Give Me Your Skilled

...Immigration policy is an extremely complexmatter...

...Reviewed by Michael J. Piore Professor of economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Written by economists, these two books share the view that immigration is an economic plus for America...

...Simon fills in the gap with pieces of theory favorable to his case, and in a purely technical sense it would be hard to prove him wrong...

...It is because such values are ignored by these two books that they seem to me finally to make an irresponsible and indeed pernicious contribution to the policy debate—whatever the contributions their authors have made in other forums to economic research...

...This is, of course, a problem caused by every frontier, but it is more acutely felt in a nation of immigrants like the United States...

...The design of our current immigration system at least tries to take the human factor into account in the high priority it assigns to family reunification in administering immigration quotas...

...It appears to be the social status associated with these jobs, rather than the specific terms of employment, that deters native applicants...

...Yet it would be more sensible to make these legal protections universal and at the same time establish stricter limits on the number of foreigners granted asylum, since the violations of human rights that would thereby be eliminated in our own country—incarceration, separation of families, restricted access to legal aid, and so on—are comparable to those the refugees are seeking to escape by coming here...

...Nevertheless, it is one that neither Simon nor Borjas shows any sign of recognizing...

...Neither gives serious attention to the broader aspects of income distribution and social mobility, to racial and sexual discrimination, or to human rights, personal relationships and national identity...

...Still, were Simon and Borjas content simply to report the results of their empirical research, little controversy would be excited by their books...

...Ultimately, I believe, it is these nonmonetary considerations that provide the most compelling case for relaxing constraints on immigration, not the economic gains stressed by these authors...

...Upward mobility, for example, is possibly the major social problem in the United States, and it is an area where immigration poses a substantial threat to natives...

...This is a more questionable claim, since conventional economics offers no well-developed, plausible model of growth to support such an inference...

...This second-generation effect constitutes an important cost of immigration: To my mind, it is the strongest argument on the side of those wishing to curtail the flow of immigrants into the U.S...

...Simon would accomplish this by admitting more immigrants generally, Borjas by jettisoning the family reunification provisions of current legislation and focusing instead on skill levels...

...The Economic Consequences of Immigration By Julian L. Simon Blackwell...

...The current exclusion from such protections of refugees seeking asylum here greatly compounds the callousness and injustice of the present system, and has produced flagrant violations of human rights— as witness the recent revelations of the tyranny exercised by guards over Haitian immigrants held in Federal detention facilities in south Florida...

...Unskilled immigrants do not seem to represent a significant threat to these groups in the first generation: Workers who enter at the bottom of the labor market take jobs that those born in this country are by and large unwilling to accept...

...We have a historical legacy of blocked mobility for blacks and Hispanics that even the last 25 years of social programs have been unable to overcome...

...They are not immune from criticism, yet virtually any economist working with the available data would come to much the same determinations, albeit perhaps somewhat more cautiously...

...402 pp...

...Both men draw up an overall balance sheet on the economic consequences of immigration and proceed to make strong pronouncements on public policy...

...Moreover, the effect is held to be greater the higher the new arrivals' skill level (although Borjas maintains that the income of foreign-born workers in place declines as immigration rises...

...These conclusions are arrived at in accordance with generally accepted economic theory...

...39.95...

...Any reform of U. S. immigration policy should begin by extending Constitutional guarantees, especially the provisions contained in the Bill of Rights, to all foreign nationals on our soil...

...The tone he uses in presenting his "findings," on the other hand, suggests a degree of conviction that I doubt many of his colleagues would second...

...Immigrants, by contrast, find the positions attractive because their sense of status derives from the conditions in their countries of origin...

...Essentially, having shown the economic impact of first-generation immigrants to be positive, and the more so the more highly skilled the newcomers, each author advocates increasing the number of skilled people entering the United States...

...Children of the newcomers inevitably develop a native perspective on the labor market, and tend to reject the menial jobs held by their parents...

...A mounting body of evidence has led both George P. Borjas and Julian L. Simon to conclude that, taking taxes and social services into account, immigrants on the whole boost our national income, raising the earnings of natives as well as their own...

...One sometimes despairs of there being a "right answer...

...They are on firmest ground when they stick to the authors' own research, which seeks to assess the impact of immigration on the income of American natives...

...The difficulty comes with the second generation...

...The case against enlarging the scope of Constitutional protections in this way seems to rest largely on fears that doing so would increase the flow of would-be political refugees into the United States to an intolerable level...

...Individuals who hold the same values and agree on the objective facts of the situation can easily urge conflicting proposals...

...But these books simply leave too many important factors out of their pictures...

...While it is admittedly difficult to place a money value on disrupted family ties, neither Simon nor Borjas so much as mentions them...

...In any event, human rights and the full array of other moral and social values we as a nation profess to believe in must be taken account of in assessing the merits of different immigration policies...

...immigration system, though, result not from its impact on social mobility, but from the inhumanity of the barriers it creates between relatives and loved ones on different sides of the border...

...Borjas' proposal to sacrifice the familial criteria for the sake of bringing in more skilled workers is thus very disturbing, quite apart from its implications for the economic mobility of native Americans...

...They are not...

...Their calculus is much too narrow, however, to sustain their prescriptions...

...The worst hardships imposed by the present U.S...

...Simon goes on to argue that immigration increases the rate of economic growth...

...In their quest for upward mobility they either edge native minority-group members out of higher status job slots, or else join the growing pool of the discontented trapped in urban ghettos, unable to meet their aspirations and disappointed in the American dream...

...In fact, the increase in skilled immigration they call for would move the social mobility problem from the second generation to the first, and would reduce the pressures that have been building up in American society to improve educational opportunities for minority children and get more blacks and Hispanics into the skilled workforce...