"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," wrote Emma Lazarus, in a poem that still puts a lump in my throat. I'm proud of America's immigrant history, and grateful that the door was open when my grandparents fled Russia.
In other words, I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration. But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular. If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.
What too often happens with this issue is that there is not a distinction made between legal and illegal immigration. We have quotas on legal immigration to insure we are not inundated with new labor. Illegal immigration bypasses that arrangement and creates its own setup.
First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
No surprise there.
Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.
What also is not discussed is what happens to areas where illegals live in great numbers. Because they are paid below market, they have to live 5-10 people to a 1 bedroom apt. That leads to overcrowding and the taxing of a city's infrastructure as well as its services such as police and fire. As a consequence, the city suffers.
That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do "jobs that Americans will not do." The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays — and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.
Yes, natural born Americans, not illegals, do those jobs here in Seattle. Consequently, labor costs are higher here than in cities where there is a large illegal population. Having lived in both, I much prefer this situation even if it means paying more money for services. |
