Clouds of Immigration

Thinking about immigration seems to cloud many minds. Certainly it clouded those of the organizers of last weekend’s protests against immigration restrictions. Televised images of massed Mexican flags did more for the nativist cause than a hundred speeches by Tom Tancredo, as witness libertarian Instapundit’s reaction: “I’ve generally favored open immigration, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one. . . . I think that these marches just made passage of strict immigration laws much more likely.”

It’s quite possible, of course, that the self-anointed leaders of the “Latino movement” wouldn’t mind getting the opposite of what they say they want. Their political power would melt away if their “constituents” assimilated, and a harsh U.S. crackdown on immigration would do much to hinder assimilation.

Also doing the pro-immigration cause no good are spokesmen who try to turn the issue into a religious question. I noted a particularly absurd example a while ago. Now Hillary Clinton echoes it, declaring that a House-passed border enforcement bill “would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself”. That kind of pseudo-pious rhetoric may appeal to New Age syncretists but can only irritate Christians who take the Bible seriously and prefer not to see it trivialized for political purposes.

Well, I’m not much bothered when leftists act counterproductively. Alas, the immigration cloud also overshadows minds on the Right. It is more than a little startling to see Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, quoting favorably this passage from Loony Left former economist Paul Krugman:

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.

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.

But Krugman is the one who is “intellectually dishonest” here – “dishonest”, because he is certainly in possession of all of the pertinent facts and enough economic knowledge to analyze them. The President, if he were wrong, would merely be mistaken, not dishonest. And he is not mistaken.

According to the figure most widely tossed about by restrictionists, about 11 million illegal aliens live in the United States. I’ve seen no statistics on how many hold jobs, but their circumstances are such that nonworking relatives and the unemployed are likely to be a small minority of the total. Let’s estimate that 8 million of them work. If they vanished, what would happen to their positions?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were, as of February 2006, 7.2 million unemployed Americans. The vast majority are frictionally unemployed and will, within a relatively short period, be hired for existing jobs. A better measure of how many could replace illegal workers is the number of long-term unemployed (over 26 weeks), which is 1.4 million (some of whom are simply unemployable owing to personal habits or complete lack of useful skills). Another possible source of additional labor is “discouraged workers”, estimated at c. 400,000. Higher wages could also attract some nonworkers into the labor force or encourage current jobholders to moonlight. All in all, though, finding 8 million new job holders looks like an insuperable challenge at any price.

Nor would any price be paid. A great many low-skill jobs exist solely because inexpensive labor can be found. Rather than increase wages, employers will do without. Beyond a certain point, they must do without if they are going to earn a profit.

Hence, if immigrant laborers vanished, 8 million natives would not spring up to harvest crops, roof houses, cook hamburgers, rake leaves, watch babies, clean homes, etc. Rather, many of those jobs would disappear, and the remainder would cost more. Both of those results would leave the country poorer. We would lose several million workers’ worth of goods and services, and all of us except the lucky beneficiaries of a tighter labor market would suffer a diminution of purchasing power.

One can imagine circumstances in which a sacrifice of national wealth would be worth it. Many restrictionists argue that American culture is imperiled by the alien influx. I don’t believe that – not when these aliens are, in an overwhelming majority, Christians sharing the heritage of the West and already half-Americanized by Yankee television – but am willing to listen to rational argument. They don’t strengthen their case, though, by offering semi-socialist analyses of the economic effect of their proposed policies. Governmental interference with free markets is never painless. I hope that, in their less clouded moments, conservative restrictionists are able to recognize that truth and take it into account.