There have been a couple of excellent articles in the "you must register & buy archived articles" NY Times in the last few months that directly address several of the points being discussed in this thread. (As usual, I am happy to PM copies of these articles to anyone who PMs me.)
The first is "The Terrible, Horrible, Urgent National Disaster That Immigration Isn't" by Lawrence Downes, an editorial board member of the NYTimes, from June 6, 2006. Here's the outline of his argument:
Part 1: What's Wrong With 'Getting Tough on Immigration'
I. Immigration, Oversimplified
Here he gives an intelligent overview of the anti-immigration argument, which has here been put forth most simplistically and without a shred of nuance by Dragon.
"In this view, the problem is not going to be solved by repairing a complex system of immigration laws and regulations, by tinkering with the economic machinery to find a better fit between labor demand and supply, or by being more diligent about enforcing existing rules about workplaces and hiring. And it certainly won't be solved by being creative or more welcoming and humane toward immigrants in a way that rewards their hard work and desire to participate in the system more fully.
It will be solved by keeping people out, and kicking people out. Do that, the restrictionists insist, and you will help resolve a host of other problems — the invasion of neighborhoods and street corners by Latino men; the upsurge of gangs and drugs; urban congestion and suburban sprawl; human trafficking; the demise of white European culture and values; the strain on jails, hospitals and schools, and the threat to the very stability of the United States.
It's no wonder some people compare immigrant workers to locusts, bacteria or an occupying army. If you could find a 250-year-old American to discuss this, he or she would tell you how familiar this all sounds. Identical arguments were once made about Chinese laborers, Japanese-Americans, Roman Catholics, the Irish, Italians, and the original unloved — though fully documented — outsiders, African-Americans. Let's not even talk about American Indians."
II. The Disturbing Role Played by Fear
Traces the xenophobic to blatant racist connections of a few key anti-immigration activists in the US.
III. An Array of Too-Costly Solutions
"Take the restrictionists' favorite solution: deporting 'em all. It is a straw man in the debate, because only the most rabid talk-show callers would be willing to pay that price — $200 billion or more, at least double the Department of Homeland Security budget. And that cost does not even count the psychic toll it would take on our nation to rip immigrants out of homes and workplaces and schools and eject them. As unlikely as we would be to pay this cost once, it is even less likely we would be willing to pay it again and again, as we would no doubt have to as new immigrants arrived to replace the ones who were sent home.
Then there is the hard-liners' other favorite solution — fortifying the border, which any restrictionist will tell you is the most urgent priority of immigration reform. Billions have already been lavished at the southern border — California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — in walls, patrols and technology. Since 1986, the border patrol budget has been raised 10 times, and the number of border patrol agents has gone up eightfold. The House of Representatives, in its disturbingly get-tough immigration bill, wants to erect a 700-mile wall, which will fatten a few powerful contractors' bottom lines by untold millions, and President Bush has already sent in the National Guard.
These price tags will only seem higher when measured against results."
IV. Local Fear and Loathing
V. Sending In the Police
Part 2: The Harder but Better Way
I. A 796-Page Attempt to Do Better
II. How Badly We Need Them
"As a conduit for workers into this country, the existing immigration system is greatly out of balance with demand. The legal path for an unskilled worker to enter the United States is through one of about 5,000 visas issued for such workers each year, which means it is no path at all. The United States economy has adjusted, of course, by hiring temporary workers and illegal workers by the millions. The invisible hand doesn't ask for ID for the roughly 500,000 people who enter illegally each year.
Immigrants — legal and illegal — fill a vital niche in the American economy. They make up 12 percent of the United States population but 14 percent of its workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office. From 1994 to 2004, the agency said in a report last December, the number of foreign-born workers grew to 21 million from 13 million, a rise that accounted for more than half of the growth of the U.S. labor force. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, immigrants hold 40 percent of farming, fishing and forestry jobs in the United States, 33 percent of jobs in building and grounds maintenance, 22 percent of food preparation jobs and 22 percent of construction jobs. Tearing the approximately one third of those workers who are illegal away from their livelihoods and families would be ruinous to the economy, particularly the agricultural and tourism industries in states like California.
Throw away the arguments that immigrants are tax leeches. On the contrary. They pay more in taxes than they consume in services. They all pay sales taxes. Illegal immigrants who use fake Social Security numbers to get hired pay income and payroll taxes — but don't collect Social Security and are ineligible for Medicaid. The amount of unclaimed Social Security tax has more than doubled since the 1980's, to roughly $189 billion. Because immigrants tend to be younger and healthier than native born workers, they use government services more sparingly. A comprehensive study of immigration and its economic effects — "The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration," by James Smith and Barry Edmonston for the National Research Council in 1997 — summed up its conclusions this way: Because immigrants on average have less education than the native-born, they earn less and pay lower taxes. But immigrants also consume far fewer services. As a result: the average immigrant pays nearly $1,800 more in taxes than he or she costs in benefits, even when you factor in the cost of public education for his or her children.
The report emphasizes that the proper way to understand these expenditures is as an investment in America's future. In a country that absorbs about one million newcomers per year, each yearly cohort of immigrants pays $80 billion more in taxes over the course of a lifetime than it consumes in services. In other words, there is no economic crisis being caused by immigration — but there could be one if it came to a halt."
III. Acknowledging the Costs
"There is one conundrum of illegal immigration that is very real: the cost it imposes on people who would compete for jobs with undocumented low-skilled immigrants. It stands to reason — how could a job market absorb so many new people and not see wages fall? An often-cited study by two Harvard economists, George J. Borjas and Lawrence F. Katz, found that from 1980 to 2000, a wave of illegal immigration from Mexico had reduced the wages of high school dropouts in the United States by 8.2 percent.
But that study gave only a partial picture. It failed to account for the economic growth that immigrants cause — the many jobs that cheap immigrant labor creates, and the gaping demographic niche it fills. As Eduardo Porter pointed out in The Times in April, "Over the last quarter-century, the number of people without any college education, including high school dropouts, has fallen sharply. This has reduced the pool of workers who are most vulnerable to competition from illegal immigrants."
This is no consolation to the janitor in Los Angeles who has seen his job disappear, or the by-the-book contractor who can't compete with the fly-by-night operation that hires — and underpays and exploits — illegal day laborers by the truckload. Any serious attempt at immigration reform has to grapple with the fact that many Americans — young black men, among others — who have been overlooked and shunned in the job market for generations will likely continue to be overlooked. That is especially true as the economy hums along through the energy of immigrants, many of them illegal. If immigration decreases costs and increases the national prosperity, we need to find a way to make sure that those gains are shared with those on the low rungs of the economic ladder."
The above point is addressed in detail in the article from the New York Times Magazine of about two weeks ago, "The Immigration Equation". The article explores the Borjas/Katz argument in detail as well as the arguments against it by other economists, particularly that of Canadian economist David Card. I highly recommend it for its complex economic analysis of the costs/benefits of immigration and how to measure these costs/benefits, particularly to elene.
There are several responses to the powerful argument that while those who are well off benefit from the cheap goods/services provided by immigration, native-born poor people are hurt by having to compete for jobs with immigrants. There's evidence, first, that immigrants create jobs just by being available to do the work: more people hire domestic and gardening help than would otherwise do so, and farm labor that would otherwise be mechanized can be done by hand more inexpensively. Second, there's an argument that the presence of non-native speakers makes native skill sets more valuable at least for some workers--construction foremen are likely to be native English speakers who are local to the neighborhood with all the knowledge that implies.
This problem is a real one, and I don't think these answers completely address the question, but it does seem helpful to get this kind of thinking on the subject.
IV. Anger on the Ground
V. The Cost Abroad
VI. Uncertain Possibilities
"It's not only because the costs of security are so high, or because the contributions that legal and illegal immigrants make to this country are so positive. Those who have been working as hard as the hard-liners have been to close this country off to people who came here to seek work and a future have a radically astringent vision of what this country should be. To militarize the border, to turn illegal immigrants into felons, means trying to reverse the polarity on the American magnet, to repel the people who have struggled, dreamed and died to get here.
It means turning this singular country into just another industrial power with a declining birthrate and a self-defeating antagonism to the foreign born. It means defining down what America stands for, no matter what the cost to the American economy, its traditions and values and moral standing.
It's dangerous. It's not rational. But the argument on the restrictionist side isn't about being rational. It's about being afraid."
My stance remains that immigration is a net good; the biggest problems in the US in terms of the economy are not caused by poor people, particularly by politically powerless immigrants, but by the wealthiest people who create policies that are exacerbating the wealth divide between the rich and the poor. I believe that anti-immigration arguments are at bottom a fearful form of racism/xenophobia that has been deliberately inflamed as a divide-&-conquer strategy, because it benefits major multinational corporations to have a monopoly on the ability to move between nations while workers are essentially trapped, the better to be exploited.
I believe that people and families of almost all levels are, however, stressed by the requirement that they move to where they jobs are, and that that stress alone should make us more focused on creating more equitable distribution of jobs and resources between and amongst nations. Building walls and making life hell for poor workers is not the way towards that, though. |
