immigration

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 10); Immigration and the Host Culture: Two Sources of Rejection

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , , , , ,

Those who know that they stand to benefit by immigration in the forms of cheaper goods and more affordable services may still oppose immigration on broad cultural grounds. Many think the nation is endangered by immigration and that the state should actively protect he nation even if immigration is economically advantageous. This idea is about coterminous with traditional xenophobia, usually perceived in English as a sort of neurosis. Nevertheless, it may also be well reasoned. It’s useful to separate cultural objections to immigration into two categories. There are objections based on revulsion and others based on the fear of cultural dilution.

Cultural Revulsion

Cultural revulsion toward immigrants is part of general anxiety about strangers that may be hard-wired in all humans: Babies do dislike most new faces. Once, the strangers prove harmless, the revulsion may dissipate quickly. Sometimes though cultural revulsion centers on tangible issues, including the immigrants’ own well articulated beliefs and customs. That’s especially true where culture intersects with the political system or with the moral order of the host country. Two examples. First, separation of church and state, of religion and government, is a pillar of American democracy (and of several other democratic countries, such as France). It’s a guarantee against a form of despotism historically familiar to people of European background. (The founding Pilgrims saw themselves as refugees from religious persecution, after all.) The separation acts like a firewall protecting us from old horrors still fresh in the collective memories of literate Euro-Americans. It was not so long ago that my own ancestors were burning people alive for wrong thinking, I know. (Not that I am not tempted today.)

So, other things being equal, I would rather not be surrounded by people for whom this customary belief is alien or indifferent. Other things being still equal, I would be slow to admit immigrants from a religious culture where this separation is itself religious anathema. Many Muslim immigrants come from countries where the lawful punishment on the books for apostasy is the death penalty, administered by the state, of course, by government. I realize it’s rarely applied but it’s on the books and it probably slows down the impulse to look out of the window of one’s own religion.  In some of those countries, atheism is considered apostasy. This kind of attitude may be both widespread and tenacious. I will never forget a street demonstration of Pakistani attorneys shown on TV protesting the fact that apostasy was not punished by death in their country. The same happened ten years later in Bangladesh.

Even those secular immigrants from Muslim areas who deplore the fact that apostasy is a capital crime in their country of origin probably still have a sense of  moral normalcy that differs much from mine. I suspect they would go easy on milder forms of government interference in the religious sphere, and vice-versa. I fear that they would not rise against certain abnormalities, government punishment of particular religious or irreligious stances, for example, as fast as I would, and others who come from a secular society. As a case in point, I take the public declarations of major French Muslim organizations following the Charlie Hebdo massacre. To my mind, mixed with sincere expressions of regret, was the suggestion they favored religious exceptions to the constitutional French principle of freedom of expression.

At a minimum, I am concerned that even nominal foreign Muslims would be a drag in a fix, or in some fixes. Frankly, I mean that I would expect from them on the average a degree of social obscurantism not compatible with their level of education. Thus, the professor and television personality Tarik Ramadan, an elegant and articulate man of culture, was the face of intellectual Islam in the French speaking world until recently. When confronted by a French journalist not long ago, however, Ramadan famously weaseled out of condemning the stoning of adulterous women. (I saw the relevant video.) It’s hard to make him my trusted neighbor although I am sure he would do the right thing if my house were on fire.

Here is my second example of cultural revulsion toward immigrants, an apolitical and non-religious example: In a wide swath of Africa, little girls are routinely subjected to a painful, grotesque and dangerous form of genital mutilation misleadingly called “female circumcisions.” (One of my sources of information is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoirs, Infidel. I have read others over the past fifty years. Ali reports that she was subjected to this atrocity herself. I have known personally two victims of the practice.) Like many other Americans, I think there is a point where peaceful coexistence with routinely committed crime becomes complicity with the same crime. I don’t want to live anywhere near people who practice this custom. Even those from the same groups who do not practice it but tolerate it in the name of tradition are unacceptable to me. (Incidentally, it is not a Muslim custom although many practitioners believe it is.) I don’t even want such people to exist undisturbed in the polity to which I belong. For this reason, I would rather have in my neighborhood 5,000 new illegal Mexican immigrants than one hundred Somali admitted legally. My preference based on revulsion illustrates how there are concrete different cultural reasons to oppose immigration not rooted in blind, ignorant “prejudice” or “pre-judgment.” But overt public discussions are often limited to the feared cultural dilution large immigration may cause that I consider below.

Under current conditions of political correctness, where a religious test may be unthinkable, my objections regarding the separation of  religion and government would lead, of course,  to the easiest solution, the exclusion of most Muslim immigrants. President Trump tried this on a small scale in 2017 and 2018, with a small minority of potential immigrants. The decision was first frozen in the courts and then thawed. As I write, it’s not being implemented. Exclusion is an extreme solution and probably not necessary. I think I could devise a test about separation of religion and government if I were asked. The test would be given to anyone without exception seeking to emigrate to the US. It’s far from a ridiculous proposition. When I first came to this country there was a test to spot Communists. However effective it was in such spotting, it kept many European Communists out, from prudence. I knew some personally.

Culture Dilution (or Erosion)

There is also the fear without a name, or without much of a name, that lurks in the background of many animated discussions of immigration. Much of it is taking place on-line. It’s the fear that one will find oneself a stranger in one’s own land and, ultimately, that one will disappear to some extent, and one’s children to a larger extent. It’s the fear that one’s children’s children will exist as one’s descendants in the flesh alone. This fear is puzzling because it’s always true that children are unlike their parents. It’s difficult to figure why people are so attached to their collective vertical membership, to that identity. (The Lebanese author, Amin Maalouf, explores this issue poignantly in his 1998 Violence and the Need to Belong -Time Warner – English edition: 2001) It’s difficult to fathom why parents wish their children to be like them although they, the children, will surely live in a different world. It’s even more difficult to understand why, at a given time, people choose, put forward, one of their memberships, that one, over the several others available. Why, “American” rather than say, “college professor”? Why “mother” rather than “vegan yoga practitioner”? (The April 2018 issue of National Geographic addresses tangentially some issues of identity.)

This apparent amorphousness of the underlying belief does not mean that identity matters little. Perhaps, the reverse is true. As I pointed out, it’s at the center of the concept of nation. Emotion-based reactions may be all the stronger because people don’t know what they are thinking, only what they are feeling. That’s one reason the concept of “nation” and associated symbols give rise to intense discussions. Many realize that their knowledge of their own country is spotty but they know what they feel when the national anthem is played. Curiously, of all the collective identities available, the national identity is one of the most heavily invoked, by Americans, certainly, but also by Bosnians, and possibly, even by Haitians. It seems to rise instantaneously in the presence of the culturally different. It matters so much that people kill and die for it. It also motivates them to play good soccer (“football”) as the splendid team from tiny Croatia demonstrated in the 2018 World Cup. (It came in second, after France.)

Once, I wrote a scholarly article and traveled half-way around the world to deliver it at an academic meeting, mostly for the pleasure of reading aloud the Greek title I had devised for it:

“Encephalokleptophobia,”

It’s the fear that that which is inside your head will be stolen, that which makes you a member of your group, so that you will cease being yourself. No doubt, it’s real enough to deserve its own name. The presence of many immigrants bearing a different culture activates this fear.

The fear of cultural dilution is not necessarily all futile. The mere presence of immigrants often actually waters down perceptibly the host culture including, first in some haphazard ways and then, in its most valued features: That which was important still is important but less so. New and different facts of life crowd out the old. Suddenly, your diner coffee, heated for hours on end, tastes just as bitter as it always did but now, you realize it. Several of the local AM radio channels play only rancheras during your commute instead of news in English. Soccer partially replaces football. The girls who used to stand on the sidelines and cheer football players now play soccer themselves. Your own children may grow up playing only soccer. They accuse one another of being “offside” when they score that goal but they don’t mean what you think they mean. Your world is still there but it’s become a bit faint; its vivid colors are turning toward black and white. Baseball will still be played but its big events will have to compete for television time with God knows what, not activities you condemn necessarily, but activities that don’t ring a bell for you, Norwegian curling, for example.

Not everything is negative in involuntary culture change. I have mentioned elsewhere how immigrants will enrich the national culture, in matters of food and of music, most obviously, and even with respect to manners. A large influx of immigrants in one’s native culture is like a forced journey in place though. Some people like to travel; others just hate it and there is probably no remedy for the latter’s rejection. To accommodate them, probably – probably – requires that immigrants be admitted slowly, in small numbers at a time. Below, I consider in a limited way actual hostility toward immigrants.

Note: I may not be the right person to gauge attachment to the culture one grew up with. Like many an immigrant, I may be more indifferent to it than most. Those who love the culture of their mother country usually don’t leave and, if they do, they return. I am the other kind of immigrant although, frankly, I often miss tête de veau sauce ravigotte. (Don’t ask!)

Appendix Two

Gains from Cultural Hybridization

Here is a sort of immigration fairy tale: In my town of Santa Cruz, California, a long time ago, landed separately two musicians from Morocco, one from the mountains and one from the gates of the desert. How these two musicians arrived here specifically, I am not sure. I sort of know how each got his green card; it may have been the old fashioned, honorable way, on their backs, so to speak.

Both were very well trained on several instruments in their traditional music, the music of the Amazigh minority to which they both belong (also known as “Berbers,” a name they don’t like.) They sing and compose in their native language, Tamazight, but also in English, in French, and in Arabic. They formed a tiny band. They played in the streets, in cafes, anyplace that would have them. Soon, they felt their duo-plus format was too constraining. One by one, they recruited local musicians with different skills and no training at all in Moroccan music, or in anything approximating it. The music they played changed, of course, it changed gradually in particular under the influence of the Western recruits. It became somewhat “inauthentic,” as the busybodies would say. After fifteen years, the group had the nerve to enter music festivals in Morocco itself. In 2015 or 2016 the group won a national award in that country. The group is called “Aza,” which means “Renaissance” in their language. (Please, buy their album on-line.)

The point of this story is that those two immigrants enriched in obvious ways, not only American culture, but world culture, if there is such a thing. They invented a new sound, a sound no one in the world had ever heard. It’s also a sound that may never have come into existence without them. This story makes me proud as an American. I want more such invention.

[Editor’s note: in case you missed it, here is Part 9]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 9): Non-Economic Objections to Immigration; Assimilation and Stubborn Language Facts

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , , , , , , ,

In my area of central California, there are many people with ascendants from Mexico. You are normally in daily contact with some of them. As is the case with most immigrations (plural) of long standing though (notably, North African immigration into France), people of Mexican origins occur at various level of cultural integration. Some live with a foot in the Old Country; others, generations, from their immigrant forebears, only look Mexican, speak only a few practical sentences of Spanish but understand more, and they have Spanish last names. A few only have Spanish surnames and, perhaps, distant cousins in Mexico. I know one dark-skinned utmostly “Mexican looking” man whose acquaintance with the Spanish language is a good ability to pronounce Spanish words. This stratification of people identified as “Mexican” creates a kind of optical illusion with consequences on the native-born’s attitudes toward immigration.

Many conservatives, friends of mine included, are fully convinced that Mexican immigrants don’t “try” to assimilate and, in particular, that they don’t want to learn English. In addition, they often add that this resistance contrasts badly with former immigrants, from another era – usually their own ancestors – from Italy, or Greece, or Eastern Europe – who made the effort to learn English quickly, perhaps in six months or so. This common imagery is based on a fallacy and on a half-truth.

The most casual observation in my area is enough to contradict the view that Mexican immigrants reject assimilation into American life. There are people with Spanish first and last names, and a Spanish accent in all the restaurants (on both sides of the counter), in the movie theaters, at the gym I patronize. The same is true in the churches I don’t patronize, I am told. My granddaughter plays soccer with other girls that include the right proportion of Hispanic girls. Local Hispanic parents (mostly Mexicans) don’t fail to send their children to public school, except when they send them to religious schools alongside Anglo Catholics and Anglo evangelicals.

At the heart of the widespread suspicion that “Mexicans” reject assimilation are several myths, endlessly repeated on conservative talk radio, about immigrants and language. They include the idea that Mexicans, and also Central Americans, fiercely resist learning English. This is an important charge because using the language with ease is obviously a necessary condition to any degree of assimilation. In fact, Hispanics don’t resist learning English because they are mostly rational economic actors. They are perfectly aware that their incomes jump up when they know English. My first housekeeper was a vivacious and fully credentialed Mexican secondary school teacher. With good English, she would have quickly become a teacher in California and doubled her income overnight. She told me she knew it. In fact, offers to teach English in miracle time dominate Spanish language radio advertising. The inexpensive English as a Second Language classes in community colleges are chronically oversubscribed.

It’s fairly easy to form an impression of unwillingness to assimilate in connection with contemporary Mexican immigrants, for two reasons. The first is the seemingly permanent existence of a Spanish speaking population. For those who don’t think much about it, there is the easy illusion that the same individuals who spoke only Spanish in 1970 are those who don’t speak anything but Spanish in 2018. It’s in part an auditory misconception, if you wish.

People of Mexican origin have been present in significant numbers in parts of the US, especially in California, for a long time, since WWII, at least. For the past thirty years and until 2010, Mexicans kept coming into the US in large numbers. They are always within earshot of Anglos, who thus hear Spanish spoken ceaselessly. Every time a fresh batch of Latin-Americans lands, including Mexicans, the pool of Spanish monolinguals is replenished. Those who arrived twenty years earlier and left the pool of the strictly Spanish speaking  did it one at a time, without fanfare or announcement. They are not especially noticeable; they are also taken for granted. Since the second generation usually retains the ability to speak some Spanish, any shrinking of the strictly monolingual pool is not self-evident. This process may account by itself for a widespread impression that Mexicans perversely refuse to learn English. If all Mexican and Hispanic immigrants suddenly stopped using Spanish, it would still take something like thirty years for all people with Spanish surnames to know English well. That’s pretty much an adult lifetime and many Anglos would be able to preserve their misapprehension in the meantime, a lifetime.

That was the fallacy. Second, the half-truth. People of Mexican descent live in those same areas in large numbers. Residence of long standing and large numbers both facilitate the formation of relatively ethnically homogeneous, partly self-sufficient areas. For recent immigrants, living in such areas eases greatly the transition via a culturally and linguistically intermediate sphere. It provides the new immigrants with familiar food, shelter, transportation information, and other practical information, directly and thanks to the presence there of Spanish-language media. It’s a rational choice for immigrants to live there, from the standpoint of short term usefulness. It helps considerably their economic and logistical integration into American life. Note that the current dominant mode of immigration based on kinship greatly helps implement this choice. Relatives easily provide temporary room and board, even small loans. Immigrants have always congregated with their own in this manner whenever they could.

At the same time, living in homogeneous immigrant enclaves must actually retard assimilation, the (obligatory) acquisition of the indigenous language, and a good understanding of the culture, in complex ways. Favoring the extended family for both cultural and practical reasons, Mexicans and their descendants often gather three generations under the same roof. Spanish-only immigrants cohabit with their children who arrived at an early age and who are consequently bilingual although often in  severely limited ways. They also usually live close to the children’s children who were brought up in Spanish at home because that was the convenient thing for all though they attend school completely in English. These patterns of settlement for Mexican immigrants ensure that their descendants take a fairly long time to become Americans indistinguishable from others.

In my personal observation, the third generation is often struck between bad Spanish and bad English but they are able to function superficially with both. (Paradoxically, the grandchildren of monolingual literate immigrants may thus end up nearly illiterate in two languages.) Since they mostly go to public school, this is noticeable to all. That is big news and it’s bad big news. The solution is some forms of bilingual education but all bilingual education is anathema to many conservatives in spite of some shining successes. I know personally of one elementary school that offers a track where all the children -Anglos included – seem to me to be competently bilingual, including in writing and reading, in which they are only a little behind their English-only counterparts. So-called “bilingual education” acquired a bad reputation in California about 20 years ago and it’s very difficult to erase it. Courses of study are like teenage girls living in small villages! Rigorously monolingual native-born tend to believe that sudden immersion in the local language is the best policy. (It’s like teaching a child out to swim: Throw him in the deep water; if he does not drown, he can swim.) This belief is simply unfounded. If you don’t think so, try learning Algebra in Mandarin.

At any rate, there appears to be Spanish-mostly towns within sight of mainstream Anglo areas. Individuals who live there do not resist learning English as many would believe; they are learning, albeit slowly and often not very well. The false impression that immigrants stubbornly resist learning English is much fortified by the fact that the overwhelmingly proudly monolingual native-born Anglos have no idea of how time consuming it is to learn a second language. I am sure -from a good number of spontaneous statements – that many are confident that they would become “fluent” in Spanish in six months or so if they cared to. (Whatever “fluent” means; it’s a fluid concept!) One of the most charitable things I have done in my life is to re-assure dozens of Anglos that it was not shameful to be unable to hold a conversation in French even after studying the languages “for two year” in high school!

The native-born’s language delusion persists although they have been sending their children to college, and now, to high school expensive, “semester abroad,” for thirty years with no palpable results. In my experience, based on 25 years of close and careful observation, undergraduates come back from a school stay abroad – almost always on an American campus – having learned in the relevant foreign language only such rare words as “anti-freeze,” “ski wax,” and “suntan lotion.” Americans being overwhelmingly courteous people, they also know ordinary forms of salutation and several ways of saying “Please” and “Thank you.” I must add that this pessimistic assessment does not exclude the possibility that the experience did the young people some good intellectually, in other, non-linguistic ways. Learning a language is a bit like lifting intellectual weights. It’s good for you even if it’s functionally useless.

In point of fact, I believe that hardly any adult learns a language well outside of a school setting, or  of some other regimented setting. (Again, see my essay on this narrow topic: “Foreign Languages and Self–Delusion in America,” referenced in Footnote Four.) And, for what it’s worth, of the twenty most accomplished bilingual individuals I now know in the US, more than half are Mexican immigrants; none is a native-born Anglo (or, as they say in Spanish, “ningún.”) They do want to learn English, at least, some do!

As I have remarked, to make matters worse, anti-immigrant rants often contrast explicitly the Mexicans’ putative unwillingness to assimilate or to learn English with the attitudes of imaginary, exemplary former immigrants, from a hundred years ago or more, often the ranters’ own forebears. Those, we are told, learned English almost overnight, never looked back at the Old Country, or much lapsed back into its language. This is a romantic tale with no basis in fact, as much American literature tells us. On the East Coast and in Chicago, American newspapers in languages other than English lasted for two or more generations after the wave of new immigrants of the relevant languages slowed to a trickle. They existed much beyond the 1920s when immigration was essentially shut off. (see footnote 5)

A word of caution to end this segment. One must weigh my words with an understanding of my California parochialism. Of course, I don’t know a lot first-hand about other kinds of immigrants in other parts of the country (the US). Dominicans are not Mexicans; Canadians who move to Florida for good are not Chinese; the Detroit area may make different accommodations for its immigrants than Silicon Valley for its own. Nevertheless, on the whole, I doubt that the broad processes by which immigrants are incorporated into American society differ much because they are so broad, precisely. I am open to contradiction, all the same.

Irrespective of willingness, immigrants differ in their capacity both to become integrated and to assimilate. This cold-hearted observation should be at the core of any wholesale immigration reform. I deal with the topic, of immigration reform at the end of this essay. I do not approach here what might be an important facet of the whole legal immigration phenomenon. Today, with fast and inexpensive transportation available, would-be immigrants  often have several opportunities to reconsider, to decide whether they are really immigrants or just visitors. (I spent, myself, two separate years working in France before my final decision to try and stay in the US for good.) A one-way flight to Europe costs only $400 in the low season. A flight back to  anywhere in Mexico costs even less; a bus fare less than half of the latter. It follows that real immigrants, those who remain for good are more self-selected than was true in the past. I expect that the self-selection pertains largely to the subject’s compatibility with American society. Would-be immigrants who have too hard a time in the US go home voluntarily, I expect. American reform efforts are directed at confirmed volunteers. It should matter.

Footnotes

5  You can trust me on this. I know quite a bit about newspapers longevity. A co-author and I practically invented the concept! See: Carroll, Glenn and Jacques Delacroix. “Organizational mortality in the newspaper industries of Argentina and Ireland: an ecological approach.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 27:169-198. 1982, and: Delacroix, Jacques and Glenn Carroll. “Organizational foundings: an ecological study of the newspaper industries of Argentina and Ireland.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 228:274-291. 1983.

[Editor’s note: in case you missed it, here is Part 8]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 8): Culture, Immigration, and Culture

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , , , , , ,

Immigrants, Language and Income

The culture of their country of origin immigrants carry with them may have consequences for the speed of their integration and for their ability to assimilate. In turn, immigrants may cause a variety of changes in American culture. Language is central to both types of cultural effects.

Current immigrants frequently have inferior earning capabilities because they are less educated on the average than are the native born. This is not the only disability they bring with them. Often, usually, their command of the English language is limited. This linguistic deficiency has consequences beyond the economic sphere. The continued poverty language incompetence fosters also retards their assimilation.

Many on the right declare themselves concerned with immigrants’ eroding influence on wages. Most of us are interested in the speed with which immigrants assimilate. Both phenomena depend to a large extent on immigrants’ competence in the English language. Linguistic competence influences the ease and speed of immigrants’ assimilation in the long run. In the short and middle run, it’s a direct determinant of income. Immigrants vary widely on a continuum of this crucial variable, from a superior command English, to no English at all.

The English language is special. Much of the world has English as a first language or as normal language of instruction in schools. A second tier includes English as a second language in its schools or, more often, in some of its schools. English is the first second language in the world. Middle class people everywhere learn English. In many countries though most people have no systematic interaction with the English language. The disadvantages of not knowing the common language of the country where one lives are so great that it’s a sort of miracle that so many even try to ignore those by moving to the US equipped with no knowledge of English. It makes sense then mentally to divide immigrants into the US in two broad categories according to their mastery of English as they land.

Silicon Valley is teeming with prosperous Indians, many of whom are actual immigrants. (There is a kind of optical illusions at work here though: Many Indians are on temporary, H-1B and F-1 visas. Indian immigrants who are not successful just go home, soon to be replaced by others. They leave little trace.) The Indian real immigrants can themselves be subdivided in two economic classes. Some spread all over the US where they utilize family connections to manage hotels and retail businesses. The Indians in Silicon Valley belong largely to another breed. Almost all are graduates from two dozen elite Indian engineering and management schools of higher learning. They are solidly middle class by upbringing although many arrive poor because of the steep income gradient between India and the US. My Indian wife – who knows I know not how, but who does know – assures me that all, or nearly all of the latter, belong to the lofty Brahman caste. (This is a case where class and caste correspond, far from a universal given.) They are people who could aspire to a good job back home in India where, however, their economic futures and their horizons would remain limited because India keeps being India. They all seem to arrive, amazingly, with a strong work ethic and with excellent work habits.

I think I taught between 200 and 300 Indian immigrants in my MBA career. Not one contradicted this generalization. Of course, this is not a generalization about Indians, but about the self-selected subgroup of Indians that shows up in central and northern California after having been admitted to and survived gruelingly selective schools back home. A couple who self-designated to me, their MBA instructor, as “lazy” would have been considered veritable Heroes of Labor in the old Soviet Union.

All the Indians from this second group are educated in English from an early age. They are used, via reading, movies and the internet, to American English (and to American culture) before they land. Outwardly, their adaptation is seamless. Digression: Except possibly that they may suffer a high rate of failed marriages. They engage in arranged marriages in India, bring their brides to America. Here, the young brides, utterly deprived of the usual Indian female support network and also, I am guessing, with a lesser mastery of English, become terribly unhappy. For this reason alone, I am guessing that Indian immigrants are less well-adjusted overall than are Mexicans who tend to bring everyone who matters with them. This is just a plausible redundant impression I gathered over 25 years. I have no figures in support.

These educated Indians obtain good jobs and they work diligently and intelligently. They are able to progress at work in good part because they express themselves with a clarity seldom achieved by other kinds of immigrants. (This, in spite of some peculiarities of Indian English: “You will go there, is it?”) They are thrifty at first, helped by the shock of finding out that a pound of lentils costs three times more in San Jose than in Kolkatta (personal research – an email to my sister-in-law there). So, they achieve a modest level of prosperity in a relatively short few years. The quick emergence of Indians in other walks of American life unconnected to high technology or to business, including medicine, the law and even journalism, testifies anew to those widespread virtues but all of this success would hardly be possible absent initial fluency in English.

Immigrants of many other different origins also make their way to Silicon Valley in response to the constant demand for high-tech specialists. The Chinese among them are numerous and conspicuous. I had them in my MBA classes for twenty-five years, right alongside the Indians. They gave me the impression of being about as excellently trained as the Indians. My intuition suggests that they were more entrepreneurial, on the whole, or maybe just more individualistic, but they nearly all struggled with English. (“Nearly;” one young Chinese woman had the cheek to correct my mistakes of syntax in class on several occasions.) If your native language does not use verb forms to distinguish between present and past, you can learn to say, “I did it,” instead of “I do it yesterday,” but it must be like a herd of potholes on the road you are traveling.

I suspect that many of the young Chinese immigrants I knew, star students back home, lived lives of frustration in the US because of the language barrier. The frustration runs deeper than a relative inability to get things done. (Though the latter counts too. I can mention it  now because there is probably a statute of limitation: Forty-plus years ago, I wrote a Chinese student’s entire doctoral dissertation; it was very good both in content and in form. Also, the student cooked well.) If you express yourself at the level of a native-born ten-year-old, the unsophisticated foreign language virginal natives treat you like a fairly-gifted ten-year-old. This is pretty conjectural, of course. I would bet on it though! I have discussed this several times over steamed mussels with some favorite Chinese students with whom I had picked and prepared the shellfish; they had no reason to lie to me, not then, anyway.

It’s difficult to generalize about the few visually inconspicuous Europeans who also make it to Silicon Valley. Those who attended my classes were as competent in English as foreigners for whom it is a second language can be. I am guessing they were competent enough to be engineers. For some reason, Russians shone among them. Reminder: I am not indulging here in a devious comparative survey of different national educational systems. Immigration to America dips into different pools in different countries. Perhaps, smart Russians always go to America if they can while equally smart French engineers would rather stay home to continue their leisurely dégustation of blanquette de veau façon Normande.

It’s certain that mastery of English plays a big part in determining immigrants’ incomes as well as their economic contributions to American society. It’s also easy to miss the competence and the high character of those who don’t understand English well. And, as I have said, nothing sounds more like a ten-year-old than a bright foreigner whose English is struggling to reach the second grade level. With a low competence in English, even if it be only spoken English, the best jobs elude you although you would be capable of performing them, language notwithstanding. I believe that millions of immigrants are employed much below their maximum earning capacity solely because of their low linguistic competence. So, while the actual economic contribution of those immigrants is correctly assessed as low, their potential contribution is systematically underrated. This is a problem capable of solutions that are rarely discussed. A merit-based system would easily incorporate such solutions. So would a system of conditional admission linked to progress in English.

Anecdote: About twenty years ago, there was a tacit agreement among Anglo employers of casual Mexican labor that Mexicans were hard working and knew how to follow simple orders, but that was it. They were automatically treated as unskilled labor. Myself, with my good Spanish, I never had any trouble finding a tile layer, a carpenter, even an electrician among the day laborers gathering outside Home Depot every morning. The specialized workers I located were not slow to point out that the work I requested was skilled work and must be paid accordingly.

We must thus remember that linguistic disability must keep the wages of non-English speaking immigrants lower than they would otherwise be at a given level of occupational competence and personal ability. Language incompetence must thus also contribute to lower prices although at some cost to productivity.  (Yes, here is the paradox: Each produces little but there are many of them. In the end, we pay less than if they were not here.) The situation of Mexican immigrant entrepreneurs, specifically, tests this idea. Entrepreneurs need to possess at least a fair command of English, if nothing else, to round up customers. The language disability is thus removed or lessened in their case, allowing for a more straight comparison of income with Anglos. It seems to me that immigrant contractors do not bid especially low, or not much lower than their Anglo counterparts. At least, when you ask for bids on a previously described job, you couldn’t guess by bid amounts who is a Hispanic immigrant. It may also be thought that such immigrants  provide a better quality/cost ratio. I don’t know if this intuitive idea, based largely on my private experience, has been examined rigorously anywhere. It’s backed by the likelihood that the self-selected immigrant group possesses some traits of character superior to those found among natural groups, including among members of the host population. I develop this idea in “Why Immigrants are Superior” (referenced elsewhere).

[Editor’s note: in case you missed it, here is Part 7]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 7): An Exemplary Social Science Attempt to Disentangle

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

Using estimations of the relationships between several sets of good data to infer causation is an old endeavor, of course. The difficulties to which I pointed above are not new. For a little over one hundred years, the social sciences have emerged largely with the mission to solve or circumvent such difficulties. Their efforts have been broadly productive; inferences of causation based on quantitative estimations that respect state-of-the-arts social science rules are more trustworthy than practically everything else. In brief, the more complex the issues under study, the more back-of-the-envelop calculations suffer in comparison with modern social science methodology. Issue of comparative immigrant vs native born criminality are pretty much at a level of complexity for which those methods were developed.

The rules of social science include an obligation to publish in scholarly journals where the findings will be subjected both to pre-publication and to post-publication critical assessment. (See my didactic essay on scholarly submission: “What’s Peer Review and What it Matters”) Publication in scholarly journals also facilitates eventual attempts at replication with its potential to root out major research-based fallacies. I realize that duplication is a rare event, but the threat of it keeps researchers on their toes. Note: This doesn’t mean that the degree of confidence one should award to serious social science products should be high, in absolute terms. There is a difference in practice between, “bad,” and “very bad.” Also, in spite of formidable recent successful hoaxes against pseudo-journals, some disciplines hold the line, including left-leaning Sociology. (Read Gabriel Rossman’s “Sokal to the Nth Degree” in the November 8th-11th issue of the Weekly Standard.)

As it happens, there is a recent study that addresses the topic of immigration and criminality that fulfills good social science criteria. It’s Michael T. Light and Ty Miller, “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?” published in Criminology, March 3, 2018. The study relies on data from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, collected from 1990 to 2014, inclusive. Its design is reasonable; it allows for the observation of change over time in the relationships of interest. The 24-year period of observation is a convenience sample of any longer period one would prefer, but it’s not known to what extent it is representative of a longer period. This is a common limitation on interpretation. Twenty-four years of observation is a lot better than one year for the purpose of generalization though. The estimation methods used in their study to express the relationship between numbers of illegal immigrants, on the one hand, and several well accepted measures of serious criminality, on the other, are up-to date. The same methods allow for the elimination of alternative formulations – that is, they allow for “controlling” for variables other than the main variable of interest, the number of illegal immigrants. The article contains a useful and thorough review of the literature. It’s written with remarkable clarity, given the inherent complexity of the endeavor it describes.

The study gives a straightforward answer to the straightforward question it poses:

The increase in the number of illegal immigrants (in the US) is associated with a decrease in serious crime.

The authors dispose fairly well of an interpretation of these counter-intuitive findings based on the idea that more illegals results in less crime reporting in the relevant populations, rather than in actual decrease in crime. This explanation would make their startling main finding practically spurious.

It is not equally clear to me that the authors have disposed completely of the hypothesis that an influx of illegal immigrants is causally linked to stepped-up law enforcement, and only thence to crime reduction. This formulation has important policy implications. It says: Illegal immigration does not increase crime, provided you do what needs to be done about it. And, you may be lucky and overshoot your mark. Ideally, I would  have liked to see a measure of cost per some unit of crime reduction included in the estimation models.

It’s unfortunate for my purpose that this study focuses on illegal immigration specifically, since my own primary interest is in legal immigration. It matters little in the end because a secondary analysis within this study indicates that increase in legal immigration (considered separately from illegal immigration) is also associated with a decrease in serious crime.

As quantitative social scientists are unfortunately inclined to do, Light and Millet give us a literal expression of their main finding, like this (I think this practice, of making findings shout instead of whispering should be heavily taxed.):

A one-unit increase in the proportion of the population that is undocumented corresponds with a 12 percent decrease in violent crime.

We don’t have to take literally this metric wording and the causality it suggests. For example, there is no need to believe that if enough additional illegal immigrants enter the US, at some point, serious crime will disappear completely. It’s enough to acknowledge that a very good study on the relationship between immigration and serious crime leaves little room for the possibility that the more of the one, the more of the other.

Note, however, that the Light and Miller findings do not exclude this formulation completely. It’s possible that in some states an increase in illegal immigration is associated with a surfeit of serious crime. It’s possible even that for all states, but for a brief period, an increase in illegal immigration is quickly followed by a rise in serious crime. Because of these possibilities, the public perception and the startling results of this study may well be compatible. These would probably not be casually detected. Few regular observers, be they politicians, journalists, or public servants are likely to have a clear view of events in 51 separate entities sustained for twenty-four years. Intelligent, rigorous minded observers may be right about what they know and drastically wrong about what they have not studied through hard facts.

Light’s and Miller’s is a classically good article. It’s thorough without sacrificing detail; it offers a good quality and a useful review of the relevant sociological literature; it’s tightly reasoned. The estimations it reports on seem impeccable. I think Light and Miller is the standard against which all reports on the relationship between immigration and crime should now be assessed. Practically, this article should contribute to switching the burden of proof: Although they are less educated, poorer, and younger on average than the native-born population, immigrants appear to commit less serious crime than the latter. More surprisingly to some, illegal immigrants, who begin their American career by demonstrating their willingness to violate American law, do not appear to be prone to criminal violence.  But, as I have mentioned before, an illegal status is a strong incentive to keep one’s nose clean.

I am not proposing here that Light and Miller’s article should forever block the progress of more conventional ideas  to the effect that more immigration is associated with more crime. All it would take would be a single study of similar quality to overturn this remarkable study’s findings. In the meantime, it would be reasonable to shift the burden of proof  away from where it has implicitly stood: immigrants tend to be criminal.

[Editor’s note: in case you missed it, here is Part 6]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 6); Immigrants, Crime and Incarceration: Another Mostly Local Cost and a Causal Tangle.

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

There exists a widespread impression, deliberately fed by some conservative media and sometimes by President Trump himself, to the effect that illegal immigrants are especially prone to crime, and to violent crime. By extension, by illogical implication, immigrants in general are tarred with the same brush.

Immigrant crime agitates for different reasons that are not always disentangled from one another. First, there is the general social disorganization that any crime causes and the worsening of the quality of life it entails. Second, mostly youthful immigrants could have the power to reverse the general decline in crime that accompanies the aging of American society. They might be the agent of a step backward for American society. Third, capturing, trying, and incarcerating anyone is very expensive, more expensive than schooling, for example. Immigrant crime in general is especially apt to disturb emotionally because it seems to involve a kind of crass ungratefulness: I let you into my living room, or you enter while I am not paying attention, and you show your appreciation by stealing the silverware, and worse.

Belief in the criminality of immigrants as a group is not necessarily the result of a kind of emotional prejudice. Immigrants are predominantly young, ill-educated, and poor, all known ingredients of criminal propensity in any context. (To my surprise, current immigrants are not predominantly male, although maleness is a strong factor of criminality.) So, if immigrants to the US are like just about every population of the same age, income, and education ever studied, they should exhibit a higher crime rate than the native-born population that is, on the average, better educated, more prosperous, and, especially, considerably older.

It’s difficult to figure out the basic truths about immigration and crime because gross miscounting by partisan journalists is common. For instance, in his 2018 article in Reason on a report based on 2009 figures, Alex Nowrasteh shows how easy it is to make horrendous but simple mistakes of enumeration: Counting single events of incarceration as if they were individual immigrants, for example, as if illegal immigrants could not be repeat offenders. (“Restrictionists Are Misleading You About Immigrant Crime Rates.” Reason, Feb. 1, 2018.)

I explicitly do not accuse the authors cited below of such miscounting.

In his 2006 article in Liberty, Cox showed that about 2.6 % of inmates in federal prison and an astonishing 12% of people incarcerated in local jails and prisons were illegal immigrants in 2002. That’s 14.6% of all persons then incarcerated in the US. The highest estimate of the number of illegal aliens I could locate for any year is 15 million. With that estimate, conservatively, incarcerated illegal aliens would be about 5% of the then US population of 293 million. Roughly, illegal aliens, according to Cox, were thus incarcerated in 2002 at almost three times the rate of their occurrence in the general population. This rate did not include incarcerations for merely being illegally present in the US (which must have been a small number since that was only a misdemeanor). Cox’s study is based on figures for only one year for the whole country.

At any rate, Cox’s incarceration figures concern mostly illegal aliens. It’s not clear whether illegal immigrants’ propensity to commit crimes is similar to the corresponding propensity of legal immigrants, nor if their crimes are similar. Legal and illegals may come from different countries and regions. Even if they come from the same places, they may issue from different classes in their societies of origin. Even if from the same places and same classes, they may constitute different samples of the populations of origin from the standpoint of motivation and thus, of personal psychology. It takes different virtues to arrange for legal immigration via whatever path, on the one hand, and to swim the Rio Grande, or coolly to overstay one’s visa, on the other. These different virtues could easily be associated with different levels of different criminal tendencies. Finally, legal and illegal immigrants have different incentives to break the law or not, the latter being in a good position to not draw attention to themselves. That’s at least until the sanctuary movement.

A study published by the libertarian Cato Institute in February 2015 examined criminal conviction data provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety. It found that native-born residents were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants in the country either legally or illegally. For all crimes together, the legal immigrants’ score was less than one third that of the native-born. The difference in the likelihood of being convicted of homicide, specifically, was very large between legal immigrants and the native-born. The former were 15 times less likely to be convicted of homicide. Even illegal immigrants were only 70% as likely as the native born to be convicted of homicide. (“Two charts demolish the notion that immigrants here illegally commit more crime,” Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post on-line accessed circa June 28 2018.)

Note that the Cato Institute study is for one state only and for only one year. Cox’s figures cited above are also for one year only but for the whole country.

It’s not obvious how one should relate these contradictory sets of findings to one another. (There are many more such studies. I chose two researchers on my side of the political fence that seemed to me to have worked with seriousness.) First, figures about comparatively rare events such as homicide are notoriously unstable. The corresponding homicide figures for 2004 or for 2014 might be very different. Moreover, both sets of figures, Cox’s and Cato Institute’s use the heterogeneous categories “legal immigrants” and “illegal aliens.” To generalize from their findings requires making the silent assumption that the composition of both is stable from year to year. This assumption is unwarranted. Nothing regulates the composition of illegal immigration and little insures that the composition of legal immigration will be similar from year to year. The varying numbers of refugees alone could sway the legal figures one way or the other.

Here is a realistic scenario: For a period of a few years, both immigration flows consist mostly of rural, mountain Mexicans from rural areas where crime is scarce. In a subsequent and contiguous period, a large flood is added, through both refugee legal immigration and through illegal immigration, of urban Central Americans (thus, of people from some of the highest crime areas of the world). Both the frequency and the nature of immigrant crime may change swiftly as a result  of this sudden (and realistic) change in  the composition of immigration, legal or illegal, or both. The composition of legal immigration may change drastically in a single year because of the influx of refugees from a single location hitherto unrepresented in the US. The composition of illegal immigration may also change suddenly because of a disaster in a region that the American federal government does not recognize as a legitimate source of refugee status. It’s hazardous to extrapolate from one period to any other period. Hence both Cox’s and Cato Institute’s findings may be correct but, at the extreme, each of them for one year only.

It’s also risky to extrapolate from one domestic location, for example, Texas, to another, for example, the whole United States. Here is one reason among others why it is so: The (innocent) rural mountain Mexicans I mention above are likely to move to the Central Valley of California and to similarly agricultural areas in Florida. Crime-prone Central Americans, on the other hand, may seek their fortune in the more familiar big cities anywhere, including, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. In this imaginary scenario, immigrant crime in Texas (Houston and Dallas, per chance) may be grossly unrepresentative of immigrant crime anywhere else in the US.

Finally, as Cox pointed out to me in a personal communication, the comparison category, “native-born” is itself heterogeneous with respect to crime. The rates for African-American  – most of whom are native-born – are several times as high as others’. Perhaps, the native-born would far better for incidence of crime if blacks were excluded from the comparison. I suspect this is true but I don’t know according to what theoretical principle, this exclusion should be made.

[Editor’s note: In case you missed it, here is Part 5]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 5); The Net Contribution of Immigrants: An Attempt at Critical Quantification

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , , , ,

In his October 2006 article in Liberty, (“Immigration: Yes, No, and Maybe” by Richard Fields, Stephen Cox, and Bruce Ramsey), Cox tries to summarize the net cost that (then) current immigrants impose on American society by working out a quantitative example. He stages an imaginary but realistic (Mexican) immigrant family of five living in Los Angeles – two parents and three minor children. He assigns reasonable earnings to the parents and sets those against the probable costs that the whole family imposes in the form of normal local and other services. He arrives at the conclusion that the family annually costs American society 38,900 2006 dollars. (I agree with Cox that this may be a conservative estimate. That would be about 48,000 June 2018 dollars, using the CPI Inflation Calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

To gauge the real magnitude of the overall normal costs legal immigrants  thus impose on American society, let’s suppose further that all of the 2016 legal immigration is composed of Cox’s families of five. That’s 240,000 such families. The aggregate excess of their social costs over their earnings is 48,000 x 240,000 = 11.52 billion dollars. As a percentage of 2016 GDP, this figure is less than 7/10,000 (seven over ten thousand – 2016 GDP from CountryEconomy.Com).

Now, let’s suppose that Cox was too conservative by one half in his estimate of the cost his family imposes on American society. This would imply that the legal immigrant families that compose all of 2016 immigration cost American society an amount that is like 14/10,000. The numerator in this last estimate includes only legal immigrants. Let’s suppose further that the number of illegal immigrants for the year of reference equals the number of legal ones and that they cost the same and contribute the same as legal immigrants. The cost that all immigrants impose on American society is then approximately 28/10,000 or about 1/3 of one per cent of GDP. If you assume that illegal immigrants earn only half as much as legal immigrants, the net cost of immigration overall goes up correspondingly. It’s still not much. My point is this: In the worst case scenario I can conjure, the net cost that immigrants impose on American society is very low. It’s of the order of 12 million Americans buying a $10 lottery ticket at Nine/Eleven every payday.

This is still certainly an overestimation, for two reasons. One, this scenario is the extreme, limiting case. There is, of course, zero chance that the total legal immigration in any one year is composed entirely of the kind of families of five Cox describes. Among the immigrants, as with nearly all immigration everywhere, there must be a preponderance of healthy young men and young women without children. This happens through self-selection: emigration is very difficult. It requires courage and even a solid dose of unrealism; children are a big impediment in this respect. But, in most cases, younger people without children must easily contribute more than they cost American society because they land all raised up and ready to work (as I said). The exceptions concern those who fall seriously sick– uncommon among the young – and those who end up in jail or prison. The latter is not a rare occurrence among the young in general, among young males in particular. As I said, I deal below with the particular cost of incarcerating immigrants.

The other imaginary limiting case is this: Among the 1,200,000 immigrants in 2016, there is a single family of five as described by Cox and the balance is made up of vigorous young women and young men who never become sick and never transgress the law. In that other limiting case, immigrants are almost certainly a net economic boon to American society. I don’t know where the reality lies and it may change from year to year. It’s doable research which, I think, has not been done.

The second reason why the figure of 28/10,000 is probably an overestimation, or why it leads to fallacious inferences, has to do with life cycles. First, there will probably be a period during the family’s life when the children will be grown and capable of working while the parents themselves are working, undisturbed by family obligations. During that period, three or four, or all five immigrants will in all likelihood contribute more than they take from American society, in spite of their low qualifications. This sweet spot may vanish when the parents reach Medicare and Social Security age. In the meantime, several family members will have contributed to the relevant social funds; one or more of the children will too, probably for 30 years or more. Hence, whether the family of five receives a net benefit or impose a net cost over a longer, trans-generational period depends on actuarial calculations that neither Cox nor I have performed.

I hasten to add that it’s quite possible that such actuarial calculations, performed with real numbers, would still show the five in my chosen family as perpetrating a net cost on American society. To be thorough, one would have to take into account two more things. One is the possibility that one of the three children will turn out to be a great, outsize contributor, like the 40% American Nobel Prize winners born abroad. Or all three. The relevant reasoning has to be trans-generational to some extent, it seems to me. Just look at the extreme imaginary scenario below.

For ten years in a row, the US admits as many immigrants as it did in 2016. That’s 12 million immigrants. Let’s assume none dies during that period and they have no children (We will see that this unrealistic assumption does not matter here.) Not one of the twelve million is able to pay his full fare. On the average, they each cost American society $20,000 there is no chance they will ever pay back, one way or another. However, one of these hapless immigrants is Steve Job’s biological father. You know the rest of this true story. Ask yourself: If it were your decision, knowing this and, and based solely on economic matters which are the stake here, would keep out all twelve million?

This quandary poses an interesting conceptual problem we keep encountering: Had Job’s biological father not accidentally made his girlfriend pregnant; had they not decided to give Steve up for adoption, would someone else have developed the personal computer with Wozniak? Without him? Would you bet on it? The truth is that American society is unusually inventive but it’s probably not the most inventive on a per capita basis. (Last time I looked, the Japanese were registering more patents than Americans – that’s per capita.) It’s also seems true that immigrants account for a disproportionate number of American innovations, including 40% of all Nobel prizes in other than literature. (And also excluding the often farcical Nobel Peace Prize.) It’s not absurd to think of American inventiveness as the happy encounter of American institutions unusually favorable to innovation with immigrant vigor. This is just a speculation, of course but how willing are you to discard it summarily?

Finally, the calculation of immigrants’ net burden imposed on American society necessarily fails to take into account real positive contributions that are difficult to quantify, more or less intangible contributions, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere. They go from Italian cuisine to my own ability to interpret some world events better than almost any native-born professor. Here is another mental experiment: Suppose a national society decided, through some process or other, to bring up the average quality of its every day food from, say English levels, to 1/3 of Italian level. The cost would be astronomical and the result would clearly constitute a significant improvement in the quality of Americans’ every day life – which is what the science of Economics is all about, of course. My point is that the fact that this felicitous result was achieved through the happenstance of immigration does not imply that its societal value is zero.

One of the highest per capita expenditures that immigrants–like every other population group over and below a certain age–impose on American society is the cost of incarceration. That cost is also mostly borne by state and local authorities, although there exists a process by which the federal government reimburses local governments for illegal immigrants incarcerated for crimes other than illegal border crossing (explained in Cox 2006). I examine below the tangled issue of the cost of immigrant incarceration.

[Editor’s note: In case you missed it, here is Part 4]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 4): Bad and Worse Immigrants, and Fallacies

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , , , ,

A study by the Center for Immigration Studies indicates wide variations in immigrant families’ propensities to receive welfare, according to their country of origin. Unfortunately, the study was published in 2011. Based on the Center’s appearances on television, it’s fair to say that it’s mostly anti-immigration although I am sure this is an oversimplification.

The score for Mexicans is 57%, 33% for Russians, 19% for Chinese, 14% for Indians, and only 12.5% for (the ever-saintly) Canadians. But the report of these seemingly clear differences may harm rational decision making in the way I warn against above. There are three reasons.

First, by emphasizing country of origin, the table seems to assume that different national groups have been in the US for the same length of time. In fact, nearly all immigrants arrive poor. Now, suppose that the average time in country for Mexicans is one year, and ten years for the Chinese. The 38 percentage point gap might vanish if the Chinese immigrants captured by the table had also been in the country for only one year.  Obviously, those are made up figures. I don’t know what we would find if proper control for length of stay in country had been applied. It would have to be an average length of stay which complicates both data gathering and interpretation again although it can be done.

Second, immigrants from different countries probably belong to systematically different classes. This would affect their propensity to go on welfare, irrespective of national culture of origin. Suppose that all Indian immigrants are medical doctors or engineers, and all Mexicans casual laborers. This difference would suffice to account for the 43 point welfare gap between the two groups. The statement, “Indians are much less likely to go on welfare than Mexicans,” in this case, may be more about doctors and laborers than about Indians and Mexicans. That’s irrespective of time in-country. Note that I am not arguing that the two groups are equally desirable as immigrants but that their respective desirability may have nothing to do with the national propensity to go on welfare by Mexicans, specifically. I can think of arguments in favor of admitting more doctors and also arguments in favor of more laborers, factoring in the cost of their possible landing on welfare for a while. Note that the gap in two categories’ propensity to go on welfare may have no ethical meaning associated with nationality of origin. After all, we don’t know what the welfare participation of Mexican immigrants would be if they were at all doctors.

Third, we have to look at immigrants contributions, positive and negative, across several generations, as we do in connection with Latino youth gangs, for example. In fact, immigrants of the same national origin may be objectionable today while their children may be desirable for American society tomorrow. An example: Suppose all Mexican immigrants are young, married, unschooled laborers from rural backgrounds. Such people tend to have many children – more than, say, unmarried, older men from the best engineering schools in India. The first group will be more likely to go on welfare than the second and it will supply America society in the next generation with more contributors to the Social Security fund. In this scenario, paradoxically, the large number of Mexican immigrants may compensate for the likely lower income of their children compared to both the native-born and other immigrants’ children.

[Editor’s note: In case you missed it, here is the link to Part 3]

Immigration Into the United States (Part 3)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

Substituting Immigrant Labor for Native Workers: A Mental Experiment

Although the area where I live is not representative of the US in general, it’s exemplary in important respects. What happens here often happens later, elsewhere in the country, in attenuated form. Santa Cruz, California is separated from Silicon Valley by a chain of hills that takes 25 minutes to cross at the right time of a good day, and up to 90 minutes at other times. On my side of the hills is a rich agricultural zone, probably the main vegetable and strawberries garden of America, plus some resort areas and several well-respected schools of higher education. I taught in an MBA program in Silicon Valley, on the other side of the hills, for 25 years. I have been the owner of needy houses in Santa Cruz for just as long, and thus a habitual user of various kinds of labor. On both sides of the hills, high-tech industries and high-margin industrial agriculture powerfully attract immigrants – although, mostly, somewhat different kinds of immigrants.

The claim that immigrants of all kinds take work from citizens is a constant background noise in my area. In general (only in general; it happens) I am skeptical of the notion that immigrants directly take jobs from the native-born, or that they threaten to do so. This is based on my parochial, local, but not insignificant experience. Employers on both sides of my hills have been complaining of a labor shortage for seven or eight years. Booming Silicon Valley employers require more engineers, more software writers, but also more of a little bit of everything, because industrial growth generates demand for all kinds of ancillary services, including dish washing. There was not a sufficient rush of diversely qualified labor while the unemployment rate was fairly high, right after 2008. It’s unlikely to happen now that it’s ultra-low (September 2018).

Big farmers on my side of the hills regularly lament their inability to pick crops in the field in timely fashion because of a perennial dearth of the requisite kind of labor. Many think that the requisite kind of labor has to be cheap. In fact one habitual user of farm labor declares publicly that he pays $26 an hour on average. This would mean, of course, that some of his laborers earn more than three times the federal minimum wage.(This is embarrassing but I cant find the reference for this item. It’s from a recent article – 2018 -. I am 95% certain that it’s from the Wall Street Journal. I looked at the article carefully when I came across it and assessed it as trustworthy.) This figure would add up to about $50,000  annual for a full time farm worker. The Economic Policy Institute only assigns a yearly full time wage of $35,000 in 2015. (“Farm worker wages in California: Large gap between full-time equivalent and actual earnings.” Posted March 21, 2017 by Philip Martin and Daniel Costa.) That’s for the best paid farm workers, those in vegetable growing and picking. Assuming a 5% rise in wages yearly because of labor scarcity, still leave farm workers much below that $50,000 figure. I read locally that the labor shortage is so acute that some farmers switch to crops not especially suited to the climate or to their skill-set but that are less labor-intensive. The lament has not lessened in several years, although there is an abundant supply of potential labor nearby, in the form of college students.

Local housing rents are high; the cost of living is also high; tuition keeps increasing. Most of the farm work that goes begging requires little more than a basic work ethic and good health. Yet the thousands of college students in nearby Santa Cruz and Monterey compete for a handful of low-paying barista positions rather than going for far more lucrative seasonal farm work. (I must say that my perverse heart is waiting for a real-life experiment in which farmers explicitly bid up dormant student picking talent: I would like to find out how high the remunerations offered can go without eliciting a response.) The cliché that there is some work that Americans reared in a soft society won’t do, is not completely absurd, it seems to me. The lack of exposure to hard physical labor of most Americans who have been students in the past ten years may play a role, possibly a preponderant role. And yes, I admit that at $60 an hour, for example, growers would probably find all the local unskilled labor they wanted. Yet, I doubt that this is what commentators mean when they complain about immigrants taking work from the native-born.

And, of course, I have to notice that very high wages paid for the production of ordinary goods corresponds to a pay cut for everyone. Nevertheless I do believe that in agriculture the pay cut would probably amount to little, in most cases. Take local strawberries retailing at $2.00/lb. Suppose field labor accounts for a full ten per cent of this retail cost. If this labor cost goes up by 100% net, the same strawberries will retail at about $2.25, at most. It seems to me that’s probably not enough to affect sales much. Farmers would have to agree among themselves to raise wages and prices which may be illegal or of dubious legality.

The Hidden Cost of Cheap Labor: Missed Mechanization

Somehow, one of the hidden costs of the importation of inexpensive labor seldom comes up in discussions of immigration. Inexpensive labor is often an invisible substitute for mechanization. As discussions amplified in 2017-2018 about a national $15 an hour minimum wage, the media produced numerous examples of employers of inexpensive labor, such as fast food restaurants, quickly increasing their reliance on robots. In those media stories, the causality was seldom well established, but it stands to reason that the relative scarcity or dearness of labor is a spur to mechanization. Conversely, the routine availability of inexpensive labor must prevent decision-makers from adopting new tools of automation, and inhibit inventors from creating others.

This relationship is demonstrated in one kind of farming after another. The European Union is a live laboratory in this respect. As the EU’s heavy fringe benefits, including its high social insurance costs, were imposed on new member countries, cheap labor turned correspondingly expensive, and mechanical ingenuity was quickly unleashed. French grape growers who swore for 200 years that their precious wine grape demands the incomparable dexterity of the human hand found themselves happily riding newly invented vine cultivating machines.

Faced with the same compensation hardships, Greek olive growers relinquished manual picking for crude tree shaking machines designed to drop the fruit onto a tarp spread on the ground. Turns out, there is actually an effective olive tree shaking device that is also deft enough to avoid endangering trees that are sometimes a hundred years old. Mechanical agricultural inventions notably now move from the Old World to the New, a historically rare pattern that tests the notion of labor substitution. As labor becomes quickly more expensive in the European Union, its farmers mechanize, while American farmers slumber in the comfort of an abundance of reasonably priced labor from Latin America. In the eighties, I helped a French fruit-drying entrepreneur sell his trailerable, self-contained, stainless steel, gleaming modern machine to California plum processors still relying on a 19th century, fixed, brick, drying tunnel. It was like standing next to a state of the art sports car while chatting with a hay wagon. As expected, much of the superiority of the French machine resided in its labor efficiency that was several times better than that of the old-fashioned brick tunnels.

A Localized Cost: Schooling Expenditures

As we saw, the first qualification to the thesis that immigration enhances economic growth is that it is simply a form of population growth. It does enhance growth, but this sounds almost trivial (except to draw attention to the fact that the native-born are not taking on the vigorous job of increasing the population). The second qualification is a little more complex. A positive effect of immigration on the overall (national) economy does not exclude negative localized effects. The GDP, a national quantity, rises but some local school districts, for instance, are fiscally overwhelmed by the influx of immigrant children. The economic benefits associated with population growth through immigration may be mostly diffuse, even imperceptible, but the localized costs of immigration are obvious and often dramatically painful. The schooling of immigrant children is a good example of a painful localized cost that gives immigration a bad name.

Internal domestic migrations would also cause local problems, but the effect would usually be of a different magnitude. Today, the bulk of immigrant children often (not always) bring significant special educational needs with them that are rarely found among domestic migrants. First, they may not know English; in fact, most don’t, although there are bright exceptions. Second, foreign immigrants may come from the poorest, most rural parts of poor countries, with inferior schools. (That is certainly the case for Mexican immigrants, the largest group in recent years.) Both conditions, ignorance of English and the family’s low educational status on arrival, require expensive remedial measures, the cost of which is borne largely by local taxing entities.

To make matters worse, the usual academic remedies often just don’t work. The public schools may be so utterly unable to teach immigrant children anything in a foreign language – English – that the standards for all children degrade and local Anglo children fall drastically behind, in reading comprehension, for example. Over several years, the cumulative deficiency can force some Anglo parent to switch their children to private schools. Native-born parents who are college graduates, or even merely high school graduates, often don’t accept with equanimity the news that their children are two or three grades behind in any subject. They frequently become bitter and, why not? If they complain, they are frequently charged with racism. (It happened to my brown-skinned wife.) Those who make the move to private school end up with both high local taxes and the need to pay tuition for their children, all as an indirect but obvious financial burden of immigration. Note again that this burden is borne by local families, with little help from those who make immigration decisions, at the federal level.

There are perhaps two reasons why the poor educational status of some, or many, immigrants is seldom discussed. First, the bulk of the host population may not be clearly aware of the educational backwardness of the immigrants. They may vaguely think of Mexico, for example, as 40 or 50 years behind the US educationally; yet the commonness of illiteracy in remote Mexican villages puts them more than 100 years behind the US in this respect. (Nevertheless, I have much respect – based on personal experience – for Mexican public education as delivered in small and medium-size towns.) When it comes to the many immigrant children from Asia, school authorities appear even more at sea. They don’t know what to make of the fact that a middle-class Chinese boy of 12 may not seem to be able to explain what he can and cannot read.

The second cause of timidity regarding the educational status of new immigrants is, of course, far-reaching political correctness. To say, “Luis can’t read English” passes for racist in many quarters, although it’s obvious that Luis actually can’t read English, or any language (See below). Discussion is further discouraged by the fact that in some areas, such as mine, immigration includes both broad categories of low educational achievers and of exceptionally high achievers, both farm hands and engineers with superior training. The existence of the latter grants verisimilitude to charges of prejudice regarding the former.

Here are anecdotes about the low level of preparedness of some immigrants. On two occasions widely separated in time, I had prolonged interaction with Mexican immigrants I had hired to help me work on my houses. I had opportunities to judge each of them to be intelligent, practical-minded, full of initiative, and flexible–real finds, in other words. Both times, I discovered fortuitously that they were illiterate in Spanish. I left them simple written instructions in that language, and none of the required work was done by the time I checked, although some other necessary work I had not explicitly requested had been performed.

The men were thus not shirking; they just did not know what I wanted done. (No, don’t blame my Spanish. It’s very good. I can read anything in that language except a chemistry textbook. I also write it with ease. After all, it’s just another debased Latin, like my native tongue, French.) Of course, this is a story about a tiny sample, hardly a sample at all. Yet the two episodes took place ten years apart, and I suspect they illustrate a common condition among Mexico-born men in my area. (I refer to immigrants, not to Mexicans in generals. The large and growing Mexican middle class seldom wanders across the border without a solid job and a gringo salary. I also know some of its members.) My illiterate journeymen’s children would be difficult and expensive to educate, even if they, the children, knew English well. There is just not much book learning in their households and it’s not likely to be well respected there.

In my otherwise bookstore-rich and library-rich area, books in Spanish were nearly impossible to find for twenty years. I think there is almost no demand for such articles. What little demand there is appears to be for Spanish translations of American books with television ties. This is more evidence of the low literacy status of Mexican immigrants in the area. (see footnote 4)

It’s also true that immigrants’ children who are truly bilingual may be an asset to the local economy as well as to the national economy. In my observation as a college professor, that’s a tiny number, and their usefulness can only be a long-term proposition.  It’s a tiny number because knowing a language well requires reading and, I think, writing. There are few opportunities (few, not none) for native Spanish speakers to learn to read and write, in addition to their normal schooling in English. So called “bilingual education” in public schools does not seem to do the job. I base my judgment on the tiny number of readers and writers of Spanish I encountered in local colleges where you would expect them to congregate.

Few Anglos perceive advanced bilingualism as an asset; I am guessing, (guessing) that it’s because they see it associated with individuals of low socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, it’s useful, obviously, for lowly jobs catering in part to a non-English speaking public. My daughter tells me that it’s impossible to get a job as a medical receptionist in my area if you don’t know English and Spanish. As for well-paid occupations, I have never heard this asset mentioned except, ironically, in connection with the Border Patrol. I don’t doubt that it’s also sometimes put to use in the diplomatic service, and in the armed forces. But bilingual children of immigrants have to compete there with recent immigrants who know English well.

Other Locally Borne Social Costs of Immigration

I have pointed out that schooling, though heavily affected by national immigration policies, is financed locally. Here is a roundup of other largely locally financed services:  various  social services for the poor, (“welfare,” “public assistance”), health care, jail and prison resources (some of which are funded by the Federal Government). When evaluating the cost of these resources as allocated to immigrants, it seems to me that a reasonable  baseline is to assume that immigrants consume such resources in quantities appropriate to their sex, age distribution, economic and educational levels, and marital status. In the US, men commit more crimes than women, especially violent crimes; women are more likely to be in charge of children than men and thus in need of help to maintain them; the poor commit more crime overall than the rich, except perhaps, white collar crime. The semi-literate are also less likely than the better educated to engage in white-collar crime. Married men commit fewer serious crimes than do single men.

Loud voices on the right proclaim that immigrants go on welfare and have dealings with the judicial system more frequently than do the native born.

Adopting the baseline I propose, even if only mentally, slows down the tendency to stigmatize immigrants, including unconsciously. Imagine (made up figures) that the median age of American men is 38 while the median age of a certain group of immigrants is 23. If you observe a crime rate among the latter 25 %  above the rate for native-born Americans, you may have discovered nothing about the immigrant group propensity toward crime, just that they are young. The use of such a baseline does not exclude the possibility of making policy inferences from the social costs of various immigrant groups based on their collective economic, age, and marital status characteristics, like this: We don’t need to import young men from Central America who are just about certain to increase the frequency and the gravity of crimes in our country.

Footnotes

4  I allow myself to be a bit of a bully on matters of bilingualism because the bulk of native-born Americans – who remain proudly monolingual – carry a ton of absurd ideas in their minds about the ease of language learning. Listen to me because I am able to do everything I know how to do in two languages, and because I am able to operate very well in a third –  Spanish – while I read yet two others. (Most are related languages, of course, different varieties of bad Latin.) Naturally also, like all Frenchmen, I know a little German too, just in case. Just kidding! Read my shocking essay on language learning: “Foreign Languages and Self–Delusion in America.”

Legal Immigration Into the United States: The H-1B Visas Confusion and Controversy (Part 2 of 6)

Jacques Delacroix Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

This is the right place for a painful digression. It’s painful because it’s about a program related to immigration that is both confusing and calculated, as if by design, to become controversial. Yet, as I argue below, toward the end of this essay, it’s a program with promise.

Many middle-class foreigners with college degrees are in the US on temporary working visas. By numbers, the main category of working visas is the H-1B visa. (This is confusing, but there is currently no such thing as an H-1A visa.) Holders of the H-1B visa must meet specific educational qualifications. They are sponsored by American employers – but also by employers who look much like labor contractors based abroad. They may stay in the US for a period of three years, renewable for an additional three years. That’s except if they work for a university or for a research institute, in which case their visa is pretty much eternal. Although the number of visas allotted each year is capped, by accumulation, the program involves significant numbers of people, about 350,000 in 2016. Some or most H-1B visas are allocated by lottery on an annual basis. (It’s completely separate from the diversity lottery described above [in Part 1], as I said.)

The rationale behind the H-1B visa is to supply workers in specialties that industrial and other organizations cannot find domestically. The program is controversial for two reasons. Continue reading →

Legal Immigration Into the United States: Introduction (Part 1 of 6)

Jacques Delacroix Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

This an essay about legal immigration. It includes a theoretical framework, essential facts, and subjective opinions. In this old-fashioned piece, there is no pretense of scholarly detachment. It’s a personal endeavor that I hope will be useful to others. I don’t have a hidden agenda but topical preferences I think I make clear. Footnote 1 describes my qualifications to discuss immigration. You might surmise that I have a more pro-immigration bias than most small-government conservatives but not than most libertarians (but who knows about them?). I deal with American immigration, specifically. I present rough figures only, trying to add some orders of magnitudes to the current complicated media narrative, and to establish distinctions that don’t always occur naturally. I don’t aim at precision. If mistakes of fact slip into my story, I hope readers will draw attention to them and thus, perhaps, start a conversation here. My few policy recommendations are all tentative but I hope they are logically linked both to orders of magnitudes and to conceptual distinctions.

I choose to address legal immigration specifically for two categories of reasons. First, there are reasonably good, trustworthy figures regarding legal immigration, while numbers for illegal immigration are largely estimated from data gathered for other purposes and often according to wobbly rules. Second, the relationship between legal immigration and illegal immigration is complicated enough to justify an essay all of its own. Here is a sample: Many illegal immigrants, especially many Mexicans, argue that there would be less illegal immigration into the US if there were more doors open through legal immigration. Yet, as I show below, to a considerable extent legal immigration facilitates illegal immigration and thus increases the numbers of illegal immigrants. So the numerical relationship between the two appears both negative and positive. In a co-authored article (referenced in Footnote 2) I examined the complex links between legal and illegal immigration in the special and numerically important case of Mexicans. Though that article dates back to 2009, it remains remarkably current in some respect. In the present essay I only refer tangentially to illegal immigration and only insofar as it serves my main object. Continue reading →

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. What is the ‘-dom’ in ‘freedom’? John Kelly, OxfordWords
  2. Does Trump Have a Point About Europe? Jeffrey Stacey, Duck of Minerva
  3. When Racism Is Fit to Print Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer
  4. How deep is the decline of the West? John Gray, New Statesman

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Belgium struggles to manage its burgeoning Islamic scene Bruce Clark, Erasmus
  2. Juul Madness John Tierney, City Journal
  3. Citizenship is the new caste system Rachel Lu, the Week
  4. Hope and fear in a world of uncertainty Kenan Malik, Guardian

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. If Hillary Hates Populism, She Should Love the Electoral College Ryan McMaken, Power & Market
  2. Why Are Some Libertarians So Conservative About Immigration? Christopher Freiman, Bleeding Heart Libertarians
  3. The Idea and Destiny of Europe Nick Nielsen, The View from Oregon
  4. Jobs, technical progress & productivity Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The illiberal conception of freedom Nick Nielsen, The View from Oregon
  2. The echoes of Chinese exclusion (immigration) Irene Hsu, New Republic
  3. The Middle Kingdom: all under heaven? George Walden, American Interest
  4. Have we forgotten how to die? Julie-Marie Strange, Times Literary Supplement

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. How did the West get religious freedom? Mark Koyama, Defining Ideas
  2. Are asylum rights misguided? Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
  3. What Does China’s 5th Research Station Mean for Antarctic Governance? Nengye Liu, the Diplomat
  4. The forthcoming changes in capitalism? Branko Milanovic, globalinequality