Who Knew That Migration Could Get Even Messier?

Immigration to the United States has been a messy issue forever, as you know if you've read my book, or any of Professor Rubén Rumbaut's books--among many others who have traced this sordid history. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants, having stamped out nations of native Americans to get to that point. But let's face it, if you weren't white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) you were highly suspect, pretty much up to the point at which the 1965 Immigration Act was passed. If you watched the PBS American Experience episode on the Chinese Exclusion Act, you'll have a good feel for this. Once in the country, harassment of immigrants and their families is nothing new. The Japanese internment camps are among the worst of the examples, but the discrimination was aimed also at non-English speaking European immigrants. My mother-in-law was born in South Dakota in the 1920s to her Danish-immigrant farm-owning parents. She was the middle child of 12 kids, and the first one to grow up not learning Danish. Why? Because when she was very young the state of South Dakota passed a law making it illegal to speak anything but English in public. The Supreme Court ultimately tossed that out, but it worked in the sense that her parents stopped speaking Danish at home and my mother-in-law and her younger siblings grew up only with English.

I thought of all of these things (and many others, but this is just a blog post!) as I have read over the past several days about the horror stories of the U.S. government separating parents from their children upon a family's arrival at the border as undocumented immigrants. This is part of a "zero tolerance" policy implemented last month by the Trump administration. The Washington Post has a nicely detailed article that tries to summarize what's going on.

But none of these legal developments requires the Trump administration to separate children from their families. Instead, separations are rising in large part because of a “zero tolerance” policy implemented by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In April, Sessions directed prosecutors to charge as many illegal entry offenses as possible.

Devin O’Malley, a Justice Department spokesman, said in the May 29 briefing that people charged with these offenses often are sentenced to time served and transferred to the Department of Homeland Security for deportation.

So, on one hand, the Flores settlement and the TVPRA require that children be released. On the other, Sessions’s zero-tolerance policy subjects any accompanying parents to criminal prosecution and eventual deportation.

Laying this on Democrats does not track with reality. The TVPRA was signed by Bush, and the Flores settlement is a court-approved agreement, not a law. Nothing required the Trump administration to separate children from their families until Sessions’s zero-tolerance policy made it a practical necessity.

And this is only part of the story. The Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC, just today announced that they are going to be having a seminar on 12 June to discuss a forthcoming rule change by the Trump administration that could allow an immigrant to be deported for using government benefits like food stamps, even though they are legally entitled to those benefits. The bad old days aren't gone yet.

Higher Status for Modern Women Increases the Birth Rate

There has been a lot of discussion over the past week and a half about the decline in the birth rate in the U.S. When the National Center for Health Statistics revealed this news, I suggested that an underlying factor was the increasing level of income and wealth inequality in this country, aggravated by lower taxes and thus fewer government programs designed to help ordinary people in ways that would encourage them to have a chid. A few days ago, Michelle Goldberg wrote a very good column for the NYTimes in which she got much more specific about what she thinks is going on. 

Most women seem to want both jobs and children, and when they’re forced to choose, some will forgo parenthood, or have only one child. In a 2000 paper, the Australian demographer Peter McDonald theorized that if women have educational and employment opportunities nearly equal to those of men, “but these opportunities are severely curtailed by having children, then, on average, women will restrict the number of children that they have to an extent which leaves fertility at a precariously low, long-term level.”

Livia Oláh, a demographer at Stockholm University, has studied how gender equality affects choices about having children at the family level. She found that in Sweden, women were more likely to have a second child if their male partner took paternity leave with their first child, a proxy for his willingness to share the work of parenting. In Hungary, she told me, couples that shared housework equally had a higher probability of having a second kid. Women “want structures and policies that make it possible for them to combine family life — housework and child care — with career,” she said.

The policy point here is that if you want a higher birth rate, the government needs to subsidize child care for women, so that they can combine a career with parenthood. Men always have that option because society assumes that the child's mother will be the caregiver. But the evidence from Europe suggests that the government has to step in with child care to free women to be both workers and mothers. In essence, governments must accord women equal status with men on this score.

The idea that a feminist, rather than a patriarchal approach will increase the birth rate is also exactly the conclusion drawn by a group of European demographers in an article published online today by the IUSSP in Paris:

Interacting the effect of women’s labor market status with that of their partner, we found that dual employment favors the transition to a second child more strongly than any other configuration. Dual-earner couples are more likely to have a second child than “traditional” couples, in which only the man is employed, probably because of their greater economic security.

And, of course, the idea that a feminist, rather than a patriarchal approach will increase the birth rate is exactly the opposite of how the current Prime Minister of Hungary thinks his government should approach its low birth rate.

The Irish Vote to End Abortion Ban

In a truly historic vote, the Irish decided yesterday that they wanted to end the ban on abortion in that country. Every news source has the story, such as the NYTimes:

The surprising landslide, reflected in the results announced on Saturday, cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States. In the past three years alone, Ireland has installed a gay man as prime minister and has voted in another referendum to allow same-sex marriage.

The “yes” camp took more than 66 percent of the vote, according to the official tally, and turnout was about 64 percent.

The vote means that Ireland's Parliament will repeal the Eighth Amendment, which was put into place in 1983, banning abortion in almost every circumstance--allowing no exceptions even for fatal fetal abnormalities, rape or incest. In place of the Eighth amendment, Parliament has pledged to pass legislation that will allow unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. 

The Prime Minister said that: "We want a modern constitution for a modern country, and that we trust women and that we respect them to make the right decisions and the right choices about their own health care.” That's really the point here--granting to women the right to make their own choices about their own reproductive health. These are decisions that, of course, men never have to make with respect to their own bodies. 

An important complement to the availability of abortion is the availability of contraception, in order to avoid an unwanted pregnancy and thus help to reduce the demand for abortion. Irish lawmakers clearly had this in mind a couple of months ago, as the Irish Times reported that the government was thinking about introducing free contraceptives for everybody if the vote to remove the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution was approved. Since the vote did go that way, we'll have to keep tabs on the next moves.

Hungarian Prime Minister Blames Low Fertility on "Liberal Democracy"

According to a report today from US News and World Report, the Hungarian government is blaming its low fertility and declining population on liberal democracy, and it intends to fight back.

Hungary's government will launch measures to stop and then reverse a demographic decline by 2030, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday, as he blamed liberal democracy for undermining traditional families.

Orban said the key question was whether the Hungarian nation was preserved "biologically and in numbers" and what the government should do to stop the demographic decline. He said the government would launch a "serious family policy action plan" but did not go into detail.

Liberal democracy had failed to halt immigration, protect Christian culture or strengthen the traditional family of one man and one woman, Orban said.

"Christian democracy protects us from migration, defends the borders, supports the traditional family model of one man, one woman, considers the protection of our Christian culture as a natural thing," he said.

Orban, 54, took power in 2010 and has continually increased his control over the media, put allies in charge of once-independent institutions and campaigned on a platform of fierce hostility to immigration.

This seems more like a rant against Muslim immigrants than anything else, especially since low fertility and population decline have been characteristics of the entire Central and Eastern European region for a long time. Hungary's next-door neighbor, Romania, has been experiencing similar trends and a paper just out in Demographic Research by two Romanian demographers suggests, somewhat ironically, that the best route to higher fertility in Romania is by increasing the levels of female labor force participation which can increase economic development and make it easier for couples to be able to afford children. This is probably not what the Hungarian Prime Minister wants to hear, but it just might work.

Global Gag Rule Bites Africa

Shortly after Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January of 2017 he reinstated the "global gag rule" that had been originally put into place during the Reagan administration, as I discussed at the time. This is a regulation that says that any organization in the world receiving money from the U.S. government (typically through USAID) was prohibited from providing abortion, abortion counseling, or abortion-related services. As a story in Reuters from yesterday notes:

The goal is to please Christian conservatives who strongly oppose abortion and are a major part of Trump’s political base.

MSI [Marie Stopes International] and the International Planned Parenthood Federation are among only four to reject the conditions of the order. They offer abortion services, in accordance with local rules, and say it is a last resort in preventing unwanted or unsafe births.

USAID says 733 other NGOS still receive funding. But in Africa, MSI and IPPF are the two largest NGO providers of free contraception and family planning advice.

Note that none of these organizations are suggesting or doing anything that is unlawful in those places. Abortion is legal under various circumstances in a large number of African countries, but that doesn't mean anything to the Trump administration with regard to Africa, just as it doesn't mean anything to them here in the U.S., where abortion is also legal. Furthermore, these organizations are not promoting abortion. They are promoting contraception, and the more effective those programs are, the lower will be the demand for abortion--everyone knows that.

Who will step up to fill in the gaps left by drops in funding from USAID? The Reuters article suggests the following candidates: They include the Hewlett-Foundation, the Waterloo Foundation, the United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Gates Foundation.