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Questions about immigration
Following on my Op-Ed from yesterday, one loyal MR reader asks me, in an email, a few questions about immigration. Here is my first cut at answers:
--Is there no amount of unskilled immigration that is too high? In other words, do you advocate open borders?
I don't believe in open borders for today's America. I would increase current immigration quotas for all groups and allow illegals to move back and forth more readily. Many current illegals would prefer to spend more time in their home country than is currently possible. I don't know exactly how much we can boost immigration and of course I don't expect political progress on the issue. But we should start with a twenty percent boost in the yearly quotas. And how about another twenty percent increase two years later?
--Why do you have faith that federal policy can address the regionalized problems [with immigration] when you don't trust federal policy to correctly judge which immigrant skills we ought to give priority?
I think the federal government is capable of giving more money to subsidize emergency rooms near the border. This is an easier task than judging what professions we will need thirty years down the road.
--You mention the success of second-generation offspring of most immigrant groups, but let's get real, this whole issue is about Mexicans, mostly, not Canadian economists. How have their offspring done? Of course, it might not even matter; if you're right that a growing supply of unskilled labor isn't bad, then does it make any difference if the second generation is also unskilled?
David Card and others have plenty of data on how well the second and third generations of Latinos do in assimilating and entering the mainstream of American life. I find the overall portrait a reassuring one. I will look for data on Mexicans per se and let you all know if I find anything useful.
N.B.: If the quality of current Mexican immigration is "lower than you would like," keep in mind the current mix is partly an artifact of current immigration law, which encourages the least rooted and the most desperate to cross the border. Young male teenagers are those who least mind being cut off from returning home. Allowing immigrants to come and go would raise the quality of the pool.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 16, 2006 at 10:00 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Couldn't you just as easily argue that more open borders would diminish the stock of immigrants? As you lower the cost of crossing the border, the marginal border crosser's opportunity cost is going to be lower, no?
Posted by: Michael Stack at May 16, 2006 9:39:43 AM
If you live in Southern California, or the Southwest US in general, I don't see how you can say that assimilation is "reassuring." Read Mexifornia by Victor Davis Hanson.
Posted by: john frank at May 16, 2006 9:55:16 AM
I think that the problem is that low-skilled immigration from Mexico, as I understand, is limited to family reunification. I don't think Mexicans can take part in the "green card lottery".
In addition to total numbers, US immigration policy should be made sane. I think we can handle nearly a doubling of current legal immigration levels (one million per year), but they should either all be in a lottery or they should all be auctioned.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at May 16, 2006 10:55:04 AM
1) My understanding of the historical evidence is that within three generations
the descendants of immigrants are as useless as any other American. All the immigrant
virtues and values will have dissipated.
2) The charge of an inability to assimilate has been levelled at any number of immigrants,
particularly notably the Eastern European Jews. Somehow they managed to assimilate
nontheless.
3) Immigrants assimilate up, not down. That is, if the immigrant feels the society
in which they are is admirable, they will assimilate. If we can keep America a land
of opportunity the immigrants will want to assimilate.
4) If one is concerned about a concentration of Hispanic immigrants, the solution
would seem to be easing entry for non-Hispanics, ie Africans, Asians, and Indians.
5) As an immigrant and the child of immigrants I may be biased.
Posted by: Acad ronin at May 16, 2006 11:09:14 AM
It seems, from a geographic point of view, that we should focus on raising the standard of living as much as we can in Mexico in order to create a disincentive for illegal immigration. If, at that point, we still want to build a wall somewhere, we can do it at the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize border, which would be much easier to police. (Especially since the Mexican border guards most likely wouldn't be as "conscientious" as our own)
Posted by: Bill Griffiths at May 16, 2006 11:36:51 AM
"If you live in Southern California, or the Southwest US in general, I don't see how you can say that assimilation is "reassuring.""
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/immigration_south_and_west.html
"Back in December of 2005, Survey USA tracked views on immigration in all 50 states. In West Virginia, 60 percent of respondents agreed that "immigrants take jobs away from Americans." The picture was the same throughout most of the South: In Alabama, 56 percent agreed, Arkansas 53 percent, Mississippi 53 percent, South Carolina 53 percent.
Meanwhile, only 33 percent in New Mexico agreed that immigrants take away American jobs. In Arizona it was 42 percent, Colorado 44 percent, Nevada 44 percent and California 30 percent."
I live in Denver, Colorado and the only negative thing I have to say about immigrants is they were mean to me in school (not many whites in my neighborhood) ;) People here understand that immigrants, legal and otherwise, are just people, trying to make a living like any of us. Personally I favor open borders.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at May 16, 2006 12:02:05 PM
Immigrants, and particularly illegal immigrants, which is what we're talking about, aren't "just people". They're a particular kind of people, with lower intelligence, less education, less comprehension of English and higher crime rates than the average American citizen. They also, by definition, have less respect for the American legal system. Besides, if they're such an asset, why doesn't Mexico do anything at all to get them to stay?
Posted by: Robert Speirs at May 16, 2006 2:16:49 PM
Thank you for revealing yourself to be an ignorant xenophobe, thus saving the rest of us the bother of reading your nonsense.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at May 16, 2006 2:40:14 PM
Dear Tyler:
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, foreign-born Hispanics trail non-Hispanic whites by five to six grade levels by 12th grade (that's 114% of the notoriously large white-black gap).
American-born Hispanics still trail non-Hispanic whites by three to four grade levels (that 67% of the white-black gap).
This data was provided to me by Stefan Thernstrom of Harvard.
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/new_underclass.htm
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 2:55:31 PM
Tyler's deeply romantic, anti-empirical view of illegal immigrants is not shared by Mexicans. Veteran war and police correspondent Fred Reed, who has lived in Mexico for the last few years, offers the Mexican view on the quality of illegal immigrants to America:
"Mexicans who can make a decent living do not want to live in the United States. Thus the US gets the losers, the second-grade educations, people who on average have neither the intellect nor the urge to study. Yes, there are exceptions. But they are exceptions.
"Everyone says, “But the Hispanics work hard.” They do indeed, in the first generation. Many people in fields such as construction have told me that the Latinos are the backbone of their operations... The Latinos work, now. Their children do terribly in school, however, drop out, and lose the desire to work. Then they join gangs."
http://fredoneverything.net/MultiCulty.shtml
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 3:02:16 PM
The data that Noah Y details is mis-leading. Some of the respondents
in California and the southwest may be illegal immigrants or Hispanics
themselves, thus skewing the results. You'd need to interview non-
Hispanic people to get accurate results.
I feel that Illegal immigrants not only take jobs away from Americans,
they lower the wages that all workers would earn in those jobs.
As for Robert's opinions, I can see where he's coming from. As a high
school teacher in Southern California, the students that I have had that
were illegal immigrants have been mostly poor, poorly educated, and of
questionable ethics. They don't stay in school very long.
That certainly doesn't mean that they are ALL that way, but that's what
I have learned over 22 years of being in the classroom.
Posted by: SoCalMike at May 16, 2006 3:11:55 PM
More data for Tyler:
- Here's the best estimate I've yet seen of the non-Hispanic White versus Hispanic IQ gap: A 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America (aged 14 and above) came up with an overall difference of 0.72 standard deviations in g (the "general factor" in cognitive ability) between "Anglo" whites and Hispanics. The 95% confidence range of the studies ran from .60 to .88 standard deviations, so there's not a huge amount of disagreement among the studies.
One standard deviation equals 15 IQ points, so that's a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics, which explains why Hispanics are given ethnic preferences in prestige college admissions.
Source: Source: Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer III, F. S. & Tyler, P. (2001) Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330.
More data with very similar implications:
- The white-Hispanic gap has been studied far less than the white-black gap, but it looks to be substantial. For example, the gap between non-Hispanic whites and Mexican-Americans on the SAT is 77 percent of the size of the gap between whites and blacks.
- On the SAT's competitor, the ACT, the white-Mexican gap is 71 percent of the white-black gap. (It’s 56 percent for other Hispanics.)
- IQ? The huge National Longitudinal Study of Youth project paid for by the U.S. military, which formed the basis for The Bell Curve, found Latinos scored 14 points below whites on the heavily g-loaded Armed Forces Qualification Test, or 77 percent of the white-black IQ gap.
Nearly two decades earlier, the 1965 Coleman report found a 13-point white-Hispanic IQ gap.
Links to documenting sources can be found at: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/no_excuses.htm
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 3:14:43 PM
Samuel Huntington of Harvard published data on academic performance by American born citizens of Mexican descent.
Here are the figures for % with a post-high school degree (including two year AA degrees):
2nd Gen: 9.3%
3rd Gen: 8.5%
4th Gen: 9.6%
All other Americans: 45.1%
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/001952.html
Clearly, importing tens of millions of Latin Americans is pushing the US away from its traditional status as a predominantly middle class society and toward Latin America's traditional highly inegalitarian society.
Tyler seems to find deep aesthetic satisfactions in Latin American culture's artistic output that would make up, in his emotional estimation, for its civic and economic shortcomings, but others might not share his predilections. Moreover, Tyler is living in a fantasy world if he thinks that illegal immigrant communities here display much of the traditional arts and crafts that he cherishes in Mexican village life. He should come out to Van Nuys and see the lumpenproletariat future he's helping impose on America by his ill-informed propagandizing about immigration.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 3:25:34 PM
Pretty interesting set of beliefs from the anti-immigration crowd.
1. Immigrants are the dregs of humanity who can't make it in their own country because they're too lazy to study in school.
2. They're taking jobs away from Americans.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan at May 16, 2006 3:27:11 PM
Roughly 80 million or so of my fellow American citizens score below the Hispanic mean on IQ, As a citizenist, I believe in making some sacrifices for the well-being of my fellow citizens, especially those less gifted in intelligence. Illegal aliens don't compete with me in the job market, but, according to the Law of Supply and Demand (which Tyler seems to believe somehow doesn't apply in the case of immigration), they do drive down the wages of the left half of the bell curve.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 3:38:23 PM
Isn't it ironic how so many of the free marketeers who scoffed at David Card's first famous study -- that minimum wage laws don't drive down employment -- have embraced his second study -- that immigration doesn't drive down wages?
In reality, Card made exactly the same mistake in both studies -- he didn't adjust for the big differences in cost-of-living between locations. In his minimum wage study, he compared New Jersey to Pennsylvania and said the higher minimum wage in NJ didn't hurt employment relative to Pennsylvania, but New Jersey is a more prosperous and expensive state. In reality, the market wage in NJ was higher than the minimum wage so of course the minimum wage had little effect on employment.
Similarly, now he's comparing much more prosperous and expensive cities with lots of immigrants to poor, cheap cities with few immigrants and, what do you know, they get paid the same wages in both. But he's failing to adjust for the radical differences in cost of living between, say, LA and Pittsburgh, a cost of living that is driven up in part by the huge number of illegal aliens in LA all needing places to stay.
In other words, there is no premium being paid to American workers to get them to move from their native cities to boom towns. Why not? Because of competition from illegal immigrants.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 3:47:15 PM
Patrick, the argument is that illegals take jobs from the least skilled of Americans. No one thinks Tyler Cowen is going to lose his job to an illegal. Its Americans who lack the skills to do anything more difficult than manual labor who are losing out.
Posted by: Roy at May 16, 2006 4:01:15 PM
The Initiative on Chicago Price Theory has put out a new blog filtering app. It is called "SailerStop" v2.2, and it prevents persons from dropping a dozen posts with canned stats on an unsuspecting comment page.
Posted by: Bill Griffiths at May 16, 2006 4:16:23 PM
Please stop this ridiculous comparison with immigration 1910. That immigration had:
1. No welfare state, all immigrants had to work. 31% of “hard working” Mexicans use some form of welfare program, more than twice the rate of natives. Unemployment is also twice as high.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/mexico/means.html
Milton Friedman has stated that successful immigration and a welfare state are an impossible match. (now I am waiting for the laughable “well, we just have to abolish the welfare state than” libertarian pipedream).
1. There was a strong culture of assimilation, with internal as well as external pressure. Would you have been better of if Germans and central Europeans had not assimilated?
3. There was no entitlement ideology, no multiculturalism, no “my ethnic group above America pride” trumpeted by media and cultural elites.
Today 44% of Blacks and 22% of Mexicans readily admit they think about social and political issues as members of their ethnic group rather than as Americans, compared to 2.5% of those with English and 1% of those with German herigate (GGS, thanks to induktivist blogg).
4. There was a very high cost of immigrating, resulting in self-selection with those who wanted to become Americans. Hardly the same as Mexicans living across the border, and considering large parts of the US their “homeland”.
More:
· What People say in polls hardly matters. If I show you a poll that says high gas prices are caused by monopolies, does that prove anything? People in areas with lots of immigration may find it worthwhile to invest in telling themselves immigration is good, in order to function better in society. Further in such states you have a large share that are immigrants/Hispanics themselves, more liberals, and a self selection where a lot of people bothered by immigration already moved out.
Patrick what I find interesting is the complete meltdown of intellectual standards from liberals/libertarians in this area. Who in this forum claimed immigrants “take jobs” from Americans? Of course that is not what illegal immigration does, it simply pushed the wages of unskilled Americans downward. If there is a “floor”, due to for example the ability to live of welfare, more unskilled Americans will drop of the labor market. Roughly 50% of young black men in this country do not work today.
Your second straw man points is even more pathetic. It is a undeniable FACT that Mexican immigrates do horribly bad in school and tend to be much more welfare dependent. You cannot square this with your politically correct fantasies, so instead of a reply we get a sneering tone, (which I am sure in your mind constitutes a counter argument).
I don’t care if Mexican immigrants do so badly because they culturally have less strong work ethics, because they have lower IQ (culturally or not), because they are selected from low skill groups, because of the incentives faces here.
It does not change the fact that they do not assimilate well, do not contribute to the US economically and engage in a host of behavior that involves large external costs to natives (crime rate 3 times as high as white Americans, welfare dependency, voting leftwing etc).
Now either show us well-reasoned arguments that show that Sailers facts and data is wrong or keep your cognitive dissonance to yourself.
More facts (evil evil facts)
I am going to, using the US-2000 census, compare the 250 million Natives, the 9.2 million Mexicans foreign born, and the 22 million other immigrants.
http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/native.pdf
http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/STP-159-Mexico.pdf
http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/foreignborn.pdf
(the 22 are obviously all foreign born minus Mexican foreign born)
Let us start with labor force participation of those hardworking Mexicans.
Natives 60.2%
Other Forign born 57.1%
Mexican 54.3%
Per capita Income?
Natives 22.000 $
Other Forign born 25.000$
Mexican 13.000 $
Perhaps the best proxy for succes in society and welfare dependecen, the rate of pover r
Natives 8.3% (remember this figure next time you speak to a liberal)
Other Forign born 11.4%
Mexican 24.4%
Share speaking english at home, as good a measure of assimilation as anything
Natives 91% (remember 8% of natives are already hispanics)
Other Forign born 22%
Mexican 5.6%
Education? Surely only a nazifacistracist uncultured biggot from the South would suggest Mexican immigrants are not well educated.
Share of population with no high school diploma
Natives 17%
Other Forign born 25%
Mexican 70%(!)
Natives 25%
Other Forign born 32%
Mexican 4%(!!)
If anyone can show me any data that suggets second or third genration Mexican immigrants are assimilating please do so.
Posted by: Teller at May 16, 2006 4:20:29 PM
Dear Bill Griffiths:
Tyler wrote today:
"I will look for data on Mexicans per se and let you all know if I find anything useful."
Now he has found the data.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 16, 2006 4:20:52 PM
Steve,
Prior to the end of apartheid, many South African whites argued that the movement restrictions on blacks should remain in place because blacks were more likely to be stupid criminals. What's your opinion on the end of apartheid? Do you think that it was a good thing?
Posted by: Christopher Rasch at May 16, 2006 4:27:53 PM
PS.
I have tried really hard to think of one important area where Hispanics in the US are contributing to society at least as much as the native majority population. Obviously there is nothing in economics, civil life, political/ideological ideas, research, academia or culture.
But I finally came up with one. Hispanics are now recruited to the marine core at about their rate of the young male population. The macho anti-intellectual culture works well in this one area. Sadly I suspect even this is not true for Mexicans, but mainly more successful and patriotic Hispanic groups such as Cubans and Porto Ricans.
Posted by: Teller at May 16, 2006 4:32:22 PM
Christopher:
In Stalin’s Soviet Union scientists that did not support the theories of Lysenko were sometimes tortured and killed in the Gulag. What is your opinion about this? Don’t you think in the end it was a good thing the Soviet Union collapsed?
Irrelevant question? Avoiding the issue? Meaningless guilt by association?
Do you actually have any arguments to claim that Hispanics and African Americans in the US do not commit crime at a disproportional rate? It is after all not a theoretical question.
Obviously non of this has anything to do with supporting state enforced apartheid, nor Staling, nor even Adolf Hitler.
Posted by: Teller at May 16, 2006 4:40:14 PM
Sailer,
"American-born Hispanics still trail non-Hispanic whites by three to four grade levels (that 67% of the white-black gap)."
You amuse me, my man. But hey, who am I to argue? That would just make me even more exceptional than I already think I am. :^)
"Illegal aliens don't compete with me in the job market, but, according to the Law of Supply and Demand (which Tyler seems to believe somehow doesn't apply in the case of immigration), they do drive down the wages of the left half of the bell curve."
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 16, 2006 4:52:58 PM
Teller,
Blacks, as I'm sure Sailer would agree, commit crimes at higher rates than whites. As a population, they're less intelligent (as measured by IQ tests), poorer, and more likely to use social services (welfare, etc.) than whites. For those reasons, pro-apartheid supporters in South Africa opposed ending mobility restrictions on blacks. How is that different from the arguments Steve is making in favor of mobility restrictions on Mexicans?
Posted by: Christopher Rasch at May 16, 2006 4:54:19 PM
