Why America Can't Be Bothered to Fix Its Immigration System
Because it is so profitable to abuse the undocumented
Spectacular NYT piece a while back that I just need to process for my own smarts on the subject. The subtitle says it all:
Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants — and U.S. employers.
Put simply, neither side’s primary players on the issue are incentivized to do anything but stick with the status quo.
The piece starts with some cool stats:
Though only about a fifth of international migrants head to North America, the United States has attracted more migrants than any other nation for the past 50 years. In 2020, the U.N. notes, the United States held about 51 million international migrants. The runner-up, Germany, had about 16 million.
This is how I state roughly the same in America’s New Map:
Among our superpower quintet, America and Europe are built to handle climate migration. Both are home to the world’s largest stocks of immigrants (50 million in America, 37 million in the EU). That equates to 15 percent of the US population and just under a tenth of the EU’s.
Not exactly taking over either place, and yet a significant labor input to be sure.
Now here’s the NYT bit that grabs you by the throat:
Migrants dream of America because they are an entrenched part of our economy. This is nothing new; America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit. Even today, some sectors in the U.S. economy seem almost reserved for workers who have been deliberately kept vulnerable. When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, establishing a minimum wage, they excluded most farmworkers and domestic workers from its protections. These workers were largely excluded again when Congress passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1970. “These spaces that were once filled by slaves are now filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University told me. “They are exploitative by design.” [emphasis mine]
Which gets us to the crux of the article’s damning judgment:
Today migrants are routinely employed in almost every blue- and pink-collar industry in America. Recent Times investigations by Hannah Dreier found unaccompanied minors packing Cheerios, washing hotel sheets and sanitizing chicken-processing plants. The United States has laws banning these and other abusive labor practices, but many companies have found a workaround: staffing agencies. “They’re all designed to skirt litigations,” Kevin Herrera, the legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, in Chicago, once explained to me. Many of these agencies specialize in hiring people who will suffer any number of degrading or dangerous conditions because they are desperate for work. Their offices are sometimes inside the company factories. But if one of their employees files a complaint, is injured on the job or is caught working illegally, the agency runs interference so that the company avoids legal responsibility.
But what about American consumers? Turns out they are the primary beneficiary — none of the hassle and far cheaper services:
American consumers benefit from these systems every time they find exceptionally inexpensive ways to get their lawns cut, their bathrooms cleaned, their houses built, their apples picked, their nails painted and their young and old cared for. The prices we pay for these services have been subsidized for generations by transnational migrants. [emphasis mine]
I make a similar point in America’s New Map:
In the previous wave, European immigrant laborers competed directly with native-born workers then aspiring to join the middle class. In contrast, today’s heterogeneous immigrant mix complements America’s middle class by being split between high- and low-tech workers. Thus, economic “replacement” is an illusion because today’s immigrants cluster in professions where jobs would otherwise go unfilled for being too high-skilled or too low-paying and thus undesired by the native-born.
So, you see, this benefit works in a high/low manner: we brain-drain top-flight tech talent and we tap lower-skilled migrants to keep our low-end services cheap.
Why bother fixing this when, in the end, the only one being abused are the undocumented (non-tech) migrants and, for them, this situation remains better than what they can get at home.
Understand these stats, pulled from the UN:
Migrants working in the US send back to their home countries only 15% of what they earn, meaning they spend 85% within our economy.
That 15% represents an informal development aid flow THREE TIMES larger than the US Government’s official developmental aid (ODA) total.
Half of that remittances flow goes to the countryside of recipient nations, meaning it addresses the worst poverty and keeps millions upon millions out of extreme poverty.
Back to the NYT:
In 2015, economists at Texas A&M concluded that if immigrant labor were eliminated from the dairy industry, the retail price of milk would nearly double. More recently, in Florida, construction projects stalled and their costs rose after the state passed new laws targeting undocumented residents. Economists say that recent migrants have also blunted the worst effects of post-pandemic inflation.
Despite all those benefits, or more likely because of them, we — as citizens reaping these economic gains — have all acquiesced to the development of a “permanent class of disenfranchised ‘illegal’ workers.” In other words, we are all complicit in the systematic abuse of undocumented labor — mostly in the name of preventing them from “stealing our jobs” (myth, as noted above) and/or ‘refusing to assimilate.”
The latter charge, as I argue in America’s New Map, does not hold up to scrutiny:
As for assimilation, comprehensive studies indicate that while today’s immigrants are, on average, less assimilated when they first arrive, compared to Europeans landing a century ago, they nonetheless assimilate faster over the years that follow—particularly in cultural terms. Where today’s immigrants lag in terms of assimilation are in the economic and civic realms, logically reflecting (1) this era’s polarized politics on the subject, and (2) the reality that one-quarter of our immigrant population is presently undocumented.
In any event, the longer immigrants live in the United States, the more they resemble the native-born on health, education, marriage, fertility, home owner- ship, crime, incarceration, and—most importantly—political preferences, thus refuting the assumption that immigrants equate to a win only for Democrats. As a rule, immigrants come to America seeking not to change it but to preserve it; they come here not to stick out but to fit in.
Summing up the dysfunctional reality, the NYT piece states the obvious:
Legal immigration today is close to impossible for most people [emphasis mine]. David J. Bier of the Cato Institute recently estimated that around 3 percent of the people who tried to move permanently to the United States were able to do so legally. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case,” he wrote in a comprehensive review of the current regulations. He concludes that “trying the legal immigration system as an alternative to immigrating illegally is like playing Powerball as an alternative to saving for retirement.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, illegal immigration is the natural consequence of the conflict between America’s thirst for foreign labor and its strict immigration laws. The world’s increasing connectedness and fluidity have just supercharged this dynamic.
If America wants fewer illegals, then it has to make legal immigration far easier, preferably allowing for migrants to come and go in response to economic cues.
This is not some failure of imagination. The fixes are obvious. Our legislators simply refuse to stop this labor abuse. Per the NYT story":
Congress tends to invest heavily in immigration enforcement but not in the enforcement of labor laws that could dissuade businesses from exploiting unauthorized workers in the first place … The only immigration policies that Congress can bring itself to enact, it seems, are funding more border security and ICE raids.
This “crisis” simply reflects our choice not to engage this issue rationally, instead continuing an abuse pattern that perpetuates negative dynamics across our hemisphere.
That approach become untenable in the face of climate change’s ravaging effects across our hemisphere’s lower latitudes. Eventually, Mother Nature will force us to deal with the immorality of our immigration system.
Beyond that, we need to extend economic opportunity and political belonging southward so as to prevent climate change ultimately cratering smaller states throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.