Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [29]
To finger immigrants for the high rate of black unemployment and the dearth of black business start-ups, however, is to ignore a host of much more likely cultural, economic, and political culprits. The reality is that inner-city grocers charge more for food because they have relatively higher operating costs and less competition than big supermarket chains with economies of scale. And, more fundamentally, high jobless rates among black natives—and black males especially—has much more to do with their unemployability than the lack of available jobs.
Two economists with the Urban Institute, Harry Holzer and the late Paul Offner, found that employment rates for black men between sixteen and twenty-four actually dropped in the 1990s, a decade of strong economic growth and job creation. Among the primary reasons cited for low labor participation rates in this subgroup were declining real wages, a significant skills gap between black and white workers, high black incarceration rates, and the disappearance of manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs in recent decades. Holzer and Offner also reported that “employers perceive a stronger work ethic among immigrants of all racial groups, and a greater willingness to accept and retain low-skill jobs.”
A front-page Wall Street Journal story in 2006 provided a useful real-world illustration of the latter point. After federal immigration officials raided the Crider chicken-processing plant in Georgia, the company lost 75 percent of its nine hundred workers, who were mostly Latino immigrants. Local black residents quickly filled the openings, and for the first time since the late 1990s black workers dominated Crider’s processing line. Inside of six months, however, the company’s racial and ethnic makeup reverted to the migrant-dominant preraid norm. “The plant has struggled with high turnover among black workers, lower productivity, and pay disputes between the new employees and labor contractors,” according to the Journal. “The allure of compliant Latino workers willing to accept grueling conditions despite rock-bottom pay has proved a difficult habit for Crider to shake, particularly because the local, native-born workers who replaced them are more likely to complain about working conditions.”
Restrictionists point to places like Crider and see an argument for sealing the border. But it’s hardly prudent to fashion America’s immigration policy around protecting a small and dwindling bloc of workers whose circumstances lend themselves to so many alternative explanations. And given that, on balance, those foreign laborers are expanding the economic pie by creating better-paying jobs for an ever-growing number of natives with higher skills, the greater good is surely served by keeping the welcome mat in place.
The U.S. economy today rewards education and job skills. The stagnation of wages at the lower rung serves as a market signal that encourages people to stay in school and upgrade their skills. It tells people that if you want to prosper in your adult life, you should get an education. And that—rather than keeping out ambitious if undereducated immigrants—will be the key to the country’s economic success going forward.
If lawmakers want to encourage more black entrepreneurship in the ghetto and improve the job prospects of working-class blacks, deregulating the marketplace would be far more effective than removing low-skill immigrants from the labor mix. Up until 1950 or so, and in an era of open and rampant racial discrimination, the jobless rate for young black men was much lower than today and not very different from whites in the same age group. Today’s unemployment gap has less to do with immigrants (or racism) than with the implementation of various labor