The Power and the Money

What would it take to get one billion Americans?

What would it take to get one billion Americans by 2100? Matt Yglesias does a good job of explaining why that would be a worthy cause in his book titled … well … One Billion Americans, but he doesn’t really say what it would take to get there. At best you can say that he proposes a bunch of policies that would be good in-and-of-themselves and will raise population growth on the margin. That’s pretty weak tea.

So what would it take? Well, here I’m going to focus on 2060 and 2100, since the Census Bureau projects out that far and I’m marginally likely to be alive, while my kids will be in their forties and (they better!) have kids of their own. According to the Census Bureau, the United States will have about 404 million people by 2060. The census projection then creeps upwards to 426 million by 2099 before starting to shrink.

The problem with that projection, as Lyman Stone will tell you, is that the Census is relying on outdated statistics. Both birthrates and net immigration have plummeted since they put together their estimates. I constructed a simple population model and plugged in actual Trump-era birthrates — i.e., 1.74 children per women instead of 1.89 and net migration of 0.6 million per year instead of 1.1 million. (I assumed the same improvement in mortality.) The result is a United States with only 362 million people in 2060. And that 2060 population will be falling, shrinking to 331 million by 2100 … a million fewer people than today.

So what could we do? Well, we could adopt Canada’s immigration policy. Using the net migration numbers for the “status quo” scenario put out by Canada’s Conference Board, American net immigration would rise to 2.7 million people by 2030. That’s about 4½ times the current number. Now, the current number has been pushed down by the Trump Administration, but immigration would still run about 2½ times the amount we averaged in 2000-16. (My calculations assume a ten-year phase-in period.)

But it would mean that the United States would accept a number close to all net migration into high income countries. According to the U.N., high income nations took in about 3.2 million people per year in 2015-20, down from a peak of 4.7 million per year in 2000-05. Now, I have no doubt that there is a lot of pent-up demand to emigrate held back by U.S. restrictions. But the United States is so big compared to Canada or Australia that it’s a real question whether we could attract this level of immigration over the next 80 years even if we wanted to. It is doubly unsure whether we could attract those numbers using the Canadian-style points system; we would almost certainly need to give bigger weight to other factors than Canada does or lower the cut-offs. 

And even that wouldn’t get us to 1 billion. Rather, the U.S. would hit 465 million in 2060 and 594 million in 2100. That’s a healthier population than you get under current policy, but it isn’t exactly the kind of dynamic growth that Yglesias (or I) would want to see.

To get to one billion by 2100 (or 570 million by 2060) you would also have to raise the total fertility rate (TFR) to 2.4 children per women. That is not a historically high number, but the only developed nation to maintain numbers that high is Israel. And even there, the number for secular Jews is only 2.2. At a TFR of 2.2, a Canadian immigration policy would get the USA to 534 million by 2060 and 851 million by 2100. A more realistic (but still hard!) TFR of 2.0 would get us 503 million by 2060 and 730 million by 2100.

But 730 million is not one billion.

I understand that hitting that target wasn’t Yglesias’s point. Rather, his point was twofold. (1) Here is a frame for a bunch of good policies! (2) Why the hell are most Americans afraid of aiming big anymore? For me, (2) is the salient point. We’re a technophilic nation, so it’s not that we’re afraid of change in general. What we’re afraid of is a certain kind of change, one involving big collective endeavors. We cower from building new cities, new roads, skyscrapers in our back yards, nuclear power plants, the Green New Deal. That’s a bad thing. We should stop. We will have a better future if we stop.

But sadly, absent some incredible rise in fertility or an unlikely drop in mortality, that better future won’t involve one billion Americans.

Stating the obvious about the tariffs on Mexico

I am union-bound to say this, I suppose. The Mexican tariffs are stupid.

First, they will not achieve their stated goal, which is to get Mexico to stop Central Americans from arriving at the U.S. border. Consider what the Mexican government is currently doing:

1. Inviting Central Americans to stay in Mexico. The problem there has been that the Trump administration does not believe that Central Americans will stay in Mexico. Rather, it believes that legalizing their presence in Mexico only makes it easier to get to the border. Under pressure, the Mexican government suspended its visa program after 13,000 applied. But Mexico has allowed Central Americans to apply for asylum from Mexico, as the Trump administration wanted. 
2. Arresting and repatriating Central Americans: 29,660 in the first two months of 2019, about the same as the 29,239 average for those months in 2016, 2017, and 2018. President Trump actually thanked AMLO for this just last month. Through May, Mexico has detained 72,410 migrants and deported 53,371. That is less than the 340,944 Central Americans the CBP detained so far this year, but it is a substantial number. It is far from clear that Mexico could do better given the limited resources available to the Mexican government. 

Second, if the administration sticks to the plan, it will be an own-goal for President Trump. The tariffs on China are bad enough, but companies can adapt and the economy is strong enough to withstand them. Moreover, they are politically popular. Tariffs on Mexico are a different story. These are tariffs that will mess with supply chains. Alonso de Gortari (Princeton) recently calculated that 30% of the headline value of Mexican manufacturing exports to the U.S. consists American exports to Mexico. So they not only hits American consumers, they punch American producers as well. Plus, President Trump can kiss goodbye any chance of ratifying the USMCA. There are cheaper ways to keep immigration on the front burner for 2020, which I presume to be the political goal. 

Third, the tariffs benefit China by taking Mexico off the table as a potential site. Manufacturing has been moving to Mexico from China for years now. The trade war would have accelerated that, at least a little. It is a good thing for America to have industry move next door. But now, well, not so much.

Finally, here is something that is not a problem for this administration: the loss of any credibility as a negotiating partner. Yes, China and Europe will take notice of how the U.S. told Mexico that all it had to do was renegotiate NAFTA but then turned around and screwed it anyway. But that is a feature, not a bug. The current administration intends to impose tariffs forever. Sure, the President will tack back and forth according to political pressures, temporary advantages, and his own strange ego. But the goal is clear, as we reported back in October 2018. Blowing up your credibility just makes it all that much easier to insure that you cannot win the trade wars that you start. 

I have to admit, however, that I think the administration is going to back down on this one. The logic of point (2) above is pretty clear. So put that down as a prediction ... albeit not one that I am particularly confident in. 

Correction: Colombia does not have birthright citizenship and seems to be trying to avoid letting Venezuelans get it

 In the Western Hemisphere, birthright citizenship is close to universal. I thought that this included the Republic of Colombia, as did the author of this article in the Harvard Human Rights Journal. 

But it turns out that Colombia is an exception. But it is not clear-cut. Here is Article 96 of the 1991 Constitution:

Article 96. Colombian nationals are:

1. By birth: 

(a) Natural-born Colombians, under one of two conditions: that the father or mother were natural-born or nationalized Colombians or that, being children of foreigners, one of their parents were domiciled in the Republic at the moment of birth.

(2) The children of a Colombian father or mother who were born overseas and later domiciled in Colombian territory or registered in a consular office of the Republic.

So what is the definition of the word “domiciled”?

Colombian jurisprudence has held that “domiciled” does not mean “resident.” A 1993 law made it more specific: “Residence is understood as residence in Colombia accompanied with the intention to remain in the national territory according to the relevant stipulations of the civil code.”

Or, if that wasn’t clear: if you don’t have legal permission to reside in Colombia, then your Colombian-born children don’t automatically get Colombian citizenship.

Specifically, if you want your kids to be natural-born Colombians, then you need to have a type R resident visa; a type M work, marriage, partnership or business visa or a type TP3, TP4, TP5, TP7, TP9, TP10, or TP15 temporary visa. Now, in case you were wondering, it turns out that refugees qualify for a TP9 visa. (The link explains all the TP visa types.)

But here is the rub. Decree 1288 granted some sort of permanent status to 442,462 Venezuelan refugees, on top of the 380,000 who had already gotten legal status. Holders of the new status can work in Venezuela and access public services. 

The Venezuelans do not get TP-9 visas. Rather, according to Article 2 of the implementing regulation, they get a two-year renewable something “issued in order to authorize the stay of Venezuela nationals who find themselves in the national territory without the intent to settle permanently, which is why it is not equivalent to a visa.”

This strikes me as a bad idea. I understand why the Colombian authorities want to pretend that the Venezuelans will all go home soon. But that is a bad bet. It is hard to imagine that granting TP-9 visas instead of the temporary whatever-it-is would engender that big an outcry. But it would at least insure that you avoid creating an underclass should things not work out and the millions of Venezuelans wind up staying in your country.

Unless there is some legal requirement at work, Colombia really should change this policy. As insurance for their own future. Because some eggs cannot be unscrambled, and the great Venezuelan exodus is beginning to look like one of them. 

Why are so many fleeing Venezuela? Famine

The Venezuelan crisis is massive. Millions of people are fleeing the country. Brookings scholars project that a third of the population may leave before the end of next year. The outflow could surpass Syria’s.

But why? Yes, there is a hyperinflation. But the world has had a lot of hyperinflations without mass refugee flows. Yes, there is a huge fall in GDP. But the world has seen similar falls in GDP without generating mass refugee flows. Yes, there is political tyranny, but the world has seen lots of terrible tyrannies, and there isn’t a civil war.

Well, the root cause is simple. Famine. An accelerating famine. An honest-to-God 21st-century famine.

Venezuela doesn’t produce enough food to sustain its population. That means that it needs to import food. But with oil production in free-fall and foreign borrowing cut off, the country has no way to buy the food that it needs. The Confederation of Associations of Agricultural Producers of Venezuela (Fedeagro) estimates that the country produces less than a third of what it needs. The USDA reports on grain production make for thoroughly depressing reading. In short, the country cannot buy the amount of food it needs from abroad and does not grow enough at home to fill the gap. 

I am not sure if Venezuela could be self-sufficient in food. I suspect that it could, were oil not allowed to systematically distort the economy. 

But the problem is not that Venezuela is not self-sufficient in food.

The problem is that the Bolivarian Republic has systematically attacked its own farm sector, destroying its ability to buy inputs or operate without losses. For all the decline in food imports, they are still above the levels of the mid-1990s ... but the domestic production is  no longer there.

The below chart tracks food imports per capita (nominal data from here). In 2016, Venezuela imported about one billion dollars of food products. The IMF tracks the international price of food, so we can convert that to real imports per capita. In real terms, Venezuela in 2016 imported about as much food per capita as it did in 1997. Venezuela was not short of food in 1997. But in 2016 that same level of imports was not enough to prevent famine. 

What political advantage accrued from destroying domestic agriculture, even during the good years, is utterly beyond me. And that, yet again, is the tragedy of Venezuela. It isn’t the evil, it’s the incompetence. Raving, insane, pointless incompetence.

In order to understand the current Venezuelan crisis, we need to turn to the economic and political science literature on famine ... which is not something I ever expected to say about an American country in the early 21st century. 

Observatorio argentino 38: Who needs checks and balances?

It is astounding to realize just how much power the President of the Argentine Republic possesses. 

This came home to me while I was checking over how President Macri recently tightened the immigration laws. Context: Argentina has a rather liberal immigration regime. (I am surprised even more Venezuelans have not shown up. I guess the limiting factor is that they need a job offer to get a work visa, although there are no limits on such offers.)

Last year, the Macri administration wanted to tighten the law. (See Observatorio Argentino 32.)  The changes were small, but they involved specific clauses in the legislation itself. You can find the original 2004 text here. So they could not be made via simple executive order.

In other presidential republics, the only option would be to go through Congress. Get the law changed. How hard that is depends on the country. 

An American president needs to be a hella politician. They need to convince a legislator to introduce the legislation; they then need to cajole the Speaker and Majority Leader to bring it to a vote. Even then, under the new 21st Century norms, they need at least 60 senators to vote yes. 

A Mexican president is a little more powerful, but only a little. Under the original wording of Article 71 of the constitution, they could introduce bills straight to the relevant committee. But by itself that gave them only a little more power than an American president. In 2012, however, a constitutional amendment changed Article 71 to give the president the ability to introduce two bills every session that go straight to the floor. Each house then gets 30 days to vote on them; if they don’t hold a vote, then the bill becomes the first item on the agenda in the next session. So congressional leaders can still delay things; and note that if they delay both initiatives the President cannot introduce any in the next session. So even with the additional post-2012 powers, they need to be good legislative politicians if they want to get anything done. 

A Colombian president is more powerful still. She or he can introduce bills and demand that Congress vote on them within 30 days, with no limits. But Colombian presidents are not legislators. They have no direct control over the amendment process. And, of course, Congress can just say no. 

But Argentina? Sweet Mary. Under a 1994 amendment to Article 99 of the constitution, the President can decree pretty much anything. The article is nuts. Read section 3 for yourself:

The Executive Power shall in no event issue provisions of legislative nature, in which case they shall be absolutely and irreparably null and void. Only when due to exceptional circumstances the ordinary procedures foreseen by this Constitution for the enactment of laws are impossible to be followed, and when rules do not refer to criminal issues, taxation, electoral matters, or the system of political parties, he shall issue decrees on grounds of necessity and urgency, which shall be decided by a general agreement of ministers who shall countersign them together with the Chief of Cabinet.

Within the term of ten days, the Chief of Cabinet shall personally submit the decision to the consideration of the Joint Standing Committee of Congress, which shall be composed according to the proportion of the political representation of the parties in each House. Within the term of ten days, this committee shall submit its report to the plenary meeting of each House for its specific consideration and it shall be immediately discussed by both Houses. A special law enacted with the absolute majority of all the members of each House shall regulate the procedure and scope of Congress’s participation.

Yes, that is as crazy as it sounds. Exceptional circumstances are not defined, and every president since 1994 has interpreted the clause to mean that they can make legislative changes to anything they want whenever they want. In theory, the joint standing committee has ten days to vote and then Congress can reject the decree. In practice, the committee often stonewalls or deadlocks and then the decree just goes ahead and becomes law, poof, just like that. 

How the hell did that happen? The 1853 drafters of the constitution did not set out to create an elected dictatorship. But they got an unelected dictatorship in 1930, when the military seized control. The Supreme Court remained in session, though, and it validated the decrees handed down by the junta. In 1947, the Court tried to block a presidential decree ... at which point President Juan Perón impeached all but one of the justices. You won’t be shocked to find that the restaffed Court ruled in Ziella v. Smiriglio:

The decree-laws issued by the de facto government are valued by reason of their origin and since they have the force of law they continue in force even though they have not been ratified by Congress as long as they are not repealed in the only manner in which they may be so, that it is to say, by other laws.

Still, only 15 decrees were issued between 1930 and 1982. When democracy returned for good in 1982, the new civilian presidents were loth to give up the power. Raúl Alfonsín used the power ten more times, mostly for small-bore stuff; his big decree replaced the peso with the austral. 

But Alfonsín was succeeded by Carlos Menem, a Trump before Trump, a Berlusconi before Berlusconi. Menem liked executive power. He started by increasing the size of the Supreme Court from five to nine. He then issued a decree that seized most bank accounts and replaced them with government bonds. People sued. 

But the packed court ruled that President Menem was entirely within his rights as long as Congress did not explicitly repeal the decree with another law. American legal scholars will be amused to know that the Argentine justices cited Home Bldg. & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934) as justification for a decision ratifying exactly the sort of thing that Hughes, Cardozo and Brandeis were trying to prevent.

The 1994 constitutional amendment creating the new Article 99 was an attempt to limit the decree power. As such it failed. Menem would go on to issue over 300 decrees. (Note again that before Menem there had been only 25 presidential decrees in the history of the Republic.) Congress would not even bother to create the joint standing committee until 2006. And it remains toothless. 

Consider the immigration reform that started this discussion. What happened after President Macri issued it? Well, the joint standing committee has only 16 members but it could not get everyone to attend. It voted 6-5 to support the decree on February 22, 2017 ... but because there was no majority its recommendation was never reported out. The decree continued as law. In October, a federal judge ruled that it was in fact law even though the whole Congress had never voted. (In this he had ample precedent, although Argentine judges are not formally bound by precedent the way they are in the Anglosphere.) He also ruled that the deportation of criminals was somehow not a criminal matter and thus the reform was kosher under Article 99. 

No matter how you slice it, it is unbelievable that a democratic president has the power to make law unless Congress actively says no. Giving Donald Trump the power of a Mexican or Colombian president would change little; GOP initiatives are hard to pass because they are unpopular. Allowing the President to force votes on them would not help. But giving Donald Trump the power of an Argentine president? Well, that is scary.

And that may be one of the prosaic reasons why Argentina is not particularly well governed. They really ought to do something about that Article 99, I think. 

Economic history is hard

Lyman Stone has a post up about population growth in the Caribbean. It’s interesting stuff; worth reading. But it suffers from a historical mistake.

I am hesitant to point out this mistake because Lyman has recently been beaten up by a bunch of rather rude people who appear to be deliberately distorting his argument about the recent American (and French!) fertility decline. So I will endeavor to be neither rude nor deliberately distorting. 

As part of a broader discussion of Caribbean population trends, Lyman uses British migration restrictions to test the effect of migration controls on West Indian population growth rates. He identifies two points where migration was restricted: the date of independence and the Nationality Act of 1981.*

The problem is that neither independence nor the 1981 act had any effect on the ability of West Indians to migrate to Great Britain. 

The U.K. first imposed migration restrictions on the West Indies in 1962. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act said that only U.K. citizens with passports issued in Great Britain or Ireland could freely enter the U.K. If you were a “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” but your passport had been issued by a Commonwealth government, even one still part of the British Empire, you were subject to restrictions. And those restrictions were pretty draconian: you needed either a work permit or the ability to show that you could support yourself without working.

The U.K. migration data is a mess, but taking the Home Office statistics for annual net migration (in thousands) at face value (page 10) indicates that it was pretty effective. The below chart puts a vertical line at 1962. Net migration from the West Indies surged in ‘61, as people rushed to beat the new law. It then collapsed in ‘62 and ‘63 and remained low thereafter.

Moreover, the Nationality Act of 1981 had no effect on the ability of West Indians to migrate to the United Kingdom! That freedom had been removed in 1962. Rather, all the 1981 act did was take the class of U.K. citizens who were not allowed to live in the U.K. and rename them British Dependent Territories citizens. They could not freely move to the U.K. before and they could not freely move after. (In 2002, the Blair government finally granted all Dependent Territories citizens full British citizenship.)

If you really want to see if migration restrictions affected population growth rates, then you want to use 1962 for your test, not independence or 1981. 

The roots of making America in Argentina

Last post presented evidence that upward mobility was quite widespread in late 19th-century Argentina. The question is why? What made it so easy for immigrants to make America? Leticia Abad (Middlebury) and Blanca Sánchez-Alonso (UCEU) give one plausible answer.

But first, Prof. Abad shoeing me her childhood home in Buenos Aires. When she was growing up, the neighborhood was downright slummy. Now it is merely somewhat run down. I give it another ten years before the first yoga studios open up and she learns the exquisite pain I feel visiting Prospect Heights or Windsor Terrace.

And now, the reasons why immigrants to Argentina made America so successfully. In 1895, native-born Argentines still earned more on average than Spanish and Italian immigrants. Italians, though, managed to outperform Spaniards despite being rather less literate (78% versus 88%) and mostly farmers (69% versus 41%) when they got off the boat. Not to mention the language barrier; it is easy for an Italian speaker to learn Spanish, and you can hold simple conversations across the line, but the two languages are not identical. I have held conversations with people across the Spanish-Italian barrier, the first time on a crowded train from Glasgow to London in 1990. I could nonetheless not possibly hold a professional conversation in Italian. 

Yet despite these disadvantages  somehow Italians sorted into higher-paying occupations. How?

The authors’ explanation is that the Italians established deeper and better networks. Basically, once Italians got a foothold in high paying occupations, it became more likely that later arrivals would follow in their footsteps and sort into those occupations. These networks raised both groups’ wages, but the Italians were better at it. (The below map shows the concentration of Italians in Buenos Aires neighborhoods in 1895.) 

So there you have it! The immigrants were able to make America so successfully because they stuck together and helped their countrymen, even after multiple generations in the New World. We don’t know if these ethnic networks were stronger or lasted longer in the Argentine Republic than they did in the United States, but it is certainly possible. Half a cheer for assimilation, then! Sometimes it’s a good thing if the melting pot doesn’t quite melt completely.

But there is another, slightly more depressing, explanation for the why the immigrants made America in the Río de la Plata. One that might also possibly explain some of Argentina’s (and indeed, the whole Cono Sur’s) relative failure. 

Hacerse la América en Argentina

Argentina, it is probably unnecessary to say on this blog, is a country of immigrants. Moreover, it is a country of immigrants from almost the same places as Brooklyn got immigrants back in the day, as this photograph shows. 

Argentines had an awesome expression to mean that you were doing well in the New World: “Hacerse la América.” It translates to “making América.” Not “making it in América” but “making América,” as in “making partner” or “making tenure.” How awesome is that?

But how many people really did make América? Sure, unskilled laborers could earn higher wages in Argentina just by getting off the boat from Italy or Spain or Syria or Russia ... but that’s not making América. Making América is doing better the longer you’re in the New World and seeing your children do better still. How common was that?

Well, two new papers can now tell us. The first is by Santiago Pérez (U.C. Davis); the second by Leticia Arroyo Abad (Middlebury) and Blanca Sánchez-Alonso (UCEU). Today I will talk about the first.

Pérez matched individual immigrants and their children across the 1869 and 1895 censuses. He also matched immigrants from arrival data collected in 1882-84 to the 1895 census. And what did he find?

Immigrants moved up the occupational ladder faster and farther than native-born Argentines. That is, if you were an unskilled laborer in 1869 and you were an immigrant, you had a 23% chance of making it to a white-collar profession by 1895. For the native born, that same chance was only 8%. Immigrants also showed significantly higher wage growth than natives. Except, for some reason, the Swiss. That country appears to have sent a bunch of slackers to the Southern Cone.

As for the people who arrived in 1882-84, fully 75% of them upgraded their occupations by 1895, a rate considerably faster than in the United States. And unlike the United States, there was remarkably little immigrant downgrading, the 19th-Century equivalent of having the former Russian brain surgeon driving a cab in Houston.

What about the children? If you were the native-born son of an unskilled worker, you had only a 10% chance of making into the ranks of the white-collar class. But if you were the son of an immigrant unskilled worker, well, then you had a 36% chance of moving on up, to the top, to a deluxe apartment in the sky. And that result holds controlling for parental literacy, earnings, and access to property.

Better opportunity than in the United States! There are two potential explanations, though, which I may get to in another post. One of which is based on the immigrants ... the other on how Argentina differed from the U.S. and Canada at a deep structural level, and not in a good way.

How is Argentina like Puerto Rico?

Mostly, it isn’t.

But there is a sign of a disturbing history deep in the genetic heritage of most Puerto Ricans. And contrary to the popular belief, there may be some trace of the same history in Argentina. 

Some background. Over on Twitter, the great Pseudoerasmus and the great Gabriel Mathy began a debate over why North America saw relatively little intermarriage between Europeans and Native Americans compared to elsewhere. Pseudoerasmus argued that it was all about initial conditions. The Iberians migrated in smaller numbers to areas with bigger indigenous populations and in a heavily male-heavy environment. Gabe, conversely, argued that it was all about cultural norms. The English did not intermarry in significant numbers even in places with high numbers of indigenous and skewed sex ratios. 

It was an interesting discussion which I hope is put into a blog post. I participated for a bit but dropped out; Pseudoerasmus and I get along brilliantly, but in the heat of tweeting innocent responses can come across as more than slightly hostile. Moreover, the long threads are impossible to follow, quite unlike comment threads on a blog or the old newsgroups. (or ... gulp ... Reddit.) These are two of the reasons why I think Twitter is useless (at least for me) and am leaning towards quitting the platform, but I digress. If you must, try here and here. 

What does any of this have to do with Puerto Rico? Well, early DNA studies, from back when such things were new and neat, showed something a bit creepy. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down through the female line, skewed Native American. But Y-chromosomes were entirely European and African. The implication is that something awful happened to the entire male Taino population; they were either killed or denied the possibility of procreation. Likely both.

Later studies upheld the results. Here is one from 2014, which sampled 326 people and found mtDNA that was 60% indigenous, 25% African, and 15% European, whereas the male Y-chromosomes were 85% European and 15% African.

Argentina is typically thought of as a European settler offshoot, and with good reason. In 1895, 25% of the population was foreign-born, overwhelmingly from Europe and the Levant. By 1914, that figure was up to 30%. Gross immigration between 1857 and 1914 came to 4.6 million people; net immigration ran about 3.0 million. (Pages 201-02 of the 1914 census.) All this with a population of only 7.9 million in 1914! Add in the Argentine-born children of those 3.0 million post-1857 immigrants, and you have a veritable transformation of the population. You might reasonably expect Argentines to have a similar genetic makeup to, say, white people in the northeastern United States or Ontario.

But there is some evidence that you would be wrong. 

A 2010 study found that 54% of Argentine mtDNA came from indigenous sources while 94% of Y-chromosomes traved to Europe. These results are strikingly close to Puerto Rico (minus the large African admixture on the island) ... shockingly so for a country which received mass immigration from Europe in relatively recent times.

So what explains the result?

Well, first, maybe it is wrong. It is one study of 246 individuals and sampling issues are not small. I suspect that the prevalence of indigenous mtDNA it is more-or-less correct; the result has been corroborated in multiple studies. The Y-chromosome part is dicier.

Second, another study added a wrinkle: half of the indigenous South American DNA appears to have originated outside the modern borders of Argentina. That opens up the possibility that at least half of the result may be driven by migration from Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru. As the authors write, “We did not collect bio-geographic information for most of the donors of our samples, and this is information was not available for most of the data collected from the literature; therefore, some donors could be in reality Native American immigrants (or descents form parents) from neighboring countries.”

Finally, European immigration to Argentina skewed male. (See page 271; it goes to CICRED 1974.) In 1869-1914, 1.7 males arrived for every female. That could explain some of the disproportionate prevalence of European Y-chromosomes compared to mtDNA without the specter of a Puerto Rican style past holocaust.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of native American ancestry in Argentina — and its apparent concentration in maternal ancestral lines — is a bit of surprise! There is a lot we do not know about the Argentine past ...

What is the cost of an independent Canada?

In the last post, I discussed Canada’s mysterious productivity gap with the United States. It appears to have been rather long-lasting. The current explanation is that the gap derives the fact that Canada is a smaller market and firms therefore have trouble reaching the optimal size and specialization. The implication is that had Canada been part of the United States, it would be more productive today. 

But does the gap really exist? Might the whole post be based on a misconception?

Vincent Geloso suggested that the gap may be driven by Quebec, but that does not match the data. The income gap with the U.S. holds for Ontario back to the 1870s. Moreover, we have detailed firm-level data for 1871 which shows that Ontarian firms were about 3-5% less productive than their Michigan equivalents. That is not to say that Quebec wasn’t a laggard! It is to say that the gap, inasmuch as it exists, is not due to backwardness in Quebec or the Maritimes. 

Randy McDonald, however, suggested that we might be asking the wrong question. Maybe the question shouldn’t be “Why are Canadian firms less productive than American firms?” but rather “Are Ontarian firms less productive than firms in the Great Lakes states?”

After all, were Canada part of the United States, then modern Ontario would be the State of West Canada with a northern border somewhere between Lake Nipissing and the Albany River. West Canada would be just another Great Lakes state. If real genuine Ontario has been consistently less productive than the Great Lakes states, then we can conclude that there is some Canadian factor holding firms back. But if it is not, then we might want to doubt the entire premise.  

It is easy enough to get regional GDP per capita for 1997-2016. Now, GDP per capita is a highly imperfect proxy for productivity. It does not account for differences in age structure, labor force participation, or work hours. But it is what I have. The data for the U.S. comes from the BLS. The Ontarian data is converted to U.S. dollars using the OECD PPP exchange rate. 

And so:

Wow! Ontario was ahead of the Great Lakes states in the late 1990s, falling behind only after 2003. It fell behind Michigan only in 2010. This makes me wish for a longer time series. Is 1997 or 2016 the aberration? Has Ontario basically looked like a Great Lakes state since 1871? There is a paper for an enterprising graduate student here. 

In fact, there are two different axes upon which to compare real Ontario with counterfactual West Canada. The intensive axis is productivity. Would workers and firms be more productive in Ontario had they enjoyed the same access to the American market as firms in the Great Lakes states? Did the value of being American, if any, change over time? The question is interesting in-and-of itself, but it also might shed light on the putative benefits of European union.

But there is an extensive axis as well! Before 1879, the problem with being Canadian was that the United States imposed high tariffs on Canadian exports. After 1879, however, the National Policy also imposed very high tariffs on American and British exports to Canada. Canadian firms still lacked access to American markets but they no longer had to worry about American (or British) competition.

If the policy worked, then firms would be created in Canada that otherwise might not have existed. Those firms would require workers. Where would those workers come from? They could come from farms, but the Canadian farm sector was still growing fast. They could come from existing firms, but that would raise wages. In an age of open immigration, high wages should have attracted more immigrants. As the industrial heart of Canada, Ontario should have had more firms and more people than it would have had it been West Canada, just another Great Lakes state. (If I had to guess, I would imagine that Wisconsin might be the best parallel for counterfactual West Canada, despite its closer proximity to Michigan.) 

But did the National Policy work as advertised? And if so, how much bigger is Canada’s population? And what were its costs and benefits relative to (1) the reality of American and Canadian protection; (2) a counterfactual of American protection and Canadian openness (i.e., no National Policy); (3) a counterfactual of American and Canadian openness (i.e., annexation or a North American customs union); and (4) a counterfactual of American protectionism but Canadian openness only to Britain (i.e., some sort imperial federation)?

If anyone knows of a literature, please point me to it! And if there is not a literature, then somebody should get on it! Economic history, like most things, needs more Canadian content.

How Canada stopped being British

Montreal is a fascinating place. And so, in honor of being here, a few random Canadian posts.

You may be aware of the recent Australian citizenship kerfuffle. Basically, the Australian constitution prevents anyone with double-citizenship from holding public office. The exact phrase is, “Is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or citizen of a foreign power.”

That is a little weird. As is the fact that the Australian high court held that it was enough to be eligible for foreign citizenship. Weirder still is that people appear to have only recently realized that this clause exists, and so a number of politicians have had to resign.

But what really struck me was the identity of three of the four “foreign powers” causing the trouble: New Zealand, Canada, and Britain. (Plus Italy.) None of these were foreign in 1901, when the Australian constitution was written. Anyone born in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or Newfoundland was a natural-born British subject. (The link goes to the British Nationality Act of 1914, versions of which also passed in all the Dominions.)

Today, though, Australian law treats all the former dominions (including Ireland, which was grandfathered in at independence) as completely foreign countries. Since 1984, Commonwealth citizens have had no benefits in Australia, although they are still allowed to vote if they arrived before that year. In Canada, Commonwealth citizenship also confers no benefits of which I am aware. In the U.K. itself, there are a few.

So, in honor of the fact that I am in Montreal, when did Canadians stop being British? Well, the short answer is 1946, when Canada passed the Citizenship Act. Except that is not quite right! The separation started earlier and took longer to complete.

The Canadian government first limited the right of Britons to settle in Canada in 1910, under the Canadian Immigration Act of 1910. The act allowed the government to deport immigrants who were “unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada” or who had traveled courtesy of a charitable organization. The first requirement was laser-aimed at black Americans; the second at poor Britons. The act introduced the phrase  “Canadian citizen” which included “a British subject who has Canadian domicile” but which also made it clear that such domicile was not automatic. 

Ironically, the Canadian attempt to discourage Britons from emigrating flipped to encouragement after WW1, when the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 authorized Parliament to spend up to £3 million per year, the equivalent of roughly C$167 million today. Canada wanted Britons, you see, but only the right sort of Briton. 

In 1921, the Canadian Nationals Act defined Canadian nationals as British subjects who were born in Canada or who legally resided in Canada for more than five years. Weirdly, anyone naturalized in Canada would become British subject able to freely move to Britain, but being a British subject did not mean that you automatically had the right to move to Canada. 

So there was a de facto Canadian citizenship in place well before 1946.

Moreover, the special place of British subjects did not disappear after 1946. British subjects could still vote in Canadian elections after only one year of legal residency. In fact, British subjects Commonwealth citizens didn’t lose the right to vote in federal elections until the Canada Elections Act of 1970; even then, they could vote in provincial elections in B.C. and Ontario until 1985, New Brunswick until 1999, and Nova Scotia until 2006. (See pages 12-13.*) 

The slow distancing of Canada from the United Kingdom seems to have been an entirely unplanned thing. I would have thought that Québécois opinion had a lot to do with that, but I would be wrong. London just kept handing off autonomy to its North American colonies bit by bit. Each bit of devolution became harder to reverse. Moreover, London refused to graft any institutional meat onto the rotting bones of its Empire, forestalling any chance that the Commonwealth might turn itself into something like NATO or the E.U. or even a glorified free trade zone.

My current hypothesis is that the key decision was to grant the Dominions the right to set trade policy. Once they had that, they had interest groups that would refuse to reverse integration in that key sector. Add to that a very understandable reluctance to get the colonies to contribute towards their own defense and you had nothing but straight decline into irrelevance. In other words, socialist beer destroyed the British Empire.

Still, it is sort of amazing just how weak the links have become between the U.K. and its settler colonies, the ones that didn’t fight a war of independence.

* Willem Maas, “Access to Electoral Rights Canada,” Access to Electoral Rights Report RSCAS/EUDO-CIT-ER 2015/9 (July 2015). 

Calling McDevite: Qatar versus the Arabian Gulf

By now, most of you have heard of the contretemps in the Arabian Gulf. Just a few notes.

1. The Saudi-Emirati coalition has not put up a blockade. They have closed their territories to all Qatari commerce, but there is ginormous difference between that and a blockade.
2. The Qataris are claiming to play nice by not expelling 250,000 Egyptians. They are not. They have no choice. The Egyptians are about 16% of the foreign population and fill a number of key roles. (Other statistics say there are only 72,000 Egyptians; 5% of the total workforce.) But even if the smaller number is correct, expelling them would be hugely costly. Egyptians are predominantly skilled and semi-skilled. In 1985-2002, 52% of Egyptian emigrants to Qatar were scientists, managers or technicians and 21% of them were university graduates. (Page 252.) The Qataris might decide eventually to retaliate by expelling the Egyptians, but it is not a move that they would take lightly. 
3. It seems obvious that this is related to the recent Trump visit. Sadly, because Trump, we do not know if he explicitly authorized it or merely gave the Saudis the assurance they needed that they could do anything without American pushback. (See our president’s recent tweet.) That said, I am curious as to the exact mechanism previous administrations used to keep Saudi policy aligned with ours. I can guess, but does anyone know?

Three and one-half more years.

Has Trumpian enforcement reduced illegal immigration in 2017? Depends on what you think happened in 2015

Border apprehensions in March 2017 fell a lot compared to March 2016. This is taken as evidence that Trumpian enforcement is scaring off potential migrants.

But as Kevin Drum pointed out, March apprehensions have been falling for a very long time. The red line shows March apprehensions for the corresponding year; the blue line shows February.

Then again, that long fall in March apprehensions stopped in 2011. They were stable until 2015, when they fell again, followed by stability in 2016, and then another big fall this year.

So is it Trump? Well, that depends on what you think happened in 2015. If something happened to start migration falling, then 2016 is the blip and this year is just the resumption of the trend. But February apprehensions (before Trump unleashed the CBP) fell in 2015 but did not rise year.

That makes 2015 seem like a one-off. If 2015 was a one-time drop, then 2017 might also be an independent one-time drop.

So what could have caused a sharp drop in apprehensions in 2015? Take a look at the purple and green lines. Those represent Mexican apprehensions of Central Americans headed north in March and February respectively. Those apprehensions jumped in 2015, when Mexico began to crack down on Central American migrants.

Now, the rise in Mexican apprehensions is less than the fall in American apprehensions, but the Mexican crackdown was brutal and likely dissuaded many people from heading north in the first place. 

Which means that we do have a one-off policy to explain 2015: a one-time upward shift in Mexican enforcement efforts. Mexican apprehensions have since fallen, but that appears to be more likely due to dissuation (as Central Americans realize how much more unfriendly Mexico has become) than a slackening of Mexican efforts. 

To sum: apprehensions fell steadily from 2007 to 2011 due to the Great Recession. They then stabilized until 2015. In 2015, apprehensions shifted downward when Mexico stepped up enforcement, stopping people before they reached the U.S. In 2017 apprehensions shifted downward for a second time, possibly when Trumpian enforcement started to scare people off. 

We won’t know for sure until the numbers for April (and May and June and July) are in. But it seems quite plausible that the current angry policies have reduced migration. Simply drawing a trend line from 2000 to date and declaring no effect can be quite misleading. 

On Cuban immigration, escalators, and helicopter parents

OK, time for me to vent.

President Obama did wrong by suspending the wet-foot Cuba policy. The United States and the Cuban Republic have a special relationship. Seriously, we do. Our histories have been intertwined more than any random pair of neighboring countries since at least 1898, and maybe earlier. Our intervention created Cuba; our internal politics kept it from becoming part of the United States; our intervention propped up governments; and our 1959 divorce was contentious and angry and contentious on both sides in ways that make no sense from purely economic or strategic standpoints. 

It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to treat Cuban migration differently than migration from, say, the Dominican Republic or Mexico or anywhere else. Cuba is, to coin a phrase, “domestic in a foreign sense.”

Sure, yeah, I understand, it was a quid-pro-quo to get Castro on board with normalizing relations. Still was wrong.

FWIW, I am not of Cuban descent and have no family in Cuba.

The London Underground did wrong by forcing people to stand on escalators. It may speed things up for the standees, but their own study showed that it raised times for walkers by 28%. If you’re too goddamned lazy to walk up a bloody escalator, then the extra time is what you should pay.

How about making everybody walk, huh? 

Middle-class parents in the DMV are weird by refusing to let their kids walk around by themselves. Seriously, it is weird. Somehow they have convinced themselves that all of America (let alone the Western world) is like them. But no. Frex this photo of kids scooting with no adults in sight on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn:

Or these kids playing handball in Long Island City:

Or this pic from a playground in the Fairmount section of Philly, ditto, at least for the two older kids in the pic, who (gasp) walked five blocks unsupervised to Roberto Clemente park to play with our bambini:

Seriously, you people. Do what you want with your kids, but don’t kid yourself. It’s weird, out-of-ordinary, strange to hover over a seven-year-old like they were four, let alone somebody nine. Let the kids walk, scoot and bike without you! And do not get me started on the proper age to ride the subway alone ...

Trump immigration raids are for white voters in the Midwest

The Trump administration may or may not be seriously considering mobilizing the National Guard to deport illegal immigrants. (The link goes to the draft memo, not a secondary source.) The reason why the administration would need state governors to agree is that a federal mobilization of the ARNG to enforce domestic law would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. (Again, the link is to the actual text.)

But the Trump administration has begun making spectacular immigration raids. Those raids, however, are not picking up very many people: only 680 in the first week, according to this report. And the deportees are all criminals, whom the Obama administration was already deporting in massive numbers. 

So what is the point? Two possibilities.

1. This is just the start of a massively stepped-up program, including those National Guard mobilizations and lots of new federal spending.
2. This is intended to give Trump voters a sense that something dramatic is being done. The terror that it strikes among immigrants is collateral damage. (Or maybe collateral benefit, from Steve Bannon’s point of view.) 

Considering that this administration appears to be the opposite of a well-oiled machine in terms of management ability, but does seem to be taking the permanent campaign to a new level, I would bet on the latter. Like the infamous taco bowl tweet from the campaign, this is aimed squarely at angry white voters. 

Observatorio Argentino 32: We are not building a wall with Bolivia!

 Many of you may know that the Argentine Republic has a remarkably liberal immigration policy. But it does have an immigration policy; Argentine borders are not open. And now the Macri administration wants to tighten them a little bit.

What will the new decree do? First, it will shorten the time it takes to deport an undocumented migrant convicted of a crime to two months. Second, it will prohibit deportees from returning for at least eight years. Third, it will create joint databases with other Latin American countries to keep track of people with criminal records. Finally, the Ministry of Security will take over border control from the Interior Ministry.

So of course Security Minister Patricia Bullrich would be asked if this meant that Argentina would be building a wall. 

Sometimes you just gotta laugh.

Robert Shiller is a genius, but ...

... this essay is just weird.

I mean, he predicts that there will be a movement to abolish nation states, not from some right-wing spectre of angry foreigners bearing down on the gates, but from citizens clamoring for more free-trade agreements, the demand for which will ... uh ... “stem from daily interactions on computer monitors with foreigners whom we can see are intelligent, decent people – people who happen, through no choice of their own, to be living in poverty. This should lead to better trade agreements, which presuppose the eventual development of orders of magnitude more social insurance to protect people within a country during the transition to a more just global economy.”

I mean, okay. Moral impulses prompted by electronic interactions with faraway poor people will lead to a popular groundswell that will both usher in an era of global free trade and increase social insurance transfers by a factor of ten. Even ignoring for a moment that OECD social spending is already at 22% of GDP and is therefore unlikely to increase to 216%, it is hard to see the theory of human behavior that causes people with sympathy for faraway poor people to demand more trade with them. 

The irony? Shiller has done so much to demolish the idiocy of using some imaginary homo economicus to set policy. But now, suddenly, homo economicus is back and plotting revolution in the most off-base essay I have read in a very long time. 

Filed under 2016 election for lack of a better place. After all, without the current election I would not have bothered to write this response. 

What does “bias” mean?

The Washington Post publicizes a lot of good political science these days. (Thank you, Mr. Bezos!) They recently ran a column entitled, “Americans aren’t biased against Latino immigration. Here’s what they actually fear.” 

Short version: Morris Levy (USC) and Matthew Wright (American) surveyed a bunch of white Californians about their attitude towards immigration. They humanized their questions by asking the respondents about a particular individual, either a Mexican immigrant named “Juan,”  a Chinese immigrant named “Yuan,” or a German immigrant named “Johan.” In addition, half of all respondents were told that the immigrant they read about had lived in the United States for two years. The other half were also told that Juan/Yuan/Johan speaks English and has worked steadily as a waiter.

Here is what they found:

In other words, when there was no information about the immigrant, more white Californians supported legalization when thinking about somebody from Europe or China than from Mexico. But if they were told that the immigrant worked and spoke English, the gap disappeared.

The authors then conclude, “Discrimination against Latinos may grow not from hostility against an ethnic ‘outgroup,’ but rather stereotypes about whether they will contribute to the United States or become a burden.”

It’s a neat result, but I don’t understand the conclusion. They find that when told a male immigrant has assimilated, white Californians don’t care about his ethnic background. But they also find that without any information, Californians assume that Mexicans are much less likely to assimilate than other immigrants. They conclude that people stereotype Mexican immigrants as less educated and more likely to become a public burden. 

That is possible. But there is another explanation. They found that white people in California don’t consider Mexicans impossible to assimilate. But their results are consistent with the hypothesis that white people consider Mexicans to be intrinsically harder for the American melting pot to melt. 

Wouldn’t that make them an ethnic outgroup?

Hillary won’t cut deportations

 I know, she made some radical sounding promises! 

But they ain’t radical. Consider the statistics for 2015. In that year, the U.S. deported 235,413 people. 

Of those, 165,935 were apprehended at the border or near ports of entry. Clinton has not promised to do anything about that, unless the apprehended are children. I don’t know how many children were deported in 2015, but I do know that only 7,643 unaccompanied children were deported between 2012 and 2015. 

Of the 69,478 deportees apprehended away from the border or ports of entry, fully 63,539 were previously convicted of a crime. Of those, 41,516 were convicted felons. (Page 5.) 

In other words, Hillary’s promise would cut deportations by at most 29,666 people, if you assume that all the children deported between 2012 and 2015 were both apprehended at the border and deported only in the 2015. That would give you a 12% cut in deportations, which is less than earth-shattering.

In fact, she said only criminals in the debate, not violent criminals. So we can include people with multiple misdemeanors. We’re now down to about 14,658 people who would be spared deportation ... a cut of 6%. And if you take the strictest definition of non-criminal interior deportations (which is what ICE uses, see page 5) you are talking only 5,942 people, implying a cut of less than 3%.

Even you make the same ridiculous assumption about child deportees, you get a reduction of less than 6%. A more realistic assumption (of, say, 3000 child deportations in 2015, all from the border) gets you a 4% cut in deportations under President Clinton. So call it a 4%-6% cut.

Open borders, that is not. As long as Mexico continues to keep Central Americans away from the border, it won’t even lead to another wave of entries. 

Trump will demonize her proclamation to avoid deporting non-criminals, of course. (Shudder.) But she will be able to accurately point out that we are talking about risible numbers of people. Whether that will make a difference, I have no idea.

This is not going to get Mexico to pay for the wall

 Well, now we know Trump’s big leverage over Mexico: force people to show ID in order to make money transfers.

Really, that’s it. That’s the big idea. So let’s briefly unpack it.

First, it would take some time. The Trump administration would need to go through the regulatory process. So this “Day 3” bullshit it just that. 

Second, it would then immediately hit the courts under multiple grounds, not least NAFTA. So more delays.

Third, let’s say it happens. Suddenly, undocumented immigrants can’t make money transfers via Western Union. Well, they would immediately move towards other means. And illegal transfer organizations would spring up. Bitcoin? Well, yes, but as this World Bank report from 2005 discusses, also “ethnic stores, travel agencies, moneychangers, hawala-type systems, courier services, hand-delivery, etc.” Some of which would, in 2017, use Bitcoin to actually send the money. 

This would all raise costs for the migrants sending money home, but it would not stop the flow. So the Trump administration would have to go after them. That can be done, but more delays. (Here Carlos will mention that the administration will be facing massive bureaucratic pushback, slowing things further.) 

At this point the Mexican government has been chuckling at Washington’s blundering for about two year. But finally, somehow, the screws go in. Then what?

Well, to figure out what the Mexican government will do, you need to look at Mexican politics. Half of all remittances go to eight states. Two of them are the D.F. and Mexico State. Those are rich places; no elected officials are going to come under pressure if remittances dry up. Of the top-ten states, few households receive remittances: 10% in Michoacán and Guanajuato; 7% in Guerrero. These households would take roughly a 15% hit to their incomes, with some knock-on effects for local economies. (Page 115.) One good counterfactual might be the Great Recession, which put a big brake on remittances from the United States.  This Banxico paper shows the results. They were unpleasant.

But would they be so unpleasant as to get the Mexican government to pay to avoid them? Uh ... no. First, it is not like Mexican governments are bending over backwards to address rural poverty now. Second, even if all the affected households decided to vote against the incumbent government, the swing would be less than 5%. Third, the swing by people not affected will be more, since, you know, they would be the ones paying the taxes to build the border wall they don’t want.

Note that the above completely avoids any Mexican nationalism. Which is, in fact, a thing and means that no government would pay. So we are back to cancelling NAFTA and ... yes, this is in the proposal ... raising visa fees. Because “even a small increase in visa fees would pay for the wall.”

OK. The U.S. issued 1.5 million non-immigrant visas to Mexicans (including border crossing cards) and 82,476 immigrant visas. Let’s say the U.S. issued $17 billion in 30-year bonds to pay for the wall. You could finance the resulting $804 million annual expense by raising visa fees a mere $502 per visa. A small increase, indeed. I mean, it is possible that demand might go down a tad if the modal visa fee went from $160 to $662.

I am wasting my time, obviously.

Powerful

 Watch this.

What if the United States bordered Russia instead of Mexico?

The United Kingdom has been in the midst of a giant immigration backlash prompted by the net arrival of roughly 1.4 million Eastern Europeans since 2004. From my perspective, that was surprising. After all, the Eastern Europeans are white and Christian or post-Christian. Don’t we all know that the reason the United States — or at least Trump supporters — gets all wiggy about Mexican immigration is because most Mexicans don’t look “white”?

Well, do we really know that?

There is evidence that racial phenotypes have had a strong impact on Mexican-Americans. Before 1945, many southwestern states (well, Texas) treated Mexican-Americans as black for the purposes of segregation. The historic impact of that has been under-studied. There is evidence, however, that once the legal barriers fell away in the late 1940s and 1950s, Mexican-Americans began moving into the “white” category, both de jure and de facto ... until the 1970s and the advent of mass immigration from Mexico.

At that point, native-born whites began to react against the arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrants. But because those immigrants were (in most but not all cases) phenotypically different, native-born Anglos began to discriminate against anyone who looked like the new immigrants. That in turn made race more salient in the lives of native-born Mexican-Americans and impeded assimilation. This is the finding advanced by Tomás Jiménez in his book. (Discussed here in the context of Reihan Salam’s misinterpretation of Jiménez’s results.)

So there is evidence that prejudice against immigrants hits most second, some third, and a few fourth-generation Mexican-Americans.* 

But imagine for a moment that the United States bordered Russia to the south, instead of Mexico. Is there any evidence that Americans would have reacted better to the net arrival of 12 million Russian-speakers between 1970 and 2015? Russia is a violent and corrupt country. Assuming (reasonably) that a Russia right next to the United States would have neither nuclear weapons nor imperial ambitions, it is not at all clear to me that the anti-immigration reaction right now would be any less were most of the immigrants pale-skinned, blond-haired Russians.**

Rather, the difference would be that native-born Russian-Americans would be far less likely to be bothered by anti-immigrant sentiments than native-born Mexican-Americans. Not because the Russian-Americans would be any different than the Mexican-Americans in their underlying attitude. Rather, native-born Russian-Americans, being clearly white and indistinguishable from other white people, would not face day-to-day prejudice imposed upon them by the reaction of non-Russians to the presence of their newly-arrived cousins. 

In short, in that world, Trumpism might be stronger. 

Would reality stop Donald Trump on the border?

 Christie endorsed Trump? I am honestly and without hyperbole shocked.

An incoming Trump administration would suddenly realize that Mexican governments are in general quite helpful to the United States. Consider immigration. Two years ago, the U.S. confronted a wave of migration fleeing the violence in Central America. Then it stopped. Why? Well:

Effectively, Mexico took over border security for the United States. Some details. (The source is biased.) Would that make Mr. Trump think twice about diplomatic hardball?

Conversely, there are some worrying signs that the Central American exodus is overwhelming Mexican efforts:

If there is a another migration wave in the summer, would it help Trump in the general? I think not, to be honest. (I actually have some doubts that there will be all that large a wave.) But it would make an ugly election even uglier.

Reihan Salam needs to read the papers he cites

 I am generally in sympathy with Reihan Salam. (DISCLOSURE: I went to high school with his older sister, Rifat.) He’s an old-fashioned non-crazy conservative. I am not, but I sympathize with his pro-natalist and mildly-nationalist priors. I certainly support his skepticism about  government intervention and his arguments against zoning laws. And he wants to abolish Stuyvesant! What’s not to like?

But sometimes the poor guy just has to twist himself into knots in order to convince himself that the “conservative movement” to which he’s hitched his professional wagon isn’t batshit crazy. You can see him attempting to justify the recent nativist turn in the GOP here. 

Much of Salam’s article isn’t crazy. In fact, the entire first section is quite well argued. He says that the rise of Donald Trump is troubling and that the Republican leadership has no idea how to discuss immigration in an intelligent way.

If he had said the following in the second section I might disagree with the conclusion but not the analysis:

1. Admitting poor immigrants is not in the national interest;
2. It’s perfectly fine for Americans to want lower levels of immigration for whatever reason;
3. The current immigration backlash ain’t got nothing on the events of 1917-31, which gave us such gems as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act and mob killings of Filipinos;
4. So the GOP should favor a Canada-style system with a lower overall cap and strict employment enforcement.

But that wasn’t the argument that Reihan made in the second section. Rather, his piece suddenly made a 90-degree turn and started to argue that the descendants of the post-1965 wave of immigration aren’t following the path of their predecessors from the Ellis Island wave.

Lest I be accused of misrepresenting his argument, let me quote him: “Why haven’t less-skilled immigrants followed the path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s?”

His argument has two parts: one about economic mobility, the other about social assimilation. I’m going to focus on social assimilation, which Reihan states is happening much more slowly for current immigrants than for their European predecessors. We’ll briefly discuss the economics at the end.

1. Reihan Salam’s argument

One what does Reihan blame this alleged slow assimilation? Well, he asserts, “The most important reason that today’s immigrants have had such a different trajectory from those of earlier eras is that in 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that sharply curtailed immigration.”

Reihan goes on to talk about the Italians, who did indeed arrive in a single relatively short wave. (See the above figure.) Reihan: “The end of immigrant replenishment led to sharp increases in inter-ethnic marriages for Italian Americans and other white ethnics. Mexican Americans, in contrast, are part of an ethnic community that until recently was constantly being replenished by new Mexican arrivals, which in turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of Mexican identity.” The, same, he says, is happening to other goups. “Over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply.”

In other words, the reason behind the alleged difference between earlier immigration waves and the current one is that the current ones are continuously replenished by new immigrants. His sources are a book by Tomás Jiménez (Stanford) and a 2007 article by Zhenchao Qian (Ohio State) and Daniel Lichter (Cornell). Jiménez has an article that summarizes his main findings here.

And now comes the fisking you’ve all awaited. It is not that Jiménez, Qian and Lichter are bad scholars. They are great scholars. (Particularly Jiménez.) Reihan just gets their work wrong.

In fact, he gets their work so wrong that it’s hard to believe that he read them. (Rifat is a good sociologist — can I blame her for not schooling her little brother?)

2. Social assimilation

Let’s start with Jiménez. Jiménez has elsewhere pointed out the astonishingly high outmarriage rates of Mexican-Americans! Moreover, Jiménez points out that those outmarriage rates have risen for second and third-generation Mexican-Americans, despite the continual waves of new immigration. In other words, Mexican exogamy has proven resilient to replenishment.

Jiménez’s argument is that replenishment inflames native-born non-Mexican irritation at new Mexican arrivals, which spills over into over into continued prejudice directed at native-born Mexican-Americans. Let me quote Jiménez’s three conclusions:

1. “First, non-Mexicans’ expressions of nativism sharpen inter-group boundaries.” Reihan could have said that immigration makes natives act like racist basterds, and it is a bad thing to be a racist basterd, so to discourage racist basterdism we should cut immigration. That is a perfectly legitimate argument. But it makes the GOP base look bad, so Reihan doesn’t make it.
2. “Second, immigrant replenishment bolsters the salience of race in the lives of respondents. In a context of heavy Mexican immigration, non-Mexicans use racial markers as proxies for a combination of ancestry, nativity, and legal status.” Again, this makes the GOP look bad, so Reihan misrepresents Jiménez’s argument.
3. “Finally, Mexican-immigrant replenishment sharpens intra-group boundaries by informing the criteria for ‘authentic’ expressions of ethnic identity. Mexican immigrants and the young second generation have come to define and police ‘Mexicanness,’ which entails, at the very least, speaking Spanish and having non-Anglo American tastes. Mexican immigrants and young second-generation individuals call into question respondents’ authenticity for not being able to openly display the cultural characteristics that might ‘prove’ their ethnic authenticity. Mexican Americans respond to these boundaries by attempting to avoid them altogether, and by providing a corrective to those who impose such boundaries. Respondents attempt to avoid inter-group boundaries by emphasizing their American national identity.” And that italicized conclusion is the opposite of what Reihan implies Jiménez argues.

Aaargh!

To be fair, Jiménez does argue that Mexican migration is unlike the Ellis Island waves that produced the Brooklyn I grew up in. But Jiménez is not arguing that there is anything unprecedented about the continuing stream of Mexican migration. Rather, he explicitly points out that both the Germans and the Irish immigrated in century-long waves; if you want historical parallels to Mexican-Americans, those two groups are the ones you should look to. And if you wanna talk about hard-to-assimilate waves of endless immigration, by a people who had no reluctance to use politics to cram multiculturalism down the throats of hard-working English-speaking Americans, then you really wanna look at the Germans. (You gotta scroll down at the link for the relevant information.)

Reihan writes, however, as if the Italians were the first immigrant group to get off the boat in America.

Hey, Reihan’s from Brooklyn, I’m from Brooklyn, to some extent it’s understandable. I went to college honestly believing that a third of all the white people in America were of Italian descent. I mean this literally: my friend Dev Patnaik cracked open an encyclopedia and disabused me of that notion. (For some reason, I knew that my personal experience about the number of Jewish-Americans was not representative, but it never occurred to me that this might also be true of the cujines.) I completely get why Reihan might assume that the Italian experience is the normal expected baseline for the American immigrant experience.

But I was 18 and a college freshman. Salam is 36 and a major public intellectual.

Now let’s move on to Qian and Lichter’s findings. Compare column (1) and column (2) below. For people aged 20-34, intermarriages among native-born Asian-American men fell from 50% to 46%, while intermarriages among Asian-American women rose from 58% to 60%.

This is not the decline Salam writes about.

Moreover, column (2) excludes multiracial people. If you classify anyone who checks off the boxes as half-white as minority — i.e., you classify people the way the 1990 census did — you would compare column (1) and column (4) and find that between 1990 and 2000 interracial marriages for native-born Asian-American men rose from 50% to 55% and for women from 58% to 67%.

Nor do Qian and Lichter believe that intermarriage rates have declined for Latinos. They spell out why on page 85, where they attempt to account for confounding demographic shifts. Bottom line: “Intermarriage with whites increased significantly among native-born Asian Americans and Hispanics, by 36 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Significantly, these multivariate results are different from the modest 1990s’ declines in intermarriage reported in Table 2.”

Heck, Qian and Lichter don’t even find a decline in intermarrige for foreign-born Asian-Americans! Page 86: “Intermarriage ratios with native-born whites declined by 19 percent for foreign-born Hispanics, from 27 to 22, and increased by only 11 percent for foreign-born Asians, from 28 to 31, during the 1990s.” It is true that Qian and Lichter find the increase in intermarriage rates for foreign-born Asians smaller than they would have expected given the increase in the number of foreign-born Asians: in other words, they did find that foreign-born Asian-Americans became somewhat less likely to marry non-Asian native-born Americans between 1990 and 2000 when you control for everything else. But that seems a pretty small reed upon which to argue that assimilation slowed down during the 1990s.

3. Economic mobility

Reihan also talks about the skill level of immigrants and their economic success, but he makes no explicit time-series comparisons. All he does is point out that immigrants are disproportionately poor after which he asks, “Why haven’t recent less-skilled immigrants followed the path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s?”

But that question makes no sense unless and until you establish that current immigrant waves are moving up the occupational and wage ladder more slowly than previous waves! Reihan does not do this. So I don’t have that much to say, other than that there is in fact a big literature on these issues. A not-bad place to start. For some economic history on the Ellis Island wave, see here. For even better economic history on the same topic, see this paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan and Katherine Eriksson. For a broader look at current assimilation, see this piece by the very same Tomás Jiménez. For a complex long-term view, see this 2006 study by Jacob Vigdor (currently at the University of Washington). See also this NBER chapter on Mexican-Americans. Finally, this is a great short book comparing Italians from 1900 with Mexican migrants today.

Ironically, that latter three provide some support for Reihan’s underlying argument. To which, I repeat, I have some sympathy and could be convinced to support.

4. Summing up

In short, I am disappointed. Immigration restriction is a reasonable position. And I generally like Salam’s positions. Repeal zoning! Tax the childless! Good stuff, logical, makes America better. But I am saddened by this piece. It misrepresents facts in order to allow Salam to call for the Republican Party to address a cultural assimilation crisis that does not exist, except inasmuch as immigration is generating a native-born white backlash.

There is nothing wrong with the GOP being the party of immigration restriction. There is a lot wrong with the insane racist way that immigration restriction has come out in the 2016 primary race. Maybe you can justify the insanity, but Reihan only does so by misrepresenting the works he cites. For a broader takedown, using sources that Reihan doesn’t cite, see Alex Nowrasteh here.

I wag my finger at you, Reihan Salam of Brooklyn! Or in our shared old school vernacular, “You serious, B? Gedouttahere.”

Refugees in Germany: lessons from 1945?

 As the New York Times notes this morning, Germany is being inundated with Syrian refugees. And while many of them are highly educated, most of them are not. The median refugee is a young Arabic-speaking man with limited job skills that are not up to German standards. 

This has happened to Germany before. After World War 2, the Soviets transferred large chunks of eastern Germany to the USSR and the Polish People’s Republic. Czechoslovakia and Hungary also expelled their German populations. Within two years, more than 7.0 million people had been expelled to what later became West Germany; ultimately 8.5 million refugees would settle there. (Another 3.5 million settled in the Soviet Zone.) 

The entire resettlement was chaotic, with refugees settling down wherever the Western occupation authorities decided to set up camps. These camps were located wherever it was most convenient. In the words of the U.S. military government: “Expellees of Eastern Europe have been settled, not where their skills could be best utilized, but in accordance with the availability of food and housing to meet their needs. Thus, labor supply is often remote from the centers of labor demand ... Most of these have been placed without regard to their skills, and many where there is no demand or material for them to pursue their trades.” Despite their awareness of the problem, American officials were more afraid of further disruptive population movements than they were of mass unemployment: they proceeded to deploy military forces along state lines to prevent refugees from moving. 

By 1948, refugees made up 25% of the population of Lower Saxony but only 8% of neighboring Nordrhein-Westfalen. Refugees were kept out of the cities of Bremen and Hamburg. Remarkably, there was no mass population redistribution once the situation settled down after 1948: as late as 1969, the distribution of the refugees had barely budged.

So what happened? Michael Peters (LSE) looked into the data and found something fascinating. Not unexpectedly, the former easterners were crowded into low-skilled  jobs: by 1960, almost 45% of the refugees worked in unskilled occupations, as opposed to only 18% of the same age cohorts of Western natives. (Page 21.) Also not unexpectedly, refugees aged 20 and older in 1945 earned about 10% less than natives in 1961 and 6% less than natives as late as 1970. (Pages 22-23.) Two-thirds of that difference was due to refugees being shunted into lower-wage occupations, rather than earning less than a native at the same job.

OK, fine, whatever. But then it gets weird. Sure, the refugees didn’t close the wage gap after even a quarter-century. But wages grew much faster in the unskilled occupations they flooded into than in other occupations. (Tables 9 and 11 on pages 24 and 26.) A 10% higher refugee share in 1950 increases wages by about 5% in 1975. 

Basically, firms in refugee-rich counties picked technologies that unskilled workers could learn to use on the job. Those workers then got better as they worked ... and their employers got better at deploying technologies suited to their (lack of) skills. The individual refugees never recovered from the trauma of their separation. But they led to technological innovation that benefitted those low down on the ladder.

So does this have any bearing on the current refugee inflow? Sadly, probably not. The first thing to note is that the distribution of human capital was about the same for the refugees and the natives. Circumstances pushed the refugees into unskilled jobs. They may have therefore been more equipped to learn on the job and help their employers innovate than a less skilled refugee wave would have been.

The second thing to note is times have indeed changed: deskilling might have been relatively easy to do in an industrial sector with no computers, but harder to carry out today, where (at least in theory) computer-controlled machines can purely substitute for labor. 

Finally, discrimination was minor for the earlier wave. Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia might have been different from the rest of Germany, but they were not Syria.

In short, the work opens up the possibility that the influx of unskilled refugees might unleash a wave of income-inequality-reducing innovation, even if the refugees themselves never catch up to the natives. But it only opens the possibility. There are, sadly, too many reasons to believe that this smaller influx will end less happily than the giant migration of 70 years ago.

Syrians to South America?

 Here is a question for you: why aren’t flights from the Middle East to South America crowded with Syrian refugees?

On paper, most of the Southern Cone countries have remarkably liberal immigration regimes. Start with Argentina. Refugees are automatically accorded two years of residency and receive legal representation. (See the 2010 Migration Act.) Now, the law is not as liberal as American activists would have you believe: undocumented migrants can still be deported (page 17), but the Argentine government has explicitly opened its doors to Syrian migration. Uruguayan immigration law is even more liberal than Argentine. All you need to do to migrate to Uruguay is demonstrate an income stream of $500 per month. After that, naturalization comes within a few years. Brazil has a liberal new refugee law. 

The problem isn’t cost. A ticket costs around $800, rather less than the monetary cost of making it overseas to Europe. 

But in practice, all three countries are pretty much closed.

Start with the official Argentine program for Syrian refugees. The refugees need to have links to an Argentine sponsor either through family ties (out the fourth generation) or via a “pre-existing personal relationship based on whatever legal, reasonable, and justifiable reason: family, social, educational, work, etcetera.” 

Unless a Syrian in a camp somewhere can demonstrate a tangible documented link with somebody in the Argentine Republic, then they do not get a visa. This policy lets Buenos Aires claim that the doors are open while actually keeping them firmly shut. 

The policy may change, depending on how seriously Argentine authorities take the definition of a family link. Supposedly, 4 million Argentines trace some ancestry to Syria. In reality, no. In the peak years of 1897-1913, net migration from Syria came to about 103,000. To get from that to 4 million you have to assume almost total exogamy, which is not likely. (For the pedantic: if you assume the same birthrates as the general Argentine population, a generation of 35 years, and total exogamy, then about 3.4 million Argentines should have some “Syrian” ancestry by now.)

Moreover, a 1936 census registered only 11.2% of the Syrian-born residents of Buenos Aires as Muslim. (Page 17, once again.) Some of that is surely conversion, but it also implies that the “Syrians” came much more from Lebanon than from Syria.  

Nor is this policy in violation of Argentine refugee law. Article 10 exempts anyone under U.N. protection. Article 11 exempts anyone who has “voluntarily settled inside or outside the country which he left owing to fear of persecution.” Depending on the definition of “voluntarily settled,” that could include precisely every Syrian refugee. It certainly includes anyone in a UNHCR camp. Only a few hundred people have escaped under this not-so-generous regime. 

Uruguay is worse. After the country took in a whopping 42 refugee families, a counterreaction set in, and the door are now firmly shut. In theory, the country has pledged to admit ... wait for it ... 120. Now, Uruguayan law opens up an interesting way from European countries to send their unwanted refugees to Uruguay: give them an airplane ticket and a $500 per month stipend. That said, given what happened with the 42 refugees the law would be changed right quick if a European government tried to take advantage of it. 

Chile, meanwhile, has a liberal refugee law that only considers people who manage to make it to Chilean territory. So no visa for that plane ticket from Dubai. 

And then there is Brazil, which had settled 1,740 Syrian refugees as of March, and 2,077 as of this month. That is nice, but still a very small number. The Brazilian issue is that the bureaucracy is slow, so even without formal quotas few applications get processed. (The Brazilians also exempt anyone under U.N. protection.) It is probably the most open, but still not enough for a mass exodus.

The Brazilian case shows how much bureaucracy can turn an ostensibly open process into a closed one. The Mexican government is coming under a surprising amount of domestic pressure to accept 10,000 refugees. I bet there will even be a bill. And it will sound good.

But the devil will be in the details. Do not wait for Latin America to open its doors in any serious way.

Vox fails to defend open borders

 Removing all immigration restrictions is a pretty fringe idea. There are reasons for that, as a careful reading of this defense at Vox will show. Dylan Matthews is trying to justify an ideological belief by claiming that indulging it will have no costs on anyone, and what costs it does have can be compensated, and anyway those costs don’t matter because the gains to non-Americans are so much greater.

He makes those second two points because his claim that there are no costs is complete bullshit.

Some Vox  columnists have a skill at making me recoil from positions I hold. That is some sort of talent. 

Is it worth fisking the article? I will, but only if there is demand.

Recommended reading on migration

Three recommendations. First, for those of you with a casual interest in the topic, there is a very brief review paper by Joseph Ferrie (Northwestern) and Timothy Hatton (Essex) on the last two centuries of international migration. (The paper actually covers the last four centuries, although it moves quickly over the 17th and 18th centuries.)

Second, Paul Collier’s new book, Exodus. It is a very well-written and thought-provoking brief in favor of immigration restrictions. If you click the link, it will take you to multiple reviews of the book. Most of the negative ones are tendentious and a little strange. This fellow here argues that countries should abandon all income redistribution in order to facilitate open borders. In that, he concedes Collier’s main argument, which is precisely that unlimited immigration could destroy the national sentiments that underpin liberal democracies. (Collier has a fascinating discussion of the theoretical circumstances under which this might happen; it is not a blanket argument. A blanket argument would obviously be stupid.) Nathan Smith at Open Borders starts by conceding Collier’s main point and calling for countries to impose special taxes on migrants instead of preventing their entry. (As an American, I recoil at that idea: differential taxation based on birthplace is contrary to the 14th Amendment. It is an odd suggestion for a proponent of open borders.) He follows up by saying that democracy is bad as part of an attack on Why Nations Fail, by Jim Robinson and Daron Acemoglu.To be fair, I am not sure that he realizes that he is arguing that democracy is bad. (I should mention that Jim Robinson is a friend.) Kenan Malik argues against a caricature of the book. One of the best parts about Exodus is how Collier lays down the conditions under which a diaspora will grow indefinitely and those under which it will not. Malik, however, writes, “A key argument in Exodus is that the levels both of migration and of problems created by it are linked to the size of diasporas.” Well, sometimes! But not always. I was left unclear what troubled Malik, other than that Collier is wrong about Great Britain. (Not being British, I can’t say, although Collier explicitly gives large shout-outs to the U.S. and Canada for our ability to assimilate immigrants.)

Finally, here is an incredible bit of investigative reporting into a Nigerian human trafficking ring. It is horrifying ... and quite amazing how the reporters made their escape.

Don’t count on the end of Mexican emigration

A month back, we argued that the job and wage data in Mexico implied that when U.S. job growth picks back up, so will immigration from Mexico. Jobs are plentiful in Mexico these days, but wages are low: the reason for low emigration, in that view, is the lack of American demand rather a lack of Mexican supply.

It appears as though survey results from Pew are consistent with that view.

Teddy Roosevelt and Spanish labor unions save Barbados, hate Barbadians!

  I don’t have a whole lot of emotional attachment to the madre patria, not where it counts.  After all, the parliament has passed a law giving the descendents of Civil War refugees the option to apply for a passport.  Yet I have zero desire to do it.  No, I have a negative reaction to doing it.  In other words, at the level where it counts, my people are the people of the United States of America.

But sometimes I can’t resist borrowing a phrase from my good friend (and great American) Carlos Yu:  “Oh, my peoples.” The story of the labor troubles on the Panama Canal is one of those times.

 
In 1904, the United States began construction of the Panama Canal in earnest.  Problem was, it needed laborers.  Lots of laborers.  Preferably cheap laborers, which ruled out hiring Panamanians.  (The Canal labor force would peak at more than a quarter of Panama’s economically active population.  Wage rates would have skyrocketed, even had that many people been interested in killing themselves to dig a big ditch ... which they were not.)  So the U.S. turned to the same place from which the earlier French canal effort had got its workers:  Jamaica.  Problem was, the Jamaican government remembered the disaster that was the repatriation of Jamaican workers after the French canal effort collapsed in 1889.  The Crown Colony government insisted that the Americans guarantee repatriation costs for any and all workers.  That ended the idea of using Jamaican labor; ultimately, only 47 worked on the Canal.

At this point the Barbadians, and later the Spanish, enter the story.

With Jamaica out, the Isthmian Canal Commission began recruiting in Barbados.  The first groups of Barbadians to arrive, however, proved too malnourished to accomplish their assigned tasks. “Not only do they seem to be disqualified by lack of actual vitality, but their disposition to labor seems to be as frail as their bodily strength.”   Governor Stevens himself wrote, “I have no hesitancy in saying that the West Indian Negro is about the poorest excuse for a laborer I have ever been up against in thirty-five years of experience.”  This should not have been surprising to anyone who knew about conditions on the island at the time, but we’re talking about Americans.  (Insert the first “oh, my people.”)  After bringing in almost 10,000 Barbadians, the Canal Zone management was disappointed with the results.

The Isthmian Canal Commission now decided to turn to, in the words of a Commission official, the “semi-white foreigner (Dago).”  Between 1906 and 1908, the Isthmian Canal Commission hired 8,000 Spanish workers.  It paid them twice what it paid Barbadians.  Now, it would be entirely reasonable to conclude that this was due to racism, but the Americans running the show weren’t particularly enamored of “dagoes.”  Rather, the higher salary was what they needed to offer to get people to leave the madre patria for Panama, and the Americans were willing to pay it because the Spanish were physically stronger and more robust than the half-starved Barbadians. 

The Spanish, however, were also the heirs to Spain’s militant labor tradition.  (Here is where the second “oh, my people” comes in.)  Spanish workers started the first major strike on the Canal in 1907.  The United States tried to use Italians to break the strike, but it didn’t work; they could only attract a total of 1,941 in 1906-07, after which they received no more.  So the American managers used the Barbadians to restrain the Spanish.  As one foreman wrote, “I could keep them both on their metal by rivalry between the two.”  The result, unsurprisingly, was an all-out riot between Spanish and Barbadian workers in 1909.  

Spanish militancy led the Canal Zone to replace Spanish workers by any means necessary.  The Americans pretty quickly figured out that Barbadian productivity rapidly rose to Spanish levels with access to enough calories.  The head of the Canal effort, a racist Brooklynite named George Goethals, reduced the work day from ten hours to nine in 1907, which lowered exhaustion, and required all workers to purchase three full meal tickets every day.  Previously, many Barbadian workers had chosen to subsist on sugar cane in order to save more money to send home — understandable, considering that meal tickets cost 9¢ ($1.98 in today’s money) and they earned only 68¢ for a nine-hour day, but terrible for their health and energy levels.  Add to that the fact that American foremen (with some head-banging from higher management, regardless of their own retrograde racial attitudes) learned to treat the Barbadians with some modicum of respect, and you can predict the result:  by 1909, the Americans were able to get the same work for less cash from the Barbadians, and stopped hiring Spaniards. 

The Spanish did not go quietly.  A violent wave of strikes rocked the Canal Zone in 1911 and 1912.  But the result was predictable.  (Oh, my peoples.)  The strikes ended with the complete replacement of Spanish labor by West Indians, mostly from Barbados.   By 1913, the Isthmian Canal Commission had brought in 19,900 Barbadians, not including the many women who followed their husbands and a continuing (if less well-recorded) migration as construction work continued after the Panama Canal’s offical opening in 1914.  In fact, the Canal would not be fully open to commercial traffic until 1920.

The ultimate migration turned out to be much bigger than 19,900.  In 1901, Barbados had a population of 195,558.  In 1921, it had a population of only 156,744.  Extrapolating from existing birth and death rates, the population of the island should have been 220,412 in 1921, implying a net outmigration of 64,000 people.  This obviously had massive effects on Panama (which had a population of only 450,000 in 1921, not including the Canal Zone) ... but what did it do to Barbados? 

Truth be told, I do not know for sure, but I have a strong guess, which will have to wait for a later post.  While we’re waiting, what do you think?

Immigration and assimilation in Venezuela

  Still beat down under the weather.  Ugh.  This is awful.  The congestion.  The congestion.  This is not a recent picture.

 
But Randy McDonald asked me about immigration to Venezuela, so I’ll talk a little about immigration to Venezuela.  Venezuela has experienced several waves of immigration, but the big ones from Europe came in the 1950s and the 1970s.  In the 1950s, Europeans migrated because of the oil boom.  Roughly 450,000 people acquired legal permanent residence during this wave.  The new democratic government in 1958 restricted migration (not unsurprisingly) and net migration turned negative during the period.  Then in 1973, with the second oil boom, immigration again spiked upwards.  By 1976, Venezuela had 270,000 resident Spaniards, 223,000 Italians, and 107,000 Portuguese.  Now, these numbers have to be interpreted carefully:  they also include, for example, 79,672 Americans, most of whom did not settle down permanently.  Nor are the figures comparable with the permanent residency figures also presented above.  But they are what we have. 

In 1976, at its peak, the various European nationalities (counting only those born overseas, not their Venezuelan-born children) made up about 3 percent of Venezuela’s then-population of 13.1 million.  It was a large migration, but it wasn’t transformative.  On the other hand, it did transform the nature of the country’s elites.  The European migrants were remarkably successful, going on to found myriads of small businesses.  In fact, it has been the descendents of those migrants, mostly Italian, who suffered the most from the government’s recent nationalization of the oil service companies.  (More on that in another post, when I’m feeling better.) 

One interesting question about immigration is:  how quickly (if at all) do the children of immigrants lose the cultural predilections of their parents?  Jewish-Americans, for example, continue to vote Democratic at far higher numbers than their income or occupational status would predict.  Does this apply to Venezuelans? 

Francisco Rodríguez of Wesleyan and Rodrigo Wagner, a grad student here at Harvard, have used the Maisanta list to ask just that question.  Maisanta, you’ll recall, was a list published by the Venezuelan government containing the names of everyone who had signed a 2004 recall petition against Hugo Chávez.  The list contained ID numbers, which can be cross-referenced against income data in the Venezuelan Social Security Institute database.  They then used people’s surnames to trace them back to various Italian regions.  They had to eliminate non-regionally-specific surnbames like Rossi, Russo, Ferrari, Esposito, Bianchi, Romano, and Colombo.  So, given all the potential objections to the methodology, what did they find?

Nothing.  There is no relationship between the political predilections of their parents’ region-of-origin in Italy and the predilections of Italian-Venezuelan voters today.  Inasmuch as Italian-Venezuelans have overwhelmingly achieved middle and upper-class status in Venezuela, they have also assimilated to the political predilections of those groups. 

The Middle Passage

Is a nation more like a business or a family?

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, I’ll point out the obvious and confirm that the above picture is not from Trinidad.  It is, however, one zip code over from the old stomping grounds of Vincent Chase and the boys.  More relevantly, it’s in the middle of one of the largest Trinidadian communities in North America.

So, yeah, this post is about emigration.  The World Bank estimates that 361,596 Trinidadians live outside the two islands.  That number is so precise as to be obviously false, but it’s what we got.  Anyway, of that number, 55 percent live in the U.S. of A. (another 14 percent live in Canada), and of those who live in the United States, 13 percent live in Queens.  (Another 26 percent, of course, live in Brooklyn.  Yeah, Brooklyn!)

What can I say about the Trinidadian-born population of the United States?  68 percent of them are Afro-Trinidadian, 9 percent Indo-Trinidadian, and 4 percent Euro-Trinidadian, with the rest “mixed.”  The median household income is $40,168, or 90.4% of the median for the white native-born population.  Median full-time male wages are $33,000, or 90.0% of the U.S. median, while the same number for Trini females is $28,933 . . . or 108.3 percent of their native-born sistern.  Only 18 percent of Trini-Americans over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.   

Man, that bored even myself.  A (slightly) more interesting discussion below the fold.

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.

A House for Mr Biswas

That’s it.  That’s Mr. Biswas’s house.  Right behind the white car.  The street now resembles Union Turnpike more than anything in the novel, but the house is still there. 

Between San Fernando and Port-of-Spain lie the towns of Chaguanas, Waterloo, and Couva, the demographic center of the country’s East Indian population. 

When the British finally got around to abolishing slavery, the sugar plantations decided to import Chinese and East Indian indentured servants instead.  The Chinese soon stopped coming, because their government insisted on free return passage for its nationals.  Only 1500 arrived, mostly from Guangdong.  They now form an influential but small community of about 15,000 — a fellow named Dereck Chin built the island’s first multiplex, and as already-mentioned the NGC is led by one Frank Look Kin.  The white population — mostly Syrian Christian, with a few Portuguese and the strangely-named French Creoles, who are neither French nor Creole — is about the same size.   

The Indians, though, arrived in massive numbers.  By the time all was said and done, 150,000 of them had made a one-way trip to Trinidad.  Their descendents make up 40.3% of the population, as against a Afro-Trinidadian share of 39.5%.

Racial divisions shape Trinidadian politics.  The Afro-Trinidadian party is the People’s National Movement, founded by Eric Williams in 1956.  The main Indo-Trinidadian party currently is the United National Congress, founded in 1988 amid splits in then-ruling National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR).  I think it’s a brilliant name, enough to hint at its ethnic base without ruling out the possibility of gaining support across the racial divide.

That said, the racial divide isn’t as stark as it could be.  21% of the population is mixed, up from 18% in 1990 and 15% in 1980.  Unlike the Guyana formerly known as British, communal violence is unheard of in Trinidad.  You see Hindu flags outside houses in mostly African suburbs—did you know that Hindus mark various family and religious events by flying colored flags?  I didn’t—and you can spot Afro-Trinidadians liming in most Indo-Trinidadian neighborhoods. 

It helps that most Indo-Trinidadian links to India have faded away.  Nobody knows what village their ancestors came from—hell, they don’t even know the state.  The Bhojpuri language is pretty close to dead, and spoken accents in English don’t appreciably vary between racial groups.  (I’ll admit it: it’s kinda cool when you hear a white guy or a Chinese fellow bust out in pure Trini.) 

Last year I found myself watching the Ukraine-Tunisia World Cup match in a run-down little bar in the town of Waterloo.  Most of the people in the place were Indo-Trinidadian, and the (Indo-Trinidadian) female propietor had hung a Union Jack over the counter.  When I asked her about it, she said, misunderstanding my question, "Oh, that’s the English flag.  Meh daughter and grandchildren live there, and we get a lot of English visitors out this way." 

Alerted, I began to spot "English" and Canadian paraphenalia in the area:  bumper stickers, posters, ads for cheap flights.  But links to India?  Nobody even seemed to know that Mittal was an Indian company.  One fellow sensibly-enough guessed it to be German.   

Migration has brought Trinidad many things, but special ties to one of the 21st-century’s emerging superpowers doesn’t seem to be one of them.