The logistics of de-immigration

Eminent social justice activist Shaun King raises a pertinent point on the current topic (in the sphere of the US presidential candidate selection process) of what to do with the "immigrants of dubious legality" in the USA:

What do you think it would look like, practically speaking, for Trump to "round up" 450,000 immigrants per month and "ship them off".

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) October 15, 2015

This is, as several people has observed, quite a hard problem.

The first problem you have is finding the immigrants, and this is probably the killer. You've got 360M people in the USA, illegal immigrants are 10M-20M in number by various estimates, so for every 1000 illegals found you have to trawl (naively) about 20,000 legal citizens - and at 450K illegals/month constant rate you're looking at 2 years to remove nearly everyone. So every month you need to annoy 9M legal residents at some level in order to meet your quota. As immigrant numbers fall, that number of recently annoyed legal residents will rise. You'll start with unobtrusive measures, but as time goes on you'll need to get more and more intrusive - and most of the annoyed legal residents are citizens, and can vote against representatives who are supporting this measure.

Then you need to make them leave the country. Detention is expensive, ask anybody in the Federal Bureau of Prisons - average is about $100/day and that assumes amortizing entry and exit costs over many months. The sooner you can export them, the better. You need to fund daily 1-way flights from a wide range of cities to the dominant countries of residence of illegal immigrants: Mexico (obviously), major nations in Central/South America, and Pakistan/India/Bangladesh. The immigrants won't be paying for this - they'd rather pass their US$ to legal resident friends and rely on that largesse being transmitted to their home country for later pick-up, at a generous margin. So the US government will be implicitly boosting illegal financial transactions as a result. Occupancy rate on those planes is going to be highly variable. Assuming average occupancy of an evacuation plane at 50% - realistically, you can't fill them with paying passengers, ask anyone in the UK - that $700 is a reasonable round trip fare to Latin America, and noting that the return journey will need to be empty (don't even think about eating the profit margins of existing airlines, there's no way this turns out well) you're spending about $700M/month just on the export. This assumes zero cost on detention and transport to the airport, which is "optimistic".

What's the end run around this? Make the illegals deport themselves. Illegal immigrants come to the USA to work and earn money for their family, with the (faint) hope that they can eventually stay. This might occur by having a baby in the USA who will be a US citizen, and applying for residency on compassionate grounds; alternatively they might eventually find an employer willing to sponsor them. So remove that attraction. There are definite areas of employment for illegal immigrants; it depends on the region, but generally agriculture (crop picking), daily manual labour and domestic service are the top areas. Focus tax audits on those areas, reduce the marginal cost of legal labor (e.g. by increasing the deductability of costs associated with a provably legal labourer) and watch the illegal employment rate plummet.

This isn't a free ride - the government will still need to fund the free no-questions-asked one-way flights home, but if they really want to make this happen then it's probably the cheapest way to achieve the goal. With no income, and easy access to return journeys to one's home country, the labour problem will mostly fix itself.

Of course, this reduces the government benefit of illegal employment - is an incumbent administration willing to forego all the income from illegal activity?

Go easy on the tea, Lewis

Mercedes F1 racing top talent Lewis Hamilton may be well advised to steer clear of cups of tea for a while after soaking Vlad Putin's suit in champagne.

It's possible that Putin will take this in the humourous way it was intended, but if I were Lewis I'd be looking around for a watch with a built-in Geiger counter.

The Silicon Valley Diversity Shitstorm

Talk about putting the cat among the pigeons. Journo Brian S. Hall wrote a short article about diversity in Silicon Valley: specifically "There Is No Diversity Crisis In Silicon Valley". It turns out to have been slightly controversial, as you can tell when you visit the original Forbes post:

The piece previously at this URL, titled "There Is No Diversity Crisis In Silicon Valley," published on 10/5/2015 [5th October 2015 for anyone using a sane date format], was deemed to have violated our Terms of Service and was removed.

Well, that's odd. What did it say? What could have violated the ToS?

Luckily, we can now read the original article on Brian's own site. An excerpt:

Silicon Valley doesn't just create greatness, it's probably the most open, welcoming, meritocratic-based region on the planet. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that disproportionately more Chinese, Indians, and LGBQT succeed in Silicon Valley than just about any place in America. Guess what? Everyone earned their job because of their big brains and ability to contribute.

The piece, to be fair, was rather heavy on anecdote. However in the ensuing Twitter blitzkreig there was some actual data posted including an illustrative stat on student study and degree achievements in STEM subjects which showed pretty clearly that white, Hispanic and black enroll in STEM programmes at about the same rate, but that the white students are disproportionately more successful in actually obtaining a degree. Asian students - of course! - enroll at twice the rate and obtain a degree disproportionately more often. So if you view a STEM degree as somewhat important in a Silicon Valley career then it's not entirely surprising that the ethnic makeup in SV correlates with those stats.

Anecdotally, Hall's assertions on race and LGBTQ seem about right to me, though I think he's missed a few letters off the latter term. The native Californians and other white Americans are distinctly in the numerical minority, and even obvious LGBTQ engineers are relatively plentiful. I also liked Hall's dig at the humanities as a contrast to "computer programming, engineering, chemistry — hard subjects that demand hard work", remembering the geography and history students lounging around after a couple of Finals exams early in the last semester after putting in a few strenuous 10-12 hour weeks, while the maths, physics and engineering students were still sweating away with 50 hour weeks revising for a series of painfully hard and objectively marked exams right at the end of the semester.

I'd probably take some issue with Hall's assertion that "Everyone earned their job because of their big brains and ability to contribute" - the latter is more aspirational than fact, SV hiring like anywhere else still has problems trying to determine whether someone who's obviously smart can actually be productive, and screws up that assessment reasonably frequently, but the basic idea is there. A SV company that does any discrimination other than by ability to do the job is going to shut off some of its source of talent, and in a hugely competitive hiring market that's a pretty dumb play.

Hall subsequently doubled down with the tweet

Tim Cook is gay Sundar Pichai is Indian Marissa Mayer is a woman They earned these roles. Their race, gender, orientation is not relevant

— Brian S Hall (@brianshall) October 8, 2015

It's worth noting that Google CEO Pichai came from a poor family in India and rose based on brutal merit. Though he had problems with the humanities in school:

He was a brilliant student but his geography and history used to let him down so he was never top of the year.

That's probably what annoyed all the humanities graduates who piled onto Hall on Twitter... Although it's a little tricky to argue for a glass ceiling for minorities in SV given the above facts, it didn't seem to stop a lot of people from trying.

SV still has recruiting and retention problems, and I'd call out the experience of women in particular - the tendency of male engineers to act like baboons is off-putting to any women engineers who want to be something other than male engineers with a slightly different placement of genitals. But I don't find anything particularly jarring, scandalous or untrue in Hall's piece, so I wonder why exactly Forbes decided to withdraw it under pressure. If it wasn't pulled because of falsehoods, was it pulled because it was too true?