Guadalupe García de Rayos may have the first notable casualty of the recent Trump executive order deporting undocumented US residents charged with felonies. Garcia de Rayos has been here twenty two years since she was fourteen and is married with two children. She was charged with criminal impersonation, a felony, when in 2008 she used a fake social security number to secure employment. Her attorney claimed that no one was victimized by identity theft-as falsely claimed by former Arizona governor Jan Brewer in a recent MSNBC interview-and that the random number, not already in use, was made up by Garcia de Rayos. After appealing a court’s voluntary deportation order, she was allowed to stay on condition that she check in every year and then every six months. She complied fully with the immigration service. This year, knowing the fate that awaited her, she checked in anyhow declining an offer of sanctuary by a local church. She did so to show courage and character. She was taken into custody by ICE officials and deported back to Mexico. Public outrage ensued at the injustice of a mother of two, who came here as a minor only one year over the age limit to benefit from Dream Act protection, who was peaceful and productive and whose victimless crime was non-violent and committed purely out of necessity to gain employment and support her family.
Activists fear that Trump’s recent executive order from January 25 will allow ICE to “cast a wider net” than in the past to people not formerly sought by immigration officials for deportation. Garcia de Rayos did not fit the profile of the typical person deported by immigration officials over the last twenty years despite the rapid increase in deportations during that period culminating with Obama’s record 2.8 million. What’s worrisome about Trump’s policy is that eventually it is aimed at all 12 million or so people residing in the US without proper documentation. Millions of people have been deported since the early 1980s when pressure mounted to act on the problem of illegal immigration. But despite this fact, there was always a bipartisan recognition of the need for immigration reform that gave undocumented workers a reasonable path to citizenship. Mass roundups were viewed as impractical, expensive and inhumane. Consequently, most deportations would necessarily be limited to those apprehended at the border or those arrested in connection with a crime, usually a violent felony. The fact that a non-violent and hard working mother of two, residing in this country for over two decades, could be deported on such a weak case for removal is evidence that this is a test case for mass, indiscriminate deportations. If this is true, then like the Muslim ban, were possibly looking at the beginnings of a racist policy to limit and then reverse the growth in the number of non-whites in the US population.
Let’s look at the issue of Mexican immigration in particular to better understand the roots of this issue and why Trump’s policy is so unrealistic. As is well known, so much of this issue is related to economic conditions in the US and the segmented labor market in the US economy that draws foreign labor. The issue is quite complex but one of the reasons why this is such a tough problem is the seemingly insatiable need for workers in various low wage industries such as agricultural, hospitality and various service industries. America’s labor force is aging-a recent World Bank estimate put the median US age at nearly 38 which is well above the global average. This will impact the workforce. According to one PEW study, “the population of prime working-age adults, ages 25 to 54, will decline in 16 states, most of which are in the Northeast and Midwest, from 2010 to 2040.” The study goes on to detail the consequences for the economy;
A shrinking working-age population — either through out migration or aging — can have devastating economic effects. Small businesses close, big employers decline or disappear. Housing prices drop. Tax revenue declines, schools are shuttered and public services become more costly. Troubled states “will become less attractive to the people who are already there, and less attractive to newcomers...”
It is no wonder that elected officials, policy makers, businesses and others have been willing to accommodate the growing trends in immigration legal or not; labor shortages in many states and industries are beginning to cause real problems despite persistent unemployment in the overall economy. A Financial Times report from early last year tells of labor shortages with higher average job vacancy durations, about three to four weeks between 2014 and 2016, and growing labor costs as a share of total costs.
“We are already very close to full employment, yet we have this trend of very slow growth of labour supply for the next 15 years, and there is very little that could be done about it barring major immigration reform,” said Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America at the Conference Board. “The implication of that is it is harder to find workers, and there is more acceleration in labour costs.”...Analysis from Goldman Sachs this week estimated that labour costs as a share of S&P 500 companies’ revenues rose to 9.8 per cent last year compared with 9.1 per cent in 2014, and were set to jump further.
Another FT report from early last year shows that the construction industry is hardest hit, especially in border states like Texas.
Across the US, the construction sector — which contributes 4 per cent to US gross domestic product — is suffering from chronic shortages of workers that are pushing up wages and slowing down activity. Of the 1,358 companies surveyed last year by the Associated General Contractors of America, 86 per cent had trouble filling positions, up three percentage points from 2014. More than seven out of 10 contractors reported difficulty finding carpenters, 60 per cent for electricians and 56 per cent for roofers. In 2014, a builder called Camden Property Trust installed security guards at sites in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas, to prevent competitors from poaching workers.
The US construction industry relies heavily on Mexican born workers. At the height of the US building boom in 2007 just before the economy crashed, there were about 1.9 million Mexican workers in the US construction industry which dropped to a mere 1.3 million by 2014 due to Obama’s aggressive border security measures resulting in the apprehension and deportation of nearly 3 million people. This has caused a crisis in an industry heavily reliant on immigrants.
During the US recession (2007-2010), the US agricultural sector lost 38% of its immigrant Mexican labor force. Many of these workers never returned. Nearly half of all US farm labor is undocumented migrants from Mexico. In states like California, Central Valley's $35 billion agricultural economy hangs in the balance. Shortages of labor will create food shortages and farm losses with rising prices for consumers.
In November of 2014, President Obama promulgated two executive orders for deportation relief that at the time potentially covered 4 million undocumented immigrants, roughly one third of the total. The orders had ample precedent since the Reagan Administration with several succeeding US administrations issuing deportation relief to broad categories of immigrants that also granted many of them temporary work permits. Obama’s orders granted temporary deportation relief to the parents of US citizens who have been in the country for at least five years granting many of these immigrants work permits. It also granted temporary deportation relief to the children of illegal immigrants (the “dreamers”) who came to the US as minors under the age of sixteen by expanding the DACA program. The Orders further had provisions for registering millions of undocumented people, getting them to pay fines and regularly pay taxes, including payroll taxes, and making criminal background checks on all participants. It gave not blanket protection to those illegally employed, such as farm laborers, who did not also meet the stated qualifications detailed in the Orders.
The Orders dealt with many of the issues widely associated with illegal immigration. In the first place, it addressed the crime problem through background checks. Also, registering undocumented workers increased their tax contributions. According to a February 2016 report by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants pay nearly $12 billion in state and local taxes annually. Add to this the well know $7 billion or so annual contributions to Social Security and Medicare through payroll taxes and we have a tax contribution that minimizes the total social services burden presented by unauthorized immigrants at the state and local level. As one CBO report from 2007 claimed, “the amount that state and local governments spend on services to unauthorized immigrants represents a small percentage of the total amount spent by those governments to provide such services to residents in their jurisdictions.” Regarding the matter of Social Security, contributions that end up in the SSA’s “Earnings Suspense File”, W-2 filings for which there is no matching numbers, have been growing over the past twenty years. According to a Boston Globe report;
Social Security, which provides retirement income to millions of elderly Americans, is largely stable – at least for now – thanks in part to the more than 3.1 million people who are working and paying taxes in the U.S. using fake or expired social security numbers. Every year, undocumented immigrants have collectively paid as much as $13 billion into the system while only receiving $1 billion in benefits in return. The contributions are starting to add up. In total, undocumented workers have contributed more than $100 billion over the last decade while living in the shadows, says Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration (SSA).
It is pretty clear that the facts bear out that undocumented immigrants are not a fiscal burden to the system considering their other financial, labor, spending and other contributions.
Obama’s efforts to temporarily normalize the status of undocumented immigrants with the Orders was aimed at both reducing fiscal burdens and threats to public safety through tax collection and criminal background checks for program eligibility respectively. In essence, absent comprehensive immigration reform, Obama’s orders attempted to temporarily cope with two of the most prominent challenges of illegal immigration. A US Federal Court got an injunction against the 2014 executive orders in February 2015 and in November 2015 the Fifth Circuit Court in Texas ruled the Orders illegal on the grounds that they imposed a financial burden on the plaintiff states, violated executive order procedure and consisted of executive overreach. In June 2016, the US Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit Court. The main argument remained consistent; that Obama violated the separation of powers by attempting to legislate from the Oval Office.
But is this the case? The ABA has described the current Fifth Circuit as “one of the most controversial, rancorous, dysfunctional, staunchly conservative and important appellate courts in the country.” Furthermore, the dissenting judge on the three member panel, Judge, Carolyn King, defended DAPA as the use of “prosecutorial discretion” based on many considerations among them Homeland Security’s limited resources to enforce the law. According to one report in the Houston Chronicle, such discretion is “...necessary given that Congress only allocates about $6 billion a year for enforcement. That's enough to annually remove roughly 300,000 of the 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally...” Judge King stated that “federal courts should not inject themselves into such matters of prosecutorial discretion” and that the entire case was therefore“non-justiciable.” It should be noted that in a motion for a stay of execution against implementing the February 2015 preliminary injunction that blocked the Obama orders in response to a lawsuit by the State of Texas and 25 other plaintiffs, the Federal government argued that; “The District Court’s order is unprecedented and wrong. The Constitution does not allow states to intrude into the uniquely federal domain of immigration enforcement.” It further argued that, “The preliminary injunction restrains the exercise of that prosecutorial discretion, a quintessentially executive function that is traditionally unreviewable, In so doing, it undermines the Secretary’s authority to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws by disrupting the Secretary’s comprehensive effort to effectively allocate limited enforcement resources.”
Judge King moreover pointed out DAPA was mostly a deportation relief order with ample precedent and did not authorize new benefits as wrongly claimed by the state of Texas and the other plaintiffs in the case. Work authorization, the main benefit decried by the appellate court, has been tied to deportation relief orders since the early 1980s as King noted and therefore did not circumvent the Congress in conferring “new” benefits. In addition, the claim that gave the State of Texas legal standing to sue the Federal Government, that of an imposition of a financial burden on the state by an executive order, was not born out by the facts. It was pointed out that the issuing of drivers licenses in particular, and other benefits would be offset by the fees, taxes, and any other revenue collected from immigrants as a result of the DAPA order allowing legal employment.
It’s time to cut through the cant and hypocrisy and implement comprehensive immigration reform. This entire issue and the madness of mass deportation, however gradual, with all the heartbreaking stories that emerge on a daily basis, would be thereby avoided. In 2013, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill 68-32 which included 14 Republicans that included a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants that would have required background checks, fines, registration and many other features to deal with America’s fiscal and security concerns regarding immigrants. It would have prevented the break up of families and the expenses and havoc entailed by mass deportations. But the House GOP spitefully stonewalled it never allowing it to the floor for a debate. They could have avoided the executive orders of late 2014, but they refused to act in good faith on immigration legislation. Such legislation could have saved billions of dollars in legal and enforcement expenses and made great contributions to the economy but being narrow mindedly ideological instead of practical and humane is just how the GOP rolls!
Now we have Trump and his gestapo tactics to deal with. If this whole matter blows up and causes violence and bloodshed as people resist expensive and unjust treatment of immigrants will the GOP still think putting party before country was worth it!