LONDON – It’s the working class who bear most of the cost of absorbing new immigrants, whether it be in France, the U.S. or Malaysia, but it is the middle class who dominate the debate, forging an alliance in its favor across the political spectrum- liberals who want to be multicultural, and conservatives, as Ronald Reagan used to, who argue for the free market and open borders.
Two new academic reports challenge the conventional wisdom that immigration is an unalloyed good for the economies of developed societies. George Borjas, a Harvard professor of economics, has published a study for the Center of Immigration Studies in which he argues that when immigration increases the supply of workers the earnings of native-born workers fall significantly. A parallel study by two professors of economics at Colombia, Donald Davis and David Weinstein, shows that the net loss for native-born Americans is $70 billion each year and increases as the size of the immigrant population grows.
All this needs to be put on the front burner of the political agenda if we are to have an honest debate about immigration. In nearly every host country immigration has become a major social and economic issue. The native working class must be fairly represented in this debate.
While the educated and much traveled often revel in the surface manifestations of new music, cuisines, religious practices and lifestyles it is the poorer members of the native working-class who have to live and work alongside immigrants, without anyone even asking them if this was the way they would chose their country to change.
Looking back over the last couple of decades what is astonishing is not so much the rise of extremist anti-immigrant parties, the growth of anti-immigrant violence and intolerant police behavior, but that a majority of immigrants have found a reasonable niche in the host society and that most of the native working class has come to terms with much of immigrant life. It accepts them in the workplace and in the unions and tolerates them most of the time in its pubs and sporting events- which is more than most of the middle class has ever contributed to racial harmony.
But this is a precarious achievement, as the growing violence against immigrants and the violent assertiveness of some immigrant groups attests. Immigration today has become too massive, despite the many controls. The growth of an even larger immigrant population is inevitable if the natives don’t reproduce sufficiently and their older members retire too early. Tensions are going to rise much further.
Part of the answer to this, paradoxically, is to liberalize the immigration market- to take down all the artificial barriers of government controls. The Cato Institute argues that then immigration will become a circular process instead of immigrants, once in, clinging like limpets to the rocks of the host country, for fear of ejection. The U.S. has conducted what is in fact a pilot project on liberalization with Puerto Rican immigration, which has always been unrestricted. Even in the 1980s nearly half stayed on the mainland only for a brief two years. In the ’90s the traffic ceased of its own accord, as Puerto Rico developed. The truth is that migrant workers, if given a choice, usually prefer to get home once they have achieved the target they have set for themselves and in today’s age of cheap air travel this becomes a practical proposition. Immigrants who cause the kind of problems that now rattle receiving society often act like they do in a desperate attempt to cling onto what they think is the way of doing things back home or simply because they feel trapped. Moreover, liberalization would destroy the evils of the black market.
Secondly, every country needs to do what the French government has recently decided. Turning its back on early remedies for high unemployment- the 35 hour week and pensioning off workers earlier- it now wants to encourage those native workers (which includes second generation immigrants already settled inside France) to work in domestic services, including child care, cleaning, gardening and help for the elderly- the so called McJobs that new immigrants usually fill because they are unappealing to unemployed residents. France appears ready to consider income support and additional welfare payments to make these jobs attractive.
If governments could add to that, pushing back the retirement age and encouraging the birth rate with suitable incentives as is being done here in Sweden, there really is no need to contemplate the need for an overwhelming growth in immigration. Who these days at 70 or even 75 cannot drive a bus or sell tickets in a railway station?
