Debating the Senate Immigration Reform Bill

The Objectivist
THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF THE SENATE IMMIGRATION BILL
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
6/7/06

Even for the Senate, the current immigration bill (the Hagel-Martinez immigration bill) is terrible. It includes a guest worker provision, an amnesty for many illegal aliens, and a large increase in legal immigration. A quick cost-benefit analysis shows why it shafts the citizenry.

Since 57% percent of illegal immigrants are from Mexico, it is worth considering their effects (as a side note, 80-85% of Mexican immigrants are illegal and 1 in 10 persons born in Mexico live in the U.S.). The following information in this section comes from a 2001 study from the Center for Immigration Studies and relies on data from the Census Bureau. As a group, Mexican immigrants suck up welfare benefits like a Hoover vacuum. While approximately 15% of natives used a major welfare program, Mexican immigrants use it at more than twice that rate (31%). One study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that the average adult Mexican immigrant imposes a net loss of $55,200 on the U.S. (taxes paid minus services cost).

This tendency persists over time since 30% of Mexican immigrants who have been here for more than twenty years use welfare benefits. Even third-generation Mexican-Americans are more than twice as likely as natives to use welfare and almost twice as likely to be in poverty or near the poverty level. Thus, Mexican immigrants and their descendants continue to suck up tax dollars.

This study underestimates the danger since as medical costs spiral upward, the costs of these immigrants will likely explode. Since 53% of Mexican immigrants don’t have medical insurance, compared to 14% of natives, these costs threaten to break our ability to bail out Medicare and Social Security. Even legal Mexican immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than 20 years are disproportionably uninsured (more than 33% don’t have medical insurance).

Nor can we reasonably expect this pattern to change over successive generations. Education is an important indicator of how a group will affect others’ pocketbooks and Mexican immigrants as a group do poorly in school. While 9% of natives drop out of high school, a whopping 65% of Mexican immigrants do. Again this pattern is multi-generational. Third-generation Mexican-Americans are almost three times likely as natives to drop out from high school and less than half as likely to graduate from college.

Culturally, Mexican immigrants drag down standards. According to one study that used Bureau of Justice statistics, Hispanics are three times more likely than whites to commit violent crimes and three times more likely to be incarcerated. They also have a comparatively weak family structure in that 36% of Hispanic births in the U.S. are out of wedlock. The kicker is that large numbers don’t identify with the U.S. or even want to become citizens. In 1997, only 15% of Mexicans qualified for naturalization did so, versus 53% from Europe and 44% from Asia.

What benefits outweigh these costs? Some Senate apologists claim that the amnesty is necessary to keep costs down. However, the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that Mexican immigration in the ’90s reduced prices between 0.08% and 0.2%. This is because unskilled labor accounts for a very small portion of economic output. Other Senate clowns claim that immigrants do jobs that natives won’t do. This is patently false since many of these jobs were done in the 1970s by non-immigrants. In 1970, for example, there were fewer than 800,000 Mexican immigrants in the country. Even if these benefits were real, they likely wouldn’t come close to outweighing the costs.

In addition, we still need to consider opportunity costs. Instead of amnestying millions of illegal aliens and letting in their families (the Congressional Budget Offices estimates that the Senate bill will increase the population by 8 million over the next 10 years), imagine we took in immigrants based on wealth, skills, and education. No one who isn’t a senator from Massachusetts could argue with a straight face that taking in largely uneducated Mexican immigrants is better for this country than taking in wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs, Pakistani doctors, and Indian engineers. The Senate is like the owner of an NFL team who uses its first round draft pick to take a player who couldn’t play for a college team. They must think we’re pretty dumb.

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The Constructivist
FOR TRULY COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
6/7/06

Over the next few weeks and probably months a conference committee made up of selected members of the Senate and the House will attempt to reconcile the Hagel-Martinez Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 (S. 2611) and the Sensenbrenner Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437). Americans should hope the cheap labor corporatists and nativist populists of the Republican-controlled Congress fail to reach a compromise. Otherwise, they will have locked us into a fundamentally flawed version of “comprehensive immigration reform” and missed another opportunity to develop a truly efficient, effective, fair, and just way of managing regional and global labor flows for the benefit of everyone in the Americas.

The ongoing debate between Congressional Republicans who emphasize punitive and militaristic solutions to the immigration “crisis” and Senate Republicans and Democrats who advocate comprehensive reforms to U.S. immigration policy avoids confronting the root causes of large-scale international migrations. What are these causes? First, consider “push” factors such as poverty, lack of economic opportunity, political repression, and social instability abroad that lead people to make the agonizing decision to leave their homeland. Next, consider “pull” factors such as demand by U.S. corporations for cheap and vulnerable workers, along with a higher standard of living, political freedoms, and social stability that make the U.S. an attractive destination for international migrants. Then, take into account the uneven effects of corporate globalization and the Washington Consensus on trade and development promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and World Bank and enacted in NAFTA and CAFTA. For example, the subsidies the U.S. offers to its own multinational corporations in agribusiness contribute to the impoverishment and bankruptcy of small farmers in Mexico and Central America, which leads them and their children to migrate to cities for work and, often, on to the United States.

By focusing on a limited version of “comprehensive immigration reform”--attending only to border and interior enforcement, visa reform and backlog reduction, and work authorization and legalization of undocumented workers--Congress fails to use key tools in aid, development, labor, and trade policy to provide disincentives for illegal immigration, mitigate the factors that lead to international migration, and recruit the most promising immigrants into our economy, society, and polity. What tools should Democrats and reasonable Republicans on the Congressional conference committee advocate adding to its legislative repertoire?

Aid: Incorporate the most promising proposals from the ONE Campaign and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty into funding for field testing aid programs aimed at drastically reducing poverty around the world.

Development: Incorporate the most promising proposals from the World Social Forum and the International Forum on Globalization’s Alternatives to Economic Globalization into funding for field testing development projects that can help build a new Washington Consensus aimed at creating conditions for sustainable economic growth throughout the Western hemisphere.

Labor: Incorporate measures recommended by Amy Traub of the Drum Major Institute, who points out that “undocumented workers’ inability to defend their rights in the workplace contributes to a race to the bottom that hurts many Americans who aspire to a middle-class standard of living.” Recognize, with Sociologists Without Borders, that “workers who can work legally and workers who are undocumented need a living wage, safe working conditions, and pension and health benefits, and they need to be treated with respect and dignity.” Supplement funding for enforcement of laws forbidding employers from hiring and exploiting undocumented workers with recognition of workers’ right to free association and the benefits for everyone when they are free to form and join unions to improve the terms and conditions of their employment.

Trade: Turn NAFTA and CAFTA into truly cooperative programs that promote fair trade and globalization from below. Invest in transnational communications and transportation infrastructure to reduce the costs of international trade.

Given that the Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to follow even the common-sense principles driving the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights’s Fair and Just Immigration Reform for All program, Americans should hope that it fails to pass an immigration reform bill before the mid-term elections in November. Once Congress is in more responsible hands, it can develop a truly comprehensive immigration reform bill.