Advantages of immigration outweigh the costs
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that we have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he set an example for the whole world, not just Americans.
Likewise, as Americans, we embrace the free market as the universal economic foundation of human progress. In short, we value freedom and liberty. A crucial part of that is the freedom of movement, and the ability to live where we want, a freedom that should not stop at city, county, state, or even national borders. So, in an ideal world, we would have unlimited migration.
But, to paraphrase Buzz Lightyear, “We’re not in an ideal world, are we?”
For much of American history we had no immigration restrictions. So, for example, as many Irish who wanted to escape the devastation of the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s could do so. While not everyone welcomed immigrants, no laws kept them out, and the combination of a small population and large area with abundant resources meant that immigrants helped America grow.
In what would be a common theme, the first restrictions were based on racism and fear. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 kept out all Chinese, primarily because railroads had employed them to build the Transcontinental Railroad, and they had worked so hard for such low wages that native-born workers feared the Chinese would take their jobs.
After the Civil War, with the rise of the industrial economy, many immigrants from Europe flocked to the United States seeking a better life. Industrialization concentrated many of them in the cities, where poor wages forced them to live in deplorable conditions. While initially most immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe – Great Britain, Germany, France – around the turn of the century the tide shifted south and east to Italy, Hungary and Russia. These immigrants were less welcomed. With the “closing of the frontier” in 1890, and the economic shift from agriculture to industry, immigrants no longer spread out across the vast continent, and remained concentrated in the cities. Their concentration and poverty frightened many native-born residents, and their numbers gave them growing political power, especially in cities.
The rise of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution created an atmosphere of fear in the U.S. after World War I, which led to the Red Scare and the expulsion of many immigrants for their radical political beliefs. These conditions led to the first comprehensive immigration restrictions in 1924, which used quotas based on the 1890 census to limit the influx of the less desirable, more recent immigrants.
These tight restrictions lasted until 1965, when neutral quotas replaced the nativist restrictions, which led to a great increase in immigrants from Asia and Latin America. The U.S. welcomed political refugees from ideological foes like Cuba and Nicaragua, as well as people from countries where U.S. military activities created conditions that endangered them, such as Southeast Asia. Mexican immigrants first came in great numbers in the 1910s, fleeing the Mexican Revolution, but many were forcibly deported during the Great Depression. They returned under the Brazeros program, from 1942 to 1964, which allowed them to harvest crops in the U.S. for parts of the year, while still returning to Mexico, creating a legal, low-wage agricultural work force. This led to a growing dependence on immigrants for farm labor, and also began the influx of illegal immigrants when employers and workers did not bother to work through the program.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan tried to resolve the growing problem of undocumented immigrants by signing an “amnesty” bill that legalized many of them. While the growth of the U.S. economy in conjunction with the relative weakness of the Mexican economy meant immigrants looking for work continued to enter the U.S. through the early 2000s, those forces weakened considerably after the Great Recession, so that in the last 10 years there has been a net loss of population to Mexico.
Of course, if Trump’s efforts to make Mexico pay for his wall hurt the Mexican economy, the ironic result will be an increase in Mexican immigrants.
Concerns about immigration focus on a three areas: undocumented immigrants who work for low wages competing with low-wage American workers, which both keeps wages low and makes it harder for native-born Americans to find work; H-1B visas are issued to skilled workers for jobs companies claim they cannot find enough native-born workers to fill – computer programmers from India are one example of this; finally, an influx of immigrants can overwhelm the native culture, essentially transforming an area. These are not unreasonable fears, but their ill-effects can be mitigated and the advantages of immigration outweigh the costs.
The biggest problem with undocumented workers is that, because they are outside the law, they can easily be exploited, which makes them much cheaper than legal workers. Many immigration opponents argue they do not oppose immigrants, just “illegal” immigrants; they are not xenophobic, they just want people to obey the law. Fair enough. But what if the law makes it almost impossible to immigrate legally? Immigrants who don’t fit in special categories from some countries, such as Mexico, have to wait decades to immigrate legally.
How we treat immigrants says a lot about us as a nation. The importance immigrants have played in our history have made America unique. Diversity is one of our strengths, and the reason we have a more dynamic economy than most. We should not let fear encourage us to betray our principles. We must develop a system that makes well-regulated legal immigration possible and provides a path to citizenship for those who are already here, so they can come out of the shadows. Efforts focused on deportation and barriers to entry may seem necessary, but will ultimately prove costly and create more problems than they solve.
James is a resident of East Washington.