The Compassion of the (Hidden) Kristof

In his Sunday column, Compassion That Hurts (fully available to Times Select subscribers), the normally open-bordered Nicholas Kristof comes out against the guest worker provision of the immigration bill (that was just put on hold again in the Senate on Friday):

I used to favor a program to allow in guest workers, thinking it would be good for them and also great for America by providing a source of low-cost labor — just as it was good for America to admit our own ancestors. And illegal immigrants overwhelmingly are hard-working people who keep the economy humming, so they deserve respect rather than xenophobic resentment and a marginalized life in the shadows.

But I've changed my mind on a guest worker program, because of growing evidence that low-wage immigration hurts America's own poor.

The most careful study of this issue, done by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the surge of immigration in the 1980's and 1990's lowered the wages of America's own high school dropouts by 8.2 percent. "The large growth and predominantly low-skilled nature of Mexican immigration to the United States over the past two decades appears to have played a modest role in the widening of the U.S. wage structure," the study concluded.

Another study, by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, reached similar conclusions. Between 2000 and 2005, he found, immigrant workers with a high school degree or less rose by 1.5 million, while employment of native workers at that education level fell by 3.2 million.

It's often said that immigrants take jobs that Americans won't take. But look at employment statistics, and you see that even among maids and agricultural workers, only four out of 10 people are immigrants.

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The broader problem is that our immigration program is structured so as to bring in cheap laborers more than brilliant minds. At last count, only 16 percent of admissions for permanent residence went to those with employment qualifications, while the great majority went to applicants on the basis of family ties.

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So let's go ahead and regularize longtime illegals, rather than leaving them forever in the shadows. But instead of bringing in a new flood of guest workers, let's recast our generosity more toward biologists and computer programmers. The H1-B visa program enriches America by bringing in high-tech workers, but the nominal ceiling on these visas has dropped to 65,000, after temporarily rising to 195,000 in the 1990's. That's the immigration flow to expand.

In contrast, bringing in 325,000 or more guest workers annually (as various versions of the current Senate bills provide) would be particularly tough on America's poor at this time. They are reeling from Bush program cuts and the fraying of medical safety nets. An influx of hundreds of thousands more unskilled laborers would impoverish them further — and to me, that does not feel like compassion.

As a counterpoint to the argument about low-wage immigration hurting American low-income workers, here's a post from last week at ThinkProgress:

Another common misperception is that increased immigration has had a negative impact on wages for lower-skilled U.S.-born workers. But as Princeton University professor Alan Krueger shows in a new American Progress memo, the actual impact of immigration on lower-skilled workers is negligible. Why?

One likely factor is that, in addition to increasing the supply of labor, immigrants increase the demand for goods and services produced in the U.S. This leads to higher wages and employment for all workers in the U.S. Immigration can also result in an increase in capital investment. And many immigrants become entrepreneurs, creating jobs for other immigrants and natives. (The latest U.S. Census data shows that “Hispanic-owned businesses now comprise one of the fastest-growing segments in the U.S. economy.”)

As Krueger writes, if we are serious about helping low-income workers, we need to act now on measures that can have a much larger impact, like “an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an increase in the child tax credit, a boost in the minimum wage, and increased job training.”

And the WaPo weighed in on Thursday with this editorial:

It sounds obvious that this influx must be depressing wages at the bottom: Double the supply of a certain type of labor and you push its price down. But attempts to measure this effect suggest that it's either modest or nonexistent. The most credible pessimist is George Borjas of Harvard University, who has calculated that wages for native-born high school dropouts are 7.4 percent lower than they would have been without immigration. But David Card of the University of California at Berkeley has compared wage patterns across cities and concluded that high school dropouts in cities with lots of immigration are no worse off. In low-immigration cities, it seems, employers don't necessarily respond to a paucity of low-skilled workers by bidding up wages to attract more of them. Instead, they may respond by investing in machinery that allows three low-skilled workers to do what six might do in a high-immigration city. Construction workers get extra trucks and power tools; gardeners get electric trimmers instead of manual shears.

Even a small impact on low-wage workers is alarming, given the rise of inequality over the past 25 years. But the question is whether to address that inequality by trying to stop immigration or to go at it via progressive taxation, larger public investments designed to prevent poor kids from dropping out of high school, or some other policy tool. Given the expense and doubtful effectiveness of border walls and employer crackdowns, progressive tax and social policies seem preferable. After all, to the extent that immigrants drive down wages at the bottom, they are driving up the inflation-adjusted wages of other Americans who get cheaper goods and services. Taxing the "immigration windfall" that flows to better-off Americans and passing it on to the less fortunate may be the best way to go.

I really don't know what to think about all the ins and outs of the immigration bill just yet--I'm still trying to wrap my head around all the procedural motions and technicalities.