CLA: Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration

Donna R. Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center

If last week’s news is any indication, residents of the richest countries on earth believe they are victims of globalization. And they see their best defense as further restrictions on migration.

As in the U.S., arguments for tighter controls over migration around the world mix fears of terrorism with anxiety about rising welfare costs. Residents of rich countries also fear the morality of foreigners, whom they perceive as lacking respect for their restrictive laws. Fears focus on the poorest migrants but no traveler is completely exempt.

In Japan, for example, where 8.1 million foreigners regularly enter the country, mainly as tourists, fears of terrorism have risen along with Japan’s continued support for U.S. military action in the Middle East. The solution? Borrowing from the U.S., Japan will require all adults to be photographed and fingerprinted. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gAdFCReRS6bvBkZwVcg7X3qIWkgQD8SGP0P80

Syria meanwhile has announced it will close its border to persons fleeing from nearby Iraq. More dramatically it will require 1.5 millions Iraqis residing in Syria to return home again. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/world/middleeast/21syria.html
Syria’s decision may please Iraq’s government but it’s unclear whether the Iraqis fleeing their war-torn country will show proper respect for the new law.

Certainly that’s something that worries France. There, a new law requires far more of potential immigrants than merely demonstrating knowledge of the French language or knowledge of French political customs. France proposes DNA testing for visa applicants. Why? The French fear that families sponsoring their relatives lie about their biological connections. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071025.FRANCEDNA25/TPStory/TPInternational/Europe/. In Switzerland, this mingling of biological with security concerns recently found even more direct expression. A right-wing political poster featured an image of three white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag in order to “produce security.�

Even European proposals that acknowledge the region’s growing need for labor reveal high anxiety about migration increases. The “blue card� recently suggested for the EU would be available only to the highly skilled. And it would impose such high income restrictions that few engineers or computer technicians could meet them. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2726912.ece

Is it any surprise, then, that in Ireland, even a sympathetic public official in city struggling to cope with the educational needs of growing numbers of immigrant children concluded “We're just victims of our times, really"? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102302162_2.html

In a world where the rich consider themselves the victims, the poor will find their own alternatives. Perhaps, as one recent report suggests, they will increasingly chase their dreams not to Europe, Japan or the U.S. but to China: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpyn/content/article/2007/10/20/AR2007102000530.html

Posted by Dan Ott at 4:46 PM | Permalink

By Claire Urban

Recently there has been a lot of news coverage of the federal lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of new immigration enforcement policies at the federal, state and local levels.

The most prominent example in the past few weeks is on the federal level, where on October 10, a judge for the Northern District of California ordered the indefinite delay of a new Department of Homeland Security rule. The new rule would have taken the Social Security Administration’s existing practice of sending a letter to employers indicating when an employee’s Social Security number did not match the agency’s files (so-called “no match� letters, intended to be used solely for managing employees’ social security withholdings) and used it to require employers to fire any employee who received such a letter, within 90 days of receipt. The judge in the case stopped the rule from going into effect because Homeland Security did not take the required step of analyzing the consequences of the new rule for small businesses. The judge indicated the effect on small businesses could potentially be quite large, and could also cause irreparable harm to thousands of employees who were legally authorized to work, and received no-match letters due to clerical errors or other administrative problems.

In many ways, this was a simple case for the court. There was a clear cut procedure to follow when implementing a new rule, the Department of Homeland Security failed to follow it, and the Social Security Administration could show that thousands of legally authorized workers would be adversely affected if the new rule went into effect. Most issues surrounding the recent zealous attempts at enforcing immigration law are much murkier. At the heart of this murkiness is the question of to what extent do immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, have the same legal protections as citizens?

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conduct immigration raids, they not need warrants to detain or to enter the home of individuals suspected by the agency of being in this country illegally. They do not need to read these individuals their rights when detaining them. However, as raids by ICE get more aggressive, and more and more state and local law enforcement agencies are teaming up with ICE to enforce federal immigration standards, or passing legislation creating their own immigration enforcement standards, the constitutionality of a separate standard for immigrants is being questioned. Federal lawsuits have been filed against county law enforcement agencies in, among other states, Connecticut, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Virginia, and against the state of Oklahoma. Two separate lawsuits have been filed against ICE, in New York and Texas; the latter by individuals who say ICE violated their rights during the raids at a Swift meatpacking plant.

While most of these suits have just recently been filed, in July of this year the first case of this type was decided by a federal district court. The district court in Pennsylvania struck down the town of Hazleton’s local immigration ordinance as unenforceable under federal law, and in the process noted that the court’s analysis “applies to illegal aliens as well as to legal residents and citizens. The United States Constitution provides due process protections to all persons.�

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Claire Urban is a Law Student at the Boston College Law School

Posted by Dan Ott at 3:26 PM | Permalink

By David Karjanen,

Federal legislation to reform immigration policies often focus on the costs associated with undocumented immigration to the United States. These are not new concerns, there are studies regarding the cost of immigrants going back as far as the 1920s.

The debate about immigration costs are particularly heated in southern border states. In California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, newspaper editorials and pronouncements from civic leaders and elected officials often use phrases like “being overrun,� “under assault,� and “inundated� as if from a tidal wave of unauthorized immigrants—migrants who are seen as sapping the life from these states. Indeed, this is part of the motivation for the lawsuit against the federal government seeking compensation for health care and other costs. For the past few years I have been looking at the labor market dynamics of immigrants and low-wage workers in California, and quite frankly, the cost/benefit debate fundamentally misses the point. Costs associated with immigration should not be seen as costs, per se, but rather subsidies to employers.

The costs/benefits of immigration have been estimated by nearly 30 different studies over the past 10 years, and the results have largely been mixed—some find a net gain from immigration, others a net loss. A recent and widely cited report from the Center on Immigration Studies (CIS: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.html) finds that households headed by undocumented immigrants generate $26.3 billion in costs for the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per undocumented household.

When the public hears this number, it is largely seen in black and white terms: immigrants cost, it is unjust for us to be subsidizing them, kick them out. In policy debates, this also leads to a fairly simple set of assumptions: immigration is a net cost, to control costs we must have urgent policy reform. Unfortunately for those who are quick to use these figures as reason to clamp down on immigration, the estimation of costs and benefits is far more complex.

There are many assumptions people have about undocumented immigrants that are simply incorrect—that these are low-skilled workers—for instance. The reality is that there are many undocumented immigrants in the country who are highly skilled—they overstay work, study, or tourist visas. What I am more concerned with here are the assumptions regarding how to fix the problem of immigration costs. The implicit assumption of most cost/benefit studies is that shutting off the flow of lesser-skilled (less than a high school education) labor, and only allowing H-1b visa holders (highly skilled) immigrants to arrive, would fix, or at least move towards fixing the problem. This assumption follows general economic theory, and is held not only be economists, but the general public. The underlying logic runs as follows: shutting off the flow of low-skilled labor would force employers to hire native-born labor. This, in turn, would raise wages and reduce unemployment (as employers would have to pay more to hire fewer workers). This in turn would reduce the public sector costs of undocumented immigrants, because we would have native born workers earning good wages and not relying on public service programs. The problem, however, is that there is not strong enough evidence that removing immigrants raises the wages dramatically or reduces the public sectors program dependence of native-born workers. Could we really imagine retail sales clerks, cashiers, janitors, and landscapers seeing wages increase from $8.00/hr to $12.00-14.00/hr (the rates at which full time workers become ineligible for most public programs)? Even the most extreme labor market models do not suggest that there would be such a dramatic wage increase. The other problem is that most low-wage workers on public assistance in the United States are native born.

What people fail to recognize is that regardless of nativity or citizenship status, low-wage workers simply earn too little to move off of many forms of public assistance. Hypothetically, even if we could expel the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and then kept any more from arriving, we would still need a growing pool of labor to work in the lowest paid sectors of our economy—retail sales persons, customer service representatives, janitors, waiters/waitresses, food service workers, and so forth. These are just some of the occupations with the greatest job growth projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the next 10-15 years, yet none of them pay adequate wages to move people off of public assistance, even when working full time.

Using 2002 data, I worked on a study that found that low-wage workers—those households earning less the minimum wage are eligible for up to $23,417 per year in public assistance through programs like food stamps, supplemental insurance, and section 8 housing, while paying $3,454 in total state and federal taxes.(http://www.onlinecpi.org/article.php?list=type&type=62 ) This leaves a potential gap of approximately $20,000 per minimum wage household. This is an amount far greater than the estimated $2,700.00 per household that undocumented immigrants are estimated to cost in public assistance. Fortunately, very few workers actually earn the minimum wage in the United States, and those that do are not taking full advantage of the public services available to them. If we move higher up the wage scale, however, the rates of public service utilization and the costs remain very high for low-wage workers.

Using a similar methodology, the Institute on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley found that in California, two million working families received public assistance in 2002. The price tag for this assistance was $10 billion per year, with most support going to families with full-time workers who earned near the minimum wage. (http://repositories.cdlib.org/ile/scl2004/01) This is a cost of approximately $2000.00 per working family—a significant subsidy on average per household, but far less than the amount that the working poor qualify for. Significantly, the majority of households have a high-school degree or higher and working full time—that is to say, they are not dependent on public assistance because of less than a high school education or failure to work, but rather because of the low wages and benefits available through employment. What this means is that the other side of the coin on the immigration costs/benefits debate is the costs of the native-born working poor. In fact, the costs to subsidize native-born working poor are higher than undocumented immigrants who are working and poor.

As the CIS study notes, on average, the costs that illegal households impose on federal coffers are less than that of other households (the reason they are a net cost is because their tax payments are only one-fourth that of other households). However, is this cost differential because the immigrants are undocumented, or because they are employed in low-wage occupations that do not pay enough to move beyond public assistance? Even CIS acknowledges that if undocumented immigrants were given amnesty and began to pay taxes and use services like households headed by legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual net fiscal deficit would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for total net cost of $29 billion. What this figure represents, assuming their model is accurate, is the total subsidy to low-wage households would increase because of their greater access to public sector programs. In other words, it is far cheaper to keep workers undocumented! What this study and other fail to recognize is that we already subsidize low-wage households by billions of dollars each year who are citizens—welfare reform has not eliminated the need for health care, shelter, subsidized meals and other vital programs.

So then are undocumented immigrants really such a great burden? Looking at Current Population Survey data for 2003, if we compare immigrant men to native born men, they tend to have higher rates of labor force participation, earn less, and use far less in public services. This represents a boon to employers—a cheaper labor force, one with a lower rate of unemployment than native-born workers, and they use less in public services than native born workers. The total costs for taxpayers—assuming it is roughly $2,700 per household—is really a subsidy to the employer to the extent that these are households which are working, but don’t earn enough to be disqualified for public assistance programs. We could add to this the massive subsidy to the economy that lower labor costs provide in keeping inflation down, and the additional economic activity generated by immigrants.

What the public should be concerned with is not that they are footing the bill for undocumented immigrants, but for low-wage work, that is, for employers. Hiring native-born workers would not fix the problem—the costs would still largely be there because low-wage workers do not earn enough to move beyond the need for public assistance regardless of citizenship. But as rates of employer provided health insurance continue to fall, wages for less than high-school educated workers are stagnant and falling, yet we have massive growth in the low-wage sector of the economy, it is time to take a hard look at the direction of the US economy overall—immigrants have just become a convenient scapegoat, and a smokescreen for the problem—an economy that isn’t working well for the working poor.
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David Karjanen is a Professor at the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota

Posted by Dan Ott at 4:20 PM | Permalink

By Louis Mendoza, Department of Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota

In the 13 weeks I have been on the road thus far I have had some profoundly inspiring encounters with people, nature, and my own potential and limitations even as I have also been confronted with Jim Crow experiences in renting motel rooms and campsites.

I have indeed been blessed to meet people from all walks of life—farm workers in the fields of Northern California, organizers in Eugene Oregon, Nampa and Boise, Idaho, and Worthington, Minnesota. I have spoken with students, retirees, cabdrivers, restaurant workers, entrepreneurs in small towns of the Midwest and Northeast, a state trooper in Wyoming who gave me a ride when my bike broke down. Included in this group are people who gave me rides when I needed help, including two young carefree hippies and a Mormon family returning to Idaho from a family reunion in California. Each of them has taught me something as we talked about the state of the country—of the prevailing dis-ease that lingers in our national body. I spoke with a Mexican immigrant worker in Leimington, Ontario who compared his experience as an undocumented worker in the US South where he felt he had to constantly be on the watch for immigrant authorities and hostile locals to being a welcomed participant in a government sponsored immigrant worker program in Canada.

What I have learned through their profound example is something I already knew yet had not fully integrated with experience, and that is that we are in this together. That is, that our destinies are intertwined. Despite the dramatic media characterizations of an ongoing cultural, social, and political battle, I believe that on the ground level most people aren’t invested in maintaining this war, nor do they live their lives in fear of change. This is not to say that fear and ignorance don’t exist and don’t drive the creation of absurd policies, such as the local ordinances that would outlaw the hiring or renting property to undocumented immigrants. Nor am I blind to the fact that the people I meet may be a self-selecting population of more tolerant or progressive folks because anti-Latino hate mongers don’t go out of their way to speak with me, but too much experiential, anecdotal, and data based evidence exists to deny the facts that change is indeed occurring.

From the many Latinos I met who are active agents in change, I heard about victories, about successes in building allies across terrains of struggle, about the emergence of a critical mass of activists struggling to counter conservative politicians. From many small town residents I’ve seen and heard about how the industriousness and entrepreneurial spirit of new immigrants has saved the local economy. In a strange irony, it is the new immigrants who have made it possible for white elders of these communities to maintain their way of life even as the local culture is undergoing a profound cultural shift.

My journey is only half complete, and I cannot assume as I head to through the south that what has been true of the Northwest, Midwest, and Northeast will hold true in the new geography of Latino immigration, but I believe that the immigrants of today are extraordinarily aware of their human rights and are prepared to defend and advocate on behalf of their community as needed even as they maintain a strong sense of their continental American identity.

I invite you to join me on this adventure by following updates of my ride that I am maintaining on a blog: http://journeyacrossouramerica.blogspot.com/. Here you can read more detail about my encounters and challenges.

Posted by Dan Ott at 3:25 PM | Permalink

By Louis Mendoza, Department of Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota

It is clear from the mainstream media’s coverage on immigration that this topic strikes a chord with people from all walks of life, all political perspectives, all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In an editorial I wrote for La Prensa de Minnesota last year immediately following the huge pro-immigrant marches held around the country, I noted with dismay that Latinos are once again having to prove that we belong here. Conspicuously absent in debates on immigration by the pundits, the politicians and the populous is an understanding of historical relationship of Latinos to this land and the causes of contemporary immigration that are a direct consequence of our failed foreign policy.

Part of this denial of our national heritage is the denial of the history of colonialism that this country was built upon: first in decimating and displacing the indigenous peoples of the continent and secondly in denying that the Latino presence in North American precedes the establishment of the U.S.; we have been here for centuries shaping, building, and contributing in myriad ways to this country. Debates have reached such fervor now that a bedrock principle of the US, birthright citizenship, is in danger of being discarded.

Much of the hysteria around unsuccessful immigration reform revolved around enforcement, resistance to what is being labeled as amnesty, and making sure that strong provisions are in place to ensure that Latinos culturally integrate into society as quickly as possible. If you listened only to the media and politicians you would think that all recent Latino immigrants do is drain the social service and educational systems even as they go out of their way to “steal� jobs and live in isolation from the mainstream.

Most of these claims are overblown and don’t withstand scrutiny. I believe we have to search out ways to discover the truth about this nation, about our past as well as our future. The U.S. is not made up of a single culture, language, or point of view. Not now. Not ever. For that reason, I decided to use my research sabbatical to travel the country by bicycle to talk to people about their perspective on how immigration from yesteryear and today has made us who we are.

On July 1st I departed from Santa Cruz, California to begin an 8,500 mile journey that will take me across 35 states and into Canada and Mexico. I write this from Richmond, Virginia, about halfway through my trip. Along the way, I have been speaking with people from all walks of life (young and old, rural and urban, minority-non-minority, and across economic class, immigrant and non-immigrant) about their views on the emergence of Latinos as the nation’s largest ethnic minority and the impact this is having on the United States’ national identity and culture.

The inspiration for my trip was an 1891 essay by Cuban patriot and poet-journalist José Martí. In this essay titled “Our America,� he called for a distinctively American culture, one that embraces rather than denies, the dynamic and organic relationship between place, language, and experience that shapes the American continent. It is this America that I have been re-discovering and affirming in my encounters with people—even as I know that I am bound to meet people who would like nothing more than for all of us to “go back where we came from.� For me, this would be Texas.

(Watch for the second installment of this blog - it will be posted in a few days)

Posted by Dan Ott at 12:22 AM | Permalink