Why Do Liberals Support Immigration?

I'm pretty late -- at least in the hyper-accelerated blur that passes for blog time -- to Ross Douthat's post on the animating assumptions behind liberal support for immigration, but it struck me as weird enough that I've spent the last few days determined to return to it. Ross argues that liberals support immigration as a sort of de facto humanitarianism -- though I don't really know what's de facto about it -- and goes on to say, "there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal."

Agreed. What a relief it's an inapt analogy!

It's often taken as gospel fact that immigration harms the wages of downscale workers. George Borjas, the Harvard economist whose figures are most often cited, argues that immigration cuts the wages of unskilled workers by about 7 percent. That's a fairly mild effect, and to turn Ross's argument around, there's something slightly perverse about eradicating the massive gains immigrants bring to both themselves and our economy in order to raise the incomes of our poorest citizens by seven percent. There are far easier, and far more positive-sum, policies that could enhance their incomes.

That said, it's not even clear that immigration does harm unskilled workers. Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis, ran the numbers for California, and came to these conclusions:

• First, there is no evidence that the inflow of immigrants over the period 1960–2004 worsened the employment opportunities of natives with similar education and experience. The study finds no association between the inflow of immigrants and the out-migration of natives within the same education and age group.

• Second, according to our calculations, during 1990–2004, immigration induced a 4 percent real wage increase for the average native worker. This effect ranged from near zero (+0.2%) for wages of native high school dropouts and between 3 and 7 percent for native workers with at least a high school diploma.

Immigrants, it turns out, often act as complementary, rather than substitutive, to native laborers. As Peri puts it:

On first thought, it might seem that the simple economics of supply and demand would answer the question: What is the effect of immigrants on wages? Immigrants increase the supply of labor. Hence, they should decrease the wages of native workers, reduce their employment opportunities, or push them to other states. The question, however, is more subtle than this, because all workers are not the same: They differ by education, skills, and occupation and perform jobs and productive tasks different from and complementary...

In nontechnical terms, the wages of native workers could increase because the increased supply of migrants is likely to put native workers in jobs where they perform supervisory, managerial, training, and in general interactive and coordinating tasks, which makes them more productive. Moreover, the presence of new workers also implies higher demand for consumption, so that immigration might simply increase total production and demand without depressing wages.

All of which is to say, a lot of us don't accept Douthat's read of the economics. Immigrants appear to exert either a very mild downward pressure on unskilled worker wages, or a very mild upward pressure on their wages. Under both sets of assumptions, their overall economic impact is positive. It would be perverse to close off immigration, given the massive benefits it offers to immigrants, in light of these numbers. If we're concerned about directly raising the wages of unskilled workers, we should, uh, do so.

And we're not even getting into more intangible benefits of multiculturalism and diversity. Many liberals are pro-immigration not only because it's good for immigrants, but economically and culturally beneficial for America. But that's a whole other post, and it's 5 o'clock on Friday.