Is Immigration Good For The Working Class?
A brief history of a vexed question
America has a long history of welcoming immigrants–and of spurning them. When the federal government first accepted responsibility for immigration policy, in 1882, Congress passed two major laws: one imposed a nominal head tax in order to pay for the cost of admitting more millions of Irish, Germans and Englishmen, and the other banned all immigration from China. The Chinese, of course, were not white, not Christian, not Anglophone; an anti-immigrant writer of the day denounced them as “pagan rat-eaters.” But he was writing in a labor newspaper. It was California workers, including members of early unions, who led the campaign against the Chinese, most of whom had been “imported”--that was the term then used–by American employers seeking cheap labor in Western mines and factories.
Organized labor today forms the base of the pro-immigrant Democratic party. Unions in Los Angeles have played a leading role in organizing protests against President Trump’s paramilitary campaign to roust Latino immigrants from workplaces and deport them. But Trump is betting that the same cultural and economic forces that have driven many working-class Americans over the last century and a half to view immigration as a zero-sum equation still obtain today. He appeals to nativism and racial hatred, just as the political leaders of the anti-Chinese movement once did; but he also draws on an old, deep reservoir of fears about labor competition.
Are those fears justified today? Probably not. While some immigrants do compete for jobs with native-born workers at the bottom of the wage scale, most take jobs that native workers do not want, in agriculture, meat-packing, landscaping and elsewhere. Harvard’s George Borjas, the most influential of immigrant-skeptical economists, has argued that every ten percent increase in immigration leads to a 3 or 4 percent decline in wages, but others peg the figure at about 2 percent. In Ours Was The Shining Future, David Leonhardt finds “clear if modest evidence” that immigration drives down wages. That said, a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that the effect of wage competition is more than offset by the productivity increase caused by immigrant labor, “resulting in a boost of natives’ wages” and of employment rates.
The Chamber of Commerce Likes Labor Cheap and Plentiful
Of course that subtle argument leaves the pro-immigration side arguing that the situation is better than it looks. The immigrants, typically undocumented, who shape up on the streets of Flushing to do construction work aren’t actually taking away jobs from union masons or depressing union wages. Native workers wouldn’t take meat-packing jobs even if they paid much higher wages, as they might have to do absent immigrant labor, again often undocumented. Or: immigration is a net benefit for the average non-college graduate, even if not for you personally. Whatever the data shows, Donald Trump has a lot of material to work with.
The chief source of political support for immigration in the United States has never been public opinion, but business. The Republicans and pro-business Democrats who dominated American politics in the half-century after the Civil War blocked campaigns to restrict immigration largely at the behest of employers and their organizations. Workers have often been on the other side. The anti-Chinese movement in California was spearheaded by radical populists of the Workingman’s Party–many of them Irish immigrants–who hated capitalists at least as much as the newcomers. The Chinese immigrants were pawns in a war between capital and labor: factory owners in Massachusetts and in Pennsylvania used them as scabs to break strikes, paying them as little as one-third of the dismal wage they had been offering to native workers. Natives often responded with violence.
Mass anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States only began as the vast wave of eastern and southern Europeans arrived after 1880. The movement was led by “old-stock” figures like Henry Cabot Lodge who feared for America’s Anglo-Protestant identity and “scientific racists” like Madison Grant academics who claimed to have proved the inferiority of the “lesser races.” But they had labor on their side. In a speech at the national convention of the AFL in 1891, when the Jews and the Italians had only begun to arrive in large numbers, Samuel Gompers, head of the union (and himself a Jewish immigrant from Holland), claimed that industries had become “over-crowded with working people” who had been “dumped” on the labor market by employers seeking to destroy organized labor.
Gompers was claiming that the newcomers had been imported, just as the Chinese had been. This was false, as he must have known, but highly effective. The AFL became a major force in calls to impose a literacy test on new immigrants–a proposal that Congress kept endorsing and that presidents, up through Woodrow Wilson, kept vetoing. By this time immigrants and their children had become a real force in both parties, adding their voice to calls to keep the gates open. But the politics rapidly became impossible. The hysteria over “Bolshevism” after 1917, and the ensuing Red Scare, in which 10,000 immigrants were arrested and several hundred deported, turned immigrants into threats not only to the American workforce and bloodstock but to its democratic values. In 1924 the Congress passed, and President Coolidge signed, a bill choking off virtually all immigration from everywhere save northern Europe–and Mexico, because growers still needed hands.
Immigration Is In Our National Interest–But Not All Immigration
Our national debate over immigration subsided with immigration itself. Now it’s returned with a vengeance, not only because the fraction of the foreign-born has reached the level of a century ago, but because, unlike then, so many of the immigrants have crossed the border illegally. The mass deportations Trump has authorized have been so cruel, so contemptuous of the law and human decency, that he actually seems to be losing the debate right now. But anger over loss of control at the border has been a gift for illiberal populists everywhere–Germany, Sweden, France and above all here. Trump doesn’t even have to make the economic argument (though, no surprise, he has now exempted farms, restaurants and hotels from the mass round-ups)..
Liberals tend to class immigration with other issues of civil or human rights, but this is a mistake. Immigrants, like all individuals, have a right to be treated decently. If they wish to seek asylum, they have a right to have their claim heard. But while asylees have a moral and legal claim on the country in which they seek refuge, immigrants do not. Countries accept them as a matter of self-interest. That’s why the question of wage competition can’t be simply wished away. If immigration is good for immigrants, and good for America, but bad for some people in America, then we either have to do a better job of protecting the losers or we have to admit some immigrants but not others–or both.
There are no two sides to the question of whether it is acceptable to snatch someone off the street, or from a factory or a courthouse, clap them in handcuffs and summarily expel them from the country. But there are two sides to the question of border control, of wage competition and even of national identity. Perhaps some day we can even have that debate.