David Frum’s musing over whether immigrants help or harm native workers is interesting but his peroration is the best part:
Theoretically, a nation could determine that high-skill labor is complementary to low-skilled labor and make decisions such as the following:
“If we admit a lot of foreign-born surgeons, we could hugely drive down the cost of major medical operations. American-born doctors would shift their labor to fields where their language facility gave them a competitive advantage: away from surgery to general practice. This policy would hugely enhance the relative purchasing power of plumbers and mechanics, enabling them to eat out more often and buy more American-made entertainment, increasing GDP and creating jobs.â€
Or: “The ratio of CEO pay to other workers has skyrocketed. Obviously we are suffering from a glut of workers and massive CEO scarcity. We should issue work permits automatically to any executive with a job offer that pays more than $500,000 a year. Americans with organizational skills will be pressed to shift to the public sector, improving the quality and lowering the cost to taxpayers of government services.â€
But that’s not how things are done. In the United States, the hypothesis of native-immigrant complementarity is deployed to justify policies that intensify competition for the lower and middle echelons of the society, rarely near the top. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way, yet somehow it always is.
Much of the article is devoted to the notion of complementarity, the idea that specialization will impel native workers to seek employment farther up the skill chain. What if there are no such jobs? What if you hire immigrants for the jobs farther up the skill chain, too?
However much training (or retraining) they might receive every displaced native workers cannot become a neurosurgeon, a nuclear physicist, or even a petroleum engineer. There are substantial barriers to entering those fields not the least of which is the rarity of the basic attributes of mind required to do those jobs. What becomes of the rest of the population? This is not Lake Wobegone. All the children are not above average.
Ellipses’ point in the link: “Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are 2 million more immigrants—legal and illegal—working in the United States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since November 2007 have gone to immigrants.”
This is probably not a 100% causal relationship. But I do think public policy should endeavor to figure out the extent of the relationship. I’m currently reading Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939. The purpose of the book is to try to figure out why the English were such successful colonizers. One of the key contributing factors involves an analysis of Anglophone penchant for boom-and-bust cycles of economic development and the ideological fervor that accompanies them. The U.S. and English dominions were colonized largely through the economics of population growth; people moved to places where they believed people would move and when people located in those places people made money largely through the increase in prices of property or other materials created by the increased demand brought on by the increased number of people. Eventually the bubble would burst and to the extent recovery happened it would be from export of goods, typically natural resources, to “older,” more developed places.
Only about a third of the way through, but the author brings data, not just glorious fairy tales of inherent ethnic goodness or strong institutions, things that could be said about other colonizers. But for me the analysis of land speculation and panics are identified less abstractly than traditional American history books that make it sound like some bankers got burned by their greed. There are large population movements involved, the broad creation of wealth across new lands, and the eventual broad destruction when the bubble burst.
In any event, this is what this feels like to me. More people generate more economic activity and some will make more money as a result, but its not real growth in and of itself. If a lot of people move to North Dakota to live in will initially increase land prices and wages for basic services, but that cycle will end, unless there is some productive activity joined to it.
Hmm. I thought that was pretty well-understood at this point. The English came to stay, brought their wives, had children. The Spaniards tended to send a few malcontents and penniless aristrocrats with armies, fully intent on making their fortunes and returning in triumph to Spain.
And then there’s the issue of remittances. A lot of whatever economic activity the recent immigrants generate doesn’t stay here. They’re sending it home at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
re: colonization, the importance of women is another point the author makes, but one to be considered along with the “head start” colonization might have. (One woman colonizer is worth several male; one early colonizer is worth several late-comers)
The author sees a great diversion between colonizers beginning around 1815, so he is looking more for an explanation of what changes were taking place a generation or two before that time, and what activities persisted throughout a long nineteenth century. He sees the big colonizers as England, Russia and the Iberians (both Spain and Portugal), and I think France and China get knocked-out from the top tier for being too-late, too-few women, and too-inconsistent. The English economics of colonization appear to be part of the answer, but I think he also is relying upon the Second Great Awakening as a source of belief in not only spiritual revival, but economic.
Man I always hate this one: “The foreign-born gardener mows the lawn, freeing his accountant employer to spend Saturday morning billing clients.”
I think I went on a diatribe on this once (“I mow my own damn lawn”) at some blog that caused everyone in the thread to make this pronouncement at the outset as if it was a moral prerequisite to have an opinion. I don’t think mowing one’s lawn makes one moral, but I do think its economic contribution to society is almost non-existent. And they aren’t substituting work at home for work at business 99% of the time; they are purchasing leisure, or an opportunity to take the kids to soccer, or paying for something they physically cannot do any more, or (in Los Angeles) conforming to social expectations of the middle class.
Something of which most Westerners are unaware is that, just as we had our Wild West, the Russians had their Wild East which played a very similar role to their economy and in their mythology.