Immigration and the National Interest
By Otis L. Graham, Jr. (U.S. Immigration in the 1980s, Reappraisal and Reform, edited by David E. Simcox, August, 1988)
The test of a nation's immigration policy is whether it serves the national interest. That statement sounds like a truism, but in the United States it is not the principle upon which we operate. Approximately 90 percent of the decisions about who will be allowed to immigrate on the legal side - and 100 percent on the illegal side - have been turned over to individuals and families. Immigration serves their interests, as they see them. We do not ask, in the normal course of events, and at the levels of government or national discussion, whether this adds up to a policy which is in the national interest. We assume it, or ignore the question.
But these are not normal times. Immigration levels in absolute terms match or exceed the great volume of immigration which came across our shores in the half century prior to World War I. With immigration now contributing nearly one-half of the nation's population growth, about half of that immigration illegal, the policy and academic communities have begun to ask if immigration as currently experienced and immigration policy as now feebly enforced serve the national interest. They began this questioning with something tangible in which the nation has an obvious interest, a healthy economy.
The economic impact of immigration is a very complex matter, much studied but elusive, especially since so much of immigration is illegal and resists accurate assessment. The answer to this question is, however, reasonably clear in broad outline. Immigration, as the United States experiences it in the contemporary setting, is on balance injurious to the economic well-being of the nation.
This reality has eluded some, who for reasons either of ideology, a trained incapacity to see things in wholes, or out of identification with those few groups or sectors which derive short-term benefits, have reported that current immigration has beneficial impacts for society at large. The theoretical basis for such a conclusion seems to be the notion that more (and therefore cheaper) labor of any kind is a benefit without costs, or at least exceeding any costs. This astonishingly narrow view of how an economy works has received official endorsement in the 1986 report of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Much is made of some empirical evidence that large-scale immigration into the state of California in the late 1970's and 1980's has coincided with expanded employment and small business formation, two signs of economic vigor. But there is too much on the other side for this optimistic view to withstand scrutiny, either as a valid conclusion for California or the larger society. One cost of this process is significant job displacement among resident and potential resident citizens, as a 1986 GAO report concluded from a review of fifty-one relevant studies. This displacement, often operating across entire industries by a process of "network recruitment," enlarges the pool of what is now more than seven million unemployed Americans who draw upon public assistance without finding a productive economic role.1 The demographic and educational characteristics of immigrants vary enormously, but the largest segment of the illegal population is composed of young, low-skilled Mexicans and Central Americans, a labor supply which is good economic news for some employers but whose broader labor force impact is to retard the structural evolution of the U.S. economy toward higher technologies and a higher value-added labor contribution. Even in California, an expansion of certain jobs under the impact of immigration could at best be called a form of economic growth. It is doubtful whether it deserves to be called economic progress, until the structural impacts of immigration are better understood.
Beyond these issues, immigrants enlarge the U.S. population, increasing the domestic population growth rate by 50 percent, thus adding to the current and future numbers of residents of a nation which leads the most environmentally damaging and resource-depleting lifestyle in human history. Economic wellbeing is not in the long run compatible with endless population expansion. As against such costs, the economic gains from infusions of entrepreneurial energies, or financial and education capital brought in from abroad are only minor offsets, and do not make immigration's net impact positive.2
Not all reasonable people reach exactly these conclusions, and the economic impact of immigration will and should continue to be a matter of study and discussion. But immigration is much more than an economic force. It changes the host society in multiple ways-not just its demography, but also the racial and ethnic composition of the population, indeed its culture in the broadest sense.
Since the 1965 immigration act, legal as well as illegal immigration flows overwhelmingly from non-European and from the lesser-developed or Third and Fourth Worlds. Demographic, economic, environmental and political trends indicate that we can readily project immigration to the United States to continue in these channels, and with increasing volume and momentum, for at least the next three generations. The United States will surely be transformed in important respects. But what changes are we to expect, and will their impact be on balance beneficial to the national welfare? Certainly this is the standard to which immigration should be held.
The policy and academic communities do not customarily approach the matter in just this way. They are more concerned with whether equity is being dealt to the immigrant, an important and complicated question. But the social impacts? Some attention is paid to labor-market effects of immigration. Beyond this, there is a faith that the future will take care of itself. This is a legacy of our national history. Immigration transformed the nation, but in desirable ways. The possibility that this might have changed is a thought tainted by a nativist past, not to be entertained.
Fortunately, outside the policy and intellectual circles, average citizens continue in ever-growing numbers to do what they have always done, speak out bluntly about things that do not seem to them to be going well in their communities. Average citizens may not be knowledgeable about the macroeconomic impacts of immigration on that abstraction, the U.S. economy. But they do have first-hand knowledge of what might be called the broader socio-cultural impacts of immigrants from abroad (or from the other parts of the United States) who settle in their neighborhoods. They know a good bit about the local fiscal impacts of immigrants upon public services, and especially the schools. While slower to face the issue, in recent years a number of economists and demographers have published several path-breaking academic studies of the long-term impacts of immigration upon American society in general and California in particular.3
It was demographer Leon Bouvier who, in 1981, looked ahead to tell us that immigration alone, if it continued for another century to add one million people a year to the U.S. population (a conservative number in view of the current rate), would prevent the population stabilization that would otherwise occur at approximately 260 million (assuming a total fertility rate [TFR] of 2.0). Immigration would force population growth by 2080 to 409 million, with considerable momentum to continue its climb.4 Then Bouvier and economist Philip Martin, in a pioneering work, were the first scholars to take up the issue which California's former Lt. Governor, Mervyn Dymally, raised so frequently in the 1970s, the inevitable transformation of California into "America's first Third World state." Dymally, himself an immigrant from the Third World, clearly thought this was a good thing, though he was apparently interested only in its political ramifications. In any event, he initially could not get any discussion going. Bouvier and Martin calculated that "minorities" would be a majority in California by 2010; and, as their assumptions about immigration totals were extremely conservative, probably underestimating immigration flows by a factor of two, the future they sketched is nearer than their estimate.5
In brief concluding passages, they went beyond economic impacts to consider the likely implications for educational systems, politics, and social cohesion. They tended to see problems. In Martin's words, "If the immigration status quo persists, the United States will develop a more unequal society with troublesome separations."6 In the concluding passages of another recent study of California, the state which is the harbinger of tomorrow in terms of immigration's impacts, Thomas Muller and associates acknowledge that large-scale Hispanic and Asian immigration is "contributing to an increasingly bilingual society in the Southwest," creating substantial problems in the schools and generating much resentment that the national identity may be changing in unwelcomed ways. "Social, political, and cultural issues," the Urban Institute authors judged, are now "uppermost in the minds of many Americans concerned with the consequences of immigration."7
Thus the research community has discovered what ordinary citizens have long, been saying, that immigration is altering the society and that these alterations deserve discussion. One naturally expects them to be a blend, though hardly an equal blend, of that which is welcome and that which is unwelcome by residents; one also expects disagreement about these categories. It is difficult to generalize about the complex impacts made by 600,000 legal immigrants arriving each year from abroad, along with the unknown number of illegals who come (judging by apprehension data at the Chula Vista station, the world's busiest border, in 1985) from ninety-three different countries. Some positive impacts are generally agreed upon: the delights of a more international cuisine, the evidence of entrepreneurial energies. What impacts may be negative, outside the economic?
While scholars have had little to say on the matter, citizens have been a source of information we have been reluctant to use. They communicate through letters to immigration reform organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), notes to congressmen and local public officials, calls to radio talk shows, letters to newspaper editors and in public forums. And, in time, the American people always project their deepest concerns into electoral politics. In 1986 public concern about immigration surged strongly into political campaigns in Texas, Florida and especially in California. The absence of border control was a major theme in the 1986 race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. The three to one margin by which an initiative confirming English as California's official language carried the day in 1986 and verified the growth of public concern that assimilation might be falling behind immigration flows.
Listening to what is said at all levels, one hears an over-arching fear of a society becoming Balkanized, deeply divided along ethno-cultural, and to some extent corresponding class lines. (See especially Sevareid, this book) In California, with a substantial Asian population, this perceived division is complex. There are four major and several numerically less significant Asian nationalities which are to some degree physically and culturally distinct. But still the decisive ethno-cultural stratification in California, as well as in the rest of the Southwest and in Florida, is the visibility of the large and growing Hispanic community, diverse in many ways but knit together by a common language and similar cultural inheritance, with the majority of Hispanics united by the fact of Mexico as their country of origin.
The fear of social division is not a new theme in American life, and in a nation of functioning pluralism, is understandably suspicious that it repeats an unwelcome pattern of the past. The United States has easily survived all the centrifugal forces of diverse nationality, ethnicity, religion, region and classapart from one narrow escape from social schism in the mid-nineteenth century. Of course we are divided, even along the important lines of ethnicity and culture; what difference does it make?
In response, one hears a catalog of worries that the new immigration is making differences that citizens who love this society do not want and should resist. There is an instinct to place the labels "exaggerated" or "unworthy" on concerns from this quarter. But a society that ignores them all is not only unresponsive to its citizens, but may be a helpless witness, even accomplice, to the erosion rather than the desirable augmentation of its cultural inheritance, perhaps jeopardizing those priceless things we so take for granted-social cohesion and comity, the grounds of a successful pluralism. The role of those privileged with leadership is, at the least, to listen carefully.
In political life, certain worries are occasionally sensationalized. We hear of a border that is porous to entering terrorists, drug traffic, and crime, as well as to to any alien who can walk. There is little good data, but there is talk, of the public health implications of a large flow of unexamined people carrying diseases long-since controlled in the United States. There is discussion of the mounting evidence that the host society cannot absorb, or at least is not absorbing, enormous numbers of immigrants on terms of mutual benefit. The schools, whose rate of success with the English-speaking children born to American citizens has lately been seen to falter, face staggering additional difficulties in their task of educating the non-English-speaking children arriving at their doors, especially those from families without legal permanency.
In the complex literature on educational achievement and the links to social mobility, the failure of the schools with Hispanic children cannot be disguised. In a report of the National Commission for Employment Policy, "Hispanics and Jobs," we learn that 40 percent of Hispanics are reported as having "difficulty in English." Most do not finish the twelve-year school sequence, and the dropout rate among Hispanics of the age when high school should have been completed was 1.5 times that of blacks and three times that of whites.8
Such evidence exposes to view a social segmentation that reflects both class and ethnic disadvantage. While the school systems may be "local," the social problems they encounter and are finding so obdurate are national problems. Joined to these concerns, which are linked in one way or another to large-scale immigration, are others: strains on public facilities for social services and recreation, as well as housing, and, by historic standards, high levels of intergroup tensions and conflicts. All of these problems resist, or do not adequately receive, measured and reasoned assessment. One welcomes the thoughtful treatment by author Michael S. Teitelbaum of another element that may be found in the question of the implications of immigration, in his "Latin Migration North: The Problem for U.S. Foreign Policy." There, for example, one finds again the remark of Eduardo Morga, then Chairman of LULAC, words that convey troubling implications that their author may not have intended: ". . . we are all ready to help Mexico in the United States. We feel that in the future, Mexico can use us as Israel uses American Jews, as Italy uses Italian-Americans, and so on.9
High levels of immigration to the United States have always strained and slowed the assimilation process, and prompted a renewed search for that elusive bond, national identity. That immigrants are different from natives is to be assumed; that we welcome some differences and tolerate others is accepted as the norm. Yet, on those matters thought to make America distinctive and precious, of which we have a powerful if poorly defined and always evolving conception, the host society has always cared fervently that newcomers change toward national norms.
While there have been some differences of view on these matters, most would say that America remains herself through successive changes so long as there vigorously survives the commitment to individual freedom-religious, political and economic - as well as to the rule of law, and a basic commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the whole resulting in an elemental national loyalty.
We do not test for these commitments at the border that separates the United States from a world in which many societies are organized around very different and even antithetical beliefs and behavior patterns. We protect and extend what seems to make America distinctive and valuable through the assimilation process, that many-faceted Master Teacher. For long periods we have flatly opposed the workings of the assimilationist principle as applied to some groups, most notably those of African descent; but in modern times we have granted it a more universal authority.
We have never agreed upon exactly what it means to be an American, but the discussion itself is a valuable part of our common life. There is broad agreement that it begins with command of the English language, and with an acceptance of political democracy and the rule of law. Its measures are thought to be full participation in economic and political life, social mobility and patriotic acceptance of the obligations of citizenship.
This discussion only hints at the complexity of that vital engine of national cohesion, justice and individual opportunity - the assimilation process. Now, more insistently than at any time in the lifetimes of the most senior of us, we hear that the assimilation process may be faltering under the pressure of immigration upon the very institutions that most make it possible - an open economy, public schools, the political process, the media, voluntary associations of a bridging character, intermarriage, universal military service.
Americans have heard before, and many of them have believed at earlier times, that immigration was too large in volume, that its economic impacts were importantly negative, as were its cultural and social impacts, and that the assimilation process could not absorb the influx. As a Southerner, a Scot-Irish and an historian who has lived for half a century, this author, too, has heard these concerns. My Scotch and Protestant Irish forebears had a easier time of it than the Catholic Irish, the Jews and others, but still we were seen as clannish, allegedly violent, and resented in some places and times.
The South, which has long been the Third World of the United States - rural, economically backward, poorly educated, its people by national standards illnourished, in ill health, and fecund - has also been viewed as foreign by people from other regions of the country. The South was the region with large families, holding on to traditional attitudes toward women and the patriarchal family, slow to question environmental exploitation, tending toward an authoritarian politics with low voter turnout, constrained in our intellectual life, defensive and proud.
The twentieth century has been for the South, until very recent times, one long season of out-migration. We migrated to the Northeast, with a major stream through Oklahoma to California; and we were resented, often enough. It was far, far worse for Southerners who happened to be black. Who, in the first four decades of this century, would have been confident that the economy and society possessed the capacity to absorb the millions of migrating Europeans, black and white Southerners, and growing numbers of Mexicans into a functioning though never a perfect pluralism? Yet migrants were absorbed and society flourished. The assimilation of past generations of immigrants, while imperfect and incomplete, has been nonetheless admirable - but it would be a misapplication of history to dismiss the immigration worries of today as a repetition of needless anxieties.
One misconception in much current thinking about American history is that ethno-cultural conflicts, whether exacerbated by immigration or not, have been deplorable aberrations, their roots only in a psychological illness called "nativism." But a major achievement of modern American historical writing, associated with the work of Lee Benson, Samuel Hays, Robert Kelley, Paul Kleppner, Joel Silbey and many others, has been to reveal and chart the presence and power of conflicting cultural and ethnic traditions in the American past. The discovery has not been simply a matter of the persistence and shaping power of ethno-cultural difference, but a growing appreciation that immigration - that disturber of the existing ethno-cultural balance - brought great and legitimate, as well as psychological and arguably far less legitimate, costs to those who had come before. A classic statement of this evolution is the commentary the distinguished historian John Higham has made upon his own Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925. Were he to write that book again, said Higham, he would give more weight to the real costs of immigration which were levied in the competition for jobs, housing and public facilities. This, too, was part of our historic experience with immigration.10
Another misreading of our history comes with the assumption that this society's assimilation of the millions who came prior to restriction in 1921 is somehow proof that this performance may be repeated in the decades ahead, as the incoming numbers again reach and exceed a million annually. Such an analogy is flawed in several respects.
About twenty million immigrants who came to the United States from the 1890s to 1921, and their subsequent children, made their way into Englishlanguage fluency, into the economy, and, slowly and with considerable difficulty in cases where ethnic discrimination was pronounced, into social life generally. But they did so in the decades between World War I and mid-century, when certain fundamental conditions obtained, facilitating the difficult and always imperfect social absorption of alien peoples. These conditions no longer obtain in the same way, if at all.
The first is perhaps most important. In 1921 this society made the decision to sharply restrict immigration, and to conform the allowable entries to approximate the national origins of the existing society. We have some reason to believe that the national origin quotas were a policy mistake, but the restriction itself was wise policy. Economic historians point out that income distribution in America improved thereafter, and probably chiefly because of, restriction of the labor supply through immigration reform. Large capital investments were substituted for labor, driving up productivity and allowing real wages to increase.11
Another view of the benefits stemming from immigration restriction has been developed recently by black sociologist William Julius Wilson, who views the "flow of immigrants" as "the single most important contributor to the varying rates of urban racial and ethnic progress in the twentieth century United States." Wilson, drawing upon the work of Stanley Lieberson and others, argues that the early curtailment of Asian immigration allowed Asians in America to move upward. The process repeated itself with the European immigrants after the restriction of 1921, but the mass internal migration of blacks continued for decades. Heavy migration intensified discriminatory feelings as well as economic competition, impeding the processes of group advancement. In this view, mass immigration does not "drive up the group next in line," but hampers the progress of previous arrivals from the migrating population. Hispanics in the decades ahead may therefore expect to experience restricted economic mobility as well as the intracommunity pathologies of crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. When society's assimilative mechanisms are given a breathing space through immigration restriction, there are immediate benefits, and these flow disproportionately to the most disadvantaged Americans.l2
Judging by the record of immigration reform in the past decade, much of the leadership of this society expects the assimilation process in this stage of our national life to perform its prodigious labors of absorption without the crucial curbs on entering numbers which facilitated the process earlier in this century. Another great difference between that America and our own is the stage of industrialization, and especially the role of industrial cities. The great waves of pre-war immigration to the United States coincided with the robust expansion of industrialism in America, based in and around the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. Those cities and their factories and associated distribution networks had a huge appetite for low- and semi-skilled labor, as America entered its glory days as the pre-eminent industrial power. Industrial cities, especially, functioned as a great machine for the integration of millions of foreign arrivals as well as internal migrants. Entry-level jobs were abundant, wages and living standards rose, and the cities proved to be a springboard to upward mobility for millions who had been cut adrift from rural life by mechanization. The costs were of course high, yet from this distance we see that the overall result was a powerful voyage toward economic progress which carried millions of aliens into American nationality with all of its benefits. Perhaps there was another, better way, but history took this path - once.13
That America is gone. We are predominantly and increasingly a service-based economy, deindustrializing at least as measured by employment, and deconcentrating both population and jobs out of the older urban cores. Two implications flow from these structural changes. We may not agree, after the industrial policy debate, upon the best private and public measures to adopt in adjusting to an altered world economy, but it is quite clear that we are in a new and lasting era of international industrial competition. America's economic future depends upon adaptation, and, if we are to retain a substantial industrial capacity, as for many reasons we must, it must be through a shift toward those knowledge-intensive sectors in both manufacturing and services, leaving many of the low-wage, massproduction industries to take root abroad. This will require a labor force of high educational and skill levels and aspirations; it does not imply a larger labor force, and certainly not one recruited primarily from the mass populations of the Third World.
At the same historical moment when the nation is forced toward these structural changes, the cities have lost their earlier function as industrial engines of assimilation. Factory and blue-collar jobs have slipped away, employment patterns have shifted to knowledge-intensive services, the white and small minority middle class has moved to the periphery, leaving behind low-income minorities and the old, facing a huge gap between existing job opportunities and the skill levels of this disadvantaged population. There is an economic and social function for America's cities, and some are struggling toward new forms more rapidly than others; but the contemporary city cannot perform the function it served in the era of mass immigration which coincided with our industrialization a hundred years ago.
These are great changes in the economic base and in the function of industrial cities. But immigration still delivers to America a similar input as it did eighty to a hundred years ago - a million or more a year from countries basically poor, less developed and culturally very different from the nation's current majority and its heritage. While many institutions contribute to the assimilation process, we can no longer count upon Frederick Jackson Turner's democratizing frontier, or the robust industrial cities that formerly heated the melting pot. The national economy is normally a force for social interchange, the acquisition of national norms and English language skills. But here we encounter the first of many signs that the assimilation process is becoming impaired. There seems to be a spread of ethnically-secluded work sites, entire assembly lines in auto plants where only Arabic is spoken, and entire job sites and industries in the Southwest that have become exclusively Hispanic-fruit and vegetable agriculture, parts of construction, ethnic-owned restaurants and other businesses, janitorial firms, food and poultry processing plants, race tracks. For the first time in U. S. history, a majority of migrants speak just one language-Spanish-and most of them live in ethnic enclaves served by radio and television stations carrying the messages of American advertising as well as all other communication in Spanish. In such settings the assimilative impulses of the national economy have a fainter influence.
Other institutions shouldering the assimilative role appear also to be losing vitality or effect. I have already noted, briefly, some aspects of what many see as the faltering ability of the public schools to convey to non-English-speaking children (in truth, to a lesser extent, also for all children) the language and other educational attainments required for social success. Even where the schools are effective, it is well known that curricula have in recent years been drained of their attention to American and Western history and culture. A subtle but farreaching shift in values over many decades seems to have carried the majority culture into a zone of self-doubt, leading to the operating conclusion that the new and desirable appreciation in the United States of non-Western cultural backgrounds rules out any publicly-sponsored cultural reaffirmation of the nation's originating inheritance as derived chiefly from Western Europe and in the English language.
And, on the side of recent and incoming immigrants, some have detected a shift in attitudes affecting the process of "becoming American." Assimilation, of course, has always been a process of losing as well as gaining, and thus painful to individuals and resisted by immigrant-group leadership. Is there a trend toward a more widespread or vigorous resistance to assimilation? John Garcia reports that Mexican immigrants naturalize at a rate considerably lower than that of other immigrants, and attributes this to the absence of feelings of identity as Americans. Surveys of Hispanic business leaders in the United States have found that the majority feel themselves to be equally Hispanic and American. A national poll in 1984 found that "most Hispanics think of themselves as Hispanics first, and Americans second" and that the trend was increasing.14
Memories of the American past have a reassuring quality, buoying our hopes with the reminder that these questions of national cohesion, assimilative capacity and the benefits and limits of separateness are not new concerns. I have chosen to stress the new conditions which call into question any complacency - an economy shifting out of mass-production manufacturing into knowledge-intensive services and goods production, with different requirements of the labor force, the greatly reduced capacity of our cities to provide millions of immigrants economic entry points to the next convoy of economic advance, as they had through most of the last century; the apparent faltering of other elements of the assimilation process, such as public schools, the self-confidence of the host culture, the receptivity of current immigrants to undergoing the beneficial discomforts of assimilation.
The most striking new feature of our circumstances is, of course, the physical proximity across a 2,000-mile land border of Mexico, the state at the northern tier of a Latin America experiencing rapid population growth within economies in varying degrees of difficulty. In the more than three centuries of immigration which built the current United States there has never been such a circumstance where immigrants in mass numbers arrived from a society to which they could continually return for cultural reinforcement by the mere turn of a dial or by the briefest land journey.
And we should not conclude even so brief a survey of the workings of assimilation in today's United States without looking beyond immigrant populations to the trapped underclass composed of American citizens, so many of them blacks whose efforts to mount the ladder of social mobility go back many generations and whose condition should humble those who still believe that ieither our economy or our government's remedial efforts constitute singly or ';together assimilative mechanisms of reassuring power.
Today's America gives many and sharply conflicting messages to any analyst of its economic and social direction. Mr. Reagan's slogan, "It's morning in America!," is a formulation available to uncompromising optimists; but one knows that he has left out much in this view from the white affluent top-the urban underclass, teenagers having or begetting and abandoning children, the dependencies on chemical substances or welfare, the ghettos that do not yield to the strategies of Democrats or Republicans. Uncontrolled immigration makes its own, and mostly a problem-enlarging contribution to these strains upon the social fabric.
In a meeting in San Diego in the Spring of 1986, which included public officials, academics, knowledgeable professionals, and that scholar/journalist, the late Theodore White, a vivid pair of scenarios emerged from discussion of the future of that most immigration-impacted state, California. One possible California, in the year 2000 or 2020, was of a society of forty to fifty million people. Apart from some crowding in Yosemite, it was a happy checkerboard of ethnic enclaves offering the best of the world's cuisine, a composite of the Pacific basin where thousands of rural peasants moved northward across the Mexican border each day to take up the menial chores shunned by successive preceding groups. Faith in this scenario required a suspension of disbelief for those who know immigration trends and reflected upon the economic and social realities.
The other, a far different scenario, was built upon economist Philip Martin's projections:
If the immigration status quo persists, the U.S. will develop a more unequal society with troublesome separations. . . . the California work force will be mostly immigrants or their descendants by 2010. These working immigrants, mostly nonwhite, will be supporting mostly white pensioners with their payroll contributions. Is American society resilient enough to handle the resulting tensions?15
Other elaborations came forward-a two-tiered society was in prospect, the one young, overwhelmingly Hispanic or black and low-income, the other large older whites and Asians, affluent, with a woefully small intermixing of these categories. It is a segmented society: the rich who work in high-technology enterprise or are retired to Palm Springs or coastal watering places, move uneasily among a mass population with low educational attainments and income levels; those who own businesses communicate to the work force through foremen who translate from English.
If we evade this second scenario, in California and the Southwest and Florida, in New York and Detroit and Chicago and Denver, and in many other places, it will not be because immigration ceased of its own accord to drive us in this direction. This society has admirable capacities, in its private and public realms, to promote that degree of economic and social assimilation required to bind this heterogeneous society into a working whole. But only an audacious and unthinking hubris would fail to recognize the sobering and apparently intensifying defects of our mechanisms of social integration, and persist in our current policy of permitting uncontrolled immigration. There is much that we do not know, but the immigration realities of tomorrow we do know much about. The Mexican population of over eighty-one million will double in twenty-seven years, the rates of population growth in most of Central America are even higher, and the pressures upon our southern borders grow yearly, apprehensions at Texas and California borders increasing 50 percent between 1985 and 1986. The only major uncertainties in this future are not demographic, but the likelihood, indeed one would now be tempted to say the timing, of the collapse of the social order in Mexico or more intense civil disturbance in societies to her south, loosening floods of refugees whose impact we have not included in even the most pessimistic of our assessments.
And who would be the chief victims and bearers of the social costs of a world without immigration reform? They would not, at least in the short run, be the affluent, who enjoy slight reductions in the cost of motel rooms, tomatoes and restaurant meals, due to a subsidy in the form of alien labor. The poor and the Hispanic American (see Richard Estrada) have the most to lose from uncontrolled immigration, was the blunt summary of Hispanic writer Richard Rodriguez.16
The policy recommendations that flow from this analysis begin with the reiteration of one of the most consensual, soundly researched and widely debated policy reforms of recent times, that the U.S. government take effective steps to curb and as nearly as possible to end illegal immigration into this society. The first steps toward that end lie in full and fair enforcement of the Simpson-Rodino immigration reform act of 1986. Second, when we turn to the other half of the immigration reform assignment, also well studied by the Hesburgh Commission and in the legislative process leading up to the 1984 version of the SimpsonMazzoli bill, the United States should move its legal immigration away from near complete reliance upon the principle of family reunification. An attractive alternative principle, which should weigh more heavily in our own immigration law, is a guiding element in Canadian immigration policy to our north, the labor force needs of the national economy. Immigration decisions should not be made in the future as they have been in the past, by employers who sustain illegal immigration and by individuals, whether citizen or alien, who claim the benefits of family reunification. We should shift the principles of selection toward a nationally determined need for augmentation of our inventory of skills, as well as toward the ends of a national policy on population size, a vital but now lacking instrument for securing the national welfare.
NOTES
1. Philip L. Martin, Illegal Immigration and the Colonization of the American Labor Market (CIS Paper l, 1986), pp. 12-23.
2. For citations to the literature on economic impacts, see Otis L. Graham, Jr., "Uses and Misuses of History in the Debate Over Immigration Reform," The Public Historian, 8 (Spring 1986), esp. pp. 46-48, and footnote #7.
3. Leon Bouvier, The Impact of Immigration on U.S. Population Size (Population Reference Bureau, 1981); Leon F. Bouvier and Philip L. Martin, "Population Change and California's Future" (Population Reference Bureau, 1985); Philip Martin, "Illegal Immigration;" Thomas Muller et. al. The Fourth Wave: California's New Immigrants (WDC: The Urban Institute Press, 1984).
4. Bouvier, The Impact of Immigration, p. 4.
5. Bouvier and Martin, "Population Change."
6. Martin, Illegal Immigration, p. 45.
7. Muller et. al., The Fourth Wave, p. 187.
8. National Commission for Employment Policy, "Hispanics and Jobs," 1982, p. 10.
9. Michael S. Teitelbaum, Latin Migration North: The Problem for U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1985), p. 34.
10. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1954), was followed by his reflections in "Another Look at Nativism," Catholic Historical Review, 44 (July 1958), pp. 147-158.
11. Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert, American Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
12. William Julius Wilson, "The Urban Underclass in Advanced Industrial Society," in The New Urban Reality (WDC: Brookings Institution, 1986); Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Black and White Immigrants Since 1880 (University of California Press, 1980).
13. John D. Kasarda, "Urban Change and Minority Opportunities," in The New Urban Reality (WDC: Brookings Institution, 1985).
14. John A. Garcia, "Political Integration of Mexican Immigrants: Exploration into the Naturalization Process," International Migration Review 15, (Winter 1981), p. 6; Yankelovich, Skelly and White (Spanish USA, 1984) p. 9. See also Gerda Bikales and Gary Imhoff, "A Kind of Discordant Harmony: Issues in Assimilation," (U.S. English, 1985).
15. Martin, Illegal Immigration, p. 45.
16. Richard Rodriguez, "Hispanics in Changing, Change America," Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1986