Hostility to immigration isn’t about economics. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

15 - 18 minutes

I’ve recently read review copies of two different books coming out this fall, both of which argue, very much in the Slow Boring mold, that the country would benefit from a Democratic Party that moderated considerably on social, cultural, and environmental issues and focused on representing working-class material interests.

Because that’s also what I think, I’m going to give those books (which differ in important ways) the props they’re due when they come out. But today I want to talk about something they have in common that I think is both wrong and important to hash out within the larger community of people who share these concerns.

What’s at issue is immigration. This is undoubtedly a topic on which mainstream Democrats have moved left since 2012 and also a topic on which the tent has narrowed such that you see less heterodoxy inside the party. Immigration was also clearly key to Donald Trump’s primary victory in 2016 — it was part of his formula for winning over secular non-college non-southern whites that year. And I think it’s pretty clear that developments in the Hispanic vote since 2016 have debunked certain progressive notions about the politics of immigration. So the topic is one where some repositioning is needed, and I’ve written a few times about what I think might be appropriate.

But these books don’t just talk about immigration as a social/cultural political phenomenon. They argue that large-scale immigration has been a cause of working-class economic problems and that repositioning on immigration issues should be part of the substance of a working-class economic agenda.

Immigration clearly has economic implications, and any effort to construct a working-class economic agenda will need to take that into account, along with the economic implications of its social and cultural positioning. This makes it different from something like gun control, where the decision about whether to call for a ban on assault rifles has almost no substantive economic implication. It’s closer, I think, to climate change, a culturally fraught political topic that also matters a lot in terms of dollars and cents.

The key thing about immigration is that while I’m sure it’s true that the perception that immigration is economically harmful to the working class plays a role in politics, I don’t believe that perception is actually true. I also don’t believe that the putative wage impacts of immigration are, in fact, all that potent politically. I think people who worry about immigration are worried primarily about border security, about law and order, and about cultural and demographic change. And I think a political strategy that doesn’t address those concerns will fail, as will an economic strategy based on the presumption that immigration restriction will be an economic boon.

For the majority of my career, it was hard to have coherent discussions of almost any microeconomic issue because a weak labor market was hanging like a shadow over every conversation. Today, that’s finally not the case — unemployment is very low, labor force participation is high, and it’s pretty easy for anyone who can show up on time and do as he’s told to get an entry-level job.

Here’s how the labor force has evolved since the start of the pandemic.

The native-born labor force fell initially, then rebounded very quickly by the summer of 2020 and has basically stagnated for three years since the population is aging.

The foreign-born labor force cratered during the pandemic because Trump shut off all immigrant inflows and then recovered rather slowly. But for the past two years, migration has been increasing and very few immigrants are retirees, so migration is driving growth in the labor force. So we should ask ourselves, knowing everything we know about the Fed and the macroeconomy, what would have happened if all those immigrants hadn’t shown up?

Lots of small things would be different. But the biggest thing, by far, is that the Fed would have raised interest rates sooner and higher to curtail the number of job openings.

It’s true that for any given job an immigrant is doing, you could say “well, if they just paid higher wages, they’d hire a native-born person.” But it’s just not true that you could replace tens of millions of foreign-born workers with higher-paid natives. That idea has never really made sense, but it’s particularly clear during current conditions that the foreign-born workforce is dramatically larger than the population of unemployed people. Without foreign workers, the jobs simply wouldn’t be done.

Realistically, we would have a poorer country that’s unable to support Social Security and Medicare at its present level. With the Medicare eligibility age pushed up and Social Security benefits stingier, we’d have more old people working. So GDP per capita would be lower, interest rates would be higher, and actual well-being would be even lower than that because we’d be cushioning the blow by curtailing popular retirement programs.

You could make the case that the relative wages of working-class people compared to college graduates would be higher if we didn’t have these low-skilled immigrant workers. But that would be in the context of everyone being poorer overall. And if it’s purely relative wages you’re interested in, the straightforward solution is more skilled immigrants rather than fewer unskilled ones. And I think that’s a good idea! But it requires thinking about the actual problems with immigration.

I’ve always thought the population demographics of immigration restrictionism go strongly against these materialist explanations. After all, think about the kinds of places that you associate with left-to-right vote switching that’s motivated by immigration. You’re looking at the Rust Belt in the United States. You’re looking at the former GDR in Germany and the northern cities of England. You’re looking, in other words, at post-industrial areas. At places that used to be politically anchored to the left by distributional conflicts between the people who own factories and the people who work in them, but that became misaligned because the factories aren’t there anymore.

Repeat: The factories aren’t there anymore.

I’ve met white working-class Obama/Trump crossover voters in Maine who are critical of the Democratic Party's position on immigration. And I’ve met white working-class Obama/Trump crossover voters in Maine who are upset about the loss of paper mill jobs and optimistic about Trump’s ability to bring them back. But nobody is upset that immigrants pushed down wages in the paper mills because the paper mills are gone! It’s absolutely true that if a ton of people from Mexico flooded into the factories and displaced the native-born workers in the paper industry, people would be upset about that. But it didn’t happen!

Are people in Millinocket mad that they need to compete with foreigners for the opportunity to move to Boston to wait tables or work in childcare centers? I’m deeply skeptical. What they have is an economic concern about their town and their community that has very little to do with immigration.

But they are also worried about immigration, just like a liberal teacher in Florida could worry both about the impact of school vouchers on her work and about the impact of abortion bans on her personal freedom. I think it’s telling in this regard that if you look at the kinds of communities that are demographically similar to declining mill towns — lots of non-college white Obama voters — that don’t happen to have suffered from de-industrialization, they also have restrictionist views on immigration. Staten Island, for example, never had manufacturing jobs to lose, and it’s not like unionized firefighters are worried about immigrants taking their jobs. People just have other objections to immigration.

On that list, a sense of chaos and loss of control at the border seems especially potent. But also, just like many people wouldn’t want to live in a homogenous small town with no interesting restaurants, many other people do prefer that kind of thing and don’t want to be surrounded by unfamiliar food and people with different cultural traditions. Tucker Carlson likes to claim that immigrants litter too much, which I think is ridiculous, but it’s of course true that America’s millions of foreign-born residents do create some litter. Some people also worry about immigrants’ impacts on budgets. I don’t worry about these things too much —I wrote “One Billion Americans,” and I’m the most YIMBY person on the planet. But precisely because I am those things, I am aware that lots of people have lots of objections to both population growth and new construction that have both practical dimensions (traffic jams) and a large dose of “change is bad!”

One reason that advocates of cultural moderation like to unreasonably play up the economic problems with immigration is the issue that I wrote about in “The two kinds of progressives.”

The way the current state of intra-progressive discourse works is that a lot of people see questions of bigotry as special and beyond compromise. So if you say “look, the issue with immigration is there’s a clash of economic interests, so we need to compromise,” you get a respectful hearing. The reply “actually, the main issue is xenophobia and alarmism” lends itself to the interpretation of “you can’t compromise with those maniacs.” As a very literal person — at times literal to a fault — I used to misunderstand these dynamics, and I’m afraid I inadvertently contributed to encouraging Democrats to become excessively uncompromising on immigration issues. Back in 2015–2017, I would hear people talking about “economic anxiety” driving voters to Trump. I looked at it and it just wasn’t true. The biggest (though by no means exclusive) thing driving people to Trump was a dislike of immigrants, especially scenarios that conjoined immigrants with crime, chaos, or receipt of public assistance. That analytic stance was usually taken to mean the Trump voters are bad people so you should just ignore them.

But I do not think you should ignore potentially persuadable voters. You should do what Obama did and try to get them to vote for you by aligning some of your views with theirs. The 2012 platform on immigration called clearly for a path to citizenship, but emphasized border security, crime control, and assimilation.

    Democrats know there is broad consensus to repair that system and strengthen our economy, and that the country urgently needs comprehensive immigration reform that brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and requires them to get right with the law, learn English, and pay taxes in order to get on a path to earn citizenship. We need an immigration reform that creates a system for allocating visas that meets our economic needs, keeps families together, and enforces the law. But instead of promoting the national interest, Republicans have blocked immigration reform in Congress and used the issue as a political wedge.

    Despite the obstacles, President Obama has made important progress in implementing immigration policies that reward hard work and demand personal responsibility. Today, the Southwest border is more secure than at any time in the past 20 years. Unlawful crossings are at a 40-year low, and the Border Patrol is better staffed than at any time in its history. We are continuing to work to hold employers accountable for whom they hire. The Department of Homeland Security is prioritizing the deportation of criminals who endanger our communities over the deportation of immigrants who do not pose a threat, such as children who came here through no fault of their own and are pursuing an education. President Obama's administration has streamlined the process of legal immigration for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, supporting family reunification as a priority, and has enhanced opportunities for English-language learning and immigrant integration. When states sought to interfere with federal immigration law by passing local measures targeting immigrants, this administration challenged them in court.

This was before the rise of the modern tide of asylum-seekers at the southern border, so the re-election campaign didn’t need to address that.

But the point is, Obama tried to address immigration in a way that emphasized patriotism, national unity, orderliness, and other conservative-leaning values. He also argued that a mass deportation scheme for millions of long-term residents was expensive, inhumane, and impractical compared to a plan that would let most of them pay back taxes and get on the path to citizenship. That was a controversial stand in its own right, but it was a defensible one that had bipartisan support and was nearly enacted into law.

To me, though, Obama’s bit about requiring people to “learn English” underscores the limits of understanding immigration politics as primarily about economics. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama says “when I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I'm forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.” That’s effective politicking precisely because it gets at some of people’s real problems with immigration. You can’t say “these people are deplorable, let’s ignore them,” but you also can’t portray their concerns as something other than what they are or you won’t address them effectively. And you’re not going to make good economic policy if you mislead yourself about immigration economics.

I don’t want to go on too long with this post, but I think it’s worth observing that the central issue of present-day immigration politics — asylum claims — has basically nothing to do with economics.

If you run the asylum claimants into an economic model, you’ll just get the general case where most analyses say they are economically beneficial (despite their relatively low skill profile) and a minority of people will say that’s wrong. But the whole reason the asylum-claimants issue is so politically toxic is that it’s not the general case of immigration. Even if, in the aggregate, having the extra workers present in the country is beneficial, it’s still not a situation that people like. It is chaotic. It is a particular burden on border communities. It involves people working under the table or else giving them work permits, which may encourage more people to come and make spurious asylum claims.

Most of all, if the affirmative case is expanding the labor force, we should do that in a more orderly way. Make sure the people who are coming are working age (rather than teenagers) and that they are going to places that want extra workers. Set up the tax code so that each person’s entry is guaranteed to help stabilize Social Security rather than being a drag on the welfare state. And decide, through a congressional or administrative process, exactly how many people can come.

My guess is that we’d get more immigrants if migration was more orderly because there’d be fewer stories about newsworthy mishaps. But if you insist on trying to argue that the case for compromise with restrictionist sentiments is about wages, you’ll have an endless chorus of liberal academics telling you (probably rightly!) that there’s no real reason to believe that asylum claimants are hurting working-class wages. The problem with the volume of asylum claimants is that people don’t like it, and a democratic government has some responsibility to give people what they want.