8/1/2022 Biden Wants an Industrial Revolution. He Can't Do It Unless Immigration Reform is Implemented.Read NowIntel’s planned microchip plant outside Columbus, Ohio, is the administration’s poster child for reviving high-tech manufacturing. But failure to allow a small number of foreign-born doctorates to stay in the U.S. could cause the effort to fizzle. Just 15 minutes outside of downtown Columbus, the suburbs abruptly evaporate. Past a bizarre mix of soybean fields, sprawling office parks and lonely clapboard churches is a field where the Biden administration — with help from one of the world’s largest tech companies — hopes to turn the U.S. into a hub of microchip manufacturing. In his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called this 1,000-acre spread of corn stalks and farmhouses a “field of dreams.” Within three years, it will house two Intel-operated chip facilities together worth $20 billion — and Intel is promising to invest $80 billion more now that Washington has sweetened the deal with subsidies. It’s all part of a nationwide effort to head off another microchip shortage, shore up the free world’s advanced industrial base in the face of a rising China and claw back thousands of high-end manufacturing jobs from Asia. But even as Biden signs into law more than $52 billion in “incentives” designed to lure chipmakers to the U.S., an unusual alliance of industry lobbyists, hard-core China hawks and science advocates says the president’s dream lacks a key ingredient — a small yet critical core of high-skilled workers. It’s a politically troubling irony: To achieve the long-sought goal of returning high-end manufacturing to the United States, the country must, paradoxically, attract more foreign workers.
“For high-tech industry in general — which of course, includes the chip industry — the workforce is a huge problem,” said Julia Phillips, a member of the National Science Board. “It’s almost a perfect storm.” From electrical engineering to computer science, the U.S. currently does not produce enough doctorates and master’s degrees in the science, technology, engineering and math fields who can go on to work in U.S.-based microchip plants. Decades of declining investments in STEM education means the U.S. now produces fewer native-born recipients of advanced STEM degrees than most of its international rivals.
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Last month, at least 53 migrants were found dead in an abandoned truck in San Antonio — one of the deadliest smuggling events in modern U.S. history. For many, this tragedy exposes the human costs of the country’s harsh restrictions on legal immigration. Some polls have recently reported that Americans have grown friendlier to immigration over the past decades. For the first time since Gallup started polling on the issue almost 60 years ago, more people say immigration should be increased rather than decreased. That’s a shift from 7 percent in favor of increases and 33 percent in favor of decreases in 1965, with the 2020 numbers suggesting that 34 percent favor increases and 28 percent favor decreases. But U.S. immigration attitudes may not have warmed as much as those numbers suggest. My new research shows that predominantly Democratic voters who support immigration simply do not see the issue as important as do the predominantly Republican voters who oppose it. As a result, opponents remain more politically influential than supporters. Americans’ Support for Immigration Is Even Weaker Than It SeemsIt’s true that a greater proportion of Americans are willing to tell pollsters that they support immigration than before. But that support is still soft. First, the aggregate change does not necessarily mean that individuals have changed their minds on the issue. My research with political scientists Dillon Laaker and Cassidy Reller looks at longitudinal survey data, in which the same respondents were interviewed over a decade. There we found much greater stability in individuals’ immigration attitudes. These attitudes form early in life and reflect deep-seated psychological traits such as openness to experience or ethnocentrism. In other words, if immigration public opinion changes in any significant way, it happens gradually, as older people give way to younger generations with different attitudes. Second, some scholars find that those people who agree to participate in surveys tend to be more liberal and more ideologically extreme than the general population. People’s refusal to participate in public opinion surveys has only increased over the past decades. As a result, recent polls may be overestimating increases in pro-immigration views. But even if more people do favor immigration, they may care about this issue less than those who oppose it — and therefore have less influence on public policy. How I Did My ResearchWhen individuals consider an issue to be personally important, they care more about it than other issues. They are more likely to think frequently and deeply about it, seek information, contact politicians and vote based on their views. Some scholars have recently tried to examine the immigration issue’s importance in public opinion, but high-quality data has often been lacking. I set out to identify all available nationally representative surveys with relevant questions about both immigration views and their importance. According to my analysis of American National Election Studies, Voter Study Group, and Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics data, those who oppose immigration feel more strongly about the issue and are more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important than those who support it. That’s especially true when the news media are paying more attention to the issue. Immigration Opponents Care More About the Issue Than Immigration SupportersEven though more Americans are telling pollsters that they support immigration, lawmakers hesitate to tackle immigration policy in ways that would make it easier to enter the United States. My research suggests that they’re right to be cautious. Americans who oppose immigration are far more engaged and active on the issue than are immigration supporters.
In fact, given the increased national attention to immigration over the past decades, the number of people who actively oppose immigration has actually increased. 7/5/2022 UN Migration Study Deems US-Mexico Border 'deadliest' Land Route in the World Based on 2021 NumbersRead Now A new study has labeled the border crossing between the U.S. and Mexico the deadliest migration land route in the world.
The study, conducted by the Missing Migrants Project and published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), recorded at least 1,238 deaths during migration in the Americas in 2021, with at least 728 of those deaths occurring on the U.S-Mexico border. "The number of deaths on the United States-Mexico border last year is significantly higher than in any year prior, even before COVID-19," Edwin Viales, author of the report, said. "Yet, this number remains an undercount due to the diverse challenges for data collection." "Our data shows the growing crisis of deaths during migration in the region, and the need to strengthen the forensic capacity of the authorities to identify deaths on these routes," he added. "We cannot forget that every single number is a human being with a family who may never know what happened to them." The study cites the Venezuelan economic crisis as a major factor that has driven people from their home countries and forced them to take "irregular routes, including overseas crossings to Caribbean nations." The dangers of the crossing made headlines last week after the discovery of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas, containing 46 migrants who died and 16 who required immediate hospitalization. Some of those taken to the hospital died shortly after arrival. The victims came from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, highlighting the scope of the migration route. IOM reported that this brought the total number of victims along the border to 493 for 2022 alone. Border Patrol officers have encountered record numbers of migrants trying to cross the southern border during the past year, with 239,416 recorded last month and 235,478 the month before that. |