New York Times Magazine (Opinion):
By Adam Davidson
March 24, 2015
When
I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather — my dad’s
stepdad — struggle with his own prejudice. He was a blue-collar World
War II veteran who loved
his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. He
carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in
people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays.
By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened.
He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs; he even hugged my gay
cousin. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time
for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this
wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics.
These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.”
I’ve
been thinking about my grandfather lately, because there are signs that
2015 could bring about the beginning of a truce — or at least a
reconfiguration — in the politics
of immigration. Several of the potential Republican presidential
candidates, most notably Jeb Bush, have expressed pro-immigration views.
Even self-identified Tea Party Republicans respond three to two in
favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Every other group — Republicans in general, independents and especially
Democrats — is largely pro-immigrant. According to Pew, roughly as many
people (18 percent of Americans) believed in 2010 that President Obama
was a Muslim as believe today that undocumented
immigrants should be expelled from the United States. Of course, that
18 percent can make a lot of noise. But for everyone else, immigration
seems to be going the way of same-sex marriage, marijuana and the mohawk
— it’s something that a handful of people
freak out about but that the rest of us have long since come to accept.
Scratch
the surface, though, and you’ll pretty quickly find that many Americans
are closer to my grandfather’s way of seeing things than they might
find comfortable acknowledging.
I am referring not to the racial animus but to the faulty economic
logic. We generally support immigration when the immigrants are
different from us. People in the middle and upper-middle classes don’t
mind poorly educated, low-skilled immigrants entering
the country. Nor do we mind highly educated professionals coming in —
unless, that is, we are in the same profession ourselves. More broadly,
those of us advocating an immigration overhaul are basically calling for
official recognition of the status quo, through
offering legal status to some of the roughly 11.2 million undocumented
workers who aren’t going away. Few of us are calling for the thing that
basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically
open borders.
And
yet the economic benefits of immigration may be the most settled fact
in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists
could not find a single
one who rejected the proposition. (There is one notable economist who
wasn’t polled: George Borjas of Harvard, who believes that his fellow
economists underestimate the cost of immigration for low-skilled
natives. Borjas’s work is often misused by anti-immigration
activists, in much the same way a complicated climate-science result
is often invoked as “proof” that global warming is a myth.) Rationally
speaking, we should take in far more immigrants than we currently do.
So
why don’t we open up? The chief logical mistake we make is something
called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: the erroneous notion that there is
only so much work to be done
and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else.
It’s an understandable assumption. After all, with other types of market
transactions, when the supply goes up, the price falls. If there were
suddenly a whole lot more oranges, we’d expect
the price of oranges to fall or the number of oranges that went uneaten
to surge.
But
immigrants aren’t oranges. It might seem intuitive that when there is
an increase in the supply of workers, the ones who were here already
will make less money or
lose their jobs. Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor,
though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they
earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That
means there are more jobs building apartments,
selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move
those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population,
which means they increase the size of the economy. Logically, if
immigrants were “stealing” jobs, so would every young
person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should
become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite
happens.
Most
anti-immigration arguments I hear are variations on the Lump of Labor
Fallacy. That immigrant has a job. If he didn’t have that job, somebody
else, somebody born
here, would have it. This argument is wrong, or at least wildly
oversimplified. But it feels so correct, so logical. And it’s not just
people like my grandfather making that argument. Our government policy
is rooted in it.
The
single greatest bit of evidence disproving the Lump of Labor idea comes
from research about the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration in 1980 that
brought more than 125,000
Cubans to the United States. According to David Card, an economist at
the University of California, Berkeley, roughly 45,000 of them were of
working age and moved to Miami; in four months, the city’s labor supply
increased by 7 percent. Card found that for
people already working in Miami, this sudden influx had no measurable
impact on wages or employment. His paper was the most important of a
series of revolutionary studies that transformed how economists think
about immigration. Before, standard economic models
held that immigrants cause long-term benefits, but at the cost of
short-term pain in the form of lower wages and greater unemployment for
natives. But most economists now believe that Card’s findings were
correct: Immigrants bring long-term benefits at no
measurable short-term cost. (Borjas, that lone dissenting voice, agrees
about the long-term benefits, but he argues that other economists fail
to see painful short-term costs, especially for the poor.)
Economists
have shifted to studying how nations so quickly adjust to new arrivals.
The leading scholar on this today is Giovanni Peri of the University of
California,
Davis, who has shown that immigrants tend to complement — rather than
compete against — the existing work force. Take a construction site:
Typically, Peri has found, immigrants with limited education perform
many support tasks (moving heavy things, pouring
cement, sweeping, painting), while citizens with more education focus
on skilled work like carpentry, plumbing and electrical installation, as
well as customer relations. The skilled native is able to focus on the
most valuable tasks, while the immigrants
help bring the price down for the overall project (it costs a lot to
pay a highly trained carpenter to sweep up a work site). Peri argues,
with strong evidence, that there are more native-born skilled
craftspeople working today, not fewer, because of all those
undocumented construction workers. A similar dynamic is at play on Wall
Street. Many technical-support tasks are dominated by recent
immigrants, while sales, marketing, advising and trading, which require
cultural and linguistic fluency, are typically the
domain of the native-born. (Whether Wall Street’s technical wizards
have, on balance, helped or hurt the economy is a question for another
day.)
This
paradox of immigration is bound up with the paradox of economic growth
itself. Growth has acquired a bad reputation of late among some,
especially on the left, who
associate the term with environmental destruction and rising
inequality. But growth through immigration is growth with remarkably
little downside. Whenever an immigrant enters the United States, the
world becomes a bit richer. For all our faults, the United
States is still far better developed economically than most nations,
certainly the ones that most of our immigrants have left. Our legal
system and our financial and physical infrastructure are also far
superior to most (as surprising as that might sometimes
seem to us). So when people leave developing economies and set foot on
American soil, they typically become more productive, in economic terms.
They earn more money, achieve a higher standard of living and add more
economic value to the world than they would
have if they stayed home. If largely open borders were to replace our
expensive and restrictive lottery system, it’s likely that many of these
immigrants would travel back and forth between the United States and
their native countries, counteracting the potential
brain drain by sharing knowledge and investment capital.
Environmentally, immigration tends to be less damaging than other forms
of growth, because it doesn’t add to the number of people on earth and
often shifts people to more environmentally friendly jurisdictions.
To
me, immigration is the greatest example of our faulty thinking, a
shortsightedness that hurts others while simultaneously hurting
ourselves. The State Department issues
fewer than half a million immigrant visas each year. Using the 7
percent figure from the Mariel boatlift research, it’s possible that we
could absorb as many as 11 million immigrants annually. But if that’s
politically untenable, what about doubling the visas
we issue each year? It would still be fewer than a million, or less
than 0.7 percent of the work force. If that didn’t go too badly, we
could double it again the next year. The data are clear. We would be
better off. In fact, the world would be better off.
Whenever
I’m tempted by the notion that humans are rational beings, carefully
evaluating the world and acting in ways that maximize our happiness, I
think of our meager
immigration policies. For me, it’s close to proof that we are,
collectively, still jealous, nervous creatures, hoarding what we have,
afraid of taking even the most promising risk, displaying loyalty to our
own tribe while we stare, suspiciously, at everyone
else. It’s nice to believe that I am part of a more mature, rational
generation, that my grandfather’s old ways of thinking are dying away.
But I’m not so sure. We might be a lot more like him than we want to
think.
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