Toward a Real Immigration Debate

Our current immigration debate is wrought with emotion and waged on grossly simplistic terms. It's a national argument loaded with bad faith, marked by a surplus of name calling and often based on terrible data.

The key to getting to the bottom of the immigration question is to embrace the complexity of the issue. If we take a broad look at the facts -- with all their nuance -- perhaps a common-sense solution will emerge.

A real issue

A few weeks ago Robert Scheer argued, "There is no immigration crisis -- other than the one created by a small but vocal stripe of opportunist politicians, media demagogues and freelance xenophobes."

I'll explain why he's partially right. Yet at the same time, to deny that immigration is a real issue is not only politically tone-deaf, it misses the point entirely.

The present state of our immigration system is horrible from a pro- as well as an anti-immigration point of view. Recall that on Sept. 10, 2001, when Guantanamo Bay was still just an odd relic of the Cold War, the United States was already holding over 3,000 people indefinitely in its immigration system, "pending deportation" to countries that didn't want them, without charge or access to attorneys.

It's an issue because we have more undocumented immigrants in this country than ever, and recent polls show that three out of four Americans consider immigration "a very big or moderately big problem." Many see unchecked immigration as the root cause of American workers' deteriorating economic health.

With virtually no mainstream debate about how so-called "free-trade" affects working people, how easy it is to break unions or how debased corporate America's ethical culture has become, it's not surprising that immigration is such a hot-button topic. Working people have seen their real wages and benefits falling, and although that decline doesn't match up chronologically with the influx of immigrant labor over the past 10 years, it's understandable that people believe immigration plays a much greater role than it actually does. Immigrants are visible in a way those other factors are not.

But while the high number of immigrants in the United States is an issue, it's not a crisis, and it is certainly not an invasion. What we've seen is a large but finite surge in immigration, mostly from Mexico and largely in response to the effects of trade deals Mexico signed in the 1990s. According to a study by the Pew organization, Mexican immigration "grew very rapidly starting in the mid-1990s, hit a peak at the end of the decade, and then declined substantially after 2001. By 2004, the annual inflow of foreign-born persons was down 24 percent from its all-time high in 2000."

That timeline corresponds perfectly with the damage wrought in Mexico by NAFTA. According to one of the better analyses of that deal's impact (PDF), between NAFTA's passage in 1995 and 2002, Mexico saw "a decline in domestic manufacturing employment" and "Mexican agriculture has been a net loser … [E]mployment in the sector has declined sharply." Real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than when NAFTA took effect.

According to a Pew analysis of census data, there are an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, up from around five million in the mid-1990s. As a percentage of the population, there are fewer foreign-born in America today than there were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At less than five percent, immigrants are a much lower percentage of the civilian work force than we've had in past eras.

We need a clearer understanding of who immigrants are and what they do. According to the Census Bureau (PDF), less than half of all immigrants come from Central and South America. The same percentage of the foreign-born population has college degrees as Americans (although fewer have high school degrees).