THE NEW IMMIGRATION: AN EXCHANGE

...History appears to teach us that when it is asserted that immigration is a problem, groups learn to hate...

...The current migration from Latin America and the Caribbean has been produced by the exhaustion of that labor reserve and the resistance that the urban black labor force, increasingly dominated in the 1960s by children born in the North, has shown to their parents' jobs...

...Here the left makes an intellectual error that can be explained, though not justified, by the history we remember...

...Although we removed such quotas from the legislation in 1966, they remain the reality of current immigration policy, imposed through administrative practice...

...II: Impact on the Labor Market...

...The industrial union movement was extremely successful in changing many of the job characteristics, raising their social status, and introducing job security and systematic promotion patterns...

...We must consider more than individuals wishing to solve their problems by change of residence...

...I argue that, while there will be refinements and shifts in emphasis regarding the case for limits on population growth, the case is becoming persuasive for a growing number of Americans...

...The process is gradual, but it is hard to see its ultimate limits...

...Some of the documented migration is also temporary and a lot of it (for Mexicans, some say as much as 70 percent) consists of undocumented entrants who are regularizing their status...

...This is brilliantly clarified in the recent study Manpower and Immigration Policies in the U.S...

...343 market to attract a fresh round of desperately poor people who will be the next underclass...

...American socialists, on the one hand, were guided by Karl Marx's vision of an international working class and so were instinctively openborder advocates...

...We are still faced with the sobering demographic news of a continuing worldwide population problem...

...Inevitably, an amnesty will eventually be granted to a large part of our illegal immigrants, and this will surely change matters and will significantly increase these costs...

...Our achievements, such as they are, rest upon an intellectual and technical heritage that we share with all humanity...

...The exceptions are population movements triggered by political upheavals in the country of origin...

...Because they view themselves as rooted in the social structure of their home communities, they see the work abroad as purely instrumental and are indifferent to the social status of the job...

...A large proportion of the undocumented migration is temporary (a fact of great importance for the argument developed below...

...Wages and working conditions in menial jobs are already controlled by federal legislation...

...The pre-World War I socialists discerned some of the basic questions that, I believe, today's radicals will reoccupy when they bring themselves to face the issue squarely...

...On the other, they knew from long and frustrating experience that the continuous arrival of masses of relatively docile, impoverished people from Europe and Asia was a more important factor than any other in delaying the final reckoning of a militant working class with the exploitative features of American industrialism...

...And there is disquieting evidence that the loss of persons with intelligence, energy, and the seeds of modern aspirations works an impoverishment upon the societies from which these immigrants come...

...In the United States, it began in the late 19th and the early 20th century with the recruitment of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe...

...February 1978) by David North and Allen LeBel, conducted for the National Manpower Policy Commission...

...The conclusion that "the U.S...

...Sensitive people of progressive outlook are dismayed that the American poor and the newly arrived poor are increasingly in conflict...

...be at all times maintained as a free asylum for all men and women persecuted by the governments of their countries on account of their politics, religion, or race...

...One group welcomed immigrants as brother laborers from abroad, though most of this wing had a tendency to see Asian immigrants as "unassimilable" (racial attitudes, not research, prompted this position...

...Chicanos understand the truth of George Sanchez's remark in 1966: "Time and time again, just as we [the Chicano population] have been on the verge of cutting our bicultural problems to manageable proportions, uncontrolled mass immigrations from Mexico have erased the gains and accentuated the cultural indigestion...

...And he fails to recognize the importance of the economic structure because he wants to understand economic outcomes in terms of the characteristics and actions of individuals rather than in terms of the socioeconomic context from which individual characteristics derive their significance and which constrain human behavior...

...The assumptions of limitless space and resources, of the economic benefits of cheap labor, and of the presumed "elevator effect" of immigration upon the native poor, all beg reconsideration...

...The net effect is to push the immigration process beyond the law where the legal restraints upon wages and working conditions, which place a floor on the labor market and limit the expansion of customary patterns, are no longer operative...

...Other groups have a strong interest in open immigration even though the number of people actually coming at this time is not so large: Jews, for example, because of persecution in the Soviet Union and the precarious position of the state of Israel, have an interest of this kind...

...Gradually, the "customary" consumption begins to expand...

...a) each American imposes a vastly disproportionate drain upon world resources and environment because of our way of life...

...Restriction of immigration, like the other components of a population policy—e.g., universal access to family planning, information, and technology—should come in a climate of ethnic and religious pluralism and tolerance, gradualism, and recognition of the international impacts of immigration-policy reforms, as well as the responsibility of Western societies for some part of the transformation of Third World economies...

...The difficulty with temporary migration as a way of filling these positions is that the migration almost never remains temporary...

...Many of these jobs are held by temporary migrants...

...q In this article Michael J. Piore draws heavily on an argument developed more fully in his book Birds of Passage, Labor Migration and Industrial Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979...

...Along with such a rise there must be some careful tightening of incomemaintenance programs, in order to mesh this push with the pull of higher wages...

...We ourselves would not have escaped the population pressures that plague the rest of the world did we not happen to have access to a technology that permits us to control family size and to live in a society where the economic and social constraints reward small families rather than large ones...

...ought to set the example of stabilizing its own population as a matter of high national priority...

...But even more significant than this global population boom is that growth is spatially so uneven...

...He seems to be under the impression that contemporary immigration is solely a matter of Asians and Latin Americans...

...It draws upon a largely forgotten part of the reform heritage in the U.S., eclipsed because of a suspected kinship with something bad called "isolationism...

...These children aspire to much the same kind of jobs as other permanent residents, and begin to resist the work of their parents either by rejecting the jobs outright or by contesting managerial authority in the workplace...

...North and LeBel conclude that "the most significant consequence of illegal immigration appears to be the creation of a two-class society...

...As usual, the rank and file must awaken the intellectuals...

...One finds no public departure from the established assumption that the nation can stand any amount of cultural pluralism, that diversity is always a source of strength...

...I argue here that the restrictionist case should now make a much stronger appeal to liberals and radicals than it has over the last half-century, and that a perhaps painful discussion is in order...

...On the other hand: The Party is opposed to the exclusion of any immigrants on account of their race or nationality, and demands that the U.S...

...Many migrants return home after a short time and still more plan initially to do so...

...But it is pledged to limited admissions out of a recognition that, although immigration is a solution to human problems that worked for our ancestors and ourselves, in this different demographic and ecological time it becomes increasingly a solution only for a very few...

...This was also true of the majority of the 347 immigrant groups from Southern and Eastern Europe prior to World War I. Finally, there is absolutely no evidence of spontaneous immigration in response to economic differentials or population pressures...

...Problems of implementation of a controlled immigration policy present technical and political difficulties going beyond the present scope...

...Among the goals of immigration policy, stabilization would be included along with family reunification, a haven for refugees, labor-force needs, etc...

...It delays devising solutions for the great mass of those whose lives will be spent not in physical escape but in learning—with our sacrificial help and resolute example—to manage what they have...

...We have lost control of our demographic future— internal increase approaches equilibrium, but immigration restores the momentum...

...In the backroom, there is a customary pattern of wage relationships that makes it difficult to raise the dishwasher's wage high enough to compensate native workers for the menial character of the job without raising the wages of the waiter and the chef to astronomical levels...

...It is probably true that the majority of migrants— especially if one includes the undocumented— comes from these areas, but virtually all of the historic ethnic communities in the United States (the exceptions are the English, Scandinavians, and Germans) continue to experience inmigration...

...Beyond that, I am sure he is wrong...

...This pattern is one of very long standing in all capitalist economies...

...The 1910 party congress came at the end of a decade when immigration had run to about a million annually...

...I say, no...

...Unwittingly these "create and maintain substantial inequities in what is supposed to be an egalitarian society...

...One-third of the European immigrants who came to the U.S...

...There is no good news on the future size of the world population, only slightly less disheartening bad news...

...Such apprehensions have the most tenuous relationship to the flow of undocumented workers...

...Demographers now dispute whether the expected global population will crest at 8, at 10, or at 12 billion—and debate whether we face doubling or tripling...

...Nonetheless, it is extremely doubtful that black unemployment could be reduced by reabsorption in these same jobs, without major changes in the job characteristics...

...it is difficult to see how we could limit immigration further without legislative commitments that would require a renewed national commitment to an ideology of explicit racism...

...Before World War I, the question of immigration deeply divided the American radical community...

...And if others will not, our own example may, with the ending of large-scale immigration, be both ecologically and socially more responsible...

...In time, stabilization might become paramount...

...If the issue is forced, the predictable stand is to favor porous if not open borders—a position, if not a reflex, with deep roots in our history, though largely unexamined since the days before World War I. We have, of course, not forgotten the old nativist movements that so embittered our politics...

...The issue deserves intense investigation...

...While we would wish it otherwise, time has invalidated laissez-faire on immigration...

...There is also an influx of undocumented immigrants, most of whom come to work here...

...The immigrants themselves seem to come not from the poorest segments of the population but from people who already own or control some economic resources (usually land) and who seek, through temporary work in the United States, funds to expand their holdings and advance socially at home...

...Studies like North and LeBel's thus work against a strong prejudice among labor-market scholars, for they appear to be reviving the job-displacement argument of the discredited Dillingham era...

...Current practice, however, is almost unlimited immigration...

...But a larger frame must be glimpsed...

...These commitments, it is important to emphasize, are not moral abstractions: they are fundamental to individual identity and to the quality and fabric of everyday life, and take priority over clean air, open space, and the like, which seem to animate Graham, however much we may also value those things...

...But even if by coincidence apprehensions were equal to the flow of undocumented entrants, this would indicate very little about the stock of undocumented workers...

...Even those of us without family connections have social and psychological ties abroad that commit us to a relatively open policy, at least for members of our own group...

...The last time immigration reached such proportions, the American left was torn by internal argument, and could not reach agreement...

...But if it were not true, should we, as Graham suggests, close ourselves off from the rest of the world and create an enclave of open space, ecological balance, and high consumption in our overpopulated, polluted, and starving world...

...The reaction of employers to these developments is almost always to recruit a new wave of temporary migrants...

...one study found that the average length of stay of undocumented Mexicans is six months...

...Indeed, the real argument regarding population stabilization has shifted from "whether...

...The most influential study may also be the worst: vols...

...On any complex issue, one would expect Americans of liberal or radical inclination to take a variety of positions...

...Taking such measures at the bottom of the labor market would finally allow the U.S...

...in the pre-World I period went home...

...That flow is composed of the number of people who were not apprehended...

...There is almost no rational discussion or respectable literature arguing that immigration jeopardizes our nation's social unity...

...Poor and overcrowded countries will do the growing, making mass migration inevitable...

...Blacks have been much less successful in forcing changes in the workplaces where they are already employed, and their protest therefore has tended to end in the higher unemployment rates we observe among black youth...

...For since the pre-World War I restrictionism rested substantially upon racist attitudes, post-World War II radicals and liberals have not reopened the discussion...

...The supporters connive in efforts to circumvent the law, and as members of the electorate they deny the resources to the enforcement agencies that would be required to prevent them from doing so...

...The difficulty with the alternative—attempting to limit the labor supply—is that it tends to drive the market underground and results in the end in an expansion of exactly the jobs that we initially tried to eliminate...

...I anticipate the comment that this essay is tinged with today's "era of limits" mood, since it argues that Americans must choose between an achievable degree of social progress at home and the 'The Mexican-American position on illegal immigration is monolithic and unthinking only if one reads the newspaper accounts of "Chicano leaders...

...The conservatives in the nativist movements of the 1890s and thereafter (excepting some employers) opposed unrestricted immigration, and eventually secured the restrictionist laws of 1921 and '24...

...An increase in apprehensions can indicate either an increase in the number of attempted entries or an increase in the number of potential entrants who are caught, or both...

...Another rank and file also stirs: the leadership of the NAACP and the Urban League— older, sophisticated, enlightened, tolerant—has been surprised and alarmed by the rising antialien sentiment from the grass roots...

...efforts in bilingualism, may yet open a debate about America's assimilative capacity...

...but since this is difficult to measure and in any expert view does not exceed a million or so of the currently unemployed, this matter is not central to the discussion...

...One of the ways in which producers sustain the job-security provision obtained by industrial unions in the 1930s is by transferring short-term increases in demand to jobs where the rules are more flexible...

...Indeed, large-scale immigration may be seen as a system of social control, a sort of well-meaning triage, in which the interests of a few mobile people are protected at the expense of those who cannot or do not leave and stay behind to suffer proverty and oppressive social systems...

...Now, with the nation experiencing immigration on a similar scale and with the Immigration and Naturalization Service admittedly unable to control it, we hear restrictionist arguments in rising volume...

...obligation to extend economic and familyplanning assistance to nations central to our immigration dilemma...

...There must also be an effort to change lifestyles in the First World, to accommodate as well as instruct developing societies...

...This realization is now widely accepted among American whites of all social groups, though it has made little headway in various minority communities...

...that it imposes heavy welfare costs upon taxpayers...

...Estimates as high as Graham's 8 to 10 million were frequent in early discussions of the issue, but they basically derived from initial efforts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to dramatize the problems it faces, and have not stood up under close scrutiny...

...Yet, on this subject, among liberals and radicals there is mostly silence except for an occasional uninformed essay claiming that immigrants are good for the country, as they have always been...

...The policy reforms North and LeBel urge include enforcement of limited admissions, combining this difficult step with recommendations for generous amnesty for many of the illegals, and for flexibility in setting annual quotas to permit officials to respond to economic trends as well as to non-manpower considerations...

...I would suggest another shift in outlook that should prove beneficial...

...to complete its stalled effort to allow all our poor, especially minorities, to gain at last an initial productive place...

...to "how...

...The major exception is Haiti...

...But in the underdeveloped world, demographic momentum is breathtaking...

...the economic analysis of the phenomenon is weak and, I believe, ultimately wrong: it displays a naive and perverse understanding of the social and political realities of immigration in American life...

...reinforce the pressures to revise our immigration law and its administration in order to achieve an effective limit...

...The example of Scottish, Basque, or Quebecois separatism, in connection with the question of the costs and social implications of growing U.S...

...Illegal entry resists measurement, but we know that arrests have mounted from 110,000 in 1965 to 766,000 in '75, and to over 1 million in '78...

...It assumes that there is some actual job displacement of native American workers...

...4 Like most socialists, the black leadership chiefly holds to its Debsian position of sympathy for human beings so impoverished that they are willing to uproot from their old home and join the American adventure...

...Perhaps, one day, every American household will have a foreign maid...

...Fears of social division, our history is thought to teach, have always been mere rationalizations for a dislike of particular racial and ethnic groups...

...It would, however, be incompatible with current flows of immigrants into the United States and would Kingsley Davis and others have estimated that about 100 million Americans would represent our country's full population load, at optimal carrying capacity...

...Nearly half the people of the earth are under 15 years of age, poised for contribution to the swarming human family...

...They argue that some significant job displacement and a general depression of wages and standards are the inevitable results of having large numbers of people without U.S...

...The income differential between the United States and the countries contributing to the current immigration has always been large...

...It is not even enough to consider only America's own minorities to whom the promise of equal opportunity cannot be kept without sealing off the labor market to the unchecked access of Third World manpower...

...Today's law is still essentially in accord with the socialist compromise of 1910, since the 1965 amendments removed racial quotas (though racial preference has been de facto reversed, as family reunification features give most weight to nonwhites...

...No socialist, to my knowledge, objects...

...Birthrates are dropping faster than anticipated in quite a few countries, holding steady in some, and running at high levels in many others...

...The adjustments might be difficult and, in the short run, inflationary...

...And here too our position is largely an accident of history that places us on a continent where the peoples who might assert a stronger historical claim have been wiped out, and where we have convenient access to technology that is really a common human heritage...

...Six nations of northern Europe have reached stabilization, and most of the industrialized world moves closer to that condition...

...Morris Hillquit fashioned a compromise bridging the two positions, and his resolution was adopted by the 1910 convention: 344 The Socialist Party favors all legislative measures tending to prevent the immigration of strikebreakers and contract laborers, and the mass immigration of workers from foreign countries, brought about by the employing classes for the purpose of weakening the organization of American labor, and of lowering the standard of life of American workers...

...New York City has managed to make sanitation work a preferred occupation and there are lists of native workers waiting for jobs that in most of the rest of the industrial world are held by migrants...

...A direct way to state the matter is to say that more than half the United States' current population increase comes illegally across our borders...

...The first is that population growth, which complicates all of our problems, must be curbed through some effective combination of individual and governmental action...

...The United States' responsibility in the face of this problem is not met simply by adequate levels of economic and familyplanning assistance to developing nations with high population growth rates: the U.S...

...Most of us would not be here at all did our ancestors not happen to live in some village where American employers were recruiting at a particular moment when the American economy was experiencing a labor shortage...

...This situation, in time, will surely be disturbed...

...It was not their finest intellectual hour...

...the left may well return to it...

...If we were going to be inundated for this reason, we should have been inundated long ago...

...Yet there is still spirited dispute on the urgency of the matter within the U.S., and there are those who continue to believe that the carrying capacity of the U.S...

...Otherwise, the 1910 position still seems sound...

...A similar resistance by second-generation European immigrants in the 1930s sparked the industrial union movement...

...This essay does suggest that we lower our expectations in order to make headway where we can...

...In the process, they gave restriction a very bad name with thoughtful people of the modern era, for their arguments were saturated with racism and unexamined prejudice...

...The only way to limit the number of jobs for which we seem to need migrants is, I am convinced, through a direct attack upon adverse job characteristics, not through attempts to curtail the migration...

...Most analysts believe the number of undocumented workers here at any one time to be between 3 and 5 million, a very large number in a labor force of 100 million but nowhere near the estimates presented by Graham...

...The Socialist party could not decide...

...We must also consider the millions who remain in the impoverished countries, unable to solve individual problems by emigration...

...Graham uses the number of deportable aliens apprehended as the basis of his figures...

...visible distress informs our conclusions that the sum total of human happiness was enhanced by migration...

...American workers were to be put first, Berger and his group maintained, not some distant international working class...

...What we have contributed individually and collectively is trivial compared to the base of knowledge and of past resource accumulation upon which that contribution is built and to which all peoples have contributed over the course of history...

...For many members of these groups, immigration policy controls the terms of access to close relatives living abroad (or clandestinely in the States...

...Thus this first major research effort to consider immigration from the manpower perspective urges restriction, not simply in the interest of national 3The overall economic impact of immigration, as distinct from the more focused question of the manpower impacts, has produced a large literature...

...It is time that such questions once again trouble and divide the American left...

...Nonetheless, Otis L. Graham's attempt in his argument for restrictive immigration is extremely disturbing...

...they are studying contemporary immigration and the contemporary labor market...

...Given these commitments, it is virtually impossible to design a policy of limited immigration meeting the demands of the older ethnic groups that hold significant political power without imposing an elaborate system of racial and national quotas...

...When, however, new legislation begins to be implemented and the economic impact becomes apparent, the coalition that supported the legislation disintegrates...

...As John Tanton writes: "I opt for a society in which individuals at least do some of their own maintenance and accept resultant lower levels of consumption...

...Increasing numbers come across the southern border, but there is also an increase in visa jumpers, who arrive at American airports and disperse beyond the puny reach of immigration officials...

...The Forces Governing the Migration THE PROBLEM with Graham's argument, however, is not the data but the analysis he presents of the forces governing the process...

...Graham's normative argument seems to rest 350 upon a morality of radical individualism, upon a willingness to judge human actions divorced from any larger social context, upon a refusal to recognize individuals as part of a larger community, and current conditions as a legacy of a shared human history...

...Some of the friends of the latter ought to be moving from silence onto the middle ground of responsible restrictionism, as Hillquit staked it out in 1910...

...Too often those who consider the immigration problem fix their eyes upon the human distress of individuals who encamp just south of the border, or who overstay on visas from India, Jamaica, or Korea...

...The authors make the unassailable point that such workers represent only a temporary solution, for their aspirations and those of their children will rise...

...Eventually we know them, hire them, and they become palpable...

...Only 50 percent of the foreign workers in France, it is estimated, will stay permanently...

...Actually, the position is ambivalent and complex...

...It creates a distorted picture of the nature and magnitude of current immigration...

...I: Impact on Population Growth...

...The right had no such difficulties...

...They think of themselves as coming to accumulate resources that will promote their social advancement at home...

...I do believe that we could change wages and consumption so as to do without jobs that are simply built into established patterns...

...More candid thought needs to be given to the extent to which migration in the 20th century has always acted, within and among nations, as a conservative force postponing social reconstruction...

...To talk, as Graham does, of a nonracist approach to restricted immigration is, in other words, a pious wish inconsistent with the social and political reality of American life...

...The new restrictionism does not base its case on these arguments—and, of course, rejects the last as unworthy...

...What does it mean to speak of a "new restrictionism...

...6 to 28 of the 1911 Dillingham Commission Report...

...North and LeBel argue that it is time to end the current subsidy to employers, and to consumers, of such things as lettuce and restaurant meals...

...To the extent that it is not man-made and derives rather from the fact that we live on an underpopulated continent, what distinguishes us from those who live elsewhere is simply luck...

...But so far, our culture is not receptive to such arguments...

...And the Larger Moral Issues WHILE IT IS POSSIBLE to dismiss Graham's arguments on analytical and empirical grounds as simply inconsistent with the realities of economic, social, and political life, I think it is important to say something about the normative values that infuse his writing...

...This occurs because it is apparently possible to put together a political coalition in favor of restricting immigration so long as the electorate does not perceive the implications of such restrictions for the patterns of consumption, job security, wage relationships, and so on to which they are adjusted...

...support for the regulations is more genuine and more readily translatable into support for their implementation...

...The left today certainly has a stronger research base than had the pre-World War 1 socialists for the view that massive immigration undercuts the American workers and poor...

...Population pressures and low incomes abroad may be largely irrelevant to the size of immigration flows, and in this we who are living in the United States may be lucky...

...Often laced with racism, arguments were simplistic yet touched upon fundamental questions...

...The social process is not foremost...

...Yet the necessity for restriction would not derive from racial or ethnic dislikes, disguised as taxpayers' revolts against heavy welfare costs...

...Most of us would not be here had our relatives not mistakenly thought they could make enough money in the States to go home quickly: had they not failed in their initial ambition or fallen into hasty marriages and unplanned pregnancies when they got here...

...We might begin a reappraisal of the issue by returning to the brief but intense debate that took place among socialists prior to World War I. But, first, we should establish the arguments of today's new restrictionism...

...Second, a great many of the jobs held by migrants appear to complement and sustain the jobs of national workers, and could not be eliminated without compromising these...

...One might argue that the cost of transportation has fallen, but in terms of hourly earnings in the United States, air transportation today from the Caribbean costs approximately what steamship transportation from Europe cost in the 1880s...

...These characteristics make the jobs extremely unattractive to U.S...

...The facts, however, do not support this hypothesis...

...History explains the curious unanimity of America's radical community around the openborder position (or the position of silence, which holds to the same course...

...One of the reasons, incidently, why second-generation immigrants were more successful in changing job characteristics than second-generation urban blacks was that the unions in the 1930s preempted much of the space within a capitalist economic system for such secure jobs and, hence, the system as a whole is now much more resistant to job reform...

...We ought to approach all complex social questions with a steady awareness of the need to view matters holistically, in light of all aspects...

...349 Social and Political Factors IF GRAHAM MISCONSTRUES the nature of the economic forces that underlies the immigration process, he seems completely unaware of the social and political context in which immigration policy in the United States is made...

...To the extent that what we have is "man-made," it has been made by the collective efforts of all humankind and we have no particular rights to its rewards...

...The official labormovement position is now for restrictionist reform, a position taken forcefully by the Secretary of Labor...

...Often, in fact, political support is generated by focusing attention on permanent immigrants already firmly rooted in the community and competing with nationals in the labor market, thus drawing it away from less visible temporary workers whose work is complementary...

...Studies of comparable migrations in other periods of American history and in other countries point in the same direction...

...In the authors' view, the presence of these workers lowers wages at the bottom, prevents change in basic structure of the secondary labor market, 2 skews income distribution in a regressive direction, and perpetuates a two-class labor force...

...Restriction, then, is assumed to be invariably a disreputable sentiment—let it go away...

...I have tried elsewhere to explain the characteristics of these jobs and their role in the productive system...

...Right or left, his is a prescription for suffering, unworthy of the tradition of left-wing politics in the United States...

...Isaac A. Hourwich's Immigration and Labor (1912) exposed the lack of evidence behind all of these (and other) alleged economic impacts (see also Oscar Handlin, "Old Immigrants and New," in Race and Nationality in American Life, 1950...

...As one Mexican put it: "If I am going to do that work, I would rather do it there and then come home and be myself...

...The influx, according to recent Immigration and Naturalization Service 341 reports, continues to mount...

...And these changes in the character of the jobs the older immigrant groups already held were an important part of the story of social advancement for those ethnic communities...

...Not all of this "traditional" migration is, moreover, documented and some of the groups where undocumented immigration is significant— such as Italians, Poles, and Irish—wield considerable political power...

...The AFL condemned unrestricted immigration and added its weight to the movement that culminated in the restrictive laws of 1921 and '24...

...Thus we see that the main victim of illegal immigration is not the taxpayer of Howard Jarvis's concern but rather the unskilled domestic worker...

...It is not clear that we are willing to pay the price...

...Times have changed, and today's awesome millions of refugees make an open door impossible...

...I personally am very skeptical about our ability to eliminate the second type of jobs, i.e., those complementary to the work of nationals, without changes in the economic system, changes whose nature we do not fully understand and whose dimensions would be difficult to contemplate...

...But when immigration-law reform cannot be avoided, as in 1952 or '65,1eft-of-center people tend to oppose governmental limitation, favoring a sort of marketplace solution to which they would normally not incline...

...There are further reasons for stabilization, and the goal of achieving it was first given cogent official expression in the 1972 report of the National Commission on Population and the American Future...

...Probably 800,000 to 1 million illegal immigrants have come to the U.S...

...economic efficiency, but as the only way to extend economic opportunity to our own disadvantaged.' North and LeBel's important and timely study makes us recall the intense World War I debate among socialists on the immigration issue, and it reinforces the argument of thoughtful restrictionists in important ways...

...The size of this flow is by its very nature unknown...

...Socialism, or at least reform, in one country...

...Graham would have us believe that the basic cause of the immigration we have been experiencing in recent years is low income and population pressure in the underdeveloped world...

...In most cases that have been studied, the immigration has been initiated by explicit recruitment efforts by American employers or their agents...

...but this might change...

...Yet on the issue of illegal immigration, ever since World War II, there is a remarkable and historically unprecedented unanimity within the American left: immigration is a "social problem" that is not a welcome subject of discussion...

...But working illegals pay taxes, and so the social-service issue is moot...

...The doubling time of Mexico's 65 million is around 22 years, of Asia's 2.4 billion around 36 years, of Africa's 436 million about 41 years...

...If we want to make such jobs more attractive (and/or less prevalent) the way to do so is to raise the minimum wage, expand overtime provisions, augment health and safety regulations, increase protection for union organization, and so on...

...One can already see this process at work in New York and Los Angeles, with the reemergence of the sweat shop, industrial homework, and other working conditions of the late 19th century...

...annually for a decade now...

...One must then ask a question that Graham, with his emphasis on population pressure abroad, never recognizes: why do the jobs have these characteristics and what role do such jobs play in the economy...

...Victor Berger led those—drawn mostly from native-American and Southern trade unions—who urged restriction...

...and "how soon...

...The per capita income in most of these countries is, both relatively and absolutely, higher today than it was in the past...

...q 351...

...Debs, calling it "utterly unsocialistic, reactionary, and in truth outrageous," entreated socialists to keep America a home for all the exploited who could make their way here...

...The organized labor movement made its choice between these two stands...

...We on the left have forgotten that this was not always so: socialists once debated socialists on the limitation of immigration, and took varied principled stands...

...Just as the legal phase was completed in the 1950s and 1960s, this would permit the completion of the economic phase of the civil-rights movement...

...Many figures on the left in this century—Herbert Croly, Bob LaFollette, Jerome Frank, Rex Tugwell, Charles Beard, and William Appleman Williams—have argued that social reconstruction at home could only be successfully pursued if the nation was adequately protected from disruptive inflows of labor and capital, from military entanglements abroad, from doctrinal commitments to Open Doors, and other devices for postponing internal reorganization...

...The second area that influences alignment on the immigration question is the impact the migrant and immigrant labor force has on the labor market...

...has hardly been approached...

...Having such a policy in place as a matter of both law and institutions would not automatically tell us how to handle the immigration problem...

...I have always thought of it as a basically right-wing position: that, in American politics, the terms liberal or radical meant something else than they do in the European context...

...Assuredly, we now hear many themes familiar from the old exclusionist movements: that illegal immigration causes one-toone job displacement, accounting for much of the current unemployment...

...It may not, of course, be possible to curtail the immigrant labor market in this way but at least we will avoid the perverse effects that the current pattern of extralegal immigration seems to have...

...This monument to bias blamed the "new" immigrant for a variety of economic ills, including depressed wages, a high rate of industrial accidents, job displacement, and even depressions...

...At the time, the population of the U.S...

...is not yet known but may easily already have been exceeded—unless we fundamentally alter our habits of energy consumption, disposal of toxic chemicals and solid wastes, agricultural practices, and more;' (c) social requirements for space, privacy, and unspoiled wilderness areas are much greater than acknowledged...

...ought to welcome and plan for a stable population" rested on several counts...

...This high unemployment originally was a result of the changing worker attitudes but is now increasingly attributable to employer preferences for the new migration streams they have succeeded in generating...

...The enemy ought to be the exploiter, not ragged immigrant and migrant laborers worse off than our own disadvantaged...

...But the dilemma is inescapable, and socialists today ought to face and debate it just as the party did in 1910...

...The matter surely is urgent and will remain so—unless some fundamental changes are made in the modes of life in industrial societies and in the planetary human demography...

...David North, Vernon Briggs, and others reverse the order, arguing that these reforms cannot work until the pool of exploitable labor is greatly reduced...

...For example, it is extremely difficult to sustain jobsecurity arrangement in an economy where demand continues to fluctuate if all factors of production are fixed and producers are never able to reduce their costs...

...but it is probably possible to do...

...b) international equity aside, the carrying capacity of the U.S...

...Yet, because of it, we can see no end to our population growth, and this will mean a very different America...

...Restrictionist ideas in 19th- and early 20th-century America derived from the selfish, reactionary, and racist side of the national mind...

...The leadership of organized labor has found the ranks pervaded by a rising sentiment against illegal workers, and opposition reaches even to the Mexican-American and Filipino workers in Cesar Chavez's union in the fields...

...Another wing suspected that the AFL was correct, and that large-scale immigration was inimical to working-class progress in America...

...was approximately 80 million, and of the world less than 2 billion...

...Of course, they do not...

...The 1910 position of the Socialist party on immigration, while it may seem at first an adroit straddle of incompatible commitments, is not without consistency...

...Standing upon the conviction that mass immigration was economically and politically harmful to the American working class, the party came out for restriction yet edged away from racial considerations, and endorsed what amounted to an open door for political refugees...

...Migrants, however, tend to be indifferent to many of these job characteristics because they view their stay as temporary...

...nationals...

...Once permanent settlement develops, relatives abroad come to join their families in the States: these latter immigrants often think of the move as permanent and aspire therefore to jobs competitive with those of nationals...

...In a global perspective, growing populations on every continent threaten and undercut economic and social advancement, deplete resources, and work an awful damage upon land, oceanic, and atmospheric ecology...

...The same person, moreover, is often apprehended more than once...

...This theme in our social thought now deserves a stronger resonance...

...Ultimately, it is this view that accounts for the analytical weakness of his argument as well: he fails to understand the social and political forces governing American immigration policy because he fails to appreciate the fact that individuals define themselves in relation to social groups...

...All observers concede that the safety valve offered to the Mexican ruling orders by the open border to the North delays a decisive confrontation with that nation's undone revolutionary tasks...

...eventually they will resent and in their turn abandon jobs they formerly sought, leaving an unreformed secondary labor 2One of the leading analysts of "the secondary labor market," Michael Piore of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, takes the view that illegal immigration will end when the secondary labor market is destroyed by reforms of wages and working conditions...

...This world view has a long history in the United States as a moral philosophy and an analytical tradition: on that point, at least, Graham is undoubtedly right...

...The authors acknowledge that, consequently, some industries would automate or close, but the majority would survive these new labor costs, passing them on to the rest of us in bearable costs of higher lettuce prices or a dollar more per motel room for the maid...

...Many people stay much longer than intended and either begin to see themselves as permanent residents or, more usually, have children, raised in the States, who do so...

...citizenship working at the bottom of the labor market...

...Among Latins generally, the Puerto Rican population in the East is known to harbor strong objections to illegal immigration...

...Simplifying greatly, here are some of the factors: • First of all, quite a number of such jobs or job characteristics are simply built into established patterns of consumption, work relations, and the like, and embedded in the inertia that surrounds all 348 such customary social relations...

...There are the works on labor-market impact by North and Le Bel, Vernon Briggs, Robert Birrell, the General Accounting Office, and others, as well as Peter Lindner's arresting argument (in his book Fertility and Scarcity in America, 1978) that income inequality is linked causally to high fertility rates, and that "the shutting off of immigration has been a major force in leveling incomes in the U.S...

...Because their stay is viewed as temporary, the migrants are also indifferent to the insecurity and lack of career advancement to which permanent residents are sensitive...

...345 conflicting interest of a small and mobile portion of the international proletariat...

...Immigration, of course, blends diverse human strands, and the "drain" upon the "sending" societies extracts both the trained and the untrained—but usually includes the best, the most restless...

...At least in its early stages, immigration appears to be governed not by the characteristics of the migrants or the incomes and population pressures at the place of origin but rather by the structure of jobs available in the United States...

...This apparently unexceptional advice leads to a perspective on immigration at odds with the open-door leanings of the intelligentsia...

...Without immigration, the U.S., given current trends, would enter a period of population stability shortly after the year 2,000...

...But no valid restrictionism can be based on such narrow objections...

...Daniel DeLeon and Eugene Debs led those who opposed restriction...

...The new restrictionism would insist upon no mass deportation, a reasonable and firm one-time amnesty, employer sanctions backed by a national work card as in Europe, scrupulous protection.for the rights of "foreign-appearing" people, adequate resources for enforcement, and more than lip-service to the U.S...

...But the pressure mounts from below for a different position...

...As for heavy social-service costs, studies show that illegals do not make extensive use of welfare services, though in half a dozen cities they incur fairly heavy public educational and medical costs...

...The alternative, as suggested above, is to press for increases in minimum labor standards...

...d) national security no longer demands masses of manpower for defense...

...But Graham may be right on this too...

...There is not the space 342 here to argue the matter in detail, only to state the case for population limitation...

...The characteristics most important for understanding the migration process are their menial, often degrading social status, their lack of job security, and their paucity of opportunities for career advancement...

...prudence suggests early stabilization to preserve options until the issue is better understood...

...The migrants are coming to take a very particular set of jobs...

...Economists and economic historians in recent years generally assume that the Dillingham arguments were not only unproved but wrong...

...Thus, we are accustomed in restaurants to eating off china dishes, rather than paper plates, and this generates resistance to the elimination of dishwashers in the backroom...

...These points are part of a dynamic argument...

...Restrictionism, of course, cannot aim to fully end immigration...

...The Magnitude of the Immigration THE UNITED STATES ADMITS about 400,000 immigrants annually: most of these are close relatives of American citizens: a relatively small proportion are members of the labor force...

...The other old argument, that the nation's assimilative capacities are strained by large-scale immigration, has no discernable adherents among people of progressive inclination...

...These are proposals that people understand in economic terms: indeed, the implications are explicit and calculable...

...even that illegal immigrants (maybe all immigrants) are not good human material...

...North and LeBel are convinced that Americans, white and nonwhite, would take such jobs themselves, coming off income-transfer programs, or rising up from dependency, if wages and standards were raised...

...Finally, whatever the stock of the undocumented population, you cannot simply cumulate documented immigration and add that number, as Graham would have us do, to obtain the total...

...A full answer cannot be developed here...

...When those migration streams were cut off by World War I, Northern industry turned for the first time to recruit black migrants from the rural South...

...q 346 Michael Piore Another View on Migrant Workers It is difficult to do justice in a brief article to the complexities of American immigration policy...

...There are two areas that give the case for stricter limits on immigration a new ethical and intellectual basis...

...We should come to prefer to the endless temporizing with social pathologies that mass immigration reflect the broader good of the poor in both "sending" and "receiving" societies, which can only come about if all are now forced to deal with the causes of poverty directly and immediately...

...The U.S., since 1965, has experienced an influx matching the volume of unrestricted immigration in pre-World War I years, and most of it is outside the 400,000 annually allowed by law...