Importing the Population

Ross Douthat’s recent New York Times article is making the rounds on the internet.  Writing about birth rates in the U.S., he says:

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

For this population replenishment challenge, rather than calling for a second baby boom, Adam Ozimek sees opportunity for immigration.  He writes:

But of course immigrants also can be tomorrow’s taxpayers, workers, and entrepreneurs; and they can keep the ratio of workers per retiree up as well. Even better, immigrants arrive here as workers and skip past the whole taking and not giving stage of childhood through adolescence. If you want to apply the conservative meme of makers vs takers most accurately then apply to adults and children. Having more babies may be economically positive, but surely if we could give birth to fully formed adults their net economic contribution would go up. And that is effectively what immigrants are: fully formed adults who enter our country ready to work without having required anything from us first, unlike those needy takers we call America’s children…

Yet if immigrants have similar effects as having babies but with more positive net economic contribution, then why fuss about “Government’s power over fertility”, which Douthat recognizes is “limited, but not nonexistent”? Our power to increase immigration in contrast is both massive and cheap: all we have to do is stop getting in the way.

Immigration Attitudes

Using Europe as an study, Jens Hainmueller and Michael J. Hiscox make the following conclusion about attitudes towards immigration:

The main question we have addressed in this paper is whether opposition to immigration in Europe, most apparent among the less educated, is driven to a large degree by fears of labor market competition. This interpretation – applied to Europe, and to other advanced economies – is fast becoming an accepted political-economy wisdom (see Borjas 1999a; Scheve and Slaughter 2001a, 2001b; Mayda 2004). The best available survey evidence we have, from the 2003 ESS, does not support this explanation at all. Our results indicate that, in contrast to what would be expected from conventional arguments about labor market competition, people with higher education levels are more likely to favor immigration regardless of where the immigrants come from and their likely skill attributes. The same relationship holds if we consider the occupational measures of the skill levels of respondents rather than their educational qualifications, and it is essentially unchanged regardless of whether we examine respondents who are in the labor force or those not in the labor force. The findings thus suggest that the relationship between education and views about immigration actually has very little to do with competition for jobs. This conclusion should not really be a surprise given that the most sophisticated economic models are equivocal about whether immigrants will have an adverse effect on the real earnings of native workers, and a growing body of empirical research shows that the actual effects of immigration flows on income, employment, and unemployment are quite small. From this perspective, our findings actually fit well with expectations from the best available economic theory and evidence.

This conventional story about labor market competition and anti-immigration sentiments appears to rest on an unfortunate misreading of the available evidence. We find strong support for alternative claims that anti-immigration sentiments are driven instead by values and beliefs that foster animosity toward foreigners and foreign cultures and that are most prevalent among less-educated individuals. The data indicate that more-educated respondents are significantly less racist and place far greater value on cultural diversity in society, and they are also more likely to believe that immigration generates benefits for their national economy as a whole. Together, these associated values and beliefs account for around 65% of the estimated effect of education on support for immigration.

A big boost to global growth…

…that politics will likely continue to stop.

Yesterday, I linked some commentary on immigration liberalization from The Economist.  I really want to highlight some of the comments from the Free Exchange column in this week’s issue.

Most of this wage gap is down to productivity differences, stemming from disparities in the quality of infrastructure, institutions and skills. An individual worker, however talented, cannot hope to replicate the fertile environment of a rich economy all on his own. But transplanting a worker into rich soil can supercharge his productivity. A Mexican worker earns more in the United States than in Mexico because he can produce more, thanks to the quality of US technology and institutions.

Millions may move from poor world to rich without bidding down wages in the rich country relative to the developing one. True, a rapid burst of immigration might temporarily reduce wages. But if the pace of movement is slow enough to allow investment to adjust, borders could open without any wage dislocation in either origin or destination economies. Migrants themselves would benefit handsomely, however. In a new paper* John Kennan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimates that opening borders could raise the average wage of workers from developing countries by $10,100 a year, or more than 100%, thanks to the large rise in the incomes of those opting to migrate.

Those bigger incomes should swell global GDP. In a recent report Sharun Mukand of the University of Warwick calculates the effect of movement by half of the developing world’s workforce to the rich world. Such a vast migration could never happen in practice, of course, but as a thought exercise it is instructive. If migration closes a quarter of the migrants’ productivity gap with the rich world, their average income would rise by $7,000. That would be enough to raise global output by 30%, or about $21 trillion. Other studies find even bigger effects. A 2007 paper by Paul Klein, now at Simon Fraser University, and Gustavo Ventura, now at Arizona State University, reckons that full labour mobility could raise global output by up to 122%. Such gains swamp the benefits of eliminating remaining barriers to trade, which amount to just 1.8-2.8% of GDP, reckons Mr Mukand.

Even a modest (and more practical) easing of restrictions could be very rewarding. Lant Pritchett of Harvard University estimates that just a 3% rise in the rich-world labour force through migration would yield annual benefits bigger than those from eliminating remaining trade barriers. The incorporation of women into the rich-world workforce provides an analogy: this expanded the labour supply and the scope for specialisation without displacing the “native” male workforce.

For a framework on how this all comes together I recommend MR University’s Solow Model talks (part one is below).

Illegals emigrant to better lives

From The Washington Post:

For a generation, the men of this town have headed north to the land of the mighty dollar, breaking U.S. immigration laws to dig swimming pools in Memphis and grind meat in Chicago.

In the United States, they were illegal aliens. Back home, they are new entrepreneurs using the billions of dollars earned “on the other side” to create a Mexican middle class.

Read the article that produced this quote

From The Atlantic:

In this time of economic uncertainty and political strife, the United States must play to its strengths. Our most enduring strength – the thing that sets us apart and ahead – has always been that we are the country where the world’s best want to live. In return for the chance to live here, immigrants have time and again helped our nation to maintain its pole position among the nations of the Earth.

Immigration and Native Education

…natives’ probability of completing 12 years of education is increased by immigration, albeit by a small magnitude, an effect that is larger for blacks than non{Hispanic whites. This positive net effect is composed in part of the additional incentive to complete 12 years provided by the presence of unskilled adult immigrants in the labor market, and of the negative effect of the presence of immigrant children, possibly classmates or neighborhood companions. Both of these effects are larger for native-born blacks than non-Hispanic whites, as would be expected given the lower high school completion rates of blacks and their residence in school districts with more immigrants.

Thanks to Ryan Avent for the pointer.

We should be a better country than this

Newt Gingrich’s hopes of winning the Republican nomination for president were dashed Tuesday with this brief lapse into reason:

“I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who have been here a quarter century, who have children and grandchildren, who are members of the community, who may have done something 25 years ago, separate them from their families and expel them. I’m prepared to take the heat for saying, let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.”

The damning word in that statement was, of course, “humane.” For most of today’s Republicans, the people who come to this country without documentation are not entitled to basic human rights, Constitutional or otherwise. They are “aliens,” and illegal ones at that, who parasitically steal American jobs and use American emergency rooms.

To most Republicans, undocumented immigrants are never law-abiding people who came to the U.S. out of desperation, often working multiple low-wage jobs to support their families. They are never people who entered legally, but overstayed their visas. They are never people who pay payroll and sales taxes but receive few public services in return. And they are never, never from anywhere except Mexico.

Gingrich’s use of the word “humane” was key, because the immigration system as it is currently structured dehumanizes those who get caught in its grasps. This Frontline documentary from October captures the horror and injustice that is perpetrated in defense of “the land of the free.” (Ed. note: Please watch it. It’s extremely powerful.) 

Whereas President Obama has repeatedly asserted his support for open, fair immigration policies, his administration has deported undocumented immigrants at a record rate. ICE has met their target of 400,000 deportations every year under Obama, a large increase over deportations under Bush. Ostensibly, this was a political strategy to clear the way for comprehensive immigration reform legislation. No Republicans — not even John McCain, who wrote a similar bill in 2007 — would step forward to be part of that effort. The hardliners ended up getting their way courtesy of a liberal Democratic president: tighter border security, more employer crackdowns, and large-scale deportations. While Obama has recently begun to reverse course, his first three years of immigration policy were an abject failure.

Ultimately, how we treat immigrants, documented or not, speaks to who we are as a country. Will America be a country that sends away those who are too poor, too uneducated, and too brown, or will we be a country that respects the inherent value of every individual, no matter where they came from or how they got here? All of those who come to America to work hard, provide for their families, and give their children the opportunity to live a better life should be welcomed. They make the country better, while those who try to exclude them make it worse.

This does not imply that we shouldn’t have strictly-enforced immigration laws. We need robust border security in order to know exactly who and what is in the country at all times. Likewise, we should crack down on employers who skirt labor regulations by hiring undocumented workers. Immigrants who commit crimes in the U.S. should be prosecuted the same as anyone else.

But we must also recognize that immigrants already in the country have a right to stay. America should not be a country that denies people who want to work the ability to do so, nor should we break apart families or punish children for the actions of their parents. We should extend more visas to those who want to come to the United States to work or study, and they should be given a path to becoming American citizens if they so choose.

After all, the primary reason the U.S. attracts so many immigrants is because of the ideals of opportunity and freedom that we espouse. Our leaders — from both parties — have failed to live up to those values. We are a better country than this, and it’s about time that our immigration laws reflected it.

Obama’s “Prosecutorial Discretion” Makes the Most of a Broken System

Last week, the Obama administration announced that it would suspend the deportation proceedings of undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to public safety or national security. Citing “prosecutorial discretion,” the Department of Homeland Security will review the roughly 300,000 pending deportation cases to determine which high-priority prosecutions to continue. The rest — especially for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children — will be put on hold.

Many of the president’s supporters had been critical of the administration for deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants during his first two years in office. The White House’s position was clear: they had to show good faith on enforcement before Republicans would come to the table to discuss comprehensive immigration reform. But as anybody who has ever watched “Peanuts” could have predicted, the GOP snatched the football away after the Democrats made their initial concessions, leaving the Democrats on their backs wondering why they had ever trusted Republicans in the first place.

The breaking point was the Republican filibuster of the DREAM Act — the lowest common denominator of immigration reform. The law only affected undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. before the age of 16. To apply for legal immigration status, they had to earn a high school diploma or GED and spend two years in college or the military. If we can’t agree that a person who was brought to the U.S. as a child, who has earned a high school diploma, and who has served two years in uniform should be able to apply for legal status — much less citizenship — then there’s no hope for any progress on broader immigration legislation. But that’s what happened, and the Obama administration rightfully concluded that executive authority was the only way to bring a modicum of fairness to a broken system.

More on this to come.

Economist Immigration Debate

I really enjoy The Economist‘s online debate forums. If you’ve never read them I recommend taking a look at this week’s debate on immigration. This topic is particularly interesting to me as it is closely related to my undergraduate thesis. This week’s debate also offers some great background reading on the issue. Personally, I tend to fall on the open borders side of things at the end of the day.