Immigration in absolute and relative termsThe other day a friend (hi Jane) pointed me towards two good Daily Kos diaries on immigration. There's a lot to like in both of them, but I want to pick out a couple of strands for discussion.

In the first Duke points out, correctly, that the US has had other high immigration periods, and indeed as you can see in the chart to the left, this isn't even the highest. He then goes on to say:

Historically there have always been a small minority of protectionists who've opposed immigration for xenophobic or racist reasons, but generally we as a people have accepted new immigrants with open arms and absorbed them into society. Yet, today we find this harder and harder to do. Many believe the new immigrants are putting undo pressures on our economy, creating stresses on a tight job market, and stretching already taxed social services and education systems.

Why today do we find it so hard to absorb these new immigrants? Why at a time in our history, when we have never been richer as a nation and more educated as a population, do we find these new immigrants putting such great stresses on our society? Perhaps we need to look at some of the changes that have taken place over the last twenty-five or so years to find the answer.

This sounds really good, but the problem with it is that in fact, in the past, there was a huge amount of discrimination against immigrants. The period in which immigrants were well accepted stopped when the majority of immigrants stopped coming from traditional sources (protestant Anglo-Saxons, Scots and Scots-Irish) and switched to Catholic groups like the non-Scots Irish, Italians, and so on. The 1850's, for exmple, saw the rise of the Nativist/Know-Nothing movement, which was vehemently anti-Irish immigration. In the 1880's the phrase "new immigrants" came into use to describe a new influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, Russia and Asia - immigrants who were mostly Catholic or Jewish. For decades there was a huge amount of anti-immigrant sentiment. In 1924 the US set quotas, then in 1927 it refined those quotas to specific numbers of immigrants from various countries. (It's also worth noting that Prohibition was an anti-immigrant measure in which the disapproving Protestant countryside tried to force its mores on the teeming Catholic immigrant masses in the cities.

And, of course, in the late 30's, Jews trying to flee from Germany were turned back.

Birth region chart for illegals: source BBC/TBRNews http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2307.htmSo anti-immigrant fervor isn't unknown, in fact it's been quite common in US history and has resulted in political movements and in practical legislation intended to slow down immigration. (Though the main cause of the collapse in the 30's was the Great Depression, which hit the US very hard.)

But when people talk about "immigration" what they really mean is "illegal immigration," so let's talk about that for a second.

The first thing to realize is that it appears that the majority of illegal immigration is from Mexico, and that when you add in Latin America you're up to about 80%. So when we're talking about illegal immigration, we're talking about illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America.

The biggest single reason is that Mexican agriculture was smashed by NAFTA (Duke mentions this but throws it in with such a large laundry list that it gets buried), so you have a lot of Mexicans who need jobs. That's not all that's going on, but it's probably the largest part of it.

mexico-economic-growth-map-pre-and-post-85.gifWhy? Because US agriculture is massively subsidized (when you make something too cheap, you get... overproduction) at levels the 3rd world can't compete with and we've forced them to remove their tariff barriers and encouraged them to concentrate on cash crops that can't easily be grown in the US/Europe/Canada.

What's remarkable about immigration isn't that there's so much of it, but that there's so little of it. Italy in the 19th century, for example, suffered an absolute population drain because there was so much emigration to the new world, and that is with a much smaller wage differential. We aren't seeing as much immigration yet as we should.

US trade policy, for some time, has simultaneously destroyed 3rd world agriculture, leading to huge population dislocation and devastated the industrial working class in the US. Unfortunately almost no one works in American agriculture, while there used to be huge numbers of manufacturing export workers. Many third world (read, Latin American and Mexican) farmers who lost their livelihood then headed north to the US.

The US has an immigration problem, in short, because it's rich and other countries are poor. More than this it has an immigration problem because large numbers of people, primarily subsistence farmers, have lost their livelihood. If they were all poor but still had their farms and livelihood, they wouldn't need to head north. This is a direct result of US, and indeed western trade and development policies as carried out by the IMF, the World Bank and various other alphabet soup agencies.

I did say there were two diaries and I'd like to touch on the second one, by Stephen. It's a good diary and I agree with most of it (his notes on insourcing, for example) but I'll point out a couple of things, starting with this:

The government has essentially turned its back on its own existing laws concerning employment of undocumented workers.

The first time in American history there were any penalties for hiring undocumented workers was when the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed. Before then, nada. Sure, the workers could be nabbed, but the employers weren't fined. (One might note that this was probably based on "how should they know" in the pre "show your identity papers citizen" era.)

The other thing I'd like to comment on is Stephen's suggestion of:

Amnesty for all workers who are here as of the date a new immigration law is signed. Amnesty, followed by a requirement to demonstrate annually that the worker has been gainfully employed for 80% (or so) of the previous year, has paid all required taxes, and has committed no crimes beyond traffic violations. Pretty much the same thing a citizen is required to do.

An employment restriction is harsh. What if you're a housewife? A kid? A student? What I would do is make it a "no welfare/no assistance rule". Also if you have work requirements, even at 80% you risk making workers the slaves of their employers. They can't leave because they'll be deported. It turns back into a guest worker program, where the workers are at the mercy of their employers. Protest bad treatment, get fired, and pretty soon you're deported.

Finally, on a personal note, when I was reading up on guest worker programs around the time of the failed immigration bill one of the things I noticed is that a big industry which uses guest workers is tree planting.

Well, I'm Canadian and I know a ton of 20-somethings (and a few 30-somethings) almost all white, mostly middle class, who spend a lot of time planting trees. Why? Because while it's lousy work and hard as all get out, you can make some pretty good money at it, it's outdoors and they'll take pretty much anyone (it's piecework, so there's no real risk.) I don't believe American 20-somethings are fundamentally lazier than Canadians. The work can and will be done by Americans if the wage is high enough. And when I say "pretty good money" realize I'm not talking about good money as you or I would probably define it, I just mean "better than McDonalds".

Insourcing, the practice of bringing cheap workers into the country to do a job that can't be outsourced, is a choice. Societies don't have to do it. Instead, they can pay a couple bucks more an hour and employ their own citizens.

Of all the problems the US has, immigration including illegal immigration is, and I think both Stephen and Duke would agree, one of the less important ones. But if the US wants to reduce it, step one is to fix its own trade, agricultural and development policies. Might want to start by rewriting NAFTA.