VDARE.COM continues its series of argument-by-argument refutations of unconvincing pro-immigration polemics. This time it's Tamar Jacoby who's on the receiving end of our peerless forensic talents.
Too Many Immigrants?
No. America needs more foreign workers.
[Peter Brimelow and James Fulford write: Tamar Jacoby is being auditioned for the role of designated immigration enthusiast apologist, a position vacant since the death of Julian Simon. Her long article [in Commentary pay archive] in the April issue of Commentary magazine was a nice change from Irwin Stelzer's hysteria. But the reasoning wasn't much better. The subtitle ("No. America needs more foreign workers.") used above is exclusive to the version that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It appears neither in the print version of Ms. Jacoby's article, nor in the Commentary magazine table of contents, which has the much more reasonable subhead "Current policy is completely irrational, and most proffered solutions would make matters worse; but there is a better way."]
Original Author: TAMAR JACOBY
Of all the issues Americans have had to rethink in the wake of Sept. 11, few seem more baffling than immigration. As polls taken in the following weeks confirmed, the attacks dramatically heightened people's fear of foreigners—not just Muslim foreigners, all foreigners. In one survey, fully two-thirds of the respondents said they wanted to stop any immigration until the war against terror was over. [The Administration, in the shape of the INS, is bravely ignoring those polls. Since September 11, over 50.000 visas have been granted to immigrants from the Middle East.] In Congress, the once-marginal Immigration Reform Caucus quadrupled in size virtually overnight, and a roster of sweeping new proposals came to the fore: a six-month moratorium on all visas, shutting the door to foreign students, even militarizing our borders with troops and tanks.
In the end, none of these ideas came close to getting through Congress. [Norm Matloff warned us that the Open Borders coalition wasn't going to let a little thing like a massacre change their minds about immigration.] On the issue of security, Republicans and Democrats, ["bipartisanship" as defined by Sam Francis' famous joke. Of course, it means that the majority of the American people, who favor restrictions on immigration, have no one to vote for] law-enforcement professionals [In 1995. a judge decided that local law-enforcement officials weren't allowed to enforce immigration law. Recently police have been saying that they will refuse to help enforce immigration laws, as this would cause them to forfeit the trust of the illegal alien community.] and civilians alike agreed early on that it was critical to distinguish terrorists from immigrants—and that it was possible to protect the country without isolating it.
The Bush administration and Congress soon came up with similar plans based on the idea that the best defense was to intercept unwanted visitors before they reached the U.S.—when they applied for visas in their home country, were preparing to board a plane or were first packing a lethal cargo shipment. A bipartisan bill now making its way through Congress calls for better screening of visa applications, enhanced intelligence-sharing among federal agencies, new tamper-proof travel documents with biometric data, and better tracking of the few hundred thousand foreign students [Many of whom are subsidized by the US taxpayer] already in the U.S.
But the security debate is only one front in a broader struggle over immigration. There is no question that our present policy is defective, and immigration opponents are hoping that the attacks will precipitate an all-out fight about overhauling it. Yet even if the goal is only to secure our borders, Americans are up against some fairly intractable realities.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, for example, there have been calls for tracking not just foreign students but all foreigners already in the country. This is not an unreasonable idea; but it would be next to impossible to implement. Even monitoring the entry and exit of visitors, as the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been charged with doing, has turned out to be a logistical nightmare [Oh yeah? So how does the credit card industry manage?]—we are talking about a half billion entries and probably an equal number of exits a year (Of the total, incidentally, by far the largest number are Canadian and Mexican daily commuters, a third are Americans, and only a tiny percentage—fewer than a million a year—are immigrants seeking to make a new life in the U.S.) If collecting this information is difficult, analyzing and acting on it are a distant dream. As for the foreign-born population as a whole, it now stands at 28 million and growing, with illegal aliens alone estimated at between seven million and eight million. It would take years just to identify them, much less find a way to track them all.
To this, the more implacable immigration opponents respond that if we cannot keep track of those already here, we should simply deport them. ["Simply deport" of course, would only apply to illegals, although higher standards would result in other visa holders being asked to leave. Why is it implacable to deport illegal immigrants?] At the very least, others say, we should move to reduce radically the number we admit from now on, or impose a five- or 10-year moratorium. In the months since Sept. 11, a variety of more and less extreme restrictionists have come together in a loose coalition to push forward such ideas. Although the movement has so far made little headway in Washington, it has become increasingly vocal, gaining a wide audience for its views, and has found a forceful, nationally known spokesman in the former presidential candidate and best-selling author Patrick Buchanan.
The coalition itself is a motley assemblage of bedfellows: [See John J. Miller's The Politics of Permanent Immigration for a self-congratulatory look at the "motley assemblage of bedfellows" on the immigration enthusiast side] liberals worried about the impact of large-scale immigration on population growth and the environment, conservatives exercised about porous borders and the shattering of America's common culture, plus a sizable contingent of outright racial demagogues. The best known organization pushing for restriction is the Federation for Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which provided much of the intellectual ammunition for the last big anti-immigration campaign, in the mid-1990's.
FAIR is still the richest and most powerful of the restrictionist groups. In the months since the attacks, a consortium it leads has spent some $300,000 on inflammatory TV ads in Western states where the 2002 midterm elections will bring immigration issues to the fore; over pictures of the 19 hijackers, the spots argue that the only way to keep America safe is to reduce immigration severely. But FAIR no longer dominates the debate as it once did, and newer groups are springing up around it.
On one flank are grassroots cells. Scrappier and more populist than FAIR, some consist of no more than an individual with a Web page or radio show who has managed to accumulate a regional following; other local organizations have amassed enough strength to influence the politics of their states, particularly in California. On the other flank, and at the national level, FAIR is increasingly being eclipsed by younger, more media-savvy [!!!] groups like the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington and the writers associated with the Web site VDARE, both of which aim at swaying elite opinion in New York and Washington.
Different groups in the coalition focus on different issues, and each has its own style and way of presenting itself. One organization, Project USA, has devoted itself to putting up roadside billboards—nearly 100 so far, in a dozen states—with provocative messages like, "Tired of sitting in traffic? Every day, another 8,000 immigrants arrive. Every day!!" Those in the more respectable [What's not respectable about billboards?] factions spend much energy distancing themselves from the more militant or fanatical, and even those with roughly the same mandate can seem, or sound, very different.
Consider the Center for Immigration Studies and VDARE. Created in 1985 as a fact-finding arm of FAIR, CIS is today arguably better known and more widely quoted than its parent. The group's executive director, Mark Krikorian, has made himself all but indispensable to anyone interested in immigration issues, sending out daily electronic compendiums of relevant news stories culled from the national press. His organization publishes scholarly papers on every aspect of the issue by a wide circle of respected academic researchers, many of whom would eschew any association with, say, FAIR's exclusionary politics. Along with his director of research, Steven Camarota, Mr. Krikorian is also a regular on Capitol Hill, where his restrained, informative testimony is influential with a broad array of elected officials. [This is a triumph for Mark's strategy of triangulation against other immigration reformers e.g. us and we congratulate him on it. We say: Let a hundred flowers triangulate! Of course, "restrained" can mean wimpish. But hey, that's what VDARE.COM is for!]
VDARE, by contrast, wears its political views on its sleeve—and they are deliberately provocative. [See!] Founded a few years ago by the journalist Peter Brimelow, a senior editor at Forbes [now with CBS MarketWatch] and the author of the best-selling Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster (1995), VDARE is named after Virginia Dare, "the first English child born in the New World." Kidnapped as an infant and never seen again, Virginia Dare is thought to have eventually married into a local Indian tribe, or to have been killed by it—almost equally unfortunate possibilities in the minds of VDARE's writers, who make no secret of their concern about the way America's original Anglo-Saxon stock is being transformed by immigration. [If VDARE.com did champion what David Hackett Fisher called "Albion's Seed" in this way, it would, after all, merely make us the Commentary magazine of the "Anglo-Saxon" minority. But in fact we have posted nothing to justify this description. If Tamar had read our "Why VDARE.com/ The White Doe" – which she clearly has not, because she misreports the Virginia Dare story – she would have seen that we satirize the miscegenation canard by posting a picture of Heather Locklear. The case against current immigration policy is a very broad one; it is all too typical for New York intellectuals to read into it only their own ethnocentric preoccupations].
The overall strength of today's restrictionist movement is hard to gauge. But there is no question that recent developments—both Sept. 11 and the flagging American economy—have significantly boosted its appeal. One Virginia-based organization, Numbers USA, claims that its membership grew from 5,000 to over 30,000 in the weeks after the attacks. Buchanan's The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization —a deliberately confrontational jeremiad—shot to the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list within days of publication, then moved to a perch in the New York Times top 10. Nor does it hurt that the anti-immigrant cause boasts advocates at both ends of the political spectrum. Thus, leftists repelled by the likes of Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Brimelow [???] could read a more congenial statement of the same case in a recent, much-discussed series in the New York Review of Books by the distinguished sociologist Christopher Jencks.
To be sure, immigration opponents have also had some significant setbacks. Most notably, the Republican Party, which stood staunchly with them in the mid-1990s in California, is now firmly on the other side of the issue—if anything, George W. Bush has become the country's leading advocate for liberalizing immigration law. But there can be no mistaking the depth of public concern over one or another of the questions raised by the restrictionists, and in the event of more attacks or a prolonged downturn, their appeal could surely grow.
In addition to national security, immigration opponents offer arguments principally about three issues: natural resources, economics, and the likelihood that today's newcomers will be successfully absorbed into American society. On the first, restrictionists contend not only that immigrants compete with us and consume our natural resources, to the detriment of the native-born, but that their numbers will eventually overwhelm us, choking the United States to death both demographically and environmentally.
Much of Mr. Buchanan's book, for example, is devoted to a discussion of population. As he correctly notes, birth rates in Europe have dropped below replacement level, and populations there are aging. By 2050, he estimates, only 10% of the world's people will be of European descent, while Asia, Africa and Latin America will grow by three billion to four billion people, yielding "30 to 40 new Mexicos." As the developed countries "die out," huge movements of hungry people from the underdeveloped world will swamp their territory and destroy their culture. "This is not a matter of prophecy," Mr. Buchanan asserts, "but of mathematics."
Extrapolating from similar statistics, Christopher Jencks has predicted that the U.S. population may double in size over the next half-century largely as a result of the influx of foreigners. (This is a much faster rate of growth than that foreseen by virtually any other mainstream social scientist.) [It is in fact one of the projections made by the Census Bureau.] Mr. Jencks imagines a hellish future in which American cities will become all but unlivable and suburban sprawl will decimate the landscape. The effect on our natural resources will be devastating, as the water supply dwindles and our output of carbon dioxide soars. (To put his arguments in perspective, Mr. Jencks finds nothing new in this pattern. Immigration has always been disastrous to our ecology, he writes; the Indians who crossed the Bering Strait 13,000 years ago depleted the continent's fauna by overhunting, and many centuries later the germs brought by Europeans laid waste to the Indians.)
Not all the arguments from scarcity are quite so apocalyptic, but all begin and end with the assumption that the size of the pie is fixed, and that continued immigration can only mean less and less for the rest of us. [No, they don't. The conservationist case against immigration is an amenity argument – more people might be able to crowd into the U.S., but what would it do to the quality of life? ] A similar premise underlies the restrictionists' second set of concerns—that immigrants steal jobs from native-born workers, depress Americans' wages, and make disproportionate use of welfare and other government services.
Here, groups like FAIR and CIS focus largely on the portion of the immigrant flow that is poor and ill-educated—not the Indian engineer in Silicon Valley, but the Mexican farmhand with a sixth-grade education. "Although immigrants comprise about 12 percent of America's workforce," CIS reports, "they account for 31 percent of high-school dropouts in the workforce." Not only are poverty rates among these immigrants higher than among the native-born, but, the restrictionists claim, the gap is growing. As for welfare, Mr. Krikorian points out that even in the wake of the 1996 reform that denied means-tested benefits to many immigrants, their reliance on some programs—food stamps, for example—still exceeds that of native-born Americans.
The restrictionists' favorite economist is Harvard's George Borjas, the author of a widely read 1999 book, "Heaven's Door." [In fact, Borjas represents the current consensus among labor economists, reflected for example in the National Academy of Science's survey The New Americans.] As it happens, Mr. Borjas did not confirm the worst fears about immigrants: they do not, for example, steal Americans' jobs, and today's newcomers are no poorer or less capable than those who came at the turn of the 20th century and ultimately did fine in America. [This is simply wrong, and much of it is contradicted by Tamar's next sentences. In particular, Borjas found that recent immigrants are relatively less skilled on average than a century ago – and the effects of a relative lack of skills in 1890-1920 can be detected in the form of economic underperformance for four generations. Even the arch-immigration propagandist Julian Simon conceded in his Economic Consequences of Immigration that immigrants do take American jobs (p. 249, 347). The only question is whether they bring compensating benefits – and whether those benefits go to the displaced. Borjas's answer to these questions: no and no.] Still, in Mr. Borjas' estimation, compared with the native-born of their era, today's immigrants are relatively farther behind than, say, the southern Europeans who came a century ago, and even if they do not actually take work away from Americans, they may prompt the native-born to move to other cities and thus adversely affect the larger labor market.
As a result, Mr. Borjas contends, the presence of these newcomers works to lower wages, particularly among high-school dropouts. And because of the cost of the government services they consume—whether welfare or public schooling or hospital care—they impose a fiscal drain on some states where they settle. In sum, immigrants may be a boon to U.S. business and to the middle class (which benefits from lower prices for the fruit the foreigners pick and from the cheap lawn services they provide), but they are an unfair burden on ordinary working Americans, who must subsidize them with higher taxes.
Mr. Borjas's claims have hardly gone unchallenged by economists on either the right or the left [actually, they are the consensus among labor economists, see above] —including Jagdish Bhagwati in a heated exchange in The Wall Street Journal—but he remains a much-quoted figure among restrictionists, who particularly like his appealing-sounding note of concern for the native-born black poor. [Critics of immigration restrictionists apparently find it hard to believe that we could be genuinely concerned about what immigration is doing to black Americans, but the damage done to the black working class by immigration had been noted by Booker T. Washington, A. Phillip Randolph, and more recently by Roy Beck, who has given testimony to what immigration has done to blacks who used to have jobs in the meatpacking and poultry industries.] Mr. Borjas's book has also greatly strengthened those who propose that existing immigration policy, which is based mainly on the principle of family unification, be changed to one like Canada's that admits people based on the skills they bring. [Click here for George Borjas' essay on his critics.]
This brings us to the third issue that worries the anti-immigration community: the apparent failure, or refusal, of large numbers of newcomers to assimilate successfully into American society, to learn our language, adopt our mores and embrace American values as their own. To many who harp on this theme—Mr. Buchanan, the journalist Georgie Anne Geyer, the more polemical VDARE contributors—it is, frankly, the racial makeup of today's influx that is most troublesome. "Racial groups that are different are more difficult to assimilate," Mr. Buchanan says flatly, painting a nightmarish picture of newcomers with "no desire to learn English or become citizens." Mr. Buchanan and others make much of the influence of multiculturalism and identity politics in shaping the priorities of the immigrant community; his chapter on Mexican immigrants, entitled "La Reconquista," quotes extensively from extremist Chicano activists who want, he says, to "colonize" the United States.
On this point, it should be noted, Mr. Buchanan and his followers are hardly alone, and hardly original. [This is a funny way of saying that they have support.] Any number of observers who are favorably disposed to continued immigration have likewise raised an alarm over the radically divisive and balkanizing effects of multiculturalism and bilingual education. Where they part company with Buchanan is over the degree of danger they perceive—and what should be done about it.
About one thing the restrictionists are surely right: Our immigration policy is broken. Not only is the INS one of the least efficient and most beleaguered agencies in Washington—at the moment, four million authorized immigrants are waiting, some for a decade or more, for their paperwork to be processed—but official policy, particularly with regard to Mexico, is a hypocritical sham. Even as we claim to limit the flow of migrants, and force thousands to wait their turn for visas, we look the other way as hundreds of thousands enter the country without papers—illegal but welcomed by business as a cheap, pliable labor force. Nor do we have a clear rationale for the selection we end up making from the vast pool of foreigners eager to enter the country.
But here precisely is where the restrictionists' arguments are the least helpful. Take the issue of scarcity. The restrictionists construct their dire scenarios by extrapolating from the current flow of immigrants. But as anyone who follows these matters is aware, nothing is harder to predict than who and how many will come in the future. It is, for example, as easy today as it ever was to migrate to the U.S. from Puerto Rico, and wages on the island still lag woefully behind wages here. But the net flow from Puerto Rico stopped long ago, [No, it didn't!. As we wrote in August, Puerto Ricans are still coming to the mainland at a rate nearly as high as the official Mexican rate] probably because life there improved just enough to change the calculus of hope that had been prodding people to make the trip. [And to the extent that it has improved, it's improved because Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and can receive Federal aid, while being exempt from Federal taxes.]
Sooner or later, the same thing will happen in Mexico. No one knows when, but surely one hint of things to come is that population growth is slowing in Mexico, just as it slowed earlier here and in Europe. Over the past three decades, the Mexican fertility rate has dropped from an average 6.5 children per mother to a startling 2.5.
Nor are demographic facts themselves always as straightforward in their implications as the restrictionists assume. True, population is still growing faster in the underdeveloped world than in developed countries. But is this an argument against immigration, or for it? If they are to remain strong, countries need population—workers, customers, taxpayers, soldiers. And our own openness to immigrants, together with our proven ability to absorb them, is one of our greatest advantages over Japan and Europe, which face a demographic crisis as their ratio of workers to retirees adversely shifts. The demographer [the WHAT?] Ben Wattenberg has countered Mr. Buchanan with a simple calculation: "If we keep admitting immigrants at our current levels, there will be almost 400 million Americans by 2050. That"—and only that, one might add—"can keep us strong enough to defend and perhaps extend our views and values." [Bunk. Technology and skill are what count, not bodies, especially unskilled bodies. Click here for more on this point from the development economist Lord Bauer.]
The argument from economics is equally unhelpful. The most commonly heard complaint about foreign workers is that they take jobs from Americans. Not only is this assertion untrue—nobody has found real evidence to support it—but cities and states with the largest immigrant populations (New York, Los Angeles and others) boast far faster economic growth and lower unemployment than cities and states that do not attract immigrants. In many places, the presence of immigrants seems to reduce unemployment even among native-born blacks—probably because of the way immigrants stimulate economic growth.
Economists looking for a depressive effect on native-born wages have been nearly as disappointed: dozens of studies over the past two or three decades have found at most modest and probably temporary effects. Even if Mr. Borjas is right that a native-born black worker may take home $300 less a year as a result of immigration, [This estimate nowhere appears in Borjas' work. He does estimate the depression of unskilled wages is around 5%, but at the minimum wage this would amount to nearly $1000 a year] this is a fairly small amount of money in the overall scheme of things. [i.e. to Manhattan journalists. Not to everybody.] More to the point, globalization would have much the same effect on wages, immigrants or no immigrants. Pressed by competition from foreign imports, American manufacturers have had to change production methods and cut costs, including labor costs. If they did not, they would have to go out of business—or move to an underdeveloped country where wages are lower. In either case, the U.S. economy would end up being hurt far more than by the presence of immigrant workers—who expand the U.S. economic pie when they buy shoes and groceries and washing machines from their American neighbors and call American plumbers into their homes.
What about the costs imposed by immigrants, especially by their use of government services? It is true that many immigrants—though far from all—are poorer than native-born Americans, and thus pay less in taxes. It is also true that one small segment of the immigrant population—refugees—tends to be heavily dependent on welfare. As a result, states with large immigrant populations often face chronic fiscal problems.
But that is at the state level, and mostly in high-welfare states like California. If we shift the lens to the federal level, and include the taxes that immigrants remit to the IRS, the calculation comes out very differently: Immigrants pay in more than they take out. This is particularly true if one looks at the picture over the course of an immigrant's lifetime. Most come to the U.S. as young adults looking for work—which means they were already educated at home, relieving us of a significant cost. More important, even illegal immigrants generally keep up with payroll taxes, contributing to Social Security though they may never claim benefits. According to Stephen Moore, an economist at the Cato Institute, foreign-born workers are likely to contribute as much as $2 trillion to Social Security over the next 70 years, thus effectively keeping it afloat. [Immigrants' contribution to Social Security is trivial in terms of the overall system. And they also represent a future liability. No reputable student of the Social Security problem takes Moore seriously.]
The economic debate often comes down to this sort of war of numbers, but the victories on either side are rarely conclusive. After all, even 28 million immigrants form but a small part of the $12 trillion U.S. economy, and most of the fiscal costs and benefits associated with them are relatively modest. Besides, fiscal calculations are only a small part of the larger economic picture. How do we measure the energy immigrants bring—the pluck and grit and willingness to improvise and innovate?
Not only are immigrants by and large harder-working than the native-born, they generally fill economic niches that would otherwise go wanting. The term economists use for this is "complementarity." If immigrants were exactly like American workers, they would not be particularly valuable to employers. They are needed precisely because they are different: willing or able to do jobs few American workers are willing or able to do. These jobs tend to be either at the lowest rungs of the employment ladder (busboy, chambermaid, line worker in a meatpacking plant) or at the top (nurse, engineer, information-technology worker).
It is no accident that 80% of American farm workers are foreign-born, or that, if there were no immigrants, hotels and restaurants in many cities would have to close their doors. Nor is it an accident that immigrants account for a third of the scientific workforce in Silicon Valley, [Considering that the institution of the H1-B visa lets companies hire what amounts to indentured labor, at lower rates than American programmers, it's surprising that there are that any Americans employed there] or that Asian entrepreneurs run a quarter of the companies there. [Which is another possible explanation for the high number of foreign programmers. The Center for Immigration Studies reported, in Reconsidering Immigrant Entrepreneurship that jobs created by immigrant entrepreneurs tend to go to other immigrants. And Tamar has already told us how"restrained" CIS is!] Today's supply of willing laborers from Mexico, China, India and elsewhere matches our demand in these various sectors, and the result is good for just about everyone—business, workers, and American consumers alike.
[As usual, this entire discussion of the economics of immigration misses the key point, which is not: Is Immigration Doing Harm? But: Is Immigration Necessary? Is it doing something for Americans that they couldn't do for themselves? George Borjas, in a calculation confirmed by the National Academy of Science survey, estimates that the aggregate net benefit of the current immigrant presence to native-born Americans is nugatory – less than a tenth of one percent of Gross Domestic Product. (And even that is currently wiped out by transfer payments, like welfare and education.) There are literally scores of policies that could spur that amount of growth, beginning with lower taxes. In other words, America is being transformed for nothing (0). All this is explained in Alien Nation, which even quotes Julian Simon as saying: "I've never said that immigration is necessary." But you have to actually read it.]
To be sure, what is good for business, or even for American consumers, may not ultimately be good for the United States—and this is where the issue of assimilation comes in. "What is a nation?" Mr. Buchanan asks. "Is America nothing more than an economic system?" If immigrants do not come to share our values, adopt our heroes, and learn our history as their own, ultimately the nation will not hold. Immigration policy cannot be a suicide pact.
The good news is that assimilation is not going nearly as badly as the restrictionists claim. Though many immigrants start out at the bottom, most eventually join the working poor, if not the middle class. And by the time they have been here 20 years, they generally do as well as or better than the native-born, earning comparable salaries and registering lower poverty rates. [Although this was long an article of faith among immigration enthusiasts, it was in fact an artifact of the more selective pre-1965 policies and has now disappeared. Read Borjas more carefully.]
Nor is it true that immigrants fail or refuse to learn English. Many more than in previous eras come with a working knowledge of the language—it is hard to avoid it in the world today. Despite the charade that is bilingual education, nearly all high-school students who have been educated in this country—nine out of 10 of them, according to one study—prefer English to their native tongue. And by the third generation, even among Hispanics, who are somewhat slower than other immigrants to make the linguistic shift, only 1% say they use "more or only Spanish" at home.
Despite the handicaps with which many arrive, the immigrant drive to succeed is as strong as ever. According to one important study of the second generation, newcomers' children work harder than their U.S. classmates, putting in an average of two hours of homework a night compared with the "normal" 30 minutes. They also aspire to higher levels of educational achievement, earn better grades, drop out less frequently—and expect only the best of their new homeland. Nearly two-thirds believe that hard work and accomplishment can triumph over prejudice, and about the same number say there is no better country than the United States. As for the lure of identity politics, one of the most thorough surveys of Hispanics, conducted in 1999 by the Washington Post, reported that 84% believe it is "important" or "very important" for immigrants "to change so that they blend into the larger society, as in the idea of the melting pot."
[If Hispanics want to assimilate, why is the Bush White House so convinced it has to appeal to them on the basis of their ethnic identity? And let's put this in perspective: even if immigrant children are assimilating, what about the impact of their presence on the education of the native-born? As one prominent neo-con (and closet immigration reformer) told VDARE.com last year, not only is that not studied, it isn't going to be studied – because no-one wants to know the answer. But Tamar doesn't even ask.]
There is also bad news. Immigrant America is far from monolithic, and some groups do worse than others both economically and culturally. While less than 5% of Asian young people use an Asian language with their friends, nearly 45% of Latinos sometimes use Spanish. Close to 90% of Chinese parents expect their children to finish college; only 55% of Mexicans do. Indeed, Mexicans—who account for about a quarter of the foreign-born—lag behind on many measures, including, most worrisomely, education. The average Mexican migrant comes with less than eight years of schooling, and though the second generation is outstripping its parents, it too falls well below American norms, either for other immigrants or for the native-born.
When it comes to absorbing the American common culture, or what has been called patriotic assimilation, there is no question that today's immigrants are at a disadvantage compared with yesterday's. Many Americans themselves no longer know what it means to be American. [Too true. We know a New York journalist who doesn't know about Virginia Dare.] Our schools teach, at best, a travesty of American history, distorted by political correctness and the excesses of multiculturalism. Popular culture supplies only the crudest, tinniest visions of our national heritage. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, few leaders have tried to evoke more than a fuzzy, feel-good enthusiasm for America. No wonder many immigrants have a hard time making the leap from their culture to ours. We no longer ask it of them.
Still, even if the restrictionists are right about all this, their remedy is unworkable. Given the global economy, given the realities of politics and law enforcement in the United States, we are not going to stop—or significantly reduce—the flow of immigrant workers into the country any time soon. Businesses that rely on imported labor would not stomach it; as it is, they object vociferously whenever the INS tries to enforce the law. Nor are American citizens prepared to live with the kinds of draconian measures that would be needed to implement a significant cutback or time-out. Even in the wake of the attacks, there is little will to require that immigrants carry ID cards, let alone to erect the equivalent of a Berlin Wall along the Rio Grande. [Yeah, yeah. That's what they said during the last Great Wave. Then came the cut-off of the 1920s.] In sum, if many immigrants among us are failing to adopt our common culture, we will have to look elsewhere than to the restrictionists for a solution.
What, then, is to be done? As things stand today, American immigration policy and American law are perilously out of sync with reality—the reality of the market. Consider the Mexican case, not the only telling one but the most dramatic.
People born in Mexico now account for roughly 10% of the U.S. work force, and the market for their labor is a highly efficient one. Very few recent Mexican migrants are unemployed; even modest economic upturns or downturns have a perceptible impact on the number trying to enter illegally, as word quickly spreads from workers in California or Kansas back to home villages in Mexico. This precise coordination of supply and demand has been drawing roughly 300,000 Mexicans over the border each year, although, even including minors and elderly parents, the INS officially admits only half that many.
One does not have to be a free-market enthusiast to find this discrepancy absurd, and worse. Not only does it criminalize badly needed laborers and productive economic activity. It also makes an ass of the law and insidiously corrupts American values, encouraging illegal hiring and discrimination against even lawful Mexican migrants.
Neither a moratorium nor a reduction in official quotas would eliminate this thriving labor exchange—on the contrary, it would only exacerbate the mismatch. Instead, we should move in the opposite direction from what the restrictionists demand, bringing the number we admit more into line with the reality of the market. The rationale for whom we ought to let in, what we should encourage and reward, is work.
This, as it happens, is precisely the direction in which President Bush was moving before Sept. 11. A package of reforms he floated in July, arrived at in negotiations with Mexican president Vicente Fox, would have significantly expanded the number of visas for Mexican workers. The president's impulse may have been partisan—to woo Latino voters—but he stumbled onto the basis for an immigration policy that would at once serve America's interests and reflect its values. He put the core idea plainly, and got it exactly right: "If somebody is willing to offer a job others in America aren't willing to do, we ought to welcome that person to the country." [This of course shows that Tamar has completely failed to grasp that work is now only part of the incentive – as Milton Friedman has put it, "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state." Neither has the President, but he’s hopeless.]
Compared with this, any other criterion for immigration policy—family reunification, country of origin or skill level—sinks into irrelevancy. It makes no sense at all that three-quarters of the permanent visas available today should be based on family ties, while only one-quarter are employment-related. As for the Canadian-style notion of making skill the decisive factor, admitting engineers and college professors but closing the door to farm workers, not only does this smack of a very un-American elitism but it disregards our all too palpable [but apparently unquantifiable] economic needs at the low end of the labor market.
The problem is that there is at present virtually no legal path into the U.S. for unskilled migrant laborers; unless they have relatives here, they have no choice but to come illicitly. If we accept the President's idea that immigration policy should be based on work, we ought to enshrine it in a program that makes it possible for those who want to work, and who can find a job, to come lawfully. The program ought to be big enough to meet market needs; the number of visas available the first year should match the number of people who now sneak in against the law, and in future years it should follow the natural rise and fall of supply and demand. At the same time, the new regime ought to be accompanied by serious enforcement measures to ensure that workers use this pipeline rather than continuing to come illegally outside it.
Such a policy makes sound economic sense—and also would provide a huge boost for immigrant absorption and assimilation. [And numbers. Note the unanswered $64,000 question here: WHAT ABOUT THE CURRENT FAMILY-BASED INFLOW? That’s because any reduction in immigration is literally unthinkable to Tamar. It’s like a learning disability.] By definition, the undocumented [i.e. ILLEGAL] are effectively barred from assimilating. Most cannot drive legally in the U.S. or, in many states, get regular care in a hospital. Nor, in most places, can they send their children to college. An indelible caste line separates them from other Americans—no matter how long they stay, how much they contribute or how ardently they and their children strive to assimilate. If we want newcomers to belong, we should admit them legally, and find a fair means of regularizing the status of those who are already here illicitly.
But rerouting the illegal flow into legal channels will not by itself guarantee assimilation—particularly not if, as the president and Congress have suggested, we insist that workers go home when the job is done. In keeping with the traditional Republican approach to immigration, the president's reform package included a proposal for a guest-worker program, and before Sept. 11, both Democrats and Republicans had endorsed the idea. If we want to encourage assimilation, however, such a system would only be counterproductive.
The cautionary model in this case is Germany, which for years admitted unskilled foreigners exclusively as temporary guest workers, holding out virtually no hope that either they or their children could become German citizens. As it happened, many of these migrants remained in Germany long after the work they were imported for had disappeared. But today, nearly 40 years later, most of them still have not assimilated, and they remain, poorly educated and widely despised, on the margins of German society. Clearly, if what we hope to encourage is the putting down of roots, any new visa program must give participants a shot at membership in the American body politic.
But how we hand out visas is only the first step in a policy aimed at encouraging immigrant absorption. Other steps would have to include the provision of basic services like instruction in English, civics classes, naturalization programs—and also counseling in more practical matters like how to navigate the American banking system. (Many newcomers, even when they start making money, are at sea in the world of credit cards, credit histories, mortgage applications and the like.) All these nuts-and-bolts services are as essential as the larger tasks, from overhauling the teaching of American history to eliminating counterproductive programs like bilingual education and ethnic entitlements that only breed separatism and alienation.
There can be no gainsaying the risks America runs in remaining open to new immigrants. The security perils, though real enough, are the least worrisome. Legalizing the flow of needed workers and providing them with papers will help keep track of who is here and also help prevent those who wish to do us harm from entering in the first place. The more daring, long-term gamble lies in continuing to admit millions of foreigners who may or may not make it here or find a way to fit in. This is, as Mr. Buchanan rightly states, "a decision we can never undo."
Still, it is an experiment we have tried before—repeatedly. [We’ve also restricted immigration before – repeatedly, going back to Colonial times] The result has never come out exactly as predicted, and the process has always been a wrenching one. But as experiments go, it has not only succeeded on its own terms; it has made us the wonder of the world. [Hmmm. We thought it was Americans that made us the wonder of the world.] It can do so again—but only if we stop denying reality and resolve instead to meet the challenge head-on.
[Let’s get this straight – we’re running a risk, so we increase it. Sounds like a head-on collision to us.]
