The House bipartisan Problem Solvers’ Caucus describes their immigration reform proposal at RealClearPolicy. It consists of five planks:
- Current DACA recipients are eligible for a 12-year path to citizenship.
- But DACA recipients who receive legal status would not be able to sponsor any parent that brought them to the U.S. illegally.
- Close to $1.6 billion would be appropriated for physical border security; these funds would support barrier infrastructure planning, design, and construction.
- And another $1.1 billion would be allocated for non-barrier security.
- The proposal would end the diversity visa lottery.
I don’t believe the plan has a chance of even coming to the floor: it doesn’t fulfill the Republicans’ sine qua non for immigration reform. That should be reducing illegal immigration but I think it has become Trump’s wall.
I believe it also includes features that are anathema to the Democrats. I’m confident that the Democrats have a sine qua non as well but I’m not actually sure what that is at this point. The most likely candidates might be a path to citizenship for all illegal immigrants or it might be any limitations on immigration at all. That’s the problem with the rejectionist stance the Democratic leadership has taken. It tells us what they’re against but not what they’re for.
My own plan would include stiff, even draconian penalties on employers who don’t verify the legality of workers using an improved e-Verify program coupled with a greatly expanded guest worker program for Mexicans. I’m sure a majority would hate those ideas, too.
Giving DACA recipients citizenship along with a serious e-Verify program is way too low-key. It might work as a means to stop undocumented immigration. But that’s really not the issue is it?
The bottom line is that the original deal with Graham and Schumer would have probably gone through, minus the existence of the far right. That’s why we’re talking about diversity lotteries, as if legal immigration is bothering the entire country and needs to be solved or reformed. It isn’t. Conservative Republicans should drop the facade and say they want whiter immigrants. It would just be easier on everybody.
It’s the issue for me.
Agree with the employer stuff and expanding the worker program. As long as employers benefit so much from having illegal workers, they will keep coming. Besides. thee is that snarky bit of me that wonders how big of a hit the Texas economy takes when they lose all of their illegals doing child care and yard work. (Ok, it has been over 3o years since I lived there, but “all” of the well to do had illegals doing that stuff. The real estate agent showing us houses offered to find us reliable ones.)
Steve
I think any immigration reform has to deal with three key elements:
– What to do about the people who are already here illegally. Not just DACA people.
– Reform criteria for who we let into the country for what reasons and for how long.
– Enforcement – Without effective enforcement the other elements are meaningless.
IMO that proposal doesn’t address all three elements – it kicks the can at best.
I think there’s an important distinction between the DACA people and others, namely the DACA people have no mens rea. In other words they’ve committed no crime. The law has been broken by their parents not by them. Entering the country without presenting yourself to a constituted representative of the federal government is against the law as is overstaying a visa. Simply being in the country is not.
Additionally, we can now be confident that there is a significant moral hazard to anything resembling amnesty. Portraying coming into the country illegally as a victimless crime is wrong, too. It hurts blacks, previous cohorts of immigrants, and the white rural poor. Not only has it lowered wages and worsened conditions in some sectors to the point where native born Americans of whatever race won’t do the work any more (meat-packing), unlimited illegal immigration has lowered the wages of people with high school only educations or less.
A continuing, reliable supply of low-skill workers causes business models that would not otherwise be profitable to remain so.
In summary, the prudent and merciful thing to do is to exert control over immigration.
Dave,
You say that immigration hurts wages as if all of the facts point to that conclusion. But they don’t. Plenty of economists say that immigration does not hurt wages. You want to have a debate in which nobody gets to do anything but agree with your conclusions.
Find one who says that. What they actually say is exactly what I said although they frequently emphasize that they don’t hurt wages overall which is true and which I will admit that I omitted. As I’ve said before every post can’t be about every thing. And you can’t just read the headline numbers. Sometimes you’ve got to dig into their citations. Mass immigration increases the earnings of the top 10% of income earners while reducing the incomes of the bottom 30% and particularly the bottom 10%. If that’s the ground you care to stand on, please remember never, ever to complain about income inequality. Increasing the wages of the top 10% of income earners while decreasing the income of the bottom 30% is practically the definition of increasing income inequality.
Well, yes. That’s because there’s general agreement among the knowledgeable with my conclusions about the income effects of immigration. It’s the consensus view. The difference of opinion is not about the effects but about their significance. I’m more concerned about low wages for native-born blacks, recent immigrants, and poor rural whites than those who favor open borders are. One cannot, however, persuade the unpersuadable.
And we haven’t even begun with the net cost/benefit issue. Increasing the population by 10% beyond what it would otherwise have been increases the use of schools, roads, bridges, sewers, law enforcement, fire departments, etc. beyond what they would otherwise have been. It takes a lot of immigrants with net benefits to make up for tens of millions of immigrants with net costs.
Consider a test case. A family of four, both parents working full time at minimum wage. Total household earnings, excluding public subsidies are about $30,000. The two kids are in school. Rent, food, transportation, clothing, eat up all their earnings and then some. Educating the two kids costs about $8,000 per kid per year. Health insurance is another $8-12,000. Sum up the public subsidies and you’re in the vicinity of $30-$40,000 per year for that family and it’s got to come from somewhere.
Also keep in mind that I don’t object to immigration per se. I merely think we should adopt sensible rules along the lines used in Canada and Australia.
My understanding is that are plenty of economists who believe that in theory immigration is good in the long-term and that untangling the affects of immigrants on unskilled labor from other forces pushing wages down is difficult to do.
And there’s this from a Brookings report:
But while immigration improves living standards on average, the economic literature is divided about whether immigration reduces wages for certain groups of workers. In particular, some estimates suggest that immigration has reduced the wages of low-skilled workers and college graduates. This research, shown by the blue bars in the chart above, implies that the influx of immigrant workers from 1990 to 2006 reduced the wages of low-skilled workers by 4.7 percent and college graduates by 1.7 percent. However, other estimates that examine immigration within a different economic framework (the red bars in the chart) find that immigration raises the wages of all U.S. workers—regardless of the immigrants’ level of education.
So some economists apparently think that the immigration affects all groups positively.
As Keynes put it in the long run we’re all dead. It is possible for things to be true until they aren’t. The conditions now are quite different from those in the 1960s, the 1980s, or the 1990s.
You have restated “plenty of economists” (that’s known as “proof by assertion”) while providing evidence for “some economists” without digging into their sources. Nearly all quote the same studies the findings of which are just about what I said: positive income effects for the highest level income earners, negative income effects for the lowest. I’m just more concerned about the lowest income earners than they are.
As a start try these sources:
Hamilton Project
Migration Policy Institute
Economic Policy Institute
These sources all, in general, look favorably on increased immigration. I’ve avoided anti-immigration sources which have studies finding much greater negative effects. The bottom line of the cited sources is that mass immigration has a small downwards effect on wages among the lowest income earners already here, basically what I’ve been saying.
“untangling the affects of immigrants on unskilled labor from other forces pushing wages down is difficult to do.”
Well, we know how markets work including labor markets. I’ve yet to see any economist claim that importing large numbers of unskilled workers benefits the unskilled workers who are already here or the unskilled labor market generally. Add in credential creep and the exporting of low skilled jobs overseas (or the retooling of low-skill labor so that fewer workers are required) and you’re pulling at both ends of the string.
And then people are shocked that low skilled work doesn’t pay well, much less provide a living wage. Well, do people really expect wages to rise in these conditions?