In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz calls for an immigrant stimulus. He wants to see a comprehensive immigration bill, with legalization and guest worker as well as enforcement provisions. This is in line with the Journal’s longstanding position and with Barack Obama’s call on Congress to pass such an immigration bill.
Crovitz makes strong arguments for increasing the number of skilled immigrants. Currently thousands of high-skill would-be immigrants are prevented from coming to the United States by our immigration laws. In contrast, Canada and Australia have immigration laws that give a preferred place to high-skill immigrants; our laws, since the 1965 act sponsored by Edward Kennedy, let in many more people through their extended-family-reunification provisions.
But Crovitz makes no real argument for legalizing unskilled immigrants or maintaining the flow of unskilled immigrants. On the contrary, he concedes that in a recession the economic incentives for low-skill immigrants are reduced and if, as generally conceded, the presence of large numbers of low-skill immigrants marginally reduces the wages of low-skill Americans, the argument for maintaining low-skill immigration is at its weakest at this point in the business cycle.
All of which suggests to me a compromise, which will displease many lobbying forces on both sides of the issue. The compromise is to move our system toward the Canadian and Australian models, with more places for high-skill immigrants and less for those benefiting from extended-family-reunification provisions. This would displease the Latino groups and groups representing employers of low-skill labor (though a separate provision for guest workers, especially, in agriculture, might assuage some of the latter). And any legalization provisions would continue to anger those who regard them as “amnesty” and those who want to see fewer immigrants in the country.
The devil is in the details, and in figuring out the possible consequences of the details. The 1965 act actually imposed lower quotas on Latin American immigrants (who before 1965 faced little in the way of limits on immigration). But its family-reunification provisions were taken advantage of by millions of Latinos, about half of them from Mexico, as they developed chain migration of relatives and giving birth to “anchor babies” in the United States who were then, under prevailing interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, American citizens. If there is any propitious time to cut back on low-skill immigration it is now when the U.S. unemployment rate and our need for low-skill workers is relatively low. But I suspect that this is not the approach the Obama administration and congressional Democrats will take.
