Billionaire Obama and Clinton fundraiser Warren Buffett and his billionaire ally Bill Gates disagree with the assessment that America is direly in need of Great-Making Again, judging by this interview they gave to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic.
The two billionaires do a good job of putting our economy in context: The country is richer, even the middle-class people live so much better than the wealthiest lived in the late 19th Century. Yet the wealth isn’t spreading terribly equally and “a more and more specialized society will create wider disparities and results,” as Buffett puts it.
The interview is worth a read. The billionaires’ approach to immigration is interesting.
At one point Goldberg asks Buffett, “You’re not a big wall guy, I guess?”
Buffett laughed “No!” and sang the praises of immigrants like Albert Einstein and former Intel CEO Andy Grove. “The quality of immigrants,” Buffett said, “the motivation of immigrants, this is what has contributed to the greatness of the country.”
Buffett is correct, of course, that America’s openness — to immigrants, to new ideas, to startups, to risk-takers — is essential to our greatness. But Buffett’s and Gates’ experiences with immigrants are probably pretty different from most Americans’ experiences with immigrants.
First, 99 percent of immigrants are not Albert Einsteins or Intel CEOs because 99 percent of humans are not Albert Einsteins or CEOs. A disproportionate number of the immigrants Buffett and Gates deal with are brilliant world changers. That could skew their image.
Second, if you look at their economic interactions with immigrants, billionaires have a very different experience than the working class does. If you look purely at the economic angle, most wealthy Americans interact with immigrants as labor: lawn mowers, restaurant staff, household labor or corporate employees. The poorer you are, the less likely you are to consume immigrant labor (in a visible way, at least), and the more likely you are to compete against immigrant labor. That is, low-skilled or poor natives will compete against immigrants for low-skilled jobs or jobs that don’t require strong connections to get.
The most common criticism of immigration, one recent poll found, is that it deprives natives of good-paying jobs.
Harvard Professor George Borjas has put out a study finding that immigration generally helps the economy while hurting low-wage people, largely by driving down wages.
Buffett and Gates are smart. I’m sure they get this. So I’m sure they also understand why the Atlantic’s headline, “Buffett and Gates: America Is Already Great, Thanks to Immigrants” will elicit more guffaws than reflection from immigration critics.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s commentary editor, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
