Immigration

Why do we have immigration restrictions in the U.S.? Does it make sense to advocate for free trade and free flow of capital without also permitting free flow of labor?

It’s interesting to ponder how much immigration would increase if there were no restrictions. Many people enter the country one way or another despite the restrictions. Would that jump enormously if immigration were legal? I don’t see why. There aren’t that many jobs for unskilled people who can’t speak English. Life in the U.S. if you are poor and don’t have a job is not so great, and is worse than in many other countries. On the other hand, there is the advantage of getting your children into the free public school system, where they will learn English and presumably be able to get a job themselves. How much would things really change?

We’re not likely to ever find out. There seems to be a real paranoia about immigration in some parts of the country. While immigrants certainly compete for jobs with unskilled workers, for other people they make the country wealthier. I think that people cite economic worries, but they are more concerned about social issues. Immigrants are by definition not like us, and immigrants in large numbers change the nature of society. It would be foolish to consider that to always be a good thing.

A different immigration issue is that of the skilled workers who come in on H1B visas. They clearly make the country wealthier, but people try to keep them out using the argument that they lower the salaries of workers already in the country. That doesn’t fit my personal experience. High tech jobs are hard to fill. H1B workers aren’t taking those jobs away from other people, they are filling jobs which would otherwise go unfilled. I’m sure there are exceptions, but that seems to me to be the general rule.

There is this advantage to immigration restrictions: they help preserve existing cultures from homogenization. Losing cultures is like losing languages: we lose ways of thought. It’s better for all of us if people around the world think about problems in different ways, assuming they can still find ways to talk to each other about their approaches. In these days of instant communication and world-wide media we will tend to lose that, but we may make it up by the small subcultures we are breaking into.

I see that I’m being inconsistent here with my thoughts a few days ago about the common narrative provided by the media. In that case I was thinking within the country, and here I am thinking about the whole world. Still, there is a clear inconsistency; something for me to think about.