First Things, May 1, 2008
Until very recently, serious conversation about immigration was all but banished from mainstream American discourse. This consensus of silence, imposed by opinion makers who found the topic distasteful or inconvenient, was undone by a number of recent events—including the sudden rise of immigration as a topic in the presidential primaries, a gathering wave of state and local immigration ordinances, and last summer’s outburst of grassroots opposition to a proposed federal amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants.
The result has been a suddenly lively debate about whether our immigration laws are too strict or too generous, how they should be enforced, and whether illegal immigrants already here should be encouraged to leave or invited to stay.
Is there a Christian answer to these urgent questions? For Catholics at least, there are relevant teachings in the Catechism: (1) The “more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able,” to welcome foreigners in search of security or a livelihood; (2) there should be no “unjust discrimination” in employment against immigrants; and (3) the immigrants themselves should “obey” the receiving country’s laws. More generally, the Catechism calls on Catholics to love and aid the poor and to act with their fellow citizens in the political and social fields to promote “solidarity and justice among nations.” Presumably, this might include political and social action aimed at changing or even resisting national immigration policies.
These teachings were applied in Strangers No Longer, a Joint Pastoral Letter issued by the American and Mexican bishops in January 2003. The letter acknowledged that each “sovereign state” has “the right to control its borders in furtherance of the common good” and “impose reasonable limits on immigration,” but also that persons who “cannot find employment in their country of origin . . . have a right to find work elsewhere in order to survive.” How are these two rights to be reconciled? According to the bishops, “the current condition of the world, in which global poverty and persecution are rampant,” obligates “powerful economic nations” to “accommodate migration flows” and to receive economic migrants “whenever possible.” The bishops expressed, if you will, a “preferential option” for free migration.
Is the United States meeting its moral obligation “to accommodate migration flows” of unemployed laborers from Mexico and elsewhere? Any such obligation falls to the U.S. Congress, to which the Constitution has committed the exclusive power to regulate migration. Since the 1920s, Congress has enacted statutes that limit the number of aliens who may migrate to the United States and that determine who is eligible to migrate.
Immigration law distinguishes between immigrants, who are expected to reside permanently in the United States, and non immigrants, who are expected to return home. Most immigrant visas are “family-unity visas,” awarded to aliens related to someone who immigrated before them. A smaller number of immigrant visas are awarded to aliens who have been offered jobs in the United States, but these “employment visas” are mostly reserved for workers with specific skills. Federal law also provides for the issuance of approximately 250,000 nonimmigrant visas each year to temporary foreign workers, but 150,000 of these “guest-worker visas” are also reserved for skilled workers, who do not typically migrate “in order to survive.” Because federal immigration law reserves relatively few visas for unskilled workers, the immigration policies of the United States arguably fail to meet what the Church considers to be the country’s obligation to migrants who “cannot find employment in their country of origin.”
Most unskilled migrant workers can take up residence only as lawbreakers, either by overstaying a visa or entering without one. Each year, approximately 800,000 aliens become illegal residents in the United States. Approximately 300,000 of them will eventually be deported, leave of their own volition, or manage to legalize their status. This net annual influx of approximately 500,000 illegal aliens has produced a total illegal population in excess of 12 million a population that is growing at a much faster rate than the native population or even the legal immigrant population.
In Strangers No Longer, the bishops correctly observe that undocumented Mexican migrants to the United States “labor with the quiet acquiescence of both government and industry.” The bishops call on the government to enact a “broad legalization program” for those workers and to establish permanent and temporary visa programs for future economic migrants. According to the bishops, legalization of undocumented workers “would help to stabilize the labor market in the United States, to preserve family unity, and to improve the standard of living in immigrant communities.”
In the wake of Strangers No Longer, the Committee on Migration of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resolved in June 2004 to make “comprehensive immigration reform, with special emphasis on legalization, a major public policy priority within the Church.” In May 2005, the conference inaugurated the Catholic Campaign for Immigration Reform, which calls for “broad-based legalization (permanent residency) of the undocumented” and “legal pathways for migrants to come and work.” At the campaign’s opening press conference, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick conceded that, “before we can change our laws, we must also change attitudes, including those of many of our own flock.”
There are some problems here. Approximately one million aliens are permitted by law to settle in the United States each year, mostly on family-unity visas.Strangers No Longer fails to recognize that many of them are, in fact, unskilled and underemployed aliens who are joining their relatives mainly to escape economic distress. A recent survey commissioned by the National Institutes of Health found that one-third of adult immigrants had never finished school in their home country.
Strangers No Longer also conflates the undocumented Mexican immigrant population with laborers who “cannot find employment in their country of origin” and need “to find work elsewhere in order to survive.” That may describe some undocumented migrants but probably not the majority. Mexico is not Sudan. The official unemployment rate in Mexico is not very different from the unemployment rate in the United States, and a survey by the Pew Hispanic Center discovered that an overwhelming majority of undocumented migrants were employed when they left Mexico.
Still, the bishops are not wrong to remind us that, for many would be immigrants, a denial of admission to the United States is a denial of their best chance to escape poverty and have their children educated beyond grade school and possibly any chance of decent health care for their families. Any Christian who opposes their admission ought to have good reasons.
When Christians call on America to shoulder its moral obligation to would-be economic migrants, on whose shoulders will this burden actually fall? Even though most illegal immigrants are Catholics from Mexico and Central America, the Catholic Church in the United States does not promise them a free education in Catholic schools or free treatment in Catholic hospitals, for the simple reason that the Church could not afford to keep such promises. Once we acknowledge that any Christian call for the welcoming of immigrants as a means of alleviating their poverty is mainly a call for someone else, primarily government agencies, to pick up the tab, we must add to the question of moral obligation the practical question of whether government agencies are capable of managing the consequences of mass economic migration without neglecting their other responsibilities.
The question answers itself. The federal, state, and local governments are plainly incapable of caring for tens of millions of poor immigrants while also fulfilling their ordinary duties to the rest of us, not to mention their special duties to America’s own underprivileged citizens. Not the least of those duties is to foster a social and economic environment in which every young American, even one not good at schoolwork, can earn a living that permits him to keep a family. Amid the current outcry of the Democratic presidential candidates against the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign factories, we should not forget that importing cheap foreign workers depresses domestic wage levels in exactly the same way as does importing products manufactured with cheap foreign labor.
Strangers No Longer does caution that any legal pathway for migrant workers “must employ labor market tests to ensure that U.S. workers are protected.” The workings of the labor market, however, guarantee that the interests of U.S. workers cannot be protected from the impact of a large, continuing influx of foreign workers. The evidence of this impact is manifest, especially in the construction industry. The building trades once afforded American boys not bound for college their best opportunity to earn a middle class living; anyone my age has witnessed in his own lifetime the collapse of many of these trades into low wage, no benefits, day labor jobs.
1997 study by the National Research Council confirmed statistically that labor migration reduces the wages of the Americans who compete for the same jobs while benefiting more privileged Americans who buy the products and services they produce. An earlier General Accounting Office study related how in less than a decade nearly the entire unionized, predominantly black janitorial workforce of Los Angeles had been replaced with Mexican immigrants. In 1994 and 1995, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, based on this sort of evidence and several years of deliberation, recommended that Congress reduce overall levels of immigration and reject proposals for a guest worker program.
The claim that Americans won’t do the jobs taken by immigrants is more of a cruel joke than an argument. What job, for example, is less pleasant and affords less prestige than collecting someone else’s garbage? Nevertheless, in the city where I live, garbage collection is a municipal service performed by unionized sanitation workers. Their wages are not generous, but they cover rent and car payments, and there is health insurance if a family member gets sick. After a lifetime of collecting my garbage, the worker and his wife are allowed a small pension to endure their old age with dignity. The city has no difficulty filling these jobs, almost entirely with African-American citizens. In some of the surrounding suburbs, garbage collection is outsourced to private contractors who routinely employ immigrant workers, many of whom are probably undocumented. Needless to say, their wages are paltry, and if the immigrants become too sick or too old to work, they are out of luck and simply replaced with other immigrants.
Some might argue that a modest reduction in the wages of working-class Americans is a morally accept- able price to pay if even greater numbers of immigrant workers are thereby rescued from dire poverty. Before asking working-class Americans to carry the burden of “solidarity and justice among nations,” however, we should first ask whether admitting some tiny percent- age of the Third World’s underemployed workers as immigrants, and providing their families with First World public services, is really the most suitable way to alleviate global poverty.
Arguably not. Ten years ago, the National Research Council estimated that the net annual fiscal cost of public services to immigrants stood at $15 billion to $20 billion, a figure that must be substantially higher today. Might we do more good for the Mexican poor by focusing these resources on what Mexicans need to thrive in their own country rather than on our own need for maid service?
Consider that a Mexican-born woman living in Los Angeles County will, on average, have three or four children. The annual cost of educating each of them in the Los Angeles public schools is over $9,000 per annum, or a total of $27,000 to $36,000 throughout their school years. According to figures from the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education, it costs $1,500 a year to educate a child in Mexico, meaning that the money used to subsidize the American schooling of one Mexican immigrant’s family would have educated more than eighteen of the children who remained behind.
Is a country that cannot handle its responsibilities to its native workforce in the face of massive economic migration at least capable of fulfilling its moral obligations toward the migrants themselves? Data from reliable government sources indicate that we are manifestly incapable of ensuring the successful social and economic assimilation of the enormous numbers that are actually arriving today.
Not surprisingly, the native-born offspring of undocumented workers lack their parents’ enthusiasm for performing society’s dirty work, but too many are not equipped by our conflicted public schools with the means to do anything else. According to the Department of Education, Hispanic students are dropping out of high school at twice the rate of non-Hispanic whites and at a higher rate even than that of non- Hispanic blacks. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that 49.9 percent of Hispanic children in the United States are born to unwed mothers and that teenage pregnancy is three times higher among Hispanic girls than among non-Hispanic whites (and, again, even higher than among non-Hispanic blacks). Since inadequate schooling and an absence of fathers are held by many to be a chief explanation of extraordinary crime rates, we should not be surprised that Hispanic men are entering prison at three times the rate of non-Hispanic whites.
Comparisons between the fate of today’s illegal immigrants and the ultimately successful assimilation of long-ago Irish and Italian immigrants are not helpful. Those earlier immigrant waves had a beginning and an end, yielding breathing space for assimilation and preventing the formation of permanent ethnic ghettos. Moreover, when the unschooled European farm and factory workers were arriving en masse, most Americans were also unschooled farm and factory workers. The economic and social advancement of the immigrants’ descendants was part of a larger story of industrialization that rose up the entire American working class. Given the extreme difficulty of preserving high wage American jobs in the face of global competition, let alone creating new ones, it is hard to foresee the great economic wave that will raise up the descendants of today’s immigrant laborers.
These are inconvenient truths, and to introduce them into a public debate over immigration policy is to invite accusations of immigrant bashing and worse. Indeed, to label worry about immigration as “hate speech” has become a leitmotif of immigration advocacy and has even found a sounding board in the Church. Cardinal McCarrick devoted much of his opening statement on the Catholic Campaign to condemnations of “anti-immigrant fervor,” “racist and xenophobic attitudes,” and the “temptation to scapegoat.” Last December, Roger Cardinal Mahoney, archbishop of Los Angeles, urged Democratic presidential candidates “to replace verbal attacks on immigrants with a focus on policy solutions,” while Bishop John C. Wester, chairman of the Committee on Migration, editorialized in the Salt Lake Tribune that “political venting toward immigrants” was diverting attention from “meaningful reform.”
No Christian could fail to condemn verbal attacks against immigrants, to say nothing of actual hate crimes. Those eager to find examples of “anti-immigrant fervor” can probably find them somewhere, but only by tendentious interpretations can they find them in the campaign literature of any major candidate for public office or on the website of any nationally recognized immigration-reform group. Far from exhibiting “racist and xenophobic attitudes,” ordinary Americans, even when protesting illegal immigration, regularly go out of their way to express their support and welcome for legal immigrants. Their “venting” is directed not against the undocumented workers but at the self-serving employers and negligent government agencies whose “quiet acquiescence” in widespread lawbreaking has allowed the problem to grow and fester.
When Cardinal Mahoney and Bishop Wester refer to “policy solutions” and “meaningful reform,” they mean the legalization of prior flows of illegal immigrants through a broad-based amnesty and the legalization of future flows through a guest worker program for unskilled foreign workers. The logic behind this “comprehensive immigration reform” is that barring or trying to expel economic migrants whose services are demanded by the economy is simply not possible with- out resorting to tools that are morally unacceptable in a democracy.
The flaw in the logic of “comprehensive immigration reform” is its assumption that the current flow of undocumented workers is a meaningful measure of the economy’s demand for such workers. Our experience with the more transparent phenomenon of offshore outsourcing teaches us instead that the appetite of employers to hire lower-paid workers is practically unlimited. No matter how many guest workers are admitted, the companies that compete with their employers, in order to stay in business, will have to demand guest workers of their own or else recruit undocumented workers. A guest-worker program, whatever its other merits, would have only a modest impact on the flow of new illegal immigrants.
Although the Catholic Campaign’s call for a “broad legalization program” is rooted in Christian charity, legalization as a component of comprehensive immigration reform has not been sold to the public on the grounds of compassion, or even of economic necessity, but rather on the grounds of practical necessity. Again and again, we are reminded by pro-amnesty newspapers and politicians that the government lacks the means to arrest and deport 12 million people and that the public would not tolerate so massive a roundup were it possible.
The specter of mass arrests and deportations is a red herring. Approximately 500,000 aliens legally cross the border every day. They come to shop or to sightsee, to attend university, to conduct business, to work for an embassy, or to fill a temporary job. If we are to enjoy the benefits of these international visits without being overwhelmed by overstayers, it should be obvious that we cannot depend on the “hard power” of arrest and deportation except as a last resort.
We depend instead on the “soft power” of allowing legal visitors the means of a comfortable but temporary stay (including free emergency medical care if they cannot afford to pay for it) while withholding from them the means of taking up a comfortable permanent residence. Denying aliens who are not eligible for permanent residence the opportunity to hold a regular job, to drive a car, to draw nonemergency public benefits, and so forth is such an effective deterrent to breaking the law that 99.8 percent of aliens who enter the country each year return home of their own accord.
Admittedly, soft power has not been an effective deterrent to aliens who are willing to perjure them- selves by submitting false Social Security numbers to those employers (apparently the majority) who insist on having one for their tax records. (More than 200,000 aliens are using 000-00-0000.) Knowledgeable participants on both sides of the immigration debate are aware that most undocumented workers would lose their jobs and be forced to repatriate themselves if the government were simply to investigate on a regular basis payrolls that exhibit an abnormally large share of invalid Social Security numbers. That is why the government’s sporadic efforts to do just that have been fiercely resisted by immigrant rights groups and chambers of commerce.
Stricter immigration law enforcement is often associated with building stronger fences along the border. Although border security will not reduce the number of visa overstayers, experience with heavy fencing in Southern California proves that physical barriers do indeed deter unlawful entry. Strangers No Longer, however, calls on the United States to abandon any plans to blockade the Mexican border, arguing that barricades would funnel desperate economic migrants into even more dangerous entry routes.
Although the terrorism threat probably mandates a barricaded border, I share the bishops’ concern about the physical safety of migrant workers who attempt to breach the barricades. No Christian society should entice its impoverished neighbors to wade rivers, evade armed guards, trek across deserts, and put themselves in the hands of criminal smugglers in order to keep down the price of lettuce and landscaping. Before building the barricades, let us first make clear to employers of undocumented workers, and to the well off consumers whose interests they serve, that the party, for them, is over.