Irrational choices
Nativism isn't about the economics.
by The Economist | WASHINGTON
CLIVE CROOK
why, despite ample evidence to the contrary, Americans view their country as a land of great upward mobility. Brad DeLong
Some of what may be going on is that America is--or has been--relatively welcoming to immigrants. Immigration is all by itself an enormous upward mobility event. And that is not factored into the standard transition matrix analyses.
Immigration is a significant means of upward mobility, which explains why so many people are so willing to go to such great lengths to enter rich nations. Today, the New York Timesexamines the digging of tunnels, a means of crossing the border which has gained in frequency and sophistication amid recent border crackdowns. It's interesting to observe that the tunnels are often used for smuggling as well as immigration, suggesting that immigrant demand for cross-border routes is subsidising the development of infrastructure usable for transporting drugs and other illegal goods into America.
The ingenuity and capital employed to build such subterranean passages clearly speaks to the magnitude of the gains available to those who successfully cross the border. We might also assume that the massive amounts of time and money spent policing the border are therefore necessary to prevent some corresponding loss on the American side. Of course, we'd be wrong.
Immigration hawks like George Borjas have estimated that wage competition from immigrant labour may reduce native, unskilled worker earnings by something like 7 percent. Other researchers dispute such figures, arguing that immigrant impact on native, unskilled workers wages is minimal and is strongly positive for skilled labour. In either case, it's clear that the gains enjoyed by the migrants themselves significantly exceed domestic worker losses.
This suggests that by regularising the status of incoming labourers and taxing off a portion of the surplus they earn from migrating we could compensate domestic workers for any harm they experience. To that tax revenue, we could also add the massive amounts of money currently spent fighting immigration--billions of dollars per year, and growing. It's almost certain that under such a regularisation and redistribution approach all parties involved would be better off than they currently are.
So why isn't this approach adopted? Well, consider a thought experiment. Would the average low-skilled American worker, given the choice, opt for open borders and a check from the government covering any losses from immigrant competition or closed borders and no check? I don't know, but I would guess that more workers would take the latter as opposed to the former. If that's the case, we would have to assume that personal economics is not the root of American anti-immigration sentiment; something more is perceived to be at stake. This, in turn, may explain the thunderous applause that greets presidential candidates who emphasise the importance of teaching and maintaining the primacy of English.
This shouldn't be surprising, nor should we necessarily consider such behaviour irrational. It would be nice, however, if more political leaders explained the cost of adopting such an attitude. We are paying more than we suspect for these attempts to maintain a sense of cultural purity.