Today George Will muses on U. S. immigration:
The border was irrelevant to the 42 percent of illegal immigrants who entered the United States, mostly at airports, with valid visas that they then overstayed. Spending on border security quadrupled in the 1990s, then tripled in the next decade. Now that net immigration of Mexicans has been negative for 10 years, Americans eager to build a wall should not build it on the 1,984-mile U.S.-Mexico border but on Mexico’s 541-mile border with Guatemala.
Fifty-eight percent of the more than 11 million — down from 12.2 million in 2007 — who are here illegally have been here at least 10 years; 31 percent are homeowners; 33 percent have children who, having been born here, are citizens. The nation would recoil from the police measures that would be necessary to extract these people from the communities into the fabric of which their lives are woven. They are not going home; they are home.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, attitudes about immigration became entangled with policies about terrorism. So, as the Economist noted, “a mass murder committed by mostly Saudi terrorists resulted in an almost limitless amount of money being made available for the deportation of Mexican house-painters.†This month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided 98 7-Eleven stores in 17 states, making 21 arrests, approximately one for every 4.5 stores. Rome was not built in a day and it would be unreasonable to expect the government to guarantee, in one fell swoop, that only American citizens will hold jobs dispensing Slurpees and Big Gulps.
For me the questions surrounding immigration are:
- Who should the new immigrants be?
- Who decides?
- How do we encourage new immigrants to assimilate?
- How many immigrants can we accept without excessive social disruption?
In the 19th century per capita GDP rose pretty steadily and that continued for nearly two hundred years. Now per capita incomes and the marginal product of labor have been flat for nearly twenty years. I attribute that to the increased financialization of the economy, globalization, and deadweight loss.
IMO we have one pressing social problem and it’s illustrated by this graph:
I attribute the substantial improvement that took place in the 1990s to the work requirement in welfare reform and the Dot-com boom.
The very high level of immigration illustrated in the graph at the top of the page has impeded the social progress we need in several ways. Blacks, particularly black youth, and the new immigrants, many of them illegal and unskilled, compete for jobs at the low end. The ready availability of entry level workers changes how work will be accomplished to favor keeping wages low.
In that context here are my answers to the questions I ask above:
- The new immigrants should be a limited number of people with substantial skills.
- The citizenry of the United States should decide who the new immigrants should be and how many of them there should be.
- For assimilation to take place we’ll need to limit how many immigrants arrive from any one country. Large coherent communities of immigrants impede assimilation.
- We already have about the number of immigrants that we can accept now. If we are to accept refugees and the high-skilled immigrants mentioned above, we’ll need to reduce the number of those who don’t fit in those categories.
or, in other words, we need an immigration policy more like those of Canada and Australia.
This is interesting:
“[I]mmigrant groups that are more skill-selected tend to have higher average incomes. The five most skill-selected groups are: Taiwanese, Nigerians, Swedes, Indians and Swiss. The five least skill-selected groups are: Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Portuguese and Cape Verdeans. For example, 82% of Nigerians are high-skilled, while only 4% are low-skilled. By contrast, only 14% of Mexicans are high-skilled, while 57% are low-skilled.”
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/skill-selected-immigrant-groups.html
One can argue that most illegal immigrants come by air, but the suggestion here is that the least successful come across the Southern border.
If you follow the link, a plot graph is used to demonstrate the relationship btw/ household income and skills for various immigrant groups. I think the types of immigrants we don’t want or those with low median household incomes that put pressure on America’s welfare safety net, which are in order: (1) Somali, (2) Hondorus, (3) Iraq, (4) Burma, (5) Mexico, (6) Cuba, and (7) El Salvador.
Note that Somalian immigrants have higher skills than Portuguese immigrants, but the Portugese have above-average income. Presumably coming from an OECD country (barely) with high-proficiency in English-speaking covers the skills gap.
I think the policy should be to select for immigrants that would not be in the bottom half of that income chart. Skills (including language) appears to be a good proxy for that. I have no reason to dispute that the Nigerians selected for immigration are highly likely to succeed in the U.S., but if you change the policy, you change the group selection.
I should add that the list I gave of those groups with the lowest incomes include a number of countries in which we receive refugees. Those are people taken outside of the normal immigration policy, which should be governed by foreign policy. In particular, I supported acceptance of Iraqi refugees.
I’ve got some qualms about their figures — for example, it may well be that Italians have more university and graduate school on average, but I doubt that means Italians and Greeks are going to be od different caliber as immigrants. Also I’m give a bit of an edge to immigrants with religious leanings — Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Confician, whatever. My general feeling is that religious applicants will find it easier to fit in comfortably in the USA; and the Americans who object to immigrants will find it easier to accept those with some religion — even if it’s a non-Christian religion.
That said, I note with some bemusement that the immigrants you gentlemen would seem to prefer are precisely the ones apt to take up residence in major coast cities, find better than average jobs for themselves, and generally stay far far away from small Midwestern and southern communities. Are you quite sure this is your ideal?
So, as the Economist noted, “a mass murder committed by mostly Saudi terrorists resulted in an almost limitless amount of money being made available for the deportation of Mexican house-painters.â€
Yeah, Georgie, we’ve just been sending Mexican house painters back by the millions….
How about next to zero immigration? We have over 300,000,000 people here. Are you really telling me we can’t find the talent we need here? Does the country that essentially invented the internet, put men on the Moon, etc. (and from a much SMALLER population base), really need to import talent from India (GDP per Cap in 2017 of $1,852 according to the IMF) or Nigeria (GDP per Cap in 2017 of $2,092 according to the IMF) to meet our needs? And what about draining the talent from THOSE countries? Great, the guys that run Google, M$ and Amazon will get a tiny bit richer, the native workforce in America will get a little poorer (best case scenario), and those immigrants will be better off – while their native countries become worse and worse due to the best talent be scrounged off the top. Isn’t there something a touch immoral about that aspect of it, as well?
As for adopting Canadian immigration policies – they’re attempting to greatly increase the number of immigrants they take, with an obvious idea of making the former European culture a minority culture in the country. Canada could end up being a Chinese colony with China hardly even noticing that anyone had left, for example. I’m not sure that’s a model to follow.
The bigger question is why do all the nations or Western Europe and those of Western European heritage suddenly feel the need to displace their own populations in favor of massive numbers of Third World immigrants? This is going to become ever more problematic in Europe in coming decades as the African population will about quadruple over the remaining decades of this century. It looks like cultural suicide so a few people at the top can loot as much as they can for themselves.
And yes, we needed help of various European immigrants for those big accomplishments. (They needed our help as well.) But we’re not really talking about the Martians or the most brilliant minds in (then modern) rocketry, either.
@mike shupp, one of the advantages of being connected to better news about America as I believe Western Europeans are, is that they can be opportunistic about opportunities. The only Portuguese immigrant I know came to America to teach soccer to middle-class families. AFAIK, he got his soccer experience in the Portuguese Navy and he took advantage of an opportunity at the right time.
That isn’t new, 17th/18th century immigration from (NW) Europe ebbed and flowed on the basis of news accounts of the American economy.