'Complimentarity' and 'Circularity:' Will New Buzzwords Fire Up the Immigration Debate in 2010?

With a national debate on the impact of foreign workers on jobs and the economy heating up for 2010, it’s time to brush up on some relevant policy jargon. Two words in particular -- "complementarity" and "circularity" -- seem to have caught the attention of experts, as legislators prepare to consider a new immigration reform bill introduced by Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill.

"Complementarity" refers to an immigrant workforce that fills niches and roles that complements rather than competes with what U.S.-born workers are offering. For immigration advocates, it’s a fancy way of saying that, even in economic hard times, immigrant workers perform jobs that Americans prefer not to do.

Another piece of specialist vocabulary, "circularity," refers to the ability of immigrants to travel back and forth between nations. Former Mexican foreign minister and New York University professor Jorge Castañeda has centered his prominent critiques of U.S. immigration enforcement on how border crackdowns and raids have severely curtailed circular migration in the last two decades. The counterintuitive result, he maintains, is more Mexicans settling illegally north of the border.

Circularity is a contested concept. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that wants lower immigration levels, has written that the circularity argument is "so comically absurd it deserves a place in The Onion."

Undocumented immigrants decide to stay in the United States for a variety of reasons, not just to avoid tougher border enforcement upon their return, he wrote.

But it’s the notion of complementarity that has become particularly important in the current socioeconomic context, which combines a fragile recovery and widespread unemployment (above 10 percent nationally, and over 14 percent in Michigan) with deep unease about where future jobs growth will come from.

Advocates of an immigration reform that would legalize undocumented workers and create more flexible pathways for entry into the United States for foreign workers cite complementarity as one reason why it makes sense to revamp immigration policy even with a weak economy.

"There is complementarity between the foreign born and native born workforce," said Craig J. Regelbrugge, co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform.

"Immigration reform and economic recovery go hand in hand," he added.

Regelbrugge used the word "complementarity" several times in a conference call with reporters earlier this week as he described the interdependence of U.S.-born and immigrant workers in agriculture. In fact, immigrant labor on farms creates thousands of jobs for U.S.-born agricultural workers, Regelbrugge said.

In Wisconsin, the prototype dairy state, immigrant laborers are some 40 percent of the dairy workforce and fill the "least desirable" roles such as night shift work, Regelbrugge said. He also cited the case of a Colorado dairy farm that had lost experienced hands after an immigration audit and had afterward seen calves’ mortality double.

But complementarity is hardly a settled issue. There is evidence that workers lacking a high school diploma do compete directly with immigrant laborers, and some economists dispute the overall notion of a mutually beneficial dovetailing of the native and immigrant workforces. On his blog last year, George Borjas, a Harvard University economist, said this about an oft-cited academic study supporting complementarity: "Things that seem too good to be true usually aren’t."

However contested, both concepts will most likely help frame the debate set to swirl around the new immigration bill introduced by Rep. Gutierrez.