Amy Traub

Letter to the Editor of the Week!

In his New York Times column earlier this week, David Brooks expounded on his theory that people opposed to immigration are primarily motivated by culture, rather than economics. A letter to the editor in today’s Times gets at the heart of what’s wrong with this argument:

To the Editor:

As someone who spent 30 years as a machinist and is now retraining in paralegal studies, I believe I’ve seen both sides of the divide that David Brooks speaks of in regard to attitudes toward immigration.

In my experience, the root of the national schism over immigration policy is not cultural attitude but economic reality. The fact of the matter is that few if any of the estimated 12 million people here in the United States illegally are here to work as actuarials or English professors or newspaper columnists - the sorts of jobs normally held by university grads. They are here to work as bricklayers or welders or landscapers.

I would posit that if illegal immigration were undermining the wages of editors and lawyers instead of janitors and kitchen staff, the current debate might sound quite a bit different.

Glenn Baldwin
Chicago, June 12, 2007

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research also makes this point persuasively.

But acknowledging that bad immigration policies (like having millions of undocumented workers toiling for sub-par wages, or establishing a guest worker program to make this arrangement formal) pose an economic threat to Americans trying to work their way into the middle class doesn’t necessarily mean we must be anti-immigrant to produce policy that’s good for America’s current and aspiring middle class.

If we recognize that immigrants both contribute positively to the economy and at the same time threaten to depress wages and working conditions because they are so easily exploitable, an answer presents itself: empower immigrants in the workplace, keep them or anyone participating the in the U.S. economy from being exploited, and we are on the road to creating an economy that undermines no one.

Clinging to Brooks’ cultural argument, which sees the primary problem with our immigration policy as a threat to identity and culture keeps us for realizing a policy that would truly benefit immigrants and the American middle class alike.

Amy Traub: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 6:17 PM, Jun 15, 2007 in Letter To The Editor of the Week
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