Tweet
IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA
By Gwynne Dyer
AZG Armenian Daily
27/04/2006
Two things about American immigration are different.
One is that the United States is the only large First World country
that has a long land border with a Third World country. The other
is that only the United States among developed countries possesses
a politically powerful domestic lobby that actively wants a large,
steady flow of unskilled immigrants, preferably illegal ones. Taken
together, these two oddities explain why immigration in America is
such an explosive topic, and why Congress is unable to pass any new
law regulating the flow.
The collapse last Friday of bipartisan negotiations in the Senate on a
new immigration bill probably marks an end for this year of the attempt
to impose some order on what many Americans see as out-of-control
illegal immigration. What split both parties and ultimately doomed the
law were President Bush's proposals for an amnesty for nine million
of the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants already in the
United States, and a new programme to admit an extra 400,000 temporary
"guest workers" every year.
The House of Representatives recently passed a much tougher law
involving serious penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants
and the construction of a 700-mile (1100-km.) fence along much of
the Mexican border, but with Congress now in recess for two weeks,
that is probably dead too. There is probably neither the time nor the
political will for the Senate to have another go at the issue before
the elections that are due this November.
What this is all about is Mexicans. The United States, contrary to
local belief, does not have a particularly high proportion of recent
immigrants compared to other industrialised countries. No more than
one person in eight is foreign-born in the US, considerably less
than in neighbouring Canada (where the ratio is one in five) and not
much more than in large European countries like Germany, France or
Britain. But nowhere else has so many illegal immigrants, nor so many
who are unskilled workers, nor such a high share from a single country.
Mexican nationals make up the great majority of the "undocumented
workers" (illegal immigrants) in the US economy. Their large numbers
and high visibility give rise to paranoid fears among some longer
established Americans that the United States is becoming a de facto
bilingual country. They also stir a wider concern that this large and
vulnerable work-force of illegal immigrants is deliberately maintained
by employers as a way of keeping the wages of unskilled workers down.
The language issue is largely a red herring: most newly arrived
Hispanic families have become fluent in English by the second
generation, just as previous waves of immigrants did before them. But
the argument that illegal immigrants take jobs away from many equally
unskilled native-born Americans, and drive wages down for the rest,
has never been convincingly refuted, even though it remains politically
incorrect.
It's not that native-born American high-school drop-outs "won't do
those jobs." They just won't do them for five or eight dollars an hour
-- or at least, a lot of them won't. Many poor Americans simply have
no choice, however, and end up working long hours in miserable jobs
for half the money that an unskilled French or German worker would
earn for doing the same work.
Illegal immigrants are not a majority of the workers in most of
the fields where they find jobs; unskilled Americans are. (The only
job in which there are almost no native-born Americans is seasonal
agricultural stoop labour.) Professors George Borjas and Lawrence
Katz of the National Bureau of Economic Research recently calculated
that the real wages of US high-school dropouts would have ended up
eight percent higher in 1980-2000 if unskilled (and mostly illegal)
Mexican workers had been kept out, even if higher-skilled immigration
had continued at the existing rate.
One of the most ridiculous myths of American political discourse
is the argument that the US-Mexican frontier is too long to police
effectively and humanely. Here is a country that has landed people on
the Moon, and that currently maintains an army of 140,000 soldiers in
a hostile country halfway around the planet, claiming that it cannot
build and maintain a decent fence along the Mexican border. Instead,
we have been treated to a thirty-year political charade in which little
bits of fence are built in the traditional urban crossing places,
thus forcing illegal Mexican immigrants out into the desert where
many of them die -- but enough still get through to keep America's
low-wage industries fully manned.
Living right next to Mexico, a country where a large proportion
of the population lives in Third-World conditions, does create a
special immigration problem for the United States, but it is far
from insoluble.
It has only remained unsolved for decades because powerful economic
interests in the United States, with great influence over Congress,
do not want it solved.
All the other business that has been so earnestly debated in recent
week in the United States Senate -- quotas for guest-workers,
amnesties for long-resident illegal immigrants, and so on -- is just
the political cover that is needed to keep illegal immigrant labour
plentiful and unskilled wages low.
By Gwynne Dyer
AZG Armenian Daily
27/04/2006
Two things about American immigration are different.
One is that the United States is the only large First World country
that has a long land border with a Third World country. The other
is that only the United States among developed countries possesses
a politically powerful domestic lobby that actively wants a large,
steady flow of unskilled immigrants, preferably illegal ones. Taken
together, these two oddities explain why immigration in America is
such an explosive topic, and why Congress is unable to pass any new
law regulating the flow.
The collapse last Friday of bipartisan negotiations in the Senate on a
new immigration bill probably marks an end for this year of the attempt
to impose some order on what many Americans see as out-of-control
illegal immigration. What split both parties and ultimately doomed the
law were President Bush's proposals for an amnesty for nine million
of the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants already in the
United States, and a new programme to admit an extra 400,000 temporary
"guest workers" every year.
The House of Representatives recently passed a much tougher law
involving serious penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants
and the construction of a 700-mile (1100-km.) fence along much of
the Mexican border, but with Congress now in recess for two weeks,
that is probably dead too. There is probably neither the time nor the
political will for the Senate to have another go at the issue before
the elections that are due this November.
What this is all about is Mexicans. The United States, contrary to
local belief, does not have a particularly high proportion of recent
immigrants compared to other industrialised countries. No more than
one person in eight is foreign-born in the US, considerably less
than in neighbouring Canada (where the ratio is one in five) and not
much more than in large European countries like Germany, France or
Britain. But nowhere else has so many illegal immigrants, nor so many
who are unskilled workers, nor such a high share from a single country.
Mexican nationals make up the great majority of the "undocumented
workers" (illegal immigrants) in the US economy. Their large numbers
and high visibility give rise to paranoid fears among some longer
established Americans that the United States is becoming a de facto
bilingual country. They also stir a wider concern that this large and
vulnerable work-force of illegal immigrants is deliberately maintained
by employers as a way of keeping the wages of unskilled workers down.
The language issue is largely a red herring: most newly arrived
Hispanic families have become fluent in English by the second
generation, just as previous waves of immigrants did before them. But
the argument that illegal immigrants take jobs away from many equally
unskilled native-born Americans, and drive wages down for the rest,
has never been convincingly refuted, even though it remains politically
incorrect.
It's not that native-born American high-school drop-outs "won't do
those jobs." They just won't do them for five or eight dollars an hour
-- or at least, a lot of them won't. Many poor Americans simply have
no choice, however, and end up working long hours in miserable jobs
for half the money that an unskilled French or German worker would
earn for doing the same work.
Illegal immigrants are not a majority of the workers in most of
the fields where they find jobs; unskilled Americans are. (The only
job in which there are almost no native-born Americans is seasonal
agricultural stoop labour.) Professors George Borjas and Lawrence
Katz of the National Bureau of Economic Research recently calculated
that the real wages of US high-school dropouts would have ended up
eight percent higher in 1980-2000 if unskilled (and mostly illegal)
Mexican workers had been kept out, even if higher-skilled immigration
had continued at the existing rate.
One of the most ridiculous myths of American political discourse
is the argument that the US-Mexican frontier is too long to police
effectively and humanely. Here is a country that has landed people on
the Moon, and that currently maintains an army of 140,000 soldiers in
a hostile country halfway around the planet, claiming that it cannot
build and maintain a decent fence along the Mexican border. Instead,
we have been treated to a thirty-year political charade in which little
bits of fence are built in the traditional urban crossing places,
thus forcing illegal Mexican immigrants out into the desert where
many of them die -- but enough still get through to keep America's
low-wage industries fully manned.
Living right next to Mexico, a country where a large proportion
of the population lives in Third-World conditions, does create a
special immigration problem for the United States, but it is far
from insoluble.
It has only remained unsolved for decades because powerful economic
interests in the United States, with great influence over Congress,
do not want it solved.
All the other business that has been so earnestly debated in recent
week in the United States Senate -- quotas for guest-workers,
amnesties for long-resident illegal immigrants, and so on -- is just
the political cover that is needed to keep illegal immigrant labour
plentiful and unskilled wages low.