Friends or Strangers
McGurn, William
Tucked away on the second floor of T the National Press Building in Washington is PJ's, a sandwich shop with standard fare, average prices, and spartan decor. Yet there is invariably a big crowd...
...This $6 billion figure is one Borjas returns to often when he speaks of the costs of U.S...
...But he fuzzes his answer...
...As it is, alas, he buries himself in a mound of figures, raising his head for that occasional flash of insight...
...Since 1965 our system has been stacked in favor of family reunification, the flip side being that it is next to impossible for someone who is simply talented or a hard worker to get in, no matter how ambitious or qualified...
...Far better to let business set what skills they need by letting them choose who enters, even using the lure of a U.S...
...Borjas please step forward...
...would have incurred had it admitted immigrants other than those it did admit bolsters the misimpression left with the reader...
...A professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Borjas is hailed on the dust jacket as "this William McGurn is the Washington bureau chief of National Review...
...mmigration is inherently dis1 criminatory," says Borjas toward the end of his book, and he marshals evidence to highlight the absurdities of U.S...
...passport to attract talent from around the globe...
...True enough, the level of schooling among immigrants has dropped, and it is from this that the author infers a drop in skills given that, in general, average earnings increase for every year of schooling...
...For example, a large number of Hong Kong residents, apprehensive of the changes that are bound to occur when Hong Kong becomes part of the People's Republic of China in 1997, recently entered the immigration market...
...M ost of the awkwardness in the book arises from Borjas's obsession with statistics...
...Not a good start...
...Yet elsewhere in the book he concludes that "the weight of the empirical evidence thus suggests that the new immigrants impose costs on the American economy...
...The existing evidence .. . indicates that the entry of relatively unskilled workers in the late 1970s (as compared to the early 1960s) led to a direct reduction of at least $6 billion in national income and to an indeterminate change in the real income of natives...
...So much for the bad...
...But no amount of refinement can give us a point system worth adopting, for the simple reason that the government would still be making decisions best left to the market...
...He FRIENDS OR STRANGERS: THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRANTS ON THE U.S...
...But again he extrapolates too far...
...Kwan has a loyal clientele of people who appreciate a merchant oriented toward service, something that stands out all the more when set against the indifference and sloth encountered at so many of the other, American-run food stores on the same floor...
...At a time when Washington is worried about America's competitive edge, it is astounding that we lag far behind other countries in this area...
...That Borjas does not include a comparative figure on the costs the U.S...
...Without doubt statistics are critical, but they are not the whole story and, as Disraeli made clear, frequently cloud the real story...
...Take the author's analysis of emigration from Communist countries...
...An even more serious weakness is his ambiguous use of the word "cost...
...Had the Senator realized that what Borjas is talking about is relative benefits rather than actual costs, he might not have been so generous with his praise...
...When most people think of a cost, they think of an actual cost, i.e., some net deduction from their actual earnings...
...Will the real Dr...
...The upshot is that Mr...
...Countries such as Australia and Canada—the two other preferred destinations for the world's would-be immigrants—have tried to get at theproblem through a point system based on an applicant's age, education, English proficiency, and so on...
...economy...
...Had Borjas mined this vein a bit more arduously, there might have been enough here to justify the dust-jacket claims...
...No doubt this confusion accounts for the plug on the back cover from the country's leading foe of immigration, Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wy...
...Early on he stoutly notes that "the presumption that immigrants have an adverse impact on the labor market continues to be the main justification for policies designed to restrict the size and composition of immigrant flows into the United States...
...Thisis iffy on the face of it, given that it assumes that proportions hold constant over lifetimes...
...More than that, he helps explode most of the canards about immigrants, not least the scaremongering about both the size and impact of illegal immigration...
...five days a week...
...Kwan came here from Korea in 1981, and has been at his post in the press building for about three years now from 6:30 a.m...
...The first is forgivable hype, but the second is flatly untrue: Julian Simon's The Economic Consequences of Immigration beat Borjas to the punch last year...
...It does not occur to our calculator that where people on the bottom don't leave Communist countries it's because they can't get out...
...Here is where Borjas's opportunity costs, properly understood, are crucial to any understanding of how much better off we could be: The inflexibility of current policy, and the missed opportunities implied by this inflexibility, is costly...
...Borjas's schtick is this: the quality (i.e., skills) of America's most recent immigrants has been declining...
...In fact, Borjas's wording is so deliberately awkward that it raises suspicions about his own intentions...
...Borjas notes these countries haven't done much better than we have, because systems based on "observable demographic characteristics" are "imperfect predictors of skills and prosperity...
...Perhaps the best thing he brings to this work is the appreciation that immigration is a market...
...ECONOMY George J. Borjas/Basic Books/288 pp...
...Unskilled workers, he asserts, stay put in Communist countries, the reason being that they "have the least incentive to migrate because they gain most from the revolution...
...These insights in turn are diluted by the curious way Borjas presents them: here asserting that there's no evidence that immigrants have hurt the economy, there suggesting that they are dragging us down...
...But Borjas pushes this to questionable limits by putting an exact price on it...
...When you cut through the mumbo-jumbo you find Borjas arguing that there is not "a single shred of evidence that immigrants have a sizable adverse impact on the earnings and employment opportunities of natives in the U.S...
...The existence and persistence of a black market for immigration implies that all parties participating in these exchanges benefit from these voluntary transactions," he says...
...Even Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping no longer pretend that those on the bottom of their respective societies have benefited from the imposition of Communism...
...Yet he defends their efforts as better than nothing, implying that the ultimate solution would be a point system refined by more economic studies...
...Economy...
...indeed, the thrust of the work is how to improve our advantages in that market rather than how to cut off the flow...
...The inflexible immigration policy of the United States, combined with the very long queues for the scarce skills-based visas, implies that these motivated and prosperous persons have little chance of being admitted here...
...The problem is that nowhere does the author tell us exactly how he calculated this $6 billion annual loss, although it appears that he came up with an equation based on education levels and differentials in earnings...
...More important, it does not say what it first looks like he's saying, that recent immigrants have been a net drain on the U.S...
...This sort of thing doesn't show up in the statistics, which helps explain why it is absent from George J. Borjas's Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the US...
...And they can lead those who don't look up from their equations into some blinding idiocies...
...policy over the past quarter-century...
...As an exercise it might be a handy tool, but Borjas presents it as an irrefutable fact that ends the story...
...Unfortunately, Borjas's remedies are not nearly as compelling as his diagnosis...
...to 6:30 p.m...
...families could continue to sponsor people, but with user fees...
...As Borjas suggests, the fact of illegal immigration contains a revealing message about immigration itself...
...Yet there is invariably a big crowd here, because PJ's offers the best service in the building...
...The problem with statistics is that they fix relationships into something static and predictable, and thus impossible to square with the dynamic of a market economy...
...where they can—Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba—they leave in droves, which is why we had something called the Berlin Wall...
...immigration policy...
...Australia and Canada quickly began to sell visas to those residents who have substantial financial resources and who are willing to invest part of these resources in the host countries...
...country's leading authority on immigration," and the book itself as "the first authoritative account of the role immigrants play in the economy...
...But the cost Borjas is talking about when he cites the $6 billion in lost earnings is an opportunity cost, the additional wealth that might have been generated by a more talented cohort of immigrants...
...Certainly the government might attach some important provisos to new immigrants—no welfare eligibility for a decade, say—but the main economic improvement would be that we would finally be getting the people American employers want to hire and have a world labor market to draw from...
...That makes it easy for him to be quoted on both sides of the aisle —not because of any unbiased authority but because he's just obscure enough for people to read into it what they want...
...Customers will even wait in line, because they know that no matter how long it is they will be out of the store in under five minutes, and the reason for that is Kwan Jong-hwa...
...With the Immigration and Naturalization Service devoting more than 80 percent of its visa allotments to family reunification, the message Uncle Sam sends is that if you don't have that sister in Pittsburgh, don't bother applying...
...22.95 William McGurn 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 begins by pointing out, correctly, that in the wake of Communist revolutions there is usually an immediate outflow of talent, for the obvious reason that these are the same people who tend to be lined up against the wall when Communists take over...
...The good news is that when you finally get down to studying Borjas's findings carefully, he's pretty much on target...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
