Michael Barone has a thoughtful essay in the WSJ today (subscription required, I fear) looking at the history of immigration reform in our country going back to the reform from 1965 which Senator Ted Kennedy also shepherded through Congress.
What's interesting when I look back at the debate is that almost no one anticipated what would happen as a result of the act -- the vast flow of immigrants, most of them legal but many illegal, from Latin America and Asia. "Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually," Sen. Kennedy assured the Senate. "Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same." His brother Robert, when attorney general, predicted in 1964 that abolishing the restrictions on Asian immigration would result in a net increase of "approximately 5,000" and as a senator in 1965 said that "the net increase attributable to this bill would be at most 50,000 a year."
Barone doesn't think that they were lying, just that everyone thought that immigration would continue to be like it had been before: people perhaps from Eastern Europe, Italy, Asia, and some from Latin America. However, history didn't repeat itself.
But immigration after 1965 did not look like immigration before. The family reunification provisions authorized what turned out to be massive "chain migration" far above the quotas. Immigration from Latin America, a trickle when it was relatively unrestricted before 1965, increased vastly afterwards. Asians proved far more interested in immigrating than Robert Kennedy expected. Why? Because by the 1960s Latin America and Asia were modernizing, with vast numbers moving off the land and into cities, just as Southern and Eastern Europe had been doing when they produced so many immigrants from 1890 to 1924.
Another reason was that the American labor market was changing. The 1920s restrictions made little difference in the 1930s, when America's economy was in depression and immigration, except for refugees, would have been minimal whatever the law. Similarly from 1939-45, when the world was at war. Postwar America in the two decades after 1945 lived in the shadow of the Great Depression, which was expected to return after the war and which many thought would come again during the recessions of the 1950s. And anyway, as John Kenneth Galbraith was teaching at the time, the economy was being gobbled up by large corporations, with employees represented by large unions: not much room for immigrants in such an economy. As Democratic Congressman Donald Irwin said in the 1965 debate, "There is no longer room for a wide open gateway into the United States -- there are no virgin lands to settle and few occupations which are in dire need of labor."
Turns out all that was right about the past and wrong about the future. In time the economy changed, with growth generated mostly by small rather than big business, with huge job expansion not in old-time manufacturing but in new service industries, with lots of both high- and low-skill jobs. And lots of demand for both high- and low-skill immigrant labor. Which is where we are now as Congress faces the problem of how to get our immigration laws working in tandem with our labor markets.
Ironically, if most jobs were still in union-intensive industries, there would be fewer jobs for illegal immigrants today. However, our economy has changed and the immigration flow, legal and illegal, reflects that change.
All this means that, perhaps, the assumptions underlying a lot of the debate today are faulty. Barone posits that perhaps there will not be an unending flood of new immigrants if we were to open the spigot to create a guest worker program.
As they do so, those on all sides seem to be assuming that immigration and the labor markets will work in the future as they have in the past. The experience of 1965 suggests that we should consider the possibility that that assumption may prove wrong. Immigration from Latin America has been surging, especially illegal immigration from Mexico. But Mexico's birth rate has been plummeting over the past dozen years. And the experience of Puerto Rico suggests that Latin immigration will taper off when countries there reach an economic level far below our own. In the 1950s of "West Side Story," it seemed that Puerto Rican immigrants would take over New York City. There were no barriers to that migration: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and there were cheap flights from San Juan to New York. But around 1961, when per capita incomes in Puerto Rico reached about 35% of the U.S. average, net migration from Puerto Rico to the mainland tapered off to zero, where it has remained ever since. Incomes in Mexico are still well below that level. But at some point immigration from Mexico and other parts of Latin America will likely fall, as immigration from Germany and Britain and Ireland fell in the late 19th century as those countries' economies grew.
Similarly in Asia. It's already happened: Immigration from Japan, seen as a threat 100 years ago, is now minimal; immigration from South Korea peaked in the 1980s; as Taiwan and Thailand and Malaysia grow, outmigration is likely to slow. There remain great reservoirs of potential immigrants in India and China, but their economies are growing rapidly and China's population is aging. Sub-Saharan Africa already contributes many immigrants, and could send more; but the tragic high rates of AIDS infection in many countries there may limit immigration.
Opponents of the legalization and guest worker provisions in the Senate Judiciary Committee bill argue that they would be just another round of amnesty and would lead to increased illegal immigration. But if the government could use high-tech means to protect the border and provide employment verification cards -- it might help if Congress found a way to get around cumbersome government procurement procedures -- an accompanying guest worker program could get the supply of legal immigrants in line with the demand for labor over the long run.
I have been truly torn about this whole debate over illegal immigration. I would like to see a compromise such as Charles Krauthammer proposed that established firmer control at the border and then some sort of amnesty/guest worker program with stronger provisions for learning English and other aspects leading towards assimilation. I think there is a core of people who would go for that compromise - no one getting everything they wanted but enough. However, I just fear that people have become so polarized on each side that a compromise may elude us. And we'll be left with the status quo which is unacceptable plus lots of angry partisan bickering. posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 12:09 PM
