High levels of immigration, legal and illegal, have not produced the positive economic results that growth-minded advocates have expected. For four decades, we have accepted vastly more immigrants than any other advanced country. Yet despite the big start the U.S. economy enjoyed after World War II, our average performance measured over the last 40 years has been among the worst of the developed nations, roughly comparable to Britain's. Many other factors explain the decline of U.S. competitiveness, but the low-skill immigration of recent decades has surely not been helpful, except to labor-intensive businesses that have profited from the supply of cheap labor - leaving the community at large to pick up the social costs.
Of course, many proponents of large-scale immigration are motivated by humanitarian rather than economic concerns, the potentially adverse impact on American citizens notwithstanding. I'm reminded of a comment made about her own country by Australian sociologist Katharine Betts in her book, Ideology and Immigration 'Humanitarianism became the chief goal of immigration for some people and immigration itself came to be seen as a form of international aid. ...The relatively poor in this country pay a disproportionate share of the cost of the conscience of the rich.'
In The Competitive Advantage of Nations Harvard economist Michael E. Porter stresses the contribution skilled immigrants can make to 'the principal economic goal of a nation - a high and rising standard of living.' But he goes on to note that large-scale immigration of the unskilled may retard the process.
During the past forty years, America outpaced all other developed countries in population growth. Immigration, legal and illegal, has been a major contributor to that growth. Since 1950, 20 million people have immigrated legally. No one knows how many have entered illegally. Estimates range from 5 million to 8 million. In the wake of liberalizing legislation in 1990, upwards of 1 million immigrants are now entering annually.
Over this period, U.S. immigration policy has emphasized political concerns - e.g. Cuba, Vietnam - and family relationships, not skills, and has done little to curb the vast flow of illegal immigrants. The result, as George Borjas concludes in Friends or Strangers, has been that 'the skill composition of the immigrant flow has deteriorated significantly in the past two or three decades.'
'...cheap labor encourages investors
to use labor-intensive means of
production, and that means slow
or no technological advance and
further slippage in our
competitive position.'
The loss of competitive advantage of many U.S. products in recent decades is importantly the consequence of the slow growth of labor produc-tivity. This is partly the result of low levels of U.S. research, development and investment compared with our principal competitors, Japan and Germany. But it is also the consequence of a labor force relatively unskilled by comparison with Japan's and Germany's - a labor force whose real income has been declining while the incomes of Japanese and German workers have been increasing. American wages are no longer the highest in the world.
In fact, the United States now emphasizes relatively cheap labor - a good part of it available because of immigration - much as Third World countries do. Aside from the retreat from the objec-tive of a rising standard of living implicit in it, cheap labor encourages investors to use labor-intensive means of production, and that means slow or no technological advance and further slippage in our competitive position. The resulting slow overall growth of the economy has meant lower federal, state and local revenues. Porter notes, 'The ability to compete despite paying higher wages would seem to represent a far more desirable national target.'
I want to repeat that immigration is but one of several causes of our economic malaise. But it is not an insignificant one.
Some researchers, Borjas among them, have concluded that immigrants - legal or illegal - do not compete with native-born Americans, although they do compete with other immigrants, including many who have been here long enough to become citizens. More recent studies, including those of Rice University's Don Huddle, conclude that immigrants do indeed compete with natives, especially when unemployment is relatively high.
Immigration proponents argue that immigrants - particularly illegal immigrants - accept wages and working conditions that citizens, even poor citizens, wouldn't. Even accepting that argument, the obvious implication is that employers would have to pay more and provide better working conditions if there were an ample supply of immigrants. But, in fact, there are cases of displacement, for example in Los Angeles, where building maintenance workers, mostly black, have been displaced by immigrants, mostly Mexican. Moreover, immigrants may well compete with citizens for low-cost housing - which means higher rentals - and public services, including education.
'The problem of refugee/ immigrant
demand for services has been
particularly acute in
Massachusetts, where the
Dukakis administration adopted
a policy of insuring the
availability of all state
services to refugees.'
Several researchers, for example the Urban Institute's Thomas Muller and Thomas Espenshade, have also studied the extent to which immigrants are a burden on public budgets, e.g. welfare, social services, subsidized housing, education. Two principal conclusions emerge 1) what most immi-grants pay in taxes does not cover the costs of the services they receive, particularly when education is included; and 2) the downward trend in immigrant skills has been accompanied by an upward trend in their use of public assistance.
The problem of refugee/ immigrant demand for services has been particularly acute in Massachusetts, where the Dukakis administration adopted a policy of insuring the availability of all state services to refugees, and both the state and the city of Boston provided many services to immigrants without refer-ence to the legality of their status.
Massachusetts consequently became a magnet for immigrants. Between 1980 and 1990, the Hispanic population more than doubled to 288,000, while the Asian population almost tripled to 143,000. The treatment of immigrants did not become a really hot issue until the sharp downturn in the state's economy and the resulting budget crisis. Now there can be no question that immigrants compete with needy citizens for drastically-reduced public services.
We are a society imbued with Emma Lazarus' words on the Statue of Liberty 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' When the statue was dedicated 105 years ago, some 60 million people lived in the United States; the frontier was still open, and an open immigration policy clearly suited our needs. Today, our popu-lation is more than four times greater, the frontier is long gone, and population growth is a principal con-tributor to the environment that so preoccupies us.
Congress passed a law in 1990 that increases legal immigration by 40 percent. Congress took this action in the face of repeated polls showing an overwhelming majority of Americans - including 74 percent of Hispanic Americans and 78 percent of black Americans in a 1990 Roper survey - opposed increased immigration.
Despite new emphasis on skills in the 1990 legislation, more than 70 percent of legal newcomers will enter because they are related to naturalized citizens, resident aliens, and former illegal immigrants who qualified for the amnesty provisions of the 1986 immigration act. The large majority of both legal and illegal newcomers will arrive with few skills.
The Haitian boat people are a case in point. Almost all have risked their lives in leaky vessels to reach the United States. While some of the earlier boat people were refugees from Duvalier political persecution, the fact that the flow increased over the previous year's during the eight months when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the landslide populist winner of the 1990 election, was in office, demonstrates that most seek economic opportunity and social services that vastly exceed what their homeland offers.
'...the fact that the flow [of Haitian
refugees] increased over the
previous year's during the
eight months when President
Aristide ... was in office,
demonstrates that most seek
economic opportunity and
social services...'
A 1985 study of recent Haitian immigrants in Florida revealed the following average years of education were 4.6; 5 percent were high school graduates; 82 percent had limited or no English; 93 percent had limited or no knowledge of the United States; 63 percent were unemployed; 29 percent were receiving welfare aid.
While there must always be room in our immigration policies for dealing with cases of special hardship, in a world in which hundreds of millions of people would gladly come to our shores, choices must be made. No immigration policy can remedy the failures of other nations to meet the needs of their poor, so it is both sensible and moral to base our policies primarily on the needs of our own society, particularly economic revival and raising the standard of living of our poorer citizens. That means a significant reduction in legal immigration, redoubled programs to control illegal immigration, and an upgrading of the skills of those immigrants we accept.
These measures won't solve America's economic problems, but they will certainly help. ?