Thinking about immigration

A few weeks ago our small mountain town held what is becoming one of our most popular festivals – “The Trailing of the Sheep”. The festival celebrates the sheep industry in Idaho and its contributions to our state’s history. It also celebrates the contributions that have been made by various ethnic groups who have immigrated to Idaho as part of the sheep industry and have grown to become part of the cultural fabric of the state. This year the focus was on the Basque community from Spain and France. As I listened to a number of first generation Basque immigrants talk about arriving in the U.S. forty years ago unable to speak English and with tears in their eyes praise the ranchers and others in the western U.S. who gave them their first chance, I wondered whether or not today’s immigrants feel as welcome as those of the recent past. When I commented about this to some of my friends they responded “at least they could speak English”. Trouble is – forty years ago they didn’t “speak English”. Today they are successful investment managers, ranchers, restaurant owners, etc. Our community would be a poorer place without their presence. As we struggle to formulate a immigration policy that makes sense in today’s connected world, perhaps we should be thinking “outside the box”. A recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine Immigration Nation by Tamar Jacoby talks about immigration in terms of supply and demand. He argues that the demand for immigrant workers in the U.S. workforce is 1.5mm per year and that this demand is going to be filled by foreign workers with or without legal status. Any effort by the government to repeal the law of supply and demand absent police state tactics of border control, check points, random raids, and mass incarceration is doomed to fail. (Our government does seem to make periodic efforts to repeal the law of supply and demand without much success – witness prohibition) Some have called for the deportation of all immigrants in this country without legal status. The generally accepted number of these undocumented workers is 12 million. By my calculation this would require 250,000 bus loads to get them back to our borders. It would create a heck of a traffic jam at the border. (There might be an investment opportunity in bus companies.) The most recent U.S unemployment number is 6.7mm people. Assuming that all of the unemployed would fill these jobs if we deported all undocumented workers (a highly suspect assumption), we would still be short 5mm workers. The only solution for companies would be to move the jobs to where the people are instead of moving the people to the jobs in the U.S. It seems to me that any successful immigration policy must allow 1.5mm immigrant workers to come to the U.S. each year to fill the demand. If the guest worker program currently being debated does not allow for filling the demand, illegal immigration will continue. Once the demand is filled the immigration supply will dwindle. People won’t come here to be unemployed. If you are going to be unemployed, you might as well stay home and be unemployed. This debate really never got off the ground in the last Congress; perhaps the recent changes of this week’s election will make a difference.

Immigration