Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [42]
The Pew Hispanic Center published a study in 2006 that tracked migration flows back to 1990. The biggest factor affecting the rise and fall of border crossings was the state of the U.S. economy. Interestingly, the longer those immigrants are here, the harder they work. The unemployment rate for illegal aliens who arrived between 2000 and 2005 was 5.8 percent, compared with 4.1 percent for those arriving prior to 2000.
Among natives, low-skill black males have by far the lowest labor participation rates, and some opponents of immigration are quick to blame Latinos. There’s no doubt some correlation, since it’s these blacks who are most likely to compete for jobs with Mexicans. But given that black alienation from the workforce has not ebbed and flowed with Hispanic migration patterns but remained stubbornly consistent for decades, there’s probably more to the story. When William Julius Wilson was writing about black nonattachment to the labor force twenty years ago, immigration was scarcely mentioned. He was primarily concerned with the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, the lack of job training for blacks, and a hellish, self-perpetuating ghetto culture that encouraged criminal behavior and left too many black men not simply unemployed but unemployable.
The 1980s and 1990s saw two of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in U.S. history, yet the labor-force participation rates of less-educated young black men actually declined over that stretch. Black unemployment is nearly double the white rate and well above that of Hispanics, even though English-language skills alone should theoretically give blacks a major advantage with employers over Latino new arrivals. Nevertheless, those Latinos have displayed a greater willingness to accept and greater ability to retain low-skill jobs. By and large, black men aren’t being shoved aside for these positions; the more likely explanation is that they’re not interested in them. Black social pathology is a long and complex story. But Latino immigrants are not to blame.
If you’re looking for a villain behind the black unemployment rate, try the welfare state. If welfare has served as a sort of settlement assistance program for immigrants who essentially come here to work, it has been a lure and a trap for the native poor. The black family survived slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, but the well-intentioned Great Society sounded its death knell. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the first to notice this back in the late 1960s, when black male employment rates began to suffer. Difficult as it may be to fathom today, black participation in the labor force in the 1950s more or less matched that of whites. Today’s discrepancy has less to do with immigrants than with government programs that inadvertently displaced black fathers as breadwinners. There’s little evidence that the prospect of life on the dole drives low-skill immigration in the twenty-first century. But many of the jobs Mexicans fill are in fact available because the welfare state has made them less attractive to lower-skilled Americans.
It’s indisputable that Latin American immigrants increase the ranks of the poor in the short run, just as previous waves of Italians, Irish, Poles, and Slavs did. All were labor migrants. Typically, they arrived poor and unskilled, taking jobs in mining, construction, and other industries. Mexicans are following this pattern. And the issue isn’t their low socioeconomic status upon arrival so much as whether they remain that way for