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Give them your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
Three countries that relied on low-skilled immigrant workers during good times — Japan, Spain, and the Czech Republic — have recently introduced voluntary return programs programs, popularly known as "pay-to-go" programs, in an effort to reduce the number of unemployed immigrants.
The programs established in 2008-2009 generally provide unemployed legal migrants with stipends that cover the cost of a one-way plane ticket "home." Some programs also offer migrants a lump-sum payment.More here.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on November 5, 2009 at 02:44 PM in Current Affairs, Economics | Permalink
Comments
Sailer's been arguing for the US to do this for a while now. ;)
And let the flames begin!
Posted by: Bob Montgomery at Nov 5, 2009 3:02:01 PM
Steve Sailer suggested this and was mocked by Will Wilkinson right here in the MR comments.
Posted by: josh at Nov 5, 2009 3:03:48 PM
It's a lot cheaper to be unemployed back home with your family in Latin America than unemployed alone in America, so it's better for all concerned.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 3:18:03 PM
Ralph Klein, the old premier of Alberta, famously gave welfare recipients one-way tickets to BC with their checks. This reminds me of that.
Posted by: Kailer at Nov 5, 2009 3:22:15 PM
From the Los Angeles Daily News:
Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley's immigrant day laborers just hang on
by Tony Castro
They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico.
And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home.
They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can't send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven't seen for years.
"We have lost our reason for being here," laments Jose Perez, 42, a Guatemalan living in the San Fernando Valley who vows he will be back home by next Christmas - and wishes he could leave sooner....
A glance at Ochoa's and Perez's decline in earnings over the past year underscores how far their dream has fallen.
For months, both have been averaging one day of work a week, earning from $60 to $80 a day. They used to work up to seven days a week at that rate.
"We didn't realize how good it was until it was gone," said Perez.
"In Guatemala, I could live with my family at my parents' house," Ochoa said.
"I would find some kind of work. I might not make much more a week there than I do here working only one day a week. But I would be home. I wouldn't be a stranger in another country."
But now Guatemalan day laborers wishing to go home face the task of saving $400 or more for the airfare to return home.
"If you're from Guatemala and you want to go home, it has to be by plane," said Ochoa. "We're not trying to be picky. But it's not a trip that can be done safely by bus."
Turning themselves into U.S. immigration authorities for speedy deportation is no easy answer. Illegal immigrants often languish for months as prisoners in detention centers. When they are deported, they may end up hundreds of miles from their home towns, families and friends.
Perez suggested a novel solution for how immigrant day laborers could return to their homelands even quicker.
"If those people and groups who are crusading to get immigrants out of the United States would offer the air fare for us to go home, we would," he said, making direct reference to members of the anti-illegal-immigration Minuteman Project.
The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.
"It's not like there's any great love there," said Perez. "If you're Guatemalan, Salvadoran or Honduran, you want to fly home.
"If we're going to go home, we want to make sure we get there alive."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 3:28:34 PM
The political side of the equation is that Obama doesn't want these poor bastards to go home. He's trying to freeze them in place by repeatedly promising to introduce "comprehensive immigration reform" to put them on "the path to citizenship" (i.e., make them Democratic Party voters) Real Soon Now.
Obama's implicit message to the forlorn guys hanging around Home Depot parking lots is that if you go home now, you'll miss out on the amnesty.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 3:46:18 PM
japan imported significant amounts of foreign labor?
Posted by: babar at Nov 5, 2009 3:50:53 PM
Dear Babar:
The Japanese government is paying unemployed Japanese-Brazilians (i.e., people of Japanese descent born in Brazil who came to Japan for jobs) to go home to Brazil.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 4:03:01 PM
Alex's headline to this post, "Give them your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," reveals, once again, how much of the elite conventional wisdom on immigration is based on sheer low-brow Statue-of-Liberty sentimentalism.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 4:22:30 PM
Even before the recession, many European countries have had buyout programs for legal resident foreigners, employed or unemployed, although usually they aren't funded at high enough levels to have much impact.
Making these buyouts generous -- say, $50k per person to permanently leave and return to their countries of origin -- would be a win-win solution to help solve Europe's largest problem (it's growing caste of disaffected, welfare-reliant Muslims) by giving Muslims who aren't happy in Europe an appealing option. (It would also inject useful new capital into Muslim countries.)
The cost would be considerable in the short run -- in the unlikely event that every Muslim in the Netherlands took up a $50k buyout ($250,000 per family of five) -- the cost would be about 10% of one year's GDP. But the long run benefits would far outweigh the short term sacrifice.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 4:43:08 PM
If our government did this they would hand out round trip tickets.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 5, 2009 4:46:49 PM
We seem to subsidize a good number of foreign graduate students in order to fill the classes at some of our universities. Perhaps even George Mason. Graduate students decide to stay and apply for visas after graduating.
Perhaps we should restrict the number of foreign graduate students entering the US given that they often do not leave after graduating. That would also change the tone of some academics -- they would have something to lose with this change and perhaps their attitude towards immigration would be more accomodative.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 5, 2009 5:14:07 PM
@Bill: Sailer is *not* an academic.
Posted by: JSK at Nov 5, 2009 6:16:30 PM
Damn it, Bob, don't say his name!
Posted by: Wevin at Nov 5, 2009 6:18:52 PM
@Steve:
Are you serious, or are you bored?
Posted by: Dan Dostal at Nov 5, 2009 6:19:07 PM
Sounds like a way to create a revolving door of immigrants wanting to return home. What an incredibly stupid policy.
Posted by: Seward at Nov 5, 2009 7:29:27 PM
"Sounds like a way to create a revolving door of immigrants wanting to return home. What an incredibly stupid policy."
No, the kicker is that in return for a flight home, a gift certificate at the local Wal-Mart in Oaxaca and whatever else you want to toss-in, we get fingerprints and retinal scans. If these illegal aliens are ever found in the U.S. again illegally, it's two years in prison.
It's fair and it's efficient, so, of course, it's barely even being talked about in the U.S.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 7:48:45 PM
And what about the deportee's brother, sister, father, son, etc.?
As for the penalty, retinal scans, etc., well I suspect that be as about as efficient and effective as the drug war is.
Posted by: Seward at Nov 5, 2009 8:34:06 PM
And what about the deportee's brother, sister, father, son, etc.?
As for the penalty, retinal scans, etc., well I suspect that be as about as efficient and effective as the drug war is.
Ugh, such complications! So much easier to just give up and accept our demographic/fiscal fate then to have to think our way through such insurmountable obstacles. What's on the CW tonight?
Posted by: ziel at Nov 5, 2009 8:50:14 PM
You'll notice that the people who actually know a lot about the immigration issue tend to have much less politically correct opinions about immigration than people who are more ignorant about the topic. For example, among economists, George Borjas vs. Alex Tabarrok.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2009 9:12:36 PM
@ babar
there are now even schools taught in portugues in japan, which is a famously monolithic (even xenophobic) country. tokyo has the largest carnival outside of brazil
Posted by: farmer at Nov 5, 2009 9:31:04 PM
I don't really have a problem with our "demographic fate" (whatever it happens to be). As for the fiscal one, creating a police state in order to enforce immigration laws seems to lead to some rather dim outcomes.
Posted by: Seward at Nov 5, 2009 10:59:30 PM
What to stop them from illegally crossing the border once again? The government would simply be paying the Hispanics a trip to see their families back home. After a few months they would try to get back.
I think it may work fairly well in Europe, but certainly not in the U.S. if the government don't solve the Mexican border problem first.
Perhaps this can backfire and end up turning into an incentive for them to come, too. They might think "if things don't work out there, I'll still get a free ticket home and some money." You never know.
Posted by: Rob at Nov 6, 2009 12:36:04 AM
As a Czech, I can comment on the issue.
The people being eligible for the return program are usually very recent arrivees from very distant countries like Mongolia or Vietnam, who have no families here and, being in the country for a year or less, do not speak the language.
The program was used for some 1500 people so far, and its aim is to prevent creation of the "unemployed immigrant" phenomenon here (so far, Czechia does not have problem with a large amount of immigrants on welfare, not least because the welfare system here is not as generous as in France or the Netherlands).
The nation is very aversive to non-working people of productive age in general, and politicians who would try to import new voters from abroad by promising cheap welfare for them would take a serious hit in the polls. This mechanism is going to work as long as the population is not willing to buy into "white guilt" syndrome pushed by part of the elites(which will take some time, because the country was not a colonial power, and it was rather a victim of proximate empires for most of the last century).
Posted by: Marian Kechlibar at Nov 6, 2009 4:05:41 AM
"well I suspect that be as about as efficient and effective as the drug war is."
We are pretty efficient at putting people in prison. And it's a free lunch because the police state is already here! Never waste a pre-existing evil as I always say.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 6, 2009 4:26:23 AM
