How many is too many? : the progressive argument for reducing immigration into the United States

632 Pages·2015·2.37 MB·English

by  Cafaro

How Many Is Too Many?

How Many Is Too Many?
The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the
United States
Philip Cafaro
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Philip Cafaro is professor of philosophy and an affiliated faculty member in the School of Global
Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University. He is the author of Thoreau’s Living Ethics.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19065-5 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-22619762-3 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226197623.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cafaro, Philip, 1962– author.
How many is too many? : the progressive argument for reducing immigration into the United States / Philip
Cafaro.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-19065-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-22619762-3 (e-book) 1. United States—
Emigration and immigration. 2. United States—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 3. United
States—Population—Environmental aspects. 4. United States—Emigration and immigration—Economic
aspects. 5. United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. I. Title.
JV6465.C34 2015
325.73—dc23
2014016936
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
1 Good People, Hard Choices, and an Inescapable Question
2 Immigration by the Numbers
3 The Wages of Mass Immigration
4 Winners and Losers
5 Growth, or What Is an Economy For?
6 Population Matters
7 Environmentalists’ Retreat from Demography
8 Defusing America’s Population Bomb—or Cooking the Earth
9 Solutions
10 Objections
11 Conclusion
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ONE
Good People, Hard Choices, and an Inescapable Question
How many immigrants should we allow into the United States annually, and who
gets to come?
The question is easy to state but hard to answer, for thoughtful individuals and
for our nation as a whole. It is a complex question, touching on issues of race
and class, morals and money, power and political allegiance. It is an important
question, since our answer will help determine what kind of country our children
and grandchildren inherit. It is a contentious question: answer it wrongly and
you may hear some choice personal epithets directed your way, depending on
who you are talking to. It is also an endlessly recurring question, since
conditions will change, and an immigration policy that made sense in one era
may no longer work in another. Any answer we give must be open to revision.
This book explores the immigration question in light of current realities and
defends one provisional answer to it. By exploring the question from a variety of
angles and making my own political beliefs explicit, I hope that it will help
readers come to their own well-informed conclusions. Our answers may differ,
but as fellow citizens we need to keep talking to one another and try to come up
with immigration policies that further the common good.
Why are immigration debates frequently so angry? People on one side often
seem to assume it is just because people on the other are stupid, or immoral. I
disagree. Immigration is contentious because vital interests are at stake and no
one set of policies can fully accommodate all of them. Consider two stories from
among the hundreds I’ve heard while researching this book.
*
It is lunchtime on a sunny October day and I’m talking to Javier, an electrician’s
assistant, at a home construction site in Longmont, Colorado, near Denver.1 He
is short and solidly built; his words are soft-spoken but clear. Although he
apologizes for his English, it is quite good. At any rate much better than my
Spanish.
Javier studied to be an electrician in Mexico, but could not find work there
after school. “You have to pay to work,” he explains: pay corrupt officials up to
two years’ wages up front just to start a job. “Too much corruption,” he says, a
refrain I find repeated often by Mexican immigrants. They feel that a poor man
cannot get ahead there, can hardly get started.
So in 1989 Javier came to the United States, undocumented, working various
jobs in food preparation and construction. He has lived in Colorado for nine
jobs in food preparation and construction. He has lived in Colorado for nine
years and now has a wife (also here illegally) and two girls, ages seven and
three. “I like USA, you have a better life here,” he says. Of course he misses his
family back in Mexico. But to his father’s entreaties to come home, he explains
that he needs to consider his own family now. Javier told me that he’s not
looking to get rich, he just wants a decent life for himself and his girls. Who
could blame him?
Ironically one of the things Javier likes most about the United States is that we
have rules that are fairly enforced. Unlike in Mexico, a poor man does not live at
the whim of corrupt officials. When I suggest that Mexico might need more
people like him to stay and fight “corruption,” he just laughs. “No, go to jail,” he
says, or worse. Like the dozens of other Mexican and Central American
immigrants I have interviewed for this book, Javier does not seem to think that
such corruption could ever change in the land of his birth.2
Do immigrants take jobs away from Americans? I ask. “American people no
want to work in the fields,” he responds, or as dishwashers in restaurants. Still,
he continues, “the problem is cheap labor.” Too many immigrants coming into
construction lowers wages for everyone—including other immigrants like
himself.
“The American people say, all Mexicans the same,” Javier says. He does not
want to be lumped together with “all Mexicans,” or labeled a problem, but
judged for who he is as an individual. “I don’t like it when my people abandon
cars, or steal.” If immigrants commit crimes, he thinks they should go to jail, or
be deported. But “that no me.” While many immigrants work under the table for
cash, he is proud of the fact that he pays his taxes. Proud, too, that he gives a
good day’s work for his daily pay (a fact confirmed by his coworkers).
Javier’s boss, Andy, thinks that immigration levels are too high and that too
many people flout the law and work illegally.3 He was disappointed, he says, to
find out several years ago that Javier was in the country illegally. Still he likes
and respects Javier and worries about his family. He is trying to help him get
legal residency.
With the government showing new initiative in immigration enforcement—
including a well-publicized raid at a nearby meatpacking plant that caught
hundreds of illegal workers—there is a lot of worry among undocumented
immigrants. “Everyone scared now,” Javier says. He and his wife used to go to
restaurants or stores without a second thought; now they are sometimes afraid to
go out. “It’s hard,” he says. But: “I understand. If the people say, ‘All the people
here, go back to Mexico,’ I understand.”
Javier’s answer to one of my standard questions—“How might changes in
immigration policy affect you?”—is obvious. Tighter enforcement could break
immigration policy affect you?”—is obvious. Tighter enforcement could break
up his family and destroy the life he has created here in America. An amnesty
would give him a chance to regularize his life. “Sometimes,” he says, “I dream
in my heart, ‘If you no want to give me paper for residence, or whatever, just
give me permit for work.’”
*
It’s a few months later and I’m back in Longmont, eating a 6:30 breakfast at a
café out by the Interstate with Tom Kenney.4 Fit and alert, Tom looks to be in
his mid-forties. Born and raised in Denver, he has been spraying custom finishes
on drywall for twenty-five years and has had his own company since 1989. “At
one point we had twelve people running three trucks,” he says. Now his business
is just him and his wife. “Things have changed,” he says.
Although it has cooled off considerably, residential and commercial
construction was booming when I interviewed Tom. The main “thing that’s
changed” is the number of immigrants in construction. When Tom got into it
twenty-five years ago, construction used almost all native-born workers. Today
estimates of the number of immigrant workers in northern Colorado range from
50% to 70% of the total construction workforce. Some trades, like pouring
concrete and framing, use immigrant labor almost exclusively. Come in with an
“all-white” crew of framers, another small contractor tells me, and people do a
double-take.
Tom is an independent contractor, bidding on individual jobs. But, he says,
“guys are coming in with bids that are impossible.” After all his time in the
business, “no way they can be as efficient in time and materials as me.” The
difference has to be in the cost of labor. “They’re not paying the taxes and
insurance that I am,” he says. Insurance, workmen’s compensation, and taxes
add about 40% to the cost of legally employed workers. When you add the lower
wages that immigrants are often willing to take, there is plenty of opportunity for
competing contractors to underbid Tom and still make a tidy profit. He no longer
bids on the big new construction projects and jobs in individual, custom-built
houses are becoming harder to find.
“I’ve gone in to spray a house and there’s a guy sleeping in the bathtub, with a
microwave set up in the kitchen. I’m thinking, ‘You moved into this house for
two weeks to hang and paint it, you’re gonna get cash from somebody, and he’s
gonna pick you up and drive you to the next one.’” He seems more upset at the
contractor than at the undocumented worker who labors for him.
In this way, some trades in construction are turning into the equivalent of
migrant labor in agriculture. Workers do not have insurance or workmen’s
migrant labor in agriculture. Workers do not have insurance or workmen’s
compensation, so if they are hurt or worn out on the job, they are simply
discarded and replaced. Workers are used up, while the builders and contractors
higher up the food chain keep more of the profits for themselves. “The quality of
life [for construction workers] has changed drastically,” says Tom. “I don’t want
to live like that. I want to go home and live with my family.”
Do immigrants perform jobs Americans don’t want to do? I ask. The answer is
no. “My job is undesirable,” Tom replies. “It’s dirty, it’s messy, it’s dusty. I
learned right away that because of that, the opportunity is available to make
money in it. That job has served me well”—at least up until recently. He now
travels as far away as Wyoming and southern Colorado to find work. “We’re all
fighting for scraps right now.”
Over the years, Tom has built a reputation for quality work and efficient and
prompt service, as I confirmed in interviews with others in the business. Until
recently that was enough to secure a good living. Now though, like a friend of
his who recently folded his small landscaping company (“I just can’t bid ’em
low enough”), Tom is thinking of leaving the business. He is also struggling to
find a way to keep up the mortgage payments on his house.
He does not blame immigrants, though. “If you were born in Mexico, and you
had to fight for food or clothing, you would do the same thing,” Tom tells me.
“You would come here.”
*
Any immigration policy will have winners and losers. So claims Harvard
economist George Borjas, a leading authority on the economic impacts of
immigration.5 My interviews with Javier Morales and Tom Kenney suggest why
Borjas is right.
If we enforce our immigration laws, then good people like Javier and his
family will have their lives turned upside down. If we limit the numbers of
immigrants, then good people in Mexico (and Guatemala, and Vietnam, and the
Philippines . . .) will have to forgo opportunities to live better lives in the United
States.
On the other hand, if we fail to enforce our immigration laws or repeatedly
grant amnesties to people like Javier who are in the country illegally, then we
forfeit the ability to set limits to immigration. And if immigration levels remain
high, then hard-working men and women like Tom and his wife and children
will probably continue to see their economic fortunes decline. Economic
inequality will continue to increase in America, as it has for the past four