Immigration Reform at the Local Level

An editorial in the New York Times a couple of days ago pulled together a very nice map showing all of the states that have introduced anti-immigration legislation, largely on the rationale that the federal government has failed at immigration reform.

The zeal to crack down locally is based on several fallacies. One is that the federal government hasn’t enforced immigration laws, even though it has greatly expanded border security in the last decade and the Obama administration is deporting immigrants at a record clip. Another is that illegal immigration is soaring, when it has ebbed in the last few years.
The final myth is that voters really want unrelenting harshness. In fact, polls show broad support for a comprehensive federal solution with tougher border and workplace enforcement, but also a path to legalization for the undocumented and a streamlined process for new legal immigrants.

The editorial misses a major point, however, which is that the federal government has not, in fact, addressed immigration reform. It has only tried to strengthen border controls. The fact that the polls show a desire on the part of Americans for there to be a path to legalization suggests that the problem with migrants is not them, per se, but their legal status. Yet, no one is willing to stand up and challenge the premise of the current immigration laws that overwhelming favor family members as legal immigrants, rather than favoring workers. Until we deal with this issue, migration will continue to be "broken," and local areas will continue to try to figure out ways to "fix" it--often with clearly racist undertones.

Undocumented Immigrants and the Crime Rate

The New York Times has a story today suggesting that crime rates along the border have decreased along with the drop in the number of people attempting to cross the border without documents. The story focuses almost exclusively on the situation in Arizona, the state that was among the first to "get tough" on undocumented immigrants. However, as Rubén Rumbaut and Walter Ewing have shown, undocumented immigrants themselves--the ones who come to the US to work--are less likely to commit crimes than are US natives. Typically their only crime (and it is a misdemeanor, not a felony) is to be in the US without documentation. When they are arrested for that crime, they wind up in jail until being deported and that is an expense that goes down as the number of undocumented immigrants goes down.


The reality, though, is that the major sources of crime associated with undocumented immigrants does not come from people coming here to work and then doing something like robbing Americans at gunpoint. Rather, crime is associated with smuggling people and drugs. The smuggling of people has become big business largely because of the increased border enforcement that makes it harder and more expensive for people to enter the country. Those people smugglers (the coyotes) are much more likely than the immigrants themselves to be committing crimes. The second source of crime, alluded to in the NY Times article, is drugs. As long as there are drug users in the US where the activity is illegal, and producers in Latin America ready to supply the need, there will be a big business in smuggling drugs. Even Evangelist Pat Robertson understands that the US would be a safer place if at least marijuana were legalized, and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has supported throughout his presidential campaign the full legalization of drugs in order to better take control of the market and, of course, provide a source of tax revenue. 


So, we need to keep border violence and crime in perspective. It is much less related to undocumented immigrants per se, than it is to US government policies (border enforcement and the war on drugs) that have created crime where little used to exist.

Where Do Muslims Fit In India?

When the Indian sub-continent gained independence from British rule after WWII, the region was partitioned into India (to be the home of Hindus and Sikhs) and Pakistan (to be home to Muslims--eventually divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh). Of course, life is never so neatly contrived. India remains home to the third largest population of Muslims in the world. Only Indonesia and Pakistan have more Muslims than India. So, what happens to Muslims in India clearly matters. As the New York Times reports, a recent election has created a call for quotas to be established for Muslims, in the same way that they have been established for the lower castes, which have been traditionally discriminated against in India.

For decades, the issue of affirmative action for Muslims has been a politically fractious one in India. Many opponents, including right-wing Hindu groups, have long argued that affirmative action policies based on religion violate India’s Constitution and run counter to the country’s secular identity. Quotas, they said, should be strictly reserved for groups that have suffered centuries of caste-based discrimination.But these arguments have been steadily countered by an undeniable and worrisome byproduct of India’s democratic development: Muslims, as a group, have fallen badly behind, in education, employment and economic status, partly because of persistent discrimination in a Hindu-majority nation. Muslims are more likely to live in villages without schools or medical facilities, a landmark government report found in 2006, and less likely to qualify for bank loans.Now, the issue of Muslim quotas has bubbled to the surface in the recent election in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the winner, the regional Samajwadi Party, has promised to carve out a quota of jobs and educational slots for Muslims, an idea first raised by theIndian National Congress Party. Legal and political obstacles remain, and some Muslims are skeptical that leaders will muster the political will to push through a quota, even as many consider such preferences justified and long overdue.

The irony in this is that many of the Muslims now living in India descend from families that converted from Hinduism to Islam precisely to escape the discrimination aimed at the lower castes.

Yet those caste affiliations never fully disappeared, meaning that a hierarchy lingered among Muslims in India. Two government commissions sought to include “backward” Muslims in the quota system by using their former Hindu caste identity, along with educational and economic indicators.

A Ray of Hope at the Bottom of the Income Ladder

The World Bank recently updated its global poverty estimates (bringing them up to 2008 from 2005), and there is good news, especially for those at the bottom--defined as people living on less than $US 1.25/day. In 1990, according to the World Bank, 43 percent of the world's population lived at that level of poverty, but by 2008 it had dropped to 22 percent. That was enough of a drop that, despite the growth in the world's population, the absolute number of people living at that level dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 1.3 billion in 2008. Not surprisingly, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia continue to have the highest poverty levels. The Economist picked up the story.

Most of the progress has been concentrated among the poorest of the poor—those who make less than $1.25 a day. The bank’s figures show only a small drop in the number of those who make less than $2 a day, from 2.59 billion in 1981 to 2.44 billion in 2008 (though the fall from a peak of 2.92 billion in 1999 has been more impressive). According to Mr Ravallion, poverty-reduction policies seem to help most at the very bottom. In 1981, 645m people lived on between $1.25 and $2 a day. By 2008 that number had almost doubled to 1.16 billion. Even if many of these middling poor move up, their places are often taken by those who have just escaped from absolute poverty; population growth does the rest. The poorest of the poor seem to have escaped the worst of the post-2007 downturn. But the growth in the middling poor shows there is much to be done.

And they add this interesting tidbit:

The poverty data chime with other evidence. Estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organisation that the number of hungry people soared from 875m in 2005 to 1 billion in 2009 turned out to be wrong, and were quietly dropped. Derek Headey of the International Food Policy Research Institute has shown that despite the world food-price spike, people’s assessment of their own food situation in most poor and middle-income countries was better in 2008 than it had been in 2006.

Celebrating International Women's Day

Women's rights have been taking a hit from Republication candidates for President in the US, so it is a good time for International Women's Day to be celebrated. In recognition of this, David Bornstein has an article in The New York Times that focuses on activities of an organization called CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education), that works to energize "Africa's girl power."

Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education) was founded in 1993 by a Welsh social entrepreneur named Ann Cotton, who began by raising money at her kitchen table to send 32 girls from poor families in Zimbabwe to school. Today, the organization works with 3,667 schools in rural parts of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana and Malawi, and has provided direct support for more than half a million children to attend primary school. Camfed has also provided grants to enable 60,000 girls to complete secondary school, supported 15,000 more who attend university or receive business training, and provided financing for 8,000 of their enterprises.In recent years, leaders in the field of international development have come to agree that the most powerful way to bring lasting social benefits to a country is to expand educational and economic opportunities for girls. What has become known as the Girl Effect is dramatic: A girl who doesn’t attend school or marries young, for example, is at far greater risk of dying in childbirth, contracting H.I.V., being beaten by her husband, bearing more children than she would like, and remaining in poverty, along with her family. By contrast, an educated girl is more likely to earn higher wages, delay childbirth, and have fewer, healthier children who are themselves more likely to attend school, prosper, and participate in democratic processes. 

As I read this, I was taken back in my mind to Harare many years ago when I was there working with the Zimbabwe National Family Planning Council. I met one day with Dr. Marvellous Mhloyi, a Professor of Sociology with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She mentioned that she had only one child, and preferred to keep it that way, but despite her genuinely amazing academic accomplishments, she was under tremendous pressure from her family to have more children. At the time, her country was poised to take off to much higher economic levels, precisely because of the accomplishments of people like her. But that was subsequently beaten back by HIV and corruption. Africa needs more girl power, to be sure.