Immigration: A boon or Burden to U.S. Society?

Last May, the University of California, Santa Barbara, hosted a debate on "Immigration: A Boon or Burden to U.S. Society?" The debate featured my good friend, Rubén Rumbaut, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UC, Irvine, and genuinely one of the world's foremost authorities on immigration, especially to the United States. He was debating Mark Krikorian, who is Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which is an anti-immigration organization based in Washington, DC. Most importantly, Krikorian's ideas have been picked up by Donald Trump and have clearly influenced Trump's approach to immigration. [Indeed, because of his anti-immigrant influence on Trump, there were a lot of protesters outside the auditorium as the debate was taking place.] The moderator of the debate was Donald Kerwin, Jr., Director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York, which is a nonpartisan migration-oriented think tank in New York City. Among their activities is the publication of the academic journal International Migration Review (and, full disclosure here--Professor Rumbaut and I have published in that journal).

We have been waiting all this time for the promised video of the debate to be made public and that has just happened. It is now available as a YouTube video through UCTV. I encourage you to watch this. It is a great inspiration for discussion. Keep in mind, though, that it is about an hour and a half, although of course you can scroll through it, if you have to.

Can Pineapples Slow Down Migration?

And, no, I don't mean by throwing them at people. Rather, the story is that growing pineapples in Guinea may be slowing down the outmigration of young Guineans to Europe. The government has partnered with international supporters to promote the development of pineapple farms that can quite literally keep young workers "down on the farm."

Despite large bauxite and iron ore deposits, this tiny West African nation has an annual per capita gross domestic product of just $885. More than half of the country’s 12 million-strong population is under the age of 25, and that combination of youth and poverty has long fueled migration. In 2016, two years after the outbreak of an Ebola epidemic added another incentive to leave, 13,342 economic migrants from Guinea reached the shores of Italy. Only Nigeria and Eritrea sent more migrants to Italy that year.

The point is an obvious one: People need jobs, and so they go where the jobs are. If the jobs are near where they live, the need to migrate is diminished. Rounding up the money to invest in developing countries is the issue, however, and this article documents that the government of Guinea has a Development Unit that seeks financial input from the outside.

This is an important development that needs global support. Indeed, I served on the Steering Committee of the World Commission on Forced Displacement, organized by the Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. One of the products of the project was the rationale for and design of a "Merchant Bank," which would be a public sector entity aimed at promoting private investment. This seems to be what's going on in Guinea. These are the sorts of positive moves that the world can make that ultimately help people to stay home, where most would prefer to be--if the local situation allowed it.

PAA History Through the Eyes of Past PAA President Robert Moffitt

PAA HISTORY

Interview with Past PAA President Robert Moffitt

By John Weeks, PAA Historian and the PAA History Committee: Win Brown, Karen Hardee, Dennis Hodgson, and Emily Merchant

At this year’s annual meeting in Austin, the PAA History Committee had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Robert Moffitt, who was PAA President in 2014, for the PAA Oral History Project. Dr. Moffitt is the Krieger-Eisenhower Chaired Professor in the Department of Economics at The Johns Hopkins University. He is also Professor, Depart- ment of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. He received his BA in Economics from Rice University, and MA and PhD in Economics from Brown University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, Brown University, and since 1995 at The Johns Hopkins University.

In the following excerpt, he gives us his overview of how the PAA has changed over time:

I think my first PAA was in the 1980s. I think it wasn’t until I went to Brown and I met all the demographers there. Sid Goldstein had been President of PAA back in 1975 and was very well connected to it and so was Fran Goldscheider and [current PAA President] John Casterline. Of course, PAA is a great organization and not only on scholarship; a great thing about PAA is its collegiality and the personal nature of it, which I’ve never found in any other association.

The field has definitely changed from my initial study of it. When I first got interested in demography back in the Mathematica years [when he was working as a researcher at Mathematica]—so that was the late 1970s— even then, it was pretty much dominated by population control and family planning and related kind of issues. Those were important issues. But the social demography side was really in its infancy and the big change that I see, particularly from my perspective, is the growth of social demography. You come to the PAA this year and the number of sessions on that topic or something related to it is tremendous. And, as a whole, the field of demography has broadened out away from those core issues of fertility, mortality, and migration.

You come to PAA today and you’ve got health and population health, for example. You’ve got applied demographers. You’ve got geographers. You’ve got survey issues and survey statisticians, although the Census Bureau has always been involved. You’ve got economists, of course, here. You’ve got anthropologists. It’s a big tent and that’s a nice thing about demography. Although I have to say that you’ve got to expect a little bit of tension between the traditionalists who say “this is what demography should be” and the younger people who say, “No. I want to do this. It’s not quite the traditional stuff. I want to bring this in.”

The big tent, with a lot of different disciplines represented at the PAA is, I think, very healthy. I also think that it’s one reason for the vibrancy and intellectual excitement of demography. Four thousand submissions this year. It’s amazing how many people come and many young demographers are interested in all different aspects of the field. This is why it is thriving and why the broadening out brings so many people to PAA. It’s the reason that PAA has succeeded.

But demography has gone through a tremendous evolution. Even when I went to Johns Hopkins, it was still Johns Hopkins—a place excelling with demographers working on population control. It still has people like Stan Becker, a distinguished demographer who works on those issues. But [Past PAA President] Andy Cherlin is there, too, and he is representative of social demography—he is concerned with inequality, poverty, and marriage. The tremendous development has been very healthy, in my view.

Moffitt also discussed the way in which his career evolved, leading to his recent participation in a committee of the National Academy of Sciences chaired by Past PAA President Greg Duncan that issued a very important report this Spring on how to reduce child poverty by 50% in ten years.

The entire interview is available on the PAA website.

The Spatial Diversity of Racial Diversity of the United States

My thanks to Rubén Rumbaut for pointing me to a new infographic put together by demographer Bill Frey at the Brookings Institution. These maps show the spatial diversity of racial diversity in the United States, using the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, anticipating what we are likely to find in the upcoming 2020 Census.

The new estimates indicate that, for the nation as a whole, Hispanic residents comprise 18.3% of the population. The shares for black and Asian residents are 12.5% and 5.9%, respectively.[1] But these national numbers change dramatically when you look closer at the country’s 3,100-plus counties.

Here's the breakdown for San Diego County, for example:

As you look at these data, remember that diversity is partly in the eyes of the beholder. As I have discussed before, most Hispanics in the United States identify themselves racially as "white," so if we organized the data differently, we would come to different conclusions about the nature of diversity. Remember, too, that it took people of Irish and Italian origin, as two prominent examples of those who are now in the "non-Hispanic white" category, to become part of the ethnic mainstream--but it did happen. At the same time, each of these broad groups of race/ethnicity has a lot of diversity within its boundaries. An immigrant from Korea is unlikely to think of themselves as ''Asian" (instead of just Korean) until she arrives in the U.S., and immigrants from Chile have probably never heard the term "Hispanic" until they arrive in the U.S.

I admit that one the more interesting demographic facts that Bill Frey puts into the description of data is this:

Among the 100 largest metro areas, only 29 do not contain a highly represented racial minority. These are mostly located in the middle of the country; Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City are the three largest, with Scranton, Pa. as the smallest. As a group, they are growing more slowly than those with a larger minority presence, but each one has become less white than was the case with the 2010 census.

I highlighted Scranton, because it was the home of Dunder-Mifflin paper company in the hit TV series "The Office." The cast in that program exhibited what we might call a minimal amount of demographic diversity. 

North Carolina Judges Deal With State's Gerrymandered Districts

You may recall that in July of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court said that federal courts had no role to play in dealing with political gerrymandering of districts at the state level. This week, however, a panel of judges in North Carolina showed that courts can act to keep state legislatures from designing district boundaries that defy the demographics of the state. The New York Times has the story, including commentary from its editorial board. 

The existing maps were so effective that they helped entrench Republican majorities even when Democrats won more votes statewide. In 2018, Republican candidates for North Carolina’s House of Representatives won less than 50 percent of the two-party statewide vote, but walked away with 65 seats to the Democrats’ 55. Republican candidates for the State Senate also won a minority of the popular vote, and still took 29 of 50 seats.

This kind of abuse of the democratic process is precisely what courts are designed to fix. But when North Carolina voters begged the United States Supreme Court for relief, arguing that they had been written out of the political process by the very people who were supposed to serve them, the five conservative justices turned their backs. The court could do nothing, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a demoralizing opinion in June — not because the Republicans are innocent, but because the judiciary can’t hold them accountable for what are, in essence, political crimes.

But the North Carolina judges did do something about it, requiring that the legislature redraw boundaries for state offices, and the Republican-led legislature seems to be agreeable to the court's decision. The only caveat here is that so far the ruling applies only to the boundaries for electing representatives to the state government, and not to U.S. Congressional Districts. There's still more work to be done, but this is obviously a move in the right direction.