Examining the right wing’s newfound concern for America ’s working class.
By Ezra Klein
Monday May 1, 2006
It was the sort of event that had an “I was there” quality to it. No guarantees, of course, but April’s immigration rally crackled with that sense of possibility, of power. You didn’t want to speak it aloud for fear that the utterance would rob the moment of its unexpected charge, but when the mall filled with bodies, when the children were hoisted upon their parents shoulders, when the countless American flags were whipped through the air, when the chants of “U-S-A” thundered across the grass, you couldn’t help it, the sentiment tangibly rippled throughout the crowd: This is the beginning. 500,000 in Los Angeles. 500,000 in Dallas Hundreds of thousands more, all across the nation. Si se puede! Si se puede!
For Republicans, this is the nightmare scenario: a nationwide political awakening and Democratic aligning of the American electorate’s slumbering giant, Hispanics. And so, as during other periods when the right becomes anxious, out has come their most potent rhetorical weapon, their tactic of last resort: progressivism. After eight years of Clinton, it emerged in Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” speeches, which advocated liberalism with prayer books. When they feared declining support for the Iraq War, out came the paeans of humanitarian intervention: think of the women, think of the children, think of the brutality! Think of the anathema to the traditionally isolationist Republican Party. And now, with today’s boycott and work stoppage signaling that the political activation of the immigrant community wasn’t a one-off phenomenon, Republicans have returned to economic populism’s comforting rhetorical embrace.
So, herewith a rapid point-by-point refutation of the right wing’s newfound concern for America’s working class.
The main one, pushed by Harvard economist George Borjas and explicated in a National Review column last week, argues that immigration pushes down the wages of low-skilled workers – which is to say high school dropouts – by 5-8 percent. In the same piece, Borjas admits that immigration creates a net gain for society, with cheaper goods outweighing depressed wages, though not by terribly much. But let’s examine his central claim a bit more.
The actual data being used here, as Brad DeLong, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, points out, is “fuzzy” stuff (George W. Bush would probably dismiss Borjas’s whole argument as “fuzzy math”). It could, at the upper reaches, suggest an eight percent drop for low-skilled workers, but there’s a 1/6 chance that it actually shows a net gain for low-skilled workers. Huh.
Indeed, other economists, like Berkeley’s David Card, have been unable to find negative correlations between immigrants and wage levels. If this seems to violate your basic sense of supply-and-demand (more workers=lower wages), remember that immigrants create markets of their own, markets that don’t remain low-wage forever: Card found that the children of immigrants have little trouble assimilating. “Second generation sons and daughters,” he wrote, “have higher education and wages than the children of natives. Even children of the least-educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives.”
Some of this may be because immigrants often cluster in industries that native-workers appear to have little interest in entering, like agriculture. Hence the common rejoinder that immigrants take jobs that natives don’t want. The emerging counter-wisdom, heard from some on the left (like Paul Krugman) as well as many on the right, is that there is no work Americans won’t do, it’s just that immigrants will labor in unpleasant sectors for so cheap that natives don’t even attempt to compete. Were the supply of cheap labor cut off, wages in these industries would rise and natives would enter.
The only problem is, were wages to rise, some of these sectors would cease to exist. America out competes the Mexican agricultural industry because our massive agricultural subsidies, when combined with cheap migrant labor and better technology, offer us competitive advantages. But as Eduardo Porter wrote in The New York Times, “in California’s strawberry patches, illegal immigrants are not competing against native workers; they are competing against pickers in Michoacán, Mexico. If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the border, the strawberries would.” Put shortly, either the immigrants can move here or the agricultural industry would move there—sadly, significantly increasing wages isn’t really one of the options.
So the impact of low-wage workers is, at worst, slightly negative, while the economy gains a bit as a whole. Quite the ringing condemnation. But so long as the right is giving a rare moment of concentration to the woes of the working class, what about this: the epicenter of immigration is, undoubtedly, California. And, in the Golden State, where immigration shot up over the last thirty years, wages for drop-outs decreased by 17 percent between 1980 and 2004. In Ohio, where immigrants rarely venture, wages for high school drop-outs plummeted 31 percent.
Indeed, the last couple of decades have seen widespread wage deterioration among the working class. The manufacturing sector has been in steady decline, and union power has been ripped apart. The minimum wage hasn’t seen an increase since 1997, and now stands at a 54-year low against the average wage. Inequality has shot up, and social mobility has markedly decreased. As Georgetown economist Harry Holzer put it, “An extra million immigrants a year cannot possibly explain why the vast majority of workers in a labor market of 150 million workers have had stagnant wage growth.” So, immigrants become the convenient scapegoat for a much larger economic problem.
If we want to help low-wage workers, we’ve a host of ways to do so. Better labor laws, like card-check, could facilitate a union resurgence. An increase in the minimum wage would boost incomes instantly. And, for that matter, allowing the million of illegal immigrants into the sunshine of labor laws and wage standards, easily accomplished through legalization, would reduce their competitiveness against native-born workers. But punishing immigrants is, for progressives, the wrong way to go about helping the working poor. For one, they are the working poor. And if immigration may slightly harms native-born workers, it’s a massive boon to immigrants, and their families, and their home countries. Meanwhile, it would be nice if conservatives, so suddenly and exquisitely attuned to the needs of America’s low wage workers, didn’t forget the sensation the next time an increase in the minimum wage comes up for vote.
Ezra Klein is a writing fellow at The American Prospect. You can visit his blog at http://ezraklein.typepad.com.
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Comments
you are just another liberal with a contempt for wokring class folks like myself
— robert - Jul 6, 10:32 PM - #