A sensible look at immigration

THE DEBATE over immigration demonstrates just how easily demagoguery and mythology can cloud careful analysis.

Listeners to right-wing talk radio could easily find themselves thinking that the future of our country is at stake if the estimated 11.5 million illegal immigrants aren't all rounded up and deported, posthaste.

But if the rhetoric among libertarians, liberals, and pro-immigration conservatives is more humane, it's hardly devoid of delusion. The assertion that our high level of immigration has only beneficial effects is also wrong, as is the notion that it is impossible, even immoral, to control our borders.

First things first. This nation shouldn't go on an extended hunt for immigrants who are already in this country illegally. Many have been here for years, with children born and raised here. They are marbled into the working life of America. Rooting them out would be heartless, costly, and counterproductive.

Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy are right that we should move those people out of the shadows and put them on an eventual path to citizenship. Yet that doesn't mean we should continue to tolerate immigration levels -- legal and illegal -- as large as those we've seen in the last few years.

A yearly estimated influx of a million legal and a half-million illegal immigrants, many of them low-skilled workers, is hardly an unalloyed plus. Rather, it offers distinct advantages and disadvantages depending on where you sit on the economic ladder.

If you're an employer looking for cheap labor, high immigration represents a low-wage bargain. Indeed, when businessmen claim they simply can't find Americans to do this job or that, what many of them really mean is that they can't hire a native worker at the unattractive wages they want to pay. Similarly, plentiful labor is a boon if you are in search of, say, a nanny or house-cleaning services.

But what if you're a low-skilled worker yourself? A large flow of low-skilled workers amounts to competition that retards wages for the jobs you can do.

''It really has a depressing effect on the low-skilled labor market," says George Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at Harvard University and an immigration specialist.

In one well-regarded study, Borjas and fellow economist Lawrence Katz concluded that immigration from Mexico alone depressed wages for native workers lacking a high school diploma by 8 percent between 1980 and 2000.

By keeping wages lower than they otherwise would be, low-skilled immigrant workers effectively transfer tens of billions in income each year from labor to employers. (Borjas estimates the total loss in labor earnings that results from all immigrants currently in the workforce at $280 billion annually.)

Further, African-Americans without high-school diplomas often get pushed to the end of the hiring line when immigrants expand the labor pool.

''If you take a look at high-school dropouts, the black high-school dropouts are the hardest hit," says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington thinktank. ''They are directly competing with immigrant workers."

Given those realities, institutionalizing the current high level of immigration is odd policy, at least from a progressive viewpoint. But that's essentially what the Senate Judiciary Committee bill would do, in part by allowing 400,000 new temporary workers each year.

''If you wanted to go there, you would have to believe we have a labor shortage," says Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. ''If you look at wage trends, you will not see much evidence of a labor shortage."

And even if there were such a shortage, a tight labor market would actually boost low-end wages and increase income equality.

Back in the 1990s, a bipartisan commission chaired by Barbara Jordan, a former Democratic congresswoman from Texas, concluded that the United States should adjust immigration policy to reduce immigration initially to about 700,000 a year, and then ultimately to about 550,000.

That range, which would mean a return to 1980s levels of immigration, is still reasonable, says Borjas. Baker, meanwhile, thinks 700,000 new immigrants would be an appropriate yearly level.

Certainly as Congress debates immigration, reasoned labor market arguments for a more restrictive policy deserve a careful look.

Correction: In my last column, I misidentified the executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts. It is Pam Wilmot.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.