By David J. Bier

In “The Lifetime Fiscal Impact of Immigrants” (2024), the Manhattan Institute (MI) constructed a sophisticated model to estimate the likely lifetime fiscal e!ect of new immigrants on the US federal budget. MI concludes that the average immigrant will be fiscally positive a modest $10,000 in present value over a lifetime but that immigrants without a bachelor’s degree will be extremely fiscally negative. MI projects that the recent increase in migration will cost the federal government over $1.1 trillion over a century. A careful review of MI’s model finds that this result hinges on several unlikely assumptions, such as new arrivals causing large, immediate increases in defense spending, and no increase in corporate tax payments. When more realistic assumptions are adopted, MI’s model indicates that young, low-skilled immigrants will produce a positive lifetime contribution to the federal budget. For instance, the fiscal e!ect for a 22-year-old high school dropout changes from a negative $315,000 to a positive $45,000. After making revisions, including accounting for lower rates of benefits usage by immigrants, the model predicts the new group of unlawful entrants will likely be positive an aggregate $4.9 trillion.

Cato Institute, Working Paper, no 82

Washington, DC: Cato Institute 2024. 22p.

By Cevat Giray Aksoy, Barry Eichengreen, Anastasia Litina, Cem Özgüzel, Chan Yu:

Scholars and politicians have expressed concern that immigrants from countries with low levels of political trust transfer those attitudes to their destination countries. Using large-scale survey data covering 38 countries and exploiting origin-country variation across different cohorts and survey rounds, we show that, to the contrary, immigrants more exposed to institutional corruption before migrating exhibit higher levels of political trust in their new country. Higher trust is observed for national political institutions only and does not carry over to other supra-national institutions and individuals. We report evidence that higher levels of political trust among immigrants persist, leading to greater electoral participation and political engagement in the long run. The impact of home-country corruption on political trust in the destination country is further amplified by large differences in levels of income and democracy between home and host countries, which serve to highlight the contrast in the two settings. It is lessened by exposure to media, a source of information about institutional quality. Finally, our extensive analyses indicate that self-selection into host countries based on trust is highly unlikely and the results hold even when focusing only on forced migrants who were unlikely to have been subject to selection.

IZA DP No. 17553

Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2024. 76p.

By Maureen A. Eger https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9023-7316 and Susan Olzak 

While radical right parties championing anti-immigrant platforms have made electoral gains throughout Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment—a key indicator of radical right support—has not dramatically increased during this same period. In this article, we seek to help make sense of this paradox by incorporating a contextual factor missing from previous studies: levels of anti-immigrant violence. Our key argument is that higher levels of collective violence targeting immigrants raise the salience of the immigrant/native boundary, which activates both positive and negative views of immigrants and makes these attitudes more cognitively accessible and politically relevant. This argument implies that exposure to violence against immigrants should strengthen existing prejudice (or empathy) toward immigrants and engender feelings of affinity (or antipathy) for radical right parties. Analyses of the German portion of the European Social Survey (ESS 2014 − 2019) and the Anti-Refugee Violence in Germany (ARVIG 2014 − 2017) datasets reveal a powerful interaction effect: exposure to higher levels of collective violence increased the probability of feeling closest to radical right parties among those who held neutral, negative, and extremely negative views of immigrants. However, these events were not associated with radical right sympathies among those holding pro-immigrant attitudes. We conclude that when violence against immigrants resonates with public opinion on immigrants, it opens new political opportunities for radical right parties. These findings should inform future research on the politicization of international migration, especially studies investigating how anti-immigrant attitudes translate into political outcomes.

International Migration ReviewVolume 57, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 746-777

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Charles Richards

The New Italians, a captivating novel by Charles Richards, delves deep into the intricate tapestry of modern Italian society. Set against the backdrop of contemporary Italy, the book follows the lives of a diverse cast of characters as they navigate through cultural shifts, economic challenges, and personal triumphs. Through vivid storytelling and rich character development, Richards weaves a compelling narrative that offers readers a window into the heart and soul of Italy today. With its gripping plot and insightful commentary, The New Italians promises to be a thought-provoking read for anyone interested in the complexities of modern Italian life.

NY. PENGUIN. 1994. 315p.

by Charles Fain Lehman

Since the 2020 “racial reckoning,” there has been increased political momentum behind reparations for slavery. Debates about reparations have moved from the halls of academia to legislatures in California and a number of cities. Americans and their leaders are increasingly asking: Are reparations justified at all? And, if so, who should get how much? This report concerns itself with a different question: Who pays for reparations? Reparations are a form of compensation for historical injustice. But many Americans did not have any ancestors present in the country at the time that injustice was committed. It is hard to argue that Americans whose ancestors arrived after 1860 should be on the hook for the costs of reparations. What fraction of nonblack Americans have ancestors who arrived after the end of the Civil War? Using demographic modeling techniques, this report pegs the figure as high as 70%, including more than half the non-Hispanic white population. These Americans are the descendants of immigrants who came to the U.S. either in the first great wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or in the second great wave, begun in 1965 and still ongoing today. Many of these more recent arrivals are at the top of America’s economic distribution. Indeed, the recent-arrival share of top wealth earners is likely only to grow in coming years, given the prevalence of immigrants and children of immigrants at the head of top businesses. This means that the base of people and wealth that could plausibly be taxed for reparations is shrinking and will continue to shrink for the foreseeable future. This dynamic plays out in other areas of social policy. Any transfer or subsidy proposal that is justified by historical injustice—e.g., affirmative action—will lose legitimacy as the population changes. This is an important, and often overlooked, feature not only of the reparations debate but of debates about such proposals in general. great period, beginning in 1965 and extending to the present. This second group, furthermore, is represented among the wealthiest Americans and American households, challenging the feasibility of a “soak the rich” approach to reparations. Even if we otherwise grant the arguments for reparations, this basic demographic fact—that a majority of nonblack Americans are attributable to post–Civil War immigration—throws a wrench into the reparations project. Publicly funded reparations for slavery will entail taking money from tens of millions of people who are not—even under assumptions of inherited guilt that are already wildly at odds with the American tradition—plausibly responsible for slavery. To ask the question “Who pays?” produces uncomfortable answers for those who would like to see reparations paid.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 26p.

By Robert M. Zecker

Race was all over the immigrant newspaper week after week. As early as the 1890s the papers of the largest Slovak fraternal societies covered lynchings in the South. While somewhat sympathetic, these articles nevertheless enabled immigrants to distance themselves from the "blackness" of victims, and became part of a strategy of asserting newcomers' tentative claims to "whiteness." Southern and eastern European immigrants began to think of themselves as white people. They asserted their place in the U.S. and demanded the right to be regarded as "Caucasians," with all the privileges that accompanied this designation. Immigrant newspapers offered a stunning array of lynching accounts, poems and cartoons mocking blacks, and paeans to America's imperial adventures in the Caribbean and Asia. Immigrants themselves had a far greater role to play in their own racial identity formation than has so far been acknowledged.

New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 360p.

By Jason A. Cade

This essay examines the immigration implications of President Joe Biden's Proclamation on October 6, 2022, which pardons most federal and D.C. offenders—including lawful permanent residents—who have committed the offense of simple marijuana possession. When used this way, the Art. II clemency power serves a communitarian, forward-looking function—in this case by giving legal effect to a societal recalibration of what constitutes appropriate punishment for marijuana possession and a growing awareness of the racially disproportionate impact that arrests and prosecutions for this crime tend to produce.

With respect to the impact of pardons on efforts to avoid deportation or to gain lawful admission to the United States, however, ambiguities lurking in the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA) raise unsettled complications. Through most of the nation’s history, both gubernatorial and presidential pardons effectively negated the effect of the pardoned crime for immigration purposes. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, Congress muddied the waters by amending key provisions of the INA. These amendments, in turn, led the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to infer legislative intent to make pardons ineffective in the immigration context, except with respect to four specifically-enumerated removal categories—which do not included controlled substance offenses. While the Supreme Court has not yet assessed these rulings, lower federal courts have deferred to the agency's interpretation.

• More.....

  All of the immigrant pardon cases to reach the courts thus far, however, have concerned state prosecutions and gubernatorial pardons, such that governing federal law has been given preemptive effect. Presidential pardons, on the other hand, raise a specialized separation-of-powers problem in light of long-undisturbed precedent interpreting the Article II pardon power as immune from congressional constraint. According to the analysis I offer, a lawful permanent resident with a pardoned federal marijuana possession conviction facing deportation should ultimately prevail in light of the broad scope of the presidential pardon power. But the constitutional question need not be fully resolved. At the end of the day, I argue, there are reasons to doubt Congress in fact intended what the BIA has inferred, and a reasonable alternative construction would give effect to President Biden's drug-possession pardons while prudently avoiding the constitutional danger zone animated by the BIA’s statutory interpretation.

  The essay concludes with a set of considerations to which policymakers should attend as they contemplate the adoption of reformatory programs that impact immigration rules. Although the Biden Proclamation too-tightly cabins which noncitizens fall within its reach, it is a step in the right direction and may well foreshadow additional reforms, including future moves by legislative and executive branches at both federal and state levels.

University of Georgia School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series, 2022. 38p.

By Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Mathias Thoenig, Stephanos Vlachos

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 “minaret ban” referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People’s Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator’s nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

Lyon, France: University of Lyon, ENS de Lyon, Gate, 2019. 57p.

By Jean Beaman.

Children of North African Immigrants in France. "Whites in France lie to themselves and the world by proclaiming that they do not have institutional racism in their nation. Relying on interviews with second-generation, middle- class North African immigrants (a group that should be presumably 'integrated' and thus happy), Professor Beaman shatters this myth and shows the deep salience of race in the country. Bravo to Professor Beaman for clearly documenting how 'racism without racists' operates in the French context!"—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, president of American Sociological Association and author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.

Luminos. (2017) 168 pages.

Edited by By Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral. Politics and Discourse.

Right-wing populist movements and related political parties are gaining ground in many EU member states. This unique, interdisciplinary book provides an overall picture of the dynamics and development of these parties across Europe and beyond. Combining theory with in-depth case studies, it offers a comparative analysis of the policies and rhetoric of existing and emerging parties including the British BNP, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Danish Folkeparti. The case studies qualitatively and quantitatively analyse right-wing populist groups in the following countries: Austria, Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia, with one essay exclusively focused on the US. This timely and socially relevant collection is essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners wanting to understand the recent rise of populist right wing parties at local, countrywide and regional levels.

Bloomsbury Academic (2013) 349p.