When in January 2008 the Republican Party candidates for president met in the Ronald Reagan Library for their last major televised debate, John McCain was asked whether he would vote for the comprehensive immigration reform package that he had steered so diligently through the Senate in 2005 and 2006. Only reluctantly and after a number of repetitions of the question did he concede that he would not. He said,
I would not because we know what the situation is today. The people want the borders secured first. And so to say that that would come to the floor of the Senate, it won’t…. We are all in agreement as to what we need to do. Everybody knows it. We can fight some more about it—about who wanted this or who wanted that—but the fact is, we all know that the American people want the borders secured first. We will secure the borders first when I am president of the United States. I know how to do that. I come from a border state where we know about building walls and ankle barriers and sensors and all of the things necessary. I will have the border state governors certify the borders are secure, and then we will move on to the other aspects of this issue.1
This reversal of position by the man who would go on to carry the flag for the Republican Party in the 2008 presidential campaign spoke directly to the depth of feeling on the question of “illegal immigration” among rank-and-file Republican Party activists in the run-up to that election. At a time when a clear majority of the American population favored some route to legality for undocumented workers—of the kind allowed for in the earlier McCain-Kennedy proposals—the vast majority of the Republican Party base did not. By the time of McCain’s about-face, Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) was no longer competing with him for the Republican nomination, but both the substance and the intensity of Tancredo’s concerns remained uppermost in the minds of the party faithful, whose votes McCain needed to win. Tancredo spoke for them and for many other Americans when he insisted that the influx of undocumented workers into the United States was putting the country into “mortal danger.” For Tancredo and his kind, the external threat was “Islamo-fascism,” the internal one was what he called “malignant multiculturalism,” and the two were inexorably linked by “porous borders and a broken immigration system.” For a certain type of American conservative in the contemporary immigration debate, both national security and national identity were and are at stake.2
The United States has two borders, of course—the longer one is actually with Canada—and to his credit, Tom Tancredo wants a fence on both. But in the popular debate now raging about illegal immigration, attention is entirely focused on the border to our south. It is immigration from Mexico, not immigration from Canada, that is in the spotlight. It is the supposed economic and social effects of a rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population within the United States that most concerns the contemporary critics of porous borders. The 40% of the undocumented workforce that comes in illegally through airports, docks, and Canada is not center stage; and it is not center stage because illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border is now said to be on such a scale, and to carry such an impact, that it requires a separate response, a response that has to be made first.
We hope that this book will help to shape that response. It has been designed to fill a particular gap in the existing literature on Mexican immigration in the United States and to make an argument about how that immigration should be studied if adequate policy proposals are ultimately to emerge. Writing on immigration abounds. Much of it is very fine, but much of it is also specifically focused. We see three dominant categories of writing on current immigration issues relating to Mexico. The first body of scholarship uses information, often selectively and with ideological motivations, to focus primarily on the domestic consequences of immigration, frequently ignoring the transnational roots of that immigration and its impact on the countries from which migrants come. A second body of scholarship focuses primarily on the plight and day-to-day struggles of Latino immigrants in the United States and on the personal hardships and dangers associated with illegal entry to the United States, often using that material to make impassioned arguments for a more liberal and open immigration policy. Yet a third body of scholarship is more policy oriented, setting out detailed prescriptions for reform, often at the cost of ignoring the impact of such prescriptions on the lives of the people caught up in the immigration drama. This book is based on the idea that understanding immigration and designing adequate immigration policies requires that the agendas of all three bodies of scholarship are considered at the same time.
Until now, as far as we can tell, no single work has provided a window through which simultaneously to consider the causes and effects of immigration, the human dimensions of immigration, and the proper policy response to it. We need that window. None of us can hope to make intelligent choices without examining carefully the historical national and international economic forces that push and pull to bring immigrants to the United States. However, to consider these factors alone, without understanding the deep human impact of our choices on immigrants and the native population would, in our view, not only be morally reprehensible; it would also prove counterproductive for policy on the ground. Only through understanding the multifaceted nature of the immigration issue can we as Americans hope to design an immigration policy that both defends the national interest and is economically sound, while simultaneously being humane and practically effective.
In its focus on these three areas together, this volume aims to illuminate the complexities that lie beyond the sound bite and the headline. It seeks to provide its readers with the information they need if they, as citizens in a healthy democracy, are ever to leave behind the current rancor of the immigration debate.
In a controversy of this kind, it is best to start with the numbers. For as the critics of immigration regularly point out, the number of the foreign-born currently living in the United States is large, although not yet quite as large (as a percentage of the whole) as it was at the end of the first great period of migration into the United States. During the 1880–1924 migration the proportion of the population that was foreign-born peaked at 14.7% in 1910. The equivalent percentage for 2007 was 12.7%. But it is rising and could well be on its way to 19% by 2050.3 Certainly, the last forty years have seen a significant increase in the rate and scale of immigration. There were fewer than 10 million foreign-born people in the United States in 1970 (5% of the whole). By March 2004 that figure was 35.7 million.4 In the 1970s the United States absorbed 4.5 million legal immigrants. In the 1980s it absorbed 7.3 million, and in the 1990s 9.1 million; plus maybe 10–12 million illegal immigrants. Indeed, “between 1990 and 2005, 14.5 million immigrants were accepted as permanent legal U.S. residents, an average of almost a million a year.”5
Daunting as these numbers are, they need to be set against the total U.S. population. “Since 2000, the annual number of legal and illegal immigrants joining the US population has averaged 5.1 per 1,000 U.S. residents.” The equivalent ratio for 1901–10 was 10.4 immigrants per 1,000 residents. In fact, the immigration rate today, though high by recent standards, is still “lower than during any decade between 1840 and 1920.”6 However, as in 1901–10, the percentage figure slightly understates the actual degree of labor force participation by immigrant workers because the demographics of the incoming and the indigenous populations differ in significant ways. The immigrant population is currently more male than the native one (60% as against 53%), contains a greater proportion of twenty-five to fifty-four year olds (76% against 67%), and accordingly has a higher employment participation rate. In 2005–6, 81.7% of all foreign-born men in the United States were in paid employment. The equivalent figure for native-born men was 72%. By 2006 foreign-born workers made up 15.3% of the U.S. civilian labor force age sixteen and over.7 The Pew Hispanic Center currently estimates that that figure will rise to 23%—or nearly 1 in 4—by 2050.8
The contemporary foreign-born population in the United States is also more Latino in composition than ever before. A century ago most immigrants entering the United States came from Europe, but that is no longer the case. Between 1980 and 2000, 87% of all legal immigration came from outside Europe, with half from Latin America alone.9 By 2006 “Hispanics comprised about 50% of the foreign-born labor force compared with about 7% of the native-born labor force.”10 Indeed, 34% of all immigration into the United States since 1990 has come from only one Latin country: Mexico. “In 2004, the 10.5 million Mexican immigrants living in the United States were 31% of the U.S. foreign-born population and equivalent to 10% of the total population of Mexico.”11 The Mexican-born population in the United States—both legal and illegal—has grown by about 500,000 a year for the last decade.12 The Latino community is currently the fastest growing in the United States. According to the latest projections from the Pew Hispanic Center, by 2050 it is likely that 29% of the entire U.S. population will be of Latino extraction, as will 31% of the adult working population.13 The current equivalent figure for both is 14%.
About two-thirds of legal permanent residents in the United States are the family members of earlier legal immigrants. There are currently no limits on the entry of immediate relatives (that is, spouses, minor children, and parents) of existing U.S. citizens, and 494,920 such relatives gained legal permanent residence (LPR) status in 2007. The equivalent figure for 2005 was 436,115.14 The number of visas available for the relatives of those here on green cards is capped, however. In 2005, 213,000 such visas were issued to family members who invariably had had to wait several years for permission to enter the United States. In “oversubscribed” countries—of which Mexico is currently a major example—even close relatives often have to wait as long as ten years for such a visa, and more distant relatives must wait longer still. Twenty years for an adult brother or sister is not uncommon. Accordingly, many would-be immigrants do not wait. “Instead they arrive with visitors visas and overstay or cross the border illegally.”15 So many, in fact, that by 2005, 30% of all foreign-born U.S. residents were here illegally, as against 31% who were naturalized U.S. citizens and 39% who were legal foreign residents, both permanent and temporary. (The absolute numbers were 11.1 million illegal immigrants, 11.5 million naturalized citizens, and 14.4 million legal foreign residents.) Currently in the United States, unauthorized immigration accounts for a third to a half of all new immigration flows, and “Mexico is by far and away the largest source country for those entering… illegally.”16 Researchers at Pew estimated that there were 6.2 million unauthorized Mexican migrants in the United States in 2005, some 56% of the total unauthorized population of 11.1 million. Pew also estimated that the size of the unauthorized Mexican population grew by 1.5 million between 2000 and 2005 and that unauthorized migrants (from Mexico and elsewhere) now account for about 4.9% of the civilian labor force: 7.2 million workers out of a total labor force of 148 million.
Thanks to the researchers at the Pew Hispanic Center and at the Mexican Migration Project, we know far more about the demographics of the undocumented immigrant population than might otherwise be expected, given its necessarily clandestine existence. We know, for example, that 30% of all illegal immigrants to the United States arrived after 2000 and that two-thirds of them arrived after 1994—coincidentally the year that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. We know that throughout that period the annual number of unauthorized immigrants regularly exceeded the number of authorized ones: 700,000 a year versus 600,000, for example, between 2000 and 2004. We know that two-thirds of all unauthorized immigrants live in just eight states,17 but that—as with legal immigrants—they are beginning to disperse geographically. We know that unauthorized immigrants are relatively young and have a high rate of labor market participation: 92% for adult men in 2004, though only 56% for adult women. We know—quite contrary to the usual stereotype—that fewer than half the men are single and unattached. The rest live in families, so that among the unauthorized totals there are at least 1.6 million children. Indeed, as women increasingly join the ranks of the undocumented, the number of nonworkers among them is on the rise, though it currently remains less than one in four.18 We also know—in line with the usual stereotype—that, particularly among young unauthorized immigrants, numbers of high school dropouts are significantly higher than among either their native-born peers or young legal immigrants: a 49% dropout rate from high school for eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old undocumented workers versus 21% for similarly aged legal immigrants and 11% for native-born young adults.19
Numbers are important, but how much do they really tell us. What do we know of the wider context and causal forces within which to set these numbers, and what do we know of the experiences and consequences that are subsumed within them?
This volume is divided into six thematic sections designed to capture the multidimensionality of the immigration debate: “Placing Immigration,” “Living Immigration,” “The Economics of Immigration,” “The Illegality of Immigration,” “The Reform of Immigration Law,” and a final policy-oriented section titled “Addressing the Conundrum.”
The first section places current immigration to the United States into a broader global context. In chapter 2 Mark Miller shows that immigration is an enduring reality of the world system and a constant feature in the historical development of American society. He argues for policy reforms that take into account the longer term trajectory of immigration flows, providing a path to legal status buttressed by more credible enforcement of existing immigration law. Miller underscores the commonality of the challenges posed by immigration cross-nationally and how they have played out with distinct policy responses, some more effective than others.
Michele Wucker explores concepts of citizenship in chapter 3. An understanding of the different ways citizenship is conceptualized is at the core of the design of effective immigration policy. She finds that there is no uniform trend in the world toward defining citizenship in a particular way and indeed that there are contradictory trends depending on the contextual circumstances. Wucker traces the historical development of notions of citizenship and nationality and the consequences of different conceptualizations for immigrants’ lives. She underscores the importance of differentiating between formal and informal norms of citizenship as crucial to how host societies treat immigrants, as well as the centrality of developing notions of citizenship at the local, national, and transnational levels. She concludes with an analysis of the implications of claims of citizenship for immigrant hosting societies.
The next section, “Living Immigration,” explores on-the-ground facts about immigration and circumstances for those actually living the immigration experience. In chapter 4, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo outlines ten essential, but often overlooked, facts concerning Mexican immigration to the United States. She argues that lack of knowledge concerning these basic facts interferes with the design and implementation of productive and mutually beneficial immigration policies. Hondagneu-Sotelo underscores the effects of deep historical patterns of immigration that shape the scope and nature of immigrant flows today. She further highlights the innovations and uniqueness of the current wave of immigration from Mexico and what these continuities and changes mean for the design of effective policy. She emphasizes the need for more informed discourse on immigration and calls for the abandonment of the restrictionist, and often nativist, rhetoric that has captured contemporary debates about immigration.
Luis Fraga and Gary Segura examine the link between U.S. national identity and immigration in chapter 5. They show that early on U.S. national identity was forged and defined in opposition to immigrants as “outsiders,” often framed in terms of fear of difference. Fraga and Segura begin by asking whether current concerns about the immigrant threats to national identity in the United States are based on understanding of the facts or whether they are driven by other factors. They find that fear of the high percentage of immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America is what drives current preoccupation with immigration. Using data from the Latino National Survey, they go on to assess the seriousness of the purported cultural threat posed by recent immigrants from these areas, finding that with respect to language, values, religion, and political orientations (in addition to a number of other areas) immigrants adapt and socially integrate quickly. Fraga and Segura conclude by assessing the risks of basing policy on uninformed perceptions, as well as the dangers of those who use these perceptions with an eye toward short-term political gain.
The third section of the book turns to the economics of immigration on both sides of the border. In chapter 6 David Coates analyzes the economic impacts of immigration in the United States, asking whether the influx of Latino immigrants has benefited or hurt the U.S. economy. Coates takes on the claims of conservative commentators that low-skilled immigrants damage the economy by creating unemployment, eroding wages, swelling the ranks of the poor, and drawing on an already overburdened welfare state. Coates underscores the difficulty of measuring the effect of immigration given the multidimensionality of what immigrants give to and take from the system and the reality that data is often chosen with purely political ends. Examining demographic change, employment statistics, wages, and costs and benefits to the welfare system, Coates finds that overall immigrants provide a moderate surplus for the U.S. economy. He recognizes that there are real (but limited) impacts on wages and job security, particularly for those at the lower end of the wage scale. However, he argues that such impacts could be better resolved through combating wage inequality rather than combating immigration, given the numerous other economic benefits provided by the arrival of a large force of young, ambitious, and hardworking immigrants.
Peter Siavelis’s analysis of the economics of immigration in chapter 7 straddles the border. He notes that all too often analysts focus on either the forces that “push” immigrants to leave Mexico or the incentives that “pull” them to the United States. Siavelis contends that a more accurate approach is to trace how the interaction of push and pull factors collectively provide greater incentives for immigration than the sum of each of the individual factors. In particular, he focuses on the interaction among three factors that, he argues, provide a potent combination that compels large-scale immigration: the ascendency of neoliberal economics in Mexico, NAFTA, and U.S. immigration policy. As do other authors, Siavelis connects his analysis to policy recommendations, concluding that effective policy will be stymied without understanding the interaction of the multiple forces that drive immigration.
The fourth section of the book turns to issues of illegality. In chapter 8, Dan DeVivo and Valeria Fernández provide a snapshot of the on-the-ground battle surrounding immigration on the Arizona-Mexico border. The authors contend that a law-and-order mentality and the rhetoric of legality and illegality obscure the deep and powerful forces that drive immigration and make it unlikely to cease any time soon. Indeed, they find restrictionist efforts like those of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and similar movements advocating the building of walls and fences to be ultimately ineffective and doomed to failure because they lack economic, social, and moral sense. For DeVivo and Fernández, multifaceted solutions that combine less exploitative trade policy, efforts to eliminate poverty in Mexico, and education aimed at transforming popularly held notions of national identity are likely to be more effective in solving the problems that emerge with inevitable movements of people across borders.
Patricia Fernández-Kelly makes the provocative argument in chapter 9 that the criminalization of immigrants has been used as a political tool to solidify U.S. popular opinion around the ideological notion that the U.S. immigration problem grows out of government ineptitude and the government’s inability to keep Americans safe. However, she argues that this effort has produced unintended but potentially damaging by-products. Groups that arrive in the United States and face hostility and policies restricting access to education and opportunities are unlikely to assimilate. Indeed, Fernández-Kelly argues that immigrants facing a hostile climate may be more likely to fall into a permanent underclass because they are effectively denied the ability to take advantage of the merits of democracy, opportunity, and fair treatment, which have traditionally allowed immigrants to succeed and assimilate. Fernández-Kelly concludes that the short-term political motivations of a few radio and television personalities and the nativism they incite are shaping the immigration debate in a way that is likely to produce laws that work at cross-purposes with the more traditional and successful pattern of assimilation via the gradual granting of legalized status for those here and the granting of additional legal avenues of immigration for those who want come to the United States.
David Martin analyzes immigration enforcement debates in chapter 10. He shows that a preference for strong enforcement of existing immigration law has come in and out of vogue depending on the political moment and has alternated with efforts to provide legalized status for immigration lawbreakers. However, following the failure of comprehensive immigration reform during the G. W. Bush administration, enforcement has again become the main focus of both legislative efforts and public debate. Despite changes in legislation and the tone of debate, Martin argues that certain enduring myths concerning enforcement have persevered. The first set of myths Martin analyzes centers largely around how a guest-worker program would likely function. He suggests that, given the problems with such programs, immigration reform should focus on changing permanent immigration provisions rather than creating guest-worker programs that might aggravate an already polarizing debate. The second set of myths concerns enforcement and the perceived futility of enforcement. Martin argues, in contrast to some in this volume, that strong enforcement of immigration legislation, primarily workplace verification and border policing, is crucial to ending the polarization and demagoguery of the immigration debate.
Chapters in the fifth section of the volume focus on the reform of immigration law, and each presents one of the three major strands that have emerged in contemporary policy debates. In chapter 11 Robert Rector lays out a law-and-order argument for immigration reform. He argues that the effect of immigration on four areas should serve as a fundamental guide to immigration law reform: the rule of law, the economy, culture, and the political arena. Rector argues that the rule of law and existing immigration laws must be respected. He finds, on balance, that the effect of immigration on the nation’s economy is negative and that immigration expands the fiscally dependent population. He argues that the cultural values brought by immigrants undermine the very values that made the United States successful in the first place and that those advocating immigration reform are politically motivated to take advantage of immigrants’ tendency to vote for the Left. Rector concludes with a policy proposal advocating strict enforcement of current laws, no path to citizenship for immigrants currently residing in the United States, legislation that ensures that any guest-worker programs not become a gateway to entitlement programs, the elimination of birthright citizenship, and a reduction in permanent resident visas.
In chapter 12 Daniel Griswold proposes a completely different approach to immigration reform, advocating market-based solutions to illegal immigration. Griswold’s point of departure is that any lasting and real solution to the challenges posed by illegal immigration must acknowledge the centrality of immigration to the success and functioning of the United States’ free market economy. Griswold begins by dispelling notions that the current wave of immigration is somehow different in scope than historical waves and that low-skilled immigrants take jobs away from Americans. Simple economics and demographics create an imbalance between the demand for low-skill jobs and the supply of native-born Americans, evermore educated and older, who are willing to take such jobs. The strong incentives driving immigration have meant that strict enforcement policies are doomed to fail. Griswold advocates comprehensive immigration reform so that immigration laws are more in line with the legitimate needs of American employers to hire workers, which, he argues, will ultimately spur growth and enhance the overall health of the U.S. economy. Griswold proposes increasing the number of visas to meet labor demand and instituting more flexible visa programs that provide maximum worker mobility and a path to legality for those already living in the United States. Griswold recognizes that there are forceful arguments against his market-based solution to the immigration problem but contends that many of these arguments exaggerate the negative impact of immigration on the U.S. economy, workforce, culture, and crime rates.
In chapter 13 Ross Eisenbrey counsels caution on the extensive use of guest-worker programs to “solve” the immigration problem. He argues that the history of guest-worker programs in the United States suggests that the federal government has neither the will nor the capacity to prevent the adverse impact of those programs on the wages and employment prospects of the U.S. workforce or the systematic abuse and exploitation of the guest workers themselves. He reviews the ease with which employers have been able to avoid requirements—in both the H-2A and H-2B visa programs—to use temporary immigrant labor only when genuine local labor shortages exist. He documents the many cases of worker abuse associated with the programs, and he points to the inappropriateness of expanding their scale at a time of deepening recession. Establishing the way guest-worker programs stimulate rather than diminish illegal immigration, he calls for the radical reform of their design and implementation, if not for closing them down altogether.
David Coates concludes the volume in chapter 14 by setting out in clear terms the range of policy choices that characterize contemporary immigration debates, from forced deportation to the expansion of the number of visas available to immigrants. Coates notes that this range of options does not correspond neatly to partisan divisions, but rather that each of the major American political parties is internally divided with respect to the most appropriate solution to the tensions generated by illegal immigration. He goes on to provide an analysis of the problems with each solution. Some of the problems are more serious than others, to the extent that they violate core principles of American democracy, openness, and freedom. Coates proposes that any solution must resist treating Mexican immigration to the United States as an isolated pathological condition but rather must understand it as a part of a global pattern of immigration responding to broader interactions of increasingly transnational markets for commodities, products, and labor. Coates notes that the decision to migrate is complex and that policies of forced exclusion may be counterproductive, encouraging more illegal immigration. The ability to cross borders to work, to easily attain visas, and to return to visit family members may actually slow the stream of illegal immigration. If earlier patterns of seasonal migration can be restored, the cost to workers, the government, and immigrants’ families would be substantially decreased.
Further, Coates underscores that wider patterns of subsidies and trade also encourage immigration and must be addressed for comprehensive immigration reform to work. Large-scale farm subsidies in the United States outprice Mexican agricultural production, driving small-scale agricultural producers in Mexico off their land and to the United States. Similarly, competition from NAFTA has hurt Mexico’s agricultural sector and prompted the widening of wage differentials between the United States and Mexico. For Coates, the multiple and multifaceted causes of illegal immigration necessitate multiple and multifaceted solutions. Coates envisions a comprehensive immigration reform to include an employer verification program and fines for companies employing illegal immigrants. At the same time he proposes an earned route to legality for workers already here. In addition, he proposes a guest-worker program, the imposition of a high minimum wage and high labor standards to prevent downward pressure on American wages, and a larger quota for legal Mexican immigration. In addition, to cushion the unevenly distributed costs of immigration in particular localities, Coates proposes an impact aid program to soften growing anti-immigrant sentiment at the local level. Finally, the underlying structure of agricultural production in North America must be overhauled to provide a more level playing field in agricultural production on both sides of the border.
The following chapters have been contributed by the foremost experts in their fields and represent cutting-edge scholarship on immigration. However, even more important, they provide thoughtful readers with the knowledge and analysis of a controversial topic that are so central to moving the rancorous and emotional debate on immigration toward a more reasoned one that serves the common and human interests of those who have spent their entire lives in the United States as well as those who are its most recent arrivals.