Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION

Sometimes I come across a piece that furthers a discussion on an important subject. Unfortunately, there is not always access to the piece. This is just such a piece: THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION (Atlantic).

I don't agree with all of the author's (David Leonhardt) points, but it is a thorough and thoughtful discussion of this thorny issue. I'll provide what direct quotes as I can. It focuses, initially, on the 1965 modifications of immigration laws that still control the process today.

Some excerpts:

"I realize that some readers may be feeling a little uncomfortable about the history described here. The celebration of immigration has become core to the political beliefs of many Americans, on both the left and the right. Immigrants are underdogs, heroes, and—for most of us—ancestors. Many opponents of immigration are xenophobes. In the 21st century, the contours of the immigration debate can seem binary: Somebody is either in favor of immigration or opposed to it.

Historically, however, the debate was more nuanced. It included many people who were comfortable distinguishing between the issues of who should be admitted and how many should be admitted. Separating these two makes clear that it is possible to honor immigrants and decry bigotry without believing that more immigration is always better. The people who wrote the 1965 law claimed to hold precisely these beliefs."
....
"At a moment when immigration has returned to political prominence, it helps to think about the continuing post-1965 immigration wave through three empirical questions. First, how have the immigrants fared in this country? Second, what have been the economic effects for people who were already in the United States? And third, how has the immigration wave altered American politics?"

I think those are core issues for this discussion.

A global perspective - not just on immigration, but also including the vast, and strange, economic inequalities found around the world.

The metaphor that has appeared to my mind has to do with erosion. Different cultures, different countries, rise higher than others for periods of time, like mountain ranges created through continental drift and plate collisions. Over geologic time these higher elevations are moderated and lowered through the forces of erosion, and are reduced to lower elevations with less energetic potential.

America, "discovered" as a treasure trove of resources populated sparsely by cultures, which were not inclined to converting their habitat into abstract "wealth", got appropriated by new and materially aggressive humans from places that had been depleted and overpopulated by more aggressive humans - metaphorically creating mountain ranges of wealth.

What we are experiencing is the erosion of that mountain range by a new, inexorable influx of lowlanders who want to share in the wealth, who will do the work at a lower cost.

Erosion of higher elevations into lower is a force of nature, and cannot be prevented.

The American Dream is to establish oneself, provide for your family, and have your children do better than you do, isn't it? From that perspective, American immigrants are models. Although first generations tend toward poverty, their parents come to the US for a better life. Like our forebears, they come from hardy stock, in that they are strivers and work hard to better their conditions - hence their immigration. A vast number are entrepreneurial, starting their own small businesses. They may start in poverty, but they teach their children the value of hard work, which is why their offspring tend to be better educated, and still have a strong work ethic.

"Children of post-1965 immigrants have ascended at a pace strikingly similar to their predecessors, as two economists—Leah Boustan of Princeton and Ran Abramitzky of Stanford—have documented. As in the past, immigrants themselves tend to remain poor if they arrive poor. And as in the past, their children tend to make up ground rapidly. Overall, most children of the recent immigration wave have grown up to earn at least a middle-class income. “The American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago,” Abramitzky and Boustan write. There is no permanent underclass of American immigrants."

But there is also turbulence in the wake of immigration waves. Employment cycles and habits of capitalism often mask the effects of immigration. Immigrants often gravitate to where jobs are plentiful, where labor demand is high. They tend to be much more mobile - because it takes time to establish roots. So, areas that they migrate to tend to flourish - but it's a chicken and egg scenario: are they flourishing because of the immigrants, or do the immigrants merely tap into the potential that is already there?

"When immigration is low, the economist Sumner Slichter explained a century ago, employers are forced “to adapt jobs to men rather than men to jobs.” People sometimes claim that immigrants work in jobs that native-born Americans do not want. But Christopher Jencks, a social-policy professor at Harvard University, has pointed out that this statement is incomplete: Immigrants typically work in jobs that native-born Americans do not want at the wages that employers are offering. One reason that employers can offer such wages, Jencks adds, is the availability of so many immigrant workers." In the grander scheme, immigrant labor matches the desire of employers - to offer jobs at the lowest wages possible, which is why CEOs love immigrants (and unions do not), and why immigrants are overrepresented in the worst labor- intensive industries, often to their (and society's) long-term detriment. Those industries are also slow to adopt better conditions because, as history has shown, immigrants don't organize and pressure them for better conditions - they're easy to exploit.