Dude, a name gets over thirty or forty letters wrong and I stop even trying to spell it correctly. I'll fix it.
I liked it better the old way.
Fuck all these immigrants with there long un-American names.
I'm not sure how realistic, practically or politically speaking, Rauchway's proposal is. Mostly because I'm not quite sure what it is; expand social programs for the working class and they won't mind if they can't earn a decent living? Politically, my taxes go up because the big businesses don't want to pay people decent wages?
I don't where the solution is, but I suspect that immigration would be less of a problem with stronger unions.
Stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, better schools, UHC... if life for the lowest level of American workers isn't so bad, then competition from new immigrants willing to work for less is less damaging.
Mmm, not sure that follows. If their life is better, doesn't that increase the incentive of the businesses to get around the pesky OSHA regs by hiring illegals?
There are good reasons to raise the minimum wage, improve schools, get a UHS, but I don't see them helping the immigration problem. Unlike unions, 'cause who cares if the guy is illegal if he can't undersell you.
Has it actually been established that immigration hurts American workers? I thought the evidence was ambiguous, or if anything, negative.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for directing people's attention to this, LizardBreath.
Pdf23ds's hunch is right-enough, if you believe the economists.
As for Cala's question, I do think we ought to give up straitening immigration beyond some national-security minimum, and should refocus our social-spending on those policies that specifically enable mobility---education, but also healthcare; job-tied healthcare insurance strikes me as a serious inhibition to workers' moving.
I hate to post and run, and maybe I will be able to stick around for a little while, but I have an appointment in a few minutes. Thanks again for the attention, though. Everyone click though!
Immigration hurts American workers as part of a package of measures including the destruction of unions, non-enforcement of labor law, a low minimum wage, reduced educational opportunity, reduction of security and benefits, etc. Changing these wouldn't end immigration, but would make it less problematic.
It's always said that immigration doesn't hurt labor, but I just don't believe that. Economists are anti-labor as part of their training. They just now, after 20-30 years shouting the opposite, started to admit that minimum wage laws do more good than harm. I'm pretty sure that all of the studies proving that immigration did labor no harm were fudged all along the line.
With minimum wage laws, at least economists were spouting orthodoxy without data. With immigration, orthodoxy says that wages obviously should go down (supply and demand), so they dig up data saying it doesn't. Seems fishy, not?
Christopher Caldwell makes a pro-immigration case here. He leaves out the fact that slaughterhouse jobs used to be family jobs which Americans wanted to do, but that aggressive union-busting ended that. There are famous cases in Austin, MN, Sioux Falls, S.D., and elsewhere. Increased immigration and worsening jobs went hand in hand as part of a balanced program.
With immigration, orthodoxy says that wages obviously should go down (supply and demand)....
Generally, I share your concern here, but that's only part of what orthodoxy predicts; it also predicts that immigration can have a neutral or boosting effect on wages if the economy receiving immigrants is short of labor.
As for historical data, in the period of peak immigration to the US at around 1900, wages actually did rise, even for the least-skilled class of workers. Though it's quite possible, maybe even likely, that they would have been rising more without immigration.
I tend to think too that efforts to interpose the state between the American people and something they want is not going to work any better here than in the war on drugs.
But the broader point of the Prospect piece is, whatever the merits of the case, there are certain political awkwardnesses to arguing immigration either on race or on class, and we need to reckon with those awkwardnesses.
Economic orthodoxy, as I said, always seems to have an anti-labor angle. There are all kinds of tweaks you can design into a study to slide it in your preferred direction, and for most economists that direction is anti labor and pro immigration (and above all, pro trade). Not lying, just honestly making the best case.
If there's a labor shortage and immigration is not too high, then wages will still go up. But factually, that hasn't happened during the period of increased immigration. Wages are flat. Over at DeLong they have a piece every month or two about this puzzle: the jobless recovery, the failure of trickle-down. It strikes me that there's no mystery at all -- the Bush administration wants to concentrate income and wealth in the highest percentiles, so it doesn't want wage increases. And immigration is part of how they do this.
No one at DeLong has ever responded when I made this point. They just continue to puzzle about the unexplainable mystery.
John -- they do not want to get extremist cooties from engaging you.
One of the complexiities is that immigration can simultaneously be good or neutral for the labor market and okay or just dreadful for the individual worker.
Broadly speaking, I strongly favor immigration. But I always get frustrated by economists' airy assumption that any "stickiness" in the lives of individual native-born workers will just solve itself. It's not that simple, and it can be very hard on people in their 40s and 50s who have been trained for very specific careers, and are now going through the agonizing process of losing their livelihoods and trying to figure out what new work they are suited to do.
Would there be any practical as opposed to political reasons you couldn't stop illegal immigration by penalizing employers who hire them. Spain and America are about the only rich countries with a lot of illegal immigrants.
1. There is a tension between having an open immigration policy and having a comprehensive welfare state. Briefly, if every citizen commands $X in government support (health care, education, etc.) one cannot be simply indifferent to immigration of people who will pay less than $X in taxes. This means, the lower X is, the less one need care about open immigration. This tension seems like it would be exacerbated by an approach like the one suggested by Rauchway, where immigration is made more palatable by raising welfare expenditures.
2. There are those who worry about immigration because of the impact on low income Americans. Then there are those who worry about immigration because they are evil racist people. It would be an error to think these are the only might imagine these are categories. No doubt this is foolish mistake to make, but it seems to be the type of oversimplification that leads to error, and thus worth explicitly rejecting. There may be other costs to immigration that one might be concerned about.
3. Pace John Emerson, it simply is not true that economist now admit that minimum wage laws are beneficial. The topic is intensely controversial, but it remains widely accepted in the economics profession that the minimum wage reduces employment. Perhaps this is a result of pervasive anti-labor biases in the economics profession, but it also follows from general economic logic that price floors and price ceilings lead to inefficient outcomes.
This is new stuff, baa. The field seems to be changing its mind. One reason that they are doing so is that the deduction from first principles has never been strongly supported by data. Another change is that they seemingly now balance the increased-unemployment effect, which is smaller than expected though not nonexistent, against the beneficial effects which are usually not even considered. When I find the documentation I'll post it.
Practically, I think it opens the door to a lot of racism. Right now, employers aren't required to prove that the workers' social security number is true and correctly assigned; they just have to show that the worker gave them one.
Absent a way for business owners to distinguish true SSNs from fakes, a strict fine only counts as reason not to hire anyone Hispanic, legal appearing paperwork or otherwise. And while it's true that other people's racism isn't a reason to stop pursuing social justice, increasing the fines (without doing anything else) simply makes racism a good business decision, which is probably the wrong way we want to structure incentives.
Class-based restrictions, on the other hand, while somewhat less unsavory and better tailored to protecting American workers, have historically been terribly unpopular.
Ironically, my boss is always threatening to replace me with an American worker, precisely because in his view, they are "less unsavory and better tailored".
I've heard that Polish finance experts are much cheaper, more efficient, and more humble than Welsh finance experts. They can't sing four-part-harmony though.
Here's a lot more on minimum wage. The issue isn't exactly decided yet, but my point is that for 20-30 years all you ever heard was dogmatic assertions based on deductions from first principles, but no data.
Whereas, with immigration and wages, the first principles are ignored entirely, and rather inconclusive data from a century ago is pushed forward, while ignoring recent data that seems to say the opposite.
It would be an error to think these are the only might imagine these are categories.
I'm not sure what this sentence means or was intended to mean.
24: Looks to me like total typo meltdown, from context intended to convey; "It would be an error to think these are the only two possible categories."
I tend to concur with Emerson's 23 that there's a disconnect between force with which economists trust a priori economic logic on the minimum wage (increase price --> lower demand) and on immigration (increase supply --> lower price). And I suspect a non-interventionist bias in policy terms might well be an explanation.
It would be an error to think these are the only might imagine these are categories.
Who wrote that? Some idiot? Meant: it would be an error to think these are the only motivations of opposition.
The thing is, and too few people seem to realize this, open immigration and free trade produce (in theory) exactly the same effects on wages and prices. Opening either one gets you to exactly the same place (again, in theory) as opening the other (or both). So you either need to tighten or loosen the two together or your efforts will ultimately be futile -- unless you are looking to effect non-economic changes in either case. Which is why I'm more sympathetic to (though disagree with) those who argue against immigration for cultural reasons than those making economic arguments, unless the latter are also talking about closing our borders to trade. Which is a terrible idea, though at least a consistent position.
American labor gets pinched both by immigration and free trade, but these tend to be discussed as independent issues. As far as that goes, all the other anti-labor developments tend to be discussed as still another, independent issue. But from labor's point of ciew, they're mutually-reinforcing and should all be discussed together.
But the Democrats have moved away from labor's point of view. I think that this was bad government and bad politics. Since approximately 1988 the Democrats have been running away from their base, and this is a disastrous strategy long-term.
The thing is, and too few people seem to realize this, open immigration and free trade produce (in theory) exactly the same effects on wages and prices. Opening either one gets you to exactly the same place (again, in theory) as opening the other (or both).
Not really. This is true from a manufacturing viewpoint, but the American economy is now over 60% services. Most people still prefer their legal services, gardeners and restaurants to be local.
Also, the key with the first-principles argument applying to minimum wage but not to immigration is because immigration increases the number of consumers as well as workers in a given economy. Thus it expands both the supply and demand sides of the labor equation. That's what makes the actual effects so difficult to determine, as they could be positive, negative, or anywhere inbetween.
Also, economists are hardly pulling on outdated data. I could dig up some of the recent working papers if you really want, but the general consensus of the academic research on recent immigration seem to be a zero to eight percent depression in wages for the least educated workers with negligable or positive effects for all other workers and a definite net positive effect for the total economy.
As for the minimum wage, the first-principles argument is pretty clear, but as was mentioned there has been recent research suggesting that the employment effects of raising minimum wages are tiny and dominated by the worker benefits. There are some explanations put forward such as asymmetry of power in labor negotiations (whether labor is a price-taker, etc.) to explain the inelasticity of labor demand at the minimum wage, and I'm inclined to believe them.
Wow, I just realized how damn dry it is to uber-summarize economic research. That really wasn't supposed to sound so terse and school-marmish.
There is a tension between having an open immigration policy and having a comprehensive welfare state.... This tension seems like it would be exacerbated by an approach like the one suggested by Rauchway, where immigration is made more palatable by raising welfare expenditures
True enough, but I didn't actually suggest a comprehesive welfare state; rather, I suggested social spending on areas specifically targeted to maximize the benefits of immigration.
I hold no brief for a "welfare state" or, what is vaguer and worse, "bigger government." I think our political discourses is poorer for pushing "more" or "less" government as realistic good / bad alternative policy mixes. What you need is a policy mix designed to respond to your actual place in the world.
immigration can simultaneously be good or neutral for the labor market and okay or just dreadful for the individual worker.
Yes, this is true, and I think it requires a reasonable person to do moral arithmetic. I shy from arguments that posit immigration as an absolute good or an absolute evil.
John Emerson, does your moral arithmetic lead you to want to bar immigration more-or-less altogether?
slaughterhouse jobs used to be family jobs which Americans wanted to do, but that aggressive union-busting ended that.
That and the iffy meat.
Eric, I'd just like to have an honest argument. I feel I've been dealing with a lot of special pleading both on free trade and on immigration. I've detailed some of my reasons above. As I've said, at DeLong what I've said has been pretty much ignored.
For decades, as I've said, I've been hearing about how the minimum wage does more harm than good. Now suddenly, it turns out that if you look at the data that may not be true.
I've been hearing recently from the same people that neither free trade nor open immigration do workers any harm. In this case, both the recent data and general economic principles seem to contradict that.
The estimates of the negative effects of free trade and immigration have been made mostly by free trade / immigration advocates, if I'm not mistaken. (I count economists as such by training, unless there's reason to believe that they have a labor affiliation).
DeLong talked about a two step plan, where the groups affected negatively by free trade had government amelioration of some sort (retraining,etc.) But the Clinton administration's Republican allies squashed step two while running step one through.
I think that both these issues should be talked about in the context of their contribution to the various sorts of harm impacting labor, and people in general on the bottom half of the income distribution., rather than piecemeal, especially not piecemeal based on ad hoc references to economic abstractions (or their supression) based on convenience.
I'd just like to have an honest argument
John, I entirely agree, and I meant my TAP article to take us a step in that direction. (And my book. I must mention my book, which is all about trying to set new terms for the debate.)
Specifically, I think that we all need to have a hard think about the US's place in the global economy, what it does both for and to us, and to consider our policies in the light of that big picture---of who we are, who we want to be, and how globalization can contribute to or detract from that.
On the subject of immigration and free trade, I observe that, historically, allowing them to run ahead unbuffered generates considerable political resistance to them, such that they eventually get shut down. I therefore think that if we want to realize benefits from immigration and free trade, we ought to find ways to prevent that happening.
Which is what I tried to say in the TAP piece.
I confess I haven't read your DeLong comments. Sorry.
I've heard that Polish finance experts are much cheaper, more efficient, and more humble than Welsh finance experts
you larf, but check out the faculty (particularly the junior faculty) of any second or third tier business school. You will see a *lot* of Central Europeans with engineering degrees. They are practically forcing out the Indians with mathematics degrees who previously did this kind of spadework.
It's a good thing that the Welsh are good at coal mining, or they'd be in trouble.
Not so much spadework, isn't it? I always thought of coal mining as more of a pickaxe problem. But my Welsh family had the sense to emigrate to Queens quite a while back, so I wouldn't know.
I'm starting to come around to thinking that open borders (that is, making immigration a fairly automatic administrative process -- get on a plane and fill out the forms) is the way to go. I don't have a sense of whether this is possible in combination with a strong welfare state, but I do think that having illegal immigrants working without the protection of the labor laws is about the worst possible result, and that's what we've got now. If we can't shut down illegal immigration, I'm starting to think that the only other choice is to make it all legal.
(In other crackpot ideas which are too silly to put in a thread where they might be on topic -- what would happen if the US set up open immigration for Palestinians: anyone now resident in the West Bank or Gaza gets a green card if they want one? We're a big country, and could absorb a couple of million of them, and it might take the pressure off Israel a bit.)
I have friends at both extremes of the immigration issue, and to a degree, both extremes of the free trade issue. A hidden message I got during both debates was "Only a few people no one cares about will be negatively effected".
To me, Republicans can think that way, but Democrats realistically can't, because Democrats are the only representation those people have. But some still do. There's nothing wrong with politicians thinking about political consequences.
I think that a certain proportion of the large pool of non-voters are demoralized Democrats who can't think of any reason to vote Democratic any more.
I'm starting to come around to thinking that open borders (that is, making immigration a fairly automatic administrative process -- get on a plane and fill out the forms) is the way to go. I don't have a sense of whether this is possible in combination with a strong welfare state, but I do think that having illegal immigrants working without the protection of the labor laws is about the worst possible result, and that's what we've got now. If we can't shut down illegal immigration, I'm starting to think that the only other choice is to make it all legal.
This is pretty much my position. Maybe a bit of bureaucracy for background/security checks, and maybe a yearly cap if we find we're getting overwhelmed. (And everybody currently waiting gets in now, rather than having to re-apply.) With valid SSNs and EADs, the tax base will also be legitimately larger. No packing people into tiny basement apartments because they can rent from a good place without fear of being deported.
Seriously, we used to have open immigration, didn't we? And sure as hell my illiterate ancestors didn't have much to offer.
Depending on which of mine you pick, they showed up with either a drinking problem, bipolar disorder, or a crazy dream of making the pork pie the standard snack food of Queens (Note to those not now living in Queens: It didn't work).
Immigration to the US was more or less completely open until 1882 (Chinese Exclusion Act). Quotas for Old World countries were instituted in 1921. New World immigration wasn't restricted until 1965.
(Source.)
Yeah. I'm always suspicious of arguments assuming that things are just fundamentally different now, that don't actually make the argument. If unrestricted immigration wasn't a nightmare in the past, who's to say that it would be unworkable now?
>If unrestricted immigration wasn't a nightmare in the past, who's to say that it would be unworkable now?
Candidates include:
1. because the costs of transportation have dramatically decreased --> unrestricted immigration is going to lead to much higher immigration than previously in relative and absolute terms
2. because we spent more money on services per citizen than we have in the past --> the potential impact of immigration on public spending is greater
3. because an increase in direct democracy and communications technology makes it easier for cohesive groups to lobby for political change --> the potential for immigration to affect political and cultural change is greater
Those are all possible arguments (although I doubt that the cost of transportation can be shown to have had much of an effect. While travelling steerage was more expensive than buying a plane ticket, it doesn't seem to have been something that kept people from immigrating.) I'm just saying that they have to be made and supported -- unrestricted immigration isn't self-evidently something that can't possibly work, given that it worked fine for centuries.
Mine just showed up poor and French, poor and Welsh, poor and German, or poor and Sicilian. They were all here by 1908 as far as I know.
1. because the costs of transportation have dramatically decreased --> unrestricted immigration is going to lead to much higher immigration than previously in relative and absolute terms
2. because we spent more money on services per citizen than we have in the past --> the potential impact of immigration on public spending is greater
Don't these two offset each other? We spend more on safety nets, true. But that's setting up the problem wrong. The choice isn't between no immigrants or very limited immigration and unlimited immigration, it's between massive amounts of illegal immigration (and the associated tax problems and burdens) and legalizing much of that. Surely legalizing them (and making them more taxable) will offset some of that.
3. because an increase in direct democracy and communications technology makes it easier for cohesive groups to lobby for political change --> the potential for immigration to affect political and cultural change is greater
First off, legal immigration isn't automatic or immediate citizenship. Second, is there evidence that cohesion among immigrant groups is a huge problem now, or one that would give recent immigrants an unfair voice? (Shorter me: boring white boys can use the internet, too.) I'd need to see numbers on this, but if there's a delay in time to become a citizen, that will lead to some cultural assimilation. Plus, I'm not sure immigrants as a group vote for one party over another, but maybe it's just because I know too many libertarian shop owners. (Shorter me: relax, they probably won't all vote Democrat.)
I'm reluctantly with baa on this one. I suspect completely open immigration would be really, really bad, all the way around. Huge influxes, massive dislocations, and the US would end up racing its neighbors to the bottom of welfare provisions.
Shorter me: relax, they probably won't all vote Democrat.
I think they actually do skew heavily towards the Democrats, initially. But I could be misremembering that.
It's been true in the past, and will probably be true as long as the Republican party line (though not every Republican) is 'afeared of dark skin', but nothing's static on that. And coalitions do break down over time; can the Democrats rely on the Catholic vote these days?
Completely open might be nuts; but what if it were just a really high number of open-lottery type visas a year, that didn't discriminate by class or education level. (We can still have all the discriminatory ones, too, so we can keep stealing scientists and doctors.) Or maybe just open for this continent. It's just clear that the present system isn't doing much except not controlling illegal information and manning the border isn't going to work.
information should be immigration. Wow, not even really homophones in text. Huzzah.
This isn't really a partisan left vs. right argument. I just think it's obvious that immigration now vs. immigration in 1880 is a different proposition. So much so that the analogy becomes almost without value.
I am enormously emotionally pro-immigrant -- heck, I even got choked up when Manny Ramirez ran out to left field with a US flag. Given how important -- and difficult -- immigration policy is, it's just bad to make decisions on the basis of how well the policy worked a century ago.
I, OTOH, am anti-immigration, because I want to send baa back to the old country. (Actually, I'm pro-immigration, but I've lived in places where there have been significant illegal immigration populations, and I can see that there are issues there that seem silly or overblown to people (like me) who don't face the brunt of them. I more or less like our present policy--pretend we're really going to be tough on immigration from now on, let illegals flow in at a moderate rate, then naturalize them all in ten years.)
See, I think the fact that it worked fine a century ago is, at the very least, some information about whether it is possible for a country to function with open borders. Not conclusive information -- I agree that all sorts of things have changed -- but some information, and information that is often ignored.
"Worked" is a relative term. It's probably not wise to see Gangs of New York as the definitive description of the immigrant communities in NYC in the past, but I think we should do it anyway.
I'd say it "worked" in the sense that it created the country we live in today, which I'd say is a pretty good outcome.
significant illegal immigration populations
I'm pretty convinced that a large part of the problems due to illegal immigration is due to their illegality -- that they can unfairly compete with legal workers by being able to enforceably market themselves as desperate and outside the protection of the laws. Once that's removed, and employers and landlords know that recent immigrants are just as able to drop a dime on them as anyone else is, I doubt that they'd be significantly bad neighbors.
54: I think that would be more applicable if we were saying that we want to replicate today's culture 100 years from now. The problem is that people today want to replicate today's culture (or better) tomorrow.
55: I don't think necessarily has anything to do with whether they're bad neighbors, or what have you. I just think that huge inflows of people are often difficult to deal with. You can draw some sort of analogy to refugees from Katrina, or even refugee populations elsewhere.
I'm for immigration like I'm for gravity: seems to have its ups and downs but anyway there's not one iota of a thing you can do to affect it. I have heard it said, and I believe it's
accurate, that the migration across the Mexico/Southwest U.S. borders is the largest movement in recorded human history. Short of correcting the income disparit(ies) between the United States and Mexico/South America, what can any restriction on immigration do except to make it more dangerous?
This isn't really a partisan left vs. right argument.
Yes, it is. No one would worry about your 3) if they thought that the effect of immigration would be very active new citizens that were non-partisan, or balanced each other out.
I just think it's obvious that immigration now vs. immigration in 1880 is a different proposition.
It's a good thing that no one's argument rested solely on it working in 1880!
What I'm seeing is lots of complicated proposals and maybe-we-can-get-the-unicorns-to-defend-the-border hopes, and I think that given the choice doesn't seem to be no immigrants versus lots of immigrants, but lots of illegal immigrants versus lots of immigrants.
I don't think it's possible to keep out people who want to be here if they're already on this continent. We can't afford to militarize the border. Huge inflows of people are difficult to deal with and we already have huge inflows of people. Might as well be documented.
58: That seems roughly like the argument for legalizing drugs. I'm not so sure there wouldn't be an increase in the amount of drug use, and that it wouldn't be a problem. Same with immigration. I'm more willing to take the risk on drugs.
So, I think one can believe an influx of new citizens with different values will have bad effects, even without cashing those "bad effects" out in partisan, left vs. right terms. For example, it would be a bad thing if american police departments started behaving more like south american police departments. That's not a left vs. right issue.
Also, it doesn't seem correct that increasing enforcement of immigration law just is de facto impossible. It would be fairly easy to penalize employers a lot more than we do now, for instance. That would have an immediate and powerful effect.
You hear this "different values" stuff a lot, but it's never clear to me just what the problem is supposed to be, given that the people we're talking about (Mexicans, overwhelmingly) come from a broadly Christian European cultural background much like ours and consequently tend to have similar values. I can see in the abstract how there might be an issue if there were a threat of massive migration from some place with a very different culture whose values were incompatible with ours, but in the current context that's just not the case.
A friend of mine puts it this way: Does America have different institutions than Mexico because of it's latitude? The answer, surely, is no. If we stipulate e.g., the police force of San Antonio less corrupt than the police force of Mexico City, it isn't because of distance from the equator. It's in large part due to a whole series of shared cultural practices/the luck of history that make the US a different country than Mexico.
Now, I happen to believe in the power of American institutions to assimilate people with different values. My ancestors -- hailing from an undemocratic and illiberal state -- were fairly rapidly transformed into people who fit comfortably in the American system. Nonetheless, the power of American institutions is not absolute -- their capacity to assimilate newcomers will at some point be saturated. Maybe this is fine. But it seems like a real consequence of *unlimited* immigration, as some have been advocating here.
I see no reason that our system couldn't absorb all the immigrants who would come in even if immigration were unlimited. But this may just be a difference of opinion.
their capacity to assimilate newcomers will at some point be saturated
This does not seem obviously true to me. By "at some point" do you mean for some rate of influx of newcomers, or after assimilating some quantity of newcomers?
I haven't read this thread at all, but I'm sure baa is right.
Maybe you should read the thread then.
I really, really don't like the woolgathering 'gee, wonder why Mexico is so bad off' argument, because too often it's wink-wink-nudge-nudge-they're-bad-seeds-you-see when it's used as an argument to say that there's something bad in the water that makes people put up with corruption and it won't stop once they move here.
baa, I know you're smarter than that, and I don't intend to tar you with the same brush here, but that argument isn't something I've heard from non-racist people; it's usually followed up with a 'THEY can't handle it.' (Oddly, they don't argue that the Chinese immigrants can't handle democracy.)
Nonetheless, the power of American institutions is not absolute -- their capacity to assimilate newcomers will at some point be saturated. Maybe this is fine. But it seems like a real consequence of *unlimited* immigration, as some have been advocating here.
I've mentioned a few times that I'm okay with limits, just not limits that are like 'No Mexicans' or 'No uneducated foreigners' when it's clear that the labor demand isn't for lawyers and doctors.
I guess I just remember reading about how those crazy drunken Irish Catholics would ruin, ruin! America for the good Protestant boys that God intended to inherit the earth, and it turned out that the U.S. didn't turn Papist, poor, and potato-befamined. More Catholic, sure, and Kennedy didn't even sell us to the Pope.
I see no reason that our system couldn't absorb all the immigrants who would come in even if immigration were unlimited.
This strikes me as madness. Corruption, and a culture of corruption, where subverting the rules is a prized and celebrated skill, is common in a lot of countries, and it does seem obvious that if you let in a lot of people who don't share a sense of civic community, you're going to have problems. I have no idea what the critical mass of corruption is, but I'm pretty damn sure that it exists. There are other reasons, but I just got a phone call...
Yeah, because, you know, there's never ever been any corruption in this country...
There's no winking and nudging. Mexico's political institutions are much worse than those in the US. China's political institutions are worse than those in the US.
I don't want US institutions to become more like those in Mexico and China. Nor, I bet, do you. Now, it just may be that US institutions are so strong that no degree of immigration will alter them. This seems to me unlikely. And I say this as someone who is very much pro immigration. It's just that so many people are Dr. Pangloss on this topic. Questions we ought to be asking include:
1. What is the *point* of immigration? What is the purpose(s) we, as Americans, seek to achieve by accepting immigrants, and naturalizing immigrants as citizens.
2. Is there a ceiling number of immigrants the US would want to accept in a given year? Is there a floor? A target number?
3. Who should get in? Should we discriminate by proximity? (should bordering countries get a preference or a disfavor)
4. Should we try to balance by country of origin?
5. Should we give an advantage to immigrants with particular education or skills?
Yeah, what ogged said. Bad decisions get made when people don't acknowledge the costs of policies they favor. That seems like a risk in spades on immigration right now.
62 is pure speculation, and I don't even see what it's based on. Mexico's had a one-party political system for ages, and not much of a middle class; those are the result of politics, not cultural difference. Culturally, Mexicans are largely family-oriented, hard-working, incredibly nice people. Why we wouldn't want more people like that here is completely beyond me.
I'm not denying that there are costs to immigration, I just think the benefits hugely outweigh them. And besides, as several people have pointed out, the issue here isn't whether or not to admit immigrants but whether those immigrants should be legal or illegal.
It's speculation that Mexico has worse insitutions than the US?
I cede ground to no one in my affection for immigrants of all kinds, seriously. But let's not make this the last word on American policy about race, ok?
It's speculation that Mexican immigration would transfer Mexican institutions unchanged into the US. I mean, how much immigration are you picturing? Do you think the entire population of Mexico would come up here?
I don't understand why baa's point is so hard to accept, at least as regards there being a maximum number per year of immigrants. We've all bitched about Red State values, and how they don't seem easily compatible with ours in certain areas. If enough Red Staters moved into my state, it would be a Red State. And the values that make it special would change. And that would suck.
I think people get hung up because it sounds like we're saying that Mexicans and foreigners are naturally corrupt.
1. To have more people and workers. To have people and workers who are invested in the country and working towards assimilating into it, rather than here just trying to sneak in to make a buck.
1a. There is a need for workers.
2. Let's say. Hmm. 11 million illegals, right? About 500,000 per year since 1986, then? Everyone's police department still refusing to accept bribes here? People still managing to survive? Constitution still in English? Okay then. Let's say a ceiling of 500,000. Divide it up by percentages of country of origin. Figure, judging on the best processing times of visas now, at least six months, probably closer to a year's wait.
3. Yes, we should discriminate by proximity; easier to keep people out of airports than through deserts.
4. Haven't thought about that as much. But the current amount of immigration, again, hasn't overthrown democracy, so let's hold steady at those levels. Maybe some more visas for the Phillipines.
5. Absolutely. We are better off with smart people coming here rather than going somewhere else.
It's still going to be a long time till citizenship and voting; none of the changes that turn us into Beijing would happen overnight.
Yeah, I'm just not thinking that the new influx of immigrants would be running things, to the point of importing foreign institutions we don't like, before they assimilated. The Irish didn't own the NYC police department until they'd been here for a while.
74: It's speculation that institutional/political differences reflect cultural factors that would transfer to a different setting, rather than that the cultural factors stem from political/instituional reality. In an entrenched single-party political system with a weak middle class, of *course* you're going to have corruption; the civil sector is going to be weak as hell, and it won't pay enough for people to live on. But I don't see any grounds for thinking that that transfers over when Mexicans immigrate to the US. I could be completely wrong, but it's not my sense that the large numbers of Mexican immigrants in the southwest have had that effect.
I know you're not actually saying that Mexicans are naturally corrupt, but yes, it does sound like that's what you're saying. And yes, large numbers of people moving into an area will have an effect on the culture of that area, but we've already got massive numbers of Mexicans moving into large parts of the country, even places that haven't had large-scale immigration before. Have those places had their values massively warped? Doesn't look like it to me.
I think people get hung up because it sounds like we're saying that Mexicans and foreigners are naturally corrupt.
Look, I'm trying really hard not to read it that way, but it's not as though you get a visa one day and vote the next to change the society. What have the political changes been in the areas with high amounts of illegal immigrants? Changes that aren't a result of the illegality, mind.
I also really wonder. Let's imagine open immigration to Mexico and Central America. Most undocumented workers from there don't bring their families. Partly this is probably because of the difficulty of immigrating illegally, but a lot of it seems to be (from what I've read) not wanting to disrupt extended family / social networks. One reason family members end up coming north as well is because the undocumented workers can't go back and forth easily, so they end up staying. It seems quite plausible to me that an open immigration system wouldn't result in a huge influx of permanent new residents, but would just make labor more mobile (and hopefully seriously reduce the way it's exploited).
Wasn't that a fairly common pattern for late 19th early 20th C Italian immigrants?
Gaah!
1. If we have totally open immigration, how many people will come? I say a huge number, and that's the problem. I can't imagine why people think the amount would stay flat.
2. Will local cultures change with influxes of new people? Of course. They don't even have to increase corruption for serious problems to arise. People don't like having their lives changed by "outsiders." Large waves of immigrants count as outsiders. Welcome to nativist unrest. This is bad, even if the immigrants are good.
3. Specific countries -- pass. I think we're pretty bad at sorting people by ability, decency, etc., generally, and wouldn't want to institutionalize the process.
Timbot's 1 and 2 are right on. Half of Tehran would be here tomorrow if we had open immigration. Though I love my fucking compatriots, this would not be a good result. I imagine there are other countries of which this is true.
Anyway, open immigratioin just isn't going to happen. What to do about Mexican and Central American immigration is the more pressing concern. Would a "tamale recipe" test avoid the racist/classist dilemma?