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Earlier this week, we published apost on how there was no relationship between the spread of notifiable diseases in the United States and immigrant populations. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, several commentators were concerned that immigrants especially illegal immigrants were spreading serious diseases like measles. This is afollow up post focusing on measles specifically, which is one notifiable disease. Alegitimate role of immigration policy is to limit the international spread of contagious diseases like measles. However, its also important to note the extent of this problem by showing that immigrants do not threaten ameasles outbreak.

Methods

Like our earlier post, here we test correlation between the incidence of measles and statelevel immigrant population shares for the 20102018 period. We use annual, statelevel measles data from the CDCs National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), which reports the number of nationally notifiable infectious diseases and conditions by state and year. Anotifiable disease is one where the CDC states that regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease. In addition to other vaccinations, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requires avaccination against measles to legally immigrate to the United States.

Foreignborn population data at the state level comes from the American Community Survey (ACS) provided by IPUMS. From the raw ACS microdata, we are able to use the residual technique refined by Christian Gunadi to specifically identify legal and illegal immigrants.

Results

To test whether states with higher immigrant shares experience higher measles infection rates, we run atwoway fixed effects regression to estimate the correlation between the measles rate per 100,000 people and the share of immigrants in astate. The regressions use state and year fixed effects and the standard errors are clustered at the state level. Table 1shows the results of the regressions. They are all statistically insignificant except a1 percent increase in the share of astates illegal immigrant population is correlated with 0.06 fewer cases of disease per 100,000 state residents at the 5percent level. Although significant, thats avery small magnitude. There is no relationship between the share of astates population that is foreignborn and the rate of measles per 100,000 residents. There is also no relationship between the legal immigrant share of astates population and the rate of disease per 100,000 residents.

Figure 1shows the lack of arelationship between the immigrant share of the population and the incidence of measles infections on the state level. Figure 2shows the relationship between the illegal immigrant share of state populations and the incidence of these reportable diseases. The Yaxes on both graphs dont line up exactly because they are the measles values fitted with the state and year fixed effects.

Originally posted here:
There Is No Connection Between Measles Infections and Immigrants in the United States - Cato Institute

President Donald Trump answers a question from CNNs chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta during the coronavirus response daily briefing at the White House, April 10, 2020.(Jim Acosta/Reuters)

Years ago I wrote a piece in these pages about how mass immigration was an immutable value of the Left. (I wanted to call it Immigration Uber Alles, but Kathryn demurred.) The point was that when any other issue or constituency favored by the Left came into conflict with mass immigration, immigration always won out.

A new statement from Jeff Sessions puts this hypothesis to a test.

Sessions will face off July 14 against former football coach Tommy Tuberville for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic senator Doug Jones. President Trump has opposed Sessions and endorsed Tuberville in the ugly and graceless fashion that is his hallmark. But the delay in the runoff caused by the Wuhan coronavirus and the issues raised by the virus have shifted the momentum to Sessions. (The candidates are neck-and-neck in fundraising, and Sessions has more money in the bank.)

One of those issues is the continued importation of foreign workers, and the accommodation of temporary foreign workers already here, at a time when 22 million people have filed for unemployment in the past four weeks.

In response, Sessions today released a statement calling for a moratorium on employment-based immigration until the U.S. unemployment rate goes back down below 3.5%, where it was in February.

This presents something of a problem for Tuberville, a go-along-to-get-along, Chamber of Commerce Republican whos happy to talk about the border wall but favors increased immigration and a guestworker amnesty for illegal aliens (and also doesnt think we should focus too much on ChiCom perfidy regarding the current pandemic). Tuberville will probably just keep hiding, in the hopes that Trumps endorsement will be enough to pull him over the finish line, so he can join the like-minded Lindsey Graham and Tom Tillis in the Senate.

But this presents a golden opportunity for the White House press corps to try to embarrass the president, which is the raison detre of much of the elite media, and to separate him from his supporters. Jim Acosta, for instance, could ask something along the lines of:

Mr. President, Jeff Sessions, whom you have opposed, has called for a moratorium on all employment-based immigration until the jobless rate returns to its pre-virus levels. Do you support his call for a moratorium, or do you support the continued arrival of foreign workers while 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment?

The president would either have to oppose Sessionss proposal and support the importation of foreign labor at a time of Great Depression-level unemployment, or support it, prompting an alert reporter to follow up by asking, Then why havent you stopped it, using the statutory authority recently upheld by the Supreme Court in the travel ban case?

Trump might well be able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters, but mouthing swamp platitudes about jobs Americans wont do in the current environment might be a bridge too far.

But I dont expect this to happen. The Left, including its news organs, hates the president, its true. But highlighting Sessionss call for a moratorium on new foreign labor would not only publicize immigration skepticism, but also normalize it as an acceptable part of public discourse. And that cannot be allowed.

The smart money is always on elite support for mass immigration. Not even hatred of Trump can trump it.

See original here:
Does the Medias Hatred of Trump Trump Its Devotion to Mass Immigration? - National Review

By Jeremy L. Neufeld

The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading and will it likely has already put the economy into recession. Our immigration system is poorly designed for immigrants to weather this kind of crisis. Unless the administration and Congress make immediate policy changes, many legal immigrants and guest workers will lose their status and be required to leave the country, devastating families, but also thereby endangering public health, retarding economic recovery, and increasing illegal immigration.

The American immigration system adds many more people to the green card queue each year than it grants green cards. The result is an ever-expanding green card backlog and ever-lengthening waiting times. We at the Niskanen Center have been critical of this bottleneck in normal times, but the fallout from COVID-19 makes the existing and impending backlog disastrous.

A high-skilled workers pathway to a green card is arduous enough in normal circumstances. An H-1B visa allows them to work for up to six years, during which time their employer can petition for an employment-based immigrant visa. If that petition is approved, then the immigrant must wait patiently, renewing their H-1B in three-year increments until a green card becomes available for them.[1] This waiting period takes many years on average even decades for certain immigrants from countries affected by per-country caps.

While in this holding pattern, the immigrant must retain their H-1B status in order to get their green card, even if the coronavirus makes doing so difficult or impossible.

Using the most recent data available from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Serviceson approved I-140 petitions and economic projections from the St. Louis Fed, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that as many as 125,000 legal immigrants already working in the United States may fall out of status and be forced to return home because of the coronavirus by the end of June.[2] More than a quarter of those will have been waiting in line for over a decade for a green card. If we included H-1B holders who may intend to become permanent residents, but who do not yet have approved immigrant petitions, the total number of would-be legal immigrants working here who may lose status and have to depart would likely more than double to over a quarter of a million.[3]

These immigrants have spent years and even decades building their lives and setting down roots in the United States, following the arduous road laid out by our immigration laws. The harms extend beyond their own futures. Family separation will result as U.S. citizen children are forced to stay behind because of COVID-19 travel bans in the home countries of their parents. People will be forced to choose between becoming illegal immigrants by overstaying their visas or endangering public health by violating social distancing in departing. When recovery can finally start, businesses and teams who relied on the talents of these individuals will be handicapped.

There are rapid regulatory policy changes that can be made to avert this looming disaster, including that:

The coronavirus is set to leave permanent scars on our country. Temporary changes to immigration policy can help make sure we dont add to them unnecessarily.

[1] Terminological note: Legally speaking, USCIS would designate these individuals as nonimmigrants until they receive a green card. However, under any normal usage, a long-term resident, present in the country, intending to stay permanently, with an approved immigrant petition is an immigrant.

[2] This very rough estimate makes the simplifying assumption that unemployment among H-1B workers would be the same as for the general population, and that H-1B workers would be unable to transfer to another H-1B eligible job within the 60 days necessary to retain status.

[3] While there is no publicly available data on the total number of H-1B workers working in the United States or how many H-1B workers have immigrant intent, we use three years of initial petitions (H-1Bs last for an initial period of three years) and then apply the same assumption about unemployment as above. While many H-1B workers may not in fact have immigrant intent, this figure is still likely to be an underestimate because it does not include any of those who have extended their H-1B status but do not have an approved I-140.

More:
How the Coronavirus Will Kick Legal Immigrants Out of Line and Out of the Country - Niskanen Center

The international spread of the SARSCoV2 virus that causes the disease COVID-19 has prompted many governments to close their borders. Immigration policy plays an important rolein limiting the international spread of contagious diseases.

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, several commentators were concerned that immigrants especially illegal immigrants were spreading serious diseases in the United States. This blog post is the first in aseries to answer the question of whether immigrants spread serious notifiable diseases other than COVID-19in the United States. This post focuses on all pooled notifiable diseases for which there are vaccination requirements to enter the United States.

Methods

This post tests the correlation between the incidence of notifiable diseases and immigrant population shares on the state level for the 20102018 period. We use annual, statelevel data on notifiable disease cases from the CDCs National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), which reports the number of nationally notifiable infectious diseases and conditions by state and year. Anotifiable disease is one where the CDC states that regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease.

Numerous diseases are reported to the CDC, but this post focuses on diseases that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and CDC require vaccination for prior to immigration. USCIS requires vaccination for mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus, diphtheria toxoids, pertussis, haemophilius influenza type B, and hepatitis B. The CDC requires vaccination for hepatitis B, varicella, seasonal influenza, pneumococcal pneumonia, rotavirus, hepatitis A, and meningococcal disease.

Data for the foreignborn population on the statelevel comes from the American Community Survey (ACS) provided by IPUMS. From the raw ACS microdata, we can identify immigrants by their nativity, citizenship status, and year of arrival. Afurther strength of the ACS microdata is that we can apply statistical techniques to identify likely illegal immigrants from observed characteristics in the data. Specifically, we use the residual technique of Christian Gunadi to identify illegal immigrants.

Results

To test whether states with higher immigrant shares experience higher rates of notifiable disease, we run atwoway fixed effects regression to estimate the correlation between the rate of disease per 100,000 population and the share of immigrants in astate. The regressions use state and year fixed effects and the standard errors are clustered at the state level.

Table 1shows the results of the regressions. They are all statistically insignificant except a1 percent increase in the share of astates legal immigrant population is correlated with 4.2 fewer cases of disease per 100,000 state residents, which is significant at the 5percent level. There is no relationship between the share of astates population that is foreignborn and the rate of disease per 100,000 residents. There is also no relationship between the illegal immigrant share of astates population and the rate of disease per 100,000 residents.

Figure 1shows the lack of arelationship between the immigrant share of the population and the incidence of these diseases on the state level. Figure 2shows no relationship between the illegal immigrant share of state populations and the incidence of these reportable diseases.

Go here to read the rest:
No Relationship Between Notifiable Diseases and Immigrant Populations - Cato Institute

Immigrants with Social Security numbers will be given $1,200 checks as long as they fall below the $75,000 income threshold set in the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed last week.

The problem is, that doesnt represent a lot of working immigrants in the United States.

Up until about a month ago, Rosana Araujo made between $1,500 and $2,000 a month cleaning houses in Miami. Thats no longer the case.

They canceled all my jobs, and now I dont have money to pay the rent, I dont have money to pay the electricity bill, she said in Spanish.

Araujo said she pays taxes on all her earnings, but she doesnt have a Social Security number. That means even if shes paying into the system, shes not eligible for any public benefits. Which means no COVID-19 check from the government. On top of that, shes worried about getting sick.

Im really scared because if I get sick, I dont have health insurance, she said.

The Trump administration has told immigrants that their status would not prohibit them from accessing any COVID-19-related health care.

But Sandra Feist, an immigration attorney in Minneapolis, said many of her clients arent buying it. Another uncertainty: Many immigrants say theyre getting a lot of mixed messages about the pandemic from their employers, particularly in agriculture. Stay-at-home orders in California and elsewhere have exempted farmworkers.

Homeland Security says that youre an essential worker, and yet were not making sure that theyre staying safe, Feist said.

And its not just undocumented people who could be left out.

If youre a U.S. citizen with a Social Security number but on your tax return youve got a spouse or a kid and theyre undocumented, then nobody in that household is going to get a check, said Doug Rand, who worked on immigration policy in the Obama White House as assistant director for entrepreneurship and is now the co-founder of Boundless Immigration, a technology company that helps immigrants obtain green cards and citizenship.

Julia Gelatt at the Migration Policy Institute doesnt think thats a mistake.

I assume that the logic is that the federal government didnt want payments to be going to unauthorized immigrants in the United States, she said.

She said this administration is nothing if not consistent with its immigration policy. President Donald Trump has maintained for years that illegal immigrants are a strain on the social safety net.

Undocumented folks paid more than $27 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2017, according to New American Economy. Legal immigrants contributed even more, almost $380 billion.

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Its not just undocumented immigrants who could be left out of the stimulus money - Marketplace