the leading pathway for immigrants to the United States and has been critical in the global competition for talent. The increased use of H-1B visas, as well as other nonimmigrant visas, has fostered much of the growth in immigrants with executive and professional occupations over the past two decades. My research offers fuller analyses of how policies directed at global competition, employment-based immigration and temporary professional workers have constricted, as well as fostered, the flow of immigration to the United States.

If there is anything made clear by these recent demographic trends it is that our policies on immigration should be forward-thinking, rather than backward-focused. Building a wall along the border with Mexico, a nation with a declining fertility rate and purportedly a positive employment outlook, is a Maginot Line for the 21st century. As I noted earlier, most Mexican immigrants are the immediate family of U.S. citizens.

Rather, we should be using these data to help us frame a debate about what the future of America will look like. We should be discussing policies such as: what are optimal levels of immigration? How should we balance this optimal level among family, employment and humanitarian flows? What role does temporary migration play in shaping future flows? These are not easy policy questions, so we need to get busy discussing our way forward.

Ruth Ellen Wasem is a clinical professor of policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin. For more than 25 years, she was a domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration.

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Read Ruth’s complete article over on The Hill at the link.

We should be discussing:

How best to integrate the millions of law-abiding undocumented residents currently in and contributing to the United States into our society;
How to increase legal immigration so that in the future these beneficial workers, family members, and refugees who are also beneficial to the United States can come thorough the legal system rather than being forced into the “extra-legal” system as has happened in the past.
Notably, doing the foregoing two things would not only reduce US Immigration Court dockets to manageable levels, but also would allow DHS enforcement to concentrate on the real “bad guys” rather than treating maids and gardeners like bank robbers.

Instead, we’re tied up fighting against the absurd White Nationalist restrictionist agenda that seeks to limit legal immigration to “white guys” and to wipe out our national commitment to refugees and asylees while artificially “jacking up” Immigration Court backlogs and misdirecting DHS immigration enforcement. Talk about the “worst of all worlds!”

PWS

09-17-18

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

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