What if Hispanic immigration were the only thing worsening our poverty crisis — the inequality presidential candidate John Edwards speaks of when he talks about “Two Americas”? What would liberals think of immigration then?
The Washington Post’s Bob Samuelson thought he had lit upon this delightful dilemma last week in a column titled “Importing Poverty.” Disaggregating recent data on poverty, he discovered that the entire increase in poor Americans from 1990 to today could be statistically accounted for by Hispanic immigrants.
And this is a terrible thing. “By default, our present policy is to import poor people,” he wrote. “We need an immigration policy that makes sense. My oft-stated belief is that legal immigration should favor the high-skilled over the low-skilled.”
But what’s wrong with having more poor people in the country?
I know this sounds strange. Of course it’s bad to see more residents of America in poverty — right? But let’s look at this assumption first from a societal perspective.
What if the newly arrived Hispanic poor aren’t contributing to social ills? They aren’t worsening unemployment, which has fallen slightly since 1990. Of course, economists have made much of stagnant low-end wages during this time period: It seems reasonable to assume this wage depression could be a direct result of the immigration of unskilled workers. But in fact, the general consensus of economists is that large-scale Hispanic immigration has probably lowered wages — but not by much. Estimates of wage reductions for high-school dropouts range between zero and 8 percent. Among the Hispanic population, the unemployment rate matches the general population’s.
Another possible societal drawback of letting in poor Hispanics might be a higher crime rate. One of the biggest anecdotal, emotional objections to loosening immigration quotas is based on the broken windows hypothesis: My neighborhood just doesn’t feel like it used to, with areas that are becoming more Hispanic featuring a greater number of people living in single-family houses and men loitering on stoops looking for work.
But here, the statistics don’t match the faint perception that more low-skilled immigrant labor equals more crime. A recent study by Harvard economist Robert Sampson revealed a lower rate of violence among Mexicans than among whites or blacks in a similar socioeconomic condition. Many others show that immigrants have a lower crime rate than natives and that border cities have less crime than comparable non-border cities.
Philosopher Charles Karelis put out a book this summer that begins to explain why the influx of poor Hispanics hasn’t led to the kind of widespread societal troubles you might expect. Karelis takes seriously the idea that it matters both how objectively poor a person is and how poor he perceives himself to be. One who sees himself as falling behind his neighbors tends to adopt a different and more reckless attitude toward risk-taking — not an irrational one, but one more adapted to thecircumstances he’s used to and his deeply mired condition — than one who sees himself as on the up and up, even if both people have the same-sized bank account.
The situation of those immigrants Samuelson calls merely “poor” may require an important clarification. Many don’t feel poor, having come from much worse in their native countries.
Entering poverty here is often, by the immigrant’s standards, a leap into the middle class. So these poor immigrants are more likely to exhibit value-maximizing behaviors we associate with the middle class — and probably more likely to escape poverty in America, since they’re already halfway on their upward journey.
The Economist showed that while the total number of poor Hispanics has increased in the U.S. since 1990 — a boom accounted for by immigration — the Hispanic poverty rate during that time period has “fallen dramatically, from 28.1 percent in 1990 to 20.6 percent in 2006.” This trend mirrors the experience of Asian immigrants to the United States and suggests Hispanic immigrants are starting to do well once they get here.
Samuelson’s column was supposed to get the goat of people like me, those who both favor a generous immigration policy and feel the poverty of our residents reflects poorly on our country, since we should be able to do better.
But I’m not even on board with his premise — that it’s a bad thing that the number of poor Hispanics is increasing here, as long as they’re not badly influencing our own society. They are better off than they were — a concept that doesn’t enter into Samuelson’s moral calculus.
His very use of the word “importing” treats these immigrants as commodities, or the pests inadvertently shipped in on cargo crates. If you really care about alleviating poverty in the world, that requires a generous policy toward the hard-up as well as those who already have fancy degrees.
Examiner ColumnistEve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
