[Mb-civic] A sensible look at immigration - Scot Lehigh - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  A sensible look at immigration

By Scot Lehigh  |  April 4, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE DEBATE over immigration demonstrates just how easily demagoguery and 
mythology can cloud careful analysis.

Listeners to right-wing talk radio could easily find themselves thinking 
that the future of our country is at stake if the estimated 11.5 million 
illegal immigrants aren't all rounded up and deported, posthaste.

But if the rhetoric among libertarians, liberals, and pro-immigration 
conservatives is more humane, it's hardly devoid of delusion. The 
assertion that our high level of immigration has only beneficial effects 
is also wrong, as is the notion that it is impossible, even immoral, to 
control our borders.

First things first. This nation shouldn't go on an extended hunt for 
immigrants who are already in this country illegally. Many have been 
here for years, with children born and raised here. They are marbled 
into the working life of America. Rooting them out would be heartless, 
costly, and counterproductive.

Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy are right that we should move those 
people out of the shadows and put them on an eventual path to 
citizenship. Yet that doesn't mean we should continue to tolerate 
immigration levels -- legal and illegal -- as large as those we've seen 
in the last few years.

A yearly estimated influx of a million legal and a half-million illegal 
immigrants, many of them low-skilled workers, is hardly an unalloyed 
plus. Rather, it offers distinct advantages and disadvantages depending 
on where you sit on the economic ladder.

If you're an employer looking for cheap labor, high immigration 
represents a low-wage bargain. Indeed, when businessmen claim they 
simply can't find Americans to do this job or that, what many of them 
really mean is that they can't hire a native worker at the unattractive 
wages they want to pay. Similarly, plentiful labor is a boon if you are 
in search of, say, a nanny or house-cleaning services.

But what if you're a low-skilled worker yourself? A large flow of 
low-skilled workers amounts to competition that retards wages for the 
jobs you can do.

''It really has a depressing effect on the low-skilled labor market," 
says George Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at Harvard 
University and an immigration specialist.

In one well-regarded study, Borjas and fellow economist Lawrence Katz 
concluded that immigration from Mexico alone depressed wages for native 
workers lacking a high school diploma by 8 percent between 1980 and 2000.

By keeping wages lower than they otherwise would be, low-skilled 
immigrant workers effectively transfer tens of billions in income each 
year from labor to employers. (Borjas estimates the total loss in labor 
earnings that results from all immigrants currently in the workforce at 
$280 billion annually.)

Further, African-Americans without high-school diplomas often get pushed 
to the end of the hiring line when immigrants expand the labor pool.

''If you take a look at high-school dropouts, the black high-school 
dropouts are the hardest hit," says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center 
for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington thinktank. ''They are 
directly competing with immigrant workers."

Given those realities, institutionalizing the current high level of 
immigration is odd policy, at least from a progressive viewpoint. But 
that's essentially what the Senate Judiciary Committee bill would do, in 
part by allowing 400,000 new temporary workers each year.

''If you wanted to go there, you would have to believe we have a labor 
shortage," says Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the liberal 
Economic Policy Institute. ''If you look at wage trends, you will not 
see much evidence of a labor shortage."

And even if there were such a shortage, a tight labor market would 
actually boost low-end wages and increase income equality.

Back in the 1990s, a bipartisan commission chaired by Barbara Jordan, a 
former Democratic congresswoman from Texas, concluded that the United 
States should adjust immigration policy to reduce immigration initially 
to about 700,000 a year, and then ultimately to about 550,000.

That range, which would mean a return to 1980s levels of immigration, is 
still reasonable, says Borjas. Baker, meanwhile, thinks 700,000 new 
immigrants would be an appropriate yearly level.

Certainly as Congress debates immigration, reasoned labor market 
arguments for a more restrictive policy deserve a careful look.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/04/a_sensible_look_at_immigration/
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