Andy Yuengert
Pepperdine University

Immigration Rights and the Burdens of Immigration

National Meeting of The Philadelphia Society
What Is An American?
April 30, 2005
Miami, Florida

             I want to make three points about immigration in the US.  One, there is a right to migrate, but it’s not an absolute right.  Two, the economic stakes of immigration policy are relatively small; if there are any real stakes, they are cultural.  Three, illegal immigration, with special emphasis on the qualifier ‘illegal’, as opposed to ‘undocumented’, is the source of our most severe immigration problems, and is our most urgent challenge.

            Let’s begin with rights.  My dissertation research was narrowly focused on the economics of immigration and assimilation.  Several years ago I was asked to write a paper on Catholic Social Teaching and immigration, so for the first time I read what the Popes have said about it.  I was shocked to find in Catholic Social Teaching a very clearly annunciated right to migration.  Now, in my research on this topic I had never come across this term, ‘rights’, in the context of immigration.  Since I am a product of American rights culture, the claim of a right to migrate was bracing; rights language is fighting words in America; rights are employed as rhetorical trumps, or clubs, in the US, and often indicate an unwillingness to compromise.  Appeals to rights are conversation stoppers.

            You don’t have to look far beyond the narrow boundaries of economic research to discover the important rights context of US immigration policy.  The 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which made possible the mass migration of the last forty years, should be understood as part of the Civil Rights movement of the sixties.  It was an international counterpart to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act: just as all citizens were to be treated as equals before the law, regardless of race or creed, all those seeking to become citizens should be treated equally.   Today rights language is as out of control in immigration policy discussions as it is everywhere else in American life: we hear about the right to driver’s licenses for illegals, even the right to citizenship.

            So what do the Popes mean when they assert a right to migrate?  It turns out, they are speaking from a tradition in which rights claims need not be absolute – which is more comfortable with tradeoffs among rights.  In this tradition, the right to migrate is not absolute; the purpose of rights-language is not to end public policy debates and disagreements, but to orient them toward the common good of all persons, natives of the host country and immigrants alike. 

            In this tradition, rights are simply the flip side of justice – to have a right means that someone else has an obligation toward you in justice.  To claim that someone has a right is to claim that something is due him.  The value of looking at rights from the side of justice is that it allows us to talk more naturally about the necessary balance among our obligations – we can’t determine what is just towards one person without considering our obligations towards others and our scarce resources. 

In fact, since rights language is so unhelpful in US discourse, it is more helpful to approach this topic from the direction of justice.  In the US, when we say immigrants have a right to migrate, it becomes difficult to consider abridging those rights in favor of the rights of natives – we speak of clashes of rights.  But translate rights-talk into justice-talk, and we can more naturally speak of the balance between our just regard for immigrants and our just regard for common goods of economy, culture, and security. 

            Our just obligations toward others arise from their dignity as human persons – made in the image of God, placed in the world according to his purposes.  It is in this sense that we are all created equal – we have a common destiny.  Anything that bears on a person’s development as a human person deserves our just respect, even solicitude. 

            When seen from the perspective of justice, the right to migrate is not absolute.  An absolute right, like the right to life, involves access to a human good that has no substitute – when we abridge someone’s right to life, we can’t expect that he will be able to pursue his happiness through other means – without life, there can be no human development.  When we abridge someone’s right to migrate, however, we are foreclosing only one avenue for his development.  Many immigrants can feed their families, and find fulfillment without migrating to America.  Those for whom migration is a crucial avenue of development – refugees and those trapped in grinding poverty in dysfunctional economies – have a stronger claim on us, and a correspondingly stronger right. 

            If our obligations in justice toward migrants puts at risk our common goods as a society – our economic order, our culture, our security – then our just obligations to our own citizens and to ourselves may force us to curtail the right to migrate.  It is important to note that restrictions on migration need not imply a denigration of the migrants themselves, or of the value of migration to them.  The benefits of immigration to immigrants themselves – the economic benefits of higher pay, remittances, and the potential benefits to dysfunctional nations of having an overseas community experienced in the benefits of a free society – should figure into our policy deliberations.  If we self-protectively curtail immigration, it is fitting that we do so with a sense of regret and reluctance.  We should not do so lightly, without consideration for those who stand to benefit from our generosity.  A healthy rights perspective allows us to balance our generous welcome of immigrants against the burdens of immigration.

            It is to these purported burdens of immigration that I now want to turn.  These fall under three headings – economic, cultural, and security concerns.  In the economic realm, both the estimated costs and benefits of immigration are small.  The National Academy of Sciences estimated that immigration increases the incomes of natives by $10 billion dollars a year, which seems like a lot of money until you compare it to an 11 trillion dollar economy.  Immigration is neither destroying nor enriching our economy.  Its continuation does not make us particularly richer, and its curtailment will not ruin our economy, no matter what it does to farming in California, to chicken processing in Arkansas, or to the nanny market in New York.  The numbers are simply too small to matter much. 

            The supposedly alarming estimates of the net cost of immigration to government at all levels are similarly small, although they are trumpeted as if they are outrageously high.  Careful estimates of the net fiscal cost of illegal immigration to the federal budget (not counting the modest benefits of immigration to social security) suggest that illegals impose $5 billion more in costs than they pay in federal taxes.  Again, this seems like a large umber, especially when the ‘b’ in billion is pronounced with explosive emphasis: “Billion!” 

            This number must be put in perspective, however.  Five billion is .2% of the 2.1 trillion dollar federal budget.  It is 1% of the federal deficit.  The federal government loses five times that amount annually – the item in the federal budget for unreconciled transactions was 25 billion in 2003.  Employees at the agriculture department were tallying up $5 billion a year in credit card fraud until recently.  The federal government gives $80 billion dollars a year away in corporate welfare, $30 billion to agriculture.  Farmers in the Central Valley in California alone receive as much as $400 million a year in just in water subsidies.  Waste and fraud in Medicare eat up $20-30 billion annually.  The $5 billion cost of illegals to the federal budget is simply not a terribly large number.  It is not on the face of it too large a cost to bear; there are other, more alarming costs to illegal immigration than its effect on the federal budget.

            The only economic numbers that come close to being significant are the fiscal burden of immigration in California, and the effect of immigration on the wages of uneducated native workers.  The $5 billion fiscal burden on state and local government in California – the Medicaid and education costs - is large when compared to the state’s structural deficit of $6 billion.  But even this can be put in perspective when compared to total state and local spending in the U.S., which total one and a half trillion dollars a year.  Because the fiscal burden of illegals is concentrated in a handful of states, those states where the burden is heaviest have a strong case for federal help.

            Perhaps the most troubling economic effect of immigration is its modest effect on the wages of unskilled workers.  Immigration has decreased unskilled wages by at most 3-4% over the last 30 years.  This is a small effect over three decades, but it falls on the most vulnerable workers – those adversely affected by trade and information technology – so it should be troubling to those who place native interests above immigrant interest.  However, compared to the gains to immigrants from immigration – a quintupling of wages for unskilled workers from Mexico, tens of billions of dollars sent back to poor Latin Americans each year – the losses to unskilled natives are small.  Moreover, a reduction in immigration will not protect native unskilled workers from the effects of free trade and information technology, which have combined to account for much of the stagnation in the wages of the unskilled.

            It should also be noted that the stakes are small in the debate over choosing skilled vs. unskilled immigrants.  Native workers do not benefit as much from skilled worker immigration as they do from unskilled worker immigration, and the gains from unskilled workers are small.  Even the gains to GDP per capita are dubious – Canada, whose skilled-based immigration system is cited as a model for the US, has experienced growth rates in GDP per capita which are significantly smaller than US rates during the last two decades, when the US inflow of unskilled workers was greatest.  After catching up to developed nation living standards in the 70s, no-immigration Japan has suffered stagnation, not increased growth.  Skilled immigration may boost living standards, but does not appear to be the most important factor in economic growth. 

            So the economic stakes in immigration are small.  The cultural stakes, whether they are large or small, generate the strong emotions that overshadow immigration debates.  There seem to be two major cultural concerns:

1 – Are immigrants from non-European cultures in some way less suited for healthy democracy?  Do they lack the habits – habits of compromise, self-reliance, and association - that support US institutions?

2 – Is a multiethnic society necessarily prone to division?  Is immigration a threat to national unity?

            My expertise is the economic aspects of this issue, so I do not have as much confidence addressing the cultural aspects.  Nevertheless, I have a several observations to make on culture.

First, it seems strange to me that we should favor immigrants from white Europe on cultural grounds.  Should we really prefer, say, 100,000 devoutly secular, globalistic French over 100,000 religiously devout Mexicans?  Perhaps we should, but I need to hear more discussion about what habits Europeans can bring to our democracy.  The answer is not obvious.  Perhaps devout Mexicans carry more healthy western traditions into the US than do Germans, Brits, and Italians.

            Second, an important piece of data on assimilation, economic and cultural, is intermarriage rates.  Intermarriage has always been an important route for assimilation, as well as an indicator of assimilation.  High rates of intermarriage played an important role in assimilating the inassimilable Irish, for example.  These rates are generally high for Hispanics (45%), which bodes well for their assimilation. 

            Third, the English language is obviously crucial to assimilation.  A basic knowledge of English should be a requirement of immigration.

            Fourth, this is not the first time a non-white immigration has occurred in the US.  Southern Europeans were not identified as whites in the 1920s – they hailed from alien cultures, alien religions, and were thought to be unsuited for the American experiment.  The fact that we lump Italians, Greeks, and Hungarians together with Germans and English into a category we call ‘white’ is a testimony to the assimilation of the inassimilable.

            To discuss the security stakes in immigration brings to the fore the most troubling aspect of our immigration problems – the large numbers of illegal immigrants who live among us in plain sight.  There is a long tradition in Western political thought that demands that laws be enforced, even to the point of recommending against the passage of laws that either are not enforced or are unenforceable.  Laws which are universally ignored tend to undermine all respect for law, and corrupt the culture. 

            We should either enforce our immigration quotas, or repeal them.  The presence of twelve million or so illegals in the US is corrupting our law enforcement, our politics, our economy, and undermines our ability to protect ourselves from terrorists.  This corruption is the biggest threat from illegal immigration.

            The corruption begins with the consciences of the illegals themselves.  Millions of otherwise good people are living a lie, pretending that they belong here, have rights here, and denying that there is anything wrong with their being here.  Their illegal status undermines their ability to bargain for better wages, to resist abuses by employers, and their incentive to learn English and assimilate into US culture.  Illegals are more likely to remain in immigrant enclaves, seeking safety in numbers.

            Illegal immigration corrupts our politics, since it forces us to pretend that laws we have passed democratically are not worth enforcing.  Illegal immigrants even have their own lobbying groups; some illegals vote, no doubt.  The advocates for illegal immigration insist not only that we tolerate their illegal presence, but that we pretend that the breaking of our laws is a trivial matter, not to be brought up in polite company.  We are even forced to pretend that the biggest problem caused by illegal immigration is the lack of documentation, not illegal status – it is not politically correct to call illegal immigrants ‘illegal immigrants’; we must instead call them ‘undocumented’ workers.  Instead of deporting illegals, we must develop new forms of ID for them – matricular consular IDs instead of passports; driver’s licenses just for them.  We must treat them like they are legal, granting them in-state tuition to our public schools.

            Our lack of desire to enforce immigration laws corrupts the immigration service.  One often hears complaints about how awful the INS used to be, and how it would not be possible to enforce immigration laws without a complete overhaul of the immigration service.  Much of the dysfunction at the INS was due to the impossible task it was given: to pretend to enforce the immigration law while not really enforcing it, to catch and release illegals, to go through the farce of informing illegal immigrants of their right to make bogus asylum claims.  The immigration services are demoralized not because they are incompetent, but because they are not allowed to do their jobs, although they must pretend they are being vigilant.

            The desire to appear to enforce immigration law while not really enforcing it has led to our policy of building fences at the border, but not looking for illegals internally.  This lopsided enforcement has been counterproductive.  Before the era of vigorous border enforcement the typical illegal immigrant stayed in the US for about a year, and did not bring his family.  Illegals cycled into and out of the US.  After the border became more difficult to cross, the average stay in the US lengthened considerably, to about three to four years.  Immigrants who got across the border were less likely to go home, and were more likely to bring their families, to settle down, demand driver’s licenses and schools for their kids. 

            Most importantly, the presence of an underground market for smuggling and fake IDs undermines our security.  Drug smuggling and human smuggling go hand in hand.  Terrorists may use the well-worn illegal entryways, and take advantage of the false ID infrastructure already in place.

            I suspect that addressing the problem of illegal immigrants will solve most of our immigration problems.  To the extent that immigration depresses wages, it is most often the wages of legal immigrants.  The ability to actually enforce that law would reinvigorate the immigration service.  Legal immigrants are more likely to assimilate than illegal immigrants.  If there are fewer illegals, and we are not bashful about searching for them, there will be fewer ways for terrorists to hide in plain sight.

            Of course, one can accept that illegal immigration is a big problem, and suggest different ways of dealing with it.  One might eliminate all illegal immigration by opening the borders and giving out free green cards, or one might actually enforce the laws on the books.  I favor the second option – I am not concerned about the large volume of legal immigration, although I would make some changes in our current legal system, putting more emphasis on English language proficiency, but I believe the illegal immigration burden is much more urgent. 

            Let me end by reiterating my points.  One, there is a right to migrate, but it does not mean open borders; instead, it means that the dignity and welfare of immigrants should figure into our policy debates.  Second, the economic stakes in the immigration debate are relatively small; restrictions on immigration should not turn on the economic costs or benefits.  Third, the most important trend is the large increase in illegal immigration.  Illegal immigration is a systematic flouting of the rule of law; it corrupts our politics, our culture, and threatens to undermine our national security.