Immigration Dilemmas

...When labor markets are tight or we want agricultural or service work performed cheaply, we welcome immigrants, sometimes without restriction, sometimes through official "guest worker" programs...

...Today, despite continuing income differences between countries like Ireland, Spain, Greece, and Italy, on the one hand, and France and Germany on the other, only 1.5 percent of the EC's population was born in a different EC country from the one in which they now reside...

...Some industries, like garment, can be cited by each...

...We now have over three thousand federal agents patrolling two thousand miles of the U.S.-Mexican land border, also with little success...

...Drywallers now earn about double what they got before the strike, and about half what nonimmigrant workers earned a decade earlier...

...Besides, Latin Americans also want to stay healthy...

...Expanding legal immigration quotas for professional and technical workers will certainly increase competition for scarce jobs...

...But there are piecemeal policies we can implement that address some of the problems, at least around the edges...

...it's just that we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing that massive national and international political and economic forces can be reversed by more vigilant policing...

...458 • DISSENT Immigration Dilemmas Minor steps have already been taken: the normal retirement age for Social Security will be raised to sixty-seven in 2027, and further increases are inevitable...

...We can also improve the ratio with an increase in birth rates, so that more young workers are available to replace those who retire...

...So if the Clinton administration succeeds in reversing the trend of declining family income, Americans will eat even more veggies, requiring more rural immigrants, legal or not...

...In Europe, experts feared there would be massive migration of poor Italians to highFALL • 1993 • 455 Immigration Dilemmas wage countries like France and Germany when the European Community (EC) was established, so Italian emigration was restricted...

...If Mexico becomes more prosperous, more people will have money to pay for emigration...

...Higher labor standards in immigrant industries where native workers don't choose to work would also ameliorate political conflict over the unavoidable presence of undocumented workers...

...In addition to those counted in official data, there may be as many as 250,000 Brazilians who came to Japan as "tourists" and then stayed on to work...

...Can we conclude from the Puerto Rican experience that Mexican migration will slow if Mexican wages are kept low...

...A consequence is declining return migration for men...

...Next, a questioner asked the candidate what he proposed to do about illegal immigration...

...Each employer contributed to a vacation and pension fund for each hour worked...

...Americans who are frustrated with our country's inability to regulate immigration might reflect on the experience of other industrial nations, even those with less inclusive traditions...

...The impossibility of border control is the most obvious difficulty...

...Better labor standards enforcement in this country would also address parts of the FALL • 1993 461 Immigration Dilemmas problem...

...But most two-job families or single parents are not in Baird's income class...

...It is true that local government is burdened by immigrant services...

...Giving up on border control is no solution either...

...As countries industrialize, formerly rural workers, now more rootless, begin to think of the next step—emigration...

...Similarly, a more aggressive and earlier defense of Haiti's democratic government was, in retrospect, the only sensible (and morally decent) immigration policy we could have adopted with regard to that country's boat people...

...Once they arrive, it is virtually impossible to prevent them from leaving the jobs for which they were recruited and finding other work...

...Advocates of loosening border controls cite the former...

...Retiring baby boomers need people who contribute more in taxes than they consume in services...

...In some cases they do and in others they provide labor no native group is willing to supply...

...In return for a promise of $2 billion in aid from the EC, Morocco has now agreed to station 3,500 troops on its beaches to try to deter human smuggling, yet the illegal immigration continues...

...The Coast Guard can't effectively police every mile of our coastline...

...Undocumented Mexican immigrants are almost never those without jobs at home...

...Japan, for example, with its aging workforce and declining fertility rate, also has a need for low-wage immigrants, even now in a stagnant economy...

...In Germany there are nearly two million Turkish immigrants, brought into the country over a thirty-year period as "guest workers," who never went home...

...Fewer immigrants would come if they knew there was no work awaiting them...

...According to economists Alida Castillo-Freeman and Richard Freeman, it's because Congress raised Puerto Rico's minimum wage so high that island unemployment increased...

...But these likely results are rarely considered when foreign policy is fashioned...

...It's probably the case that today, more immigrants are working in jobs natives don't want than in competitive occupations...

...Production of all vegetables combined rose by 33 percent, because even imports from countries like Mexico and Chile couldn't satiate Americans' hunger for more vitamins and roughage...

...They averaged about $1,100 in weekly earnings, in today's dollars...

...Harvest of corn, wheat, and other grains is mechanized, but fruit, vegetable, and nut horticulture, occupying only 1 percent of U.S...

...Early in this century, after all, when Mexicans were even poorer relative to Americans than they are today, American railroads and farmers had to send recruiters to Mexico to beg laborers to come...

...In 1920, however, over 13 percent of Americans were foreign born...

...Those left on the streets migrated...

...Last year, the border patrol intercepted 1.2 million would-be immigrants from Mexico, but since there is no point to incarcerating them (or jail space to do so), nearly all are sent back to try again...

...It may have been the first time the "policy-wonk" candidate couldn't come up with a ready solution...

...When the baby-boom generation retires, 20 percent will be over sixty-five...

...At some point in the future, most experts believe, the gap will become small enough that emigration will slow...

...And there are 700,000 Koreans living in Japan, many descended from laborers imported by force during Japan's prewar occupation of Korea, others who immigrated illegally in recent years...

...In reality, NAFTA and trade policy could become irrelevant to the volume of future immigration flows from Mexico, since, as Wayne Cornelius suggests, these factors are likely to be swamped by Mexico's domestic agriculture policy...

...Open contempt for any important law engenders disrespect for law itself, so we owe it to our national integrity to make serious attempts at enforcement...

...incomes is necessary...

...they have above-average education and aspirations whetted by urban industrial employment...

...For example, workers amnestied under the 1986 law will soon be eligible to bring in family members— several million additional legal residents...

...It's not that the pressure for illegal immigration is so great that if we relaxed our barriers, we'd be inundated with hordes of immigrants...

...By establishing a high minimum wage for Puerto Rico, Congress in effect determined that it was better to bring unskilled Puerto Rican migrants to New York than to send New York jobs to Puerto Rico...

...While only 26 percent of the U.S...

...But today, international competition in garment assembly has become so fierce that a domestic industry probably could not survive if it paid the wages of fifteen years ago...

...But last year the Mexican Constitution was amended to permit these lands to be sold, and it is widely expected that corn and bean subsidies will decline...

...But even though laid-off aerospace engineers don't normally seek work as gardeners or carwashers, this is a hard argument to make when unemployment is high and wages are declining...

...Before President Salinas's policies of economic liberalization, Mexico subsidized peasants to remain in rural areas...

...But for illegal immigration, there is no analogous solution, because the most sophisticated analysts can't make a reasonable guess at the level of immigration that must be allowed before control is practical...

...So if the intercepted ones keep trying, the odds are increasingly in their favor...

...advocates of tightening cite the latter...

...As this gap narrows, economic growth and development in Mexico will initially stimulate increased emigration to the United States...

...There is also no displacement of native workers in low-wage service jobs, in restaurant kitchens, say, or hotels...

...The reality would also change with job opportunities here...

...By 1992, drywallers worked nearly sixty hours a week to take home $300 in cash, with no benefits...

...Can immigrants, therefore, be said to have displaced AfricanAmerican workers in the garment industry...

...It is to these equally desperate and ambitious migrants that our ineffective border control is most unfair...

...It used to be easier to send immigrants back when their work was done, because their wives were content to wait for them at home...

...If labor law had been reformed so it wasn't so easy for construction contractors to abandon their contractual relationships with trade unions, it might have been more difficult for immigrants to displace union members in California's homebuilding industry...

...With the carpenters union out of the picture, contractors also dropped their health insurance plans, stopped paying into vacation and pension funds, and cut wages...

...Once such powerful networks are established, policy is impotent to break them...

...Here's one example: fifteen years ago, residential drywallers —the people who erect plasterboard for interior home walls—were represented by the carpenters union in southern California...

...the first question from the audience was a predictable, "Who are your foreign policy advisers going to be...

...By 1980, one-third of working-age persons born in Puerto Rico had migrated to the mainland...

...Solutions Total border control is an unrealizable dream...

...Few Americans, after all, move from city to city in search of relatively small wage increases, so long as they have a job at home...

...In Los Angeles, with mostly undocumented immigrant workers, the garment industry has grown in the last decade, while manufacturing as a whole, and especially garment manufacturing, has declined nationwide...

...farmland, is labor intensive and consumes 40 percent of total farm wages...

...Japan also has illegal immigrants from Malaysia, Thailand, Iran, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who overstayed tourist visas...

...So we'll need the taxes of younger working immigrants to pay Medicare and Social Security for the older generation...

...Since 1987 alone, the number of Mexican women attempting to cross the border illegally has doubled, while the number of men has not changed...

...Traditional societies send few emigrants, but the disruption of traditional ways spurs emigration...

...Since fresh vegetable consumption rises with upscale lifestyles, holding down personal income growth kept vegetable acreage from increasing even more than it did...

...But bringing guest workers into a country is easier than sending them home...

...Few immigrants leave home without some idea of how to find work in America...

...In the garment districts of Los Angeles, New York, or Miami, entire plants are staffed by immigrants from the same small village in Mexico, El Salvador, or China...

...In the United States, we give priority for legal immigration to "family reunification," meaning that immigrants can bring their relatives here at the head of the line...

...the government, for example, bought corn from peasants at twice the world price and prohibited the sale of communal farm lands to private investors...

...in other words, a 1 percent increase in family income is associated with a 1 percent increase in broccoli and lettuce consumption and a 2.4 percent increase for cauliflower...

...growers' demands for immigrant labor...

...The claim is heard less frequently now, because it's become clear that the relationship is more complex...

...Once an immigrant community is established here, this becomes a lot easier...

...The purpose of these policies is to encourage investment in efficient cash crops for export, but if successful, they will result in many fewer peasants working the land: approximately one million peasants are expected to leave farming annually during the next ten to twenty years...

...border policies...

...The services–taxes balance of which we now complain will become a national, not a local issue...

...But in the late 1970s, contractors began to hire Mexican immigrants to work without union contract protection Immigrant workers in turn recruited their friends and relatives, and by 1982 enough nonunion drywallers (many from just one town in rural Mexico) were available, and the contractors stopped hiring union labor altogether...

...Fewer Americans will be working when the baby boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964) begins to reach retirement age in 2010...

...Failing that, we could underwrite a targeted industrial policy in Mexico, which, in violation of free trade rules, would subsidize the development of small industries in rural areas where peasants are being displaced...

...fresh tomato consumption jumped from thirteen to eighteen pounds per person, and U.S...

...Those who dream of cities without poorly educated, low-wage immigrants should be required to describe what middle-class and even lower-middle-class life would be like without them...

...population is now in the prime working age of twenty to thirty-nine, 46 percent of immigrants are in that age group...

...Because of immigrant seamstresses, an industry exists that supports not only its professional and managerial employees but a variety of upstream workers in computer software, machine tools, textiles, and petrochemicals...

...no native workers are available or willing to work in these industries even in periods of high unemployment...

...But many Mexican women, for example, are no longer willing to stay home while their husbands travel back and forth to earn money in the United States...

...In 1992 alone, 280,000 foreigners came to Japan on short-term visas and then disappeared into the country...

...In the 1970s, South Korea's economy was the fastest growing in the world, and its emigration rate to the United States was also the fastest growing...

...Yes and no...

...Now, women want to come north to work as well, either with their husbands or independently...

...Industrial workers aspire to better jobs, and when they reach the limit of their upward mobility at home, think of the next step—emigration...

...Uncounted others made it, ferried to a point two hundred yards from shore by Moroccan smugglers...

...Competition for Jobs Do immigrants take jobs from residents...

...Immigrant wages for housecleaning, lawn mowing, child care, and even carwashing make work outside the home feasible for people who could otherwise not afford it...

...In Los Angeles, for example, fifty-five thousand native garment workers were displaced by immigrants in the 1970s...

...the occasional interception of a Chinese human cargo ship is only token...

...The Mexican labor force is already growing at the rate of one million jobseekers per year, from three hundred thousand to half a million more than current economic growth can absorb...

...Also, setting aside for the moment the complicated question of whether newcomers compete with native workers for jobs, it is indisputable that undocumented immigrants who take jobs in labor-short occupations deny places to would-be lawful immigrants who live in nations from which illegal entry is less practical...

...And immigrants will become part of the solution, not the problem...

...No longer paying income or Social Security taxes, they will instead consume Social Security and Medicare...

...Today, 12 percent of Americans are over sixty-five years old, and their health and retirement benefits consume about one-third of all federal spending...

...And then there is France, whose new conservative government proclaims a goal of "zero immigration...

...Communist governments were mostly successful at preventing workers from being employed without authorization, but no other governments have been able to do so...

...These reforms might, if we are lucky, combine with other political and economic developments to slow the "push" of immigrants from sending countries, provide some additional protection for native workers in those few industries where competition with immigrants is a reality, and encourage more honorable and responsible treatment of immigrants, who, in any event, will continue to arrive...

...Martin and Taylor report that fresh vegetables have high "elasticities...

...We can improve the ratio if we make people work longer and raise their retirement age...

...Immigration flows are even more immune to FALL • 1993 • 457 Immigration Dilemmas policy influences because the relationship between economic status at home and the propensity to migrate varies from society to society and from time to time...

...Clinton demurred, calling such considerations premature...

...Once an immigrant group establishes a presence, networks linking immigrants with their home country become difficult to break...

...If you have an answer," Clinton told the questioner, "you can be my foreign policy adviser...

...Contractors now dealt only with labor brokers who paid workers in cash and ignored income-tax withholding, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and minimum-wage laws...

...One important reform would be a Mexican development program that goes beyond free trade...

...These benefits can be paid for only by large tax increases on those still working, by big jumps in productivity or by changes in the ratio of working to retired Americans...

...Germans now retire at age sixty, but the sixty-and-over set, now 21 percent of Germany's population, will make up 30 percent by the year 2020...

...The EC has lots of immigrants—but most come from poorer countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East...

...Even today's educated guess would change tomorrow, based on political developments abroad (like the Tiananmen massacre or the overthrow of Aristide) or changes in economic growth rates and job creation in places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic...

...Other healthy fruits and vegetables had a similar impact...

...With fewer workers to pay that many pensions, Germany has increased its retirement age to sixty-five, effective in 2012...

...it contradicts, for example, our desire to reduce teen pregnancies...

...When we attempted to rescue respect for law by abandoning our 55 mph speed limit in rural areas because most people flouted it, we established a new limit of 65 mph, a level we thought drivers would respect...

...The wage differential between Germany and Italy was still four to one, but for most Italians, the income difference wasn't great enough to make the upheaval worthwhile...

...It can't be done, but the fantasy persists that a policy could be devised that welcomes the restaurant, hotel, and personal FALL • 1993 • 459 Immigration Dilenunas service workers on whom we obviously depend, but bans all others...

...even in poor countries, people rarely want to leave their families and communities...

...Another important industry that could not exist but for immigrants is horticulture...

...But at the same time, our national budget is becoming more dependent on immigrant taxes...

...Emigration is expensive (the illegal kind often requires hiring a guide and buying false documents for as much as $2,000), and the poorest Mexicans can't afford it...

...Had the Puerto Rican minimum wage been lower, fewer islanders would have migrated, but more factories would have left the mainland for the island's low wage haven...

...When George Bush and Carlos Salinas first began promoting a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), one of their claims was that providing more jobs in Mexico would reduce the Mexicans' desire to emigrate...

...government commission recently concluded it could take "several generations...

...And also, of course, we could stop eating broccoli...

...Union drywall agreements required homebuilders to pay for full family health insurance...

...All told, immigrants make up over 10 percent of France's population, and many have relatives and friends who are ready to join them, legally or illegally...

...This is also happening: the fertility rate (children borne by the average woman) has jumped from 1.87 to 2.05 in the last five years...

...If we truly want less Mexican immigration, persuading the Mexican government to slow its agricultural liberalization would be one approach...

...There are also industries where immigrants do compete with natives, and this competition not only creates native unemployment but reduces wages for those who remain at work as well...

...No: too many other factors will intervene...

...All told, there are probably five million undocumented immigrants in Western Europe, 1.5 percent of the population...

...and a variety of uncontrollable and unpredictable economic, political, and social developments in sending countries will, in any event, have a lot to do with the actual level of immigration...

...It is, of course, theoretically possible that restaurants and hotels could be forced to pay wages high enough to attract American high-school graduates, but if they did so, we'd have many fewer (because much more expensive) vacations and conventions, not to mention meals away from home...

...Factoring these kinds of variables into rational immigration rules is beyond the ability of any policy maker...

...for the remaining jobs, employers were able to select only the most qualified workers, who then chose not to migrate and accepted relatively good pay at home...

...When restrictions were finally abandoned in 1968, however, few Italians left home...

...The construction industry where immigrants displaced native workers and the vegetable industry where no natives choose to work are extreme ends on a scale of displacement...

...Funds spent in this way might be more effective than hiring more border patrol agents...

...We can let migrant workers in as the demand for vegetables expands, but how do we reduce the number of "guests" when demand contracts, and how can we require them to avoid enticing their brothers and cousins to join them...

...100,000 to 600,000 a year evade capture...

...Important industries (garment manufacturing, for example) could not exist without an immigrant labor supply...

...As noted earlier, a four-to-one ratio wasn't enough to spur Italian moves to Germany...

...By that time, we will have spent the boomers' Social Security contributions to offset the federal budget deficit...

...q 462 • DISSENT...

...she could have afforded to pay good wages...

...In the United States, there are perhaps three and a half million undocumenteds, a slightly smaller share of our population, though we have another three million formerly undocumented persons who were "legalized" after the 1986 amnesty...

...As immigration expert Wayne Cornelius points out, of the 30,000 Peruvians now in Japan, half may be illegal...

...Immigration will have to be an increasing part of the solution, not only in the United States, but throughout the industrial world...

...Mexicans are even less likely to abandon their culture and homeland for small income differences...

...acreage devoted to broccoli increased by 50 percent in the 1980s as Americans' annual fresh broccoli consumption almost tripled to 4.5 pounds per person...

...Our minimum wage is now so low, however, that lawful employers can survive by paying the minimum to immigrant workers, while sweatshop operators exploit immigrants' vulnerability and collect an additional premium...

...Zoe Baird didn't need to hire an illegal immigrant to care for her child...

...There are already one million undocumented immigrants living in France, with another 4.5 million foreigners there legally—mostly Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians...

...Carlos Salinas's goal of "exporting tomatoes, not tomato pickers" is frustrated by Mexicans' consumption of tomatoes at twice the per capita rate of Americans...

...In a way, George Bush's inability to banish broccoli from health-conscious American diets is one cause of undocumented immigration...

...Today, the ratio of U.S...

...A broccoli crop, for example, requires fifty-two labor-hours per acre...

...A national health insurance plan, for example, that covered all workers whether here legally or not, would relieve the burden of taxpayers to provide for immigrant health in public emergency rooms and hospitals...

...It's a fantasy...

...Something short of full equality with U.S...

...456 • DISSENT Immigration Dilemmas Push and Pull All industrialized nations have an "immigration problem" for similar reasons...

...The civil wars in Central America and Indochina, whatever else they might have been, will ultimately have affected America most by raising immigration flows—as any tour through Salvadoran, Vietnamese, and Cambodian communities in California will attest...

...it is impossible to calculate immigration flows to match domestic employment needs...

...Since 1989 Japan has crafted a temporary, and racist, solution by recruiting some 200,000 (according to official government figures) South American workers who have partial Japanese ancestry...

...Emigration pressures will be irresistible, regardless of NAFTA or U.S...

...Enforcement of minimum wage, health and safety, and other workplace rules could reduce, albeit only marginally, incentives for employers to substitute immigrants for natives in other industries where real competition takes place...

...Glazer should look again...

...And the argument will become even harder if the proposals of some reformers—to increase the immigration of skilled workers—become law...

...Germany needs more young Turks, not fewer...

...Minimum-wage enforcement in immigrant industries, along with a more hospitable climate for union organizing, would put more money into immigrant neighborhoods and increase their tax contributions to the broader community, while reducing immigrant use of welfare, food stamp, and similar benefits...

...But professional smuggling rings are already at work importing South Americans with documents faking Japanese bloodlines...

...Paying for Our Pensions Two claims fuel much of the recent debate about immigration...

...Although our immigration restrictionists are now more civilized than those in Germany, the 8.5 percent of our population that is foreignborn is not much greater than the 8.2 percent of German residents who came from elsewhere...

...One is that immigrants draw more on public services (like welfare and public health) than they contribute in taxes...

...But this is not something we necessarily want to encourage...

...If natives were willing to work, they would demand wage-and-benefit packages that would certainly make the industries uncompetitive with companies based abroad...

...Even rapid expansion of Mexican tomato acreage won't replace U.S...

...The sociologist Nathan Glazer remarked a few years ago that "one does not note in Japan, a country with very few immigrants, unmade hotel beds, unwashed dishes in restaurants, unmanned filling stations...

...Last year, one thousand would-be immigrants drowned while trying to swim to Spain...

...Ultimately, we can't increase the workingtoretired ratio enough without a lot more immigration...

...to Mexican wages is about seven to one, and the ratio of living standards (measured purchasing power) is about three to one...

...Bush did make something of a contribution to solving the problem...

...As candidate Clinton realized, we can't hope to design a coherent immigration policy...

...Though nobody knows how many Mexicans would actually immigrate if they could do so unimpeded, the number is smaller than most Americans think...

...Immigrants recruit friends and relatives from back home when their employers need additional help...

...Our self-image of America as a nation uniquely open to immigration is historically accurate but less true today...

...It's not that stepped-up border patrols are entirely useless...

...Clinton said he didn't know what to do, since immigration was the most complex issue facing the nation...

...Then we were unique, not now, when throughout the world, one hundred million people are immigrants in one country or another...

...Japan's fertility rate is only 1.53 and, in thirteen years, Japan is expected to become the first country in the world where over 20 percent of the population is older than sixty-five, a point the United States can expect to reach by 2025, unless there is a lot more immigration...

...It seems there is a way of managing even without immigrants...

...American upper-middle-class life is dependent on immigrant workers performing tasks at wages no established resident would consider...

...In an atypical action, these undocumented immigrant construction workers went on strike to bring back the carpenters union...

...According to agricultural economists Phil Martin and Edward Taylor, U.S...

...Broccoli alone brought two thousand migrant farmworkers from rural Mexico to the United States...

...The second is that immigrants take jobs from the rest of us...

...But nobody can hazard a guess about when that point might come—one U.S...

...Fifteen years ago, undocumented immigrants fully displaced African-American garment workers in many cities, because the immigrants were willing to tolerate wages and conditions far below what legal workers were used to...

...production grew by 38 percent...

...A clever union 460 • DISSENT Immigration DUenunas lawyer went after the contractors for minimumwage violations and used the potential backpay liability to leverage a strike settlement that included reinstatement of health insurance and a wage increase...

...The migrants were Puerto Ricans with belowaverage education levels, and they were more likely to be unemployed before leaving the island—just the opposite of today's Mexican immigrants...

...It is impossible to design an immigration policy that bars the "takers" and welcomes the "providers...

...Over 10 percent of California's immigrants are on welfare, and over 25 percent of southern California's jail population are immigrants...