Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [76]
My primary goal in writing this book was to offer a rebuttal to some of the more common anti-immigrant arguments that I’ve come across while covering the issue as a Wall Street Journal editorialist. The received wisdom, courtesy of ratings-driven populists on talk radio and cable news outlets primarily, holds that immigrants cause more trouble than they’re worth. We’re constantly told that foreign-born workers are displacing native workers, that they’re crippling our welfare-state apparatus, that they’re criminally inclined, and that they aren’t assimilating. Yet time and again, my own reporting and research found these claims to be overblown when they weren’t counterfactual.
Economists across the political spectrum, from liberals like David Card to conservatives like Richard Vedder, have demonstrated that the free movement of labor adds efficiency and productivity to our economy. Hence, immigrants tend to stimulate economic growth rather than cause unemployment. Those conclusions are not cherry-picked exceptions. They are the rule. Indeed, the current economic literature is replete with such findings from, among many others, Pia Orrenius, Julian Simon, Gordon Hanson, John Whalley, Giovanni Peri, Bjorn Letnes, Jonathon Moses, David Henderson, Alberto Alesina, Tyler Cowen, Bob Hamilton, Jagdish Bhagwati, Philippe Legrain, and Grancesco Giavazzi.
Yes, you occasionally will come across a serious economist like George Borjas who makes the opposite argument. But even his research simply concludes that, at most, low-skill immigrants from Mexico might have a slight negative impact on this country’s small (and shrinking) unskilled native labor force. It’s also clear that on balance, Borjas is the outlier. If your anti-immigrant arguments are overly reliant on research like his, you’re the one who’s cherry picking. My intent in citing study upon economic study to make this point is not to bore the reader but rather to illustrate the vast gulf between populist bombast and mainstream economic thinking.
And so it goes with other oft-repeated contentions about immigrants and welfare, immigrants and crime, immigrants and assimilation—none of which hold up very well to scrutiny. It turns out that the low-income immigrants who qualify for public benefits sign up at much lower rates than low-income natives. It turns out that immigrants also commit crimes at disproportionately lower rates than natives. And it turns out that the children of Latino immigrants are, in fact, learning English. What’s more, they’re learning it with the encouragement of their parents and despite the best efforts of bilingual education advocates and other nettlesome multiculturalists.
Another goal of this book was to put today’s debate into perspective. Scapegoating foreigners for domestic problems real or imagined is something of an American tradition. Any student of history knows that the complaints and criticisms lodged against today’s Latinos were thrown at previous immigrant groups. But how easily some of us forget.
Ireland was the source country of the first mass migration to the United States. The Irish flooded America in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly the cities. In 1850, more than a quarter of New York City’s residents were born in Ireland. Throughout the 1800s, the United States absorbed Irish newcomers at more than double the rate of current Mexican immigration.
These Irish immigrants were dirt-poor peasants back home, but in America they settled in urban ghettos among their own kind, where crime and violence and disease were not uncommon. Most were uneducated. Many spoke no English. They worked as domestic servants, ditch diggers, stevedores, and in other low-skill, labor-intensive jobs that the natives shunned. They were stereotyped as slow-witted drunks and ne’er-do-wells who would never acculturate to America. They were considered members of an inferior race. Political cartoonists drew them with distinctly simian features. Restrictionists of the period called for rounding