More On Immigration
Some people are beginning to see the real problems with rapid influxes of illegal immigrants. I've never seen this particular problem pointed out. But now that it has been, it seems very obvious. Robert Samuelson, writing in today's Washington Post points out that there are two problems bound to intersect in the near future. Intersect like two fully loaded freight trains meeting head on.
President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics — immigrants, their children and grandchildren — increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers.
Does this look like a harmonious future?
Samuelson has just pointed out an extremely large elephant in the living room, hasn't he? We have a problem coming at us in only a few years. It will not be an easy one to solve. He points out that it is not exactly illegal immigration that is causing problems. Rather it is the disproportionate number of low skilled, poorly educated workers.
The central problem is not illegal immigration. It is undesirably high levels of poor and low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, most of whom are Hispanic. Immigrants are not all the same. An engineer making $75,000 annually contributes more to the American economy and society than a $20,000 laborer. On average, the engineer will assimilate more easily.
Testifying recently before Congress, University of Illinois economist Barry Chiswick — a respected immigration scholar — said this of low-skilled immigrants:
"Their presence in the labor market increases competition for low-skilled jobs, reducing the earnings of low-skilled native-born workers. . . . Because of their low earnings, low-skilled immigrants also tend to pay less in taxes than they receive in public benefits, such as income transfers (e.g., the earned income tax credit, food stamps), public schooling for their children, and publicly provided medical services. Thus while the presence of low-skilled immigrant workers may raise the profits of their employers, they tend to have a negative effect on the well-being of the low-skilled native-born population, and on the native economy as a whole."
Which is quite true. I've worked with a lot of immigrant engineers over the years. Many are as American as a native born person in a very short time indeed. So we are in a dilemma. The pro-illegal immigrant activists are agitating for more and more low skilled workers. An open border. What is likely to result is not a better life for them in the long run. It will result in this country regressing and being absorbed into the third world. How's that for a cheery thought.
There are striking parallels between how we've treated immigration and aging. In both cases, the facts are hiding in plain view. But we've chosen to ignore them because candor seems insensitive and politically awkward. Who wants to offend the elderly or Latinos? The result is to make our choices worse by postponing them. A sensible society would long ago have begun adapting to longer life expectancies, better health and greater wealth by making careful cuts in Social Security and Medicare. We've done little.
Unfortunately, the two problems intersect. Just coincidentally, the Census Bureau projects both the 65-and-over population and the Hispanic population to be about a fifth of the total by 2030 (the elderly population is now about 12 percent). The tax increases that will be required to pay for existing federal commitments to the elderly are on the order of 30 to 40 percent. People who don't think there will be conflicts between older beneficiaries and younger taxpayers — Hispanic or not — are deluding themselves. People who imagine there won't be more conflicts between growing numbers of poor Latinos and poor African Americans for jobs and political power are also deluding themselves.
As the president says, we need a "comprehensive" immigration policy. He's right on some elements: controlling the border; providing reliable identification cards for legal immigrants; penalizing employers that hire illegal immigrants; providing some legal status for today's illegal immigrants. But he's wrong in wanting to expand the number of low-skilled immigrants based on the fiction of U.S. labor "shortages." In his testimony, economist Chiswick rightly argued that we should do the opposite — give preferences to skilled immigrants. We should be smart about the future; right now, we're not.
And that pretty well says it all, doesn't it? We're not being smart at all. Neither are our politicians.
Immigration Reform | Gaius Wednesday, 17 May , 2006
By Scott W. Somerville, Wednesday, 17 May , 2006 @ 11:57 am
How come nobody mentions “minimum wage” in the whole discussion of illegal immigrants? Am I right to assume that illegals don’t generally get paid the minimum wage?
By Gaius, Wednesday, 17 May , 2006 @ 12:04 pm
They actually probably get minimum fairly often. Sometimes less (especially when they are under the table as well as being illegal). It’s an illusion that the minimum wage actually is met by most employers of documented workers. McDonalds pays higher than minimum for pete’s sake.