Amy Traub

…Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Maximize Earnings During Each Two-Year Window

The most recent immigration compromise bill (large pdf) in the Senate is coming up for criticism from almost every angle, from business interests to the immigrant advocates, labor unions, and the anti-immigrant right.

It appears there's no one who likes the bill in its current form but President Bush.

Well, the President and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

In yesterday's column, Brooks argues that, rather than an incoherent hodge-podge of contradictory provisions, the bill somehow appropriately establishes a system of tough but fair incentives for immigrants.

First, Brooks argues that the bill would produce a big "values-shift" for currently undocumented immigrants, who would be required to "obey the law, learn English, and save money" in order to gain permanent residency, and ultimately citizenship in the United States. But it's not the values of immigrants that are the problem: most already believe that it's important to learn English and are waiting on long lists for over-subscribed English classes to open up; many are already saving money to send to impoverished relatives abroad and pay off the smugglers that got them into the country; and aside from violations of immigration statute, immigrants are already less likely to be convicted of crimes than non-immigrants. The problem with our immigration policy is not the "values" of immigrants, but the fundamental mismatch between our current laws and (to put it bluntly) reality, including the economic reality of a nation that relies on the labor of undocumented immigrants.

But enough about reality, back to David Brooks.

He argues that the bill also improves incentives for aspiring immigrants, who under this bill would be selected more on the basis of "merit points" than close family ties to current citizens. The incentive this creates, according to Brooks, is to be the sort of person "who can be self-sufficient from the start." But why should self-sufficiency be more of a goal than contributing to a strong family? Not only does the bill disregard the family values conservatives claim to cherish, it ignores the role of family-based social capital in immigrants' contributions to the U.S. economy. Take for example the elderly immigrant who cares for her grandchildren while their parents work full-time. She may not be self-sufficient, but is certainly enabling the family to make a greater economic contribution to the U.S.

Finally, we have Brooks' absurd justification of the bill's guest worker program. In our forthcoming analysis of the bill, DMI will argue that this guest worker program is even worse than that of other recent immigration proposals because it would bring workers into the country for just two years and then require them to return to their countries of origin for a year before returning to work in the U.S. for another two years. At the end of their stint as guest workers, there is no provision for permanent residency. Brooks, however, likes the enforced isolation of guest workers from mainstream society. Whereas it was good for undocumented immigrants to "think in the long term" and become "enmeshed within the normal rules and laws that the rest of us live by" this apparently isn't the case for guest workers. They, instead, should "be as flexible as possible... so they can maximize earnings during each two year window." Why would we want people as part of our economy who are only focused on maximizing their income in two-year windows? More to the point, why would we want a permanent and growing number of U.S. jobs to be transformed into positions suitable only for a young "flexible" workforce, providing no options for a long-term future? Brooks provides no explanation.

There are a lot of things wrong with U.S. immigration policy, from the huge backlog that keeps families separated for years, to our counterproductive border enforcement efforts, and the legal barriers that prohibit the immigrants our economy depends upon from working here legally, fueling a vast underground economy vulnerable to exploitation. For the most part, immigrants themselves -- hard-working, law-abiding, taxpaying people -- are not the problem. Immigration legislation should seek to change the law, not the immigrants. And don't get me started with Brooks' Harvard metaphor...

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Posted at 1:20 PM, May 23, 2007 in David Brooks critique | Immigration
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