Perception and Reality Matter

In an article at Politico Zack Stanton interviews Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. I agree with a lot of what Mr. Selee has to say, disagree with some but this passage particularly caught my attention:

For migration movements, reality trumps perception. Perception matters, but people don’t usually move 2,000 miles or spend $6,000—the only money they have, plus money that they borrowed from relatives or “financial institutions” like prestamistas, or “loan sharks”—people don’t do that, and they don’t take a dangerous journey unless they think they can get in. There was a perception that with Biden, the border would be more open. And then the reality was that some people actually did get in. The perception of the change, coupled with just enough reality of change, allowed the smugglers to sell this.

I mean, smugglers are smart and unscrupulous marketers. They can’t sell what doesn’t exist, but they can exaggerate what does. I lived in Tijuana for around six years, and I had neighbors who were smugglers. I worked with the Mexican YMCA back then. We had a home for migrant youth, and I was the one gringo there. A father would call us and say, “José is going to get picked up by a close friend of the family,” and these guys would show up — and it’d be the same “family friend” who picked up someone else last week. We got to know these guys. We’d hang out, have a cup of coffee. They are smart, smooth marketers. But as good as they are at selling their wares, they can’t sell what doesn’t exist. When there’s a real change on the ground, they’ll exaggerate that; they can exaggerate how easy it is to get in. But if nobody is getting in, they can’t completely make it up. The reality of change mattered as much as the perception of it.

which echoes things I’ve been saying here, as many of Mr. Selee’s remarks do.

There are a number of areas in which I part company with Mr. Selee, however, and many are related to path dependence. What happened in the past limits the choices we have now. In 1965 you could make a very good case that we could use a lot more immigrants. Wages were rising as was the marginal product of labor and those had been the case for a century. Income and wealth equality were reasonable. Healthcare and education were relatively inexpensive. About 4% of the population were immigrants.

Fast forward to today. Wages for the lowest earners have been flat for decades and, contrary to the claims of those who demand sharp increases in the minimum wage, the reason for it is rather obviously the slack labor market produced by mass immigration from Mexico and Central America. Our income and wealth inequality are now more like those of a Third World country than of a European or Anglosphere country. Costs of healthcare and education have been rising faster than the non-healthcare or education sectors and have been doing so for decades, so much so that both are increasingly unaffordable for ordinary people let alone for the working poor. The percentage of immigrants in the country is around 15%. The last time it was this high we slammed the door shut for nearly a half century.

If we’re going to be able to improve the circumstances of blacks and immigrants already here while preserving legal immigration and accepting legitimate asylum seekers (as opposed to economic migrants), we need to control illegal immigration and that becomes increasingly the case with each new illegal immigrant. The situation is different than it was two years ago or five years ago because the circumstances are different than they were two years or five years ago.

There is an urgent necessity for the Biden Administration to broadcast an unequivocal message: we will control our borders and we will enforce our laws. Can the administration retain the support of open borders advocates, have the humane policies that Candidate Biden advocated, while doing what’s necessitated by today’s conditions?