The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan
Political ·Wednesday December 24, 2008 @ 01:37 EST (link)
The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan has the transcript of a panel discussion on the book The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's (which I have on hold at the library, but haven't been able to pick up due to snow), held by the Center for Immigration Studies at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, October 30, 2007. Some quotes (summaries in italics, some elision for brevity, and highlighting is mine):
If conservatives have demonstrated anything over the last decade-and-a-half, it is that enforcing the law works. Liberals long claimed that crime could not be lowered until poverty disappeared. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton begged to differ, and began the most rigorous, accountable, and humane campaign of policing that [New York city] had ever seen. Crime dropped 70% and stayed down.
After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security deported 1,500 illegal Pakistanis living in New York City. 15,000 Pakistanis then left voluntarily.
If someone proposed a program to boost the number of Americans who lack a high school diploma, have children out of wedlock, sell drugs, or use welfare, he would be deemed mad. Yet, our current immigration chaos is doing just that. Hispanics now have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. The Hispanic-out-of-wedlock birthrate is 50 percent, two times that of whites, and three times that of Asians. The Hispanic dropout rate is the highest in the country. And Hispanic children are joining gangs at younger and younger ages.
Somewhere around 2000, it was considered impolite to use the word illegal alien, even though itÂs an entirely descriptive term… the imprecise word, undocumented worker, doesnÂt tell us very much at all about the people who are here. Not all are working. Some figures have suggested that 25 percent of those on California entitlement are here illegally from Mexico. And undocumented suggests that there was documents at one point, and they had been forgotten or lost. In most of the cases, nobody had a document.
There were two tactics, I think, of [people] who wanted what I would call de facto open borders. One was to demonize people as racist who were concerned about enforcing the law… the second thing that proponents of open borders try to do is they try to confuse the issue of legal and illegal immigration.
We have sort of a lifecycle, where the employer uses, if I could say, the muscular capital of hardworking people from Mexico, and then after they are 40, to pick an arbitrary date, he throws them back on the entitlement industry. … So it is in the interest of the employer to keep the present system.
But the point is what is cynical about it—and I want to get back to that debate I had not long ago with the Mexican consul—is that, as I pointed out to him, the Mexican government expects somebody in Firebaugh or Mendota or Five Points who is struggling on $10 to $11 to send half of that wage back to Mexico. And that would, de facto, mean that he would have to work and live in conditions that are somewhat deplorable, and he would have to be subsidized by another government. His educational, his medical needs, whether in the emergency room or in the school district would have to be subsidized by the United States simply because he didnÂt have the capital not necessarily because the wages were low but because half of his wages were being sent to prop up the Mexican government.
And when you couple that with the notion of La Raza, despite linguistic contortions … in Latin it means the race. No other group, whether itÂs so-called white, Asian or black, would have a national organization of the race; it just would be beyond the pale.
HereÂs what [the National Academy of Sciences] said about the first great immigration [1800-1925]: in general those immigrants were on par or slightly more skilled than the American workforce that was currently here. As a result of that, these immigrants succeeded fairly rapidly. … The majority of them didnÂt stay here, and very few people understand this. America did not have a social safety net; we did not have welfare, we did not have Medicare, Medicaid, we did not have school lunch programs. If you couldnÂt make it here, you went back. And in fact, itÂs estimated that more than half of all immigrants during the first great immigration went back.
Now, not surprisingly, their children also succeeded… some of them did wonderful, great things. Most of them just became sort of solid members of the middle class. Economic studies have shown is that the children of the first great wave of immigrants essentially did 10% better than their parents economically. But itÂs not like they made these great leaps.
ThereÂs a third reason why these immigrants were able to succeed, a reason that we never talk about in this current debate, and that is that there were so many immigrants coming that there was a political reaction against them. That political reaction were the series of immigration restriction laws starting in the 1920s that eventually helped to cut off virtually all immigration to the United States; that combined with the Depression, which turned America into actually a net exporter of people during the 1930s, one of the few decades in American history when we were a net exporter.
Why is that important? Because economic research shows who immigrants compete most with; they compete firstly with other immigrants, and then they compete with native-born workers. When we had what you could call an immigration moratorium… we gave all those immigrants who were here and staying here an enormous advantage. They no longer had to compete with other… that immigration timeout is another reason why that generation succeeded.
(In summary: the three reasons previous immigrants succeeded:
- Their skills were equal to or greater than the American work force
- They self-selected as able to prosper (without entitlements)
- A reduction in immigration levels helped them establish themselves.)
In essence, the educational levels and the skill levels of todayÂs immigrants are not much different than immigrants of the first great generation, but America is a hundred years advanced.
A study done by economists published in 2006, economists at Harvard and the University of Chicago, estimated that immigration has been responsible for 40 percent of the decline in male black employment in the United States over the last 20 years.
So when you look at these sorts of issues you begin to ask yourself, what can we do to make immigration a plus for the American economy&hellip. Australia I found to be a very interesting case, and hereÂs why. Australia, as late as the mid-1980s, had an immigration system that was similar to our old immigration system in that it was sort of based on national origin. They favored people from Europe, and then of course when people from Europe stopped coming because, you know, theyÂve got their own opportunities in Europe. Then they favored people from Asia, and then finally they said, why donÂt we stop this national origin stuff; why donÂt we figure out what our economy needs and try to attract people with the right skills who want to come here, regardless of where theyÂre from? And so they shifted from a policy that was national-origins based and that favored people who had family relations to one that was based on skills.
To paraphrase JFK: we should not ask what America (and the American taxpayer) can do for immigrants, but what immigrants can do for America, and for individual Americans: and if that answer is that the immigrant will hurt individual Americans, then the door should stay closed.
