The Washington Post had a headline article, “Backers of the Immigration Bill More Optimistic“, about the increasingly heated debate on immigration. The optimism for the bill is based on the results of a recent Washington Post – ABC News poll on American’s opinions on the bill. Specifically the poll asked the question “Would you support a program giving illegal immigrants the right to stay and work in the United States if they pay a fine and meet other requirements?”. The results were 52% in favor and 44% in opposition.
The debate and poll raised two big geographic questions for me. Where are the immigrants and where are the people voting in favor/opposition of them. To answer these two questions I dug into GeoCommons to look for data and I found a great data set on net international migration from 2000 to 2006 by county across the United States. The data was collected from the Census and uploaded by AarK two months ago. The specifics on the data are available as well as the ability to export it as KML to use it how ever you like. So, where is international immigration centered around? Check out the maps and see. Pan around and zoom into your city.
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I started off the map showing Texas since it is such a hotbed of activity and debate, but you can pan or zoom around to any city. Los Angeles is definitely dominate but Houston, Miami, Phoenix, NYC, and Dallas are strong immigration hubs as well. Now comes the interesting part of adding in a geo-locating poll to see how the votes on immigration match up with the actual immigrant population.
Hopefully the poll will pick up and I’ll upload the vote location results into GeoCommons and post up the results for folks to see. This is just one take on the story though. Anyone can go into GeoCommons and map another part of the immigration story, or add a different polling question. Maybe you have data you’d like to combine with this and map out. You can do it in GeoCommons and share it with the world or download the data and do it just for yourself. The goal is to get you involved with the news story. Don’t let the headlines dictate the story, dig into the data and make your own conclusions then share them with everyone else.
3 Responses to Mapping the Immigration Debate
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People who vote against drastic immigration reform – which must allow undocumented immigrants the right to stay – must be unaware of the enormous underclass in this country & how it functions to support everyone else. Already a tightening of the borders has impacted agriculture, notably in southern California but all over the country as well. Without the Latinos who flow across our borders, crops are not tended economically, let alone picked & packed. Prices of homegrown American food will skyrocket, along with hotel rooms, restaurant food, construction & garden maintenance, just to mention some of the most obvious areas where Latino labor makes life easier & cheaper for everyone else. Due to the irrational & unhealthy sense of entitlement that contaminates American culture, it is virtually impossible to find native-born Americans who will perform the tasks now done by the undocumented – with energy, will & a diligent work ethic that we once touted as “Anglo-Saxon”. And in any discussion of Latin American immigration, it’s also important to note that they wouldn’t be leaving their homes & families, often for years or forever, if the North American Free Trade Agreement hadn’t made it impossible for them to make a living in their own country. Very few people leave kin & country behind willingly. Naturally, immigration needs controls, but as a second-generation Italian-American, I say let them stay.
Within any proposal to add population one must, of course, analyze the effects of population increase on the infrastructure. The earliest, greatest effect is how additional children must be provided education for which the cost is borne by the states. In the analysis of where immigrants live, we find that ten states carry the greatest burden (40 states carry some burden). The taxpayers in those ten states must somehow pay (ranging $9000 to $14,000) by either raising state income tax, state sales tax or property tax. Meanwhile, the 40 lower-paying states have a lesser burden. Because the U.S. has no immigration policy, that is, it has an Open-door policy, we have inadvertently devised a system of unequal taxation on particular state residents while allowing other Americans to “reap the benefits without paying their fair share. Recently, I have been reading that the majority of the social costs to carry the legal and illegal immigrants is not caused by the breadwinner of the family. It is caused by the women and children and the criminal immigrants which require court and incarceration services. Unrevealed in the arguments advocating illegal immigrants to remain is the analysis of who pays the costs and who receives the benefits.
It is always easy for one to generalize a benefit, for example, we pay less for food and tourism without offering the costs supporting the immigrant superstructure. With a magic whisk of the hand those costs are swept under the rug or completely ignored.
Study after study reveals that our population MUST target zero growth soon or will will be facing dire consequences. Those arguments are likewise dismissed as unrealistic. “Quality of Life” issues are similarly disregarded in a large population by pro-Open-Door advocates. Perhaps the immigrant fails to bring the “Quality-of-Life” viewpoint with him. Or even, perhaps, he must dismiss the population argument knowing that he is adding another soul to our already large population base, otherwise, he wouldn’t come. If the president’s words, “We cannot deport 12 million of them!” are translated into a dozen languages are they not words inviting another million or two? Who? Just who is in favor of getting a handle on zeroing out population at 350 million? Raise your hand if you are.
The assumption that existing citizens of the U.S. are entirely carrying the burden of aid to the undocumented denies the reality. Many undocumented workers use (& yes, I KNOW it’s illegal!) false social security numbers in order to work. They pay taxes, but because they cannot legitimately file tax returns without becoming visible to the authorities, they mostly never do so and so thus never ask for refunds. All that money just goes into the pot without any need for the federal government to deal with the untidy mess of actual people.
Not to mention that the profitability of firms using cheaper, undocumented labor contributes to the prosperity & tax bases of the communities in which they function.
Oh, & it’s one of the dirty little secrets that everyone in the federal government knows, that these unclaimable contributions not only bolster the general tax base, but also provide a not insignificant support to a straining Social Security system. Undocumented immigrants working illegally will never claim on this system.
And here’s the reality about our sacrosanct American Quality of Life. If everyone on the planet were to live at the standard of North Americans, we’d need another two planets. But do We really need all this Stuff? Are we going to build a 50′ high, 30′ wide Great Wall of America around our pile of consumer goods & spend all our grandchildren’s wealth defending it? What for? What sort of society would they be left with?
Instead of piling the Stuff higher & higher & building bigger walls & bigger guns to protect our right to have all the Stuff, why don’t we share some of it? Make friends with the developing world & stop treating them as our personal slave labor force? Help them find a reasonable level of prosperity? Make do with a little less? Have stronger communities? Spend less time watching 60″ HDTV plasma TVs & more time talking to our neighbors? Interestingly, since our level of Stuff has significantly increased in the last 50 years, studies regarding the perception of personal Happiness indicate that people saw themselves as happier then than they do now. Could it have been that communities were stronger; people were less isolated; the pursuit of Stuff, encouraged in the latter twentieth century by powerful, sociopathic corporate entities, was less important?
The coming changes to our social structure as oil availability constrains our energy usage & rising temperatures strain our capacity to feed our population are going to force us to modify our behavior. Why not start now & choose the structure those modifications take?
The studies you speak of requiring zero population growth apply to the entire planet. Earth is struggling to support more than 6 billion of us & those who don’t have are going to be in constant conflict with those who do, ref: Darfur, almost totally caused by water shortages in the area. In fact, American birth rates have plummeted in the past few decades. Without the children of new, less educated immigrants, there very soon will not be enough people to support the systems that provide for the aged here in the U.S. Personally, I’m in favor of zeroing out world population at 4 billion, but oh! Whoops! We just slipped right past that mark.
My dear Captain, it’s a difficult, complicated problem, and one that is not served well by paranoia. Grouping the women (who almost always are working moms) & children of immigrants with criminals is extremely unfair. Yes, in any large group, there are always damaged personalities who cause problems. They are a minority. Deport them. I’ve got no argument there. There are also those who fail to support themselves. Again, they are a minority. Deport them? Sure. Sometimes. It’s definitely a harder decision.
You are right. The cost of uncontrolled & undocumented immigration is hard to calculate. A reasoned, thoughtful debate & non-partisan, creative solutions are our only hopes. To all our problems.
A time of great change is upon all citizens of this planet. America can lead the way. Or not. Future generations will judge our wisdom or our foolishness. The immigration debate is just one area of many where we must rise above our petty personal concerns and think like civilized and very humane beings.