Let the Aliens In

...Such talk in Congress and the White House is nothing if not popular...

...Wayne Cornelius dismisses this belief as a “cruel illusion,” and there is in fact little to support it...

...Other refugees from Communism than the Vietnamese, like the Hungarians and the aforementioned Cubans, are no longer dependent on welfare...

...Only in 1921 did the government decide to close the open door to some foreigners, mainly those from southern and eastern Europe, who were arriving in sufficient numbers to cause grave alarm among the nation’s governing WASPs...

...But legalizing their status and loosening restrictions on immigration to make illegal entry unnecessary would substantially improve the aliens’ lot, which is what many Americans apparently regard as scandalous...

...Only 27 per cent used hospitals or clinics, four per cent collected one or more weeks of unemployment insurance, four per cent had children in U. S. schools, one per cent participated in U. S.-funded job-training programs, one per cent secured food stamps, and 0.5 per cent secured ,elfare payments...

...In 1975, for instance, the agency caught and deported 766,600 illegal aliensbut using that figure as a basis for estimating a total number, as INS does, is questionable at best...

...All the pressures on the illegal worker encourage him to do what he’s told, take whatever pay he’s given, and keep his mouth shut...

...At the same time, illegal workers tend to avoid any contact with government agencies, even those that might provide help, out of fear of being caught...

...The illegal alien’s outlaw status undercuts his bargaining power and compels him to accept nearly anything his employer chooses to inflict on him, from low pay to long hours to poor working conditicns...

...The aliens don’t make much difference to unemployment because unskilled Americans understandably prefer subsisting on welfare or unemployment payments to working long hours at low-paying drudgery...

...The choice is between continuing this legacy and standing at the walls to beat back the hordes-a choice that tests not only our trust in our heritage and our free institutions, but our humanity as well...

...But the majority of the Vietnamese here have barely been in this country two years, and Marion Sees their swelling of the welfare rolls as a short-run problem that will correct itself in time...

...Iiistorically, there appears to be no correlation between the rate of immigration and economic health...

...Not only that, but local officials say the Cubans have created at least 100,000 jobs since they arrived...

...Though the invasion has been silent, the reaction to it has been very noisy...

...For instance, we can count on the greed of the American Bar and Medical Associations to safeguard against the brain drain from underdeveloped countries that open immigration might cause...

...Most of the aliens they surveyed were paid little more than the minimum wage, with some receiving even less than that...

...Aliens either get good wages or they get low pay for jobs no one else will take...

...What is more disquieting is that the perception of a crisis has grown out of confused thinking that rests on questionable premises, unsubstantiated statistics, and groundless myths...

...They were shaking them down for 15 or 20 bucks apiece, threatening to call us if they didn’t pay up...

...If he is mistreated, defrauded, or injured on the job, he is not likely to seek legal redress...

...Another Chicano organization said that kickbacks to field bosses and excessive deductions for room and board likewise are common practices...

...Wayne Cornelius says few illegal aliens from Mexico want to live here permanently anyway, and that most of them come for less than six months...

...One of the healthiest periods in American economic history, 1881 to 1921, coincided with the arrival of 25 million foreigners...

...Aliens who didn’t fit into these categories simply were not to be admitted...

...The Fixed Pie The vaguest but one of the most persistent myths about illegal aliens is that their mere numbers strain our economic capacity, thus lowering our standard of living...

...It’s also disturbing that the issue so easily raised a public clamor in a nation of liberal traditions incompatible with xenophobic hyperbole...

...North and Houstoun reported that most of their respondents worked as laborers (including farmworkers), service workers, and other semi-skilled or unskilled workers...

...letting them in need not be a purely selfless gesture...

...Too many people want too badly to get in, and we would gain little from redoubling our efforts to keep them out...

...If he complains, his employer can fire him or even have him arrested by the INS...

...and for that matter, few that have had such far-reaching benefits...

...Since many aliens are apprehended more than once, the number of aliens who are caught is probably quite a bit lower than the total apprehensions...

...There are few American traditions nobler than that of providing a sanctuary to the weak, freedom for the persecuted, and opportunities for achievement to the ambitious...

...A California businessman who hires illegals told New West magazine, “If you pulled out every illegal alien in Los Angeles at midnight tonight, you would wake up tomorrow morning in a town without busboys, maids, or parking-lot attendants...

...When hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees poured into Miami in the decade following Castro’s revolution, many Miamians feared they would swell the relief rolls...

...Nobody knows...

...Keeley agrees, noting that one million legal aliens left the U. S. during the 1960s...

...The only hard numbers available are statistics on INS apprehensions...

...Illegal aliens no doubt also suffer relatively poor working conditions...

...That hasn’t stopped Chapman and his allies from using their unreliable estimates as the basis of even more unreliable calculations of how much illegal aliens cost the government...

...Factual support for this argument is conspicuously absent, no doubt because what concrete evidence there is discredits the theory...

...As noted above, the Cuban experience in Miami suggests that the influx of immigrants actually stimulated the local economy...

...Even the lowest wages paid in the U. S. are much higher than most could dream of making at home...

...The people who founded the United States pictured it not as an entrenched and isolated outpost but as a beacon for the rest of the world and a refuge for the oppressed...

...They are also vulnerable to even more flagrant abuses...

...are] to endure, the basic strain of our population must be maintained Stephen Chapman is a Washington writer...

...Charles Keeley is skeptical of scare talk about the flood of aliens who would arrive if restrictions were relaxed...

...As the above congressional report subtly explained it, if “the principles of individual liberty...

...Unfair Competition At the heart of organized labor’s demands for measures to stop the influx of foreigners is the notion that they compete unfairly with American workers, displacing Americans from their jobs and depressing the general level of wages...

...And the hard work has paid off: JacobY notes that the “median income of Cuban families rose from $5,244 in 1967 to $8,091 in 1970...

...Congress presumably shared the sentiments of the cynic who scorned President McKinley’s professions of affection for “our little brown-skinned brothers”: “They may be related to President McKinley, but they’re not related to me...

...Aliens, like most immigrants, generally appear eager to accept work of any kind because of the social stigma they attach to not working, the improvement it represents over jobs in their native countries, and the hope of advancement...

...Most of our fears about illegal aliens are without foundation and the conclusions drawn from them, however popular, are thus mistaken...

...Eliot Abrams, an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, says flatly, “There’s no evidence that the average alien depresses wages...

...his weapon was the untiring repetition of huge numbers...

...More Vietnamese are going to resettlement agencies for help in finding gainful employment, and they turn out to be hard, earnest workers,” he says...

...Body Smugglers Of course, many aliens have to go through a lot of hardship just to get into the U. S. Some pay hundreds of dollars to professional body-smugglers for help in getting across the border, and hundreds more for forged papers, “green cards” (Alien Registration Receipt Cards), and entry documentssome of which are so poorly forged as to be worthless, although the aliens have no way of knowing that...

...The old American ideal of the melting pot is based, in part, on the knowledge that most of the foreigners who come to America are those with the qualities most beneficial to a dynamic society...

...Putting them on welfare was a simple solution to a very complex problem...

...It guessed there were about 8.2 million illegal aliens in the U.S., but such experts as Wayne Cornelius, an assistant professor of political science at MIT and a longtime student of the subject, have criticized Lesko’s estimate as much too high and its methods as scientifically dubious...

...In one congressional hearing he placed the number of illegal aliens at four to five million, but when asked about the basis of his estimate, Chapman replied, “It is just a midpoint between the two extremes...

...According to Charles Keeley, a sociology professor at Fordham University, “Chapman was a master at defining the issues for the purpose of increasing his budget...

...We may have grown cynical about such notions, but is it right to turn away all the foreigners who still take them seriously...

...Labor thinks a lot of our economic ailments would vanish if only the illegal aliens would...

...A Department of Labor study by David North and Marion Houstoun last year reported: “This group of illegal alien workers were significantly more likely to have participated in tax-paying systems (many of which are automatic) than to have used tax-supported programs...

...A recent study by the San Diego County Human Resources Agency arrived at similar conclusions, estimating the county’s annual cost in social services to illegal aliens at $2 million and the aliens’ yearly contribution in taxes at more than $48 million...

...According to their line of reasoning, aliens impose a burden on taxpaying Americans by using public services, welfare benefits, and food stamps-all for free, since they don’t pay taxes...

...and our economic standards preserved.’’ With only a few changes, the quotas lasted until 1965, when Congress passed a new Immigration and Nationality Act that was aimed principally at reuniting families, admitting needed workers, and granting sanctuary to political refugees from Communist countries and the Middle East...

...The government leaned overboard in making assistance available to the Vietnamese, without making them understand that collecting welfare is not the normal way of life here,” says Leon Marion, Executive Director of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service...

...The Border Patrol hauls the aliens away and the farmer gets a couple of weeks’ labor for only the cost of room and board...

...The Welfare of the Cubans The American experience with immigrants from Cuba during the 1960s implies that aliens do not come to the U. S. to sit back and collect welfare checks...

...Aliens who walk across the border (as most illegals do) are often gttacked by gangs of hoodlums on either side...

...just a guess, that is all...

...The General no doubt would be chagrined to learn that instead of aliens being a burden to the rest of us, it’s the rest of us who are a burden to the aliens...

...Apart from any consideration of their illegal status,” said North and Houstoun, “they appear to be like immigrant workers: highly motivated and hard-working employees, whom U. S. employers regard as very productive workers, despite the fact that many do not speak English...

...New West mentions one Mexican who got $1.3 5 an hour stripping paint in his first job here-ten times what he earned driving a delivery truck in Mexico...

...When in 1973 he assumed control of a small, little-noticed agency demoralized by scandals and the impossible job of keeping out illegal aliens, Chapman took the offensive, warning publicly of an impending “national catastrophe” and publishing inflammatory magazine articles with titles like “Illegal Aliens: Time to Call a Halt...

...I’m not so sure everybody’s dying to get in here...

...Nor is there any obvious relationship today between the number of illegal aliens in a given region and that region’s prosperity...

...To keep them out is not only to circumscribe their freedom, but also to sentence them to a bleak, painful existence they desperately want to escape...

...The aliens in industrial jobs worked an average of 44.5 hours a week, while comparable Americans worked only 35.9 hours...

...Despite a special federal welfare program for them, the Cubans wasted no time in finding jobs, however menial...

...These people didn’t learn how to operate in our culture, and didn’t realize that everyone is supposed to work for a living...

...The low unemployment rate in Texas is 44 largely a consequence of the state’s stingy assistance to the poor...

...Like the NorthHoustoun study, the San Diego report expressed doubt that aliens displace American workers, noting one instance in which the State Human Resources Agency could not fill 2,154 jobs made available by the deportation of illegal workers, a failure it blamed on the jobs’ low wages, poor prestige, and long hours...

...A former official of California’s North County Chicano Federation told the San Diego Human Resources Agency that such incidents are standard practice among many citrus and flower growers, who they estimate owe illegal aliens $20,000 in back pay...

...They often pay illegals substandard wages-a practice made possible not by the noqnal dictates of the market, but by a “black market” in labor that puts the employer in an abnormally strong position and the employee in an abnormally weak one...

...Like our own parents and grandparents, foreigners come to this country today to lift themselves out of poverty, to escape political oppression, to give their children a better life...

...Conversely, the high unemployment rates in cities like New York and Chicago, where aliens are believed to flock, is probably due far less to the aliens than to the generally stagnant economic conditions in the industrial Northeast and the attractiveness of the relatively high welfare and unemployment benefits in such cities, which are enough to make any unskilled worker think twice about working for a living...

...Under the worst of circumstances, namely living here illegally, what the aliens find in the U. S. is plainly better than what they left behind, which of course is why they came...

...Instead of talking about throwing out all our illegal aliens and doing our damnedest to make sure they don’t come back, we ought to be taking precisely the opposite tack and legalizing the status of illegal aliens already here, while eliminating the numerical quotas on immigration from the Western Hemisphere...

...One Border Patrol officer told the Washington Star, “On the American side, we broke up gangs of local high school kids who had been lying in wait for the wets...

...By very skillful manipulation of the press, he created a crisis mentality, which perfectly fit his agency’s bureaucratic needs...

...They were robbing them, beating them up, raping the women...

...We even had two 12year-old kids who were stationing themselves at the end of a long culvert drainpipe that the aliens used to sneak through...

...Now, Jacoby says, “Miami is filled with small businessmen who were bluecollar workers in Cuba...

...Most revealing of all, 57 per cent of those polled agreed with the unequivocal declaration, “Illegal aliens should be rounded up and sent back to where they came from...

...In addition to valuable support from such interest groups as the AFL-CIO, the American Legion, and Zero Population Growth, Chapman’s campaign was favored by circumstance, coming at a time of severe econamic troubles...

...Nobly trying to avoid these disasters, Congress established immigration quotas based on the ethnic makeup of the American public, letting in a lot of northern Europeans, a few southern and eastern ones, and only a handful of Asians...

...In keeping in mind the humanitarian reasons for letting in more foreigners, it is not necessary to lose sight of our own interests...

...One congressional report expressed the worry that the immigration of such people tended “to upset our balance of numbers, to depress our standard of living, and to unduly charge our institutions for the care of the socially inadequate...

...The problem of a temporary swelling of the welfare rolls is one we have to face, but experience shows that it is only temporary...

...That the drawbridge to the golden door is now in danger of being pulled up is due mostly to the vigorous xenophobia of former Marine Corps commandant General Leonard Chapman, who retired in January after four years as commissionei of the Immigration and Naturalization Service...

...It is a common practice for farmers in the Southwest to hire illegal Mexicans for a couple of weeks and then call the Border Patrol when payday rolls around...

...They give an employer his money’s worth...

...One Border Patrol officer tells of apprehending and deporting a single Mexican five times in one night...

...So I am selecting a midpoint...

...North and Houstoun discovered, for example, that the aliens in their survey generally “earned less per week than comparably employed U. S. workers, though they generally worked considerably longer hours...

...An Immigration and Naturalization Service-commissioned study by Lesko Associates, a Washington consulting firm, had little Success in narrowing the wide range of estimates...

...Our immigration laws slam the door on thousands of people who would like to move to the U. S., and that in itself is a bad thing...

...by 1974 only 10 per cent were on the welfare rolls, most of them elderly people...

...Gallup likely could have found a majority in favor of melting down the Statue of Liberty and selling it for scrap, perhaps replacing it with a giant replica of a snarling Doberman Pinscher to underscore the point...

...Many of the jobs held by illegal aliens are the kind that few Americans would accept, regardless of their skills...

...A good deal of frightened talk is afoot about how to save ourselves from being drowned in this “brown tide” of illegal aliens, most of it boiling down to one simple idea: get them out and keep them out...

...Heedless of the chilly welcome, a lot of our neighbors still want to come, with the main consequence of the 1965 ceiling being a “silent invasion” of illegal aliens that has unnerved many observers to the point of near-hysteria...

...The Great Depression, on the other hand, came only a few years after we established the first immigration quotas...

...Indeed, the strangest thing about the controversy over illegal aliens is that it so seldom touches on our hallowed tradition of welcoming the weary immigrant, a tradition that goes to the heart of the nation’s character and purpose...

...The alien can hardly demand that he receive the minimum wage or be allowed to join a 46 union (although some unions have illegal aliens as members...

...A Gallup poll last year discovered that 74 per cent of Americans regard illegal aliens as a “very serious” or “fairly serious” national problem, with 82 per cent blaming at least one of our social ills on their presence...

...In fact, most employers deduct both income and FICA taxes from the paychecks of their illegal workers, partly because they don’t always know which ones are illegal and partly because they fear problems with the IRS and the Social Security Administration...

...while 77 per cent of the study group reported that they had had social security taxes and 73 per cent reported that they had federal income taxes withheld...

...The San Diego report mentioned an incident in which an illegal alien who suffered three heart attacks was refused permission to see a doctor...

...The Vietnamese emigrated to the United States with little preparation and no real purpose besides escaping what they expected would be a very unpleasant fate...

...As General Chapman admitted, no one knows how many illegal aliens there are in the U. S., and there is probably no way of finding out...

...Disturbed by the arrival of 160,000 immigrants a year from the Western Hemisphere (almost all from Latin America), Congress placed a quota on them of 120,000 a year-the first time in our history it had placed a numerical limit on Latin immigrants...

...and the accident that most illegal aliens have brown skin didn’t hurt his efforts either...

...According to Susan Jacoby , ’who has written extensively about aliens in the U. S., “By 1962, small businessmen, technicians, clerical workers, and urban factory workers were arriving by the thousands...

...some states, like those of the Southwest, have healthy economies despite a lot of aliens, while the industrial cities have both aliens and poor economic health...

...Coming from an Eastern society, they faced greater cultural and linguistic barriers than did the Cubans or other immigrants from Latin America...

...For our first century-andahalf of existence, we welcomed almost anyone who wanted to come, and the invitation was accepted by millions of people all over the world...

...Chapman has gone so far as to argue that deporting all our illegal aliens would cut the unemployment rate in half...

...One reason the debate about aliens so often goes astray is that it concentrates on their effects on the rest of us, ignoring humanitarian questions of whether or not coming here is good for them...

...After all, the rest of us have much to gain from the continual infusion of new people, whose mere presence testifies to their determination and willingness to take risks...

...This opinion rests on a false conception of a fixed pie-the more people there are, the smaller each slice...

...Training the Mule Chapman’s public relations techniques in his campaign were reminiscent of the farmer who began his mule’s training by clubbing him over the head to get his attention...

...Obviously, the aliens would benefit from the ordinary rights and privileges accorded other American workers...

...Until 1882, in fact, the U. S. had no formal immigration policy, and for the next 39 years it didn’t limit the number of immigrants...

...It’s foolish to pretend that open immigration will be completely free of problems, but most of them seem easily surmountable...

...Many employers take full advantage of the opportunity to exploit the aliens...

...Contrary to popular belief, few of the Cubans were wealthy, and even those who were arrived almost penniless...

...that, after all, is how things *usually work in Washington...

...One nice thing about the difficulty of immigrating is that it weeds out those who are timid or lazy, leaving only the adventurous and the ambitious...

...The case of the Vietnamese refugees is less encouraging, but the presence of many of them on welfare rolls appears due partly to the unique circumstances of their immigration and our efforts at settling them in American society...

...It will be argued that if illegal aliens are given legal status, they will likewise choose relief benefits over low-paying jobs, but the evidence suggests otherwise...

...But the blame for nearly a third ending up receiving welfare payments lies mostly on the federal government...

...San Diego, despite its 1 1 .%percent unemployment rate, had a similar experience: when some 340 jobs were vacated by illegal aliens, INS was unable to fill them with Americans and finally let the employers hire commuter workers from Mexico...

...The reality, then, is just the opposite of the myth spread by Chapman and his ilk: illegal aliens contribute more than their fair share to government revenues and receive far less than their share of state and federal benefits...

...The current length of time that Westem Hemisphere people have to wait for visas is about three years, which at the current quota means a total of only 360,000 people are waiting, hardly an alarming number...

...Moreover, many would-be immigrants-who come mostly from poor, authoritarian countries in Latin America-see the U. S. as the only way out of a life of poverty, ignorance, and oppression, and in most cases they are probably right...

...Without erecting a Berlin Wall along the Mexican border and subjecting employers and illegal aliens to all sorts of draconian measures-which would require much higher expen’ditures and expanded enforcementthere is no way to stop the influx of people from Latin America...

...It’s no surprise that the public concern about illegal aliens has been fostered by a government agency less interested in the public than in more power, greater prestige, and a bigger budget...

...Evidently the threat to the punty of the AngloSaxon race was too obvious to mention...

...when he finally visited one on his own, he was fired...

...North and Houstoun also concluded that illegal aliens neither compete with skilled American workers nor depress wages...

...You would probably get a big initial flow, but not necessarily an unreasonably high number, and after that the number would probably drop off sharply,” he says...

...And it is not likely that more liberal immigration laws would attract unmanageable numbers of foreigners...

...I have heard one or two million at one end of the scale and eight or ten 42 million at the other...