As a supporter of what restrictionists would call an “open borders” policy, I was relieved when the Kyl-Kennedy bill seemingly died and am correspondingly displeased by its resurrection. In a broad sense, it may reflect sensible thinking about immigration, but the details undermine its principles. The proposed “Z Visa” for current illegal immigrants will be too expensive and the process of obtaining it too cumbersome to attract more than a small percentage of illegals to documented status. The guest worker (“Y Visa”) program will likewise be unattractive. Its policy goal is to ease entry for skilled workers, but it will impose on them the crippling requirement of leaving the country for one year out of every three, and prohibitions against less-skilled laborers will remain in place. Besides, even were these placebos better designed, the sclerotic Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services couldn’t administer them.
In short, after all the hubbub, the bill will do little more than rearrange the status quo. The huge “industry” of document fraud, identity theft and gray market finance that makes life as an illegal alien possible – and is readily available for would-be terrorists – will continue to function, because the demand for its services will be unabated.
It puzzles me that anybody wants to rush toward enactment of this hastily prepared legislative sausage. President Bush’s support of the bill is like ordering steak, then accepting in its stead a meat pie from Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler.
At the same time, I can’t sympathize with the restrictionists, because their utopia is just as unworkable as Kyl-Kennedy. On the one hand, “enforcement first” would compel Americans to do a job that they really don’t want to do, namely, turning yard workers and waiters and chambermaids and meat packers into the authorities so that they can be deported to countries where they couldn’t find decent jobs before and in many cases will have to live under incompetent or outrightly malign governments. The inevitable sequel to a successful deportation effort would be a stream of news stories about men and women (and, naturally, their children) who had carved out modest livelihoods for themselves in America and were now starving, disease-ridden, quasi-enslaved or dead in Mexico, Haiti, Belize, Somalia or Bangladesh. Sure, the plethora of these accounts would be due to media bias, but they would be true nonetheless and would tar restrictionism as a cruel and barbarous policy.
Worse yet, the goal of restrictionism – to rid the labor force of its illegal component – is as impracticable as the means. We don’t know for sure how many illegals are in the work force. Accepting the restrictionists’ favorite number for the total illegal population, about 12 million, and making the plausible assumption that a large proportion don’t bring children or nonworking spouses with them, the total number of workers should be around eight million. The delusion underlying the economic case for restrictionism is that, if those eight million disappear, their jobs will be filled by Americans who are at present out of work or marginally employed.
A glance at labor market statistics dispels that hopeful idea. As of May 2007, the United States had 6.8 million unemployed individuals, 4.5 million who worked part-time but desired full-time unemployment and 1.4 million who were marginally attached to the labor force (either willing to work but not actively seeking jobs or “discouraged” from doing so by a perceived lack of openings). That pool is not big enough to fill eight million vacancies, because –
The unemployment figure includes frictional unemployment, the fraction of workers that is, at a given moment, moving between jobs. Because jobs and job seekers can’t be matched instantaneously and perfectly, frictional unemployment is inevitable. For that and other reasons, few economists believe that the unemployment rate can go below about four percent. The current rate is an historically very low 4.5 percent, meaning that the present pool of unemployed translates into no more than, optimistically, a million people available to fill the jobs left behind by exiting illegals.
The 4.5 million involuntary part-timers cannot fill 4.5 million full-time slots. Again optimistically, there might be 2.5 million replacement workers in this pool.
Finally, many of the 1.4 million in the “marginally attached” pool are unemployable for lack of the minimally necessary habits or skills for productive labor. Still, we might find a million usable workers here.
These rough calculations yield a total of five million people to do eight million jobs. To fill the rest, labor force participation would have to increase substantially, which it won’t ceteris paribus unless wages rise. Restrictionists often seize on this prospective increase in the cost of labor as a boon to low-skilled native-born workers, but that hope is a phantom. Low-priced jobs are low-value jobs. If the cost of filling them goes up, they will remain empty. A small number of workers will doubtless get larger paychecks, but the improvement in their condition will be balanced by the loss to the economy of the goods and services currently produced by several million illegal workers. A few of our countrymen will be richer, but the country as a whole will be poorer. The consequences are identical to those of protective tariffs: small gains narrowly distributed and a larger overall loss.
At this point, the immigration “debate” boils down to a clash between two unfeasible positions, each backed by increasingly strident rhetoric. The fiercest emotion seems confined, however, to the right side of the arena. Liberals are paying little attention. By staying away from the contretemps, they avoid aggravating a natural fissure in their own ranks, between “multicultural” racists and labor union reactionaries. It’s clear in any case that the Left regards the sacred cause of losing the war in Iraq as far more important than addressing a border control problem that has persisted for decades without doing a great deal of harm. Would that conservatives could assign the same priority to the War on Terror!
Comments