A Customs and Border Patrol agent pats down a woman who will be returned to Mexico. (Photo by Gerald L. Nino.)
By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
Sometimes it feels as if it’s become unpatriotic to think.
As if there’s something wrong with those who refuse to ape a notion such as illegal immigration is destroying this country.
Today, let’s push the boundaries of patriotism.
Earlier this month, I spent a week in Oklahoma and Texas studying the effects of immigration (both legal and illegal). The conference, put on by the Institute for Justice and Journalism and Oklahoma University’s Gaylord School of Journalism, assembled folks on all sides of the issues. We heard from immigration advocates and opponents; politicians; pastors, priests and imams; immigration officials, judges, prosecutors and public defenders; legal and illegal immigrants; and refugees.
And yet, despite that impressive lineup, some of the people who left the biggest impact on me were the ones who didn’t bring much more than numbers to the table.
They were economists and demographers.
And they blew my mind.
Some of the information they offered — “Immigration benefits the U.S. economy overall and has little negative effect on the income and job opportunities of most native-born Americans” — was not new.
That sentence actually came from a 1997 report by the National Academy of Sciences.
Although the numbers folks who spoke at the conference reiterated the concept that immigration is largely a fiscal “push,” what struck me was where those numbers can lead you — if you take the time to think.
For me, it started with something called “circular migration.” That’s the practice of people leaving their homeland to go work someplace else for awhile, and then returning to their home and families.
Circular migration is certainly nothing new. It’s been going on as long as there have been borders and boundaries. If you want to waste a little time on the internet, Google “circular migration” and you’ll find reports from the Phillipines, Australia and most European countries. The United Nations issued a fascinating report in 2009 titled “Circular Migration and Human Development.”
In the United States, circulation migration predated our southern borders. And even after we established the border, circular migration went on with little enforcement.
Then, from 1942 to 1964 — a period of war and phenomenal growth — the United States actually made circular migration legal with something called the Bracero Program, in which Mexican migrants were given temporary visas to come work. Four million Mexican workers came to the United States in those 22 years, and most returned to their families.
But in 1965, an unusual coalition of liberals and conservatives helped pass the Immigration and Nationality Act, putting an emphasis on family and humanitarian immigration. And the Bracero Program was history.
“The Bracero Program was killed by human rights groups and labor unions,” said Ed Shumacher-Matos, director of the Migration and Integration Studies Program at Harvard University.
And so began the period of increasingly tighter borders that effectively ended work-based circular migration.
“When, in 1986, we began to militarize the border, that begins to cut off the circular flow,” Shumacher-Matos explained.
Faced with a border that was difficult enough to cross once, much less over and over, workers began to bring their families.
Now, I heard all this just after Pia Orrenius, a senior economist and research officer with the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, explained that the biggest costs tied to illegal immigration were for health and education. Costs linked to … families.
Basically, our laws and policies are not only encouraging illegal immigration. They’re increasing our costs from it.
When I realized the irony, I blurted out to the panel, “I feel as if my head’s going to explode.”
They all nodded sympathetically.
Orrenius has studied the pattern of circular migration and come to the conclusion that, over decades, there’s been a fairly steady figure for the number of legal and illegal immigrants who come here to work. They come because they’re either highly skilled or because they do the kind of work that increasingly higher-educated Americans won’t do. At least not at the prices that consumers (and therefore employers) are willing to pay.
So she actually has a plan:
Rather than emphasizing permanent visas for family/humanitarian reasons, place the emphasis on highly educated workers. And offer 900,000 temporary visas that could be bought by companies.
Need 20 temporary workers to pick fruit or work at a meat plant? Buy 20 of the temporary visas. That way, businesses would be encouraged to first look for native workers (since they’re paying to bring in outside workers), but at the same time, they could fill their labor needs.
Meanwhile, the government still gets tax money from workers but doesn’t have to pay as much for health and education. And it gets an additional source of revenue.
Certainly, there are things that would have to be worked out. But what’s amazing to me is that, saddled with a system that everybody agrees is broken, all the panelists agreed on one thing:
Politicians — on both sides of the issue — would never consider such a dramatic shift in policy.
Hey, they might have to think.
And sure enough. First thing I read when I got back to Florida was about how the state legislature was considering a dozen immigration-related bills.
You see, the debate about illegal immigration isn’t just about numbers, or what makes sense.
It’s also about culture, and people’s fear of change.
Which will be the topic of the next blog item about immigration.