Immigration’s downside
How’s your Spanish? Probably better than it used to be.
You see Spanish words and phrases everywhere nowadays.
When you go into the big box stores or the DMV, there are signs all over in Spanish, just as there are signs in French all over bilingual Montreal.
Presumably the Spanish words are posted all over to aid those who are here who don’t speak English.
In any event, Spanish is everywhere.
So you’ve probably picked up a few words yourself.
Maybe “Cuidado: piso mojado.” “Caution: wet floor.”
If you have occasion to contact a government agency, the recording tells you — in Spanish — to presione uno para espanol.
There are election ballots printed in Spanish, and there are motor vehicle licensing tests in Spanish. Hmm.
But there aren’t a lot of candidates campaigning in Spanish. And there aren’t a lot of traffic signs in Spanish.
Say you’ve taken your driving test in Spanish and now you’re cruising down the N.J. Turnpike fighting its notorious Mad Max traffic. Suddenly the signs say — in ingles — “Right lane closed 1 mile ahead, merge left.”
Now what? Do you shout “Que diablos!”? Do you try to quickly look up “merge” in your Englishto-Spanish pocket dictionary?
Such ruminations, of course, run the risk of being condemned as xenophobic. Even far weightier issues related to immigration tend to be rebuffed with huffy scorn and disapproving mien.
For example, such issues as what effect, if any, does immigration have on crime? What about on the job market?
These questions are now taking on greater urgency.
A new President is about to take office pledged to take a more welcoming attitude toward immigration.
Joe Biden has signaled his support for measures to accommodate those who have long resided here in the shadows of illegal immigration.
He proposes to provide illegals with “free” (i.e., tax-funded) medical insurance. And he seems likely to condone, if not give his nod of official blessing, to bandito “sanctuary cities,” places where immigration law is winked at instead of enforced.
So now it’s all the more touchy to broach indelicate questions regarding the downside of immigration.
Yet, with the Wuhan virus having wiped out employment in the millions, is now an advisable time to be inviting immigration to compete for scarce jobs in an economy struggling to recover from the stress of a pandemic?
Simply asking the question may result in a remonstrating finger being waved in your face. What are you — some kind of Know-Nothing bigot?
You are sternly reminded that there have been periods in U.S. history when anti-immigration attitudes incited violence and gave birth to troublesome political movements. The Know Nothings, for example.
The Know Nothings evolved into the Native American Party and thence into just the American Party.
Eventually (some contend) the Know Nothing legacy yielded today’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
In the 1856 presidential election, the Know Nothings put up Millard Fillmore as their candidate, America’s last Whig president. He ran third behind winner James Buchanan, Pennsylvania Democrat, and runner-up John Fremont, anti-slavery Republican.
Still, Fillmore garnered 21.5 percent of the popular vote and even managed to carry an entire state, Maryland.
The movement was powerful enough that Abe Lincoln, ever the shrewd politician, was careful not to provoke the Know Nothings’ opposition when he later ran for President.
The Know Nothings tended to be populist and even included an anti-slavery faction among their ranks, the historians say. Still. the Know Nothings’ “PlugUglies” were never averse to making their political point with fists or clubs, not unlike today’s Antifa or BLM hotheads.
In former days, anti-immigrant attitudes were synonymously anti-Catholic.
Today, to the extent anti-Catholicism exists, it has a home base largely among progressivism, which finds the Catholic Church’s stubborn opposition to gay relationships and its stick-in-the-mud condemnation of abortion to be repressively reactionary.
After the Know-Nothings’
heyday, resistance to opendoor immigration started coming not so much from deplorables of the hinterlands as from notable liberal voices.
Frederick Douglass, the great civil rights advocate, urged that America’s burgeoning industrial jobs in the post-Civil War period go to former slaves, ahead of immigrants. The wishes of big business, however, prevailed over his.
Later, civil rights leader and congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a liberal Democrat, advocated sharp restrictions on immigration — including the legal variety — in her role as chair of a U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
She contended, as did Douglass, that immigration undermines jobs and salaries for unskilled labor, putting African Americans, especially, at disadvantage.
Even as recently as the 1970s, hers was not the only liberal voice making a case for limits on immigration.
Influential voices in the Democratic coalition urged crackdown measures against illegal, or “undocumented” immigrants, to use the de rigueur euphemism insisted on today by those of leftish disposition.
Labor leaders from Samuel Gompers to A. Philip Randolph to Cesar Chavez were vocal adversaries of illegal aliens, as they then dared to call them. Chavez even urged his members to line up along the southern border and physically block illegal immigrants from crossing over.
Socialist firebrand Bernie Sanders not long ago also opposed measures to promote immigration, viewing them as a drag on wages, especially at the bottom levels of the job market.
More recently, however, Sanders has adjusted his position to keep himself aligned with current Democratic Party dogma. That dogma views immigration as a powerful new constituency for delivering election victories.
Meanwhile, there was a period not long ago — before Donald Trump — when barriers along the U.S. border with Mexico started going up, extending their coverage to some 600 miles, and did so with the support of such Senate luminaries as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
There was a period around the same time when President Barack Obama’s speeches castigating illegal immigration might have, in an earlier era, put him on the Know Nothing ticket with Millard Fillmore.
But, no mas, as you might say.
Obama made his adjustments, too, as did union leaders in re-aligning themselves with the Democratic Party’s overhauled immigration policy.
Unions nowadays tend to raise the lion’s share of their dues and political clout not from factory floors or coal mine shafts but from public payrolls, government and schools. And public payrolls, unlike private-sector ones, remain pretty much isolated from inroads by cheap-labor immigration.
Oddly, joining the Democratic Party in robust support of immigration are Republican-allied special interests such as the probusiness Chamber of Commerce and libertarian/conservative voices such as the Cato Institute and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Meanwhile, Big Tech’s new class of multi-billionaire oligarchs — aligned with today’s Democratic Party — lobbies intensely for the sluice gates of immigration to be thrown open. Tech companies prod the government to flood the upper-level job market with the mass issuance of H-1B work permits for immigrants.
So immigration erodes U.S. salary levels at the higher-skilled pay levels, too — although it mostly continues to undercut the unskilled and low-paid.
Ordinary common sense tells you that immigration erodes salary levels. If a company is looking for a worker to help, say, unload trucks, and an immigrant applicant is willing to do the job for $5 or $10 less an hour than a native applicant, who’s gonna get the job, all other things being equal?
As Joe Biden might say, “C’mon, man.”
But, if you’re skeptical of folk wisdom, there’s credible academic research that supports the proposition too.
Harvard economist George Borjas, himself the offspring of Cuban immigrants and no Know Nothing, rates immigration “a net good” for the nation. “But not everyone benefits when immigrants arrive,” he hastens to add.
“For many Americans, the influx of immigrants hurts their prospects significantly,” he says. “When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay goes down,” the economist adds.
His own research has found that a 10 percent increase in the number of unskilled immigrants undercuts the already low wages of unskilled American workers by 3 percent.
American citizens of African and Latino descent “have suffered most from the (immigration) wage dip,” says Borjas.
He notes that a disproportionately high percentage of immigrants — especially illegals from Mexico and Central America — have limited education and job skills.
Borjas’ research has concluded that low-skill immigrants have increased the low-skill U.S. workforce by 25 percent and have whittled away bottom-level salaries by $800 to $1,500 a year.
Anyway you look at it, immigration — especially illegal immigration — also significantly contributes to the plague of crime that troubles, mostly, low-income minority neighborhoods.
Of course, not all immigrants are involved in crime, and nobody, other than such irrelevant fringe as the Proud Boys and scraggly Klan remnants, suggests otherwise.
But credible statistics reported by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office show unmistakably that illegal aliens make significant contributions to U.S. crime levels.
This is hardly surprising given the fact that many illegal aliens have limited education and are in their late teens or 20s, the age cohort closely associated with criminal activity.
Moreover, most illegal aliens hail from nations south of the border where powerful criminal cartels make their base and service the U.S. drug market as well as oversee the flow of illegal immigration northward.
The GAO reports that convicted criminal aliens comprised 21 percent of the inmate population of U.S. prisons in 2016, a figure that did not include an overflow 170,000 criminal aliens held on federal charges in state prisons. All of this comes at an incarceration cost to taxpayers of $1.4 billion a year, according to the GAO.
Debatable claims are voiced that the rates of lawbreaking are lower among illegals than among U.S. citizens. Maybe so, maybe not.
Of course, such arguments overlook the consideration that if you count illegal immigration as lawbreaking, then the rate of lawbreaking among illegals is 100 percent.
Setting that issue aside, however, it is clear that illegal immigrants add significantly to crime numbers.
The GAO survey of crime data, 2011-2016, reports the following levels of illegal alien criminal convictions as a percentage of total federal criminal convictions, by crime category:
— Drugs, 31.5 percent.
— Money laundering and racketeering, 21.9 percent.
— Auto theft, 12.8 percent.
— Assault, 9.6 percent.
— Murder, 8.9 percent.
— Firearms offenses, 7.5 percent.
— Sex offenses, 4.1 percent.
These are hardly trivial numbers. They added up to more than 200,000 federal convictions over the period surveyed — some 40,000 major criminal offenses a year by illegals. (See “GAO Criminal Alien Statistics: Information on Incarcerations, Arrests, Convictions, Costs and Removals.”)
It’s easy to wax sentimental and recite Emma Lazarus’ Statue of Liberty paean to immigration. But coldhearted tech automation marches inexorably onward.
Todays economy, alas, has little need for unskilled labor in the millions to do the once-backbreaking work of clearing roads, digging canals and operating foundries.
The topic of immigration surely merits, at a minimum, discussion beyond the self-righteous virtue-signaling, the haughty, holierthan-thou dismissals and the shallow political blather it’s now receiving.