Liberals Divided on Immigration

Posted by Myrna the Minx on April 23, 2006 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

From a CBS News Poll conducted between April 6-9, 2006. It looks like a healthy majority of Americans polled are in favor of letting illegal immigrants stay in the U.S. if they pay a fine, have been here at least five years, pay any taxes they owe, speak English, and have no criminal record. My question is, can we send Americans who have criminal records somewhere else? Or better yet, maybe we can set up some kind of exchange program with Mexico or another country?

N=899 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (for all adults).

Michelle Goldberg on Salon.com (subscription) has a really interesting article on the divide among liberals on the immigration issue. While some have heralded the recent demonstrations as a new civil rights moment, others have expressed concern over how illegal immigrants affect the job market, particularly for low wage earners and minorities, attributing the lowering of wages to the influx of illegal immigrants.

Britt Minshall is a United Church of Christ pastor and a proud member of the religious left. A former civil rights Freedom Rider, he heads an interracial Baltimore congregation of 200, which has ministries that care for recovering addicts and for prostitutes….He calls the current administration ‘evil, wrong, treasonous … a pack of monsters.’ And yet as he watched hundreds of thousands of immigrants march through the streets of America’s biggest cities in the past few weeks, he found himself agreeing with some of the most right-wing Republicans. Most liberals are ‘dead wrong’ on immigration, he says, arguing that social justice demands a crackdown on the undocumented. ‘I’m afraid the Minutemen have a point here,’ he says.

However, its not clear from the data if illegal immigration can be blamed as the main cause for a decline in wages or the decline of labor unions. Some economists like George Borjas think so:

In a 2004 study, Harvard economist George J. Borjas wrote that by “increasing the supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4 percent.” High school dropouts were more severely affected — their wages were reduced 7.4 percent, Borjas found. “The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary,” he wrote. “It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status. What immigration really does is redistribute wealth away from workers toward employers,” Borjas told the Washington Post last month.

But not everyone agrees with the conclusions of Borjas’s study:

UC-Berkeley economist David Card challenged them in a 2005 paper titled “Is the New Immigration Really So Bad?” He declared that the wage gap between American dropouts and high school graduates has remained nearly constant since 1980, despite the rise of immigrants in the workplace. “Overall, evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant,” he wrote. A recent analysis in the New York Times, “Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye,” pointed out that the wages of high school dropouts in California, who face a lot of competition from illegal immigrants, fell 17 percent between 1980 and 2004. But the wages of high school dropouts in Ohio, where there are very few illegal immigrants, fell 31 percent during the same period.

Nor is it at all clear that illegal immigration is to blame for high African-American unemployment, as pastor Minshall supposes. “No academic has really been able to make the direct correlation,” says Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Clinton and a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. African-American unemployment, she says, “obviously has something to do with a broader set of sociological and racism issues. It leads people to say if you didn’t have the immigrants here, legal or illegal, then those high unemployment rates among African-American males would come down. But that’s not been the case.”

Still, there is a general consensus among most experts that immigration has at least some negative effect on the wages of low-skilled American workers. “Nobody’s been able to really pin it down with hard data, except to the extent that there probably is a slight depressing of wages,” Meissner says. “We know from economic theory overall that if you have an unending supply of labor, you’re going to make it more difficult for the workers at the bottom to compete effectively.”

As Goldberg notes, illegal immigration is part of a larger problem of setting up classes and groups of workers against each other so that the continuing problem of the unequal distribution of wealth is ignored:

Nathan Newman, policy director at the Progressive Legislative Action Network, points out that right now, the poorest fifth of Americans earn a mere 3.5 percent of the national income. Rather than accepting the status quo and then fighting over their small shares, Newman argues, American and immigrant workers need to join together. Turning that 3.5 percent into 7 percent, he says, would have a far more salutary effect on wages than any crackdown on immigrants.

“The reason most workers, civil rights leaders, et cetera, are supporting the idea of immigrant rights is that they know the best way to keep [labor policies] the same is to allow conservatives and others to pit different groups of workers against each other,” Newman says. As he sees it, support for the immigration movement isn’t a betrayal of America’s working class; rather, it’s the key to a class-based political realignment. The movement that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets this month has “the makings of new political alliances that are far more stable and far more likely to create broader social change,” he says. “Which is again why you see many black civil rights leaders supporting these marches. This is the alliance they want. They think it’s an alliance that can deal with these much broader issues.”

And that’s what should be happening. Liberals need to leverage this momentum into a real movement for the realignment of wealth, fairer labor practices, a higher minimum wage, and an all around more effective approach to illegal immigration that includes a real attempt at maintaining a secure border.

Read this editorial from the Washington Post: Time for a Tex-Mex Marshall Plan.