Does Donald Trump Really Want to Deport Family Members of Deployed Military Members?

In 2013, the Obama Administration adopted a policy that directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to no longer deport undocumented aliens who are  spouses, children or parents of U.S. military personnel and veterans.  The policy stated that these family members would be allowed to "parole in place" while they applied for legal residency.  As Military Times reported at the time, the "White House took the action in response to Defense Department concerns over troops' families being ripped apart by the forced removal of a relative who is in the country illegally."

In either a stroke of object cruelty or fumbling incompetence (or both), the Trump Administration rescinded this policy last week.  As Marine Reservist Nathan Fletcher explained in the San Diego Union yesterday, this policy change is not only cruel, but also bad for national security:

This was as much about national security as it was about upholding our commitment to support our troops. The Department of Homeland Security wrote, at the time, that “military preparedness can potentially be adversely affected if active members of the U.S. armed forces … worry about the immigration status of their spouses, parents and children.” We need our service members focused on accomplishing their mission and the safety of each other.

When you deploy to war, your greatest worry is not yourself. You worry about your family left behind. The least we can promise those willing to give their life for our country is that their immediate family members can remain in that same country. By all accounts, the policy has worked well.

Yet the Trump administration’s new immigration enforcement policy eviscerated “Parole in Place” protections. It does not continue a policy that reflects a promise made to recruits who joined the United States military in the last four years.

The new enforcement directive could have easily maintained the protections of this unique program, as it did a few others. It could have made clear that agents of the U.S. government will not round up and deport the spouses and children of our active duty service members.

Instead, it casually dispenses with exercises of executive discretion based on a “specified class or category of aliens.” The administration either did not know or did not care that one of these specified classes included military families.

Read it all here, and then call your Congressman that the policy be reinstated..

Immigration, Demography and the Future of U.S. Economic Growth

While the current focus on immigration has been on illegal immigration (and national security limits on immigration from certain countries, there is also a larger debate now occurring on legal immigration.  Steve Bannon asserted last year that legal immigration was the "real problem." Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue have introduced a bill to cut legal immigration in half.   As Seattle Times columnist Jon Talton has argued, Trump voters are less concerned with the economic effect of immigration than with the fear that American will no longer be a majority white country, and this concern has as much to do with legal immigration as illegal.

Missing in all of this debate, however, has been the very real demographic consequences of cutting immigration to this country.  Simply put, immigration has allowed us to avoid a demographic challenge facing other countries.  In countries in Europe and Asia, the share of those over 65 is growing rapidly.  This is resulting in both slower growth, and increased costs in carry for the elderly.  As the Pew Research Center explains:

The aging of populations does raise concerns at many levels for governments around the world. There is concern over the possibility that a shrinking proportion of working-age people (ages 15 to 64) in the population may lead to an economic slowdown. The smaller working-age populations must also support growing numbers of older dependents, possibly creating financial stress for social insurance systems and dimming the economic outlook for the elderly.

Graying populations will also fuel demands for changes in public investments, such as the reallocation of resources from the needs of children to the needs of seniors. At the more personal level, longer life spans may strain household finances, cause people to extend their working lives or rearrange family structures. Perhaps not surprisingly, an aging China announced a relaxation of its one-child policy in November 2013.

 As Greg Ip explains quite well in today's Wall Street Journal, Trump can only achieve his economic growth goals if immigration levels are increased, or at least kept at the same levels:

Immigration’s economic significance is greater than even these numbers indicate for two reasons. First, immigrants are usually younger than the native born population: about 65% are working age, between 25 and 64, compared with 52% of the native-born. Also, among immigrants just 5% are over 65, compared with 15% of the native born. Second, immigrants will have children who will bolster the labor force in later decades. The contribution from the children of native-born parents “will simply be outnumbered by the flood of departing baby Boomers,” the NASEM study says.

Consider this: The working-age population grew on average 1.4% per year from 1965 through 2015, when economic growth averaged 3%. The Pew Research Center estimates that at current immigration rates, the working-age population will grow just 0.3% per year in the coming two decades. With half a million fewer immigrants per year it grows just 0.1%, and with 1 million fewer, the working-age population shrink by 0.1% per year.

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Second, they tend to bring skills that are in great demand. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study by John Bound, Gaurav Khanna, and Nicolas Morales found that the influx of tech workers using the H-1B visa, a permit for skilled workers, during the late 1990s depressed the wages of U.S. computer workers and scientists by 3% to 10% but made the overall country better off by boosting innovation and reducing prices for consumers.

Put simply, if we want to avoid the demographic crisis facing other countries, and we want to ensure an economy in the future for our children that will make social programs like Social  Security sustainable, we need to continue to be a nation of immigrants.

(Greg Ip, by the way has a very interesting report on how demographics drives economics here. And economist John Chilton pointed me to this interesting study that found that "locations with more historical immigration today have higher incomes, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment.")

Why Any Immigration Barrier Directed At Muslims Is Counterproductive

In a letter that I signed, together with about 100 other former national security officials, we argued that the Trump Refugee Ban Executive Order, in addition to being unnecessary and wrong,  “will harm our national security” because  “it has already sent exactly the wrong message to the Muslim community here at home and all over the world: that the U.S. government is at war with them based on their religion.”  In my posts on Facebook about the Order, I made a similar point—that such a ban makes us less safe, not safer.

As you might expect, we have received pushback for this point.  Isn’t it better to take no risks?  Given the terrorist attacks in Europe, isn’t there at least a small risk that one person from this country intends us harm?  If, so, why take even this small risk?

Even apart from the obvious point that we accept far greater risks in our everyday lives, this question also fails to consider the possibility that imposing such a ban itself increases the risk of radicalization.

As explained in an interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times, there is actually some research that supports our fear that anti-Muslim actions and rhetoric will contribute to the radicalization process, and thereby increase the risk of developing home grown terrorists.  The academics of conducted this study, Sarah Lyons-Padilla of Stanford and Michael Gelfand of the University of Maryland explain their study:

We conducted a survey with nearly 200 American Muslims, half of whom were immigrants, half of whom were born in the United States. We asked them about their experiences as religious and cultural minorities, including their feelings of being discriminated against on the basis of their religion. We also asked how they managed their dual identities as Americans and Muslims, and how they felt toward fundamentalist Islamic groups and extremist causes.

Our findings were clear: The more our participants reported feeling culturally homeless — that is, fully belonging neither to American culture nor to that of another nation — and discriminated against on the basis of their religion, the more they said they experienced a lack of meaning in their lives. In turn, this loss of meaning was associated with greater support for fundamentalist groups and extremist causes.

This finding was consistent with research by the social psychologist Arie Kruglanski that showed that the psychological need for significance, not religion or ideology, is what propels people toward extremism. Extremist groups offer a sense of purpose, certainty and belonging to those who work on their behalf.

These groups go after Muslims who feel culturally homeless, leaning heavily on the claim that the West is anti-Islam. In this context, Mr. Trump’s original ban, which sent a strong message that Muslims were not welcome in this country and could not be “real” Americans, amounted to free propaganda for extremists. As one poster argued on a pro-Islamic State web channel, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the declared leader of the Islamic State, should consider Mr. Trump’s executive order a “blessed ban.”

You can find the article here.  The full study is also interesting and can be found here.  

While it appears the original Executive Order will be pulled back, it will replaced with an Executive Order that will still target immigrants from predominately Muslim countries.  It too will send a message that will hurt our efforts to prevent radicalization.

Immigrants and Crime

While the focus on attention lately has been on the link  (or the lack thereof) between terrorism and refugees, President Trump and other advocates of more restrictive immigration policies also contend that immigrants are responsible for an increase in crime.  I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the evidence.  Not surprisingly, the claim appears to be false.  Immigrants, actually, are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans.

Scientific American offers a good summary of the evidence on this issue:

Immigration-crime research over the past 20 years has widely corroborated the conclusions of a number of early 20th-century presidential commissions that found no backing for the immigration-crime connection. Although there are always individual exceptions, the literature demonstrates that immigrants commit fewer crimes, on average, than native-born Americans.

Also, large cities with substantial immigrant populations have lower crime rates, on average, than those with minimal immigrant populations.
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Across our studies, one finding remains clear: Cities and neighborhoods with greater concentrations of immigrants have lower rates of crime and violence, all else being equal.

Read the entire post  (which was written by the researchers themselves, and not filtered by journalists).