Supra Hominem

Via Greg Mankiw,

Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants?
Nativist Nonsense Distorts a Critical Issue

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday, April 30, 2007; Page A15

President Bush is doing his pragmatic best to secure immigration reform. He is honorably laboring to revive some version of the bipartisan bill that got 62 votes in the Senate last year. But watching this torturous process is enough to make a sane person scream. The livelihoods of millions are at stake, yet most immigration pronouncements are nonsense.

People accuse immigrants of gang violence, drunken driving and a general contempt for the law. But in 2000 the incarceration rate for immigrants was just one-fifth the rate for the population as a whole, according to Kristin Butcher of the Federal Reserve and Anne Morrison Piehl of Rutgers University.

People say immigrants are feckless and lazy. But in California in 2004, 94 percent of undocumented men ages 18 to 64 were in the workforce, compared with 82 percent of native-born men. Far from being part of a shiftless underclass, the act of coming to the United States makes immigrants among the most upwardly mobile groups in the nation, only a bit behind hedge-fund managers.

People say, contrariwise, that immigrants steal jobs from native-born Americans. But economists have patiently explained for years that there is no finite "lump of labor" in an economy. The presence of migrants causes new jobs to be created: Factories that might have gone abroad spring up in Arizona or Texas. Hasn't anyone noticed that California, where fully one-third of the adult population is foreign born, has an unemployment rate of less than 5 percent?

Political affiliation is less a continuum and more a Möbius strip and so it isn't surprising to find that Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and parts of the Sierra Club are on the same page here. Not to get all Ad Hominem on Nativists or anything, because really, the article above demonstrates it isn't even necessary.