Immigration Policies - Wall and Deportations Not Included

San Diego - Tijuana Border

George Borjas of Harvard makes several recommendations for immigration policies. Read the entire linked article for full details.

Winners and Losers. And what about legal immigration? The time has come to start talking about legal immigration more realistically. Despite what the Chamber of Commerce claims, legal immigration is not manna from heaven. As with all other social policies, legal immigration creates winners and losers, and any rational discussion of immigration policy must consider that tradeoff. The employers who gain, along with many willing co-conspirators in the media and academia, have effectively silenced debate by reframing the issue as a battle between white-hatted globalists who carry the banner of progress on the one side and the xenophobes and racists on the other. If nothing else, the widespread revolt against globalization makes it obvious that there are indeed losers, and the losers are tired of being lied to and being left behind. American workers had no voice in setting up a system that was bought and paid for by the economic interests that gain from increased immigration. It is time to change that balance of power—those who gain should bear part of the costs, and those who lose should receive some of the benefits. There are many ways of redistributing the gains—ranging from taxing those industries that most benefit from the hiring of immigrants to making employers pay tens of thousands of dollars for each H-1B visa granted. If nothing else, this would help employers internalize the cost of the policies that they have benefitted so much from, and lead to a much more rational discussion of how much and which type of immigration we should have.

Who Are You Rooting For? President-elect Trump clearly articulated his vision of what immigration policy should accomplish in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention: “Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.” This goal is consistent with an approach of responsible nationalism, where the well being of Americans, and particularly of American workers, should weigh heavily when we determine in which direction to go. There are obviously many other groups that we might care about–including the immigrants themselves, the firms that profit from the additional labor, and the people left behind in the source countries. It is easy to detract from the discussion by arguing over mundane trivialities: Does immigration reduce wages by 3 percent or 5 percent? Is the fiscal burden $50 billion or $75 billion? We need a radical reframing of the immigration debate. The detractors of President-elect Trump’s proposals should be asked to answer a simple question: Who are theyrooting for? By making them explicitly declare whose well-being they really care about, we will get a much more honest look at the ideological forces that drive their immigration proposals, and the American people would get a chance to see who exactly is representing their interests.
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How Many? To be brutally honest, I don’t know. Any economist can easily answer the question in the abstract: As long as the contribution of an additional immigrant exceeds the costs imposed by that immigrant, it would be optimal to let that person in. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to operationalize this very simple rule. In fact, there isn’t a single academic paper that one can rely on to make a credible argument about what the optimal number of immigrants should be. The United States has admitted an average of about 1.5 million immigrants per year over the past two decades (about 1 million legal and half-a-million illegal). It seems self-evident that the debate over the consequences of immigration—which partly fueled the momentum behind Trump’s victory—hints that many Americans believe that we have gone beyond the optimal number. We also have some evidence that this high level of immigration led to a slowdown in immigrant assimilation. More than two decades ago, the Commission for Immigration Reform, led by the legendary Barbara Jordan, recommended to President Clinton a target of around 500,000 legal immigrants per year. If the “enforcement first” approach is successful and dramatically slows down the flow of illegal immigrants, it may be sensible to initially settle on a number between the 500,000 Jordan recommendation and the current 1 million legal immigrants. Let the political bargaining begin!