Time for Principled Conservative Candidates to Speak Up

Wall Street Journal (Op-Ed)

By Jason Riley

September 22, 2015

Time for Principled Conservative Candidates to Speak Up

The Republican presidential race may sport a deep bench, but it’s currently fielding some shallow front-runners.

Donald Trump, who continues to lead in the polls, won’t acknowledge that Barack Obama was born in the United States. And Ben Carson, his rival who is rising in the polls, apparently wants a religious litmus test added to our Constitution’s age, residency and citizenship requirements for the presidency. Meanwhile, Govs. Rick Perry and Scott Walker have dropped out due to lack of support, notwithstanding their executive experience and records of job creation and combating powerful special interests.

The news that the Obama administration will lift the cap on refugees the U.S. accepts to 100,000 by 2017 is likely to exacerbate the reactionary populism that has dominated the GOP race so far. Yet it’s also an opportunity for the principled conservatives in the race to articulate a foreign-policy agenda that is more thoughtful than banning Muslims from the Oval Office. The refugee crisis in the Mideast gives Republicans a chance to display a more welcoming stance on immigration, a topic that has dogged the party in presidential contests since George W. Bush left the White House.

In an effort to accommodate the vocal but relatively small number of restrictionists who vote on the issue, some candidates will play to the fears and anxieties of Americans. The better course would be to remind voters of our proud and honorable history as a nation of refuge. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, about 125,000 Vietnamese were resettled in the U.S. Three years later, a second wave of Vietnamese began to flee, and they soon were joined by Cambodians and Laotians also escaping from communism. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter ordered the Seventh Fleet to search for and rescue the “boat people.” More than 800,000 refugees eventually settled in the U.S.

Concerns today that terrorist networks could exploit our humanitarian efforts are understandable and legitimate, but they are also long-standing and should be weighed against a moral obligation to do much more than we’ve done thus far. The Obama administration’s strategic priorities have made the refugee crisis worse. And there’s no reason we can’t put in place a resettlement plan that rigorously vets applicants to ensure that only bona fide refugees receive asylum.

The bigger challenge for Republicans may be educating voters on the economic consequences of importing more workers during a period of stagnant wages, tepid growth and low labor-force participation. Here again history offers perspective.

A quarter-century ago economist David Card published his pioneering study on how the influx of Cuban refugees during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift affected Miami’s labor market. Between May and September of that year, 125,000 mostly unskilled Cuban immigrants settled in Miami. The city’s labor force grew by 7% in a remarkably short period, yet unemployment did not increase and the average wages of natives did not go down.

Mr. Card’s findings aren’t limited to Florida or even to the U.S. Research on immigration’s impact on Southern California in the 1970s has shown similar results. So have studies on how French and Israeli labor markets were affected by sizable numbers of newcomers from Algeria and the Soviet Union, respectively. “The popular belief that immigrants have a large adverse impact on the wages and employment opportunities of the native born is not supported by the empirical evidence,” conclude economists Rachel Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt.

Mr. Card has his detractors, such as Harvard economist George Borjas, who argues in a recent reappraisal of the Card study that Miamians without a high-school diploma bore the brunt of any negative impact on wages that did occur. That’s not too surprising. Foreign nationals in the U.S. tend to compete for jobs primarily with one another, and natives without a high-school diploma can be close substitutes for low-skilled immigrants. Yet even Mr. Borjas concedes that the negative impact on this subset was short-lived and disappeared inside of a decade.

It’s also worth noting that the group most affected by low-skilled immigration is a segment of the population that has been steadily shrinking for decades. High-school dropouts fell to 7% in 2010 from 27% in 1960. The better way to help inexperienced low-skilled Americans is by eliminating minimum-wage laws that make them too expensive to hire, not limiting competition from foreign workers whose presence is otherwise enriching us.

According to Mr. Borjas, immigration may be increasing GDP by nearly a quarter of a percentage point, or about $43 billion annually. That may not seem like much in a multitrillion-dollar economy, but it adds up when compounded over time.

Issues like immigration and free trade are easier to demagogue than explain. When will Republican presidential candidates stop taking the easy route?

Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com