Post #21 - Immigration - In Some Cases, Neither the Cause Nor the Solution

I’m a big believer in reading your ideological opponents—in getting their perspectives from them, not just from others writing about them.

We’ll get back to that.

Earlier this summer, I interviewed (1) Professor Exequiel “Zeke” Hernandez of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and (2) Dean Alberto Gonzales of Belmont University College of Law (Dean Gonzales is also a former U.S. Attorney General, White House Counsel, Texas Supreme Court Justice, and Texas Secretary of State) about books each has written on immigration reform.  Neither man is a liberal, per se—Professor Hernandez is independent, and somewhat emphatically so, and Dean Gonzales is a Republican, having been hired by former President George W. Bush on five separate occasions (for the four positions I already mentioned, plus as Bush’s general counsel when he was first running for Texas governor in 1994)—but if we had to be exceedingly reductive and put everyone into a “further restrict legal immigration” camp or a “don’t” camp, they’d both be in “don’t.”

Both men repeated the idea that “there are some jobs Americans just won’t do”—that there are industries or jobs where employers cannot consistently fill roles with native-born Americans at wages that allow businesses to keep operating.

The sentiment doesn’t come out of nowhere.  In Professor Hernandez’s book, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, he cites a 2021 joint report by Deloitte and the National Association of Manufacturers that estimated more than two million positions were likely to go unfilled by 2030, and argues that “[m]any of the candidates manufacturers invite for job interviews don’t show up.  Those who do balk at starting salaries, even when they have no prior work history or demonstrable skills, or even when the employer promises they can quickly reach their desired pay level if they prove reliable.  And few do: among those who accept job offers, absenteeism is rampant.  You can’t manage a business like that.”

From the Deloitte report, “many manufacturers can’t fill entry-level production associate positions. These are the jobs that do not require technical know-how or industry knowledge, such as team assemblers, production work helpers, and hand-held tool cutters and trimmers.  Rather, they require a person who has a basic level of ‘human capabilities,’ such as following directions, willingness to learn, and follow-through. These entry-level positions could be filled by people recently displaced from other industries (hospitality, food services) or high school graduates, and starting wages in manufacturing are notably higher than local minimum wage levels (median wages for team assemblers is US$15.55, double the minimum federal wage of US$7.25 per hour).  But applications are not pouring in for them.  And there is no indication whether this trend will reverse.  In fact, US manufacturing executives surveyed believe that finding the right talent is now [in 2021] 36% harder than it was in 2018.  As one executive worried, ‘Is there a point when we run out of production workers or a point when we have to consider moving to a different location?’”

In the anecdotes Professor Hernandez uses in his book, the solution to the conundrum is immigrants—newcomers to America who have no better options than the night shifts and low-paying jobs that American manufacturers are struggling to fill.  There’s a certain discomfort in that answer, in the idea that, rather than raise wages to the point where native-born Americans will sign up, employers can just wait for people who are desperate enough to do anything for any amount of pay.  If the median pay for these entry-level positions is $15.55 per hour (granted, in 2021), or $31,100 across a year of full-time work, half must be between that upper bound and a lower bound of the $14,500 that the federal minimum wage of $7.25 will get you over 2,000 hours.  The 2024 federal poverty line for individuals is $15,060, and for a family of four is $31,200.

But unemployment is at 4.3%—higher than it has been recently, but still low—so what’s the problem?

Let’s get back to the idea about reading your ideological opponents.  If you’re the sort to make assumptions about somebody based on who they follow on social media, you’d have a field day with my Twitter/X account.  I follow revolutionary communists, libertarians, and provocateurs of many stripes—a whole host of people with whom I disagree, including Ryan Girdusky.

Girdusky is a political consultant, writer, and prolific tweeter (X-er) originally, I believe, from Queens who self-identifies as a national populist, or right-wing populist.  During the 2020 presidential campaign, I wanted to better understand the case for then-President Trump, as opposed to the case one might make for a more typical Republican, one of President Reagan’s ideological descendants—to better understand what I might not have in 2016—so I read the aptly-named The Case for Trump, by conservative academic and author Victor Davis Hanson, with Newt Gingrich on the cover calling it a “must-read for anyone who supports the President,” and They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution, by Girdusky and Harlan Hill, another young political consultant and provocateur.

Looking back, the following quote from They’re Not Listening’s advance praise section carries a different level of importance: “In this insightful new book, Ryan Girdusky and Harlan Hill chronicle various populist movements all over the world and the issues that underlie their political strength.  Interesting and readable, They’re Not Listening contains important lessons for an international political class that seems uninterested or unwilling to come to grips with the political instability that roils their respective countries.  Whether you, like me, see the rise of populism as a useful corrective to forty years of bad policies, or wish it would just go away, I suspect you’ll learn something from this intelligent, readable overview.”

Who said that?  Then-private citizen, now-vice presidential candidate JD Vance.

And that’s the thing—while I may not agree with Girdusky on much, there are important people who do, and I think it’s worth making a real effort to understand them and where they’re coming from.  I would also note that Vance saying “forty years of bad policies” is an interesting choice of timeframe—forty years, as of the 2020 release date for the book, takes you back to the year President Reagan was elected.  

Anyway, when I read the book, I reached out to Girdusky on Twitter with some clarifying questions.  He responded very politely, and may have taken my interest for agreement, since he later invited me to a fundraiser for a political action committee he had put together to fight for more conservative school boards (I declined).

I reached out again to him this summer to ask if he’d be willing to do an interview on immigration.  I was interviewing “don’t’s,” as in “don’t restrict legal immigration,” and fall more in that camp myself, and wanted to properly represent the other “don’t’s,” as in “respectfully, don’t come here.”  Girdusky told me to just read CIS, or the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank (tag line: “low immigration, pro-immigrant”).  

CIS was founded in 1985 by John Tanton, an anti-immigration activist who had previously founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and went on to found NumbersUSA.  The basic gist is that the most influential anti-immigration organizations and lobbyist groups in the United States were mostly founded by the same guy—Tanton—and largely funded by the same woman, Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon family fortune.  For what it’s worth, the Southern Poverty Law Center considers CIS an anti-immigrant hate group.

But CIS is taken seriously, especially by the men at the top of today’s Republican Party.  They’re on the advisory board for Project 2025, and CIS alumni worked in the Trump administration.  CIS Director of Research Steven Camarota has a PhD in Policy Analysis from the University of Virginia and has testified 30 times before Congress since 1999.  His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other major newspapers.  He, at least, is no provocateur—the writing of his I’ve read is even-handed. 

In 2018, he published an article pushing back on the idea that “There Are No Jobs Americans Won't Do.”  He argues that “[i]f immigrants ‘do jobs that Americans won't do’, we should be able to identify occupations in which the workers are nearly all foreign-born.  However, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal).  Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.”  That’s an interesting point!  But I think the claim that “there are some jobs Americans won’t do” is clearly hyperbolic and gets at, I think, a slightly different point than the one Camarota is answering.  Perhaps a more nuanced, accurate claim would be that “there are some jobs that employers struggle to fill with native-born workers because American citizens in those places have other options.”  In other words, the Americans that refuse some of these manufacturing jobs aren’t refusing jobs—they’re refusing those jobs, and they’re doing so because they can find others. (Here's another response from Matt Yglesias I think is worth reading.)

Camarota wrote another article this summer in National Affairs, a serious and deeply thoughtful conservative publication housed at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank headed from 2009 to 2019 by Arthur Brooks, who, among other things, recently published a book on happiness with Oprah.  

In “The Cost of Illegal Immigration,” Camarota argues that “[t]here is an alternative way to fill low-skill jobs—namely by drawing more Americans back into the labor force. The share of less-educated native-born men who have abandoned the labor force (i.e., they are neither working nor looking for work) has increased dramatically over the last six decades. In 1960, 7% of native-born men ages 20 to 64 with no education beyond high school were out of the labor force; in 2023, it was 22%. These individuals do not show up as unemployed in labor statistics because they are not actively looking for work.”

But, as important as it is that we address that problem—and it’s a very real, very serious problem—I’m not sure immigration is the answer, one way or the other.  If you look at the labor force participation by state as of June 2023, three states are at 70%: North Dakota (70.5%), Utah (70.4%—incidentally, CIS recently published an article about how Utah is a stealthy sanctuary state for illegal immigrants), and Wyoming (70.0%).  The two lowest states are Mississippi, at 54.6%, and West Virginia, at 55.7%.

And here I think is what Camarota doesn’t properly address: the states with the lowest labor force participation rates aren’t that way because of immigrants—West Virginia has the lowest foreign-born population in the country, at 1.5%, and Mississippi is third, at 2.4%.  Heck, there are tens of thousands of jobs available in West Virginia and Mississippi—more jobs than, or nearly as many jobs as, there are immigrants of all ages.  It wasn’t immigration that drove West Virginians and Mississippians out of the workforce, and restricting it won’t bring them back.  Camarota himself recently wrote that “The decades-long decline in labor force participation among the less-educated has a variety of potential explanations.  Some researchers believe globalization and automation have weakened demand for less-educated labor and caused a long-term decline in wages, making work less attractive.  Others point to overly generous welfare and disability programs that undermine work.  For men in particular some research holds that changing expectations about men as providers, including the decline in marriage, has caused them to value work less.  There is also evidence that substance abuse, obesity, and criminal records can be causes and effects of the decline in work.”

In a recent poll by The Economist/YouGov, 87% of Americans polled said immigration was an important issue for them for the 2024 election, and 12% said immigration was the most important issue, behind only inflation/prices and jobs and the economy.  People care an awful lot about immigration, and there is currently a broad consensus that illegal immigration should be curtailed (there is very much not broad consensus on who should get credit for fixing it, which makes it difficult to get anything through Congress).  

But I think it’s worth asking why—not because we shouldn’t care, but because we should really understand why we should.  How much political capital will it require to “fix” immigration, whatever that means, and what will that do for the people of West Virginia and Mississippi?  What will that do to bring people back into the workforce?  In some places, maybe something, but I’m not yet convinced.  That isn’t to say we shouldn’t fix our immigration system, that we shouldn’t rein in illegal immigration—but there are problems immigration didn’t cause and won’t solve.

Random Fact

Corín Tellado was a prolific Spanish writer of romantic novels and photonovels who worked from around 1945, when she was 18, until 2009, when she died at the age of 81.  She published more than 4,000 titles, selling over 400 million books.  

So, I’m 34 right now.  If I want to hit 4,000 on my 81st birthday—[Redacted for privacy, but December] [Redacted], 2070—which is approximately 16,900 days away, I’m going to need to publish a book every 4.225 days.  To do so in Spanish would set me back a bit further, given I don’t currently speak the language.

I hereby formally step back from my quest to be the most prolific Spanish writer of all time.  You win this one, Corín.

Random Recommendation

So, I was an English major in undergrad, and, believe it or not, I took five separate poetry classes, including two poetry workshops.  I think it’s worth reading the odd poem here and there, even if it’s not something you would generally do.  There are many different kinds of poetry and many different kinds of poets—you probably won’t resonate with everybody, but you probably won’t resonate with nobody.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

By William Wordsworth

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Subscriber Update

Closing in on 250!  At 237 as of this writing.  If every person who reads all the way to the end shares this with just one person, and promises that person a plate of cookies should that person subscribe, I feel quite confident that we should be able to get to at least 238.  The best case scenario, of course, would be that people are easily persuaded by cookies, and that we immediately jump to 474.

Then, the best best case scenario would be that everyone—including each new subscriber—continues that pattern every day—that the subscriber base doubles every day as the world is covered in good will and plates of cookies.

That would put us at the entire population of Earth in a bit over 25 days.  Personally, I think that would be great.  I would probably be under so much crippling pressure to make each article perfect that I wouldn’t actually write anything besides short blurbs about Barry Bonds, but we deal with one problem at a time.  There would also be serious sugar, butter, and flour shortages, but, again, one problem at a time.