Common Sense Immigration

By Noah Clarke.

A small woman with a round chin and vice-like hands, Lina Clementina Graffieto, boarded a boat in Genoa, Italy in late October, 1921. She was about to turn eighteen and had been working in textile mills for the past thirteen years. Two weeks later, Lina arrived at Ellis Island, told customs her name, stuck out her tongue and entered New York City. With the help of a few women she had met crossing the Atlantic, Lina found a three room apartment on Bleecker Street and started a job sowing artificial flowers for $0.50 a day.

That is how my great-grandmother came to the United States and how my family got its start in the New World. It is hardly a unique story. What is unique, however, is that she was never called an “illegal immigrant.” She never had to show a passport or prove she deserved to be in the country. What she did have to do, however, was gather up the courage to abandon the only home she had ever known and travel half-way around the world without speaking a word of English. That is the kind of person the U.S. should want to have living inside its borders. In fact, one might even imagine the federal government would be recruiting such people to move to America. Unfortunately, the reality is the exact opposite.

The legal immigration system has become so unwieldy, the process so slow, that skilled and unskilled immigrants are giving up on the “land of opportunity” to return home to India, China and Mexico. In a USA Today report, Duke University professor Vivek Wadhwa explained that “what was a trickle has become a flood…For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced.” Wadhwa estimated that over 100,000 immigrants will head back to India and another 100,000 to China.

And this is not just about computer programmers in Silicon Valley. Unskilled and often illegal immigrants, who helped power the American construction industry by providing affordable housing for the middle class, are also leaving the country in droves. Non-citizens are simply fed up with a broken immigration system.

As it stands, the immigration system represents a protective tariff on labor. This harms consumers in the same way tariffs on any imported goods do: by raising the prices Americans have to pay at the check-out counter. Immigration increases competition in the labor market eliminating inflated wages just as competition leads to cheaper television sets, laptop computers and laser eye surgery. When the cost of labor falls, entrepreneurs can offer their products at lower prices, thereby boosting the purchasing power of everyone’s take home pay.

But beyond simple economics, immigrants represent a part of what economist Julian Simon termed the “ultimate resource.” Growth and prosperity depend in large measure on the creativity of the human mind. The more problems people solve the better life becomes. That suggests that the more minds an area, region or country has the more likely it will be that someone discovers a better way of doing things –be it cleaning fish, making coffee or designing cars. In particular, immigrants are self-selected group. They have the ambition and drive to leave friends and family and come to a new country where the food is bad, the language is foreign and the customs are weird. And yet they adjust and thrive. These kinds of people are not only the “ultimate resource,” but just might be the best resource.

The immigration system is broken. Rather than try to fix it, let’s just scrap the damn thing and tell to the world: come and help us make a better, wealthier and smarter country.

Noah Clarke is an economist.

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