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Category: immigration

Published on Leave a comment on Immigration and Globalization

Frequent commenter ishmaelabroad asks for a reaction to this exchange between Andrew Leonard at Salon and George Borjas on his blog. Keeping in mind that this is a reaction to a comment on an analogy, here goes.

Borjas makes a reasonable point that journalists, more than many other professional occupations, should understand the impact of an influx of competitors with low reservation wages on the prevailing wage level. Leonard accepts this point, but then suggests his own analogy between globalization and the futility of erecting barriers to illegal immigration:

To think that one can turn back the tide of competition unleashed by the Net is a lot like thinking that in a globalized world one can ameliorate the wage impact of illegal immigration by building a border fence or by passing laws imposing strict sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. The work forces of China and India and eastern Europe and of course Mexico have joined the world economy just like bloggers have joined the media universe. In both cases, technology has played a huge enabling role, and, unless the world experiences a truly massive and unprecedented energy crisis, that technologically-midwifed change is not going back in the bottle. In a globalized world, massive disparities between the living standards of individual nations will create more pressure than ever before for some kind of equalization,
whether that means workers finding their way from the developing to the developed world, or capital headed in the other direction.

I think he's right insofar as he notes that there will be "some kind of equalization." I think that he's concluding prematurely that immigration will play, needs to play, or should play a large role in that equalization.

The current Wikipedia entry for globalization points to economic integration in four types of markets: goods and services, capital, technology, and labor. I'm an economist with libertarian views, so I am all for greater opportunities to exchange the first three across national borders, provided that property rights are protected. I'll further assert that if those opportunities were enhanced, there could be less pressure for labor to move across national borders. (See this earlier post.)

The difference between labor and the other three markets is that a laborer is a person, and people have rights unrelated to their economic lives. As I've said before, I don't believe in guest-worker programs that authorize a second-class citizenry. So if people have immigrated, they have the right to vote, and their votes may move policies away from those that would otherwise prevail. As another example, they have the right to make claims against a social welfare system, and their claims may outweigh their contributions through the tax system. I'm sure others could come up with more examples.

So immigration, as distinct from other forms of globalization, imposes a distribution of costs and benefits on the rest of society that is intermediated through the political system. A citizen of the U.S., even one who embraces the other three types of globalization, could reasonably conclude that the costs of immigration imposed through the political system outweigh the economic benefits. This is particularly true if the benefits to the immigrants themselves are excluded. (See the distinction between being generous and being fair to would-be immigrants in this recent post.)

There are obviously many citizens of this country who have come to a different conclusion about these political costs net of economic benefits, and so they are naturally advocating for a more permissive immigration policy. However, if a citizen had come to that conclusion, then the next question is whether the costs of deterring illegal immigration are sufficiently smaller than these political costs net of economic benefits. Leonard (if he is asking this question) seems to believe that the ability to deter (e.g., through a border fence or employer sanctions) is so low or that the costs of deterrence are so high that the answer to this question would almost always be "no." I'm not so sure.

Published on Leave a comment on Yes, Mikey, It Really Is About Illegal Immigration

Mark Thoma directs us to Michael Kinsley's commentary in Time arguing that "legal vs. illegal immigration isn't the real issue." I take the bait. Here is one of Kinsley's key paragraphs:

Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration. This is a debate about immigration.

That's not a good test, unless Kinsley is arguing that a politician's desired amount of legal immigration should not depend (negatively) on the number of illegal immigrants who are already here. One does not have to argue that there are no differences between illegal and legal immigrants (for example, in their economic or fiscal impact) to assert that the key distinction of legality is relevant for public policy.

Additionally, why does Kinsley develop his article by excluding the possibility that a politician believes that the number of legally authorized immigrants each year is the appropriate one and wants to reduce total immigration to that target which emerged out of the democratic process? Later in the article, he suggests this is possible:

There is some number of immigrants that is too many. I don't believe we're past that point, but maybe we are. In any event, a democracy has the right to decide that it has reached such a point. There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners.

But let's not kid ourselves that all we care about is obeying the law and all we are asking illegals to do is go home and get in line like everybody else. We know perfectly well that the line is too long, and we are basically telling people to go home and not come back.

But he should have written, "no obligation to be generous to foreigners." This is an important distinction. Telling the ones here illegally "to go home and not come back" is the way to be fair to "foreigners," particularly the ones near the front of that very long line.

He should also have written that we have no obligation to cede our decisions about who enters the country to the "foreigners." Insisting on a distinction between legal and illegal immigration is a way to keep control of that process. Why should we give up that prerogative? To be generous to some and unfair to others? I'm going to need a better reason than that.

And while we are on the topic of obligations, we should clarify what our obligations are to those who are here illegally. We are obligated to protect their basic human rights. We are not obligated beyond that to ease the considerable burdens they face in being here illegally, whether through issuing them drivers' licenses or providing a path to citizenship that recognizes their illegal tenure here. We may choose to do so, but we are certainly not obligated to do so.

And, referring back to the first excerpt, we are not obligated to ensure that immigration laws are "enforced with vigor" against those who have managed to enter illegally if the cost of enforcement is perceived to be too high or the consequences too disruptive. That in no way undermines our authority to enforce them with vigor against those who would seek to enter illegally in the future to prevent them from doing so. That seems to be where most of the Republican candidates are, and on this issue, that's where I am, too.

Published on Leave a comment on Tom Tancredo Visits Dartmouth

The steady stream of candidates to campus continued on Monday, with Congressman Tom Tancredo holding a Town Hall meeting at the Rockefeller Center. Here's an article in The Dartmouth covering the main points of his remarks. Most of the evening was a discussion of his views on immigration. Since I'm not a fan of establishing a guest worker program, which I consider an institutionalized second-class citizenship, I tend to agree with him more than the other candidates. On the efficacy of building fences and on whether we should be doing more to enable legal immigration, he's more of a hardliner than I am.

Overall, I had the same reaction to him as I had to Congressman Ron Paul when he visited. As a Republican, there are many things about his views that resonate with me. But my question is this. In a nutshell, "If those are your beliefs ..., then why are you not taking on a leadership role in Congress to make sure they are reflected in the law of the land?" If you fancy yourself an authentic conservative, and if you believe that the people will support you in your views, then build a governing coalition around that among your colleagues in Congress. If you cannot do that, then why would we think that you have the ability to lead from the Oval Office?

There was a frank discussion about what it has been like to serve in Congress in recent years, and he had no particularly kind words for how the institution functioned while the Republicans were in the majority. At one point, he likened Congress to "Chinese water torture on your principles." He said that the way arms were twisted by the Republican leadership to pass the Medicare drug bill was a low point for him as a Republican in Congress.

Mine, too.

Published on Leave a comment on More Sensible Cross-Border Flows

This is probably not the best timing, given the very weak August employment report, but I regard the developments in this article in Wednesday's New York Times as a good sign. Five months ago, I asked the question in the context of the immigration debate, "Is Labor Now the Mobile Factor?" I wrote:

In the current environment, I would expect to see capital going south across the border with Mexico, drawn by the high returns available due to the large amount of low-wage labor. But that's not what we are seeing. We are seeing the labor cross the border--at considerable personal cost--to take the low-wage jobs and then send remittances back to Mexico. (Even in agriculture, where the land is obviously not mobile, I would be surprised if much of the agriculture in the Southwestern U.S. couldn't also be produced in Mexico. But there is nothing in the argument that requires the unskilled labor to work in agriculture or any particular industry.)

The article notes that there are American farmers who are moving their businesses south of the border:

Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

About 500 people work for Steve Scaroni’s farming operation in Mexico. Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in the fields of California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexican and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

“I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.”

That's good to know. I consider our "blood" to be the same color for the same reason, and I am also tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue. I'm tired of hearing people treat American citizenship as if it is incidental to an economic transaction. Stepping up to that task in this article (filling in for the President, I guess) is Senator Dianne Feinstein of California:

She predicted that more American farmers would move to Mexico for the ready work force and lower wages. Ms. Feinstein favored a measure in the failed immigration bill that would have created a new guest worker program for agriculture and a special legal status for illegal immigrant farm workers.

There is nothing so sacred about cheap lettuce that we should create a population of second-class citizens to pick it in California rather than Mexico. So I'm glad Mr. Scaroni has moved his operations to Mexico if he feels that is what is essential for his business if he is to abide by our immigration laws. I am particularly glad that the legal and economic infrastructure has developed in Mexico to the point where he can do it.

I wish him the very best in his endeavor, and I'll reward him like I do all other businessmen--I'll buy his product if it's the best one on the market for the price. The article gives a good accounting of the various business challenges involved, and it's worth a read.

Published on Leave a comment on Immigration on The Exchange

I participated in New Hampshire Public Radio's program, The Exchange, this morning to discuss the immigration bill passing through Congress. Audio will shortly be posted here.

For the details, I relied a lot on my archive and on some posts by George Borjas at his new blog. There were four questions I wanted to raise on the show:

1) Is immigration from Mexico just like any other wave of immigration?

The historical success of immigration in this country has been based on immigrants who left the old country behind, to assimilate and to blend their culture with the existing American culture. Mexico is right next door. The presumption that most immigrants will assimilate is much weaker, if not plain wrong. We should be very wary of absorbing so many immigrants, even legal immigrants, from a neighboring country whose objectives may not coincide with our own.

2) Is a guest worker program a good idea?

I regard a guest worker program as a form of second-class citizenry, and I do not support the creation of a second-class citizenry. Citizenship to me is not incidental to an economic relationship. Once we legitimize a second-class citizenry, their pleas to be elevated to first-class citizenry will be difficult to ignore, particularly given our national history of inclusion and equality. Once we legitimize frequent border crossings, we take ownership of the social problems that result from explicitly transitory populations NOT rooted to family relationships in a particular place. Show me the shining examples of guest worker programs in other large industrialized countries and I'll change my mind.

3) Are there jobs that Americans won’t do (this one is straight from an earlier post)?

There are no jobs that Americans refuse to perform. There may be jobs that Americans refuse to perform at the prevailing wage rates. This simply means that the wage rates should rise and the number of jobs should fall, until the number of jobs matches the number of people authorized to work in the country who are willing to perform them. If it turns out that with these higher prevailing wage rates, the employer can no longer operate at a profit, then the employer should cease operations--or relocate to a place where labor and other costs are sufficiently cheap as to allow a profitable business.

4) Is there a link between immigration and terrorism?

When discussing immigration from Mexico, this link appears to be tenuous at best. I have not seen any evidence that a porous southern border has contributed to greater vulnerability to an attack like 9/11. The way terrorists from 9/11 (or the recent episode at Ft. Dix) was to overstay visas--that's very different. The southern border may be contributing to law enforcement problems in the Southwest, to which I am not indifferent, but that’s a very different problem.

For the rest, you will need to listen to the podcast. Enjoy!

Published on Leave a comment on The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration

So goes the title of a report to the Council on Foreign Relations by UCSD Professor of Economics Gordon Hanson. From the Introduction, here's a teaser:

This analysis concludes that there is little evidence that legal immigration is economically preferable to illegal immigration. In fact, illegal immigration responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not. Illegal immigrants tend to arrive in larger numbers when the U.S. economy is booming (relative to Mexico and the Central American countries that are the source of most illegal immigration to the United States) and move to regions where job growth is strong. Legal immigration, in contrast, is subject to arbitrary selection criteria and bureaucratic delays, which tend to disassociate legal inflows from U.S. labor-market conditions. Over the last half-century, there appears to be little or no response of legal immigration to the U.S. unemployment rate. Two-thirds of legal permanent immigrants are admitted on the basis of having relatives in the United States. Only by chance will the skills of these individuals match those most in demand by U.S. industries. While the majority of temporary legal immigrants come to the country at the invitation of a U.S. employer, the process of obtaining a visa is often arduous and slow. Once here, temporary legal workers cannot easily move between jobs, limiting their benefit to the U.S. economy.

I'll have to add this one to the "good intentions" pile of reading.

Published on Leave a comment on Is Labor Now the Mobile Factor?

David Jackson reports in USA Today that President Bush is making a visit to Arizona to tout his proposal for a guest worker program. I get as far as the fourth paragraph before getting bent out of shape:

The president said measures must be taken to protect the border from immigrants who come over with impunity; but he said there also needs to be an organized system to accommodate workers who are doing jobs Americans refuse to perform.

There are no jobs that Americans refuse to perform. There may be jobs that Americans refuse to perform at the prevailing wage rates. This simply means that the wage rates should rise and the number of jobs should fall, until the number of jobs matches the number of people authorized to work in the country who are willing to perform them. If it turns out that with these higher prevailing wage rates, the employer can no longer operate at a profit, then the employer should cease operations--or relocate to a place where labor and other costs are sufficiently cheap as to allow a profitable business. The "organized system" that accommodates this is simply a free market and enforcement of the most basic immigration laws.

When I was first learning economics, we always spoke of capital, not labor, as the mobile factor of production. Maybe something has changed. In the current environment, I would expect to see capital going south across the border with Mexico, drawn by the high returns available due to the large amount of low-wage labor. But that's not what we are seeing. We are seeing the labor cross the border--at considerable personal cost--to take the low-wage jobs and then send remittances back to Mexico. (Even in agriculture, where the land is obviously not mobile, I would be surprised if much of the agriculture in the Southwestern U.S. couldn't also be produced in Mexico. But there is nothing in the argument that requires the unskilled labor to work in agriculture or any particular industry.)

How bad must the environment for business and investment be in Mexico for the capital to stay here and the labor to cross the border?

Published on Leave a comment on Anti-Illegal-Immigration, Not Anti-Immigration

If you said the over/under on how much of a New York Times editorial I could was two sentences, then "under" was the smart bet. In something called an "Editorial Observer," Lawrence Downes begins:

Everybody said that the nation’s anti-immigrant fever was going to spread to Texas this year.

I am as much for border security as the next much-maligned conservative, but I (along with many of the rest of them) have nothing against immigrants. Our gripe is with illegal immigrants and those in the United States--whether employers or activist groups--who facilitate their entrance and permanence in the country. Failing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration is a disservice to the debate about immigration reform.

The editorial goes on to discuss the alliance that has formed between pro-business Republicans and the pro-illegal-immigrant (my word) groups in favor of reforms that Downes describes as "that blend of border toughness and pro-immigrant fairness that Republicans elsewhere deride as 'amnesty.'" Money quote:

The story dates to last year. It has to do, as Megan Headley wrote in The Texas Observer, with pro-business Republicans realizing that anti-immigrant fervor “threatened to purge Texas of the workers that pluck chickens, build houses, and make some people very rich.”

There is nothing so sacred about plucked chickens or new homes or the wealth of those who employ illegal aliens in pursuit of their own riches that should condone the flouting of immigration laws. For more on immigration reform, read here.

Published on Leave a comment on Civil Disobedience, Not So Much

Via Powerline, I learn of an incident at Columbia two weeks ago regarding students disrupting a public presentation by Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project. As they say, let's go to the tape:

Powerline links to an article in yesterday's Insider Higher Ed, which contains a number of sensible statements by people at Columbia regarding the students' behavior. But it also includes this passage:

However, another observer of protest rights on campuses said that the students were well within their rights to go onstage. “The students had a right to unfurl banners at an event,” said Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a liberal bar association that has supported the protestors. “Some people have asked, ‘Well, was it crossing the line to go up on the stage?’”

“I don’t think that’s crossing the line.”

“We don’t think they caused the violence; they weren’t going to stop Gilchrist from speaking; they just wanted to stand there and hold their banner while he spoke,” Boghosian said.

“In addition to a crack-down on dissent in this country, there seems to be a waning tolerance for civil disobedience. If you want, you can call the act of jumping on the stage an act of civil disobedience, a practice that has been used for hundreds of years in this country to resist tyranny,” said Boghosian, who added that she believed the university would likely have given the students just a “slap on the wrist” if the situation had not turned violent.

You can call that civil disobedience, but only if you don't really care about the meaning of civil disobedience and in fact want to trivialize over a hundred years of struggle against genuine oppression.

What the students did was clearly not civil, but more importantly, it was not disobedient. Don't confuse rudeness with disobedience. To disobey is to refuse to abide a dictate imposed by an authority. There was no such imposition here. The students were not being compelled to obey, they were being invited to listen. The inability to distinguish is a sad commentary not just on current events, but on our current appreciation of those who did resist nonviolently--at great peril to themselves--in the name of just causes.

Published on Leave a comment on Immigration Econoblog

Gordon Hanson and Philip Martin discuss "Immigration's Costs and Benefits" in today's WSJ Econoblog. I'll highlight two passages by Gordon that I think are very well put. The first deals with the change in scale and possible reasons for immigration from Mexico:

Today, however, the scale is entirely different. Mexican immigrants now account for about 5% of the U.S. labor force (and 35% of the immigrant labor force), up from less than 1% in 1970. What happened?

I would cite two events. Since 1982, Mexico has had several major economic contractions and has been unable to string together more than a few years of solid growth. As a result, per capita income in Mexico has steadily fallen relative to per capita income in the U.S. Why stay in Mexico when incomes are rising faster in the U.S.?

Compounding migration pressures has been the entry of Mexico's baby boom into the labor force. While fertility rates in Mexico have dropped sharply in the last three decades (from five kids per woman in 1970 to three kids per woman in 2000), it wasn't that long ago that the typical Mexican woman had nearly a half dozen children. Mexico's high fertility years produced a demographic bulge, the members of which in the last 20 years have come of age and started to look for work. As luck would have it, Mexico's baby boom entered the labor force during Mexico's two decades of dismal economic performance and decidedly lackluster growth in labor demand. The result has been the surge in Mexican immigration that we have been witnessing.

What makes the current surge in Mexico-to-U.S. migration hard to slow is that today's generation of Mexican young people do not have a memory of good economic times in Mexico. Many may have lost faith in Mexico's ability to provide them with a decent future. Such a change in expectations is a powerful force because it implies that Mexico would have to produce unexpectedly strong economic growth for a sustained period to get Mexican workers to believe in the Mexican economy, again. In the meantime, Mexican labor will keep heading north.

And the next considers some of the problems with a guest-worker program, even relative to the status quo:

A guest-worker program, at least how it is envisioned by Congress, would be a disaster. For as maligned as illegal immigration is, it has some attractive features in terms of economic efficiency. Illegal immigration delivers U.S. business the types of workers they need (low-skilled labor, which is increasingly in short supply), when they need them (during times when the U.S. economy is expanding), and where they need them (in regions where job growth is strong).

A guest-worker program would have none of these properties. Given the snail's pace at which the Department of Homeland Security operates, U.S. employers would likely have to apply for guest workers long in advance of when they actually need them. The flexibility and adaptability of current illegal inflows would be lost. In response, many employers would probably go back to what they are doing now, which is hiring illegal workers.

Successful policy reform would require rethinking both illegal and legal immigration in the U.S. Why not convert most family-sponsored immigration visas into visas awarded on the basis of skill? Why not make the number of immigrants awarded visas conditional on U.S. economic conditions? Why not have the price of a U.S. immigration visa be determined by market conditions? These are questions that in the current debate should be asked but sadly are not.

It's a good discussion of the issues and challenges in this area.