Illegal Aliens: Visitors from the Third World
Abrams, Elliott
Elliott Abrams ILLEGAL ALIENS VISITORS FROM THE THIRD WORLD The non-one hundred percent Americans. Nothing has received so much comment with so little thought as the Illegal Alien Crisis. John...
...1. Labor migration is an international phenomenon...
...First, the electric fence, the mass roundup of illegal aliens, the arrest of employers who have hired them-such methods would mark a change in the way we conceive of and run our country, including a great increase in the federal police presence...
...Herewith, six propositions, aimed at reducing the confusion...
...It means that the fear of creating a permanent, enormous class of illegal residents is probably unwarranted...
...and from 1942 to 1964 under the "bracero" program of temporary work permits, which reached 400,000 workers annually in its later years...
...But even assuming that they take more jobs than they create, are these jobs that Americans would otherwise take...
...In recent years Mexico, guided by an import-substitution theory rather than an export-production theory, has invested in capital-intensive sectors...
...Surveys show that the great majority of illegal aliens receive what their legal co-workers do for the same jobs...
...has not been the passive recipient of foreign labor, but its active recruiter...
...It is neither alarming nor even faintly surprising that our poor neighbors wish to come work in our richer domain...
...Moreover, the U.S...
...All other matters, like the balance of payments between the two countries or the U.S...
...Perhaps what is meant is that he is receiving less than the typical wage an American would get for the same work...
...Unlike the Poles or Irish or Italians, these Mexican immigrants are not, for the most part, settlers...
...If we throw them out there will be no more unemployment (now just under six million...
...4. There are not ten million illegal aliens in America, and not all the aliens are Mexicans...
...The sector of the economy in which the illegal immigrant works has some bearing on this: In recent years nearly half of those working in agriculture were paid less than the minimum wage, as opposed to less than a quarter of those working in service industries, commerce, or construction...
...The answer is not obvious, but in Los Angeles and San Diego studies found that when a group of illegal immigrants in low-pay, low-prestige hotel and service jobs were deported, their jobs were taken almost entirely by commuter workers from Mexico, not Americans...
...Clearly, if there are several million illegal immigrants here, their renting, shopping, eating, and so forth create jobs...
...It means-as most students of the subject have been saying for some time-that we must reconsider illegal entry figures, for these may count the same people over and over again...
...When the waves of Irish immigration began in the 1840s, the cry went up that there were not enough jobs to go around...
...In a sense, this is not surprising, for who would think that the availability of welfare and unemployment compensation deters no one from working...
...But our having recruited them does remove some of the piety from the arguments of nativists...
...Will it stop or slow down naturally...
...On the whole, illegal aliens pay more in taxes than they get back...
...throughout 1977...
...These six propositions suggest what needs to be done about illegal aliens: nothing...
...The Post conducts interviews in hotel kitchens...
...And talk funny...
...Second, success-keeping all those new illegal aliens out and sending the others back home-would risk disaster...
...economic history is, in a sense, a history of immigration...
...2. Labor migration has long been part of our history and beneficial to the United States...
...Sometimes a discrete event leads the migrant to go north: A truck is destroyed in an accident, a house burns down, a crop fails, a flood strikes, and cash is needed...
...Moreover, the percentage of illegal aliens receiving less than the minimum wage has declined from about a third in 1954 to just over a quarter in recent years, according to Wayne Cornelius of MIT...
...But it is worth noting that agricultural wages in Mexico are $10 to $15 per week, making even sub-minimum American wages a great improvement...
...government studies have shown, not surprisingly, that income and social security taxes are typically withheld from an illegal alien's paycheck...
...When considering immigration from such lands as the Dominican Republic, we must remember that, along with wages being generally as low as those in Mexico, no oil bonanza holds out even the dream of quick economic development: Poverty seems likely to be the general condition for decades to come, and for an industrious man or woman immigration will remain an attractive way of combating it...
...It is not possible, of course, to know precisely how many illegal aliens there are in America...
...Labor migration is not a modern menace, but a familiar effort of men and women to improve their lot in life...
...George Meany unites with the zealots of ZPG...
...John Lindsay comes out of retirement to babble about "massive roundups...
...Moreover, labor migration is commonplace within all but the richest countries, as rural workers move from farms to cities...
...immigration quotas were scandalously racist) and on economic fears (aliens would impoverish American workers by flooding the labor market at starvation levels...
...Bigotry, stupidity, nativism, and demagogy have a long history with respect to immigration...
...And even if more general efforts to slow the birth rate and increase economic growth prove successful, they are more likely to bear fruit in the 1990s than in the 1980s...
...labor market structure, pale by comparison...
...After the great wave of immigration prior to World War I, the Golden Door swung closed to all but Northern Europeans...
...Senators warn...
...Perhaps we, like the countries in Western Europe, should accept the idea that in a rich industrialized nation with a highly diversified economy there will always remain some very unattractive jobs to be done, and that immigrants from poorer countries will typically do them...
...Only ours is unregulated, and the workers are called undocumented aliens...
...The point about aliens is They Don't Vote...
...Immigration Elliott Abrams practices law in Washington and writes frequently for The American Spectator...
...It undercuts many claims about the "crisis" we face...
...As Commissioner of Immigration Leo-nel Castillo recently said, "The United States is experiencing the world's largest temporary worker program, larger even than the guest worker programs of Switzerland, France, Holland and Germany...
...And especially from working at such low-pay and unpleasant jobs as busboy or dishwasher...
...And increase our population...
...Often a sojourn in the United States is deeply embedded in the traditional economic life of a village, having been part of the pattern of family life for three or four generations...
...Do we then face the growth of a population of illegal aliens which will mushroom indefinitely...
...Labor migration can be seen as a "problem" whose "solution" we must seek, or it can be seen as a "phenomenon'' which should be "understood...
...But we have a 1,900-mile border with Mexico, and this unique First World-Third World frontier makes it impossible to stop illegal immigration by any simple or cheap method...
...When Mexican workers were needed, they were sought out...
...each year to join their countrymen...
...But this is not true...
...The rest come primarily from other Caribbean and Latin American countries whose proximity facilitates travel to the United States...
...Indeed, one may argue that the only truly important matter involved in the entire illegal alien discussion is our relations with Mexico, and the only real risk is that these will suffer...
...It means that the growth of the illegal population will be much slower than has often been suggested...
...It is often said that they are "exploited,'' but in whose eyes ? A Mexican farmer who increases his daily pay tenfold by becoming a New York waiter or busboy or auto repairman does not feel exploited, one may presume...
...benefits the alien, and us...
...Thus, to portray immigration, especially Mexican immigration, as a novelty and a menace is particularly unfair...
...They are labor migrants, here to earn money they can't earn at home-where their family stays...
...How is this explained, this sea of bigotry and nonsense about immigrants and immigration...
...in the United States it was $6,995...
...Of these, a bit under two-thirds are thought to be Mexican...
...If not, should it be halted by the Immigration Service at any price...
...3. Illegal immigration is unstoppable...
...The main argument against these immigrants-and it is one heard before in our history-is that they take our jobs...
...Even putting aside cost and practicability, there are two good reasons not to...
...Will hundreds of thousands enter the U.S...
...And they commit crimes...
...What is the nature of this "transient immigration...
...Immigration policy was based on racial prejudice (Asians, for example, were simply excluded for a time, and until 1965 U.S...
...We may be under no moral obligation to permit Mexican workers to enter now simply because we recruited them in the past...
...Information like this may not describe the problem in some cities, such as Los Angeles, but it is important nonetheless...
...The President was moved in 1977 to devise a plan which, thank God, disappeared exactly one day after it was announced...
...It would be startling were peasants in Mexico, where an agricultural worker's wages may be as low as $1.50 per day, not attracted north to work...
...As a result, lies and inaccuracies go unrefined and downright foolishness goes unrebuked...
...With an immigrant able to work in the United States for perhaps ten times the Mexican wage, the incentive for coming is clear...
...In a sense this practice began with slavery, and was followed by other, less invidious, efforts to import foreign labor: for example, the hiring of gangs of Chinese railroad workers...
...Whatever the reason, the worker's goal is to achieve a better life for himself and his family in Mexico...
...Nor should it be thought that Mexico's oil bonanza will soon change this: While the national income will rise, the average wage may not...
...The facts are "well-known...
...The fact is that the illegal alien problem is not unprecedented, not unpredictable, and -I will argue-not serious...
...There are at least ten million illegal aliens in America...
...Samuel Gompers denounced immigration with his customary vigor...
...By contrast, studies show they make little use of welfare and unemployment insurance, or even of hospitals and schools...
...And it means, ironically, that efforts at closing the border with Mexico may be counterproductive, for nothing is so likely to lead illegal aliens to stay here as the fear that, should they go home, they'll never be able to get back in again...
...They don't pay taxes, anyway, but they get sick and they go on welfare, so they cost us billions...
...Mexico City has grown from six and a half million in I960 to thirteen and a half million today, for example, and in those years Manila grew from two and a half million to seven million...
...Why not, then, take whatever steps are needed to seal the border more effectively...
...Among Mexicans, the largest group of illegal aliens, very few wish to remain in the United States permanently...
...This information is crucial...
...It happens, of course, all over Europe: In 1977 there were 1.5 million foreign workers in France, 500,000 in Switzerland, and 1.9 million in Germany...
...We are not about to be swamped, for one well-documented reason that is often overlooked...
...5. Most illegal immigrants are transients...
...A job in America is but a temporary means to this end...
...It is simply wrong to assume that all illegal aliens come here to stay...
...What, then, is the problem with having them...
...One can persuasively argue that typically-though of course not universally-illegal alien workers take jobs Americans do not want...
...Immigration Commissioner Castillo now says, "We estimate there are three to five million people in the United States who are here illegally...
...Probably the most sensible estimate, put forward by demographer Charles Keely,* is four million...
...and a Washington Post article of April 15, 1979, suggested that illegal aliens may be contributing as much as $500 million a year to the hard-pressed Social Security system...
...The underlying assumption-that the economy was static-was ridiculous, yet it still informs the debate today, as if the presence of millions of workers created no jobs...
...Counting the Uncountable," Population and Development Review, December 1977...
...Although much of the discussion is hopelessly muddled, carried on without any sense of international economics or history, illegal immigration can easily be understood...
...The Times does a series...
...And in Mexico, where the unemployment rate is estimated at six percent, the underemployment rate is 49.3 percent...
...actively recruited Mexican labor: in the 1880s and 1890s under specially lenient provisions of the immigration laws...
...They take Americans' jobs" is a slogan, not an analysis...
...A 1977 survey by a sociologist at the Colegio de Mexico found that an illegal immigrant's average length of stay was but five and a half months, and that only 13.7 percent of all illegal aliens had stayed in the U.S...
...Politicians will say, and sometimes do, anything about them because there are virtually no rewards for defending them...
...How does one prove or disprove this...
...After taking half of Mexico in war, the U.S...
...Will five million become ten in a few years...
...6. There is little evidence that illegal aliens hurt America and much evidence that they help it...
...Likewise Japan...
...Illegal immigration to England can be controlled rather easily...
...Easily...
...At a time of high unemployment, it is said, this is outrageous, and it must be stopped...
...And how hard should we fight to keep these jobs ail-American anyway...
...Congressmen shout...
...Eliminating this "pressure valve'' for Mexico would threaten its economic, and thus political, stability, which would hardly serve our national security interests or help along our efforts to share in Mexico's oil and gas...
...To the extent that we may choose any characterization we wish, we would do well to choose "phenomenon" and stop worrying about what to do when we don't know what to do, can't do much even if we choose to, and aren't sure whether, in the end, it might not hurt us more than it helps us...
...Although several labor-intensive pilot programs are underway, including investments in agriculture and small-scale industry, Mexico will not soon absorb its pool of excess labor...
...In 1976 per capita income in Mexico was $1,130...
...What is so attractive about a crusade which aims at securing these jobs for disadvantaged Americans, like blacks or Chicanos or Puerto Ricans, who are now emerging from such jobs after years of struggle...
...And, in view of our declining population growth and predicted labor shortages, we should be reminded that importing labor has long been profitable to many countries, including our own...
...The much higher figures, which have occasionally been used by federal officials, strain credibility, and sometimes have been pure guesswork...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
