Brookings: Programs - Metropolitan Policy Program

This Week in Immigration: SJC Sends Immigration Reform to the Floor

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:06:00 -0400

Big news in immigration policy: Last night, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send S.744 to the Senate floor. In a 13-5 vote, Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake joined their Democratic colleagues. Much of the day was focused on contentious amendments aimed at making the pathway to citizenship impossible for undocumented immigrants. Sen. Hatch’s reworked high-skilled amendments were approved. “With a heavy heart,” Sen. Patrick Leahy withdrew one of the most controversial amendments extending immigration protections to gay couples.

A brief recap of last week’s markup: Last Tuesday the Committee wrapped up amendments regarding border security and began discussion of temporary high-skilled workers. Notably, the Committee rejected the use of a biometric entry-exit system as a trigger for beginning the legalization process (expect Sen. Rubio to bring it up again) and approved an amendment that doubles labor certification fees, allocating them to STEM education. On Thursday the Committee addressed E-Verify.

The House’s Gang of Eight – Democrats Luis Gutierrez (IL), Zoe Lofgren (CA), John Yarmuth (KY), and Xavier Becerra (CA), and Republicans Raul Labrador (ID), John Carter (TX), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), and Sam Johnson (TX) – has come to an “agreement of principles” and will release a bill in the near future. The road was (and still is) rocky, with talks looking like they might unravel right before their self-imposed deadline of last Thursday. Rep. Carter is a vocal critic of the Senate bill and anti-immigrant rhetoric is harsh in the House, so expect this bill to be more conservative than S.744.

In the meantime, the Rep. Bob Goodlatte is not satisfied with S.744 and House Judiciary Committee is still working on its piecemeal approach to immigration reform. Over the last week it held hearings on its two bills, covering E-Verify and a temporary agricultural worker program, as well as the Senate’s bill. Next up is a bill from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) addressing “rules for highly skilled and educated foreign workers.”

It is well documented the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) union isn’t happy with the Schumer-McCain bill. But another agency union is joining them – U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) – claiming “the bill would fail to address an ‘insurmountable bureaucracy’ at the federal agency.”

How does your legacy on immigration issues affect your election prospects? It depends on who you ask, but it promises to play a role for Republicans eyeing 2016 or former U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo’s potential bid for Colorado governor. For one Republican, it was enough to change parties: the Republican National Committee’s State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach switched his affiliation to Democrat because of the “culture of intolerance” toward immigrants.

There is a slew of government reports from the last week to check out:

The Congressional Budget Office released their 2013 update to “A Description of the Immigrant Population.” It includes some great top-level statistics about the foreign-born population in the United States.
The Congressional Research Service released a report finding “a widely touted Border Patrol initiative to send migrants back to Mexico far from the points they are caught entering the U.S. illegally has one of the worst track records at discouraging people from trying again.”
The Census Bureau released a report estimating “net international migration is projected to overtake natural increase as the driver of population growth in 2032.”
USCIS released the latest DACA applicant numbers. As of April 30, they received 515,922 applications.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © ERIC THAYER / Reuters

Suburban Poverty Profiles: Montgomery County, Maryland

Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:27:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Suburban Poverty in America, a new book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, explores the growth of suburban poverty and offers unique policy solutions for revitalizing struggling communities. Montgomery County, Maryland is one of the spotlight suburbs, whose plight has also been recognized by NPR. Learn more about the book and other suburban communities at confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org.

Montgomery County, Maryland— a suburban county adjacent to the nation’s capital— consistently ranks among the country’s wealthiest counties. In 2010, it ranked twelfth in the nation for median household income at more than $89,000. Yet in recent years, this million-person jurisdiction has grown increasingly demographically and economically diverse, changing the scope and scale of need among the county’s residents.

The 2000s, in particular, were a period of marked transformation in Montgomery County. Through the middle part of the decade, more jobs and people came to the county and the number of residents living in poverty dropped slightly. However, the disruption of the Great Recession more than erased those gains. No other county in the Washington region, including the District of Columbia, experienced increases in poverty of the same magnitude during the late 2000s.

Data Point: In the three years between 2007 and 2010, Montgomery County shed more than 37,000 jobs, dropping below its 2000 jobs total by 2010.

At the same time that the county faced unprecedented economic challenges, it also experienced a rapid demographic transformation. The 2010 census revealed that, for the first time, non-Hispanic whites constituted less than half (49 percent) of the county’s residents, down from 73 percent two decades earlier. And while immigrants accounted for fewer than one in five residents in 1990, in 2010 they represented almost one-third of the population and almost 40 percent of poor residents.

Data Point: Between 2007 and 2010, the number of residents living below the federal poverty line grew by two-thirds, or more than 30,000 people, pushing the poverty rate up by nearly 3 percentage points.

Rapid increases in poverty, coupled with the shifting demographics, often left communities in suburban Montgomery County struggling to play catch-up without the resources to match the growing and changing needs of their residents. In response, leaders across the county came together to make sure diverse communities in need do not miss out on critical safety net services because of lack of information or cultural barriers, described further in our local innovation profile of Montgomery County’s Neighborhood Opportunity Network (PDF).

Authors

Strengthening the Federal/State Partnership on Passenger Rail

Robert Puentes — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Robert Puentes presented this testimony before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in advance of the expiration of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, which emphasized better rail performance and demanded a commitment from Amtrak's state partners. He discussed Amtrak's performance and the partnerships between the federal government, Amtrak, and the states, highlighting the ways in which states have provided lessons the nation should build on going forward. Read the full testimony here (PDF).

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Read the Testimony

Authors

Robert Puentes

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America - Release Event

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:30:00 -0400

Event Information

May 20, 2013
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

Click here to visit the Confronting Suburban Poverty in America website.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Back then poverty was largely confined to inner-city neighborhoods and isolated rural areas. Today, the overwhelming majority of America’s poor live not in cities—but in the suburbs of its major metropolitan areas. Yet the paradigm of poverty in America, and the infrastructure for addressing the conditions poor families and communities face, has failed to keep pace with the reality of these changes. The problems of the growing suburban poor are now exacerbated by a weak economy and increasingly limited resources for nonprofits, philanthropies and government at all levels.

As with many challenges facing the nation, metro area leaders are leading the way in the search for solutions—learning how to do more with less and adjusting their approaches to address the metropolitan scale of poverty, collaborating across sectors and jurisdictions, using data and technology in innovative ways, and integrating services and service delivery.

In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Brookings, 2013), co-authors Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. On May 20, they along with some of the nation’s leading anti-poverty experts, including Luis Ubiñas, president of the Ford Foundation, and Bill Shore, founder and CEO of Share our Strength, and leading local innovators from across the country discussed a new metropolitan opportunity agenda for addressing suburban poverty, how federal and state policymakers can deploy limited resources to address a growing challenge, and why building on local solutions holds great promise.

Click here to visit the Confronting Suburban Poverty in America website.

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Audio

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America - Release Event

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2013 184pp.

Video

Presentation - Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

Synopsis:

In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. For decades, suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, so that suburbia is now home to more poor residents than central cities, composing over a third of the nation’s total poor population. Unfortunately, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. The solution no longer fits the problem. Kneebone and Berube explain the source and impact of these important developments; moreover, they present innovative ideas on addressing them.

The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including job sprawl, shifts in affordable housing, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. As the authors explain in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, it raises a number of daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they better reflect and address new demands. This book embraces that opportunity.

Infographic; What’s Driving the Rapid Rise of Poverty in the Suburbs?:

(Click to expand)

The authors put forward a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize poverty alleviation and community development strategies and connect residents with economic opportunity. They have created an Action Toolkit so that anyone can be apart of confronting suburban poverty.

Event:

On May 20, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings hosted an event marking the release of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, co-authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube. Below, you can watch a piece of the event with Elizabeth Kneebone, as she discusses how the landscape of poverty in America has changed.

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Presentation - Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

In the News:

Read The New York Times Op-Ed on Confronting Suburban Poverty in America »

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alan Berube

Elizabeth Kneebone

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Ordering Information:

{CD2E3D28-0096-4D03-B2DE-6567EB62AD1E}, 978-0-8157-2390-5, $28.95 Order

Widening the Panama Canal and the Future of Global Trade Mapping

Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:25:00 -0400

Up and down the Atlantic coast, US ports are abuzz. Dredging machines, tunnel excavators, and highway pavers from Miami to New York are preparing metropolitan economies and their ports for a newly expanded Panama Canal. As the thinking goes, an expanded Canal promises bigger ships, bigger cargo loads--and each metro wants a piece of the bigger business.

But lost in this port-related arms race is what the newly-widened Panama Canal means for the US economy . Too many metropolitan areas simply assume they’ll immediately acquire new freight business when the expanded Canal opens, or that there will be more business at all. These billion-dollar assumptions ignore a more fundamental question: how and where will the Panama Canal affect US’ global goods trade?

Answering that question requires a broader view, one less predicated on ship size and more on economy size. It also requires metropolitan areas to gain a better understanding of their goods trading relationships, and how those relationships power their local economies.

It’s time to have a frank conversation about what investments like the Panama Canal mean for US trade and economic growth.

First, let’s start with a little context. The Panama Canal, set to celebrate its 100th birthday next year, is one of the world’s most important trade assets. It primarily helps connect US Atlantic and Gulf ports to their trading partners in Asia, Oceania, and South America. Driven by those major markets, the Canal already moves over 330 million tons of freight each year.

However, the Canal suffers from capacity constraints. The world's largest ships can no longer fit through certain locks, meaning the Canal was ill-prepared for its second century. In response, Panama initiated a major overhaul including two new locks, plus widening and deepening several existing channels. When complete in 2015, larger container ships will expand potential trade volumes between the Americas and Asia--and more seamlessly connect global markets in the process. The promise of these larger ships is the inspiration behind the Atlantic ports’ major capital projects.

Yet, as ports carry out such extensive projects, questions and skepticism linger over the future direction of freight movement and the long-term economic implications. How will ports handle the extra time it takes to load and unload the new mammoth ships? How will Pacific port investments in the United States and Canada counter the investments at the Atlantic ports? These uncertainties complicate analysts’ and policymakers’ abilities to identify exactly how the expansion will shift the precise location and scope of all freight flows.

The country and its metropolitan leaders need a way to remove these uncertainties. And it begins with a better understanding of our current goods trading relationships at the metropolitan scale.

As it stands, metropolitan data is scant. There is no geographically-consistent database of what goods metropolitan areas consume and what goods they export. Similarly, there is no database of geographic trading relationships with their domestic and international peers, or which ports facilitate the international side of the trade ledger

Imagine if the United States didn’t know how much electronics it imported from China, or how much oil it imported from the Middle East. That’s the situation metropolitan economic and freight leaders face.

It’s time to get a better handle on these regional trade relationships. Local, state, and federal officials should know which metropolitan areas trade the most goods with Asia, and are therefore the most sensitive to the Panama Canal’s capacity. They should also know how these goods flow between markets—whether they’re more reliant on Pacific or Atlantic ports, and how a capacity change on either coast could shift that equation.

This kind of knowledge also extends beyond just the Panama Canal. As other freight investments come online across the United States and the world, public and private sector leaders should have the statistical tools to know what’s at stake. A more thorough understanding of the country’s metropolitan trading network would help inform local investment decisions like we’re seeing in Baltimore and Norfolk. It would also inform a national freight strategy that prioritizes investments with the highest returns.

The metropolitan reaction to the Canal widening is a microcosm for what the country misses when it comes to freight planning. In a relatively fact-free zone, it’s easy for local ports to justify these major investments. But dredging a port or building a tunnel costs significantly more than simply upgrading our knowledge base.

Even with global trade slowing its growth since the Great Recession, there’s little question that goods volumes will continue to rise in the coming decades, whether through the Panama Canal or elsewhere. It’s time we make sure our metropolitan economies have the knowledge to succeed in that environment.

The Brookings Metropolitan Policy team will aim to address that knowledge gap over the coming year. Working with a team of outside experts, we've assembled a geographically-consistent, globally-oriented goods trade database. In turn, the analytics from that database will help us provide public and private sector leaders with a better understanding of exactly what, where, and how metropolitan areas trade goods and the implications for their local economies. We are excited to start sharing those results this fall.

Authors

Adie Tomer
Joseph Kane

GCI Houston: Greater Houston and the Next Economy

Bruce Katz — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: On May 15, 2013, Brookings vice president Bruce Katz spoke at the Houston convening of the Global Cities Initiative, a joint project of Brookings and JPMorgan Chase to catalyze high-level discussions of metropolitan leadership in the world economy and the actions metro leaders can take to improve trade relationships with cities in mature and rising markets. Hosted by Rice University, the forum brought together distinguished regional, national, and international leaders from the business, civic, government, and philanthropic communities to explore how the greater Houston area can enhance its ability to compete globally.

Bruce Katz - Global Cities Initiative

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Authors

Bruce Katz

Going Global: Greater Houston’s Economic Future

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:30:00 -0400

Event Information

May 15, 2013
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM CDT

Baker Hall
Rice University, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
6100 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005

As the United States emerges from the Great Recession, it is clear that the nation’s economy must be purposefully restructured from one focused inward and characterized by excessive consumption and debt to one that is globally engaged and driven by production and innovation. A growing chorus of leaders is calling for a new growth model, one that creates more and better jobs by engaging rising global demand and attracting global talent and capital. These leaders recognize that only by harnessing the power of cities and metropolitan areas can the country hope to foster job growth in the near term and restructure the economy for the long haul.

On May 15, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and JPMorgan Chase hosted a forum at Rice University, “Going Global: Greater Houston’s Economic Future,” the second in a series of domestic and international forums being convened this year by the Global Cities Initiative. This is the second year of the five-year initiative. The forum explores how metropolitan-led economic growth—including global trade and investment—are important for job creation, and how Metropolitan Houston can leverage its position in the global market.

Speakers and panels provided context on the region’s position in the global marketplace and offered insight into how area leaders can work together with international partners to expand global trade and enhance Houston’s economic prosperity.

Join the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #GlobalCities. Photos courtesy of John Everett.

Roundtable Presentations:

View Bruce Katz's presentation on Houston's next economy »
Download Marek Gotman’s presentation on workforce development (PDF) »
Download Amy Liu's presentation on regional export planning (PDF) »

Bruce Katz, Brookings Vice President & Founding Director, Metropolitan Policy Program

Gina Luna, Chairman of JPMorgan Chase for Houston

Bruce Katz, Brookings Vice President & Founding Director, Metropolitan Policy Program

Video

Event Materials

Participants

Moderator

Amy Liu

Co-Director and Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

Panelists

Bruce Katz

Vice President and Director, Metropolitan Policy Program
The Adeline M. and Alfred I. Johnson Chair in Urban and Metropolitan Policy

Honorable Peter Ammon

Ambassador

Honorable Richard M. Daley

Former Mayor of Chicago
Chairman

Dr. David Leebron

President

Gina Luna

Houston Market President

Amy Liu

Co-Director and Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program

David McClanahan

President and CEO

Strengthening U.S. Manufacturing, Region by Region

Mark Muro — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:17:00 -0400

Last week President Obama used his trip to Austin, TX to announce the creation of three more public-private manufacturing research institutes as nodes of a $1 billion National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI). On the same day, though, there was another intriguing if lower-key announcement on the Obama administration’s manufacturing agenda.

That’s the new Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership, the first phase of a two-phase effort aimed squarely at communities and regions, announced by the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA).

Focused squarely on the fact that the locus of U.S. manufacturing prowess is emphatically local and regional, the new competitive solicitation will allow as many as 25 local communities to be awarded $200,000 this year to create smart strategies for leveraging and aligning their public- and private-sector assets to provide a promising environment for advanced manufacturing. These awards will in the near term allow ambitious communities to develop “bottom-up” plans for strengthening their regions’ intellectual, human, and physical infrastructure.

But beyond that, the small grants and the resulting regional strategies will also help prepare a cadre of U.S. regions to compete for the second phase the partnership, which will next year entail a competition that will award (contingent on congressional support) five to six U.S. communities with up to $25 million for the implementation of regional advanced manufacturing strategies. That’s real money that would—like the full build-out of the NNMI initiative—allow for real strides in advancing U.S. manufacturing in the country.

Yet, while such material awards would be welcome, what is key to the Manufacturing Communities Partnership is its four-square focus on the local and regional angle. For several years now we at the Metro Program have been harping on the sub-national underpinnings of manufacturing competitiveness and the importance of recognizing those underpinnings, establishing state and regional innovation centers to foster them, and making sure to embed regional advanced industries hubs in their surrounding industry clusters and supply chains. Most recently my colleagues Bruce Katz and Peter Hamp proposed creating a “Race to the Shop” competition aimed at calling forth bold regional visions for advanced industry growth, rewarding those visions, and better organizing disparate federal programs in support of the strategy.

We believe all of this is critical because advanced industry dynamism does not grow up just anywhere. Rather, industries reach critical mass in places—most notably, metropolitan places—where firms and workers tend to cluster in close geographic proximity whether to tap local supplier networks, work with local research institutions, draw on local workers, or profit from formal and informal knowledge transfer. In this respect, smart companies are more and more deciding where to locate facilities and hire workers based on the quality of a community’s infrastructure, institutions, and human capital—what the Harvard Business School scholars Gary Pisano and Willy Shih call its “industrial commons” and others its “industrial ecosystem.” The upshot: If U.S. regions—working with their states and the federal government—can bolster the density, efficiency, and vitality of the nation’s regional industrial clusters they will add to overall advanced industry competitiveness.

Broadly then, the EDA and its agency partners are not restricting themselves solely to broad (and needed) national and macro-economic policies on research, trade, taxes, and regulations. Instead, by going local, they are getting at the regional sites in communities where manufacturing supply chains actually come together and generate prosperity. That’s a good place for federal manufacturing policy to be.

Authors

Mark Muro

Image Source: © Aaron Josefczyk / Reuters

This Week in Immigration

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:46:00 -0400

The immigration reform legislation debate is ramping up with last week’s activities including hearings at the Joint Economic Committee, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, and Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

But by far, the star of the week was the Senate Judiciary Committee’s markup of S.744. By Wednesday, over 300 amendments were filed. You can find the Senate Judiciary Committee’s official list of amendments and actions here. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) is on the ball with the ins and outs of the legislative process—check out their compilation of each amendment’s “stated purpose” in one document.

After the flurry of amendments, no real surprises emerged, but Sens. Jeff Sessions, Chuck Grassley, and Ted Cruz, all Republicans, look to be the biggest kill-the-bill proponents. On the left, the most controversial amendment covers the rights of gay couples, filed by committee chairman Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.)

The first day was focused on the bill’s first title, border security. Sen. Leahy’s office offers a “recap” on the first day of markup, including details on the 22 amendments passed, six rejected, and four withdrawn. Also helpful is AILA’s detailed summary. Perhaps the most notable accepted amendment comes from Sen. Grassley and expands the border security plan from only “high-risk” sections to the entire southern border. As reported by ABC News Univision, some of the adopted provisions on border security play a political game to attract conservative support in the House, while tougher “trigger” amendments were rejected. The markup will resume Tuesday, most likely with high-skilled temporary immigration.

We still have not seen anything from the House’s “Gang of Eight,” and as reported by The Hill, Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez says if they do not introduce their bill by the end of the month, they will not introduce anything. Is the glass half empty or half full?

Off the Hill, Monday’s Heritage Foundation report, claiming legalization would cost $6.3 trillion, has been hotly contested; the pushback from the right has been loud and swift. The fallout continued after details emerged about co-author Jason Richwine’s dissertation, which claimed “the average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population,” and tied IQ to genetics and race. On Friday, Richwine resigned from Heritage.

There was another cost-benefit analysis last week, but it hasn’t garnered the same attention as the disputed Heritage report. According to a study requested by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the Social Security Administration estimated passage of immigration reform would “boost Social Security’s coffers by more than $240 billion over the coming decade and add $64 billion in new tax revenues to Medicare. It would also increase the size of the economy by a full percentage point by 2017, and increase employment.”

Tensions on temporary workers are still simmering. On Point took up the issue of H-1B workers, with a rousing debate among panelists. My colleagues Jonathan Rothwell and Neil G. Ruiz look at the misconceptions surrounding the STEM shortage and H-1B visas. On the lower-skilled side, the New York Times reported on hiring practices for farm workers that might pit native-born and foreign-born workers against each other.

At the state level, Colorado has been the site of some immigration legislation this week. The state legislature passed laws allowing driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and in-state tuition for some undocumented college students.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

Image Source: © David McNew / Reuters

Minority Turnout Determined the 2012 Election

William H. Frey — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:49:00 -0400

While it may seem like the 2012 presidential election has been analyzed to death, the recent release of the Census Bureau’s November election survey points out the key role that minority voter turnout, especially for blacks, played in determining the outcome.

Until now, most of what we knew came from the National Election Pool exit poll which elicited Election Day candidate preferences of voters. The new, larger survey from the Census Bureau permits an examination of the voting-eligible population and the extent to which they turned out to vote. These turnout rates tell us a lot more about the enthusiasm, or lack thereof, among different groups.

Already, the Census Bureau’s report trumpeted the historically noteworthy finding that black turnout rates in 2012 exceeded that of whites for the first time. This, in an election when white turnout declined significantly and Hispanic and Asian turnout inched down modestly from 2008.

The rising black turnout can be viewed, to some degree, as continued strong support for the first black president. The downturn of white turnout might be attributed, in part, to a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate or politics in general during a sluggish economy.

Before the election I made the case that a Democratic win would require a high minority turnout rate to counter what I then thought would be high turnout on the part of an energized Republican-voting white population. According to these new data, I was wrong about the rise in white turnout. But the question still remains: Was high minority turnout necessary for Obama to have won the national vote?

Changing Demographics, Turnout and Voting Margins

To answer this question now and in the future, an examination of the role of turnout in the context of the changing face of America’s electorate and the strong racial and ethnic preferences for Democratic and Republican candidates provides insight.

From purely an accounting perspective, shifts in election outcomes can be viewed as a product of (1) demographic changes in the eligible voter population; (2) changes in the turnout of different groups of eligible voters; and (3) the candidate preferences of those who vote. A look at the patterns for the three previous elections shows a striking move toward the Democrats on each of these dimensions.

With respect to eligible voters, the (typically Republican-leaning) white share of the electorate declined from 75.5 to 71.1 percent between 2004 and 2012 (Figure 1). During this period, the (typically Democratic leaning) combined black and Hispanic electorate rose to approach nearly quarter of eligible voters—a fraction that will rise in the future as more U.S.-born Hispanic children reach age 18.

In contrast to the constant shifts in eligible voter demographics, racial and ethnic trends in turnout and voter margins take a sharper turn after 2004.

White turnout continued to dive after the 2004 election when it was at a post 1992 high (Figure 2). In contrast, minority and especially black turnout moved in the opposite direction. The black turnout rates of 64.7 percent and 66.2 percent in the past two elections were the highest since 1968 when Census surveys began. Hispanic and Asian turnout improved markedly after 2004. For both groups, turnouts for the 2008 and 2012 elections were higher than any year since 1992.

With respect to voting margins, all three minority groups favored Democrats more strongly in the two post 2004 elections (Figure 3). The “tepid” 2004 black Democratic margin of 77 rose to 91 and 87 in the subsequent two elections, the highest margins in 40 years. Hispanic and Asian margins for Democrats also rose markedly for 2008 and 2012

For whites, the 2004 Republican margin was high by historical standards at 17. It declined in 2008 but then rose to an extremely high 20 in 2012—the largest white Republican margin since the 1984 Reagan-Mondale election.

So overall, compared with 2004, minorities showed: higher shares of eligible voters, higher turnout rates, and higher Democratic margins in the two most recent elections. For whites, on the other hand, post-2004 elections showed smaller shares of eligible voters and lower turnout. White voters did vote more strongly Republican in 2012, but this was offset by reduced turnout

The result, of course, was Obama wins in both 2008 and 2012. But how much of this is due to the rise in minority turnout and decline in turnout for whites?

With 2004 Turnout Levels: Republicans win in 2012 but not 2016

To assess the impact of turnout alone on the 2012 election I assumed that the national electorate had the size and racial and ethnic composition of the new Census survey and applied to it the more “Republican favorable” turnout rates of 2004 for each racial and ethnic group, as shown in Figure 2. This of course resulted in more white voters and fewer minority voters than actually occurred in 2012. To these voter populations, I applied the actual 2012 voting margins as shown in Figure 3. The result of this exercise was a small 2012 Romney win of 9,000 votes—a virtual tossup. Thus it might be said that the high minority and low white turnout rates of 2012 were responsible for Obama taking the national vote, irrespective of the changing demography of the electorate.

To see how much difference the higher 2012 turnout of minorities alone made in the final outcome, I conducted the same exercise assuming the “low” 2004 turnout rates for blacks, Hispanics and Asians, but with the actual 2012 white turnout rates. Under this scenario, the 2012 election is close with Obama ahead, but barely. So we might say that the high turnout of minorities, and blacks especially, did make a difference in the outcome of the 2012 election.

As a final exercise, I produced projections for the 2016 and 2020 elections which adjust Census Bureau population projections to estimate eligible voter populations by race and ethnicity in those years. Again, I contrast election outcomes, assuming 2004 “Republican favorable” versus 2012 “Democratic favorable” turnout rates, but in each case applying 2012 voter margins to each racial and ethnic group. This time, the Democratic candidates win under each scenario in each election, though with smaller margins when 2004 turnout rates are assumed.

What this tells me is that turnout will be less important for Democratic victory as demography changes in their favor, though they must maintain their strong voting margins among blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For Republicans, the latter projections show that they cannot count primarily on white support to take the White House. Even assuming high 2004 turnout rates and 2012 Republican voting margins for whites, they cannot win unless they also peel off more votes among minorities. In this regard, demography indeed becomes destiny.

Authors

William H. Frey

H-1B Visas and the STEM Shortage

Jonathan Rothwell and Neil G. Ruiz — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:01:00 -0400

Last month, a landmark immigration reform bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate that has the potential to both increase the number of available H-1B visas for foreigners working in specialty occupations and shift the U.S. employment-based visa system to a more merit-based scheme favoring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers.

As it stands today, businesses say they cannot find the skills they need in the domestic labor pool and need access to a global pool of STEM workers. Bolstering their contention are a number of studies that suggest that STEM jobs exhibit characteristics of under-supply: high wages and low unemployment.

Yet, some analysts have argued that there are plenty of U.S. native-born workers who can do these jobs. They claim that H-1B workers do not have special skills but instead are preferred because they are paid lower wages.

Without attempting to fully resolve this complex issue, new detailed data on H-1B wages by occupation, presented more fully here, suggests that the H-1B program helps to fill a shortage of workers in STEM occupations.

Employers request H-1B visas for hard-to-fill STEM jobs. The vast majority—90 percent—of H-1B applications are for jobs requiring high-level STEM knowledge. This finding is based on our analysis of Department of Labor survey data on the knowledge needed to perform occupations. The evidence shows that these vacancies are harder-to-fill than other job openings.

Labor market experts interpret the duration of a job opening as an indicator that qualified candidates are hard to find. Such an interpretation of vacancy survey data is empirically grounded in both historical and many contemporary labor market surveys from private firms and state governments.

Using 2011 job openings data from the Conference Board for the 100 largest metropolitan areas, we find that 43 percent of job vacancies for STEM occupations with H-1B requests are reposted after one month of advertising, implying that they are unfilled. By contrast 38 percent of vacancies in non-STEM occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree go unfilled after one month, and just 32 percent of job postings for all non-STEM occupations. In a statistical analysis of over 50,000 openings, we find that those requiring STEM knowledge take significantly longer to fill, even controlling for requirements for education, experience, training, and managerial knowledge, as well as wage rates and metropolitan area location. The most commonly requested H-1B occupations in each metropolitan area also take longer to fill.

H-1B visa holders earn more than comparable native-born workers. H-1B workers are paid more than U.S. native-born workers with a bachelor’s degree generally ($76,356 versus $67,301 in 2010) and even within the same occupation and industry for workers with similar experience. This suggests that they provide hard-to-find skills.

To reach this conclusion, we analyzed 2010 H-1B petitions obtained from labor economists Magnus Lofstrom and Joe Hayes through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. We combined these data with micro-records from the American Community Survey to compare employed the U.S. native-born with a bachelor’s degree to their H-1B counterparts.

Like Lofstrom and Hayes, we find that H-1B workers earn more than Americans in the same occupation and age cohort. The 20 most common cohort-minor occupation combinations found in the H-1B program are listed below. These groups comprise roughly three-quarters of all H-1B workers in the database. In 17 of the 20 groups, wages are significantly higher for H-1B workers, and there is a significant negative difference only for life scientists aged 30 to 35. For the three largest computer occupation groups, wages are much higher.

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Wages are increasing in occupations with most H-1B requests. In recent years, from 2009 to 2011, nominal wage growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree has been high for the most prominent H-1B occupations. The average native-born worker experienced flat annual growth in wages over that period (0.0 percent), but wage growth for those in computer occupations—the largest H-1B category—grew by 1.3 percent each year since 2009 and 2.7 percent each year since 2000 for those with a bachelor’s degree. Wage growth was even higher for engineers, with 2.1 percent growth since 2009 and 3 percent growth since 2000.

For every prominent H-1B occupational category except life scientists and operations specialties managers, wage growth was stronger than the national average since 2009. Since 2000, all but postsecondary teachers have seen higher than average wage growth.

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There are two important caveats. First, hard-to-fill high-skilled jobs do not always require many years of post-secondary training. Even among H-1B visa requests, about 25 percent are for occupations that typically require only an associate’s degree, meaning that the current U.S. workforce could be trained to do these jobs at relatively little cost. Second, not all STEM jobs are experiencing the same symptoms of shortage.

A data-driven bureau is needed to identify occupational shortages. Overall, there is compelling evidence that the H-1B visa program is helping to alleviate acute shortages in various occupations. Yet, because of data limitations, the evidence is far from complete. If the Senate bill is passed into law, the proposed Bureau on Immigration and Labor Market Research should collect better information from employers about job openings, including occupations, the number of qualified applicants, the number of interviews conducted, and the length of time it takes to fill the job. Likewise, the bureau should also consider how demand and supply play out in regional or metropolitan area labor markets, since job search and recruitment often happen locally. Armed with such information, as well as indicators presented above, visas and public funding for training and education in hard-to-fill occupations could be more confidently allocated.

Authors

This Week in Immigration: Senate Markup

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:22:00 -0400

Last week, we saw the first modifications to immigration, specifically student visas, in light of the Boston Marathon bombings. Two of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends, Kazaks in the United States on student visas, were “charged with conspiring to obstruct justice.” Now, as reported by the Associated Press, “The Homeland Security Department ordered border agents to verify that every international student who arrives in the U.S. has a valid student visa.”

While many senators were visiting their districts during the recess, there’s still plenty to report on. May Day rallies in support of comprehensive reform and citizenship were scattered throughout the country, including an event with Sen. Harry Reid in Las Vegas. Sen. Orrin Hatch “appears willing to support” reform that includes a pathway to citizenship. “Gang of Eight” Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were on the town hall offensive to promote their proposed legislation. Markup begins this week; be sure to check out this Politico piece, detailing what kind of amendments you can expect to see and from whom.

Representatives in the House are slowly releasing individual legislative pieces. The first, introduced by Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Lamar Smith, is an expansion of E-Verify. The second, introduced by Goodlatte, is an agricultural guestworker program. With a flexible cap but 500,000 visa minimum, it looks like there is a lot to work out between the House and Senate.

President Obama visited Mexico and Costa Rica last week, and immigration reform became a central focus. Prior to his trip, Obama held hosted an advocate briefing at the White House. As reported by the Washington Post, Janet Murguía, President of the National Council on La Raza was in attendance and recalled Obama’s remarks: “He said, ‘If the bill were presented on my desk today, I would sign it,’” and “He looked at the advocates and said, ‘We’re not going to get everything we want in this.’”

Sen. Marco Rubio continues to be at the front and center of immigration reform. Over the last week, we learned Rubio doesn’t have high hopes for the Schumer-McCain bill in the House, considers provisions for same sex couples a deal breaker, and published a high-profile op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times also reported on the relationship between Rubio and former Sen. Jim DeMint, his one-time “mentor.”

If there is a rift between Rubio and DeMint, it looks like it will only continue to grow. Today DeMint’s Heritage Foundation released a report on the fiscal impacts of the Schumer-McCain bill, making immigration reform look very costly. The libertarian Cato Institute especially pushes back on Heritage’s methodology, already releasing a rebuttal. The reason? Heritage uses a “static fiscal scoring” as opposed to “dynamic fiscal scoring” that assesses the impact among all sectors of the economy.

While Heritage’s report on the costs of immigration reform will cause a stir, I’ve been enjoying NPR’s coverage of the economic impacts of different aspects of immigration. Stories on costs of “farmworker shortages,” impacts of reform on “low-wage black workers,” and how “major American companies benefit from undocumented workers” have all been on-point.

Authors

Nicole Prchal Svajlenka

DOE’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative Leverages Regions

Scott Andes and Mark Muro — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:26:00 -0400

This spring, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is launching a new Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative that will support both clean energy and manufacturing competitiveness by promoting greater energy efficiency in the U.S. production sector. Rolled out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee last month, the new initiative advances a smart take on both the nation’s energy and manufacturing strategies. But more than that it reflects a welcome new spatial and geographic emphasis at the Energy Department.

At the most general level, the new initiative marshals a number of DOE offices, research institutions, and private sector partners to map out and implement networks that promote clean energy production and energy-efficient manufacturing. Key to the effort is that this new push—like the Obama administration’s National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) proposal—takes an explicitly regional approach to innovation and the diffusion of next-generation technologies.

In this respect, the initiative aims to engage with regional epicenters of advanced manufacturing such as smart automation in Austin, Tex. and low-heat stamping in Denver, Colo. to drive local and national advances. These areas have established production ecosystems and are driving the technological frontier within clean energy; they are prime sites of U.S. innovation. Along these lines, the initiative has already awarded a total of $15 million to five projects in five different regional manufacturing clusters.

Yet the new focus is not just about covering the geographic bases. By supporting centers of excellence close to regional industrial clusters, DOE is leaning on a large body of literature that suggests innovation results from an iterative set of exchanges between production and research activities that more often than not thrive on proximity.

To be sure, old-line thinking continues to maintain that R&D facilities develop prototypes out of whole cloth and then transfer design requirements to manufacturers, wherever in the world plants are located. However, while this may be the case for low-tech industries, the reality for advanced industries is often the other way around. The genesis of many new technologies comes from within the production process via daily interactions with production facilities. These “co-location synergies” emerge as manufacturers adopt new techniques and equipment to increase efficiency and R&D engineers build upon shop-floor technological competencies to create innovate products and services. And within strong regional clusters, particularly metropolitan regions, such co-location benefits are able to penetrate beyond the incumbent R&D performing firm into the local supply chain—creating high-value start-ups and upstream innovation.

And in fact the ORNL launch event highlighted all of this. Led by Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Dave Danielson with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in attendance, the event highlighted both a very cool DOE facility—the Carbon Fiber Technology Facility (CFCF) at ORNL—and EERE’s emergent regional stance. CFCF is a production line-sized test bed for public and private sector researchers to explore new carbon fiber composites at scale. As such, it offers to both East Tennesssee and the nation a one-of-a-kind piece of shared industrial infrastructure as well as a focal point for local technical exchange. Currently, for example, 45 firms make up the carbon fiber composite consortium that work with CFCF researchers—many of which are small-and medium-sized firms located in East Tennessee. In that way, the CFCF is emerging as the hub of an nascent “industrial commons,” where firms of all sizes can leverage not only CFCF resources but the broader R&D infrastructure at Oak Ridge, the University of Tennessee, and in firms. In other words, the carbon fiber hub and cluster being fostered in East Tennessee—like Austin and Denver—epitomizes the increasingly “bottom-up” feel of U.S. and global innovation systems and likewise highlights a new region-oriented stance at DOE.

While it’s too early to judge the impact of the Energy Department’s Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative, the new push looks promising. By focusing more of DOE’s efforts on regions, a historically isolated, sometimes obtuse agency may be beginning to align itself with some of the most dynamic technology development exchanges of all—those that happen locally.

Authors

Scott Andes
Mark Muro