The
working class
shouldn't have to contemplate
more immigration
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
March 28, 2005
LONDON - It's the working class who
bear most of the cost of absorbing new immigrants,
whether it be in France, the U.S. or Malaysia, but it is
the middle class who dominate the debate, forging an
alliance in its favor across the political spectrum-
liberals who want to be multicultural, and conservatives,
as Ronald Reagan used to, who argue for the free market
and open borders.
Two new academic reports challenge
the conventional wisdom that immigration is an unalloyed
good for the economies of developed societies. George
Borjas, a Harvard professor of economics, has published a
study for the Center of Immigration Studies in which he
argues that when immigration increases the supply of
workers the earnings of native-born workers fall
significantly. A parallel study by two professors of
economics at Colombia, Donald Davis and David Weinstein,
shows that the net loss for native-born Americans is $70
billion each year and increases as the size of the
immigrant population grows.
All this needs to be put on the
front burner of the political agenda if we are to have an
honest debate about immigration. In nearly every host
country immigration has become a major social and
economic issue. The native working class must be fairly
represented in this debate.
While the educated and much
traveled often revel in the surface manifestations of new
music, cuisines, religious practices and lifestyles it is
the poorer members of the native working-class who have
to live and work alongside immigrants, without anyone
even asking them if this was the way they would chose
their country to change.
Looking back over the last couple
of decades what is astonishing is not so much the rise of
extremist anti-immigrant parties, the growth of
anti-immigrant violence and intolerant police behavior,
but that a majority of immigrants have found a reasonable
niche in the host society and that most of the native
working class has come to terms with much of immigrant
life. It accepts them in the workplace and in the unions
and tolerates them most of the time in its pubs and
sporting events- which is more than most of the middle
class has ever contributed to racial harmony.
But this is a precarious
achievement, as the growing violence against immigrants
and the violent assertiveness of some immigrant groups
attests. Immigration today has become too massive,
despite the many controls. The growth of an even larger
immigrant population is inevitable if the natives don't
reproduce sufficiently and their older members retire too
early. Tensions are going to rise much
further.
Part of the answer to this,
paradoxically, is to liberalize the immigration market-
to take down all the artificial barriers of government
controls. The Cato Institute argues that then immigration
will become a circular process instead of immigrants,
once in, clinging like limpets to the rocks of the host
country, for fear of ejection. The U.S. has conducted
what is in fact a pilot project on liberalization with
Puerto Rican immigration, which has always been
unrestricted. Even in the 1980s nearly half stayed on the
mainland only for a brief two years. In the '90s the
traffic ceased of its own accord, as Puerto Rico
developed. The truth is that migrant workers, if given a
choice, usually prefer to get home once they have
achieved the target they have set for themselves and in
today's age of cheap air travel this becomes a practical
proposition. Immigrants who cause the kind of problems
that now rattle receiving society often act like they do
in a desperate attempt to cling onto what they think is
the way of doing things back home or simply because they
feel trapped. Moreover, liberalization would destroy the
evils of the black market.
Secondly, every country needs to do
what the French government has recently decided. Turning
its back on early remedies for high unemployment- the 35
hour week and pensioning off workers earlier- it now
wants to encourage those native workers (which includes
second generation immigrants already settled inside
France) to work in domestic services, including child
care, cleaning, gardening and help for the elderly- the
so called McJobs that new immigrants usually fill because
they are unappealing to unemployed residents. France
appears ready to consider income support and additional
welfare payments to make these jobs
attractive.
If governments could add to that,
pushing back the retirement age and encouraging the birth
rate with suitable incentives as is being done here in
Sweden, there really is no need to contemplate the need
for an overwhelming growth in immigration. Who these days
at 70 or even 75 cannot drive a bus or sell tickets in a
railway station?
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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