Conservative intellectuals and pundits who are overcome with enthusiasm for wooing “Sam’s Club Republicans,” as opposed to the more traditional country club Republicans, might want to stop off at a Sam’s Club or, just as good, a Wal-Mart store to chat with the customers who are not new immigrants–about half, by some reckonings. If they did, they might find that this sought-after constituency is not quite in agreement with the relaxed immigration policy that John McCain and President Bush favor. At least not with the rules as they now are.
The resentment of illegal immigration is more than a mere under-the-breath mumble and isn’t assuaged with talk of eventual assimilation, of adding to the cultural richness of America, of how hardworking the newcomers are (as, indeed, many of them are). But hardworking at creating and tending to the gardens and pools of upper income Americans, many of whom wouldn’t know how to find a Sam’s Club without a GPS, doesn’t butter the parsnips of working-class Americans, typified by the folks I talked to this August in many parts of Colorado, a swing state.
The first complaint is about the cost of health care. Not the cost of fixing whatever is wrong with themselves, or even for uninsured and poorer neighbors, but the cost of caring for immigrants, many or most of whom they assume are illegally in this country. One woman talks of holding down three jobs so that she can pay off an expensive operation she endured. Meanwhile, the hospital has to bear the costs–some of them loaded onto her bill, she is certain–of maternity wards crowded with immigrants, most of whom she believes are illegal who either cannot or do not pay the costs of bringing into the world the new American citizens who they hope will make their own deportation less likely.
A father of a young teenager rails at the fact that his daughter is being held back in school because so many of her classmates can’t speak English and, bored by lessons they don’t understand, disrupt the class–teachers being helpless to prevent such mayhem in part because they feel physically threatened by the young miscreants. And these Sam’s Clubbers are more than a little annoyed when they hear it suggested that the teachers–not to mention cops and doctors–should learn to speak Spanish. “Press 2 for Spanish” is one of the most derided terms in this part of America.
Others talk of the destruction of property values in towns that were once peaceful, indeed sleepy places, but now are uninhabitable in the evenings and on weekends because young male immigrants–unfettered by family constraints with their wives and children left behind in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or other Hispanic countries–consume more beer than they should, and behave as you would expect under the circumstances.
No use trotting out the argument that the economy needs these workers, and that in states that are driving them away by deploying novel law-enforcement techniques–Arizona is a recent example–employers are groaning about shortages of agricultural and construction labor. To the Sam’s Club crowd, this is nothing more than an argument by employers eager to keep wages down and preferring to deal with a workforce made docile by its illegal status, or by a weak bargaining position due to the need for a paycheck, and now. They don’t need studies by Harvard professor George Borjas to tell them what their eyes reveal–that immigrant workers put downward pressure on wages.
Or try the argument that one of the aspects of American exceptionalism and greatness has been its ability to absorb immigrants, to turn the huddled masses into hardworking, tax-paying American citizens. Even throw in the heroism of newcomers who are serving in the armed forces. Again, no dice. Sam’s Clubbers know the difference between the self-reliant immigrants who came here before the welfare state was in place and the newer arrivals who know that the benefits on offer include access to free medical care–free in the sense that they do not have to pay for it–and other perks. Indeed, many have grandparents who came to this country because they were told the streets were paved with gold, found out they weren’t, and learned English so that they could vote and set their children on the path of the American dream.
Most of all, the Sam’s Club voters hold to the old-fashioned notion that illegal means illegal, that illegal behavior requires punishment not a reward, and that even newly arrived legal immigrants are making their lives more difficult. They know, deep down, that it is impossible to deport 12 million, or is it 13 million or 15 million, illegal immigrants. And they know, too, that many of the people who have them up in arms are, one-on-one, quite decent and even nice. And some, such as overseas doctors training here, are darned useful to have around in an emergency. Most of all, they know this: The government either has no idea of the impact clusters of immigrants are having on their daily lives, or just doesn’t care. They don’t believe studies that show that immigrants do not reduce property values, because anecdote trumps data, and they all know someone who has had to sell a home or trailer for a fraction of what the property would have brought before their neighborhood was affected by immigration. And they certainly don’t believe studies that show that the crime rate among immigrants is no different from that of people like themselves, because they know that their local police are so steeped in studies urging them to “understand” the newcomers that law enforcement is no longer applied with an even hand.
B efore reaching for your poison pen to accuse me of nativism, racism, or whatever accusation substitutes for rational argument, ask yourself this: Can Republican candidates hope to find a new constituency in the aisles of Sam’s Clubs if they ignore the most salient fact of life for these voters? So, as Lenin asked in another connection, “What is to be done?” The broad outline of a pro-Sam’s Club policy is easy to articulate, but more difficult to implement. Immigration confers benefits on employers and costs on native workers, mostly workers at the lower end of the income scale–the Ronald Reagan-Hillary Clinton Democrats. It is no surprise that the Wall Street Journal and employer groups favor few restrictions on immigration. To borrow from the language of my undergraduate days, the employer class benefits from a workforce that does not demand higher wages; depresses, even if only slightly, the wages of American workers (5 to 8 percent is the best but highly contested estimate); and is docile. In technical jargon, employers want the labor supply curve to be highly elastic, so that it takes only a slight increase in wage rates to induce a flood of job applications. In more earthy terms, employers prefer what Henry Ford was wont to call “a few hungry men at the gate.”
In a world in which transport costs are low and knowledge of job opportunities and living standard differentials is readily available to anyone watching an American soap opera, people will move to the highest paying jobs almost as surely as capital will seek out the highest return. Not quite as readily, as it is far easier for a young banker to push a button and move millions of dollars around the world than it is for a potential immigrant to pull up stakes and seek out opportunities in another country.
But readily enough, as anyone who has stayed in an American hotel with a workforce that is increasingly drawn from Eastern Europe and South America will attest. Not a bad thing–if the beneficiaries of this work force do not pass the costs off to our typical Sam’s Clubbers. Which is now the case: Employers do not bear all the costs created by their decision to hire immigrants, and the hotel guests pay less than they would if the hotel’s labor costs were higher.
There is a solution. Employers can be prevented from fobbing off the costs of their hiring practices onto others by laws forcing them to internalize these costs, just as we force polluters to pay for permits that reimburse society for the costs their manufacturing activity creates.
Such cost internalization can be accomplished by requiring employers to purchase import permits for immigrant workers they choose to hire. The funds can follow the worker, and go to the hospitals, schools, and other facilities that must bear the burden of caring for and educating the newcomers–and that means paying the costs of assimilation: funding language and other courses necessary to get immigrants to buy into the society they are joining. If the employer chooses to hire illegals, when he is found out–and enforcement must be stepped up–whatever monetary penalties are imposed on him should include reimbursement to the community for the costs his workers have imposed on the hardworking Sam’s Clubbers.
This proposal, I know, will upset some conservatives. It might not be a call for mandatory, employer-purchased insurance, but it does require employers to reimburse the affected community for, among other things, the health care costs of immigrant employees. The justification is clear: Otherwise, those nontrivial costs come out of the pockets of the Sam’s Clubbers, who Republicans know are tempted to defect to the Democrats in search of the tax cuts that Barack Obama is promising them. In a rather indirect way, the Democrat’s proposal to tax the rich, which includes many employers, and distribute the proceeds to middle-income families, a group that includes many Sam’s Clubbers, will accomplish the reimbursement of losers by winners that should be the goal of immigration policy. But only very, very indirectly and wastefully indeed.
R obert Solow, the left-of-center Nobel economics laureate, recently told a conference in Landau, Germany, that economists must develop ways of redistributing income “to those who are damaged by -otherwise useful developments in the economy from those who profit.” His is the old liberal cry for a more equitable distribution of wealth. But as John Selden pointed out in 1869, “Equity . . . is . . . what everyone pleases to make it. Equity is a roguish thing.”
The best answer to such a policy call for “equity” is a policy based on economic efficiency, which is served when the consumer of a good or service pays all the costs associated with the creation of that good or service. If the consumer pays less, the good will be overconsumed. Which is what happens when an employer can avoid some of the costs of his decision to hire immigrant workers: He will use such labor in greater quantities than if he had to pay its full cost, which includes the cost imposed on society. Conservatives who for years have opposed setting a minimum wage for young workers on the ground that employers will therefore use fewer such workers, must surely understand this.
Such is the architecture of an immigration policy that will appeal to Sam’s Clubbers, and not merely to Hillary’s shot-and-a-beer in the back of a pickup crowd. It won’t be easy to craft. But I leave that chore to legislative carpenters.
America needs immigration. We need the young workers who are daring enough to try to make their way in a foreign country. We need the infusion of cultures different from our own, so long as they come along with the desire to assimilate. Most of all, we need to regain our pride as a haven for the hardworking and the persecuted. John McCain once asked a small group, in response to a hostile question about his views on immigration, “What is America about if it is not a place that welcomes hardworking people?” Now, if only he would match an economically sophisticated immigration policy to the grandeur of that vision of what this country is all about, he might indeed be able to garner votes in the aisles of Sam’s Clubs.
Irwin M. Stelzer, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).
