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Mexifornia: A State of Becoming
Panel Discussion Transcript*
August 19, 2003
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.
Moderator:
Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center
for Immigration Studies
Panelists:
Victor Davis Hanson,
California
State University, Fresno
Joseph
Perkins, San Diego Union-Tribune
Steven
Camarota, Director of Research, Center for Immigration Studies
MARK KRIKORIAN: Good morning. My name
is Mark Krikorian. I am executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies, a think tank here in Washington that examines and critiques the impact
of immigration in the United States. For those of you interested, all of our
work is online at cis.org, including the transcript of this panel discussion,
hopefully next week.
California is in the midst of an
unprecedented, tumultuous recall campaign to recall the sitting governor and
select a new one. The state labors under a deficit of at least $35 billion, and
as the Census Bureau recently reported, more Americans are leaving the state now
than are moving in; a reversal of the image, of the myth of California. And yet
the chief cause of the state’s malaise is almost completely absent from the
recall election debate: immigration. Whether you’re talking about schools,
healthcare, or other issues that are of consequence in California, there is very
little discussion of immigration among serious candidates.
Now, we had considered inviting Gary
Coleman to discuss immigration and its effect on California, but instead we
found a much more qualified scholar to inject discussion of our dysfunctional
immigration system into the silence over this critical issue. Victor Davis
Hanson is a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, the
author of numerous books on military history, and a fifth-generation family
farmer in California’s Central Valley. He observed the workings of the earlier
immigration paradigm while growing up in a largely Mexican-American community
where young people were inculcated into America’s history and heroes, and he’s
seen that model of assimilation veer off the tracks over the past 30 years or
so.
Professor Hanson’s book that he’s going to
discuss today –
Mexifornia – grew out of an article in
City Journal
last year and has – to borrow from the title of Professor Hanson’s upcoming
book,
Ripples of Battle – had ripples far beyond the book and the magazine
article itself. Professor Hanson has brought real legitimacy to discussion of
this issue. Not only is he a serious scholar of classics, his writing since
9/11 is muscular commentary, I could only describe it as, in National Review
Online and The Weekly Standard and elsewhere, has made him, frankly,
something of a celebrity on non-immigration-related issues, and also his empathy
for immigrants that you see in the book. It’s very clear and very direct – he
grew up with Mexican-Americans, went to school with them, has relatives who are
Mexican-Americans, and fits actually very well with the center’s approach to
this issue, which is to try to make the case for a pro-immigrant policy of lower
immigration.
Before Professor Hanson starts, I’d just
like to address one little issue. In The Washington Times today
he hinted that he had gotten somewhat tired of the hypocrisy and the slander
that pervades discussion of the immigration issue. And I sympathize. It
reminds me of Fred Thompson’s remark. Senator Thompson, when he was first
elected, having been an actor, and came to Washington and after a few weeks said
he yearned for the honesty and sincerity of Hollywood, after having spent a few
weeks in Washington. And apparently he never got used to it because he left and
is now starring in “Law and Order.”
I would only say to Professor Hanson, I
want you to persevere in this issue. We need more voices like his; more voices
that have genuine empathy for what newcomers go through in the United States,
but at the same time are not shy about addressing the real concerns and the
problems that we’ve seen as a result of our broken immigration system.
After Professor Hanson talks we’ll have two
respondents of sorts, or two people who will elaborate a little further on this
issue. First, Joseph Perkins will speak. Joe is a syndicated columnist at the
San
Diego Union Tribune. His articles appear in more than 200 papers
nationwide. Before that he worked on the White House staff for Vice President
Dan Quayle, and before that he was an editorial writer for The Wall Street
Journal, where he actually wrote many of the open borders editorials.
The Wall Street Journal, as you may be familiar, has repeatedly called for
the abolition of America’s borders. Joe actually contributed to some degree to
that and I guess has been doing penance ever since, because he then went to
Southern California and realized it wasn’t at all like what he was told it was
supposed to be like and has very much changed his take on that and will tell us
a little bit about that.
And then finally, Steve Camarota, the
Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, has become one of
the top students of the impact of immigration on the United States, and is the
author of a report that we did – that’s outside – on the characteristics of
Mexican immigrants, and will give us some statistical context to think about the
issue of Mexican immigration to the United States in general and California in
particular.
Professor Hanson?
VICTOR DAVIS
HANSON: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here. I didn’t want to
write the book, actually, as Peter Collier of Encounter [Books] called me up and
said, basically, this is an 800-pound gorilla that’s in the living room that
nobody wants – this issue nobody wants to touch. I think there’s some truth to
this. The conservative right either believes that it’s essential to have an
unassimilated and undocumented pool of workers who are very industrious,
audacious, brave, wonderful people who don’t have avenues of legality and will
work at a wage that’s not commensurate with U.S. citizens, and they will allege
that they need to compete in a global economy, or that agricultural prices are
depressed or construction costs must be kept low, and they can’t get that
quality of worker at that price if these citizens were in fewer numbers – if
these people were in fewer numbers or legal. And then many people on the left,
although only a fringe, will talk of the Reconquista, or La Raza – I think
they’re not relevant to the discussion, but most of the people on the left do, I
think, believe that an unassimilated constituency will require group rather than
individual representation – i.e., people like themselves.
So between those two extremes, the
discussion is sort of curtailed. Nobody wants to be called a racist by the
latter or a protectionist by the former. In between it’s the California
suburban average citizen who likes the idea of cheap food, going to a restaurant
pretty cheap, and has developed the lifestyle of the 19th century
aristocrat in some ways. Whoever thought that a Californian who was middle
class, perhaps with a combined income of $100,000, could have somebody from
Mexico here illegally to cut his lawn, clean his home, watch his children? And
then at the same time that’s happening, he’s upset that if he goes and he looks
at certain statistics of poverty, incarceration, education, that some of these
groups who come from Mexico are represented in proportions that are higher than
their representation in the population. So there’s all of this strange
political mix, and the result in California, which we’re always a therapeutic
society, is simply not to talk about it.
I got interested in the issue because I’m
a fifth-generation farmer and I’ve watched changes in my community. The local
school that I used to go to, which was about 60 percent Mexican or
Mexican-American, [featured] assimilation, no ideology of “the border crossed
us, we didn’t cross the borders”; no bilingual education, Chicano history, just
simple assimilation.
Those products of that school are quite successful; they
run our hometown now. However, just before I came I looked at the rates of
schools that are meeting California achievement levels, and in that same school
– it’s a mile and a half – it’s 100 percent Mexican, and 9 percent met the
minimum level of reading competency, and about 7 percent in mathematics, so
something radical has happened.
As an employer who used to farm full time
and owns property that I rent out, I noticed another thing, that gradually –
there had been a right of passage when I was growing up that everybody of all
different races and nationalities – actually we were delayed school for two
weeks while we went out and picked grapes or picked peaches. That has been
exclusively almost always a labor pool of people who are here undocumented from
Mexico, and despite the legality of Social Security numbers and I-9s on file
with the employers, everybody knows that those documents are not legitimate.
As a historian, someone who writes about
the history of culture, I know that it’s a fact, whether we want to admit it or
not in these politically correct times, that most people migrate from
non-Western countries to Western countries simply because the menu or the
combination of capitalism, private property, open markets, consensual
government, the chauvinism of the middle class, secularism, all of these things
combine to make a dynamic society, whether it’s ancient Athens or Rome or Europe
or America, and that it works very well because of all cultures in the world,
the Western culture puts a greater primacy on multiracialism. That is, it can
accept – the sins of mankind are always with us – racism, sexism – but in the
West there is this self-critique that allows, say, a person from the United
States who may be of Chinese ancestry to be a real American in a way that any of
us who went to China would find it difficult to assume Chinese citizenship and
be accepted.
But the key to it all in history is that
the people who join this society must do it in numbers or in a fashion that
allows them to be fully integrated and assimilated. Helots in Sparta didn’t
work. Metics in Athens didn’t work. Resident aliens in Rome didn’t work, but
people in the Empire who were given citizenship did work, and when they were
assimilated with Italian culture, it worked.
And finally, in addition, I’m a professor
and most of my students are Mexican-American – are actually illegal aliens. I
just had a student who was an illegal alien who is now at Princeton’s graduate
school in history, and I realized that if we could reach people in numbers that
gave us a chance to give them full attention to master the English language, do
things like learn Latin, German, understand the history rather than put them in
the social sciences en masse, then the same patterns of assimilation were no
different at all. And yet when I look at the California State University system
where I teach, 63 percent of all Hispanic students of any legal status – illegal
or not – are failing the entry requirement to take college courses. So the
whole first year is spent in remedial classes – 63 percent. And these are the
cream of the crop because these are people who go on to university.
One way I wanted to write the book, then,
is to say, how did this system perpetuate and will it continue and who benefits
and who loses? So I looked at each different group. Ostensibly, a person who
comes from Mexico and makes $10 an hour in cash feels that he’s reached a
bonanza compared to $10 a week, let’s say, in Oaxaca, and it looks great. But
I’ve noticed a tragic life cycle: that we and the Mexican government almost
traffic in human capital. While it looks good in the beginning, somebody
typically – and again, I’m generalizing, but I’ve seen empirically, over my
lifetime – people will come from Mexico at 18, 20, usually single males
predominantly, they’ll work very, very hard, they’ll be delighted that they’ve
had more money in their life, they can send money back and become almost heroic
in their village for doing so. But if you follow that work in concrete, hotels,
restaurants, landscaping, agriculture, that’s not a rite-of-passage job for
people who are here illegally and who don’t know English. It becomes a
permanent position, and human nature being what it is, your body cannot
withstand that type of work.
So ultimately, at the age of 40 or 50, that
dream has sometimes turned into a nightmare because a person may have a bad
back, a bad shoulder, and then the employer who either paid cash or low wages or
didn’t have a health plan says, well, go to the neighborhood clinic, workman’s
comp, Section 8 housing, and the entitlement industry then picks up that added
cost. Meanwhile, the children of that immigrant, whose father or mother may not
know English and may not be documented, then develops a very different idea.
Often he has not, or she has not, been to Mexico. She doesn’t speak Spanish in
the same fluency as her parents did, doesn’t read Spanish necessarily, doesn’t
know English to the same degree that people that he or she will have to compete
with, and has a very different view of America. Often rates of incarceration or
gang activity are higher commensurately with the population. But more
importantly is the reaction to the employer, and they will tell you, don’t bring
anybody onto the cement crew who speaks English because the second generation
will not work like the people from Oaxaca. This is the standard – and so then
we just renew the cycle and traffic in human capital.
I also looked at it from the view of the Mexican government. We don’t know how
many hundreds of thousands of people cross the border without legal
documentation, but it does seem to me that there is a policy in Mexico that some
of the critical problems that challenge the Mexican government – the inability
to house, feed and clothe millions of people and the need to open up the
economy, to reinforce property rights, to guarantee investment, to root out
corruption, to have a transparent society, to formalize a truly democratic
society – haven’t evolved yet. And one of the symptoms of that is that a very,
very wealthy country with rich minerals, oils, weather, tourism, and agriculture
depends on sending a lot of people northward; not southward to Brazil or
Argentina, but they vote with their feet to come to California or to Arizona or
Texas. That seems to me to prolong the ability to face real reform as long as
you have a safety valve.
And then you have a strange psychological transformation. Whereas the Mexican
consul in Fresno will be very upset if an undocumented worker, as he should be
or she should be, is roughed up in the Tulare County jail, but that same
attention doesn’t always extend to people when they’re in Mexico, in Chiapas,
for example. So we have this schizophrenia.
If we look at another group besides the employer, besides the Mexican
government, we look at agribusiness or industry in California, they will tell
you that they can’t compete globally when agriculture prices are depressed over
a 20-year period unless they pay cheap wages: $8 to $10, often in cash. The
problem with that is that it also has ramifications – we have statewide a 7 to 9
percent unemployment rate – in Fresno County we have up to 15 percent. And it’s
almost the more you talk to employers – and I am a former employer – you almost
get the ideology that somewhere around 1970 the free market simply ceased to
work; the old idea was that if you raised wages you would attract workers. So
they will say, teenagers won’t work, people at the mall won’t work, kids won’t
work anymore, but at some golden opportunity, at $11 perhaps, $12, you can draw
that workforce back into agriculture or construction if you’re willing to pay
enough.
And it seems to me not just a business or an economic question, but a morality
question when you go to towns in Central California or you go to Central Los
Angeles and you see people who are Mexican-American citizens, or you see people
who are African-American or poor white, or whatever group you’re talking about,
it’s almost as if the society has cast them off and said, you’re not part of
this society; we don’t have a job for you, even though the unemployment rate is
over 10 percent, but we do have a job for people who are more industrious who
are here illegally. And that seems to be an indictment of our entire society,
once we accept that.
If you look at the situation from the question of the law, one of the hallmarks
of Western culture has been this respect and supremacy of legality. It starts
with Plato’s “Crito,” and says, “Socrates, you may not like the laws but you’re
a member of a consensual society and you have to respect them and obey them, and
they convicted you so you have to pay the penalty.” It’s a fundamental Western
tenet, but what we’re doing in response to this, because both the left and the
right politically have vested interests, we’re creating an alternate legal
universe that we’ve never done before in the United States, and this is new
ground. For example, our legislature has passed a bill giving drivers licenses
to people who are here illegally, undocumented, whatever term we want to use.
There’s a great euphemism in terms we use. If you say “illegal alien,” people
get very angry now in California because they say it’s not right – they’re not
aliens and they’re not illegal; they’re workers and they happen to be
undocumented. But nevertheless, if you look at the driver’s license – and the
governor probably, in extremis, in this political climate, will sign that –
suddenly you raise a whole host of problems that we’re just now learning about.
People from Argentina, people from Nicaragua, are they allowed to get driver’s
licenses?
I had a friend who’s running my farm– from India. Will his relatives get to
have drivers license that are here on Green Cards? Will the mother who goes
into the DMV and rifles through her purse trying to find this strange thing that
we’re all supposed to have but never really do carry with us, a birth
certificate, will citizens have to have birth certificates to prove that they’re
15 and people who are not only not citizens but here illegally, will they not
have to have that documentation?
And this whole illegal universe ripples in very strange places. For example,
when I'm teaching a class in the humanities, a student will come to me, often
Mexican, of Mexican heritage, who’s a citizen, or a person from any heritage,
from Nevada, Arizona, and say, why do I have to pay $5,000 for tuition when
somebody who’s here illegally from California pays two thousand? And I usually
use the standard argument, well, perhaps their parents – well, no, no, he’s only
been here five years, or he doesn’t pay California State income tax. And often
they’ll say, well, should I go down to Mexico and come in illegally and then
perhaps I’ll get a discount?
Now, these seem absurd, but they point out the dangers when you go down that
path of tampering with the primacy of the law. I’ll give you one final example.
We have – contrary to popular belief – we have a great multiracial society that
has a lot of things that make it work. Intermarriage is one, popular culture.
Any society that’s been able to have as popular icons the Williams sisters,
Tiger Woods, Jennifer Lopez shows you that race is becoming increasingly
insignificant, but what we have in California are numbers of groups – Koreans,
Punjabis, Chinese, Filipinos – who are desperately wanting to come to
California, and what we’re sending the message is, if you do it legally – and
most do – you can wait up to five years and we will punish you. If you come
illegally from Mexico – and essentially we don’t use that word – we will reward
you. And so we bring up these strange ideas of amnesty. Well, we’ve already
done amnesty once, and the idea is amnesty without conditions – I think all
Californians would accept amnesty as long as it comes with the idea that we’re
going to change the system. Otherwise it’s just rolling amnesty, perpetual
amnesty.
Finally, what should we do? Well, I think most people support immigration, so
we want immigration. It always enriches the culture. But we want it, I think
in California, under legal auspices and in numbers as it was before 1975, where
we can use the traditional powers of American assimilation – again, popular
culture, educational system, intermarriage – to turn Mexican people who do want
to become Americans – and that’s why they’re here or they wouldn’t have come
here, as I said, they would have gone to Central America – and turn them into
Americans. And that would require, I think, legal legality-measured
immigration, and this big question that nobody wants to address: some attention
paid to the borders, because you can’t have two systems where you say, we’re
going to let people come in at 250,000, 300,000 per year under legal auspices
and then not do something to the border.
Will things get better or worse? I think probably worse, and we’re seeing it in
California with apartheid societies. Where I live there are towns such as
Orange Cove, Mendota, Parlier, that are 100 percent either composed of people of
first generation from Mexico, or illegal aliens, or second generation, where its
third- and fourth-generation Mexican citizens have left, where basic services
don’t work at the level of surrounding communities, and they’re almost test tube
cases of what not to do when you reject American integration and diversity and
you allow apartheid societies of people who basically serve more affluent people
and are in a shadow community without legality.
So I would predict, for what it’s worth, that this campaign – this issue
eventually, whether we like it or not, is going to be raised and it’s going to
be demagogued in a way that’s going to be quite infamous.
Thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN:
Thank you, Professor. Now Joe Perkins and then Steve. Joe?
JOSEPH
PERKINS: Thank you, Mark. Mark mentioned earlier that I began
my career at The Wall Street Journal on the editorial page, and the page
was, when I started, and continues to this day, to be a strong advocate for what
could be described as a de facto open borders policy. And as Mark mentioned, I
wrote more than a few editorials, essentially advancing the same position. And
this changed for me. It changed for me when I moved to California, to San
Diego, which shares a border with Tijuana. San Diego also boasts the world’s
busiest land crossing at San Isidro.
So the point is that immigration and open borders was a theoretical concept for
me, writing from our lovely offices in New York, far from the maddening crowd,
but it came home when I actually moved to San Diego, California, and saw, day by
day, the consequences of our essentially unchecked immigration from Mexico into
California.
Now, Professor Hanson attributes The Journal’s advocacy of open
borders, I think, to its fealty with the corporate right, and there’s something
to be said for that; there is some truth to that. It’s one of the ironies of
this whole immigration debate that there are as many staunch advocates of open
border policy on the right as there are on the left, but for entirely different
reasons. But The Journal’s advocacy, and I think the advocacy of many
people in this country for this de facto open borders policy, I think, is
attributable to a real simple explanation, and that is that most of the folks
have not actually seen the consequences of that policy. They have not actually
visited the border region more than, say, the occasional trip to see what the
consequences are. Otherwise, if they had, I think that they might be a little
bit more circumspect in terms of their views.
The fact is that California, the nation’s most populous state, has been
transformed by immigration, particularly illegal immigration. I would venture
to say that if my friends in New York, who continue to advocate open borders,
were to have 100,000, say, Chinese immigrants sail into New York Harbor year by
year and suddenly becoming part of New York State’s population, and of course
most of them would probably end up in New York City, that they might feel
differently. The same with my friends in Washington, D.C. When I lived and
worked here at the White House in the former Bush administration on former Vice
President Dan Quayle’s staff, I had a similar position that I had at The Wall
Street Journal, that immigration, legal immigration, was a good thing, and
even illegal immigration ought to be winked at; that we ought to figure out a
way to regularize those who come into our country illegally. But I would
venture to say that if, say, 10,000 – not 100,000, but if 10,000, say – Haitian
refugees were somehow to end up at the border of Washington, D.C., that
lawmakers here in this city might feel a little bit different.
And this is the way that people feel in California. You know, California has
been very much in the news this year, particularly this summer with our upcoming
recall election, and many of the maladies that afflict the state have been laid
at the feet of the governor, Gray Davis, and some of them he is responsible for
but many others are just the consequences of an immigration system that’s out of
whack; in other words, the budget deficit that California is straining under,
the fact that there are six to seven million individuals lacking health
insurance in this state, prison overcrowding that is near the worst in the
country, not to mention the failing public school systems where our fourth
graders, eight graders, and the high school graduates are under-performing
compared to the rest of the country. All this has to do with essentially trying
to bring hundreds of thousands of new entrants into the system and not being
able to absorb them all.
And what makes the problem even worse is that many of the new entrants really
haven’t the same desire as previous immigrant populations to assimilate and to
assimilate American culture. There is something that – the professor refers to
it as a separatist kind of ideology that I think is advanced mainly by the
multiculturalist left, as he described them, that suggests that, well, there is
really no difference between cultures, that Western culture is not superior to
any other, and that unspoken weight encourages that separatism: maintain your
roots, remember your previous culture, do not subordinate that culture to
Western culture, do not Americanize, essentially.
So what happens is that kids get into school and they segregate themselves. I
mean, it’s a phenomenon that we’ve noticed with other ethnicities, other
nationalities, but not nearly to the extent that it occurs in the Mexican
population in California today. And, you know, even saying that can raise, I
think, accusations of xenophobia or even racism. But it’s not. It’s just a
fact of life that California has become almost, in the words of Kerner, “two
societies…separate and unequal,” in many respects because the fact of the matter
is, I think, because far too many recent Mexican immigrants to California are
ambivalent at best and hostile at worst to assimilating, fully assimilating to
American culture. It has the consequence of creating, I think, a permanent
underclass.
As the professor mentioned, previous waves of Mexican immigration to California
included – I think most of those who arrived were industrious, hardworking, and
that is kind of the image that is put forth about immigrants, like previous
waves of immigration to our country. But it’s a little bit different now; the
ethic is a little bit different. Yes, there is some hard work, et cetera, but
now there’s also a sense of entitlement, and what does that entitlement
include? Well, that entitlement means that no matter how you arrived in this
country, whether it’s legal or illegal, you should have a right to public
charity, essentially; you should have not only free education for your children,
but you should have access to social services, paid for by the taxpayers of
California; you should have access to healthcare, if not paid for by the
taxpayers, then by businesses in the state. And one could say, well, they are,
as the professor mentioned, landscaping your homes, they are doing your laundry
in hotels, they are an integral part of the economy, and therefore one ought to
do that; we ought to be more than willing to provide these kinds of benefits.
But I think that what it does, if anything, is foment a sense of resentment and
hostility by the native population that doesn’t work to the advantage or in the
interests of recent arrivals from Mexico.
I might also say that I really believe that it is a disservice and really,
frankly, an insult to immigrants in California, not just Mexicans but other
immigrant populations, including those who hail from Asia, from other nations,
and Latin America, who’ve done things the right way, who have queued up on line
to immigrate to this country, who had waited years in some cases to be granted
citizenship, when 100,000 or more every year can just essentially steal across
the border and jump to the front of the line. They see that we have a governor,
we have a legislature that says, let’s bestow drivers licenses upon those who
are undocumented, let’s grant them in-state tuition, let’s guarantee them health
coverage regardless, and it is a mockery to those who’ve done it the right way.
As a matter of fact, the greatest resentment that I’ve seen of this comes from
immigrants.
And you know, here’s another mythology about it. There are some who suggest
that, well, all those who oppose granting amnesty or regularizing those who come
to this country illegally are somehow, again, racists or xenophobic. But it’s
interesting that the generation that the professor alluded to, those who did
come here from Mexico years and years ago, two decades, three decades ago, have
a different perspective than the recent arrivals. They too believe, like the
rest of Californians, that we ought to make a clear distinction; we ought to
clearly delineate differences between legal immigration and illegal
immigration. If you come to the country legally, then we are willing to confer
upon you certain benefits, but if you come illegally, then you have no right, no
entitlement to benefits. That’s why for all you’ve read about the supposedly
anti-immigration ballot initiative that the voters of California passed back in
1994, not only did a majority of whites endorse that initiative, but many
non-whites as well, including one-third of California’s Latino population. It’s
the same thing with the English-only or the English immersion initiative that
passed the ballot some years ago.
So, the point is that even the Hispanic population of California recognizes that
there is a real problem with unchecked illegal immigration. And the professor
is half optimistic about the future when he says, well, he doesn’t believe that
it is a definite that California will become essentially a de facto colony of
Mexico. Unfortunately, I think things are trending the other way. I really
believe that what we’re going to see, if our policies from Washington and from
the state capital of California, Sacramento, don’t change in the next five
years, 10 years, that we’re going to see the kind of Balkanization, the kind of
apartheid, as the professor describes it, in California that we have seen in
other troubled parts of the world. It will be a new phenomenon here in America,
and it’s something that troubles me profoundly.
Thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN:
Thank you, Joe. Steve Camarota.
STEVEN CAMAROTA:
Thank you, Mark.
Those of us who can’t write as well as the other two panelists – and that’s
myself – tend to then gravitate elsewhere, towards mathematics or numbers. And
so my presentation will be a little bit different; not as eloquent, but
hopefully will provide a somewhat different perspective than Mr. Hanson’s and
Mr. Perkins as well.
You can turn on the overhead.
Let me talk about what I – the first thing that I like so much about this book
is that it understands an important fact: that immigrants are not things, they
are not simply factors in production. You hear talk about a guest-worker
program, for example, as if people are just something you can bring in and throw
out when you don’t need them, as if they were a cheap plastic part from China.
There is this confusion of immigration and trade as being roughly similar, and
there are similarities. If a person in another country makes something and then
we bring that product – a TV set, a car – to the United States, we are, in
effect, importing the fruits of that person’s labor. And in a similar fashion,
instead of importing the fruits of their labor, we can actually import that
labor if the person comes. But this similarity leads to a misperception that
somehow the two are roughly equivalent. They are not.
Immigration has enormous implications outside the field of economics, for
example, in terms of population size. It has impacts on public schools and
public coffers. It impacts politics and culture. These things may be costs and
benefits, but the point is it makes them fundamentally different than trade.
And we need to understand that, and what I think Professor Hanson has done in
his book “Mexifornia” is help us understand just how different immigration is
from trade, even though there are some theoretical similarities.
Let me start off by looking very briefly at California’s immigrant population.
In figure one – put figure 1 up there – what we see here is the size of
California’s immigrant population. These things are in your handout, which will
be distributed now.
Anyway, what we see here is just an enormous growth in the Mexican immigrant
population – these are only foreign-born persons from Mexico – from around
400,000 in 1970 to over 4 million, based on the 2002 March current population
survey collected by the Census Bureau. In that time, we have seen, if you will,
a Mexicanization of California’s immigrant population. In 1970, only about 24
percent of California’s immigrants were from Mexico; today it’s 45, 46 percent,
close to half – so a very significant increase. Nationally the Mexican
immigrant population has gone from about 800,000 in 1970 to about 10 million
today – so well over a 10-fold increase over the last 30 years, really dramatic
growth.
One of the things I also like about Professor Hanson’s book is he emphasizes the
illegal nature of Mexican immigration, which makes it somewhat unique. Of the
roughly 10 million Mexican immigrants or foreign-born people from Mexico in the
United States, INS has estimated that about 5 million of them are here
illegally, about an additional 2 million are beneficiaries of the amnesty that
we had back in 1986, so they were formerly illegal. So that’s at least seven
(million) of the 10 million are illegal, and probably one (million) to two
million additional of the 10 million are people who were illegal but were
allowed to adjust status in the United States; that is, get a Green Card and now
become permanent residents. So of that 10 million, it might be 90 percent are
people who are either here currently illegally or former illegal aliens, and in
California the story would be similar.
Now, one of the most important stories about Mexican immigration in the United
States you’ll see in figure 2. This shows the educational attainment of Mexican
immigrants in the United States, what education levels they have. And the
important point, the thing that stands out so much from figure 2 is that about
two-thirds of the Mexican-born population in the United States lacks even a high
school education. That has enormous implications because there is no
single-better predictor of how you will do in the modern American economy than
your education levels. So what this tells us is that a very large share of
Mexican immigrants will have a great deal of difficulty competing in the United
States, regardless of legal status, regardless of their language skills. The
American economy offers very few opportunities for people with this kind of
skill profile. Only 4 percent of Mexican immigrants in the United States have a
college degree or more. The corresponding figure for natives is over 30
percent. Roughly a third of natives have a college degree or more.
Now, when we look at the impact on California’s economy – figure 3 – one way to
think about that is, what kind of labor is Mexican immigration giving us? What
we see from figure 3 is a very dramatic increase in the supply of people who
have less than a high school education. The way this figure reads is 56 percent
of all persons in California who work and have less than a high school degree –
these are adults – were born in Mexico. That means that any impact on the
Californian economy, or the national economy for that matter, will be by
increasing the supply of unskilled labor, increasing the supply of high school
dropouts.
Now, what’s interesting about this is that although the numbers are big for
Mexico and very big at the bottom in the labor market, the impact on the U.S.
economy is actually very small, and here’s why: unskilled workers only account
for a tiny fraction of total economic output. If you take what high school
dropouts account for in the United States and add it all up, it’s about 3.7
percent of total economic output. Thus, even if Mexican immigration gives us
cheap labor, it’s giving us cheap labor affecting a tiny share of the labor
market.
Now, nationally, in the 1990s, Mexican immigration increased the supply of high
school dropouts by about 15 percent. So if that 15 percent were to lower wages
for high school dropouts, for construction workers, nannies, people who do
agricultural work, by 5 or 10 percent, the impact on prices in the United States
must be miniscule, because mathematically, if you reduce something that only
accounts for 4 percent by 5 percent, you’re still only at one-, two-,
three-tenths of 1 percent. It can’t come out any other way.
So the idea that Mexican immigration is vital to the U.S. economy is simply
false. It cannot be so, given the kind of labor it provides. And the reason is
simple: we don’t pay unskilled workers very much to begin with, so increasing
the supply of them doesn’t give us a big economic boost. It can’t. It’s just
doesn’t. And this kind of modeling is – you know, the National Academy of
Sciences has done this and it all pretty much comes out the same. The impact of
Mexican immigration on the United States is very tiny, though it may mean a lot
for some employers and it’s understandable that they would want to hold onto it.
Now, of course, as Professor Hanson constantly emphasizes, Mexican immigrants
are not just things; they’re not just factors in production. If we go on to
figure 4, what we see is use of some major welfare programs in California by
households headed by Mexican immigrants. About half the households are probably
headed by people in the country illegally, and yet what we see – and this is
from the March 2002 Current Population Survey, so this is well after welfare
reform – we find in just every program that we look at, people from Mexico make
much more extensive use of public services in California. In some cases the
differences are dramatic. Food stamp use among Mexican households is about four
times what it is among native households. Medicaid use is of course dramatic.
And why Medicaid is so important and why Mexican immigration is almost certainly
– and immigration generally has played a big role in California’s budget crisis
– is that Medicaid is paid for – a large share of it – roughly a third to a
quarter in most states – by the local, by the state government. And so, use of
Medicaid by immigrants is a very significant issue for the state government
because it’s a very large share of their expenditures.
Now, of course, immigrants and Mexican immigrants do pay taxes. Illegal aliens
sometimes pay taxes; sometimes they work on the books, sometimes – and they pay
taxes through sales tax, or if they own a home or if they rent, they might pay,
directly or indirectly, real estate tax. Let me just look at some straight
calculations here in figure 5. This shows the average tax liability – now,
whether people actually pay all this – (chuckles) – you have to decide – for
federal and state income tax in California for natives versus Mexican immigrant
families or households. And what we see is that the average California
household has a state income tax liability – that is, if they paid everything
they should – of $5,600. But unfortunately, for Mexican immigrants, it’s only
about $1,500; so roughly a quarter or less.
Well, a very big difference between the – what Mexican immigrants are supposed
to pay and what natives are supposed to pay. This fact, coupled with the very
high use of public services, means that there is a very high cost to cheap
labor. It must create a very large deficit, and the reason it does, again, is
that Mexican immigrants are overwhelmingly unskilled. Unskilled people don’t
make much money. They are eligible for a whole host of services, and yet they
don’t pay much in taxes. That’s the way our system is supposed to work. The
problem is, if you – if you will, if you transfer the rural poverty of Mexico to
the United States, it has enormous implications for fiscal coffers.
Let me give you another example where it has a big impact. About 13 percent or
so of California’s population is comprised of people born in Mexico, but 25
percent of the kids in public school – at least, probably more like 30 percent –
are the children of Mexican immigrants. A very large increase in school
enrollment is what Mexican immigration does to California, but the problem is,
it doesn’t create a corresponding increase in the local tax base.
Let’s just move on very briefly to table six. This figure just shows how
longtime residents from Mexico do in the United States versus all Mexican
immigrants. And one of the things that Professor Hanson makes the point is that
people from Mexico who have lived in these United States for many years – and in
this chart, what you see is people who have been here for more than 20 years,
and that is the light-colored column – don’t close the gap with natives; they
don’t do that well. Their welfare use rates, their lack of health insurance,
the share living in or near poverty is dramatically higher in California. So
that – what we would hope is, although immigrants come poor, they do better over
time. What we see here, in that last column, is 54 percent of Mexican
immigrants still live in or near poverty; more than double the rate of natives,
even though these are people who have been here for more than 20 years. Welfare
use, health insurance, same thing, and if we would have looked at a host of
measures – home ownership – Mexican immigrants do not close the gap with
natives. And of course, if we remember, with two-thirds of Mexican immigrants
in the United States arriving without a high school education, how could it be
otherwise? There is just no way.
And finally, this last figure, figure 7, shows things generationally. Professor
Hanson’s book talks about generationally, and I think there are reasons for
concern, and he suggests some. Let me just look at some data very quickly.
It’s a complicated table. The first bar, where it says 9 percent, is for
natives. This is national. Everything else we have been looking at is
California. I did not have a chance to recreate this for just California. But
this looks at things nationally for Mexican immigrants, and what we see is 65
percent of Mexican immigrants, again, lack a high school education. In the
second generation, it’s 25 percent: much better. That is clear progress, but it
doesn’t come close to natives, 9 percent who lack a high school education, and
in the third generation – that’s the dark column – high school drop rates are
just as high as they are in the second generation.
Now, college graduation rates look a little better through the generations.
Again, the 29 percent is for natives, the other three columns are for first
generation, second generation, and third generation. There you see again, very
big differences between American natives and all other third generation Mexican
– people of Mexican ancestry. Welfare use: no progress over time. Third
generation Mexican-Americans use welfare at exactly the same rates as
immigrants, and the share in or near poverty – we actually see not only no
progress by the third generation, but things actually slip back. So this table,
although complicated, suggests a very difficult course. Let me suggest one
reason why that is.
The single best predictor in the United States of whether you will go to college
or how far in school you will go is how far your parents went. When you have a
situation in which such a large share of Mexican immigrants come with such
little education, it is likely to take generation after generation to close that
gap, and what we see here in figure 7 is precisely that.
With that, I will leave it to Mark.
MR. KRIKORIAN:
Thank you, Steve. We have some time. We have left a good deal of
time for questions. So please identify yourself as well as your affiliation,
and keep the questions short, and make sure there is a question mark at the end
of it, and, you know, make clear who it is the question is addressed to. Can
you identify yourself and your affiliation?
QUESTION: (Off mike.)
MR. CAMAROTA:
Oh, well, just for the general numbers, it’s just census data. They
ask everyone your citizenship status; you know, where you were born, what
country you were born in, and what year you arrived, and then they go on in
Current Population Survey and there are some other surveys. The government does
very large surveys, over 200,000 people. Then they go and they ask people, you
know, do you use welfare, how much education you have. The Census Bureau has a
budget of something like $7 billion, and that’s what they do with it: they go
out and they just constantly conduct a whole series of surveys. This is, for
example, where we get our unemployment data from. You want to know what the
unemployment rate in the United States, it comes from the same data.
Is the data perfect? No. In general, though, what we think is that it
understates welfare use, but probably for natives as well because people are a
little reluctant to say that they are on welfare. But, in general, in most
cases, when we try to match it up with administrative data – because we know,
say, for example, how many people are on Medicaid, roughly speaking. We keep
track of that and then we match it up with the surveys. It comes out okay; it’s
not exact, but it’s very close. So that’s how we can do that. Is there some
number of Mexican illegals who are missed in this data? Yes, there probably
are.
Now, this data was everyone, including legals and illegals, because I and others
– the Census Bureau, the former INS, and others do try to pick out the illegal
aliens based on certain characteristics like educational attainment, year of
arrival, citizenship status, but I didn’t do that here. I just gave you the
straight numbers. If I pull the illegal aliens out and just look at the legal
immigrants, the welfare stuff looks much worse because the illegals sign their
kids up for Medicaid, but they don’t use as much in the other services. On the
other hand, they pay much less in taxes, not only because they work under the
table, but they’re also much poorer, and the way the system works is if you
don’t make much money, you don’t pay much in taxes.
MR. KRIKORIAN:
Yes,
Bill?
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