Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [19]
A nation’s ability to produce goods and services determines its wealth. Productivity, defined as the quantity of goods and services produced from each hour of a worker’s time, is why some nations are wealthier than others. It’s a major reason why GDP per capita in the United States was $39,676 in 2007, but only $29,300 in France, $6,394 in Ukraine, and $1,237 in Mozambique. Productivity, writes Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, “is the key determinant of living standards” and “the key determinant in growth of living standards.” For our purposes, the question is whether immigrant labor ultimately contributes to America’s productivity and economic growth, or detracts from it.
Fundamentally, immigration to the United States is a function of a labor shortage for certain kinds of jobs here. Of course, work is not the only reason foreigners migrate to America, but judging from their overrepresentation in the labor force, and the fact that immigrants (excluding refugees) resort to welfare less often than the native-born population, we know that work is the main reason they come.
Rather than appropriating jobs from natives, however, immigrants are more likely to be simply filling them—and often facilitating more employment opportunities in the process. The job-displacement myth, which fuels so much of the national immigration debate, can be rebutted empirically. In 2006, for example, there were around 146 million workers in the United States, and 15 percent, or 21 million, were foreign born. If immigrants are stealing jobs, 21 million U.S. natives, or something approximating that number, should have been out of work. But as economics reporter Roger Lowenstein noted in a July 2006 New York Times Magazine article, “the country has nothing close to that many unemployed. (The actual number is only seven million.) So the majority of immigrants can’t literally have ‘taken’ jobs; they must be doing jobs that wouldn’t have existed had the immigrants not been here.”
The reason that immigrant workers tend not to elbow aside natives for jobs and depress wages has to do with the education and skills that foreigners typically bring to the U.S. labor market. Most immigrants fall into one of two categories: low-skilled laborers or high-skilled professionals. One-third of all immigrants have less than a high school education, and one-quarter hold a bachelor’s or advanced degree. Most native workers, by contrast, are concentrated betwixt those two extremes. Hence, immigrant workers tend to act as complements to the native U.S. workforce rather than substitutes. There is some overlap, of course, but this skill distribution is the reason immigrants and natives for the most part aren’t competing for the same positions.
A poignant piece of satire that was posted on The Onion Web site makes this point as well as any academic paper— and much more entertainingly. “As millions of new immigrants flood across the border each year,” we’re told in the ominous intro to a fake, CNN-style report, “the American worker is paying the price.” We’re then introduced to “Raymond Boyle,” a former corporate executive who recently lost his $800,000-a-year job to one “Alberto Fuentes,” “who illegally crossed the Arizona-Mexican border in the back of a melon truck two years ago.”
The segment goes on to describe how, despite speaking no English and having no formal business education, Fuentes displaced Boyle because Fuentes was “willing to work for significantly less.” In no time, the immigrant was outperforming his predecessor, a feat that Fuentes’s supervisors attributed to his “ability to put in long hours without taking vacations.” Interspersed with shots of the diminutive Fuentes conducting board meetings in a baggy sweatshirt and baseball cap are interviews with Boyle and his family, who’ve suffered the indignity of having to sell one of their homes. “Unless you’ve gone through it before,” says Boyle, “you can’t imagine what it’s like to live year-round in your summer home.”
The video clip concludes by showing Boyle in his new job busing