Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [23]
It’s a tragedy that America’s public school system is geared more toward appeasing teachers’ unions than educating kids. And until that changes, the trends will be difficult to reverse. The upshot of the status quo is that Mumbai and Beijing—often by way of MIT and Stanford— are currently producing a good amount of the talent that Bill Gates needs to keep Microsoft competitive. Immigration policies that limit industry’s access to that talent become ever more risky as the marketplace becomes ever more global. If we want American innovators and entrepreneurs to continue enhancing America’s wealth and productivity—and if we want the United States to continue as the world’s science and technology leader—better to let Apple and Google and eBay make their own personnel decisions without interference from Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs.
With respect to lower-skilled immigrant workers, who are more plentiful and thus more controversial, the economics of the phenomenon don’t change. Nor do the end results. True, first-generation Guatemalan whiz kids aren’t dominating high school science contests. And their parents are more likely to be manning the assembly line at a meatpacking plant than founding a software company. Still, the low-skilled foreigner, just like his high-skilled counterpart, is contributing to U.S. economic growth. And he, too, is doing so by filling a vital niche in our labor force, only this niche was created by the demographic reality that between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of working-age native born U.S. residents without a high school diploma fell from fifty to twelve.
A construction company, for example, might employ skilled professionals in the form of engineers; intermediate-skilled workers in the form of salesmen, clerks, and accountants; and lower-skilled workers in the form of roofers, plumbers, and crane operators. And just as immigrant computer software engineers expand the labor pool in Silicon Valley, lower-skilled laborers are job multipliers as well. James Holt, a labor economist and former professor at Pennsylvania State University, has found that each farm worker creates three jobs in the surrounding economy—in equipment and sales and processing and packaging. In the forest industry, additional loggers and graders and truck drivers mean additional furniture suppliers and cabinetmakers. Say’s Law still applies: Supply creates its own demand.
In 2005 immigrants were 12 percent of the population and 15 percent of the workforce. They were also 21 percent of low-wage workers and 45 percent of workers without a high school education. Around one-third of these immigrant workers were in the country illegally. Yet the U.S. unemployment rate in 2005 averaged just 5.1 percent, a sign that the national labor market for low-wage, low-skilled occupations remains tight, even as fewer and fewer natives are interested in filling the available slots. The strong demand for low-skilled immigrant labor is the result of more and more U.S. natives earning high school and college degrees, which is a good thing. It means more Americans are becoming more productive. But it doesn’t follow that the jobs overqualified U.S. natives spurn are now obsolete. Lower-skilled workers, let’s remember, tend to manufacture our goods, build our homes, harvest our crops, prepare our food, care for the elderly. They are nannies and janitors and truck drivers and chambermaids. Just because fewer parents are pushing their children toward the building trades doesn