Family Separation for the Children of Undocumented Workers - from illegal immigrants to tax cheaters

Imagine a political group gets into office and they are as upset about undocumented workers and businesses as Trump supporters are about undocumented workers. The difference being, this group is upset about a failure to file or pay taxes. 

These people are upset about tax cheaters in the same way that Trump supporters in 2016 were upset about illegal immigrants. What they didn't realize, though, is that the government they voted in would decide to discourage tax cheaters through a policy of family separation. Children of tax cheaters were essentially incarcerated, left in lock-down 23 hours a day. Some of the children actually adopted out.

It seems that these folks outraged at tax cheaters have two choices once they see this. One is to simply say, "Yeah. That is spot on. Take their children." The other is to be outraged, shocked that this new government would systematically separate families as punishment for cheating on taxes. The relevant question at that point is whether undocumented (as in did not file any or any accurate tax records) workers deserve a punishment this harsh and whether they'll vote again for this administration now that they know how far they'll take things.

This is the question before Trump supporters who are as equally outraged at undocumented workers (who don't have proof of residency or citizenship) but still feel that systematically separating families as a discouragement is even more evil than having someone in the country willing to work in our fields or kitchens for lower than minimum wage. The question is, Do you want to be on the side of an administration that will perpetuate this kind of cruelty on the most helpless people within our borders? Children who not only don't understand our system but don't even speak our language and for whom the only clear reality is that they've been torn from their mother? Because in 2016, you may not have properly understood why Trump was working so hard to convince you that Mexico was sending us rapists and murderers. Now you do. Good people like you can be made to support cruelty only if you believe it is just retribution for egregious behavior. Now you know that this was to get your support to be cruel to people who are born so inferior that they don't even deserve the comfort of a mother. These people are so evil that they don't deserve family. Now you know that the point was to be cruel to children who are vulnerable, confused and traumatized. If you find that more outrageous than someone crossing the border in the hopes of a better life for them and their children, you have a simple way to stop such behavior: don't vote for the man who has done this and still thinks he has done nothing wrong. Don't vote for Trump.

And I know that the Trumpbros are going to jump on this and say, "But under Obama this happened." Yes. With legal proceedings and detentions, this kind of thing happens. There is a difference between the rare case that inevitably falls out in the midst of managing borders and systematically separating children as Trump, Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions intended. There is a difference between the rare case and systematically warehousing thousands of children in converted Walmart stores.

So think about the policies that matter to you and who deserves punishment. Whose behavior you think most undermines the economy you think we're trying to build. Tax cheaters? Illegal immigrants? And then ask whether the proper punishment for such undocumented workers is taking their children from them. Because if you voted for Trump in 2016 and then this happened, you can honestly say that you didn't see this coming. If you vote for Trump in 2020, you have to own this and say that someone trying to better themselves without having all the proper paperwork - as illegal immigrants and tax cheaters do - deserves to have their children taken from them as punishment. You have to clearly state that you support cruelty to the children of people who cut corners to make a better life for those children. Perhaps I'm a starry-eyed optimist but I don't believe nearly as many people will support that kind of cruelty as believe that undocumented workers of any kind is an issue.

CBC article here 
Trump's family separations at border played out 'exactly how it was designed to': journalist Jacob Soboroff

You Dreamer You

Imagine a game show.

You find yourself on stage with 3 strangers.

You are told to vote on a proposal to send foreign-born, undocumented people back to the country where they were born. If a majority of you vote for this proposal, it will be immediately enforced. Whether brought to the country as an infant or a 14 year old, one cannot stay here unless one's parent or guardian had the proper paperwork. Such people will be immediately deported once the law is passed.

Now it gets more interesting.

You are then told that one of you is actually foreign born and undocumented. As you talk among yourself you realize that none of you have a memory of living anywhere but the US. There is a 25% chance that the "born in a foreign country but raised in the US" person is you. Meaning, there is a 25% chance that you are the one who will be deported to what is - to you - a foreign country.

How do you vote?

#dreamers

Trump's Bold Solutions to Imaginary Problems: Address to Joint Session of Congress on the last day of February 2017

I did not see Trump's speech but read it. My initial reaction is that it was filled with about equal number of promises that are too general to ever be broken and promises to fix problems that don't exist. He made general promises more akin to "I'll be a great husband," rather than specific, measurable promises like, "I'll massage your back, do the laundry but not cook dinner." He is going to be a great president but we don't really know what he means by that. And he repeatedly framed improving situations as awful, promising to fix what hardly seems broken.

What Trump said ...

My commentary ...

A new chapter —
(APPLAUSE)
— of American greatness is now beginning. A new national pride is sweeping across our nation, and a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp. What we are witnessing today is the renewal of the American spirit. 

That's an interesting spin on lowest approval ratings ever for a president''s first month. Or maybe he meant to say that a new surge of optimism is the impossible dream when so many Americans disapprove of your performance.

Dying industries will come roaring back to life ... Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and ultimately stop, and our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety, and opportunity.

Trump continues to play the role of economic savior, promising to bring back the dead or dying. There's a little problem with this plan: manufacturing as a percentage of the American workforce has been steadily falling since about 1930. It's not a product of NAFTA or China joining the global economy. It's a product of our industrial economy becoming an information economy and of manual work being steadily automated.  He's exaggerating inner cities' plight - rural America is shrinking faster than any downtown - but if he really wants to revive an area he won't do it with manufacturing and mining jobs.

Since my election, Ford, Fiat, Chrysler, General Motors, Sprint, Softbank, Lockheed, Wal Mart, and many others have announced they will invest billions and billions of dollars in the United States and will create tens of thousands of new American jobs.

For reference, each month the America economy creates (and destroys) millions of jobs. Millions. (The difference between the number created and the number destroyed gives the net number of jobs gained, which is typically between 100,000 to 300,000 during a healthy expansion, as we've had in the 6 years.) Making deals with companies that may add tens of thousands of new jobs is a rounding error in a typical month - much less in a 4 year term - in this delightfully dynamic economy. 

The stock market has gained almost $3 trillion in value since the election on November 8, a record.

This is great. It also has pushed P/E ratios to a heady level that suggests it'll be tough to continue at this pace for another four years. Even so, this rise is rational: with tax cuts and deregulation, short-term profits should go up. It will take longer to find out what sort of trade deals he'll make and what that will do to the economy.

We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption

Trump continues to make personal deals with foreign countries. The most suspicious example of this was China granting him a coveted and long-denied trademark just days after his win. This trademark will be worth millions to Trump.

We want all Americans to succeed, but that can’t happen in an environment of lawless chaos.

Lawless chaos? Violent crime has been steadily dropping since about 1980. Illegal immigration has been steadily dropping since at least the Great Recession. Trump is determined to take drastic measures to solve two imaginary problems: lawless chaos and a surge in illegal immigration. It's like a the father of a teenager cracking down on bed wetting, a problem that had disappeared about ten years earlier. 

Not only has illegal immigration slowed in the last 8 years or so, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans, as can be see in this graph.

Tonight, as I outlined the next steps we must take as a country, we must honestly acknowledge the circumstances we inherited. 94 million Americans are out of the labor force.

The economy Trump inherited is in stark contrast to the one Obama inherited. 76 months in a row, the economy has created jobs; breaking the old record of 48 months by roughly 2.5 years. In the year before Obama took office, the economy lost 4.4 million jobs; in the year before Trump took office, it created 2.2 million jobs. Put differently, the economy created 6.6 million more jobs in the year before Trump took office than it did in the year before Obama did. So how can Trump make it sound like he's inherited economic carnage? 

This 94 million out of the labor force number is one of the weirdest that Trump has cited. How does he arrive at this number he's repeatedly mentioned? He uses the labor force participation rate. This is a measure of folks not working or looking for work who are over the age of 16. If you are a 28 year old house husband or retired at the age of 71 or a 19 year old at university, you are counted as a non-participant. My 81 year old, retired mother is part of this 94 million. If you are over 16 and are not working or looking for a job, you are part of Trump's 94 million.  

We have measures of the labor force participation rate that date back to January of 1948. That year, life expectancy for men was 64.6. Today life expectancy is 76.2. The percentage of people who are retired now is higher than it has ever been - in part because people are living longer and in part because people are so much more affluent than they were in 1948. This alone would drive down labor force participation rates. But to offset that, women have joined the workforce in larger numbers.  These are just two of the demographic changes over time that have shaped this number since 1948. What is the net effect of these and other factors? 

Between 1948 and 2017, labor force participation rate has averaged 62.9%. What is it as of January 2017? 62.9%. Since 1948, the rate has ranged from 58.1% to 67.3% but the labor force participation rate for our most recent month is exactly what it has averaged since we began measuring it. To say that it's a problem now is to say that it has been a problem since just after World War II. Funny that no one has mentioned it before Trump, much less used it as proof that they'd inherited an economy in terrible shape because by that measure, every president has inherited an economic mess.

When Trump says that 94 million Americans are out of the labor force, he's decrying the fact that young mothers, old retirees, the idle rich, the handicapped and others have chosen not to work- in roughly the same proportion as they have since the end of World War II nearly 70 years ago. But how else to make an unemployment rate of 4.7% (a rate one standard deviation below average) sound bad? To say that he's inherited an awful economy is like saying that nobody since Reagan won by a wider margin of electoral college victory; it's wrong unless you discount all the other data points.

Summary

Trump's speech promised bold solutions to the imaginary problems of labor force participation rates, illegal immigration rates, violent crime and a loss of manufacturing jobs. Labor force participation rates are exactly at their historic average, and violent crime and illegal immigration have been steadily trending downwards for decades. A dwindling number of manufacturing jobs is a sign of progress in the same way that a dwindling number of farming jobs was. During the 1800s the American economy transitioned from an agricultural to industrial economy; during the 1900s, it transitioned from an industrial economy to an information economy.  These two transitions have meant a dwindling percentage of the workforce has been needed for farming and manufacturing. It's not a sign of economic apocalypse that we no longer have 90% of the labor force farming; it's a sign of progress.

Trump has consistently shown a disinterest in facts but even when he does pay attention to a current number he fails to put that within larger trends. It's tough to understand what should happen when you don't even understand what has happened. Trump's grasp on the situation is about as tenuous as his grasp on the facts.

---------------

This from CBS news on the 94 million not in the labor force.

https://twitter.com/CBSEveningNews/status/837085323679105028
14.6 million are students, 43.7 million are retired, and 28.4 million are disabled or out of work for family reasons (looking after a family member like a child or elderly parent).

Just One Glaring Problem with Trump's Approach to Illegal Immigrants

A guy seeing your frustration with a coin that seems to often come up "tails!" offers to get rid of the tails of your coin.
"How," you ask.
"Trust me," he says.
Frustrated and angry, you do.
How does he get rid of the tails portion of your coin? He just takes the coin.
The good news? No more tails.
The bad news? No more coin.

Donald Trump has convinced his supporters that immigrants are a threat to their livelihood and even their lives. (More than once he's trotted out grieved parents whose child has been killed by an illegal immigrant with a gun or a car.) If we build a wall ... If we deport them ... If only it weren't for immigrants, the economy would be so much better.

Well, there is your tail. We don't like losing jobs to the immigrants and Donald promises to get them out.

How? Well, he glosses over the little details of how you'd manage to find and deport 11 million people. (A task that is complicated by so many things - including the fact that families are rarely one thing; how do you deport a 45 year old whose two teenagers are not only citizens in the US but in school here? His answer? Trust me.)

But his plan to remove the tails portion of the coin of course involves taking away the heads portion of the coin.

Every person here in the country is part of our domestic market. They rent or buy houses. They buy food, clothes, cars, and thousands of little and big things that get sold or rented every day. If we were successful at deporting 11 million people, we would lose all that demand for goods and services. Even assuming that their incomes are only half that of the average American, they represent incomes of about a quarter of a trillion - $275 billion - a year. That's a chunk of income lost, enough to throw the country into a recession.

I could make all sorts of mind-numbing calculations based on reasonable assumptions about how much illegal aliens contribute to the economy but bottom line, if they aren't living here, they aren't shopping here. The good news is that they wouldn't be here to take your job in nailing up sheet rock in the construction  industry; the bad is that they wouldn't be here to demand housing and with them gone, it's conceivable that the homes abandoned would be available for folks to buy or rent, meaning that no one would need to build houses for awhile and you still wouldn't have a job nailing up sheet rock in the construction industry. It's tough to imagine that demand for housing would be strong in the aftermath of 11 million lost residents.

Donald Trump is promising to take away the tails you hate getting on your coin. How will he do that? He'll take away your coin.

Illegal Immigration or Xenophobia?

My wife is a Canadian. Years ago, her cousin had a permit to drive a load into the U.S. Given that work was slow in Canada, he over-stayed this work permit, running loads around California. Until one day, he was pulled over by Immigration. As the agents began to open doors and search for hidden compartments and hidden contraband and people, one of the agents walked up to Dennis, who was sweating in his cab.

"We're sorry about this," said the agent, looking directly at blonde haired, blue-eyed Dennis. "But we get so many illegal aliens around here."

"I understand," Dennis said. About fifteen minutes later, Dennis was on his way.

I'd say that the biggest lie about illegal immigration is that it is about illegal immigration. It seems to me that it's about xenophobia, about fear of other cultures. The real point, it seems to me, is to work towards some kind of imagined cultural purity.

Two Kinds of Conservatives - One Divisive Issue

Republicans are split on the issue of illegal immigration.

To say that you are a conservative begs the question: Conserve what? The Republican Party is a place for various kinds of conservatives: religious conservatives, business conservatives, and cultural conservatives. Generally speaking, these groups overlap. The issue of illegal immigration highlights one area where they do not.

Business conservatives generally have no problem with immigration – legal or illegal. Some jobs can be exported and some cannot. For jobs like farming and construction, it makes sense to bring in lower-paid workers.

Cultural conservatives are threatened by immigration – legal or illegal. For them, the country is defined by a common language and culture. If you expect to live in this country, you should speak English and understand, if to subscribe to, Judeo-Christian beliefs and Western culture. To sacrifice this sense of nationalism for low-wages would be like encouraging your daughter to work as a prostitute. For cultural conservatives, values are more important than money.

Of late, national elections have been decided by one or two percent. Republican leaders realize that alienating even a fraction of any one of their conservative groups can cost them control. For them, the very fact that illegal immigration has become an important issue is to have lost on the issue. There is no obvious way to reconcile the views of these two very different kinds of conservatives.

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For more on cultural conservatives, here's Jeralyn Merritt commenting on Tom Tancredo's stance on immigration as a threat to Western Civilization.

"Presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo told supporters gathered at a private ranch here Friday that American culture, as well as the fate of western civilization, is being threatened by illegal immigration.

....'There’s an issue that is so much broader than all that, so much more serious. It is the issue of our culture itself, and whether we will survive.'"

The Most Important Question Never Asked About Illegal Immigration: What's it gonna cost you?

We have a problem. Illegal behavior is killing about 12,000 Americans each year, and costs us about $40 billion. Yet this illegal behavior is generally tolerated in all but the most extreme cases, and is generally winked at. Millions of us enjoy a measure of benefit from this behavior – freeing up our time for leisure.

The above paragraph doesn't refer to illegal immigration. Rather, it refers to speeding.

For some reason, illegal immigration has become one of the hot issues, a source of near hysteria, in this year’s presidential campaign – particularly for the Republicans. This baffles me. There are dozens of other issues - like speeding - that also involve illegal behavior and that are, nonetheless accepted as part of the status quo.

There are activists who take to the street to protest illegal immigration and then activists who protest the protestors. The topic has generated noise and emotion, and I guess that’s what counts for getting media coverage.

But for those of us neither inclined to see illegal entry into this country as a right nor see it as a serious threat, the issue has to make it on its merits. That is, someone has to convince us that the cost of reducing illegal immigration is less than the benefit.

We already spend about $11 billion a year protecting our borders from illegal immigration. The US reports that this money stops or finds about 750,000 illegal immigrants a year. Others estimate that the population of illegal immigrants still increases by 500,000 a year. So, for $11 billion we stop about 60% of those trying to enter illegally.

This raises a number of questions. 1, how does this expenditure already compare with other budget items? 2, how much more would we spend to stop how many more? 3, how much does it cost us to have illegal immigrants here?

1. At $11 billion a year, it is already double the amount spent on either the National Science Foundation or the Army Corp of Engineers (the agency that did not have enough money to shore up New Orleans levies) and more than the $7.5 billion we spend on the Environmental Protection Agency.

2. Marginal cost goes up as the task gets harder. You might stop the first 750,000 immigrants for about $15,000 each, but the next 500,000 will be harder to catch. This is obvious. If they were not harder to catch, we’d already be catching them. So, what are we willing to spend to catch the next 100,000? $25,000 each? And the 100,000 after that? $50,000 each? At some point, the additional $2.5 billion or $7.5 billion begins to look like real money. And at no point does the flow of illegal immigrants ever stop. The only way to even approach zero would be to halt all foreign trade and tourists – actions that would cripple the American economy.

3. What does it already cost us to have illegal immigrants? Well, given that they typically come here to work, most estimates of their economic impact are positive. Let’s instead assume that the impact is negative. Let’s assume that out of every 10 illegal immigrants, 1 has an upaid medical bill of $120,000 and two are here for free K-12 education, at $6,000 a year. This works out to be less than $15,000 a year that they cost us. This is a very pessimistic estimate but one roughly equal to the cost of stopping illegal immigration.

If you don’t get all misty eyed about the rights of poor people to enter this country or about the erosion of our sense of national identity, this issue breaks down into simple economics. Someone is going to get rich if we spend more money to stop more immigrants. If you are an average taxpayer, that someone is not going to be you. It might cost us $15,000 per illegal immigrant. It will cost us more than $15,000 for each additional illegal immigrant stopped.

Better instead to insist that the proponents of the move to spend more on illegal immigration make explicit the costs and benefits of their program. Nobody is proposing that we scrap the current program and simply allow illegal immigrants to rush in at will. The proposals before the American people are proposals to spend even more money. The question that deserves to be asked is, how will this benefit us? So far, I’ve never heard that question answered.