How immigration harms minorities

Public Interest, Summer, 1996 by Norman Matloff

The popular press tends to portray proposals to reduce yearly immigration quotas as pitting whites against nonwhites. Yet they are overlooking the fact that the downsides of immigration often fall more heavily and more directly on nonwhites, i.e., on blacks, Asians, and Latino Americans. As one Mexican American put it, when immigration's negative impacts come, "We get hit first."

It is thus no wonder that many minorities strongly support immigration reform, both in terms of legal and illegal immigration. An Empire State Survey taken in 1993 found that half of the immigrants in New York agreed with the statement, "Immigration has made this city a worse place in which to live." In California's 1994 vote on Proposition 187, the rates of "yes" votes among blacks, Asian Americans, and immigrants were all near the overall statewide rate of 59 percent. A Hispanic USA survey found that up to 80 percent of Mexican Americans agreed that "there are too many immigrants."

And, though it has become politically popular to draw a sharp line between legal and illegal immigration, the fact is that minorities tend not to make this distinction, since the problems arising from the two kinds are typically the same - overcrowded schools and depressed wages. Moreover, the yearly volume of legal immigration is several times larger than that of the illegal kind. Thus, in this article, the term "immigration" will refer both to legal and illegal immigration, with an implicit focus on the former.

Most analyses of the impact of immigration focus on economic issues. These are not unimportant, and I will describe the economic harms brought upon minorities by immigration. Yet the noneconomic problems are at least as important, and probably more so. The current high yearly immigration quotas are contributing to a pervasive (though largely unconsciously created and maintained) new American caste system among U.S. minorities, with Asian immigrants at the top, native blacks on the bottom, and Latino immigrants in between. This has the unfortunate effect of undermining America's commitment to improving the condition of blacks.

Not enough jobs

Even among those who claim that positive economic effects flow from immigration, or who downplay the negative effects, there is a general consensus that earlier-arriving immigrants are hurt by the addition of later-arriving immigrants. George Borjas of Harvard University, for instance, has found that a 10 percent increase in immigration populations reduces immigrant wages by 10 percent (a staggering statistic, in view of the fact that the 1990 Immigration Act increased yearly immigration quotas by 40 percent). One major factor is that poor English skills force immigrants who had been professionals in their native lands to seek low-skilled jobs in immigrant communities. This swells the number of workers seeking such jobs, depressing wages.

While economic theory would suggest that immigration would slow as wages fall, other forces are apparently at work: would-be immigrants often do not know of such wage trends; they may regard even weakened employment opportunities here as superior to those back home; and they may believe that opportunities are better here for their children.

The complex econometric models that statisticians use to understand such trends are helpful; they are, however, no substitute for direct observation. For example, Po Wong, director of the Chinese Newcomers Service Center in San Francisco, told National Public Radio that, of the 11,000 new arrivals who tried to find work through his agency, only 2 percent were successfully placed. More recently, he told journalist Sanford Ungar,

I don't think our community is equipped to welcome this large a number. It is especially difficult to find employment for those who speak only Chinese, who have very little education, or who have never acquired a skill to compete in this new market. It's very depressing to see so many people come here looking for work.

The pattern is the same in Latino immigrant communities. When asked why most Latino Americans wish to see reduced immigration, Antonia Hernandez, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, explained that

migration, legal and undocumented, does have an impact on our economy ... [in] competition within the Latino community.... There is an issue of wage depression, as in the garment industry, which is predominantly immigrant, of keeping wages down because of the flow of traffic of people.

The competition for jobs among Latinos was illustrated in a rather dramatic manner in a recent article, "Immigrants Split Over Job Scarcity: Legal Residents in Marin Tell INS About Illegals," in the San Francisco Chronicle. It begins, "A shortage of jobs is provoking cutthroat rivalry among immigrant day laborers in San Rafael's Canal Area, where some [legal immigrants] are getting ahead by turning in their undocumented peers to the INS."

Those immigrants who bring some savings with them to the United States may seem on the surface to be better off than day laborers, as they can start businesses. Indeed, entrepreneurship is taken by many pro-immigration analysts to be a major selling point for high-immigration policies. Yet the entrepreneurs suffer the same problems as the workers do. Not being familiar with American culture and business, the would-be immigrant entrepreneur will typically start the same kind of business as his friends and relatives have - thus creating an oversupply of businesses of that type. Sociologist Peter Kwong of Hunter College has written that "in the 1980s, business in [New York's] Chinatown reached the point of saturation: too many immigrants, too many new businesses, and exorbitant rents. Suicidal competition developed throughout the community." In 1995, Sung Soo Kim, president of the Korean-American Small Business Service Center in New York, noted that "we are in the middle of a tragedy. Last year, we had 700 stores open but 900 close. Growth has completely stopped."