The Wal-Mart 300
Time to put immigration reform back on the Bush agenda.
Friday, October 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Federal agents arrested more than 300 illegal immigrants at 60 Wal-Mart stores across the country yesterday. We'll wait to see if there are terrorists hiding behind those blue smocks, or merely striving Mexicans working for $10 an hour. But we already know the case will demonstrate once again the need to fix our immigration laws.
The U.S. immigration debate has been frozen since 9/11, and perhaps understandably so. Americans want their government to be reasonably sure that visitors and immigrants aren't a security risk. But more than two years later, the absence of a coherent immigration policy is hampering both economic growth and national security. The good news is that Members of Congress are filling the vacuum left by the Bush Administration's political caution.
As an economic matter, consider that this month the annual H-1B visa cap on white-collar immigrants fell to 65,000 largely without debate. As recently as 2000 Congress had expanded the limit to 195,000 as companies scrambled to meet employment needs. For now U.S. firms need fewer workers, but what happens when hiring picks up?
To stay competitive globally, and thus to maintain their U.S. work force, businesses need to be able to import talent they can't always find here. It so happens that 28% of U.S. Ph.D.s in science and engineering go to foreign-born individuals. Immigration caps force such skilled, innovative professionals out of the country. Or they cause U.S. companies to "outsource" those jobs to India or elsewhere.
And that's our loss. Nearly 30% of Silicon Valley's technology concerns are run by someone of Indian or Chinese descent. In 2000, they collectively accounted for $19.5 billion in sales and 73,000 jobs, according to a study by the University of California at Berkeley.
The popular but false notion that H-1B visa holders represent "cheap labor" displacing U.S. workers was addressed in a report last month by Stuart Anderson of the Immigration Policy Center. He writes: "Data indicate that foreign-born professionals working in the United States actually earn more than their native counterparts when controlled for age and the year in which a science or engineering degree is earned."
Among lower-skilled immigrants, current U.S. law is even more troubling. A recent front-page Wall Street Journal story noted that stricter policing of the southern border, intended to staunch the immigrant flow, has in fact made matters worse. The price of an illegal crossing has tripled since 1995, and the average U.S. stay of an undocumented Mexican had climbed to nine years by the late 1990s from just three years in the 1980s.
Places like California--where 90% of the farm workers are born in Mexico and half of those are undocumented--obviously need the labor. Current U.S. policy encourages the farm workers to stay past the growing season rather than go home and risk another expensive and dangerous return to the U.S. And that decision puts a needless strain on state and local services, including schools and hospitals.
It all cries out for reform, and several border-state Congressmen are leading the effort. Three Arizona Republicans--Representatives Jeff Flake and Jim Kolbe and Senator John McCain--have recently introduced the Border and Immigration Improvement Act. Their proposal creates a temporary worker program to "direct the flow of workers into a legal framework and aid the government in getting a better handle on who's here and who's crossing the border." That can only be good news for the Office of Homeland Security, whose resources are better used tracking down terrorists in flight schools instead of pursuing Wal-Mart cleaning crews.
The bill also gives illegals already here a way to apply for legal status, but requires them to pay a fine for breaking the law. Some 300 Mexicans die every year crossing the border. The survivors are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation from smugglers on the way and employers once they arrive. Cleaning up this black market in labor is, if nothing else, the humane thing to do.
We would remind our restrictionist friends on the right that these immigrants are no more guilty of "stealing" jobs from Americans than their H-1B counterparts. The 1990s saw relatively large levels of immigration, particularly from Latin America. Yet the unemployment rate fell to below 4%, and real wages rose for everyone. President Bush campaigned on the sensible line that "family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." They still don't. For economic reasons alone, it's time to put immigration back on his agenda. |
