Immigration

A new paper by Brian Cadena uses a clever instrument to better understand the relationship between immigrant inflows and labor market opportunities.  From the abstract (my emphasis added):

This paper demonstrates that immigration flows respond to differences in labor market conditions by documenting the systematic change in newly arriving low-skilled immigrants’ location choices in response to exogenous supply increases among the US- born. In contrast to previous treatments of this question, this paper relies on an identifiable source of exogenous variation that alters the expected returns to entering a labor market. Using pre-reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrant inflows shifted away from cities with more welfare leavers toward cities with smaller reform-induced supply shifts. The empirical methods I use improve upon previous immigrant location studies by explicitly allowing for unobserved city amenities that provide different values based on the immigrant’s source country. The extent of the selection uncovered is substantial: for each additional native woman working in a city as a result of welfare reform, 0.8 fewer female immigrants choose to live and work there. These results provide direct evidence that selective location choices among immigrants tend to equilibrate labor market returns across geography.

If you read all the way to the fifteenth paragraph of this news article covering President Obama's appearance with Mexico's President Calderon on Wednesday, you will find the following claim:

By some estimates, one-tenth of Mexico’s population resides in the United States without permission.

And then you might wonder, now that President Calderon is in the United States on a diplomatic visit, what part of that problem will he own?  You can read the text of the remarks at the White House website, and you won't find much.  Here are the relevant passages about the recent law passed in Arizona (my emphasis added):

The latest news from the Grand Canyon State is that the governor has signed a bill that "prohibits classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group."  The target is apparently a Mexican-American Studies program in the Tuscon school district.  Whether you like laws like this or the immigration law passed last month, they both seem to be desperate attempts to push back against the demographic trends that are going to shape the state's future.

A new report from the Brookings Insitution gives an indication that Arizona is just the leading edge of these demographic changes. 

In more than five years of blogging, I have noticed that posts on immigration generate some of the most heated exchanges in the comment section.  Last week's short post on the new Arizona immigration law was no exception. Here are some more points I'd like to make.

First, what does the law mean?  There have been different characterizations presented in the media, but what I had in mind was similar to this one presented by Roger Noriega:

The Arizona law  requires the police to determine the immigration status of any person who is stopped for any "lawful" reason.  Only if that person does not present valid, government-issued identification is there a "reasonable suspicion" that he or she is "unlawfully present in the United States," after which the officer must make reasonable attempts to verify the person's immigration status.  State authorities are required to report the arrest or conviction of an illegal alien to federal immigration authorities.  The law requires an illegal alien (or a lawful alien who is not carrying his green card) to pay fines and jail costs.  The vast majority of the bill is dedicated to imposing stiff sanctions on those who employ or smuggle illegal aliens.

This is consistent with how I think we should begin addressing illegal immigration.  (See my first post on immigration reform from March 2006.)  If this is not the way the law is intended to work, then the law should be modified.

I think most of the negative reaction to the recently signed immigration law in Arizona has it exactly backwards.  If you told me that by carrying personal identification and producing it when asked by state police, I could play some role in preventing one of my countrymen from meeting the same fate as Rob Krentz, I would happily do it.  I would consider it a small price to pay, as I do each time I show identification at legal border crossings.  The legal residents of Arizona, of whatever race or ethnicity, should be banding together to protect the other legal residents of their state, of whatever race or ethnicity, against harm that results from illegal crossings of their southern border.  Failing to protect each other from violent crime -- not from a request for identification from state police -- is what "undermines basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans."

I wonder if the Founding Fathers envisioned that this sentence (highlighted in bold, courtesy of Harold Meyerson's column in today's Washington Post) would become so commonplace:

The civil rights leaders who have called this march don't doubt that if Obama could enact immigration reform by executive order, he would. In his meeting with them last Thursday, the president affirmed his commitment to the cause. Whether it will become his legislative priority is another question: Congress is waiting to see what Obama does, even as Obama says he needs to see some GOP willingness to enact reform (and this is certainly a cause that some leading Republicans, most notably John McCain, have supported in the past).

Why should Congress wait to see what Obama does?  Congress should do.  Obama should sign, or not.  When you march on Washington, you should be facing east from the Washington Monument, not north.

I first learned of this phenomenon about 10 years ago on my first trip to China.  Imagine the population of Russia walking around China looking for work.  From Yao Lu, a sociologist at Columbia:

The conventional term for internal migrants in China is “floating population,” a phrase that describes unprecedented migrant flows, moving from inland villages in the underdeveloped central and western regions to China’s costal cities, searching for work. According to recent estimates, the total number of migrant workers is more than 150 million, perhaps the largest movement of labor in human history. The floating population is a major force fueling the country’s rapid economic growth. Having made China one of the largest export economies in the world, migrant workers have also become visible to those outside China.

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