Explaining Trump’s Appeal, Part 3
by Mike Kimel
Explaining Trump’s Appeal, Part 3
In a recent post, I showed that since 1950
a. foreign born population correlates to slower job creation
b. it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to find a job in the US
I want to try to tie both those facts, and explain them. But first, I need more facts, which, oddly tie somewhat Trump’s rhetoric. I’m going to rely a lot (but not entirely) on a set of slides prepared by the Census. That presentation looks at figures relating to the foreign born population. For purposes of the Census, and this post for that matter, foreign born simply means “not a native born American.” Native born Americans include people born in US territories, and the children of American citizens born abroad. Thus, neither group is included among the foreign born population.
The Census presentation includes the following graph:
Figure 1 above shows that in 2010, there were 11.7 million Mexican-born people in the US making up 29% of the foreign born population. That’s easily the largest group of foreign born individuals, followed by China, India, and the Philippines, which make up 5%, 4% and 4% of the foreign born US population.
As the next graph from the same presentation shows, it wasn’t always that way:
As Figure 2 shows, as recently as 1960, the bulk of the foreign born population came from Europe, but now European born residents are dwarfed by those from Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia.
Here’s a bit more detail on Mexican and Central American immigration, again from the same set of slides:
The graph shows that Mexican and Central American born people made up 6% of the US foreign born population in 1960 and 37% of the US foreign born population in 2010.
Now, say you are playing the role of Donald Trump in a theater off-off-Broadway. And let’s say the playwright got confused and created a Donald Trump that was an amalgam of Trump and Ross Perot. Such a character would keep Trump’s umbrage at the presence of Mexicans and Central Americans, and combine it with Perot’s inimitable style and fondness for pointing at charts. If you played that role, your lines might look like the following:
1. On average, Mexican and Central American born people have less education than native born Americans
According to this Rand report,
[O]ut of every 100 students entering the first grade of primary school in Mexico, around 68 of them will complete all nine years of basic education. Thirty-five of these will go on to graduate from upper secondary. And only slightly more than 8 percent of the population aged 18 and older in Mexico holds a bachelor’s degree.
In the US, just shy of 30% of the population 18 and over has a Bachelor’s degree or more advanced degree, so a significant percentage of the immigrants are less educated than the existing population.
Additionally, Trump might argue that the same combination of circumstances that lead many Latinos abroad to not get an education may be transmitted through the generations once here. To argue that, Trump might highlight the figure below from the Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education Magazine:
2. On average, Mexican and Central American born people are disproportionately poor and use up disproportionate amounts of government assistance
Trump might start this argument by posting this graph from the Census slides:
So we see that foreign born people, in general, earn less than the native born, but that the largest group of foreign born people, those from Mexico, have very low earnings.
Not that those earnings will necessarily remain in the country. In 2015, remittances, at $24.8 billion, were the largest source of foreign income for Mexico.
In any case, the poverty rate of low earning groups is also, not surprisingly, high:
Now, these days low income and high poverty means government transfers & subsidies, as Mr. Trump would be quick to tell us. Estimates I’ve found of the government transfers & subsidies going to the foreign born vary quite a bit, and tend to be characterized by opponents as ideological.
To avoid getting caught up in that debate we can ballpark this ourselves, and focus entirely on the region Trump is likely targeting when he discusses the Great Wall of Trump. Mexico and Central American, in 2010, accounted for over 13.7M people (Figure 1 – just Mexico, El Salvador & Guatemala) with 29% in poverty (Figure 6 – assuming El Salvador & Guatemala born people have the same poverty rate in the US as Mexico born people). That means about 4 million Mexican & Central American born people eligible for programs related to poverty alleviation. Now, in the US as a whole, about 46.7 million live in poverty. So about 8.5% of the poor people in the US come from the 4.4% of the population that were born in Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Federal outlays for transfer payments that probably included foreign born poor people include “Children’s health insurance,” Medicaid, “Total, Assistance to students,” housing assistance, “Total, Food and nutrition assistance” and “Total, Public assistance and related programs.” If I didn’t screw anything up, in 2010, that amounted to $672 billion and change. 8.5% of that is $57 billion.
On the other hand, tax revenues would necessarily be a much smaller number. I’m not tax accountant, but I do believe that once exemptions, deductions, and credits are take into account, the average person making $23,810 is probably paying very little in taxes. (For what its worth, according to this, a single filer with no dependents pays $948, and a married filer with two children pays nothing.) But if $23,810 is the average income of the working person in that group, even assuming very, very generously that the employment to population ratio for the group is 75% (relative to US figures of 60% now), it is easier to come up with a scenario where total tax revenues are less than $57 billion than it is to come up with a scenario where total tax revenues exceed $57 billion. So from the perspective of Trump’s bean counter, that portion of the foreign born population is, on net, a fiscal drag on the public purse.
Which brings us to the Great Wall of Trump. How much would that cost? According to the Washington Post, Trump estimated that Trump’s Wall would cost $8 billion. The newspaper put the figure closer to $25 billion.
Now, Trump would argue there’s another reason for the Great Wall of Trump, and that is crime, which brings us to the third argument you would utter in your role of Trump in the off-off-Broadway theater:
3. On average, Mexican and Central American born people are disproportionately likely to end up committing crimes
At this point, I suspect Mr. Trump would pivot away from the Census graphs. He would probably show us this graph from the Federal Bureau of Prisons:
Figure 7
It goes without saying that Mexican citizens do not make up 14.8% of the US population.
Your Trump character would probably also trot this graph:
Figure 8
Note that according to Census figures for 2015, “Hispanics constituted 17 percent of the nation’s total population.”
At this point, your Trump character would overtake his Perotian tendencies and drone on, stream of consciousness style, for an indeterminate period. Eventually, the curtains would come down.
A few notes. First, in full disclosure, I am Hispanic (Argentine heritage on my father’s side). I would imagine that Mr. Trump’s Wall would be equally intended to deal with South Americans as Mexicans and Central Americans. As a result, I would have preferred to look at a broader group that includes me. However, South Americans are a much smaller share of the immigrant population to the US, so statistics are hard to find. For this post, I took the drunk-looking-for-his-keys-under-the-lamppost approach.
Second note – in fairness to Trump, he generally makes a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, at least when it comes to those from the Western Hemisphere.
Third note – I had intended to explain some findings from my previous post on Trump but this post has already gotten too long. I will get to that explanation.
Is your assumption about the share of Latin immigrants collecting benefits valid?
Since many of them are illegal they would want to avoid contact with the authorities and would not apply for the benefits they are eligible for, so
the share collecting benefits probably would be lower than you assume.
Moreover, those working in the legal economy would pay social security taxes –including the employers share — but would return to Mexico, etc.
when they age and not collect the social security they have earned. I’m sure the point that many of them use a phony social security number is significant.
Spencer,
Your point has a lot merit. One would think being illegally in the country would mean fewer benefits. A quick Google search reveals
http://thelawdictionary.org/article/why-is-it-that-illegal-aliens-get-free-food-stamps-health-insurance-and-pay-no-taxes/
Also, this from a pro-immigrant organization
http://www.michiganlegalaid.org/library_client/resource.2005-05-29.1117417917453/file0/at_download
The above lend support to anti-immigration groups who complain about the following scheme
http://cis.org/An-Aid-Program-that-Routinely-Discriminates-in-Favor-of-Ineligible-Aliens
Finally, this piece (containing data from the same anti-immigration group cited in the previous link) claims Hispanic immigrant groups receive more welfare than other immigrant groups. I can’t vouch for that advocacy group’s numbers except to say that one point they make definitely rings true, namely that Hispanic immigrants tend to have more children, and households with more children tend to receive more welfare benefits.
So honestly I am not sure what the numbers are and they seem deliberately hard to find. To me that would tend to mean they are larger than one would otherwise expect or those with an easier ability to collect the data, namely pro immigrant groups, would have released the data already.
Apologies. Forgot to post the last link in my comment above.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/01/immigrant-welfare-use-report/71517072/
Wouldn’t this just be race bating using economics as the rationalization? I note that the charts shown don’t show US citizen black incomes, incarceration, etc. which would put the Hispanics and Latino immigrant economics into better perspective.
Also I know that the white European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were likewise poor and produced little relative to the whole, so that the race bating in economic rationalizations is actually based on and reduces to modern economic welfare related issues….. which is the real target of the right wing… using racially based issues on current “immigration” where non-whites are the overwhelming proportion of immigrants relative to earlier times simply plays to racist beliefs.
Hence the charts used are selectively used to show how race bating can be used to further the right wing’s agenda by propaganda.
Another way of saying this is that current political right wing conservatism is still using racist America as their means to their ends.
“baiting” rather than bating… sorry.
Longtooth,
In 1989 plus or minus a year, I went to see Cesar Chavez speak. Its been a long time, but I have two memories of the event. The first is that every time the word “Armenian” was mentioned, activists throughout the hall would blow on whistles. There were (are?) a number of prominent of Armenian families among growers of various crops in California. Additionally, George Deukmejian (of Armenian background) was then governor.
The second thing that stuck out was how much Chavez and the mostly Hispanic crowd was against immigration. And when Chavez spoke of immigration, he meant (and I could be wrong, but I think he spelled it out) illegal immigrants who would come to California to work as farm laborers. Chavez and his supporters understood that more farm workers meant more competition and less pay for Chavez and his supporters. I never went to a speech by Deukmejian or any of the growers, but I imagine they understood how the supply and demand for farm labor works too.
I suspect Chavez and his largely Hispanic supporters that day would have strongly supported the construction of the Great Wall of Trump had it been suggested at the time. I also imagine every one of them would have taken issue with being described as race baiters. Instead, Chavez was arguing, essentially, that the first priority of the country should be to the people currently there, and that with few exceptions, the decision of whether to allow someone else to enjoy the privilege of coming to the country should be predicated more on the pros and cons to those already there. That is to say, the position Donald Trump has now on immigration from Mexico and Central America is the position Cesar Chavez held in 1989 (plus or minus a year).
Regarding Trump’s “appeal” on keeping foreign-born workers out of the US, I doubt if “facts” matter much at all to his supporters. It’s obvious that decent jobs aren’t available, and the immigrants become easy targets. Trump’s “Wall” was a stupid off-the-cuff notion which resonated only because nobody else was saying anything at all about protecting US citizens.
I don’t personally give a hoot about where a person is born, but I do happen to care a lot about whether or not that person is a legal citizen of the US. It happens to be my own view that US citizens ought to be the ones working at US jobs under the aegis of whatever legal protections are available.
Importing desperate and impoverished people from foreign places is unfair to everybody except the swine who are looking for union-breaking inexpensive and helpless workers.
Except that
a) Chavez was trying to establish a farm-workers union of underpaid immigrants from Mexico who were legally brought to the US by the US to supply the farm labor required for WWII’s agriculture, after incarcerating all the citizen Japanese who had constituted a large proportion of western farm labor,
b) Chavez couldn’t do that with just the legal Mexican farm laborers in the country (California predominantly) at that time he necessarily depended heavily on the illegal Mexican farm workers to support his cause to get higher wages and better working conditions for farm laborers, “wet-backs” or not.
Your observed animosity of the Farm Workers to the Armenian growers in CA at that time and well before that time in fact, was a Fresno & Tulare County prominently local issue since it is in those regions that the Armenian immigrants found to be most environmentally like their own prior residence, and who had out-done the local native growers in a few farm industries by slowly buying out other small farmers, then larger ones over time,
The Armenian’s came to the US with money and assets which they used to establish small business’s in Fresno, Tulare, Visalia, Dinuba, etc. in orchard and grape growing region around Fresno and Tulare Counties.
The Mexican farm laborers, legal and illegal came with the shirts on their backs, lived in squalid “farm labor camps” (see Farmersville for example) and were paid (net of “rent” for the labor shacks) pennies on the dollar. That was what Chavez’s movement was all about.
The Mexican farm laborers were almost exclusively “wet-backs” … (legal immigrants) who also came across the Rio-Grande when the US was legally importing poor Mexican’s to man the western fields during WW II. The US immigration services turned a completely blind-eye to the illegals and subsequently didn’t require them to show proof of having been imported legally during the war when they Mexican immigrant farm laborers were granted the ability to apply for citizenship several years after the war.
I lived in the Valley from 1951 – ’59 (Visalia) at that time, as a youth but fortunately also became friends with many of the farm labor families (all of whom lived across the tracks, literally) by pure luck (in hindsight). I went to school there with the sons and daughters of the growers around Visalia…. all of which were lily white major growers and owners of the processing facilities, farm trucking and farm vehicle firms. Then as now that segment (the virtually owners of the valley) of the valley that took advantage of the Mexicans and Okies (refugees form the mid-west draught and dust storms in the 30’s… i.e. we called them “Okies”… with subsistence (if that0 level wages.
So don’t give me any shit about what you think you know about what Chavez was fighting for,, and who his constituencies were … they included (most dominant proportion) the illegals.
Trying to use the Armenian’s as a comparative for immigrants is even worse… they came with family funds and assets available and so had a leg up from the get-go in the valley. They cooperated together as an ethnic group that was also terribly descrimated against racially… by my time in school it was still prevalent but my first love was an Armenian girl (4th through 8th grade… Jill Jenanigan,who unfortunately for me only allowed friendship). I knew a few Armenian immigrant families (their parents and the kids I went to school with) when I lived in Visalia. By the time I was an eight grader I’d read William Saroyan’s book (one of them… I’ve forgotten which one).
Quit trying to compare oranges, grapes, and avocado’s as if they’re just variants of the same fruit.
And oh, btw, “Deukmejian was born 1928, Courken George Deukmejian, Jr. in Menands, New York, to Armenian American parents. His parents were Armenians who emigrated from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s to escape the Armenian Genocide
A new wave of Armenian immigrants came in the late 1940s, including Soviet Armenian prisoners of war who were able to make their way westward after being freed from Nazi camps. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowed people displaced during the World War II to immigrate to the US. From 1944 to 1952, 4,739 Armenians migrated to the US.
The first Armenian arrived in California in 1874 and settled in Fresno. Fresno and the Central Valley in general were the center of California Armenian community, but in the later decades, especially since the 1960s, when significant number of Middle Eastern Armenians arrived in the US, Southern California attracted more and more Armenians.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Americans#Second_wave_of_immigration
Longtooth,
My point, which you seem to be reiterating, is that a group of people who are on one side of the border can be opposed to having more people who (in aggregate) are genetically indistinct from them join them across the border. That is to say, it isn’t xenophobia or racism. It is economics. And that contradicts what you wrote earlier when you used the term race baiting.
Zachary Smith,
I noted in comments to a different post some time ago that I was seeing people support Trump who I would have thought were natural Hilary supporters, including some who had never voted Republican before, and who had in the past raised money for Barack Obama and other Democrats. There may be xenophobes among Trump’s supporters, but I suspect you are painting with a broad brush.
If I may editorialize, personally, I think (and it seems from your comment that you may too) that Hilary is closer to having a rational tax policy than is Trump, and Trump is closer to having a rational immigration policy than is Hilary. That’s about the only positive thing I can conclude about either one of them so (to me at least) it doesn’t feel like a good option is available.
Mike,
I am between Trump and Jill Stein.
Largely due to dismay with the crooked DNC and opposition to neocon Hillary (the crimes with security data are icing).
On dismay of DNC I will vote solid thuglican down ticket. A first in 44 years!
ILSM,
I too have never checked an R box for any national level office. But security trumps economics. I look at Germany, and I see the German Gov’t telling its citizens to stockpile supplies in case of an “unlikely event” that “could threaten our existence.” What?
Then I ask myself, what are the chain of events that lead to that sort of announcement? Sadly, it seems to me that the path that got the German gov’t to yesterday’s announcement is described by Hilary and her advisors as the path we should follow. This to me far more insane than Trump’s type of crazy.
To Mike Kimel August 23, 2016 7:51 am
*** … Hilary is closer to having a rational tax policy than is Trump, and Trump is closer to having a rational immigration policy than is Hilary. ***
Tax policy is a subject I haven’t even considered, and I know virtually nothing about the positions of either candidate. I’d assume Trump is lots worse on that, but that’s merely a guess.
So far as I know Trump’s only ‘positives’ are his claims he’d oppose the TPP and not start a nuclear war. The former is something I sort of doubt given his wealth and all, and the latter is merely a desperate hope the man isn’t just flapping his jaws. On all other issues I’m aware of Trump is a walking and talking disaster.
Hillary’s corruption and most of the rest of it doesn’t actually bother me all that much – such stuff has become a standard feature in the politics of the US of A.
It’s the woman’s slobbering desire for Wars For Israel and her dedication to the TPP which frighten me to death.
My other main concern – Climate Change – isn’t on the table at all with either of these two dopes. So in the slightly longer term it may not matter which of them moves into the White House. (I prefer that sort of language because it’s really painful to consider the alternative of being walking dead men.)
Zachary Smith,
I would disagree with one point you made, namely that Hilary is out to fight Israel’s wars. From what I can tell Israelis are less than enthusiastic about Hilary. They also seem unhappy about seeing weak but stable dictatorships in their neighborhood destabilized given all likely alternatives to weak but stable dictators are will probably cause them more trouble. So the wars are obviously for someone else’s benefit.
“My other main concern – Climate Change – isn’t on the table at all with either of these two dopes.”
You need to change your information sources.
“The science of climate change is unforgiving, no matter what the deniers may say. Sea levels are rising; ice caps are melting; storms, droughts and wildfires are wreaking havoc. … If we act decisively now we can still head off the most catastrophic consequences.”
“Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it’s a hoax. It’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, okay? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”
*** I would disagree with one point you made, namely that Hilary is out to fight Israel’s wars. ***
When Saudi Arabian terrorists attacked the US in 2001, Bush the Dumber and his Zionist buddies engineered a nation-destroying attack on Iraq. After that, the big cry was On To Iran until it became clear that this was impossible at the time. Fast forward to the time of Secretary Hillary when Syria had a civil war ignited. Candidate Hillary wants to finish the job of smashing that little nation. Secretary Hillary was also the main driving force in totally destroying Libya. If Hillary Clinton has ever criticized Israel for it’s behavior in Gaza or the West Bank, I missed hearing that news. If Hillary Clinton has ever called for the total withdrawal from the lands Israel stole in 1967, I’ve never heard about that either.
I’ll grant that it may be a Cosmic Coincidence the recent wars the US has fought happened to be on Israel’s hit list. But I will maintain this is not exactly a likely conclusion.
*** The neocons have never given up their dreams of overthrowing Mideast governments that Israel has put on its enemies list. Iraq was only the first. To follow were Syria and Iran with the idea that by installing pro-Israeli leaders in those countries, Israel’s close-in enemies – Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups – could be isolated and crushed. ***
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/10/would-a-clinton-win-mean-more-wars/
By the way, there are a few real and potential enemies of Israel still around in the Mideast. Turkey recently had a near-death experience with a nation-destroying civil war likely engineered by the CIA. And Saudi Arabia is being encouraged by the neocons to grind itself to bits.
Lebanon (lots of water Israel needs there) and Iran remain “unfinished business for the neocons. It’s a very safe bet that President Hillary will do Israel’s bidding in all cases. Short of getting End-Timer President Cruz, how could that little outhouse of a nation-state do any better than Hillary?
Imagining that Israel isn’t tickled pink with Hillary is akin to supposing Brer Rabbit doesn’t really want to be thrown into the briar patch by Brer Fox.
I forgot this Wiki-Leaks email from Hillary.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328#efmADMAFf
*** The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. ***
That entire email is about helping Israel. Hillary, like a very long string of US politicians dating back to Jimmy Carter, knows that Israel has a massive nuclear arsenal. It’s illegal under US law to give money or anything else to Israel because of that, and that law has been ignored for decades. This is because Israel is God’s Favorite Nation – and because the little craphole of a nation owns the US Congress.
Zachary Smith,
This is my last response in this topic as it risks derailing a discussion on another topic. Hilary may well have one explanation for posterity, but:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/08/23/politics/donald-trump-israel-american-voters/index.html
On the other hand, Hilary’s backers include many people who want to see Israel wiped out or at least weakened.
It’s hard to make both those facts square with the notion that Hilary is out creating wars for Israel.