The Democratic Party’s Shift in Immigration Explained
Last week, Chicagoans attended a town hall meeting to express their outrage over the influx of immigrants into their city. More specifically, they protested sheltering immigrants at Amundsen Park. Despite pleas from the council — including John Roberson’s, the Chief Operating Officer of Chicago, who emphasized how this is a “humanitarian crisis” (24:40) — one can hear the outrage of attendees. Why would a city already rife with poverty and crime devote resources to housing people who probably entered the country illegally? Such a question is possibly what enraged the crowd who shouted “You work for us!” This event, along with Eric Adam’s controversial speech on immigrants coming to New York City last month, reveals a shift in the Democratic Party that culminated in Biden reviving Trump’s notorious wall. Trip Gabriel and Lisa Lerner of the New York Times noticed this trend as well.
This turn is surprising. In response to Donald Trump’s approach to immigration, which combined bigoted rhetoric with perceivably inhumane enforcement of the rules, the Democratic Party seemingly embraced the polar opposite take. I cringed at the Presidential candidates back in 2020 who called for open borders. (All under the guise of “Decriminalizing border crossings.”) No doubt I was not the only one. So what gives? Xenophobia is undoubtedly a culprit. H.P. Lovecraft once remarked “[T]he oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Given we evolved in mutual-aid societies constantly at war with one another, bigotry turned into a survival mechanism. When Americans behold thousands upon thousands of “aliens” crossing the border, those barbaric yet innate tendencies kick in. But that is not the only factor.
The other factor is this: Class warfare. Immigration plays a key role in rising economic inequality for reasons comparable to unfair trade agreements. By artificially increasing the supply of low-skill workers, the wages of everyone falls. And since illegal immigrants are not covered by labor regulations, employers will prefer them over high-school dropouts who are paid very little. But even if one ignores illegal immigrants, without any easily transferable skills, the worst off among the poor will struggle to compete with the migrants who outnumber them. As George J. Borjas notes:
The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year. We don’t need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages.
And who benefits from this the most? The rich. Immigration helps the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants — from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus” — the net increase in the total wealth of the native population — to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.
Borjas continues:
The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus [in government services], so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers — the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans — sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program [from the poor to the rich].
Yes, immigration helps the economy in other ways thanks to the increased productivity and the innovation from high-skill immigrants. Theoretically speaking, immigrants can also increase the number of consumers in the economy; creating more jobs thanks to improved aggregate demand. But importing large numbers of low-skill workers at this point is effectively class warfare. This, in my view, is a consequence of neoliberals failing to minimize capitalism’s fundamental contradictions. They ignored the destructive inequality that comes with prioritizing bourgeois interests; the failure of “trickle-down economics” explains the surge in populism on both the left and the right.
Comprehensive immigration reform of course is the ideal. As long as you demonstrate a strong desire to be an American while lacking a shady or criminal past, and you are willing to contribute to her national welfare, coming into this country should be much easier. Personally I also favor something resembling Canada’s point system; promoting both integration into American society and filling in labor market gaps (best of both worlds!). But this has to come with redistributing the financial gains immigration creates from the rich to the poor. The billions of dollars created by immigrant laborers should not be enjoyed primarily by the rich; citizens should get a slice of the cake as well in the form of a job guarantee, a universal dividend, among other possible programs.
Without adequate redistributive programs and modernizing worker’s rights, immigration is in fact class warfare; or what Bernie Sanders once called “a Koch brothers conspiracy.”
