Buy a link now!
Mexican women at the Tijuana border Larry Towell/Magnum Photos
For a country of immigrants, the U.S. remains vexed about how to deal with the fact that people from elsewhere still want to come here. Two successive Presidents have now been stymied in their attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The latest foray is the DREAM Act, a narrow but important piece of the immigration reform puzzle that would, at a minimum, give the children of undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. The bill failed in the Senate last December, despite the Obama Administration’s support. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reintroduced the act in May, but the prospects for passing any meaningful legislation before the 2012 election are slim.
In the meantime, the millions of illegal immigrants already here must continue to live and work in the shadows, one false move away from arrest and deportation. Indeed, legislation in states such as Alabama and Georgia is moving toward treating not just illegal immigrants, but also those who employ them, as criminals. And yet if forced to do without illegal labor, vast sectors of the U.S. economy, from agriculture to construction, would founder—not to mention the putting greens infested by crab grass and the children who would run riot without care. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports legalizing undocumented workers who are “already contributing to our economy,” provided they don’t otherwise run afoul of the law.
What makes the political impasse over immigration particularly frustrating is that hiring an illegal alien is good for the illegal alien, good for the U.S. economy, and good for the country he or she comes from. So what’s not to like? In cases like this, there is only one moral course available for true patriots: Go find an illegal to hire. Huge numbers of people in border states are doing precisely that.
There are about 11 million people living illegally in the U.S., according to the Pew Hispanic Center. By most estimates, the overall net economic impact of this illegal immigration on Americans is pretty small. Consider, for instance, the common argument that illegal immigrants are a drain on public services. A comparatively conservative analysis by Gordon Hanson at the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that illegal immigrants contribute about 0.03 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. If the net cost of government services to immigrants is included, their overall economic impact amounts to -0.07 percent, or roughly $10 billion—“essentially a wash,” Hanson concludes.
But don’t immigrants take jobs from and depress the wages of unskilled, native-born workers? Actually, immigrants tend to leave when there are fewer jobs available—that’s one reason why migration to the U.S. from Mexico is at an all-time low at the moment. As economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri argued in a paper in 2006 for the NBER, the impact of total immigration on the wages of unskilled, native-born workers was less than 2 percent, or roughly $8 per week. In a 2010 paper, Ottaviano, Peri, and Greg Wright looked across U.S. industries and found that the net effect of immigration has been to create more jobs for native workers—including low-skilled workers. That’s in part because many immigrants take jobs that would otherwise be sent abroad.
In a separate study, Peri analyzed cross-state evidence and found no proof that immigrants crowd out native, unskilled employment—and considerable evidence that they increase productivity. Each 1 percent increase in employment due to immigrants is associated with a half-percent rise in state income per worker between 1960 and 2006. Immigrants provide services efficiently and are themselves a source of demand for local goods and services. Unskilled immigrants take on manual tasks such as construction, while unskilled natives move into communications tasks such as call centers. This is an efficient division of labor that increases overall productivity.
©2011 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
Read Full Article »