Can't We All Just Get Along?
Friday, March 31, 2006 at 7:49AM Nice piece by David Brooks today on immigration ("Immigrants to Be Proud Of," NYT, 30 March 2006). All sorts of arguments about how Hispanic families tend to be--relatively speaking--paragons of family values.
My arguments tend to be more grubby. Hispanic immigrants do the 3D jobs a lot--as in, dirty, dangerous and difficult. They earn every year upwards of a half trillion in wages. They spend over 90 percent here in the States and sent a mere fraction to families back home, yielding a cash flow that, in Latin America alone, is roughly ten times what America sends the entire Gap annually in Official Developmental Aid.
How's that for connectivity? And "families to warm a conservative's heart."
Brooks' hidden agenda? "To persuade the evangelical leaders in the tall grass to stop hiding on this issue," to "believe what Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas believes: that a balanced immigration bill is consistent with conservative values."
Thanks to an assist from Larry Kudlow, Steve DeAngelis and I are schedued to sit down with the senator during one of my upcoming trips to DC. We'll be talking about economic connetivity, shrinking the Gap, and how to make Development-in-a-Box real.
Exciting stuff, intriguing guy I find myself standing alongside on a few big issues near to my heart.
Reader Comments (3)
I would argue that freedom of movement is a basic human right. However, since the effects of immigration are felt largely at the level of local communities, I think migration (both immigration and internal migration) should be governed primarily at the local level. The nation is far too large a unit to be meaningful here.
Tom writes that Hispanic immigrants "spend over 90 percent here in the States and sent a mere fraction to families back home, yielding a cash flow that, in Latin America alone, is roughly ten times what America sends the entire Gap annually in Official Developmental Aid". Now, let's look at the effects of cracking down on illegal immigration. Less cash to Latin America ==> more poverty and more unrest there (self-perpetuating) ==> more attempts to leave and go to the US or other countries. Some fraction of attempts to enter the US illegally will succeed. Furthermore, these are likely to be better hidden than now. So the proposed measures to restrict immigration will be at least partly self-defeating. Gotta love paradoxical effects!
I am very much in favor of increasing immigration quotas but there's a problem with destabilization in a lot of high immigration communities. Poor, rule-set traumatized people take time, effort, and resources to assimilate and we've been falling down on the job on that front for quite some time.
We shouldn't have any players in the immigration saga turned into 2 dimensional cardboard cutouts and that includes both the immigrants themselves and the individuals manning the complex system of integration and assimilation that exists in the US.
Immigration should be restricted to a level somewhat below that which will swamp our assimilation mechanisms. I don't think that anybody is really all that hostile to this idea (except the Aztlan bigots and the multi-cultis who are hostile to assimilation). The major problem seems to be that a large number of people, including the President of Mexico it seems, are engaging in magical thinking about how hard it is to keep assimilation going.
I've helped people assimilate coming out of Romania. It was and is not a trivial matter but I just like doing it. The stressors on assimilation are real and growing. No pro-immigration flow solution is going to be sustainable if assimilation is not strengthened.