BY
DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH
The
Immigrants have been accused of debasing our culture, overcrowding
our schools and hospitals, and lowering our wages. Now a Harvard professor is
blaming them for sending African-Americans to jail.
George Borjas of
The story goes as follows. Low-skilled immigrants arrive in
Let's for the moment ignore the insulting assumption that
African-Americans are more likely than others to turn to crime if they cannot
find work. The major problem with Mr. Borjas's
argument is that young black men began withdrawing from the labor force in the
1960s, when the share of immigrants in the labor force was less than 1%.
The percentage of black men between ages 16 and 24 who were not in
school, not working, and not looking for work rose to 18% in 1982 from 9% in
1964. It then reached 23% in 1997. These trends are clearly discussed by
American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray in "The Underclass
Revisited."
There are many complex factors leading to the incarceration of
black men over the period 1980 to 2000. Yet Mr. Borjas
only uses as variables information on employment, wages, education, race,
incarceration rates, and immigration. Other factors he omits are changes in
laws, stricter enforcement policies, longer sentencing guidelines, and changes
in welfare regulations. These conceivably have a greater effect on
incarceration rates than immigration.
Mr. Borjas, careful as always, hedges
his bets by saying that "much of the decline in employment and increase in
incarceration observed in the low-skill black population would have taken place
even if the immigrant influx had been far smaller." Given this conclusion,
it is surprising that Mr. Borjas published this paper
at all.
The problem for Mr. Borjas is that the
finding that immigrants substantially lower Americans' wages, a central thesis
of much of his work, just isn't holding up. Research of mainstream economists,
as well as his more recent studies, shows different effects. So linking
immigrants to African-American incarceration is the new tactic.
Take Mr. Borjas's own calculations. In
2003 he found that immigrants lowered wages of average American-born workers by
3% and wages of high school dropouts by 9%. A year later, he found that the
effect on high school dropouts had moderated to a 7% loss.
By 2006 Mr. Borjas concluded that
immigrants actually raised average wages of Americans by 0.1% and only lowered
the wages of the low-skilled, those without a high school diploma, by 5%. This
means that
The research findings of more mainstream economists show little
effect of immigration on wages of native-born Americans. Senior economist Pia Orrenius of the Federal
Reserve Bank of
David Card of the
Giovanni Peri of the
Why the difference? Mr. Borjas makes two
assumptions in his models that mainstream economists do not. First, he assumes
that immigrants are substitutes for nativeborn
workers. Second, he assumes that capital is fixed and does not respond to
changes in wage rates.
Mainstream economists observe that immigrants have different
skills and job preferences from native-born Americans, and so make American
workers more productive. They assume that immigrants complement rather than
substitute for native-born workers and that capital moves to take advantage of
available labor. Although immigrants will be substitutes for some primarily
low-skilled workers, many of whom are immigrants too, the negative effect on
such workers is much smaller than the positive effect for everyone else.
To take a simple example, if a construction firm cannot find
plasterers or stucco masons, an occupation overwhelmingly performed by
foreign-born workers, it can do fewer jobs than a firm that had these
immigrants on the payroll. With fewer jobs, employment of both immigrants and
native-born Americans declines.
Of course, some might say that the construction firm just needs to
offer more money to plasterers and stucco masons, and then more native-born
Americans would take the jobs. But since the price would be higher, fewer
projects would be completed. So employment for native-born Americans could
decline.
In a speech in the Senate on April 9, 1924, the senator of South
Carolina, Ellison Du-Rant Smith, said that "We have population enough
today without throwing wide our doors and jeopardizing the interests of this
country by pouring into it men who willingly become the slaves of those who
employ them in manipulating the forces of nature, and they few reap the
enormous benefits that accrue therefrom."
In 1924 Senator Smith did not regard immigrants from
Blaming immigrants for the incarceration rates of
African-Americans is a sign of desperation. Will they next be held responsible
for
Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow
at the Hudson Institute, where she directs the Center for Employment Policy.From 2003 to 2005 she was chief economist of the