While I was researching for a paper last year, I came across this organization called National Association for Business Economics (or NABE) It is a pretty low key organization (judging by its website alone). But the articles I found there were all pretty good.
So I bought a membership for $50 (?) but have not had chance to read much from their publications. I did attend this morning’s conference call on immigration. I thought it was a very good discussion.
Three panelists:
Rakesh Kochhar, Pew Hispanic Center
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Hudson Institute
Steve Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies
Kochhar gave a very concise but very well organized run down on their study. The PDF file is here. I wish he hadn’t put Asian samples next to the Latinos because they are just so different. But maybe that is his point. One number leaps out of the presentation is that the industry that generated most jobs recently is construction. And some construction jobs employ up to 50% of Hispanics (e.g. dry-wall installation).
Furchtgott-Roth has a slight accent (Afrikaan?). Her presentation is perhaps the weakest. More anecdotal than statistical evidence. But she knows the domain literature very well and constantly citing one paper after another. She is the token pro-labor-flow gal.
Camarota, the only “true” American among the three, is the token anti-immigration guy. I later looked up his picture–looks like a mob hit man! He mentioned that he has a brother who is paid $17 an hour (?) stocking warehouse. And he is a director in a research institute. Apparently, this is a family with a pretty high standard deviation.
Camarota’s problem is that he is too secular, too political. He has neither the number nor the fluency of literature to contend with so he plays the patriotism card over and over. However, he does have a good point in that the impact of immigration is not uniformly distributed and the illegals are squeezing particularly hard on the lower tier of native work force (à la his brother). He think this is totally … you guessed it, unpatriotic. Here is one of his publications.
My mind is already made up on this issue (two points: there can’t be free capital flow without some kind of liquid labor flow. And no taxation without representation) However, I still appreciate some of the thoughts:
- Self-employment rate among immigrants is not higher than that among the natives.
- Total factor productivity. Several people mentioned this term. I can only imagine they are saying that when calculating immigration impact, one should not look at labor input alone. For example, office worker may be more productive if their house chores are taken care of. Or a gardener becomes a contractor thanks to readily available laborers.
- Camarota kept saying in recent years, there has been a surge of highschool dropouts. Nobody followed up on that but he didn’t say whether part of the growth comes from Hispanic population or not.
- He also suggested immigration is somehow linked to the incarceration rate among the blacks.
- This is interesting: he posits that the low immigration rate in the mid-20th century (1920-1970s) allowed a previous wave of immigrants to be slowly assimilated into American society. His conclusion is that continuous waves of immigrants will change American culture.
- Furchtgott-Roth used the traffic law analogy to ridicule those who say the reality must be such and such because the law says so.
- Camarota strongly objected to a question from the moderator that, as economists, what do the panelist think of immigration in the scope of world economy. “People are not just a factor (in a model)”, he said. The “citizenship” certification matters a lot to him. I almost wanted to ask him, what if an American patient got some of his organs and blood from an immigrant donor? Does that make him less an American? What else counts as “American”? Education–more specifically, the civic classes in high school? Well then how do we compare American kids who never attended those classes (e.g. the dropouts or homeschoolers) with Mexicans who attended everything else?
- According to a 2006/9 Princeton paper, 2nd generation Mexicans in LA primarily use English. Large portions of the 3rd gen don’t even speak Spanish (hard to believe though).
- Most people seem to agree that a low skilled immigrant is a net drain of the public service by strick monetary measures (the disputes are in the non-monetary factors). It is something like $3K/person or $29K/family per year?
- Social services designed for the poor are being taken advantage of (by the low-skilled immigrants): just another reason why native poor are miserable.
- Furchtgott-Roth suggests that doubling INS’ budget by $2-4 billion will be a lot cheaper than spending $10-20 billion building and mantaining border walls.