The Unknown Candidate: Elitist Immigrant Reform

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Elitist Immigrant Reform

Sounds like Nick has been shootin' the breeze with Tom Friedman on immigration. Though Kristof brings more compassionate to the problem, he agrees with Friedman, for somewhat different reasons, on one point: that future immigration should favor biologists, computer programmers and other high tech, highly educated workers over the unskilled, uneducated variety.

While I see the economic advantages of encouraging more educated immigrants, I don't believe it is either right -- or compassionate -- to exclude less skilled workers.

The real problem, as I have said again and again, is not that uneducated immigrants are lowering wages for Americans. It is business people, who hire those immigrants at subsistence pay, who are responsible for lowering wages.

The situation can and should be remedied--easily--by raising the minimum wage to an amount that, unlike today, can realistically support a worker. If businesses stop undercutting immigrant wages in order to increase profits, American workers will no longer lose out to immigrants in competition for those jobs.

Compassion That Hurts
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

In 1951 America welcomed an East European refugee who spoke no English. His first job in the U.S. was at a logging camp in Oregon, and I suppose that if that job hadn't gone to my father, it would have gone to an American.

That's the nub of the problem: it's hypocritical of us to close the doors behind us (unless you're a pure Navajo), yet there's a genuine problem with the impact of immigration on the poorest Americans.

I used to favor a program to allow in guest workers, thinking it would be good for them and also great for America by providing a source of low-cost labor — just as it was good for America to admit our own ancestors. And illegal immigrants overwhelmingly are hard-working people who keep the economy humming, so they deserve respect rather than xenophobic resentment and a marginalized life in the shadows.

But I've changed my mind on a guest worker program, because of growing evidence that low-wage immigration hurts America's own poor.

The most careful study of this issue, done by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the surge of immigration in the 1980's and 1990's lowered the wages of America's own high school dropouts by 8.2 percent. "The large growth and predominantly low-skilled nature of Mexican immigration to the United States over the past two decades appears to have played a modest role in the widening of the U.S. wage structure," the study concluded.

Another study, by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, reached similar conclusions. Between 2000 and 2005, he found, immigrant workers with a high school degree or less rose by 1.5 million, while employment of native workers at that education level fell by 3.2 million.

It's often said that immigrants take jobs that Americans won't take. But look at employment statistics, and you see that even among maids and agricultural workers, only four out of 10 people are immigrants.

I can't write about this issue without thinking of Elmer, a neighbor when I was growing up. He's a high school dropout now in his 50's, but when I met him in 1971, he was earning $26 an hour in a union job. He's very hard-working, but for the last decade he's been reduced to janitorial jobs paying not much over minimum wage. People like Elmer haven't been heard from in the immigration debate, but they have the most at stake.

The 1986 immigration amnesty ended up bringing in waves of unskilled workers. They care for our children and mow our lawns. But as they raise living standards for many of us, they lower the living standards of Americans like Elmer.

That's a trade-off we need to face squarely. The impulse behind immigration reforms is a generosity that I admire. But the cold reality is that admitting poor immigrants often means hurting poor Americans. We can salve the pain with job programs for displaced Americans, but the fundamental trade-off is unavoidable.

Children are hit particularly hard, because they are disproportionately likely to be poor. Nearly half of American children depend on a worker with a high school education or less.

The broader problem is that our immigration program is structured so as to bring in cheap laborers more than brilliant minds. At last count, only 16 percent of admissions for permanent residence went to those with employment qualifications, while the great majority went to applicants on the basis of family ties.

When I lived in China, American diplomats complained that under the law they had to deny visas to brilliant physicists while granting immigrant visas to elementary-school dropouts who had a relative in Chicago.

So let's go ahead and regularize longtime illegals, rather than leaving them forever in the shadows. But instead of bringing in a new flood of guest workers, let's recast our generosity more toward biologists and computer programmers. The H1-B visa program enriches America by bringing in high-tech workers, but the nominal ceiling on these visas has dropped to 65,000, after temporarily rising to 195,000 in the 1990's. That's the immigration flow to expand.

In contrast, bringing in 325,000 or more guest workers annually (as various versions of the current Senate bills provide) would be particularly tough on America's poor at this time. They are reeling from Bush program cuts and the fraying of medical safety nets. An influx of hundreds of thousands more unskilled laborers would impoverish them further — and to me, that does not feel like compassion.

Photo credit: Nicholas D. Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)