Recent immigration gains currency as economy baseline
Pioneer Press, July 6, 2001
By Mitchell B. Pearlstein

Thanks to last year’s census, we’ve spent 2001 awash in demographic data, trying to get our heads around one immense portrait of ourselves after another. But few numbers have been as striking or as potentially telling as the following, pulled together by David Ellwood of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

While the American labor force grew by a stunning 50 percent from 1980 to 2000, Ellwood predicts it will likely grow by only 16 percent over the next 20 years.

Even more remarkably, whereas native-born, "prime age" workers (ages 25 to 54) increased by nearly 27 million over the last two decades, Ellwood projects no growth in this category over the next two decades. In fact, he predicts the native-born white population in this age group will shrink by 8 million workers. These projected reversals are grounded in the inescapable fact that the Baby Boom ended nearly 40 years ago. They also presume the proportion of women entering the work force -- after increasing dramatically for a generation -- can’t help but slow down.

I’ll leave it to first-rate economists like Ellwood (a Minnesota native who served in the Clinton administration) to debate whether the American economy is dependent on an ever-growing work force. At the very least, I would argue that we will need larger numbers of two kinds of workers in particular: highly trained professionals on whom high-tech industries depend; and sizable numbers of other, generally far less educated, men and women on whom all of us increasingly will rely for a thousand and one essential if poorly paid jobs, ranging from grilling our burgers, to cleaning our offices, to ministering to our failing bodies in nursing homes.

Where will such a rush of workers come from? The only possible answer is expanded immigration, because no matter how much progress we make in the next few years in cloning humans, none is likely to emerge from petri dishes all pedigreed and primed to punch in.

Assuming that immigration quotas are indeed increased, how might things work out? (For context, somewhat more than 1 million immigrants, family members and temporary workers probably entered the United States legally in 1998, the last year for which I have seen recent data.) Immigration may be as American as apple pie, but it’s also regularly tart and thick with pits. The two core areas of contention are familiar. One is economic. Does immigration (perhaps illegal immigration especially) constitute a burden on the nation economically? Or is it a net benefit?

The second main area of dispute is social. New groups from radically different cultures, goes the soothing cliché, have always managed to assimilate successfully, if not in a first wave, then shortly afterwards, led by their kids. But what about more recent arrivals to these shores and prairies? People whose circumstances differ markedly from our nation’s historic stock of backgrounds.

In the former matter of money, I have little doubt that the country as a whole benefits from immigration -- even as individual states and communities are routinely left holding big bags for educational, health, and other costs that deserve to be shared nationally. And as for social and civic demands, while it would be gracious to say nothing of consequence has changed in recent decades, fact is, integrating newcomers in this particular state was probably a slice easier (which is not to say easy) when they came from fewer corners of the globe.

For those of us whose grandparents came over on the boat, there’s something distasteful about being stingy on immigration. But that’s not the main reason I’ve become a more enthusiastic proponent over time. I once thought, for example, that poor people who were already here, especially African Americans in inner cities, would be further pressed economically if immigration were to grow. I’m not nearly as convinced now. Or, at any rate, it’s impossible not to attribute much of the recent resurgence of distressed neighborhoods to the energy and entrepreneurship of immigrants. For best local examples, think of University Avenue in St. Paul and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, now known as "Eat Street." Might similar hesitations about immigration soften if it came to be viewed not only as a historically humane course for the United States to pursue, but -- even more than is currently the case -- as an economically self-interested policy for our country to expand? Sounds plausible. Though the very last thing any American community needs is for immigration’s spiritual capital to be devalued; for aspiring players in an ennobling, long-running drama to be viewed, above all else, as bottom-line cogs.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.