David Brooks gets it wrong, again
I was reading David Brooks today in the New York Times. Ordinarily, on those of Brooks’ columns that I have a chance to post a comment about on the Times website I try to maintain a tone of respectful skepticism. I missed the opportunity to comment earlier on today’s column which, in the main, I generally agree with Brooks that an immigration bill introduced by Arkansas’ Senator Tom Cotton and Georgia’s Senator David Perdue that would cut the number of legal immigrants into the United States in half by roughly 500,000 would be a terrible idea. Brooks uses unfilled employment vacancies in the construction industry as his metric to make his point that cutting the number of legal immigrants would not be an incentive for American workers to fill those jobs even if they are no longer competing with recent immigrants.
Historically, America was largely built by immigrant labor, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Bohemian, Balkan, and the like in the eastern half of the country, and with Mexican and Chinese labor on the West Coast and elsewhere in the Far West. Economic competition and nativist racism were used by employers to their advantage to keep wages low. That open ended system of unrestricted immigration largely ended in the mid-1920s. In the post-World War II era, population gains in the states bordering the Pacific Ocean and Southwest were incentives for migrant agricultural laborers to seek employment in the construction industries, which is where second and third generation descendents of immigrants now frequently work.
Brooks is correct in suggesting that the building and construction industries no longer offer reliable and sustainable employment opportunities at the bottom end of the American economy, either for immigrants or for native-born workers. He mentions the fact that the near-collapse of the housing industry has drastically reduced opportunities for employment in home and light-commercial construction, but he neglects to point out that we as a country no longer invest in publicly-funded infrastructure. The Interstate Highway System, begun during the Eisenhower Administration, and funded with plentiful federal tax dollars, could no longer be funded. Likewise, we no longer invest in airports, harbors, dams and flood control facilities that were the mainstay of a large fraction of working-class families over three or four generations. Much of that infrastructure was built during the New Deal Democratic administrations of Roosevelt and Truman, and carried on by the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. But that type of investment has always been a national priority, going back to the beginning of our Republic, where, under the Constitution, Congress is empowered to spend to the general welfare.
Nowadays, much of that earlier infrastructural investment is corroding or decaying under our feet. Just this past two weeks, several large reservoirs in California were found to be at risk for collapse, because funds to improve or maintain them were no longer priorities, certainly not with the federal government, which has been hamstrung by congressional Republicans’ refusal to appropriate the necessary funding, and to a lesser extent the State of California, which has scant funds to spare. In a decade-long drought, few lawmakers anticipated that flood control would become the state’s number one priority in 2017.
Brooks mentions some statistics regarding construction employment in the European Union, Denmark in particular, to the effect that immigration there did not drive down wages but rather allowed native Danes to improve their economic status by seeking upscale employment opportunities that paid better. Nice to know, but essentially irrelevant when we consider the fact that birthrates overall within the United States have largely declined over the past decades, thereby reducing opportunities for younger, healthier, and more vigorous workers to seek employment in construction and the building trades. Those jobs, by definition, require much more physical exertion than their counterparts in the service industries. Older workers, even those with construction experience, often find themselves unable to keep up with the pace of work today. It is also an established fact that many former construction workers are disqualified from that kind of work by reason of physical disability brought on by workplace injury and progressive diseases, such as diabetes. Large numbers of them are receiving disability payments, either under Social Security or other types of disability compensation programs.
So, if construction is a declining factor in the American economy, where will new workers get the requisite training and job experience they need to succeed, and to eventually replace those who leave or retire from that form of employment?
In addition to the physical demands that construction workplaces on individual workers, the intellectual demands can be equally daunting and less easily overcome. Brooks mentions a study by the National Academy of Sciences that found that immigration did not drive down most wages, but that it had a “very small” and temporary effect on native-born workers without a high school degree. Maybe so, but lacking a high school diploma or GED certificate creates more than social stigma. It can effectively foreclose any opportunity for those workers from improving their employment prospects beyond the occasional or seasonal jobs that they might have to rely upon to survive.
Contrary to Donald Trump’s and his cohort’s mistaken assertion that immigration is the source of our job losses, it is well understood by most people that technology is the cause of most of the job losses that we have suffered since the late 1970s. Regardless of where one works, understanding technology and how to employ it is the quintessential and universal skill that one needs in order to obtain and hold any sort of job that promises more than dead-end employment. In the building and construction industry in particular, where calculations of dimension and volumetric quantity are essential skills, even for casual laborers, and ability to use computational tools and devices is essential. Likewise, the ability to install and calibrate environmental sensors, electronics of every description, and related technologies, is also essential if one is to do anything more than earn a living through muscle power alone. Those jobs are rapidly diminishing, because machines do it better and cheaper.
But for those who do aspire to better employment opportunities elsewhere, and do not have the requisite diplomas or certificates attesting to their completed education or training and competencies in essential job-related skills, they may find themselves precluded from obtaining jobs they are qualified to do by reason of state-mandated licensure requirements that, while reasonable in the abstract, may prove to be as sure a barrier to internal migration between states and localities for native-born workers as our immigration quotas and other restrictive measures adopted by the national government. Occupational licensure frequently requires, as it should, licensees to upgrade their skills, most frequently obtained through trade-or industry-sponsored skills courses, and each licensee is required to participate and acquire a certain number of Continuing Education completed hours of training over specified time frames.
It’s become a mantra among certain conservative commentators that state-mandated licensure requirements are overly broad, but as long as we have no national standard for work skill competencies, states are generally free to establish whatever minimum standard they believe necessary to protect the public health, safety, and welfare. And who is to say that states requiring continuing education and licensure are wrong to do so, where the object of that licensure is to protect the public from harm from untrained or negligent people working in businesses jobs that they are not qualified to do? Restrictions on immigration will do nothing to improve employment opportunities for prospective workers in jobs that now require significant investments of time and effort to successfully complete job-related training and certifications before being hired.
Instead, Brooks points to Houston, Texas, with that city’s vibrant economic life, few zoning restrictions, and a culture that welcomes immigrants. Brooks suggests, in an aside, that the Houston scene is tasteless and tacky, and that he would prefer a bit more in the way of municipal zoning restrictions, that, in and of itself, does not make his case. Aestheticism aside, we live in a complex world where the laws of physics ultimately prevail. Living together in a complex, multi-layered environment affects everyone. Regulation has been a part of the human environment for more than five thousand years. Land use regulations in today’s United States pale in comparison to grazing and irrigation practices having the force of law in ancient lands. The Libertarian conceit, with its emphasis on the preening self, is tolerated only where society’s core interests are not at stake. When that happens, today’s Republican so-called ‘Conservatism’ will be swept away.
Houston is seen as welcoming emigrants, that welcome implicitly includes competencies to do work; and increasingly, the world of work is requiring much more than the ability to perform physical labor. By and large, foreign-born immigrants undertaking to emigrate to the United States, and willing to incur the expense and risk of doing so, are intellectually well prepared for whatever employment opportunities they may aspire to, and take advantage of, if and when presented. Not so much with many of our native-born. JD Vance, in his acclaimed book, Hillbilly Elegy, makes the point quite well, as he relates that neither he, nor any of his friends growing up in Middletown, Ohio, returned there to live after they completed their educations elsewhere. This is the same story told by every immigrant who came to America to escape the lack of opportunity in their former home or country, to pursue a better life here. But in this case, the former home is here, and it is not going away anytime soon.
I suppose, after sounding like a member of the liberal elite with the first 18 paragraphs of his column, Brooks apparently felt the need to reaffirm his Conservative credentials with a snarky comment that Senators Cotten and Purdue reincarnate “those static mind-set/slow growth/zero-sum liberals one used to meet in the 1970s.” My recollections of the 1970s are quite clear, and except for a few zealots I might have run into in and around Berkeley, there were very few examples of that type of mindset that I encountered.
What has changed are the terms under which growth can be achieved while still maintaining a sustainable civilization. Protecting the environment from indiscriminate dumping of toxic waste does not, ipso facto, advocate for limiting economic growth. It does, however, insist that polluters put the cost of pollution on their own balance sheets, rather than fobbing it off on everyone else. Clean air, the same thing. Opposing slash-and-burn ruination of our land, water, and natural resources in the pursuit of short-term profit does not make someone an enemy of economic growth. Neither does opposing corporate domination of our political life make us anti-growth.
The true irony is that at the inception of our country’s experiment in republican government, Hamiltonians argued that by natural law men of property were somehow entitled to a privileged position in managing public affairs because they had a greater stake in society. That was in the day when most wealth was held and managed by individual persons acting for themselves or in small business partnerships, and joint stock companies were few in number and closely regulated by the states granting them their charters to do business. Today, large business corporations have only the most tenuous ties to their owners, who by and large lack any reasonable means to hold corporate managers and employees to account. That, in effect, has transformed those enterprises into self-governing quasi states that Alexander Hamilton would vigorously oppose as a violation of fundamental republican principles if he were alive today.
As a self-proclaimed Conservative, Brooks should be pointing out that civilized society’s first obligation is to its own preservation and to insist on personal accountability for those who create moral hazard in advancing their own wealth and happiness to the detriment of everyone else.
From time immemorial, kings and governments of every description have used their wealth and resources to protect themselves and those they rule from external threat. In return they promise protection and fundamental fairness in the ways they use their power to rule. In economics, it should be no different. In a world where certain economists style themselves as high priests of modern civilization; we know that they flatter themselves far too much, and take themselves much too seriously, when the stakes for our survival are so high. Their mathematics are abstruse as their conjectures are unprovable; and the assumptions upon which those conjectures are grounded are frequently devoid of empirical evidence that supports their conclusions. What we have than is a half-baked philosophy that for some has become a form of religion.
But David Brooks seems to want to have it both ways, tepidly acknowledging the risks we face in the world that we live in, while still trying to pay homage to those whose pretensions and excesses in pursuit of unattainable ideals that are destructive of every value we hold dear.
