Immigration and Globalization

Frequent commenter ishmaelabroad asks for a reaction to this exchange between Andrew Leonard at Salon and George Borjas on his blog. Keeping in mind that this is a reaction to a comment on an analogy, here goes.

Borjas makes a reasonable point that journalists, more than many other professional occupations, should understand the impact of an influx of competitors with low reservation wages on the prevailing wage level. Leonard accepts this point, but then suggests his own analogy between globalization and the futility of erecting barriers to illegal immigration:

To think that one can turn back the tide of competition unleashed by the Net is a lot like thinking that in a globalized world one can ameliorate the wage impact of illegal immigration by building a border fence or by passing laws imposing strict sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. The work forces of China and India and eastern Europe and of course Mexico have joined the world economy just like bloggers have joined the media universe. In both cases, technology has played a huge enabling role, and, unless the world experiences a truly massive and unprecedented energy crisis, that technologically-midwifed change is not going back in the bottle. In a globalized world, massive disparities between the living standards of individual nations will create more pressure than ever before for some kind of equalization,
whether that means workers finding their way from the developing to the developed world, or capital headed in the other direction.

I think he's right insofar as he notes that there will be "some kind of equalization." I think that he's concluding prematurely that immigration will play, needs to play, or should play a large role in that equalization.

The current Wikipedia entry for globalization points to economic integration in four types of markets: goods and services, capital, technology, and labor. I'm an economist with libertarian views, so I am all for greater opportunities to exchange the first three across national borders, provided that property rights are protected. I'll further assert that if those opportunities were enhanced, there could be less pressure for labor to move across national borders. (See this earlier post.)

The difference between labor and the other three markets is that a laborer is a person, and people have rights unrelated to their economic lives. As I've said before, I don't believe in guest-worker programs that authorize a second-class citizenry. So if people have immigrated, they have the right to vote, and their votes may move policies away from those that would otherwise prevail. As another example, they have the right to make claims against a social welfare system, and their claims may outweigh their contributions through the tax system. I'm sure others could come up with more examples.

So immigration, as distinct from other forms of globalization, imposes a distribution of costs and benefits on the rest of society that is intermediated through the political system. A citizen of the U.S., even one who embraces the other three types of globalization, could reasonably conclude that the costs of immigration imposed through the political system outweigh the economic benefits. This is particularly true if the benefits to the immigrants themselves are excluded. (See the distinction between being generous and being fair to would-be immigrants in this recent post.)

There are obviously many citizens of this country who have come to a different conclusion about these political costs net of economic benefits, and so they are naturally advocating for a more permissive immigration policy. However, if a citizen had come to that conclusion, then the next question is whether the costs of deterring illegal immigration are sufficiently smaller than these political costs net of economic benefits. Leonard (if he is asking this question) seems to believe that the ability to deter (e.g., through a border fence or employer sanctions) is so low or that the costs of deterrence are so high that the answer to this question would almost always be "no." I'm not so sure.

Yes, Mikey, It Really Is About Illegal Immigration

Mark Thoma directs us to Michael Kinsley's commentary in Time arguing that "legal vs. illegal immigration isn't the real issue." I take the bait. Here is one of Kinsley's key paragraphs:

Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration. This is a debate about immigration.

That's not a good test, unless Kinsley is arguing that a politician's desired amount of legal immigration should not depend (negatively) on the number of illegal immigrants who are already here. One does not have to argue that there are no differences between illegal and legal immigrants (for example, in their economic or fiscal impact) to assert that the key distinction of legality is relevant for public policy.

Additionally, why does Kinsley develop his article by excluding the possibility that a politician believes that the number of legally authorized immigrants each year is the appropriate one and wants to reduce total immigration to that target which emerged out of the democratic process? Later in the article, he suggests this is possible:

There is some number of immigrants that is too many. I don't believe we're past that point, but maybe we are. In any event, a democracy has the right to decide that it has reached such a point. There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners.

But let's not kid ourselves that all we care about is obeying the law and all we are asking illegals to do is go home and get in line like everybody else. We know perfectly well that the line is too long, and we are basically telling people to go home and not come back.

But he should have written, "no obligation to be generous to foreigners." This is an important distinction. Telling the ones here illegally "to go home and not come back" is the way to be fair to "foreigners," particularly the ones near the front of that very long line.

He should also have written that we have no obligation to cede our decisions about who enters the country to the "foreigners." Insisting on a distinction between legal and illegal immigration is a way to keep control of that process. Why should we give up that prerogative? To be generous to some and unfair to others? I'm going to need a better reason than that.

And while we are on the topic of obligations, we should clarify what our obligations are to those who are here illegally. We are obligated to protect their basic human rights. We are not obligated beyond that to ease the considerable burdens they face in being here illegally, whether through issuing them drivers' licenses or providing a path to citizenship that recognizes their illegal tenure here. We may choose to do so, but we are certainly not obligated to do so.

And, referring back to the first excerpt, we are not obligated to ensure that immigration laws are "enforced with vigor" against those who have managed to enter illegally if the cost of enforcement is perceived to be too high or the consequences too disruptive. That in no way undermines our authority to enforce them with vigor against those who would seek to enter illegally in the future to prevent them from doing so. That seems to be where most of the Republican candidates are, and on this issue, that's where I am, too.

Tom Tancredo Visits Dartmouth

The steady stream of candidates to campus continued on Monday, with Congressman Tom Tancredo holding a Town Hall meeting at the Rockefeller Center. Here's an article in The Dartmouth covering the main points of his remarks. Most of the evening was a discussion of his views on immigration. Since I'm not a fan of establishing a guest worker program, which I consider an institutionalized second-class citizenship, I tend to agree with him more than the other candidates. On the efficacy of building fences and on whether we should be doing more to enable legal immigration, he's more of a hardliner than I am.

Overall, I had the same reaction to him as I had to Congressman Ron Paul when he visited. As a Republican, there are many things about his views that resonate with me. But my question is this. In a nutshell, "If those are your beliefs ..., then why are you not taking on a leadership role in Congress to make sure they are reflected in the law of the land?" If you fancy yourself an authentic conservative, and if you believe that the people will support you in your views, then build a governing coalition around that among your colleagues in Congress. If you cannot do that, then why would we think that you have the ability to lead from the Oval Office?

There was a frank discussion about what it has been like to serve in Congress in recent years, and he had no particularly kind words for how the institution functioned while the Republicans were in the majority. At one point, he likened Congress to "Chinese water torture on your principles." He said that the way arms were twisted by the Republican leadership to pass the Medicare drug bill was a low point for him as a Republican in Congress.

Mine, too.

More Sensible Cross-Border Flows

This is probably not the best timing, given the very weak August employment report, but I regard the developments in this article in Wednesday's New York Times as a good sign. Five months ago, I asked the question in the context of the immigration debate, "Is Labor Now the Mobile Factor?" I wrote:

In the current environment, I would expect to see capital going south across the border with Mexico, drawn by the high returns available due to the large amount of low-wage labor. But that's not what we are seeing. We are seeing the labor cross the border--at considerable personal cost--to take the low-wage jobs and then send remittances back to Mexico. (Even in agriculture, where the land is obviously not mobile, I would be surprised if much of the agriculture in the Southwestern U.S. couldn't also be produced in Mexico. But there is nothing in the argument that requires the unskilled labor to work in agriculture or any particular industry.)

The article notes that there are American farmers who are moving their businesses south of the border:

Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

About 500 people work for Steve Scaroni’s farming operation in Mexico. Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in the fields of California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexican and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

“I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.”

That's good to know. I consider our "blood" to be the same color for the same reason, and I am also tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue. I'm tired of hearing people treat American citizenship as if it is incidental to an economic transaction. Stepping up to that task in this article (filling in for the President, I guess) is Senator Dianne Feinstein of California:

She predicted that more American farmers would move to Mexico for the ready work force and lower wages. Ms. Feinstein favored a measure in the failed immigration bill that would have created a new guest worker program for agriculture and a special legal status for illegal immigrant farm workers.

There is nothing so sacred about cheap lettuce that we should create a population of second-class citizens to pick it in California rather than Mexico. So I'm glad Mr. Scaroni has moved his operations to Mexico if he feels that is what is essential for his business if he is to abide by our immigration laws. I am particularly glad that the legal and economic infrastructure has developed in Mexico to the point where he can do it.


I wish him the very best in his endeavor, and I'll reward him like I do all other businessmen--I'll buy his product if it's the best one on the market for the price. The article gives a good accounting of the various business challenges involved, and it's worth a read.

Immigration on The Exchange

I participated in New Hampshire Public Radio's program, The Exchange, this morning to discuss the immigration bill passing through Congress. Audio will shortly be posted here.

For the details, I relied a lot on my archive and on some posts by George Borjas at his new blog. There were four questions I wanted to raise on the show:

1) Is immigration from Mexico just like any other wave of immigration?

The historical success of immigration in this country has been based on immigrants who left the old country behind, to assimilate and to blend their culture with the existing American culture. Mexico is right next door. The presumption that most immigrants will assimilate is much weaker, if not plain wrong. We should be very wary of absorbing so many immigrants, even legal immigrants, from a neighboring country whose objectives may not coincide with our own.

2) Is a guest worker program a good idea?

I regard a guest worker program as a form of second-class citizenry, and I do not support the creation of a second-class citizenry. Citizenship to me is not incidental to an economic relationship. Once we legitimize a second-class citizenry, their pleas to be elevated to first-class citizenry will be difficult to ignore, particularly given our national history of inclusion and equality. Once we legitimize frequent border crossings, we take ownership of the social problems that result from explicitly transitory populations NOT rooted to family relationships in a particular place. Show me the shining examples of guest worker programs in other large industrialized countries and I'll change my mind.

3) Are there jobs that Americans won’t do (this one is straight from an earlier post)?

There are no jobs that Americans refuse to perform. There may be jobs that Americans refuse to perform at the prevailing wage rates. This simply means that the wage rates should rise and the number of jobs should fall, until the number of jobs matches the number of people authorized to work in the country who are willing to perform them. If it turns out that with these higher prevailing wage rates, the employer can no longer operate at a profit, then the employer should cease operations--or relocate to a place where labor and other costs are sufficiently cheap as to allow a profitable business.

4) Is there a link between immigration and terrorism?

When discussing immigration from Mexico, this link appears to be tenuous at best. I have not seen any evidence that a porous southern border has contributed to greater vulnerability to an attack like 9/11. The way terrorists from 9/11 (or the recent episode at Ft. Dix) was to overstay visas--that's very different. The southern border may be contributing to law enforcement problems in the Southwest, to which I am not indifferent, but that’s a very different problem.

For the rest, you will need to listen to the podcast. Enjoy!

The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration

So goes the title of a report to the Council on Foreign Relations by UCSD Professor of Economics Gordon Hanson. From the Introduction, here's a teaser:

This analysis concludes that there is little evidence that legal immigration is economically preferable to illegal immigration. In fact, illegal immigration responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not. Illegal immigrants tend to arrive in larger numbers when the U.S. economy is booming (relative to Mexico and the Central American countries that are the source of most illegal immigration to the United States) and move to regions where job growth is strong. Legal immigration, in contrast, is subject to arbitrary selection criteria and bureaucratic delays, which tend to disassociate legal inflows from U.S. labor-market conditions. Over the last half-century, there appears to be little or no response of legal immigration to the U.S. unemployment rate. Two-thirds of legal permanent immigrants are admitted on the basis of having relatives in the United States. Only by chance will the skills of these individuals match those most in demand by U.S. industries. While the majority of temporary legal immigrants come to the country at the invitation of a U.S. employer, the process of obtaining a visa is often arduous and slow. Once here, temporary legal workers cannot easily move between jobs, limiting their benefit to the U.S. economy.

I'll have to add this one to the "good intentions" pile of reading.

Is Labor Now the Mobile Factor?

David Jackson reports in USA Today that President Bush is making a visit to Arizona to tout his proposal for a guest worker program. I get as far as the fourth paragraph before getting bent out of shape:

The president said measures must be taken to protect the border from immigrants who come over with impunity; but he said there also needs to be an organized system to accommodate workers who are doing jobs Americans refuse to perform.

There are no jobs that Americans refuse to perform. There may be jobs that Americans refuse to perform at the prevailing wage rates. This simply means that the wage rates should rise and the number of jobs should fall, until the number of jobs matches the number of people authorized to work in the country who are willing to perform them. If it turns out that with these higher prevailing wage rates, the employer can no longer operate at a profit, then the employer should cease operations--or relocate to a place where labor and other costs are sufficiently cheap as to allow a profitable business. The "organized system" that accommodates this is simply a free market and enforcement of the most basic immigration laws.

When I was first learning economics, we always spoke of capital, not labor, as the mobile factor of production. Maybe something has changed. In the current environment, I would expect to see capital going south across the border with Mexico, drawn by the high returns available due to the large amount of low-wage labor. But that's not what we are seeing. We are seeing the labor cross the border--at considerable personal cost--to take the low-wage jobs and then send remittances back to Mexico. (Even in agriculture, where the land is obviously not mobile, I would be surprised if much of the agriculture in the Southwestern U.S. couldn't also be produced in Mexico. But there is nothing in the argument that requires the unskilled labor to work in agriculture or any particular industry.)

How bad must the environment for business and investment be in Mexico for the capital to stay here and the labor to cross the border?

Anti-Illegal-Immigration, Not Anti-Immigration

If you said the over/under on how much of a New York Times editorial I could was two sentences, then "under" was the smart bet. In something called an "Editorial Observer," Lawrence Downes begins:

Everybody said that the nation’s anti-immigrant fever was going to spread to Texas this year.

I am as much for border security as the next much-maligned conservative, but I (along with many of the rest of them) have nothing against immigrants. Our gripe is with illegal immigrants and those in the United States--whether employers or activist groups--who facilitate their entrance and permanence in the country. Failing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration is a disservice to the debate about immigration reform.

The editorial goes on to discuss the alliance that has formed between pro-business Republicans and the pro-illegal-immigrant (my word) groups in favor of reforms that Downes describes as "that blend of border toughness and pro-immigrant fairness that Republicans elsewhere deride as 'amnesty.'" Money quote:

The story dates to last year. It has to do, as Megan Headley wrote in The Texas Observer, with pro-business Republicans realizing that anti-immigrant fervor “threatened to purge Texas of the workers that pluck chickens, build houses, and make some people very rich.”

There is nothing so sacred about plucked chickens or new homes or the wealth of those who employ illegal aliens in pursuit of their own riches that should condone the flouting of immigration laws. For more on immigration reform, read here.

Civil Disobedience, Not So Much

Via Powerline, I learn of an incident at Columbia two weeks ago regarding students disrupting a public presentation by Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project. As they say, let's go to the tape:



Powerline links to an article in yesterday's Insider Higher Ed, which contains a number of sensible statements by people at Columbia regarding the students' behavior. But it also includes this passage:

However, another observer of protest rights on campuses said that the students were well within their rights to go onstage. “The students had a right to unfurl banners at an event,” said Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a liberal bar association that has supported the protestors. “Some people have asked, ‘Well, was it crossing the line to go up on the stage?’”

“I don’t think that’s crossing the line.”

“We don’t think they caused the violence; they weren’t going to stop Gilchrist from speaking; they just wanted to stand there and hold their banner while he spoke,” Boghosian said.

“In addition to a crack-down on dissent in this country, there seems to be a waning tolerance for civil disobedience. If you want, you can call the act of jumping on the stage an act of civil disobedience, a practice that has been used for hundreds of years in this country to resist tyranny,” said Boghosian, who added that she believed the university would likely have given the students just a “slap on the wrist” if the situation had not turned violent.

You can call that civil disobedience, but only if you don't really care about the meaning of civil disobedience and in fact want to trivialize over a hundred years of struggle against genuine oppression.

What the students did was clearly not civil, but more importantly, it was not disobedient. Don't confuse rudeness with disobedience. To disobey is to refuse to abide a dictate imposed by an authority. There was no such imposition here. The students were not being compelled to obey, they were being invited to listen. The inability to distinguish is a sad commentary not just on current events, but on our current appreciation of those who did resist nonviolently--at great peril to themselves--in the name of just causes.

Immigration Econoblog

Gordon Hanson and Philip Martin discuss "Immigration's Costs and Benefits" in today's WSJ Econoblog. I'll highlight two passages by Gordon that I think are very well put. The first deals with the change in scale and possible reasons for immigration from Mexico:

Today, however, the scale is entirely different. Mexican immigrants now account for about 5% of the U.S. labor force (and 35% of the immigrant labor force), up from less than 1% in 1970. What happened?

I would cite two events. Since 1982, Mexico has had several major economic contractions and has been unable to string together more than a few years of solid growth. As a result, per capita income in Mexico has steadily fallen relative to per capita income in the U.S. Why stay in Mexico when incomes are rising faster in the U.S.?

Compounding migration pressures has been the entry of Mexico's baby boom into the labor force. While fertility rates in Mexico have dropped sharply in the last three decades (from five kids per woman in 1970 to three kids per woman in 2000), it wasn't that long ago that the typical Mexican woman had nearly a half dozen children. Mexico's high fertility years produced a demographic bulge, the members of which in the last 20 years have come of age and started to look for work. As luck would have it, Mexico's baby boom entered the labor force during Mexico's two decades of dismal economic performance and decidedly lackluster growth in labor demand. The result has been the surge in Mexican immigration that we have been witnessing.

What makes the current surge in Mexico-to-U.S. migration hard to slow is that today's generation of Mexican young people do not have a memory of good economic times in Mexico. Many may have lost faith in Mexico's ability to provide them with a decent future. Such a change in expectations is a powerful force because it implies that Mexico would have to produce unexpectedly strong economic growth for a sustained period to get Mexican workers to believe in the Mexican economy, again. In the meantime, Mexican labor will keep heading north.

And the next considers some of the problems with a guest-worker program, even relative to the status quo:

A guest-worker program, at least how it is envisioned by Congress, would be a disaster. For as maligned as illegal immigration is, it has some attractive features in terms of economic efficiency. Illegal immigration delivers U.S. business the types of workers they need (low-skilled labor, which is increasingly in short supply), when they need them (during times when the U.S. economy is expanding), and where they need them (in regions where job growth is strong).

A guest-worker program would have none of these properties. Given the snail's pace at which the Department of Homeland Security operates, U.S. employers would likely have to apply for guest workers long in advance of when they actually need them. The flexibility and adaptability of current illegal inflows would be lost. In response, many employers would probably go back to what they are doing now, which is hiring illegal workers.

Successful policy reform would require rethinking both illegal and legal immigration in the U.S. Why not convert most family-sponsored immigration visas into visas awarded on the basis of skill? Why not make the number of immigrants awarded visas conditional on U.S. economic conditions? Why not have the price of a U.S. immigration visa be determined by market conditions? These are questions that in the current debate should be asked but sadly are not.

It's a good discussion of the issues and challenges in this area.

The Virtual Posse

According to Alicia A. Caldwell of the Associated Press, you too may soon be able to patrol the nation's southern border in virtual reality:

The governor of Texas wants to turn all the world into a virtual posse. Rick Perry has announced a $5 million plan to install hundreds of night-vision cameras on private land along the Mexican border and put the live video on the Internet, so that anyone with a computer who spots illegal immigrants trying to slip across can report it on a toll-free hotline.

[...]

Under the plan, announced on the eve of the state GOP convention, cameras and other equipment would be supplied to willing landowners and placed along some of the most remote reaches of the border. The live video would be made available to law enforcement and anyone else with an Internet connection.

Viewers would be able to call day or night to report anything that looks like trespassing, drug smuggling or something else suspicious.

The plan has attracted some criticism. Here are two examples from the article that are quite revealing. Up first:

"This is just one of those half-baked ideas that people dream up to save money but have no practical applications," said Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project in Austin. "We would be far better off to invest that money in Mexican small towns along the border so people wouldn't have to emigrate."

I'd be curious to see the cost-benefit analysis that generates the "far better off" conclusion. And Mr. Harrington's suggestion for the use of the $5 million would make a very unusual platform for the governor of Texas. Here's the beginning of the TCRP's mission statement:

The Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) promotes racial, social, and economic justice through education and litigation. TCRP strives to foster equality, secure justice, ensure diversity, and strengthen communities.

In light of Mr. Harrington's comments, perhaps the TCRP should append the words "in Mexico" to the end or change the name of the organization. The civil rights of legal residents of Texas don't seem to be the priority in Mr. Harringon's writings, where he is surely not being misquoted.

Up next:

Luis Figueroa, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, warned that the cameras could lead to racial profiling and vigilanteism.

"This leaves the door open to anyone who has a vindictive state of mind or a racial motive," Figueroa said. "Anyone down there could easily be mistaken and falsely accused of something they didn't do."

Racial profiling? I guess Mr. Figueroa has some concerns that the cameras will systematically miss all of the non-Hispanics coming across the border between Texas and Mexico? Here's MALDEF's mission statement:

MALDEF is a national non-profit organization whose mission is to protect and promote the civil rights of the more than 40 million Latinos living in the United States. Making sure that there are no obstacles preventing this diverse community from realizing its dreams, MALDEF works to secure the rights of Latinos, primarily in the areas of employment, education, immigrants' rights, political access and public resource equity.

I don't see how the governor's plan violates the civil rights of anyone living in the United States. The posting of the cameras is with the consent of the property owner. The monitoring of the feed on the Internet is by volunteers. Those entering the country by way of private lands are doing so illegally and should be apprehended. Their civil rights are not being infringed either.
If the second letter in MALDEF has its conventional meaning, then MALDEF should be all for the governor's plan.

In Praise of Representative Sensenbrenner

Maybe the lack of bipartisanship wasn't such a bad thing. Consider this bipartisan effort in the Senate:

The Senate legislation, which also creates a guest worker program and seeks to tighten control of the border, passed 62 to 36. Twenty-three Republicans and one independent joined 38 Democrats to win approval of the bill in one of the few displays of bipartisanship on a major piece of legislation in years.

If the Senate bill's provisions were to make it into law, they would be the most substantial overhaul of immigration law in two decades. The key architects of the bill, Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, hailed the bipartisan coalition for withstanding a large number of amendments intended to sink the legislation.

The New York Times article goes on to describe the Democrat supporters of the Senate bill as follows:

But supporters of the Senate legislation said they hoped to keep their central principles intact. Democrats said they would not support legislation that did not place most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

Can someone give me a justification of why that's the line in the sand? Exactly what did these 11 million people do to merit a path to citizenship that is anything other than follow the existing laws for legal immigration?

I don't think it can be done. I think Representative Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had it exactly right in his reaction to the bill that came out of committee in the Senate:

The bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 27 repeats the mistakes made 20 years ago when we provided amnesty to illegal aliens and let unethical businesses off the hook. The Senate bill includes amnesty for the 11 to 12 million undocumented aliens in the US who have managed to elude the authorities. This is a slap in the face to those who are following the law and taking the right steps to enter this country. The Senate proposal absolves the wrongdoers and penalizes those who are obeying the law. I do not accept the claim made by some that this is not amnesty because among other things, illegal aliens would have to pay two fines of $1,000 each. It is offensive to me to think we have legislators who are considering selling US citizenship for $2,000. US citizenship is not for sale. It is a privilege bestowed upon those who appreciate its value, and who contribute to our nation by living in a manner that reflects the principles and ideology of being an American. When someone’s first step in this country is taken in direct violation of our laws, I cannot support a process that allows them to continue residing in the US, while others wait up to 20 years outside the US before they are able to take their first step into this country legally.

Let's hope he stands his ground during the negotiations between the House and Senate versions of the two bills. For my earlier posts on immigration, see this, this and this.

Marginal Revolution's Open Letter On Immigration

Alex Tabarrok writes an open letter on the economic benefits of immigration and invites economists to sign. I'm happy to do so.

And yet there is nothing in the letter that would prevent me from also saying that of the House, Senate, and White House points of view described here, my policy preference starts with the House bill, strips out the penalties to those in the medical and religious fields who may provide humanitarian services to illegal immigrants, and ups the annual number of legal immigrants allowed into the country.

Recognizing the largely positive economic effects of immigration does not require one to favor open borders, a guest worker program, or amnesty for those currently here without proper documentation--all of which I consider very bad ideas.

On the Border with Economic Incentives

Via Roland Patrick, I am led to Professor James D. Miller's application of economic incentives to the immigration and border issue, and as I am an economist, I like what I read. And I wonder if it will work. From the column at TCS Daily:

Ideally, Mexico would help us police our shared border. But Mexico receives huge remittances from its citizens unlawfully working in the U.S., so it's currently in Mexico's interest to promote illegal immigration. A well-designed guest worker program, however, could change this and turn Mexico into a U.S. immigration ally.

President Bush has proposed creating a guest worker program in which many Mexicans would have the legal right to work temporarily in the U.S. Unfortunately, even with Bush's program in place Mexico would still encourage its people to work illegally in the U.S. and send home some of their pay.

So instead we should create a guest worker program under which the number of legal Mexican guest workers is based on the number of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. For example, for every additional illegal Mexican immigrant who enters the U.S., the number of Mexican guest worker slots could be reduced by two. Under this plan, Mexico has an incentive to reduce illegal immigration into our country.

If you want Mexico's help on the border, find a way to tax Mexico for violations of the border. Miller acknowledges the challenges to implementation. It necessarily includes legitimizing what is now done illegally, and yet it may also involve penalties that are stiffer than what the pro-illegal-immigration crowd would be willing to accept. But it's an interesting idea to consider.

Making Sense on Immigration

This post by Herbert Meyer at Real Clear Politics seems to identify one of the major disconnects in the current debate over illegal immigration:

One of the most striking features of the immigration debate now raging in Washington is that none of the Democratic or Republican proposals seem to hold any appeal for ordinary Americans--which is why this debate is generating so much frustration among voters that no matter which proposal Congress adopts, the issue itself threatens to shatter both parties' bases and dominate the November elections.

Simply put, the debate in Washington isn't about "immigration" at all - and that's the problem.

To ordinary Americans, the definition of "immigration" is very specific: You come here with absolutely nothing except a burning desire to be an American. You start off at some miserable, low-paying job that at least puts a roof over your family's head and food on the table. You put your kids in school, tell them how lucky they are to be here - and make darn sure they do well even if that means hiring a tutor and taking a second, or third, job to pay for it. You learn English, even if you've got to take classes at night when you're dead tired. You play by the rules--which means you pay your taxes, get a driver's license and insure your car so that if yours hits mine, I can recover the cost of the damages. And you file for citizenship the first day you're eligible.

Do all this and you become an American like all the rest of us. Your kids will lose their accents, move into the mainstream, and retain little of their heritage except a few words of your language and - if you're lucky--an irresistible urge to visit you now and then for some of mom's old-country cooking.

This is how the Italians made it, the Germans made it, the Dutch made it, the Poles made it, the Jews made it, and more recently how the Cubans and the Vietnamese made it. The process isn't easy - but it works and that's the way ordinary Americans want to keep it.

The Two Hispanic Groups

But the millions of Hispanics who have come to our country in the last several decades - and it's the Hispanics we're talking about in this debate, not those from other cultures--are, in fact, two distinct groups. The first group is comprised of "immigrants" just like all the others, who have put the old country behind them and want only to be Americans. They aren't the problem. Indeed, most Americans welcome them among us, as we have welcomed so many other cultures.

The problem is the second group of Hispanics. They aren't immigrants - which is what neither the Democratic or Republican leadership seems to understand, or wants to acknowledge. They have come here solely for jobs, which isn't the same thing at all. (And many of them have come here illegally.) Whether they remain in the U.S. for one year, or ten years - or for the rest of their lives - they don't conduct themselves like immigrants. Yes, they work hard to put roofs above their heads and food on their tables - and for this we respect them. But they have little interest in learning English themselves, and instead demand that we make it possible for them to function here in Spanish. They put their children in our schools, but don't always demand as much from them as previous groups demanded of their kids. They don't always pay their taxes - or insure their cars.

In short, they aren't playing by the rules that our families played by when they immigrated to this country. And to ordinary Americans this behavior is deeply - very deeply - offensive. We see it unfolding every day in our communities, and we don't like it. This is what none of our politicians either understands, or dares to say aloud. Instead, they blather on - and on - about "amnesty" and "border security" without ever coming to grips with what is so visible, and so offensive, to so many of us - namely, all these foreigners among us who aren't behaving like immigrants.

I think this is why I'm so disinclined to have a guest worker program or to look for ways to accommodate illegal immigrants. If you want to spend an extended period of time in the United States, you should want to be a United States citizen and abide by the steps required.

Should They Stay or Should They Go?

I think this may be the best protest poster I've ever seen. It captures very well the problem of dynamic inconsistency that plagues any attempt to rationalize or improve the nation's immigration laws. The full article reports on the 500,000 people who protested in Los Angeles against legislation passed by the House that:

[W]ould make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally, impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, require churches to check the legal status of people they help, and erect fences along one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border.

It further quotes the President in a way that illustrates the problem quite succinctly:

"America is a nation of immigrants, and we're also a nation of laws," Bush said in his weekly radio address, discussing an issue that had driven a wedge into his own party.

I start from the basic premise that a nation needs to define its borders and establish the rules for who is a citizen and who is not. Once those borders and rules are set, some people can be identified as being in the country illegally. In order to discourage illegal immigration, the nation's laws must promise severe punishment for those who are so identified. But here's the rub. Once an illegal immigrant has become an otherwise law-abiding resident, the nation should provide as much support to that person as possible. And once the illegal immigrant has a child in this country, all bets are off. Say what you want about the woman in the photo, the kid poking her in the eye is innocent in all of this and we do such children no favors by deporting or jailing their parents.

I am convinced from having worked on this briefly toward the end of my time at the CEA and from the President's remarks that the administration has its heart in the right place on this and is trying to make some progress on a very challenging issue. There are two parts of the President's rhetoric that I continue to dislike. The first is embodied in this statement from the radio address:

Finally, comprehensive immigration reform requires a temporary worker program that will relieve pressure on our borders. This program would create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do. [Emphasis added.]

That last phrase is a decidedly non-economic statement. Americans will not do these jobs at the prevailing wages. The appropriate response is to let the wages rise, so that the market clears without resorting to workers from abroad. That means that more Americans will do them at the higher wage and that fewer employers will demand the services. That's the way we deal with other markets--I see no reason why we should systematically undermine the wages of low-skilled workers in urban and border areas by refusing to enforce immigration laws. So I disagree with the assertion that reform should involve a guest worker program specifically to allow such jobs to be filled in some exceptional way.

The second issue is whether any reform is perceived is an amnesty. Here's the excerpt from the radio address:

One thing the temporary worker program would not do is provide amnesty to those who are in our country illegally. I believe that granting amnesty would be unfair, because it would allow those who break the law to jump ahead of people who play by the rules and wait in the citizenship line. Amnesty would also be unwise, because it would encourage waves of illegal immigration, increase pressure on the border, and make it more difficult for law enforcement to focus on those who mean us harm. For the sake of justice and for the sake of border security, I firmly oppose amnesty.

Okay, I oppose amnesty as well, for all of these reasons. But if we oppose amnesty, then we haven't addressed the twelve million people who have a version of the story that the woman in the picture is trying to tell.

So, as the House has done, we have to lead with the punishments. I would leave the churches out of it, at least at the start. I would start with extreme fines for employers caught violating the law--fines that are several orders of magnitude greater than any economic benefit that could be gained by hiring illegals at a lower wage than citizens. This applies to large employers and household employment of domestic workers alike. My next targets would be the smugglers who bring illegals to this country and anyone found forging documents that establish citizenship. Jail time, severe and mandatory. I think that laws to deny illegal immigrants access to driver's licenses and other non-essential benefits of citizenship are generally a good idea.

That's about as much prevention as we can do without looking to deport moms with kids. I don't think there is much we can do on that margin, except to deport those who are apprehended if doing so does not jeopardize their children. But most illegals will not likely be apprehended, because they don't break any other laws (and there's nothing beyond lip service about devoting more resources to doing so in the radio address). Those who are here are probably here permanently, unless they leave voluntarily. So there are two more steps we can take.

The first is to work on the border. I have no problem with fences. I am willing to pay taxes to support the increases in border security required to keep as many illegals out as possible. Let the problem get no worse than it currently is. The second is to increase the limits on legal immigration. Who needs the complications of a guest worker program? We are unlikely to enforce the exit requirements, and I see no reason to have two classes of resident formalized in this way. And perhaps a greater pipeline of people coming in legally and enjoying the benefits of citizenship would be the inducement necessary to get those living as illegals to change their status.