Immigrants Against Immigration

When the Nazi Master Race people constructed death camps throughout Poland and Germany 60 years ago, inmate-police-functionaries enforced Nazi camp rules. They were called “kapos.” Often, it was Jews policing Jews. Today, a Cuban refugee immigrant, Dr. George Borjas, is the academic point man for the country’s anti-immigrant movement. An immigrant demanding the demolition of American immigration policy, a demolition based on race and ethnicity.

Borjas (John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University), a former faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, is the academic messiah of the anti-immigrant movement in the United States.  The movement is today’s Know-Nothing Party that based its entire existence in the 1840s and 1850s on opposing immigrants and Catholics.  Like the Know-Nothings, Borjas ignores facts in making policy suggestions, suggestions that become the ultimate “truth.”

In his book, “Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy” Borjas states that current immigrants are less educated/skilled than native-born Americans.  That statement is wrong. He uses Census data that includes illegal aliens, people the entire world knows are less educated and eager for farm work. RAND Corporation economist Jim Smith destroys Borjas with a study that found, “The median years of schooling for the LEGAL immigrants, 13 years, is a full one year higher than that of the U.S . native born.”

Borjas, using Census data, claims that earnings of immigrants NEVER reach the level of the native-born. That is not true. According to economist Harriet Duleep of the Urban Institute and National Science Foundation senior analyst Mark Regets, immigrants have faster and larger wage growth (6.7 percent) than the native-born (4.4%) and any early negative difference in wages mostly disappears after ten years.

Borjas’ argument is entirely bogus, by the way. According to Stuart Anderson, director of immigration policy for the United States Senate Immigration Subcommittee, Borjas deceivingly subtracts self-employed immigrants from his wage studies.  Anderson, writing in Reason Magazine says, “If, out of 100,000 immigrants, 60,000 started restaurants and software firms, and 40,000 worked as waiters, Borjas would count only the wages of the 40,000 waiters. Moreover, if 10,000 of the waiters later started their own successful restaurants, Borjas would remove them from the calculations of immigrant earnings growth, thus further biasing the results downward.”  He doesn’t do the same in stating native-born income. In other words, Borjas’ immigrant wage calculations are intentionally misrepresented and miscalculated.

Borjas claims that immigrants are fiscal liabilities, based on his faulty interpretation of the massive study of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1997 that made such a claim insofar as California was concerned. Wrong, again, Borjas!

Ronald Lee, a UC Berkeley economist who prepared the NAS study told a U. S. Senate committee that the study did not reflect the true situation because of computer model problems.  He says, “As for the fiscal impact of legal immigration, with the appropriate assumptions, a dynamic analysis would likely show that 49 of the states come out ahead, with the 50th, California, a close call.”

Borjas and his adherents declare that immigrants cost us money.  They don’t.

Borjas states that immigrants don’t add much to the American economy and do only when they lower native-born wages by accepting lower wages for traditional American jobs, like ditch digging and janitorial work.  He further posits that immigrants would just as likely succeed in their own countries if they stayed there.  Stuart Anderson writes in Reason Magazine, “In fact, immigrants come here precisely because oppressive political or economic policies block them from succeeding in their own countries.

Further, Borjas ignores immigrant induced productivity, immigrant business formation and immigrant performance of jobs native-born refuse to do at any wage because, Borjas says, “They are difficult to quantify.” Really?

The heaviest and most deceitful charge that Borjas makes is that the little educated native-born class suffers lower wages because of immigrants.  That is blatantly untrue.  Borjas claims that the true measure of this is the emigration of native-born from states that experience heavy immigration. But, Columbia University economist Francisco L Rivera-Batiz has proved that theory wrong.  His studies show that where out migration can be measured, it is generally college educated who leave, not the-less-than-high-school class. In California, for example, there was a quantifiable out migration of college educated when the defense/aerospace industry collapsed as the Cold War collapsed. What did that have to do with immigration?

Borjas thinks immigration should only be on a point basis of education and skills, but admits that if his imaginary point system was implemented, “most likely, the predominance of Mexican immigrants. will decline substantially.”

Aha! So that’s what is at the bottom of Borjas’ proposed policies. In fact, he admits, if his point system was implemented, his own mother couldn’t have immigrated to the USA from Cuba and she couldn’t have brought four-year-old George Borjas with her (His education would have been an immigrant “cost”).

Borjas takes us back to the same motive of the Ku Klux Klan in the Twenties and the German Nazis in the Thirties, race and ethnicity as policy. Borjas cannot escape his own words, nor can his supporters and sycophants.

Original link – originally written in 2000 and still true today!

####

Raoul Lowery Contreras (1941) was born in Mexico, raised in the USA. Former U.S. Marine, athlete, Dean’s List at San Diego State. Professional political consultant and California Republican Party official(1963-65)…Television news commentator, radio talk show host…published Op-Ed writer (1988 to present)…author of 12 books (as of 1-05-12). His books are available on Amazon.com.