Sowell Applied Economics Thinking Beyond Stage One (revised and enlarged ed)

immigrants, the pay levels of native-born American men have exceeded the pay levels of immigrant men by larger and larger amounts.

Among the costs imposed by immigrants that do not get counted in the marketplace are the unpaid services of hospital emergency rooms, schools, and law enforcement. However, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get comprehensive and accurate data on all these things. In the absence of such data, conflicting estimates tend to be inconclusive. Moreover, many of the costs created by immigrants are not money costs, but are no less important.

Whatever the arguments for or against the importation of more workers, the importation of people has remained, as it had always been, an importation of their cultures as well. Many of the immigrants who flowed into Europe after the lowering of immigration barriers came from Muslim countries with lower standards of living— Turks to Germany and Algerians to France, for example— and brought with them a culture with values that raised barriers to assimilation into the new society, even as the barriers to immigration were lowered. The net result has been a growth of separate ethnic enclaves in Western European countries, not only different from but in many cases hostile to the values of the society around them. Such differences and hostilities have been accentuated during a period of international clashes between many Western and Muslim countries and between movements in the Muslim world and Western society.

Despite the term “guest workers,” these were not guests whose length of stay was determined by their hosts. Whole families migrated and remained to produce offspring. Whatever the legal authority of the host country to terminate their stay, the same political forces which combined to create more open immigration laws remained a political barrier to obstruct any attempt to return the immigrants to their homelands. In short, “guest worker” programs proved to be irreversible and the immigrants and their children became a growing proportion of the population of the host countries, since the immigrants were usually younger than the native-born population and had more children. The second and later generations of these immigrant

families were as prone to disaffection as the second generations of some other immigrants have been in other lands around the world.

Although the first generation of immigrants were brought in to become workers, unemployment has tended to be high among the second and later generations. In parts of France, for example, unemployment rates among Muslim young men have been estimated at about 40 percent. One measure of their alienation from the society around them is that they commit not only economic crimes but also gang rapes, for which they seem “not merely unrepentant or unashamed but proud.” A shrewd observer of peoples and places around the world described the young Muslim population in and around Paris:

Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal. . . A kind of anti-society has grown up in them— a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France.

Unappeased by “the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity,” the young men from these alienated immigrant enclaves, with a “them-and-us worldview,” needed “to see themselves as warriors in a civil war, not mere ne’er-do-wells and criminals.” All this was said before the Muslim riots of 2005 which swept through Paris and other French cities, and which shocked many who had no inkling of what bitter enemies now lived within their borders. According to The Economist:

A month after the riots died down, France is still taking stock. In three weeks of violence across the country, some 10,000 vehicles were burned, 255 schools, 233 public buildings and 51 post offices were attacked, 140 public-transport vehicles were stoned, and 4,770 people were arrested, according to figures obtained by Le Monde.

The Washington Post reported: “Most of the recent violence in France— the worst civil unrest in the country in nearly 40 years— has occurred in poor suburbs and neighborhoods populated by large numbers of immigrants and their French-born children.”

France has not been unique in being shocked to discover the consequences of lowering the barriers to immigration in stage one without considering what could happen in later stages. Britain has been rocked by explosions in London’s subway system, set off by British-born Muslims of a second or later generation. Moreover, organized public displays of animosity and contempt toward British society by Muslims in Britain have included death threats on which authorities have refused to take any action, even when these threats have been pointed out to them. In other parts of Europe, threats have been made against people who have exercised what is traditional free speech in their own country by criticizing some aspect of Islamic culture, as they criticize their own culture. A painting that had hung in the British Museum for generations was taken down after complaints that it was offensive to Muslims.

In Germany, two-thirds of the 2.6 million Turks in the country do not have German citizenship and the visiting Turkish prime minister urged them not to assimilate. According to The Economist:

Just 14.8% of German children but 45.4% of Turks end up in Hauptschulen, which ought to prepare them for simple trades but often fail to do even that. In Neukölln they are a dumping ground. Graduates cannot work out how many square metres of carpet would cover a floor, says the district’s education chief, Wolfgang Schimmang.

How did such circumstances come about?

With the rise of attitudes and beliefs hostile to recognition of different endowments of desired characteristics among different groups, culminating in non-judgmental “multiculturalism” in many countries in the latter part of the twentieth century, both the process of selectively choosing the countries from which immigrants would be accepted and the process of assimilating them after their arrival were severely limited. Often the emphasis has shifted from the interests of the receiving country to the plight of those who want to enter from poorer and often less free countries. Along with this

philosophical shift, there has been a growing desire of employers to get workers for low-skilled jobs whose pay scales were not always sufficient to attract an adequate supply from the native-born population in prosperous countries with generous welfare-state benefits that made not working at all a viable option.

Cultural assimilation has been held back by the “multicultural” idea of accommodating and perpetuating group differences instead of seeking social cohesion by drawing various segments of the population into the common culture of the country. In Britain, for example, there are more than a hundred ethnic support groups, ranging from an Afro-Caribbean lunch club to a forum for Chinese diabetics, just in Liverpool, and swimming pools in most big towns have “women-only nights, aimed mainly at tempting modest Muslims into the water,” according to The Economist. Individually and in the short run, many of these things may be benign but, thinking beyond stage one, this can mean freezing social divisions at the expense of the social cohesion required to sustain a society.

Increasingly, both U.S. government documents and documents from private businesses and other organizations in the United States have been printed in foreign languages. Courts have been asked to either overlook or deal leniently with violations of American law by people whose acts are considered legitimate in their native cultures. In the past, various ethnic organizations in the United States— among the Irish, the Jews, the Lebanese, and among American blacks— put forth sustained efforts over a period of decades to change the behavior of people in these groups to conform to the norms of the larger society around them, in order to advance the group as a whole. In the new, multicultural world, however, ethnic organizations turned their attention to getting the larger society to accept these groups as is, and even stigmatizing those in their groups who tend to assimilate.

All too often, today’s ethnic organizations, whether among Muslims in Europe or Mexicans in the United States, seek to keep their constituencies foreign in culture and alienated in attitude from the larger society around them. This is not to say that all, or even most, of the people in the immigrant communities in Europe or the United States share the adversary

attitude of many organized immigrant movements or the European or American “multiculturalists” who wish to preserve foreign cultures. For example, when a proposition against teaching foreign school children in their native languages— usually Spanish— was put on the ballot in California in 1998, more than 40 percent of Hispanic voters supported the ending of so-called “bilingual” education.

What proportion of various other immigrant groups in Europe or America want to assimilate, and to what degree, remains largely unknown. What is known is that the organized and vocal portion of these immigrant groups tend to be not only against assimilation but even against the values of the societies in which they now live.

SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

Economics cannot provide “answers” to the immigration “question.” What economics can do is provide questions to address to politicians who claim to have answers. Moreover, economic analysis goes beyond stage one, as political proposals seldom do. The political phrase “guest workers,” for example, suggests that immigrants brought in to do various work are like guests who come and go as their hosts decide, and that the impact of these immigrants on the existing citizens can be evaluated on the basis of their work alone. That is not true even in narrowly economic terms, given the vast sums of money expended to provide medical care and welfare benefits to immigrants, as well as schooling for their children, not to mention the costs of imprisoning a disproportionate number of immigrants from Mexico living in the United States, both legally and illegally, or the costs created by crime and terrorism by immigrants in Europe, not to mention the diseases being introduced into Western nations by immigrants from poorer countries.

Whether in Europe, the United States, or elsewhere, both the costs and the benefits of immigration can vary enormously with the origins of the immigrants. This is one of many reasons why there is no solution to the problem of immigration in general— because there are no immigrants in

general. There are specific immigrants from specific places with specific patterns and specific track records.

History can be either a help or a hindrance to understanding today’s immigration issues. A study of the past can show general patterns, many of which can be recognized in today’s events as well, such as a growth of disaffection and alienation among the offspring of some immigrants from poor countries, even when the first generation was glad to have improved their lot in life by moving to a more prosperous and freer nation. History can also show what valuable contributions some immigrants have made in some countries during some eras. But what history cannot do is show that to be inevitable for all immigrants in all eras, or even for most immigrants in most eras.

The fact that past critics of particular immigrant groups that were deemed to be inassimilable at some time in the past turned out to be wrong under the conditions of those times does not mean that critics who point out how little assimilation takes place among particular groups today must also be wrong under today’s very different conditions. Among these different conditions today are ethnic organizations promoting the perpetuation of foreign cultures and of past or present resentments, in contrast to ethnic organizations of the past that promoted assimilation. Moreover, immigrants to the United States in the past were cut off from reinforcements of their foreign cultures by newcomers from their homelands when the drastic restrictions on immigration in the 1920s stopped so many newcomers from arriving in America. Those who today invoke historical parallels are seeking to keep the flow of cultural reinforcements coming. Things happened in a particular way in the past for particular reasons. Where those factors no longer exist, there is no reason to expect the outcomes to be the same out of sheer historical parallelism.

Among the things that politicians say that economics can challenge is the oft-repeated claim that immigrants take jobs that the citizens of the country will not take. That can be challenged both empirically and analytically. In the United States, for example, there are no major sectors of the economy in which even half the workers are immigrants. A study of 473 job classifications found only 4 in which immigrants were a majority—

stucco masons, tailors, produce sorters and beauty salon workers— and even in those occupations native-born Americans were more than 40 percent of the workers. Agriculture is a sector in which many claim that immigrant labor is essential but half of all agricultural workers in the United States were born in the United States.

The fear that there would be “ten-dollar lettuce” if illegal immigrants were not available to pick it is completely inconsistent with the economics of agricultural prices. A fraction of the price of agricultural produce goes to the farmer and an even smaller fraction to the farm workers. For example, the average American household spent $370 for fruits and vegetables in 2004, of which $65 went to farmers, who in turn paid $22 to farm laborers. Even if farm laborers’ pay doubled, that would raise the price of a year’s supply of all fruits and vegetables put together by just $22, or less than 10 percent. Ten-dollar lettuce makes a catchy political slogan but it has nothing to do with economic reality.

Like history, economics cannot be invoked thoughtlessly, without regard to the specifics of the time and place. In the abstract, the free movement of people, like the free movement of goods and services, promotes economic benefits when there are willing participants, ready to transact on mutually agreeable terms, unimpeded by a national boundary. But the movement of people from country to country has different consequences from the movement of goods and services. When Americans buy a Toyota from Japan, the Toyota does not demand that the United States accommodate the Japanese language or that Americans adjust themselves to Japanese customs in their own country, much less introduce diseases into the American population. Moreover, Toyotas do not give birth to little Toyotas that can grow up with the problematic attitudes of some second generation immigrants.

In the abstract, all things are the same except for the differences and different except for the similarities. But such truisms do not make policies for people the same as policies for goods and services. Not only do people differ from goods and services, people differ from other people, and any policy— on immigration or anything else— which insists on ignoring such differences among people risks discovering that ideas which sounded good

in stage one can turn out to be disastrous in later stages, when those ignored differences produce “unintended consequences.” In the case of immigrants, those consequences can be irreversible.

so that we can avoid the common problem of people talking past each other, as happens too often in discussions of discrimination.

PREJUDICE, BIAS, AND DISCRIMINATION

Prejudice, bias, and discrimination are too often confused with one another. Each requires careful definition before discussing substantive issues, if those discussions are not to get hopelessly bogged down in semantics.

Prejudice

Prejudice means prejudgment. Yet the term has been widely used more loosely to refer to adverse opinions in general about particular racial or ethnic groups. Unless we are prepared to accept as dogma that there cannot possibly be anything about the skills, behavior, or performance of any group, anywhere in the world, which reduces their productivity as workers or their desirability as neighbors, we cannot automatically equate adverse opinions or actions with prejudgments. Too much empirical evidence exists to allow any such dogma to survive scrutiny. For example, per capita consumption of alcohol and rates of alcoholism have varied by some multiple among various groups in the United States and in the Soviet Union, among other places— and the adverse effects of alcohol and alcoholism have been too well documented to require elaboration. Rates of crime, disease and other adverse conditions have likewise varied widely among various groups in countries around the world.

Were the organized crime activities of the Chinese tongs in various countries in Southeast Asia mere “perceptions”? Was the Maharashtrian majority in Bombay simply prejudiced against other Maharashtrians when they preferred to buy from businesses run by people from South India, rather than businesses run by their own compatriots? Is it just racial