Immigration Policy for an Age of Mass Movement
by Irwin M. Stelzer
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A rational immigration policy should aim to enrich a host nation whilst doing what it can to reduce opposition to the social consequences of immigration.

The populations of the world are on the move, propelled by oppression and poverty in some countries; attracted by job opportunities in the growing economies of the industrialised countries, or by the relatively generous welfare benefits available in the world's richer countries; and facilitated by the rapid communication of the availability of opportunities and the declining cost of transportation. The United States, for instance, welcomes some 800,000 legal immigrants annually. Indeed, America is in the midst of what Harvard Professor George Borjas calls the 'Second Great Migration [which] has altered the "look" of the United States in ways that were unimaginable in the 1970s.'1

But data for legal immigration tell only part of the story. A huge trade in illegal immigrants is now organised by highly efficient people-smuggling gangs that control train, truck, bus, shipping, and hotel assets. Estimates of the number of people risking the perils that face illegal migrants in order to seek better lives in foreign countries vary. The most often cited is that of Britain's Home Office, which estimates that about 30 million people are smuggled across international borders every year in a trade worth between $12 billion and $30 billion annually, with 500,000 illegals entering the EU annually.2

Europe is not the only destination of choice for the world's immigrants. Just as illegal immigrants from China and Eastern Europe pour through the Balkans into the EU,3 so Mexicans and Central Americans pour across the Rio Grande into America. The US Immigration and Nationalisation Service estimates that there are between five and six million illegal immigrants living in America, about half having come from Mexico. That number excludes the three million illegal aliens who were granted amnesty in the 1980s, and is swelled each year by around 300,000 immigrants arriving without necessary documents or simply remaining in America after their student or visitors visas expire.4

Even if we allow for the tendency of bureaucrats to inflate numbers such as these as a predicate to requesting increased budgets, we must still concede that bringing desperate workers to where the jobs are is a very big business indeed. It is this illegal traffic, combined with rising fears that the identities and cultures of target countries are about to be obliterated, that has triggered a worldwide debate on immigration policy.

The policy debate

Debates about immigration policy are, of course, nothing new, either in America or in other industrialised countries. But two forces are operating to bring the debate to centre stage.

First, the sheer number of people on the move has increased enormously. The bringing down of the Iron Curtain and subsequent problems in the Balkans have opened a new pathway to Western Europe, and increased the number of people with good reason to pack their bags and seek safer and more economically attractive homes. The problems in Africa have increased the disparity between living standards on that continent and in Europe, making the dangerous trip to Spain more worth the risk. And America's economy, with its seemingly insatiable demand for workers, combines with the porous borders characteristic of a democracy to provide an attractive target for immigrants from Mexico and points further south.

The second factor that has brought new urgency to the debate about immigration policy is the corporatisation of illegal immigration. No longer is the illegal a single brave soul, or family, that has trekked or sailed miles to find a more congenial home. With the exception of those trying to escape Fidel Castro's tyranny, the lone entrepreneur has been replaced with well capitalised, internationally organised people-smuggling rings-some 50 large ones, known as 'Snakehead gangs', reportedly dominate the trade.

This has added a tragic urgency to the arguments about immigration. In Great Britain, 58 Chinese attempting to enter Britain illegally from Belgium died when the ventilation system in the container truck in which they were secreted malfunctioned. In America, Mexicans being led across the border by smugglers are frequently left to die attempting to walk across the deserts of Arizona. Earlier this year, over 300 illegal immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan drowned when their boat sank off the coast of Java, a matter of little concern to the smugglers who provided transport for them.

Very often, those who succeed in entering the target country illegally are so indebted to the ring that smuggled them in that they are forced to work at virtual starvation wages, or in illegal trades such as drug running and prostitution, to pay off their debts to the smugglers. The fees are so high that the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention reckons that people-smuggling is now a more lucrative racket than drug-smuggling.

Coping with illegals

As with the drug trade, so with the people trade, the first reaction of policymakers is to interdict the traffic-step up border patrols, set up mechanisms for international cooperation, increase the penalties levied on those caught aiding immigrants to enter a country illegally. In America there are calls for more border guards, and longer and higher fences along the Mexican border. In Britain, lorry drivers are now fined £2,000 for each illegal found hidden in their vehicles, and the Prime Minister and his Italian counterpart have called for 14-year prison terms for persons profiting from the trade in people, while at the same time promising to protect those 'fleeing persecution.'5 Whether traffickers who willy-nilly save people from persecution by trafficking in them should be driven from business is a question the Prime Minister chooses not to answer.

Although we will never know just how many immigrants would arrive in richer countries if all efforts to limit their numbers were suspended, we do know that those efforts cannot by any stretch be called successful. The number of illegal immigrants swarming across the borders of all industrialised-read, 'rich'-countries is increasing. In Britain, the special police unit set up to staunch the flow of immigrants concedes that the number sneaking in to Britain through the port of Dover has increased by 500% in the past six years. Germany, France, Spain, and Italy all report a similar rise in the tide of hopefuls migrating to where the jobs are.

What to do? The policy of stepping up enforcement procedures clearly is not working. In America and in Britain, as well as in some European countries, periodic recourse to amnesties for illegal immigrants is the politicians' way of accepting the fact that past restrictions have not barred entry to the degree intended, and that deportation is either impossible, inhumane, uneconomic or all three. Which does not mean that such measures should be abandoned. After all, no geographic area can legitimately claim nationhood if it cannot control its borders and who may enter its territory. Or at least try.6

Nor is the policy of attempting to distinguish among types of immigrants proving very successful. In America, Britain and other countries, for example, efforts are made to distinguish between those immigrants seeking 'asylum' and those 'merely' seeking economic advantage. But separating real from bogus asylum seekers is often difficult, not only because the immigrant has every incentive to concoct tales of persecution that officials in the host country have no way of challenging or verifying in many cases, but because the definition of persecution is not always clear cut.

Those who generally oppose immigration contend that asylum status should be reserved for those threatened with, say, ethnic cleansing, and should be denied to those merely suffering economic persecution. This sounds sensible until one remembers the early days of Germany's assault on its Jewish population, when a progressive tightening of the economic noose was taken by many Jews as a warning to get out, but who found no nation willing to accept them, leaving them to become victims of the German people's Final Solution.

So confusion reigns: the American government has the bizarre policy of returning to Fidel Castro's tender mercies those Cubans unlucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard while still in their rafts and boats, but offering sanctuary to those who make it to our beaches; women's groups argue that asylum should be granted to females threatened with genital mutilation or forced marriages in their native country; and the British wonder whether Gypsies are sufficiently at risk of harm in their native Romania to warrant granting them the right to stay in Great Britain, where their aggressive begging and widespread calls upon the country's welfare system are causing a storm of protest from the middle class.

Towards a coherent policy

No serious policymaker can defend 'bogus' asylum seeking or 'illegal' immigration. Nor can any serious policymaker argue that a nation does not have the right to control the amount and character of those it chooses to welcome as temporary workers or as permanent residents en route to citizenship.

But this tells us very little about just what immigration policy should try to do, for it is the policy itself that determines what is legal and what is not. It is possible both to oppose illegal immigration (and illegal anything, for that matter) while at the same time wanting to change the law that casts some, but not others, into the 'illegal' category. So, too, with asylum seekers. It is policy-policy that can be changed-that defines the standards that distinguish legitimate from bogus asylum seeking.

Broadly speaking, there are three possibilities.

Immigration policy can be built on humanitarian principles: offer an 'open door' to all those whose lives can be improved by taking up residence in the country they seek to adopt. A purely humanitarian, open-door policy does have its difficulties. Professor Borjas opens his book with a vignette: the 1979 meeting at the White House between then-president Jimmy Carter and China's Vice-Premier, Deng Xiaoping. When Carter urged Deng to respect human rights, among them the right of the Chinese regime's subjects to emigrate, Deng responded, 'Well, Mr. President, how many Chinese nationals do you want? Ten million? Twenty million? Thirty million?'7 So much for the wide open door.

At the other extreme, immigration policy might be based on the notion that a nation cannot allow any significant immigration without diluting its values, customs and mores, and becoming a multicultural hodge-podge of groups with such varied approaches to life and public policy as to become ungovernable. This 'slammed-door' policy has its advocates in all countries, from historically liberal America to historically less liberal Austria and France.

These advocates would like to have a national review of their nation's current policy, with the object of declaring a moratorium on immigration until some policy can be devised that permits only a few to immigrate-that few being of a sort that does not threaten to dilute the native stock by adding to what those in this camp contend is the already unacceptable cultural, religious, and racial diversity of the existing population. It is too easy to dismiss this view as racist, or nativist. Although some opponents of immigration may indeed have such ignoble views, many who would ring-fence their countries are patriots who are devoted to the historic values of their nation, and who want to see those values preserved for the indefinite future.

A policy based on self-interest

Alternatively, and somewhere between the extremes of an open-door and a slammed-door immigration policy, is one based on the economic self-interest of the receiving country. Such a policy would be designed to admit only, or primarily, those immigrants likely to maximise the wealth of the native population.

In earlier times, it was possible to argue that this goal of enriching the host nation was served by an open-door policy, one that also served humanitarian purposes. After all, the tempest-tossed immigrants who were seeking better lives were willing to work hard at menial tasks, and did not seek aid from the state, relying instead on their own efforts and a bit of help from voluntary agencies and their families. They and their offspring were destined in the end to enrich the nation that received them. So a nation could benefit economically from its humanitarianism.

But then came the welfare state, creating the possibility that the immigrant might be seeking a hand-out rather than a hand-up. The emergence of the welfare state in industrialised countries made it impossible to continue to argue that a nation could do well by doing good-that by adopting a relatively open immigration policy for humanitarian purposes it also served its economic interests by attracting only a valuable stream of eager new workers. So closing the doors to all who might be a burden on the state came to be regarded by pragmatists as the unambiguously correct policy.

But it is arguably no easier to distinguish immigrants who might add to national wealth from those who will be a drain on it, than it is to distinguish legitimate from bogus asylum seekers. For one thing, nations with declining populations need younger workers-workers whose prospective contributions to society over their working lives it is difficult to estimate at the time they seek to immigrate.

There is also another somewhat vaguer reason why it is difficult to determine just which immigrants will enrich, and which will burden, a nation. The Economist recently argued that for a city to be attractive to the young, internationally mobile, entrepreneurial types who are creating new businesses and most of the new jobs in the economies of all of the developed nations, it must be trendy, culturally diverse-in short, 'cool'. That requires the presence of 'young, trend-setting bohemians'. And 'for real bohemia youÊ . . . need immigrants . . . to create cultural diversity and to challenge complacent monoculture'. 8

So what might seem a purely humanitarian policy of accepting penurious immigrants might not be devoid of economic advantages to the receiving nation. Indeed, even an informal policy of turning a blind eye towards poor, illegal immigrants has clear economic advantages. In America, for example, there is no question that without the some five or six million illegal immigrants estimated to be in the over-stretched labour market, upward pressure on wages and hence on inflation would be greater, interest rates would have to be higher, and economic growth slower. It is not so easy, after all, to separate potential wealth-creators from those who at the time of immigrating have dimmer economic prospects, but who may contribute to a stronger macroeconomy and eventually become quite productive citizens.

The difficulty of separating humanitarian from economic considerations is not the only thing that is bedevilling policymakers. There is, too, a conflict between various interest groups. With lawful immigration restricted, employers are vying with each other to have the workers they need obtain the valued visas that grant immigrants permission to work. Employers of high-tech workers are pressing for a relaxation of restrictions on workers with programming and other skills. This includes the UK government, eager to import, among other skills, more skilled hospital workers. Employers of workers at the other end of the labour market-gardeners, bed-pan emptiers, unskilled construction workers, hotel workers9-are everywhere urging their governments to open their doors to applicants, and to relax efforts to hunt down and deport illegals.

Meanwhile, America's trade unions, traditionally opposed to immigration, suddenly find themselves conflicted. They know that immigration puts downward pressure on the wages of native-born Americans without a high school diploma,10 and fear that job-hungry immigrants make handy strike-breakers. And they argue that even high-tech employers are pressing for more immigrants so that they will not have to bear the cost of training American citizens for the jobs opening up in the industries of the future. But some unions also know that immigrants constitute the pool from which they will be drawing future members.11 Unions in the hospitality, office, hospital and other industries are thus re-examining their traditional opposition to immigration and calling for amnesties for illegal workers and an end to prosecution of employers who hire them. These unions can count on support from the public sector unions, which see low-wage immigrants as potential new 'clients' for the social services rendered by their members

Immigration's foes

But political parties in the United States know that out there in the middle class there lurks a serious objection to the rapid changes in the 'look' of America. Unskilled workers-the very ones most threatened by what has come to be called 'globalisation'-are well aware that they are the ones who will pay the price for a continued influx of workers willing to work harder for less.12 So politicians vacillate, and worry about what to do. No satisfactory policy being available, they temporise by raising the quota for this or that group, promising to crack down on illegals, and then granting them amnesty.

American politicians are not alone in their dilemma. Policymakers in most developed countries also find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Increased longevity combined with decreasing birth rates is creating the prospect of a larger and larger number of retirees receiving pensions paid for by the ever-rising taxes of fewer and fewer workers. One estimate has it that Europe would have to take in 100 million immigrants by 2050, rather than the 23 million it plans to allow, merely to keep its population from falling. Despite this, no mass influx is likely to be politically acceptable.

In Britain the leader of the Conservative party says he fears that Britain is becoming a foreign country. In America, some right-wing intellectuals would close the country's borders because 'the United States can no longer be an "immigrant country".'13 Canadians, among the more liberal of all peoples, are upset by scandals involving the illegal importation of Chinese workers, and the subsequent need to support the intercepted illegals while they avail themselves of the years' long appeals process. Some Europeans blame immigrants for rising crime rates, unemployment, and high welfare spending. Even traditionally liberal Britain is in a stir about the rising number of asylum seekers, many of them bogus and many of them Gypsies who aggressively beg on the streets of London and other towns in order to supplement the housing and other benefits they receive from the government.

In response to these difficulties, European policymakers are groping for some way to keep out those immigrants most likely to upset their voters. With Home Office projections showing that Britain is likely to receive some 150,000 non-EU immigrants per year for the foreseeable future, and the Association of Chief Police Officers reporting that violence between asylum-seekers and local communities is on the rise,14 the need for a sensible and broadly acceptable immigration policy is becoming increasingly urgent.

Importing workers, temporarily, and then telling them 'go back to their own countries', is not a very practical position, given the difficulty of controlling the movement of immigrants and the high demand for agricultural and other manual labourers throughout Europe's recovering economies. As Germany's experience shows, most of the so-called 'guest workers' that Germany admitted from Turkey on a temporary basis stayed on, and have been joined by their families. Some 2.5 million people of Turkish origin now reside in Germany, alongside some five million other immigrants.15

The rising need for workers

In the end the need for workers of all sorts will dominate policy, de facto if not de jure. The demand for unskilled workers willing to do the jobs that richer Europeans and Americans will not do will overwhelm worries about the social problems associated with those workers. The need for skilled workers will also mount, and with it the willingness of all nations to welcome skilled immigrants.

That means that the demand for immigrant labour will grow, at both the high and the low end of the labour markets. Every country will try to attract only the highly skilled, and then on a temporary basis. And every country, like it or not, will need the unskilled, whether they be Turks in Germany or Mexicans in America. That's the demand side.

On the supply side, ambitious job-seekers and malingering welfare-seekers will find ways to get into the countries that offer them opportunities to earn paychecks or qualify for welfare checks. Improved and cheaper transportation, plus better organisation of human smuggling by the Mafia-style gangs to which I referred earlier, will facilitate the matching of the supply of and the demand for immigrants. This will satisfy some employers and even some trade unions, not to mention central bankers, who would prefer to see the workforce in their countries expand, rather than institute repeated growth-stifling and politically unpopular increases in interest rates.

But the great middle classes, and organisations of the lowest paid workers or those who find themselves outside of the labour market, can be expected to oppose any substantial and noticeable increases in immigration.

A policy proposal

Formulating immigration policy that is both sensible and politically acceptable is no mean trick in these circumstances. Here the tools of economic analysis, leavened with a bit of humanity, might help not only to dispel some of the cant that surrounds immigration policy, but also to see the outlines of some steps that might be taken that satisfy the self-interest of countries that are the targets of millions of immigrants.

Of course, economic considerations are not necessarily the ultimate determinants of immigration policy. Nor should they be. In the case of immigration policy, economic considerations will remain subordinate to a reconciliation of each society's conflict between what one author calls 'the desire that one's society not become less homogeneous',16 and its sense of decency and generosity to those huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Start where most economic textbooks start: there are three factors of production-land, labour and capital. Land is by definition immobile; capital, as we have seen in recent years, is highly mobile, a restless creature forever seeking out places where it can be put to its highest and best use, as measured by the potential rewards on offer; labour (in which is embedded what some consider a fourth factor of production, entrepreneurship) is somewhere in between these two in mobility.

Continue to the next chapter of any elementary economics text. The free flow of the factors of production to their highest and best use maximises prosperity. National income rises when farm lands are converted to residential communities and industrial parks; it rises, too, when capital is free to move from dying to growing industries; and it rises when labourers are free to move from manufacturing industries that are in decline to service industries that are on the rise.

This is as true on an international as on a national scale. Which may be why attempts to attract capital by creating non-sustainable and artificial incentives to woo it end in tears, as do attempts to prevent its 'flight' to greener pastures. And why only truly coercive states can build walls high enough to prevent brain-and brawn-drains when economic opportunities in other lands far exceed those at home, and why attempts by democratic target countries to stem the intake of 'illegals' and 'asylum seekers' are likely to be as successful as the failed attempts to staunch the importation of illegal drugs.

It takes draconian measures to offset the lure of improved living standards, for, 'like trade, migration is likely to enhance economic growth and the welfare of both natives and migrants; and restrictions on immigration are likely to have economic costs.'17 The incentives of immigrants to pursue jobs is overwhelming, and the incentives of employers to welcome them is strong. It is very difficult for any state to intervene successfully when demand and supply are attempting to converge at a price that both parties to a transaction find attractive.

This creates a bias in favour of a more accommodating immigration policy. No need for authorities to engage in the feckless enterprise of distinguishing real from bogus asylum seekers, or to determine which refugees have what the laws calls 'a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion'. Simply take in those who want to work and who can find work, supported until they do by private relief agencies or family members. Legalising these workers would provide them with greater legal protection against exploitation by employers seeking to pay less than the statutory minimum wage, and thereby reduce the downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the labour market.

This policy would make economic sense, but

it would not overcome the opposition of those who fear the social consequences of maintaining an open door policy. And, of course, it provides no answer to the vexing question of just how many immigrants to accept-a question to which I shall return in a moment.

The opposition to abandoning failed humanitarian criteria in favour of one biased in favour of accepting more immigrants-for that is what any policy that recognises the efficiency of allowing the free movement of peoples really is-can be lessened by linking a generous immigration policy to three other measures.

Reducing opposition to immigration

First, assimilation must once again be the path down which receiving nations insist newcomers travel. English is essential to citizenship in the English-speaking nations, and fluency in the language of any host country is essential to citizenship in those countries. Period. Respect for ethnic origins and traditions must not be allowed to destroy the cultures of the countries that receive immigrants fleeing from less attractive places. The tendency of immigrants to concentrate geographically in 'barrios, ghettos, and enclaves',18 and to adhere to many of the customs and mannerisms of their country of origin, frighten the native population into believing that theirs is becoming a strange and alien land. Social and legal pressures to require assimilation and, eventually, citizenship, might just might ease these fears, although it will not be easy to persuade the dominant cosmopolitan elites in most countries to abandon their infatuation with multiculturalism in favour of more assimilationist policies.

Second, since the economic goal of open immigration is to increase the supply of labour-of people willing and able to work-it seems sensible to permit new entrants to work, but to deny them welfare benefits, on the general theory that the latter should be made available only to citizens. This would discourage the lazy and the incompetent from seeking entry, and should moot some of the political opposition to immigration.19 After all, the fact that some come in search of welfare rather than work is an understandably troubling pheno-menon for the average worker who sees his taxes going to support foreign spongers. Indeed, it is the reputation of countries like Britain or Australia as a 'soft touch' that is doing much to make them the destination of choice of many immigrants.

Finally, a firm policy of the immediate deportation of law breakers, from rapists to beggars, should ease middle class fears about the inability to maintain the zero tolerance policy that has made America's cities once again habitable, and that has been abandoned in Britain in the face of charges of rampant police racism.

How many and which ones?

None of this, of course, goes to the question of just how many immigrants a nation should allow. There is no good answer to that question, except that we know that 'uncontrolled immigration is an impossibility.'20 Australia and Canada assign points to visa applicants based on various characteristics, but the number of applicants deemed to have accumulated sufficient points to have 'passed' is more or less arbitrarily chosen. Professor Borjas would vary the intake with the unemployment rate, lowering it when labour markets soften, raising it when they tighten.21 That may combine political realism with maximisation of economic benefits to the host country, since newcomers are most valuable in times of labour shortages.

As for who should come in, the points system seems to me less appealing than some form of bidding for visas. In America some 10,000 visas are available to rich foreigners who create at least ten jobs by investing at least $1 million, or $500,000 in an area of high unemployment. Britain, Canada and, I suspect, other countries have similar policies. This could be extended by placing still greater reliance on market principles to allocate visas, with available visas being auctioned to those who most value and can afford them, or to those who can persuade prospective employers to invest in their entry into the native labour force. Such a policy would maximise the total gains accruing to the host country's treasury, and most likely add the most to national wealth. But, as Professor Borjas notes, 'despite the logical appeal and apparent benefit of the market approach . . . many persons-myself included-feel there are some things that should not be for sale.'22

My disinclination to agree with that conclusion, and to favour market-based solutions, stems largely from my inability to conceive of a better way to allocate scarce resources such as visas. Certainly the present use of favouritism-cum-corruption is inferior; reliance on humanitarian considerations has been proven seriously flawed in practice; and the selection by bureaucrats of certain occupations for favoured treatment-a sort of 'give me your nurses, your teachers and your programmers' policy-is likely to prove once again that markets change too quickly for bureaucrats to keep pace. Consider that in America a bitter fight to increase visas for computer programmers had no sooner concluded than the dot-com and high-tech bubbles burst, throwing thousands of resident workers with those skills out of work.

So this economist, after reviewing the alternatives, finds himself favouring an immigration policy aimed at the rather selfish goal of enriching the host nation (and only incidentally its new arrivals), doing what is necessary along the way to reduce some of the opposition to the social consequences of immigration.

But there is more to a nation than its GDP.23 I would be inclined to leaven the auction system that would increase the wealth of nations with a bit of humanitarianism to allow entry, and a bit of succour to the demonstrably persecuted and to those genuinely seeking to be reunited with their immediate families. Include as part of such a humanised economic policy an insistence on assimilation, bar welfare payments to newcomers, deport undesirables promptly, and the countries of the world might just have a set of immigration rules that makes economic sense, avoids increasing crime and tax rates, and permits policymakers in host countries to feel that they have done the right thing, both by immigrants and their own nations.

Postscript

Since this piece was written, the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has focused new attention on US immigration policy. That focus is on the near-term problem of tightening existing regulations so that visas are not granted casually by overworked consular officials, often to bogus students who have gained admission to equally bogus 'educational institutions', and that visa violators are rounded up and dealt with promptly by law enforcement agencies. So far, so good. But what this new, tougher policy fails to address is the continuation of an immigration policy that is unaccompanied by a programme of assimilation that requires immigrants to absorb American cultural and citizenship concepts, all the while keeping the authorities informed of their whereabouts and activities-a system that more or less places on parole those seeking the privilege of extended stay as a guest in our country, and, in some cases, eventual citizenship.

Endnotes
1 George Borjas, Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
2 The Economist (10 February 2001).
3 British authorities estimate that about half of its illegal immigrants arrive via the Balkans. Financial Times (16 March 2001).
4 Borjas, Heaven's Door, 203-204.
5 Financial Times (5 February 2001).
6 Clearly, a sufficiently repressive regime can control immigrationÊ and emigration, as the East German and Soviet regimes proved. Whether it is possible for a democratic country to do so is the subject of debate. One student of the subject believes that the 'illegal influx' of Mexicans into the United States can be controlled, 'especially by the country that put a man on the moon. What is missing is not the way. It is the will.' Border patrols can be increased and fences built along the 200-250 miles of U.S.-Mexican border that 'are thought to be passable at all.' Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House, 1995), 236-237.
7 Borjas, Heaven's Door, 3.
8 The Economist (15 April 2000).
9 ÊAt the posh Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, immigrants from Croatia, Poland and Jamaica make up more than one-fifth of the hotel's 1,600-person workforce. Business Week (20 November 2000), 129.
10 In this connection, see Borjas, Heaven's Door, 82-85.
11 See Business Week (20 NovemberÊ 2000), 129-133.
12 The National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council (NRC) estimates that immigration was responsible for 44% of the decline in wages that high-school drop-outs experienced from 1980 to 1994. This 'means that 13 million workers, . . . the poorest 11 percent of the labour force, are experiencing an immigration-induced reduction in wages of approximately 5 percent or $13 billion a year.' Steven A. Camorota, 'Does Immigration Harm the Poor?', The Public Interest 133 (Fall 1998), 25. Camorota estimates that the gains to skilled workers and to capital exceeded this loss to the unskilled by roughly $5 billion.
13 Brimelow, Alien Nation, 258. One author reports that 'since 1993, an increasingly noisy chorus of complaints about immigrants and immigration has dominated the public discourse . . .'. Peter Salins, Assimilation American Style (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), 200.
14 The Times (23 January 2001).
15 The Financial Times (29 November 2000).
16 Julian L. Simon, The Economic Consequences of Immigration (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc, 1989), 11. Simon cites Margaret Thatcher's statement that because the British people fear 'being swamped by people of a different culture', the country of which she was then Prime Minister 'must hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration'.
17 Stephen Glover et. al., 'Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis,' (UK: The Research, Development and Statistics Directorate of the Home Office, 2001), vii. The authors are quick to add that there are significant social and economic externalities associated with migration.
18 Borjas, Heaven's Door, 161. See also Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
19 Tom Steinberg suggests that benefits for asylum seekers be limited to a few months and made conditional on seeking work, and that asylum seekers who prove to be bogus and who refuse to work 'be struck off welfare and deported.' Tom Steinberg, 'Reforming British Immigration Policy', IEA Working Paper 2 (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, October 2000), 18.
20 Steinberg, 'Reforming British Immigration Policy', 121.
21 'The number of immigrants that maximizes the social welfare of the country is probably smaller when the economy is weak and larger when the economy is strong . . . If the unemployment rate is high, . . . fewer immigrants should be admitted.' Borjas, Heaven's Door, 203.
22 Borjas, Heaven's Door, 179.
23 Salins objects what he calls the 'tortured short-term microeconomic analysis' of the type I have described, preferring to rely on a comparison of economic performance in cities in which immigrants have congregated with those less well endowed with such newcomers. Salins, Assimilation American Style, 201.

Author
Irwin M. Stelzer is Director of Regulatory Studies at the Hudson Institute. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London earlier this year. The full version may be found at <www.iea.org.uk/wpapers/stelzer.pdf>

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