What’s changed recently is not immigration but emigration of American jobs. This has transformed the national perspective on foreign workers, at home and abroad, thoroughly bollixing the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the process. Polls show an increasingly sour mood. It’s too late to blame George Bush, too early to blame Bill Clinton and too simple to blame aliens for horning in on American opportunities. Yet that is exactly the backlash now underway.
Of course if it’s easy for strapped American workers to blame immigrants for their plight, it’s even easier for someone like me to tell them to calm down about it. Except for a few facile British word-smiths invading our shores, I don’t have to worry about foreigners threatening my job. Nor do most American professionals. This has set up a class tension on both immigration and trade issues that will only deepen. Workers look to their immediate job prospects, which are threatened. Elites look, yes, to their competent foreign nannies, but also to the longer-term lessons of history and economics, which suggest that immigration is the engine that drives national success.
That’s not a defense of rampant illegal immigration. Sad as the situation was, the Clinton administration was right last week to pressure Mexico into sending a boatload of 695 undocumented Chinese back across the ocean. Somebody has to send a message to slimeball smugglers that there’s no money in it. Otherwise, the Golden Venture-type expeditions would just keep on coming. By some estimates 100 million people are on the move worldwide–the largest refugee flow in human history. They can’t all live here.
The problem is that many of the same people arguing against illegal immigration are also against legal immigration. Polls show that large majorities erroneously believe that illegals predominate in the United States, and interest groups exploit this confusion to push for broader restrictions. The much-quoted Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), for instance, wants a moratorium on all immigration.
This is an excellent way to destroy the future vitality and economic success of the United States. For instance, over the last 20 years the middle class of New York City-made up of earlier generations of immigrant families-essentially moved to the suburbs. Without new immigrants, the city would have been composed of only the very rich and the very poor, with large sections of the outer boroughs depopulated and devastated. Some of the 854,000 who settled there during the 1980s became terrorists or tax cheats; others opened shops and watched their kids win high-school science prizes. Overall, they quite literally saved New York.
This may be tough to swallow if you’ve just lost your job to an immigrant. But it’s a hard fact of American economic history. Whatever the early adjustment pains for the aliens themselves and for the public services they burden–immigration eventually pays off big. Having endured hardship to get here, new arrivals are essentially prescreened for moxie. In the first generation, that energy sometimes translates into a willingness to do sent work avoided by Americans-or crime. By the second and third generations, immigrant families are building the small-business backbone of the nation. This isn’t only about some words on the Statue of Liberty. It’s about wealth creation for everyone.
Unfortunately, when the subject cuts as deep as immigration, logic tends to get deported. Consider the absurdity of the Mexican situation. Securing a 2,000-mile border is nearly impossible, no matter how much the government beefs up the Border Patrol. Once rebuffed, the Mexicans just come back and try again the next day. By some calculations, they now make up roughly five sixths of all illegal immigrants.
Clearly the only real solution is to create jobs in Mexico, and the only way to do that is through NAFTA. So all of the politicians worried about illegal immigration are pushing hard for NAFTA, right? Well, no. Their constituents see NAFTA and illegal aliens as part of the same problem -job loss to Mexicans, on both sides of the border. Among the toughest challenges facing Bill Clinton is to explain to workers why long-term economic abstractions should prevail over short-term worries about their next paycheck. It sounds complicated. It sounds elitist. But when laid out carefully, with a democratic faith in the ability of people to understand their own interests, it can also have the ring of leadership.
