we're going to keep importing Maria's to do such work no matter what

This is just false, Orrin. Few points:

1) You underestimate the public anger on this issue.

More Than Three-Quarters of Americans Want Stricter Immigration Controls. (November 2003, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)

77 percent of Americans say “we should restrict and control people coming into the country to live more than we do now,” including 82 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of both Democrats and Independents.
full poll

47 Percent of Americans Want Immigration Decreased; Only 13 Percent Want It Increased
(June 2003, by Gallup)

Gallup's annual poll on immigration issues consistently finds that a majority of Americans wants to decrease immigration and that only a small percentage wants to increase it.
full poll

Point being, the political will is there, but the elites are in thrall to special interests - La Raza on the left and cheap labor on the right. Publi opinion is there, but we have not yet begun to fight. All we have to do is make employers bear the full cost of the worker. Currently, they are fobbing the assimilation costs off on the community - health care, education, bilingual signs and documents and translators, increased crime, and so on.

One thing we can do is divide up California's $4.6 billion dollars in payments (see below) to illegals among those most responsible: the employers of illegals. That is, we don't necessarily need to pick up each illegal and boot them out manually. Instead, we conduct spot checks of every employer in California. Those found employing illegals are assessed a healthy fine meant to defray the taxpayer for the services provided to illegals. The beauty of this is that it addresses the fundamental economic issue here: employers are not shouldering the full cost of the worker , which includes all the assimilation and transfer payment costs (not to mention the crime). The result is that illegals begin to auto-deport.

2) This gets to a larger point: unskilled immigrants are net transfer payment recipients. Even the open-borders LA Times admits that illegals are responsible for a huge part of the Cali deficit:

"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that education is the best predictor of income and thus of benefit and cost," said UC Davis economist Philip L. Martin, an expert on rural immigrants.

He cites studies that say an arriving immigrant with at least a high school education will pay an average $89,000 more in taxes and other revenues than he or she costs in services. Those with less than a high-school education, however, put such a demand on public services that their large negative value persists through their children's and grandchildren's generations.

So here's the bottom line: The total the state spends on illegal immigrants is no more than $4.6 billion a year, with CalWorks being a judgment call. This is a substantial amount, but clearly not enough to account for all of the state's budget gap, which is running $8 billion to $12 billion annually.

(Note that this is a massive underestimate, as it counts federal & state as separate, and counts children of illegals as legals under the current lunatic 14th amendment intepretation.)

3) The bottom line - which cannot be reiterated enough - is that unskilled immigrants reduce the GDP-per-capita and the transfer payment pie . Those who cannot compete in our economy will agitate for more socialism, more transfer payments, and more preferences. As Steve Sailer says:

The fundamental point about amnesty and taxes is that you can't get blood from a stone. Immigrants with eighth grade educations wind up costing us lots more in social services than they pay in taxes. If we upped our intake of summa cum laude graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bangalore, well, we could milk them, but there's not much we'll ever get out of ex-peasants and much we'll spend on them and their families.

Furthermore, even the descendants of unskilled immigrants are much less likely to make it in America than the descendants of skilled immigrants. See the Philip Martin reference above. Russians, Chinese, Indians and (yes) Middle Easterners are generally skilled and have done well in the US. Contrast this to the effect of 40 years of economic preferences for a voluntary, unskilled group like Hispanic Americans - they are still poor, albeit not as poor as African Americans.

GC:

Much of what you say is true; however, it is irrelevant. The courts will not allow tighter control. The monies given to illegal immigrants typically stem from court decisions, not legislative votes. Also, look at CA and CO for stricter laws that the courts gutted or set aside.

I do not agree that the political will is there: not more than 5% of any poll is going to support defending the borders with deadly force. And that is what it will take. Polls are easy - action is difficult. If English were formally declared as the national language, it would show some energy in the right direction, but how long before some Federal Court struck that down, too?

There are parts of the country (the apple crop in Central PA, for example) where migrant Latino workers do most if not all of the agricultural harvesting. These are not border areas. 30 years ago, locals worked those fields. Now, they don't. Time is not going to run backwards, especially with a declining anglo population in a lot of those places.

Finally, don't you think it is a stretch to assume that illegals will "auto-deport"? Once here, they are not going to leave unless they are removed. Even if large industrial firms are barred to them, work will always be available on a daily basis elsewhere. And neither the Democratic or Republican parties is going to punish employers for utilizing low-cost labor, no matter what they say publicly. Someone on the national level may get some points for attacking immigration, but Mr./Ms. County Commissioner is not going to attack the largest employer in his/her county. Too much to lose in that.

godless:

Horsewash. We never want immigrants, but we won't do the work ourselves and won't spend the money to close borders or tolerate the goon squads that would be required to deport them. Anti-immigration is theoretical, not real. It's good politics, bad policy.

GC -- Anger? Where? People might not like a policy, but that's not anger. Right now, in Massachusetts, the courts have just thrown out 5000 years of tradition because, well, it occurred to them they could. There's no anger. I doubt we'll suddenly see it pop up with immigration.

And, of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. What modern American election has to an anti-immigrant triumph. And no choosing Ca. propositions that get 60% latino support.

As for GDP, I hope to write more later about why this argument is wrong (I might not get the chance, but I'll try), but let's start with this. Subtracting out the portion of GDP generated by immigrants and the descendents of immigrants, what's left?

David:

Even the Casinos would be empty if you subtract descendants.

Exactly.

Anti-immigration is theoretical, not real.

one might remember that between 1924 and 1965 this nation did have a policy that resulted in low immigration rates. so the theory can be applied-if the will is there....

First, let me make clear that I support an aracial skilled immigration policy. I'm against unskilled and illegal immigration. Ok, to specifics...

Orrin:

Emotional appeals based on patriotic soldiers cut both ways. One could easily tote up the number of murders and terrorist acts committed by illegal aliens (not least among them 9/11) for a different effect. Let's discuss this dispassionately.

jim:

First, you might be interested in this post and this on how to remove illegals without mass deportations. Thing is, we are already deporting 400000 per year, but letting in 800000. Can we really not improve enough to break even, or to begin net outflow and send a message?

Second, the conventional wisdom is that the public won't stand for it. But the conventional wisdom is wrong - Prop 187 passed by an overwhelming margin, and Arnold won tremendous support for banning driver's licenses.

Third, it's not a stretch to assume they'll auto deport once we start enforcing the law. That's what happened with illegal Muslims after we enforced the law selectively:

More than 13,000 Arab and Muslim men in the US are facing deportation after co-operating with post-11 September anti-terror measures, it has been revealed. ...the immigration service - which faced a backlash after several of the 11 September hijackers were found to have been in the country illegally - says enforcement is now a top priority. Correspondents say families in [illegal] immigrant communities have already started packing up to leave the country...

oj and David:

You essentially ask a) why are today's immigrants different from before and b) whether there are jobs immigrants will do that Americans won't.

Short answer: open borders would be disastrous as policy, unskilled immigrants are different from skilled immigrants, preferences and welfare did not exist for previous waves, and willingness is a function of price. As my co-blogger razib points out, the 1924-1965 immigration moratorium is a big part of what caused the assimilation of Italians, Jews, and Irish - it didn't happen by magic.

Long answer: (from a blog post)

The "free movement of labor" *between* countries isn't capitalism. Free movement of goods, yes. Free movement of people - no.

If 9/11 taught us nothing else, it taught us that borders matter.

Consider the reductio ad absurdum. If we just opened up the borders, tens of millions would come here overnight. You can get a sense of the demand by realizing that 10 million applicants applied for the 50000 spots in the "diversity lottery", an ill-conceived idea to give out immigration visas at random.

So a true open borders policy would mean the immigration of tens of millions of people. Russian neo-Nazis, Communist Chinese, Islamic fundamentalists - you name it. We couldn't possibly assimilate that many people. We couldn't possibly create a bureaucracy large enough to run background checks on them.

As for the previous waves of migration - there are two differences between then and now.

First, unlike before, today we have the pick of the world . We could take 1 million PhD's in engineering and math every year - skilled immigrants who will create jobs and start companies. But only about 20% of our current immigrants are coming in on skilled visas. The rest come in through chain family reunification, where "family" is broadly interpreted. It's not just your spouse and kids. Your siblings, parents, grown children and so on can also come over, and can in turn bring *their* spouses over. Since "sibling" is difficult to prove in non-first world countries, that might mean your whole village. The upshot is that we're currently basing legal immigration on distinctly un-American nepotism , rather than meritocracy. And that doesn't begin to account for the million illegals per year.

Second, a huge fraction of these voluntary immigrants receive economic preferences and are plugged into a social net after arriving. I'm at a loss to understand why some classes of voluntary immigrants (Hispanics, Africans) get preferences intended for the descendants of slaves and Native Americans, while others (Asians, Middle Easterners, Europeans) do not.

Needless to say, such a safety net and unjustified preferences did not exist for the immigrants in the 1880's. They made it in the US or they went back. It's little known, but on the order of 30% of newly arrived immigrants in the 1880's went back home:

Historians use the phrase "birds of passage" to describe immigrants who never intended to make the United States their permanent home. Unable to earn a livelihood in their home countries, they were migratory laborers. Most were young men in their teens and twenties, who planned to work, save money, and return home. They left behind their parents, young wives, and children, indications that their absence would not be long. Before 1900 an estimated 78 percent of Italian immigrants were men. Many of them traveled to America in the early Spring, worked until late fall, and then returned to the warmer climates of their southern European homes winter. Overall, 20 to 30 percent of Italian immigrants returned to Italy permanently.

Third, after the last great wave of immigration, there was an immigration time-out from 1924-1965 that permitted assimilation to take place. That was the time of the rise of the middle class and the unification of the various ethnic groups into a common American identity. Check out this graph. So assimilation did not just magically happen - it required a timeout to happen.

Second, on why unskilled immigration is bad for the economy in both the short and long term:

PB says:

Immigrants, even the unskilled kind, are almost certainly not a net loss to "the economy" provided they work. They may not be a net contributor to tax revenue, but this is NOT the same thing. Illegal immigrants, legal immigrants and citizens ALL make contributions to the extent that they consume goods and services, and add the value of their labor to GDP. By your logic, the easiest way to grow the economy would be to reduce the population down to nothing. This is NOT the way to go, as such disparate places as Japan, Ukraine and Italy are finding out.

First, perhaps my use of the term "the economy" was unclear, so let me rephrase. If all you're looking at is *total* GDP, then yes, more labor hours will increase total GDP. But that's not a good metric - India has the fourth largest GDP in the world, but it's poor. It's GDP-per-capita that is the real metric of a country's standard of living, and it is clear that unskilled immigration reduces GDP-per-capita. Unskilled immigrants are far less likely to start businesses or to work in service jobs.

Second, what you are neglecting is that choosing to accept unskilled immigration over the alternatives will reduce not just GDP-per-capita, but also the long term growth in GDP-per-capita. This is because of three factors.

a) large pools of cheap labor discourage automation, which reduces productivity growth.

b) choosing to accept unskilled immigrants over skilled immigrants means that we suffer an opportunity cost: less Silicon Valley companies founded and thus less jobs/technology created.

c) High transfer payments (bilingual, crime, health, education) and preferences to *voluntary* immigrants retards economic growth. Transfer payments to illegals are the unspoken reason for California's budget crisis - Prop 187 was not honored.

By the way, I'm not alone on this. I'm a convert from the CATO school. Read the National Academies of Sciences report and Heaven's Door by Harvard Prof George Borjas if you want the numbers.

GC --

I really want to read the administration's proposal so I can discuss specifics. In particular, I find it hard to believe that it's as close to open borders as people claim, but I just don't yet know. Til then:

Illegal and legal immigration are, as you suggest, two different things. I have no problem with the administrations incarcerating people who they find here illegally and deporting them. But the outcry we've had, since 9/11, with a population being investigated because of homeland security concerns, does indicate to me that we'd never be able to clear out longstanding residents. More importantly, what Congress is going to pass these laws and which president is going to enforce them? If we have a problem now, and we do, we need to choose the best practical solution.

As for legal immigration, I think you and I would more or less agree. However, I have read the arguments that free passage of labor is different economically different from free passage of goods, and I've never been convinced. There are externalities and political/security issues, but I dissagree that, economically, it is different.

As for assimilation, the argument that these immigrants are different from all immigrants that have come before has been wrong for 200 years so far. That doesn't mean that it is necessarily wrong now, but it does impose a tough burden on those making it.

Of course you like GDP per capita as a metric: it always falls with immigration because immigrants are almost always poorer than Americans. Neither Indian programmers or campesinos come here to make less money. That's not the question, though. The question is whether incumbent Americans are better off with immigration. The answer has always been yes and, right now, is very much so. If you take immigrants out of the income distribution, you find that native-born Americans have become much better off over the last decades, that income inequality among the native-born has decreased and that the reason has been the continued economic upward mobility of native-born blacks. As the generally accepted theory is that immigration will have its worst economic impact on blacks, this is very good news.

(I do want to say something about the skewing of our political system by immigration. As population, rather than citizens, determines representation in the House and the Electoral College, border states have more weight than they should. This is a problem we should address.)

Finally, though, I do want to admit what you no doubt suspect: my preference for immigration is not driven solely by logic or economics. My relatives who made it out of eastern Europe to America lived. All those who stayed died. I'm simply not going to pull up that ladder now that we've made it into the lifeboat.

Godless:

Anti-immigration isn't about keeping terrorists out, it's about keeping Mexicans out, just as it used to be about keeping Jews and Catholics out.

David and oj:

I understand the emotional connections here. Personally, I am the child of immigrants from India, and I'm obviously happy that they made it over.

But - and this is a big but - everyone can't come here. Do we agree about that? We can't let tens of millions of people in overnight, which is the reductio ad absurdum of immigration policy. Letting in an immigrant is a much more weighty matter than accepting a box of playstations. David, you seem to agree - there are all sorts of citizenship and national security considerations here, not to mention the externalities of transfer payments, education, and so on.

Right now, I have several relatives who're jumping through all the ridiculous INS hoops. One of them is in a situation similar to this Princeton student, the first female winner of the Singaporean math Olympiad:

University administrators said Wu's visa applications were denied four times by U.S. consular officials in Beijing this summer because officials thought Wu, 20, who comes from a working-class family, would illegally stay in the U.S. after completing her education at Princeton.

Now that is ridiculous - the INS enforces on the wrong people. Our current system is utterly broken. There is no reason that Mexico (2% of the world) should get 30% of the spots. There is no reason that 75% of the immigrants should get in through nepotistic chain family reunification[1], or that only 20% of visas should be awarded on the basis of merit. And there is no reason that those brazen enough to jump the queue should be rewarded over those who waited in line.

This is about both fairness and the rational self interest of the United States. As a taxpayer in California, non-immigrant households are on the hook for $1178 more in taxes per person. That bundles both skilled and unskilled together. Any capitalistically inclined person should pause at that figure, and realize what the implications are should even more unskilled immigrants enter. More here.

Last point - you guys seem to doubt that the Bush proposal is really an amnesty. I understand that - he keeps saying it's not an amnesty. But there are two things to consider. First, under the current (lunatic) interpretation of the 14th amendment, anyone child born in the US is automatically a citizen. And since you can't deport a citizen (especially a baby), millions will have so-called "anchor babies". Second, the plan is indefinitely renewable:

One of the things that's integrated in these principles is -- and the President will call for -- a three-year term of participation for the temporary worker program, and call for the opportunity for that to be renewed. ... However, the terms of the temporary worker program -- as I said, three years initially, allowed to be renewed and so forth -- we believe estimates to be about 8 million people who are here undocumented.

[1] Not just spouses & children, but siblings, parents, grown children, etcetera. And in many third world countries, documentation of "sibling" status is sketchy - leading to cousins and totally unrelated "relatives" comingin.

David:

Of course you like GDP per capita as a metric: it always falls with immigration because immigrants are almost always poorer than Americans. Neither Indian programmers or campesinos come here to make less money. That's not the question, though. The question is whether incumbent Americans are better off with immigration. The answer has always been yes and, right now, is very much so.

David - it's not true that all immigrants are poor. Russian, Indian and Chinese immigrants make more money than the American mean. As generally skilled immigrant populations, they pay more in taxes than they take in. But unskilled immigrants make less money and are less educated than the average American.

So: it is not true that all immigrants are poorer than Americans. Immigrants are a very bipolar group. Skilled ones do very well, and increase the GDP-per-capita of the US. Unskilled ones are net transfer payment recipients. See this report by the National Academy of Sciences. There are other studies that disaggregate the (very different) effects of skilled and unskilled migrants, but this is a start:

In California, where many new immigrants live, each native household is paying about $1,178 a year in state and local taxes to cover services used by immigrant households, the panel said. In New Jersey, which has a more established immigrant population, the calculation is about $232 a year. However, annual estimates of immigrants' impact on state and local taxpayers may be inflated and should not be used to predict the long-term costs of admitting new immigrants, the panel said. These calculations do not indicate how much immigrants and their children will pay in taxes or how they will use public services over their lifetimes. On an annual basis, new immigrant families receive more in publicly funded services than they pay in taxes, the panel said. Most -- especially those from Latin America -- tend to have more school-aged children and require more educational services than other households. Although immigrants use about the same level of government services as native-born residents, most immigrants pay less taxes because they own less property and have lower-paying jobs....

The wage gap between new immigrants and native workers has grown rapidly in recent decades, the panel said. In 1990, for example, recently arrived male immigrants were paid 32 percent less than native workers; in 1970, new immigrants' wages were 17 percent less. New female immigrants make 22 percent less than native-born women, a gap that has grown by 10 percent since 1970. This wage gap is growing mainly because more recent immigrants -- many of whom are from poor countries in Latin America -- have much lower education and skill levels than most Americans.

New immigrants are more than twice as likely as Americans not to have a high school degree, the panel said. More than one in three new immigrants have not completed high school. As a result, a disproportionate number of immigrants hold the lowest paying jobs in restaurants for instance, or in domestic positions. In 1990, almost half of all new immigrants earned among the lowest wages in the United States.

Historically, the wages of immigrants who entered the country when they were 25 or younger eventually equaled those of native workers after immigrants had been in the work force for about 20 years. However, because new immigrants are coming to the United States with substantially lower education and skill levels and are starting with lower wages, it be may more difficult for them to close the wage gap. In particular, most Mexican male immigrants, who make among the lowest initial wages, have not seen any increase in wages relative to those of native workers even after 20 years in the U.S. work force.

In other words, the National Academy of Sciences agrees - this wave of unskilled immigrants is, unlike the previous waves, *not* catching up in wages or living standards. Contrast this to skilled immigrant groups who are hitting the ground running.

Also, income inequality in the US is rising as a consequence of unskilled immigration. See the Brookings institute report here.

Quick points:

1. I don't disagree with you about the mechanics of immigration. I have no problem with preferring skilled workers, PhDs, and the rich who are willing to pay megabucks for Green Cards.

2. But, all other things equal, I prefer a liberal legal immigration scheme.

3. This has little to do with controlling the borders (I'm all for it) and, even more important, dealing with the illegals already here.

4. I have no opinion yet on whether the President's plan is an amnesty, but I'm willing to consider an amnesty on the merits.

5. I couldn't disagree with you more strongly about the 14th Amendment. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States". Children born here and living here are citizens.

Godless:

It is and should be an amnesty. Yes, I do think everyone can come here. The solution to our immigration problems is to indoctrinate people more fiercely into Americanism and require assimilation, not to keep people who want to be Americans out. At any rate, if we're going to keep some folks out, skills should be less a concern than culture, so I'd take the Christian Mexicans first.

OJ: I differ with you only in the application, not the principle. I couldn't care less if the Americans of 2110 are white, black, brown, purple, whatever, so long as they are Americans. I'd favor a more restrictive (and more effective) immigration policy merely because most, if not all, of the assimilation structures are broken. Fix them, and to my mind, let there be open borders.

Yes, but the broken institutions are our fault.