I'm pretty late -- at least in the hyper-accelerated blur that passes for blog time -- to Ross Douthat's post on the animating assumptions behind liberal support for immigration, but it struck me as weird enough that I've spent the last few days determined to return to it. Ross argues that liberals support immigration as a sort of de facto humanitarianism -- though I don't really know what's de facto about it -- and goes on to say, "there’s something slightly perverse about pursuing humanitarian ends through policies that lower the incomes of your poorest citizens and raise the incomes of your richest citizens. If I proposed a new AIDS-in-Africa initiative and advocated funding it through a regressive tax that included a tax credit for families making over $75,000, I doubt that many liberals would line up behind the proposal."
Agreed. What a relief it's an inapt analogy!
It's often taken as gospel fact that immigration harms the wages of downscale workers. George Borjas, the Harvard economist whose figures are most often cited, argues that immigration cuts the wages of unskilled workers by about 7 percent. That's a fairly mild effect, and to turn Ross's argument around, there's something slightly perverse about eradicating the massive gains immigrants bring to both themselves and our economy in order to raise the incomes of our poorest citizens by seven percent. There are far easier, and far more positive-sum, policies that could enhance their incomes.
That said, it's not even clear that immigration does harm unskilled workers. Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis, ran the numbers for California, and came to these conclusions:
