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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Texas is 100% playing politics with the border. Well, maybe 90%; we've got to leave some room for Florida, which is apparently so overwhelmed that they have to use Texan migrants for their publicity stunts.

First, what's the cost of living in rural Texas or California? How about NYC? We already have a method for evaluating how much someone is willing to live in a particular location. It's curious that Republican lawmakers have chosen this particular cause to intervene in the market. There is a symmetrical argument for job markets; the demand for cheap agricultural labor in NYC does not compare to that in a commensurate area of west Texas or SoCal. Martha's Vineyard was a particularly extreme case--dumping migrants somewhere with no jobs and a high opportunity cost suggests that efficiency is a low priority indeed.

Second,

75k/yr is probably NYC's fair share (as 1/35 the US population)

How many illegal migrants do you think we get in a year? Because that rate suggests 75K * 35 = 2.6M/yr. Actually, I'm seeing a NYC population more like 1/39th of the US, which would suggest a total intake of 2.9M/yr. Given that the total illegal population has been stable or declining since 2007, at something like 10-12M, I find this rather unlikely. Source 1, source 2.

I don't have estimates for how many illegal immigrants are already in NYC, but Table 3 from source 2 estimates 520-630K in New York state. the city has 8.38M of the state's 19.5M people. Using the low end, since cost of living and agricultural labor likely pull migrants away from NYC, a rough estimate suggests 220K illegal immigrants already in NYC. That's somewhere between 1/44 and 1/36 of the total illegal population.

If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population

I'd argue that the fair share is zero, because the population shouldn't exist, because it's illegal. Those constituencies undermining the rule of law in a way that increases the population should shoulder 100% of the burden, because they are responsible for all of it. I'd say that states and cities that declare themselves sanctuary locations should receive all of the illegal immigrant population.

They aren't being "shipped." They're not auto parts.

If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

Why wouldn't being a sanctuary city increase what counts as their fair share? If they have policies intended to be more friendly to illegal immigrants than average, shouldn't they also have to take more illegal immigrants than average?

If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

The justification is that they support the migrants and the people shipping them away don't. There's no problem with that arrangement; if you are pro-migrant, congratulations, you should welcome the chance to live up to your principles and help the unfortunate.

what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

Rubbing their noses in NIMBY hypocrisy is quite sufficient.

Imagine an alternate world where Democrats found some clever way to publish the names of the daughters of rich politicians who had abortions. Imagine the Republicans freaking out and sputtering bullshit protests when they are obviously just upset that their constituents are finding out how many of their mistresses are getting abortions. Do you think you would be sympathetic to their plight? Can you muster up a comparable defense of Hershel Walker's abortion scandal?

Uh, yeah, I'd actually be upset about that doxxing.

That's not a very good comparison, though. The original argument was that sanctuary cities didn't have their "fair share" of illegal migrants. It'd be like Democrats finding newly pregnant Republicans, counseling them to get abortions, bussing them to abortion clinics, and then crowing about how high the Republican abortion rate is. I think you'd call that political theater and feel a sense of distaste.

The original argument was that sanctuary cities didn't have their "fair share" of illegal migrants.

Was it? I think the argument I've heard is more "You want them? You take them." And they clearly treat getting relatively small numbers as a catastrophe that they have little capacity to handle, so I find the "already getting their 'fair share'" stats to be deeply suspicious.

I was referring to slider's

Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.

...

If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’

If they're already doing that, his argument gets a lot weaker.

Now, I agree that it's not a knock-down defense. It's still possible that NYC is shirking, that voters would demand a border wall if they weren't insulated from the immigrants. But it's not obvious. There are 5-600K illegal immigrants in New York state--4-6% of the illegal population. The state has about 6% of the total US population. As others pointed out, their laws are illegal-friendly, the enforcement is limited, NYC is a "sanctuary." It's not like residents are actually pushing illegals out. I'd assume that market forces and climate should make NYC less appealing than rural Texas and California, and yet it's picked up quite a few anyway.

So New York probably isn't far off from its proportional share, it's not being obviously exclusive, and it clearly has handled previous migrants well enough that residents aren't upset. Republicans want to claim that NYC is being hypocritical for complaining about a stress that only appeared once Abbott got involved.

Republicans want to claim that NYC is being hypocritical for complaining about a stress that only appeared once Abbott got involved.

But that's the point. Why is it a stress? Your whole argument hinges on NY being able to easily absorb the amounts they're receiving. If that's not the case (and it clearly isn't), then there's something different about the cohort of folks illegally crossing the southern border and making an asylum claim compared to the general block of people who are not legal residents of the US.

Put it this way: Is NY getting an amount of the people who crossed last month that is proportional to how much they represent support of the border crisis / open border situation? That 4-6% of the population might be a serious under-proportion if NY Senators and Congresscritters represent 15-20% of the defacto national support for the present shitshow. Similarly, if NY illegal immigrants are mostly people who overstayed visas, or long-time illegal residents who have been in the US for 10 years and have significantly acclimated, that might be trivially easier to deal with than a comparable number of Venezuelan refugees who just finished a 4,000 mile death trek.

Shrug. I don't think it's any worse a parallel than trying to deflect to someone's abortion scandal.

Given that the total illegal population has been stable or declining since 2007, at something like 10-12M, I find this rather unlikely. Source 1, source 2

These methodology behind these numbers is bad and a better methodology based on inflows, outflows, and demographic data suggests the illegal population is twice as large.

We have more direct data on new arrivals anyway. Ignoring people who aren't caught, border patrol has stopped about 1.8M illegal entrants this year so far. It seems Biden is now expelling about 40%. 1.8M*0.4/35 = 20.5K annual flow, not too far off.

22M? Big if true. Would that apply to the CBP estimates of NYC's current population, too?

I don't think your math checks out on the annual flow, though. It would be 1.8M * (1-0.4), assuming that everyone not in that 40% is just released into the country, and I'd divide by 39 instead of 35. Where'd you get the 40% number? Closest I could find was ~1M of the 2.2M encounters getting expelled under Title 42, but some of the remainder is also detained or turned back at the border. And of course neither number counts those who dodge the CBP entirely.

Yeah it should have been 60% and I forgot to include the source for the encounter and release numbers.:

Biden’s DHS is honoring that order increasingly only in the breach. Just 40 percent of the aliens who were stopped by Border Patrol at the Southwest border in July were expelled under Title 42, down from 47.7 percent in June and 62.3 percent in all of FY 2021. By contrast, Trump expelled more than 87 percent of migrants subject to Title 42.

The report in source 2 of gp actually addresses this...

Research by the Office of Immigration Statistics replicates the Fazel-Zarandi et al. methodology and assesses the possibility that the size of the unauthorized population was in the range of 16.2–29.5 million on January 1, 2017 as Fazel-Zarandi et al. conclude, rather than 11.4 million as the DHS residual model estimates. One key finding is that the difference between FazelZarandi et al.’s results and DHS’s residual model is entirely driven by high estimated growth in Fazel-Zarandi et al.’s model during the 1990s—yet key data required for inflow-outflow modeling are not available for those years. These data limitations, along with a number of questionable modeling assumptions, give DHS no confidence in Fazel-Zarandi et al.’s findings about population growth in 1990-2000. A forthcoming DHS whitepaper includes a preliminary inflowoutflow analysis that is similar to the Fazel-Zarandi et al. method but updates certain assumptions and makes fuller use of DHS data for 2000 – 2018; the paper finds support for the DHS estimate of about 11.4 million people as of Jan. 1, 2018 (Rosenblum, Baker, and Meeks, forthcoming).

...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?

To make it clear for them that you don't want to deal with shit policies they're supporting ?

Most illegal immigrants already live in a couple of metro areas, generally in blue states or blue cities in red states. The issue is not really about the distribution of the notional burden of illegal immigration; it is a fundamental dispute whether or not illegal immigration/asylum seeking is even a big deal.

So why are they complaining about receiving a few tens of thousands more?

Then perhaps proponents should be honest about it rather than using a pretense of correcting unfairness.

It's okay for Republicans to say "we don't want these immigrants, so we are making them your problem." Democrats are entitled to object to this (manufactured) burden. If that's the case, Republicans shouldn't get to act as if their maneuver highlights hypocrisy.

Democrats are entitled to object to this (manufactured) burden.

Manufactured by?

Republicans shouldn't get to act as if their maneuver highlights hypocrisy.

Why not?

I think I made it pretty clear, above, that New York isn't obviously shirking. If they're already supporting their "fair share," then objecting to additional busses is not hypocritical.

You're welcome to disagree. Please try to make an actual argument instead, though.

The responsibility they're shirking is law and order. The people through their elected representatives choose to not address border security. Their fair share of the problem should be proportional to their lack of of cooperation on stemming the invasion.

If I have a roommate and I bring a new dog in despite my dog-hater roommate’s protests, then complain about how my roommate has been starting to shaft dog food costs on me, is that hypocrisy or not? Would my roommate getting me to walk the dog more than 50% of the time be a manufactured burden?

What exactly is a fair share of responsibility on something between two parties when one party clearly didn’t want that something and had that something imposed on them?

I don’t even have a dog (ha ha) in this fight, I live in another country and don’t really have strong opinions on immigration one way or the other, and immigration where I live generally seems to be positive. But it doesn’t seem like the problem is either manufactured, or that it doesn’t highlight some sort of hypocrisy. Let me rephrase: It doesn't seem like the problem is entirely artificial and Republicans just decided to fuck with New York just to dunk on them, and it isn’t obvious that there isn’t some sort of hypocrisy in asking for other states to process massive amounts of prospective immigrants on short notice (as “illegals” and asylum seekers do) while when the same thing happens in their own borders they shit themselves, irrespective of whether they are taking in a “fair share” of immigrants.

Blue cities in red states are still a problem for the red states. Herding them into these locations is a step in the right direction, though.

First I’m picking up elsewhere that the illegals in NYC are largely people who did not leave when their visa expired. So people who had jobs and functional lives. I don’t know enough to verify the truth of this. But therefore a different type of illegal than the completely homeless no job type showing up in Texas.

This article gives some numbers. 2 million illegal encounters so far at southern border this year. No clue how many are getting in but at that rate then 75k would be fair (though to date NYC only gotten 14k….75k was just my estimated run rate off Adams saying 4-6 buses a day)

https://news.yahoo.com/number-illegal-migrants-entered-us-155908676.html

I agree Florida doesn’t have the same issue. More similar to NYC that the illegals are a few by boat from Cuba, Visa expired illegals, or those with enough funds family to come to Florida.

I don’t know the true number of refugees but I’m fairly certain there are not 2 million agricultural jobs available in Texas. And NYC has a lot of restaurants in need of labor etc.

This is worth consideration, and if you want to calculate a fair share based on visa-expiration vs. border-hoppers, I'd be interested in reading it.

It is also possible that this year real is bucking the trend, and I am wrong to generalize from the last 15 years of stable population. If there are 2 million more illegal immigrants in the US next year, then shipping 51K to NYC would be proportional.

But we have been told about border crises year after year. Caravans, surges, whatever. And yet the population has been stable. Those 2M encounters are before any decisions--the article says 920K were already deported under Title 42. This chart suggests that >1M have been expelled, and that the remaining group includes detainees and deportations, too. It's not clear how many of those are released into the US until a hearing, or how many migrants are dodging the CBP entirely.

I don't think that it's obvious NYC is shirking its fair share, so I find it pretty defensible for them to complain.

Overstays are definitely the largest group of illegal immigrants in the US, but the vast majority are tourists and business visitors, not workers (it is very difficult for an unskilled person to get a work visa). So, not people with jobs. See overstay reports here

Re the 2 million encounters, the vast majority were immediately expelled or detained. It looks like 25-30 pct have been released.

Overstays are definitely the largest group of illegal immigrants in the US, but the vast majority are tourists and business visitors, not workers (it is very difficult for an unskilled person to get a work visa). So, not people with jobs.

But... how do you imagine they survive if they don't have jobs? Do you imagine they are all wealthy retirees, that they are economic parasites on the welfare state, or does the legal category not reflect the underlying reality?

The OP said:

So [visa overstayers are] people who had jobs and functional lives. I don’t know enough to verify the truth of this. But therefore a different type of illegal than the completely homeless no job type showing up in Texas.

My point is that a person who becomes an illegal immigrant by overstaying his tourist visa is also jobless when he becomes an illegal immigrant. He also is effectively homeless, in the same sense that an illegal entrant is. eg: From the perspective of the job market, or whether they are parasites on the welfare state, it does not matter whether an illegal immigrant entered illegally or overstayed a tourist visa. The distinction is not nearly as stark as the OP assumes.

The difference is that visa overstayers generally do not start out destitute and homeless. They arrive on airplanes with papers in hand, and they either have finances arranged such that they can live here in reasonable comfort without a job, or they choose to overstay once they have procured a job. They are apples and oranges to migrants who cross the border on foot and then claim asylum.

  1. And many, if not most, border crossers have relatives and friends in the US and can also live in reasonable comfort. It is not as if visa overstayers are particularly well off; if they were, they would not be seeking to illegally immigrate.

  2. I don't know what you mean by "papers in hand"; the only "papers" they have are tourist or similar visas, and some don't even have that

  3. The only job they could have procured is an illegal job. Had they procured a legal job, they would have applied for a work visa and hence would not be staying illegally.

Just to clarify, these are not people who are overstaying their tourist visas because they want a chance to see the Grand Canyon. These are illegal immigrants, just like border crossers, who plan to stay permanently and simply used a different means of entering the country.

Anyhow, as I said, the point is not that the groups are absolutely identical, but rather, as I said, the OP is greatly overstating the difference between them.

These are illegal immigrants, just like border crossers

The whole point is that, while they are both illegal immigrants, visa overstayers are not just like border crossers.

One group arrives on airplanes with passports and legal entry visas. The other undertakes a dangerous journey on foot or smuggled in a truck. It doesn't take a brain the size of a galaxy to recognize that there are going to be enormous socioeconomic differences between these two groups. OP didn't "overstate" anything, you're just splitting hairs to try to dismiss a fact that is inconvenient for your worldview (i.e. a deep blue sanctuary state like New York freaking out over the grim reality of what it means for thousands of the second type of illegal immigrant to arrive on one's doorstep).

No one is "splitting hairs." I simply pointed out an inaccuracy in OP's statement, who claimed that the overstayers have jobs. They don't. If anyone who is dismissing facts because they are inconsistent with their worldview it is you, because you keep claiming that places like NY are "freaking out" because illegal immigrants are arriving despite the obvious fact that NYC is full of illegal immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere, who are working as food delivery riders (on bikes, nor cars), dishwashers, etc.

And that is what I said: that the two groups are in the same place vis-a-vis the labor market. And if you did a little more reading,you would know that plenty of people in far-off lands borrow huge (to them) sums of money to fly here with the intent to illegally immigrate. So, although there are certainly some socioeconomic difference between the overstay rates, you are seem to be overstating them.

And here is the most important thing: Your comment is the very first time anyone mentioned socioeconomic status. OP only mentioned current job status. Yet you claim I ignored something that hasn't even been discussed.

Nor, by the way, do you say what relevance the difference in socioeconomic status has to the specific issue we are discussing, which is the NYC response to the bussing of the migrants in question.

More comments

Can you help me understand how you arrived at the conclusion that visa overstays are the largest group of illegal immigrants in the US? I looked at the overstay reports and I see a somewhat consistent estimate of about 700k per year. 25% of 2M is 500k, but it only represents actual encounters, so I'd expect this number to be the sum of the encounters released and the non-encounters. If even 10% more illegal immigrants are crossing without an encounter, it seems to me that the rate of growth of non-visa overstay illegal immigrants is larger, especially as of the last few years. Is the argument that the total visa overstay population is still larger than the total illegal southern border crossing population? I didn't see estimates for either of those numbers in the overstay reports.

I did not mean to imply that the link was the source of that statement, and because I was agreeing with the post's statement in that regard, I did not look for a citation. But see here

It helps. But dishwasher, cook, etc you don’t need English. I’ve eaten in restaurants in America where the waitress could only speak Spanish. I point at menu, she brings foods, I pay bill.

Even less of an issue at a McDonald’s self check out. They only need to learn how to say order numbers in English.

I'm starting to wonder if this wasn't the reason fast food places didn't shift to meals/combos.

But most restaurant workers are not waiters.

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