Round Up: The Economist Argument for Immigration; How Hard Is it to Immigrate Legally?
Political blogger Ezra Klein presents an economic argument that immigration is not only positive for a nation’s economy, but necessary (newsweek.com):
Economists will tell you that immigrants raise wages for the average native-born worker. They’ll tell you that they make things cheaper for us to buy here, and that if we didn’t have immigrants for some of these jobs, the jobs would move to other countries. They’ll tell you that we should allow for much more highly skilled immigration, because that’s about as close to a free lunch as you’re likely to find. They’ll tell you that the people who should most want a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants are the low-income workers who are most opposed to such plans. And about all this, the economists are right.
There are also non-economic considerations, of course. Integrating cultures and nationalities is difficult. Undocumented immigrants raise issues of law and fairness. Border security is important. Those questions are important. They’re just not the subject of this column.
The mistake we make when thinking about the effect immigrants have on our wages, says Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, who has studied the issue extensively, is we imagine an economy in which the number of jobs is fixed. Then, if one immigrant comes in, he takes one of those jobs or forces a worker to accept a lower wage. But that’s not how our economy works.
With more labor—particularly more labor of different kinds—the economy grows larger. It produces more stuff. There are more workers buying things, and that increases the total number of jobs. We understand perfectly well that Europe is in trouble because its low birthrates mean fewer workers, and that means less economic growth. We ourselves worry that we’re not graduating enough scientists and engineers. But the economy doesn’t care if it gets workers through birthrates or green cards.
Regardless of who is coming, navigating the U.S. immigration system has become more complicated, making immigrating legally a challenge (USA Today):
Many people in Latin America have requested legal visas to come to the USA, but the wait can be decades, if approval is given at all. Diversity visa programs aimed at increasing the USA’s cultural mix are skewed against Latin America because there are so many of its people already here. All of which provides a powerful inducement to sneak in, critics of the U.S. immigration system say.
U.S. visa laws have changed and become so much more complex since the days of Ellis Island that it is simply impossible for many hardworking people around the world to legally immigrate to the USA, they say.
“It’s not a system that is at all geared to reality,” said Nic Suriel, an immigration lawyer in Phoenix.
Immigration-control advocates say the system is doing its job and the true problem is that the USA cannot afford to take in more people.
“America is already at an unsustainable level of hyperlegal immigration,” said William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee. “Anybody that’s complaining about us not letting enough people in legally is full of it.”
Until the 1920s, immigrating to the USA was relatively easy. America needed people to populate its Western frontier and work in its factories.
In 1921, Congress passed the first law setting numerical limits for visas based on countries of origin.
As the USA moved toward a service-oriented economy in the 1960s, immigration officials became more selective about the kinds of workers the nation wanted.
These days, U.S. immigrant visas are limited mostly to the educated, the affluent or people who have spouses or parents in the USA, said Gustavo Garcia, an immigration lawyer in Mexico City. If the ancestors of most Americans had tried to immigrate to the USA under today’s rules, their American Dream would have ended before it began, Garcia said.
“These days, you need a visa before you can even embark on a trip to the United States,” Garcia said. “They couldn’t have even gotten on the boat.”
Under today’s rules, most immigrants must be sponsored by a family member or by an employer, who must prove to the U.S. government that the immigrant has skills that are in short supply.
Category: Economy
