Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration

By Daniel Necas, Immigration History Research Center

Reading some of the latest journalistic accounts of the various sides of the immigration issue, one would almost begin to feel that immigration is the single most important question in current U.S. developments. Immigration is being portrayed as the number one issue that Republicans entering the presidential race have recently had to deal with

The New York Times reported last week on several GOP presidential hopefuls cruising the state of Iowa in search of hints for their campaigns. Senator Sam Brownback seems to have been baffled (but was he, really?) by the insistence on immigration-related questions by people he met in Iowa. At the end of a meeting spent mostly answering questions related to immigration he asked the audience: “Any other topics that people want to talk about?” And yet another immigration-related question was dispatched. Similarly, John McCain as reported by the Washington Post, or Mitt Romney as reported by IowaPolitics.

Meanwhile, on the state and local levels, authorities are occasionally trying to address some of the immigration-related issues they are being pressured about by their constituents, but, ultimately no major immigration legislation can by-pass the federal level as it is likely to touch on constitutional rights. Recent examples from Texas and Missouri can serve well to demonstrate this trend.

What everyone appears to agree on is that the immigration law is “broken” and a major, comprehensive overhaul is necessary. At the same time, the issue is understood to be so complicated that results cannot be expected any time soon and any serious effort to make progress stalls before it even gets off the ground.

What must be luring for politicians about the widely perceived immigration crisis is that it is difficult to determine exactly who is responsible for it. Attitudes toward immigrants migrate easily across party lines, a portion of the blame can always be relegated to the immigrants themselves, and since they come from the outside of the nation USA, the “us” and “them” mentality so useful for nation unity building can set in. Immigration has frequently been a problem in the past and will be in the future as long as the United States is a fairly prosperous democracy and as freedom and resources available in parts of the globe are scarce. So, how to satisfy large numbers of voters who want the government to be tough on “illegal” immigrants and at the same time not lose the equally as important if not more lucrative favor of business owners, who in some sectors of the economy could not simply maintain their profits without the labor of immigrants? And frankly, how many of those angry, patriotic Americans would be happy to pay higher prices for their produce, hotel accommodations and other products and services if the cheap labor currently extracted from immigrants would have to be replaced by U.S. citizens or “legal” immigrants in better-paying jobs with benefits that they would inevitably (and only rightfully so) demand? At least some politicians have found a partial solution – to loudly support “border security” (achievements in this direction can be easily documented by how much was spent on law enforcement personnel, unmanned surveillance blimps and other fancy devices, building a fence, etc.) with the awareness that migrant labor will continue to flow across the border anyway (while, sadly, more will pay with injuries or even their lives than before).

However, some sources suggest (see also research by Professor Douglas Massey of Princeton University) that with the border posing such difficulty for crossing, migrants from Mexico are more likely to permanently establish their lives north of the border rather than migrate seasonally back and forth as demand for their labor fluctuates. (A lesson one would hope the supporters of fortified borders would learn from the past is that an iron curtain on a country’s border can be made effectively tight only by totalitarian regimes – and perhaps they have but chosen not to tell us about that yet.)

For the current administration and its potential successors from the same party, the “growing immigration debate” could be a welcome gift. (Or the result of a well-designed campaign by smart political strategists?) Instead of being questioned on the mishandled war in Iraq, the slow economy, the continuing and deepening social and racial divide, corporate fraud, the degradation of the environment, the record deficits, the chaotic and erratic health insurance system, the depletion of the social security funds, the quiet, but significant limiting of civil liberties, etc (1). – all items that the current administration can be held substantially responsible for over the past 6 years – they can comfortably swim in the ever murky waters of immigration while repeating the notorious: “Yes, it is broken, we need a reform ….”

As always, to make sense of the information supplied by the government and the media, one needs a healthy distance from it all. As much as one might be personally interested in immigration (myself being a case in point), it may be useful not to let anyone use the escalating immigration debate as a smoke screen intended to blur from view the other crucial issues whose handling in the immediate past needs to be accounted for, and whose handling in the future is to be expected from the new political leadership.

Daniel Necas, Immigration History Research Center

(1) Most of the failures of the past 6 years do not need to be specified here, to illustrate at least the deepening social and racial divide, one can look at the declining incomes of average workers, especially those classified as African American or Latino in 2000-2005, despite growing productivity, as reported by the BBC in 2006.

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Posted by Dan Ott at 03:27 PM | Permalink

By Andy Urban, PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty

So much for a bit of a vacation. In recent months, to use an apt cliché, trouble seems to follow President George W. Bush wherever he goes. His weeklong visit to various Central and Southern American countries that ended on March 14, was not a trip marked by Guatemalans, Mexicans, and so on, greeting him with open arms. To begin with, Bush’s entire relationship to this region has been troubled by an unfulfilled promise – that his presidency would pay greater attention to Central and Southern American countries than his predecessors in the Clinton administration. After September 11, this promise went out the window. In addition, Bush’s trip to the region was shadowed by a strategically timed jaunt undertaken by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Chavez took the opportunity to bash Bush as it were, whenever the opportunity presented itself. Although I am personally no fan of Chavez’s recent acts of censorship over the Venezuelan media, it is nonetheless enjoyable to see him dog the President and ruin the staged visits he was making. Add to all of this the protests that accompanied Bush’s visit – some of which ended in violence and perhaps excessive police force against demonstrators (as the very last paragraph of this LA Times article describes [link]), and you can see why the man often chooses to squirrel himself away in Texas.

Not surprisingly, everywhere Bush went immigration was raised as a key topic – although again, maybe not the topic Bush himself wanted to talk about. In Guatemala, President Óscar Berger confronted Bush directly about a raid on a Massachusetts sweatshop that resulted in upwards of 300 undocumented immigrants being captured and processed for deportation. As an article in Business Week notes, “A number of [the undocumented immigrants] sent to Texas for deportation were Guatemalan women, many of whose children were stranded at day-care centers.” [link] Bush’s response to Berger was, that, “I’m sure they don’t want to be sent home, but nevertheless, we enforce laws.” So much for family values.

Alfredo Corchado, writing for the Dallas Morning News, begins his article on Bush’s visit to Mexico and his meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon with a clever pun about how Bush sought to “mend fences with weary Mexicans.” [link] It is difficult to mend fences when the proposal to build a 700-mile fence still angers and antagonizes Mexicans to no end. Although funding for the project has not been approved, the fence remains on the table. Calderon expressed doubt that even a fence would do anything to stop immigration, given the close links between the two countries, and also wondered publicly whether Bush and Congress would successfully pass any type of immigration reform before he was out of office. At least he treated Bush to a tour of some ancient ruins.

As all of the above articles note, one of the consistent themes in Bush’s visits was his promotion of free trade, and a policy that he believes will alleviate poverty and therefore the need for Central and Southern Americans to emigrate. To his hosts, more concerned with other issues, this must have sounded a bit like a prerecorded message, and not a live interaction.

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Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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Posted by Dan Ott at 12:03 PM | Permalink

By Elizabeth Boyle, Associate Professor of Sociology & Law, IHRC affiliate

When my Grandfather Cianciaruso was a young man, he worked as a shoe repairman in Iowa, and every month he sent most of the money he earned back to his mother in Italy. At that time, it was common for migrants to send money back to family members (these payments are called "remittances"). And remittances are still exceedingly common among new migrants today. The more things stay the same, the more things change, however. Today, remittances are viewed as a possible solution to global inequality and poverty. From where does this view come, and how realistic is it?

The international financial system, including the World Bank, is the source of this new vision of remittances. International investors believe they can harness remittances to provide security for loans to poor countries (World Bank, 50). Better security means lower interest rates for borrowing countries and more steady interest payments for lenders/investors. Remittances may also provide basic services that governments are unable to afford in poor countries. What seems to get lost in these discussions is that migrants’ financial support of their families is not a new source of income. The pie can be cut into new shapes and slices, but in the end the size of the pie does not increase (unless migration increases, a point I will return to below).

The overly optimistic message about remittances has been getting lots of attention recently, as newspapers have been filled with remittance success stories. The New York Times, using Inter-American Development Bank statistics, reported that remittances are the "largest and most direct poverty reduction program" in Latin America, greatly exceeding the amount of foreign aid doled out by the United States to countries in that region. Celia Dugger reported in another Times article that remittances were a factor in reducing poverty in Nepal from 42 percent of the population to only (?) 31 percent. Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel covered the story of Guatemala President Oscar Berger Perdamo's visit to Jupiter, Florida. During a meeting with Guatemalan expatriates, the President exclaimed, "Thanks for those blessed remittances. They have allowed your families to rise from poverty." There is no doubt that remittances are important. For families that receive them, they can even make the difference between life and death.

But can remittances solve the problem of poverty globally? Despite the hype, the answer is no. First, consider that while Grandpa Cianciaruso regularly sent money to Italy, neither I nor any of his other grandchildren picked up that burden. Remittances are common for first-generation immigrants, but become very rare by the third generation. Unless they are continuous and replenished, remittances will only be beneficial to the poor in the short term. Consider that remittances have been around for a long time—and so has global poverty.

The second reason that remittances cannot solve global inequality is that they tend to track existing wealth patterns rather than change them. To better understand the flow of remittances, the World Bank divided countries into four groups based on their GDP in 2005—high-income, upper-middle income, lower-middle income, and low-income (World Bank, 91). The organization found that the remittances going to individuals in the high-income group of countries ($125.3 billion) dwarfed the remittances going to individuals in all of the other groups combined ($24.1 billion) (World Bank, 91). The top five national recipients of remittances in 2004 were India, China, Mexico, France, and the Philippines—not the poorest countries in the world by a long shot. When remittances are measured as a percentage of GDP rather than in raw numbers, more poor countries are among the top recipients (such as Haiti). Nevertheless, the fact remains that most migrants' money goes to the wealthiest countries. The World Bank’s own report on remittances to Latin America concludes that remittances are “neither ‘manna from heaven’ nor a substitute for sound development policies” (xii).

Yet another problem is the unhealthy incentives that chasing remittances place on national governments in poorer countries. The lure of remittances from former residents prompts countries to encourage emigration. The Stabroek News reports that the “most common Caribbean export is not sugar, rice, coffee, bananas, bauxite, but its people.” In the Nepali case “success story” above, remittances came at a high price. Remittances quadrupled from 1996 to 2004, but by the end of that period, 1 out of every 11 adult Nepali men was working abroad. The outward flow of a country's most talented citizens will hurt that country in the long run. Encouraging emigration to enhance remittances also tends to undermine cooperation between countries, such as the U.S. and Mexico, to limit undocumented migration. Thus, chasing remittances leads to some troubling policy outcomes. It may be helpful in the short term, but it takes a serious toll in the long term.

Sending money to less fortunate loved-ones is a wonderful, generous act. It illustrates what many of us see every day—that migrants have a strong work ethic and are deeply devoted to their families. Remittances offer desperately-needed relief and special opportunities to many individuals in poor countries. Despite their benefits, however, remittances are not a cure for global poverty. They did not lead to greater economic equality a century ago; they will not do so today. And the cost of formally encouraging remittances has a high price tag; a cost that will have to be paid by poor countries eventually.

Elizabeth Heger Boyle
Associate Professor of Sociology & Law
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Posted by Dan Ott at 01:02 PM | Permalink