Late, great immigration debate

Does the U.S. economy need all those illegal immigrants to stay or a are they taking jobs away from Americans?

All this week, Mark Krikorian and Tamar Jacoby debate immigration.


Wanna work hunched over in a field? Knock yourself out!
By Tamar Jacoby

Mark Krikorian will respond later this morning

Of course, we need immigrant workers—and most Americans don't need an economist to explain it to them. Does anyone reading this want to spend the next several decades—because remember, this isn't just summer work, these are full-time, year-round, lifetime jobs—hunched over in the fields, or busing tables, or standing at a dirty, dangerous assembly line in a meatpacking plant? Do you know anyone raising their kids to do any of those jobs, or anything like them? I doubt it, because very few Americans do. In 1960, half of all American men dropped out of high school to look for unskilled work. Today, fewer than 10 percent do—but we still need those kinds of jobs filled.

And immigrants don't just keep the economy going, they grow it, making us all richer and more productive. You can't grow a business without new workers—and not only do most native-born workers already have jobs, but with most of us having smaller families and baby-boomers retiring en masse, the native-born workforce will soon be shrinking—shrinking dramatically. So without a robust supply of new immigrants, our economy, too, would soon be shrinking. In fact, if there'd been no immigrants in the past decade, the U.S. economy would have grown by less than half as much as it did. Think about it: half as many new houses built, half as many businesses opened, half as many new jobs created, half as much new tax revenue collected—and much less economic vitality.

And that economic growth isn't just good for employers—it's good for all Americans, whatever they do. Imagine a young couple that wants to open a restaurant. How could they if they couldn't find folks to bus the tables and wash the dishes and do the scullery work in the kitchen? But if they can find those low-skilled employees—and most likely they will be immigrants—then they can also hire waiters and managers and hostesses and a chef, and chances are, many of those jobs will be filled by native-born Americans. Not only that, but once the couple opens the restaurant, that will mean more work for local farmers, local produce truckers, the construction company they hire to build the restaurant, the people who furnish and decorate it, a bank, an insurance company, an ad agency, and lots of other businesses up- and downstream from all of these—most of which employ more relatively skilled Americans than immigrants. The moral of the story: immigrants aren't stealing American jobs. On the contrary, they're creating them—they're growing the pie for all of us.

But what's crazy is that under the current immigration system, there's no legal way for these needed workers to enter the country. Not only do we need the eight million illegal workers already here to stay on. Just imagine how many businesses would shrink or collapse if they left. (Remember, we're at what economists call "full employment"—virtually no workers to spare.) But we also need a continuing supply of new workers to keep the economy growing.

As is, that growth generates about 500,000 new unskilled jobs every year, but there are only 5,000 visas for foreigners who want to do full-time, year-round, unskilled work. No wonder people are breaking the law—there's no other way to square that circle. It's not okay that they do—no one thinks it is. But we need a better answer—a system that allows these needed workers to enter the country lawfully.

We shouldn't have to choose between immigration and legality. We need to fix our broken immigration system so that we can have prosperity and the rule of law too. And frankly, I don't understand you, Mark. Why on earth are you opposed to that? Wouldn't you rather see a system that is lawful and controlled. As is, you're just an apologist for our hypocritical, nudge-nudge-wink-wink failure—unrealistic law that we can't possibly make stick and that benefits no one but the smugglers and a few unscrupulous, bottom-feeder employers.

Tamar Jacoby is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la- ... ion-center