The Best Plan for 1970

The editors of the Washington Post laud President Biden’s immigration plan, saying it would truly “put America first”:

The U.S. population growth rate in the just-ended decade was the lowest since the first national census in 1790, according to the Brookings Institution — lower even than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The number of Americans below the age of 18 actually shrank in the 2010s, by more than 1 million.

That stagnation, the product of an aging population and historically low fertility rates, cannot be reversed by immigration alone. But it will certainly be exacerbated, and has been in the past four years, by a policy hostile to newcomers. In President Donald Trump’s penultimate year in office, annual net immigration fell below 600,000, the lowest level in decades; it was more than 1 million in the final years of the Obama presidency.

That stagnation, the product of an aging population and historically low fertility rates, cannot be reversed by immigration alone. But it will certainly be exacerbated, and has been in the past four years, by a policy hostile to newcomers. In President Donald Trump’s penultimate year in office, annual net immigration fell below 600,000, the lowest level in decades; it was more than 1 million in the final years of the Obama presidency.

Mr. Biden is moving quickly where he can — fully reinstating the Obama-era program providing work permits and deportation protection for “dreamers,” young migrants brought to this country by their parents; rescinding Mr. Trump’s 2017 travel ban from majority-Muslim countries; halting construction of the southern border wall; and reining in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation policies. He has also signaled he will increase annual refugee admissions, which Mr. Trump poleaxed, and scrap a Trump administration rule that denies green cards to immigrants deemed likely to use public benefits such as food stamps.

Other measures will require congressional action. Under legislation Mr. Biden is sending to Congress, green cards conferring legal permanent residency would be granted to dreamers as well as to immigrants from strife- and disaster-wracked nations who have been here for years.

The president is also pushing tougher border security — in recognition that the new administration is not inviting a wave of new migrants, still less amid a pandemic — though not as a precondition for his immigration reforms. His more impactful, long-term strategy to dissuade new waves of illegal immigrants is a concerted aid effort to boost economies and contain crime in Central America.

Mr. Biden has laid out an immigration program that would genuinely put America first.

I see four major problems with Mr. Biden’s plan:

• The $15 minimum wage which he also supports
• It makes reducing carbon emissions harder
• It’s too expensive
• It isn’t 1970

When conjoined with the $15/hour minimum wage he supports, it would foster an increase in the depth and reach of the underground economy, much of which’s labor pool is comprised of illegal immigrants. The sad reality today is that if someone wants to come into this country across our southern border, he or she will. There is no enforcement measure which cannot be evaded or suborned.

The cheapest, easiest, least painful way for the U. S. to reduce its carbon emissions, another policy which Mr. Biden supports, is to reduce U. S. population. Contrary to what the editors suggest, we don’t need to increase U. S. population. We need to reorient our economy away from low wage labor and high volume personal consumption. We need to adjust to fewer people not bring in more.

For some reason advocates of increased immigration never seem to take the costs into account. Every additional family of five (two parents and three children) incurs public costs of about $40,000 a year or more. The immigrants we need are those who can pay those costs. Most of the immigrants we take in cannot.

But most importantly his plan would have been great if adopted in 1970 but a lot has changed since then. Them the marginal product of labor (the basis for increasing wages) wear increasing, had been increasing for 200 years, and would increase for another decade. It has been decreasing for the last 40 years. It is no surprise whatever that wages for people with high school education only or less have been decreasing in real terms over that interval. We just don’t need more workers with limited English and no legal skills that are in demand. The data on this could not be clearer.

Additionally, a seemingly neverending supply of such workers skews our economy away from the industries and reforms that would lead to higher wages for U. S. workers.

Finally in 1970 approximately 4% of the people here were immigrants. Now nearly 15% are—nearing the highest percentage in American history and higher than any other major economy. There are social costs associated with that large a population of immigrants, many of them from Mexico and Central America. Those costs are largely borne by blacks, young people, and other immigrants.

In 1970 ordinary people could get jobs that paid enough to live on, raise a family, and have a reasonably comfortable retirement. That is no longer the case. That needs to change and it will not change until we redirect our economy along different lines—lines that don’t require millions of unskilled or semi-skilled workers with limited English.

What we need for 2020 and beyond, unlike what Mr. Biden has proposed, is an immigration system that makes it nearly impossible for non-citizens or those here without permission to work here. That is the sort of system adopted by Canada, Australia, and New Zealnd—the countries we most closely resemble.

One more thing. The last time we extended the possibility of citizenship to those here illegally only a minority of those eligible ever became citizens. I don’t know why that was the case but it definitely was the case. It’s an issue for activists and political operatives not for the immigrants themselves.