Immigration News: April, 2004 - Volume #11

Census, Welfare, California, New York City

The US Census Bureau released new projections that foresee the number of US residents rising from 282 million in 2000 to 420 million in 2050. In 2000, the racial/ethnic makeup of US residents was: White, 69 percent; Hispanic and Black, 13 percent each; and Asian and other, six percent. By 2050, these percentages are projected to be: 50, 24 15, and 13, meaning that the share of Hispanics among US residents almost doubles and the share of Asians almost triples. It is possible that, by 2050, today's racial and ethnic categories will no longer be in use.

The Urban Institute estimated there were 10 million unauthorized foreigners in the US, plus three million US citizen children with at least one unauthorized parent, in the US in 2003. According to USCIS, there were seven million unauthorized foreigners in the US in 2000, including 4.8 million or 69 percent from Mexico; 200,000 from El Salvador; and almost 150,000 each from Guatemala, Colombia and Honduras.

Foreign-born persons are 11 percent of the US population, and 14 percent of US workers. Economists estimate that 10 percent more foreign workers decreases the wages of US workers by three to four percent. The US is expected to attract over a million immigrants a year between 2000 and 2010, with the major source countries remaining Mexico, China, the Philippines, India and Vietnam.

Welfare. The US revised federal welfare policies in August 1996, and the number of families receiving cash assistance has fallen from four million to two million. The reasons why Temporary Assistance for Needy Families rolls continued to fall as unemployment rose after 2001 include the fact that some adults reached their lifetime limit of five years of cash assistance, some were dropped for failure to work as required (at least 30 hours a week), and some did not apply because of complex applications. TANF has been extended on a year-by-year basis since 2001, and Democrats want to use the 2004 reauthorization of TANF to increase the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7 an hour.

All residents with US income must file tax returns by April 15, regardless of legal status. Legal residents with earnings and incomes of less than twice the poverty level and at least one child living at home are eligible for refunds of the taxes they paid and additional payments of up to $4,000 via the Earned Income Tax Credit Program. The Rural Families Speak Project in a San Joaquin Valley survey found that most families had incomes below $19,920 a year, the poverty line for a family of five, but only a third applied for the EITC. The EITC is the largest federal anti-poverty program. Some 21 million US families received EITC refunds and payments totaling $37 billion in 2003.

California. California voters on March 2, 2004 approved Proposition 57, which authorizes the sale of up to $15 billion in bonds to pay off debts accumulated from three years of budget deficits, and Proposition 58, which requires the state to enact a balanced budget each year with a rainy-day reserve. The California bond sale will be the largest state and municipal debt sale in US history.

Some 42 percent of Los Angeles city residents were born abroad, and in March 2004 Los Angeles created an Office of Immigrant Affairs to serve as a clearinghouse to help immigrants gain access to city services. Los Angeles is widely seen as the "the Ellis Island of the West Coast."

USC demographer Dowell Myers examined the upward mobility of foreign-born Latinos since 1970, and found that their poverty rates drop over time. For example, a third of the 1.8 million foreign-born Latinos who arrived in California between 1980 and 1990 were poor in 1990, but only a quarter of the 1980s arrivals were poor in the 2000 census. Myers emphasized the positives- 70 percent of Latino immigrant children in California graduate from high school, and 55 percent of middle-aged California Latinos in the US at least 20 years own their homes.

Two Los Angeles-area "lawyers" charged 350 Chinese clients $1,000 to $8,000 each to file for asylum; they were ordered to pay a $1.85 million fine. California requires immigration consultants to file a $50,000 bond and to provide written contracts to clients specifying that they are not attorneys. Polish-born Elzbieta Malgorzata Bugajska was sentenced in Los Angeles to 10 years in prison for immigration fraud, charging Koreans and Filipinos $25,000 to "fast-track" their applications for immigrant visas. In one part of the hoax, a colleague donned judge's robes and administered the naturalization oath to some of the foreigners that Bugajska promised to "naturalize." Bugajska was convicted of immigration fraud several times in the 1980s, but this was her first prison sentence.

Michoacan Gov. Lazaro Cardenas Batel met hundreds of Mexicans in Santa Ana in a campaign-style rally; Cardenas is the grandson of the Mexican president who nationalized Mexico's petroleum industry. A third of the 300,000 residents of Santa Ana are believed to come from Michoacan, and two million Michoacanos are believed to live in the US.

California's master plan for higher education promised the top eighth of the high school graduating class places in the University of California and the top third a place at California State University. However, in 2004-05, some qualified students were diverted to community colleges to save money-- California spends $4,400 a year to educate a community college student, $7,000 at a Cal State, and $9,000 at a UC campus. About 70 percent of UC students enter directly from high school; but two-thirds of Cal State students transfer there from community colleges.

California repealed a law granting driver's licenses to unauthorized foreigners shortly after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected in 2003, but Florida Governor Jeb Bush in April 2004 endorsed a state bill that would grant two-year licenses to the estimated 400,000 adult unauthorized residents of Florida who agreed to undergo and pay for background criminal checks.

The Save Our State initiative, successor to Proposition 187, reported that over 400,000 of the required 600,000 signatures had been collected by early April 2004; the deadline is April 29, 2004. Like Proposition 187, SOS would prohibit illegal immigrants from receiving state-funded welfare benefits, and make it make it a misdemeanor for state and local officials - such as police officers - not to report unauthorized foreigners to federal authorities. Unlike Proposition 187, the state Republican Party has not endorsed the SOS initiative; former Republican Governor Pete Wilson made his support for Proposition 187 a centerpiece of his 1994 reelection campaign.

Ann Marie Tallman replaced Antonia Hernandez, who left to head the California Community Foundation, as president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is headquartered in Los Angeles and supported by major US corporations and foundations.

Leaving California. The Los Angeles Times on February 16, 2004 profiled six brothers from Los Cerritos, Michoacan who migrated to Oxnard, California to pick strawberries in the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1993 began to move to Rogers, Arkansas to work for Tyson Foods- they moved despite subsidized housing in Oxnard, food stamps and other benefits. The six families are very large, with a total of 52 children, including one with 11 children.

About 20 percent of the 40,000 Rogers residents are Hispanics, and many of those who moved to Rogers from California note that their annual earnings rose from $8,000 a year to $20,000 a year, wives could also work, and low-cost housing enabled them to become homeowners. In unincorporated areas of Arkansas, there are few building codes, and many Latino immigrants build their own homes. California's share of US immigrants fell from 38 percent in the 1980s to 25 percent in the 1990s.

New York City. New York celebrated its first Immigrant History Week in April 2004 to coincide with the reopening of Ellis Island, where 12 million southern and eastern European immigrants arrived. Nancy Foner, author of the book "From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration," says that New York City is still being made and remade by immigration, but that today's newcomers arrive by plane instead of ship, and are from China, South Asia, and Latin America.

Nearly one million immigrants have arrived in New York since 1990, so that 36 percent of the city's eight million residents are foreign-born, nearing the 1910 peak of 41 percent. The foreign-born are, in descending order: Dominicans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Guyanese and Mexicans.

New York City is considering granting legal immigrants the right to vote in local elections, following the lead of five towns in Maryland that allow noncitizens, even illegal immigrants, to vote in local elections. New York City has one million legal immigrants, equivalent to more than a fifth of the total number of current voters. In New York City, all residents could vote in school board elections until the boards were abolished in 2002.

The organization New Immigrant Community Empowerment argues that allowing legal immigrants to vote in local elections prepares them for "becoming citizens and voting in national elections." Alien suffrage, allowing non-citizens to vote, was common in the 19th century but by 1928 voting in the US was generally restricted to United States citizens. In 1992, Takoma Park, Maryland permitted noncitizens to vote in local elections, and four other cities followed its lead.

The Sierra Club, a 112-year old organization with 750,000 members and a $95 million a year budget, held elections in which three candidates who want the club to advocate reduced immigration are running for five of the 15 Board seats--former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University entomology professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris, the former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In past years, fewer than 75,000 members cast votes; in the April 2004 elections, more than 150,000 votes were cast.

Robert F. Worth, "Push Is On to Give Legal Immigrants Vote in New York," New York Times, April 8, 2004. Daryl Kelley and Carlos Chavez, "The Carranza family, like many Latino immigrants, found its way into the American middle class by leaving the Golden State," Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2004.

Australia needs you: