Reason Magazine - Topics > Immigration

Getting Serious About "Getting Serious"

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

I want to call la migra on my neighbors.

It's not just that I hate the other tenants in my building, or that I want to see some upfront constituent service from noted blackface authority Julie L. Myers, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It's not only that I think I might get better treatment from my prick landlord if several units in the building were forcibly emptied. I'm not even sure how well calling in a raid from ICE would work: I have good reason to believe that the only family in the building I like is out of status.

It's just nice to share the popular feeling of being personally burdened by the invasion across our southern border. My fellow supporters of unrestricted immigration, who spend all their time being chauffeured between undocumented-nanny-cleaned mansions and illegal-janitor-tended Ivory Towers, forget the degree to which immigration-restriction pressure is driven by a feeling of injustice, in particular by suspicions of condescension and neglect from aloof authorities. That people in power refuse to get serious about illegal immigration is the essential premise of all immigration foment. That feeling gels in a sense that even when public officials do get serious about illegal immigration, they're really winking at the audience. And public officials don't do a whole lot to correct that impression.

Here's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff giving a recent assessment of his efforts to seal the U.S.-Mexico border: "To me, the most important thing we're doing at the border is showing the American people that if we make a judgment that we need to do something and we promise to do it, we'll do it."

If you're passionate about stopping illegal entry into the United States, it's hard not to see that statement as a condescension: Chertoff's stated concern isn't catching illegal immigrants at the border; it's showing the American people that he wants to catch illegal immigrants at the border.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) specializes in the language of convincing voters and understanding their concerns. If, as is statistically likely, you augment your opposition to immigration with opposition to free trade, these clumsy attempts to validate your feelings can seem insultingly false: Who is able to believe Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) really opposes NAFTA when she's swilling down Canadian whiskey?

Sure, you could argue that restrictionists deserve no better. After all, when you go to a doctor for an imaginary malady, you should expect to be treated with a placebo.

But not all the complaints are as petty as my beef with my neighbors. In Los Angeles, the March murder of 17-year-old high school football star Jamiel Shaw has opened an off-topic but revealing controversy over a Los Angeles Police Department rule governing how officers are supposed to deal with illegal immigrants.

Pedro Espinoza, Shaw's accused killer, is an illegal immigrant who was released from county jail shortly before the murder, despite procedures that were supposed to have him referred to federal authorities and (presumably) deported. For various reasons (among them, that Espinoza was arrested by Culver City cops), the case doesn't bear on the LAPD's "Special Order 40," which was promulgated in 1979 by then-chief Daryl Gates and advises cops not to initiate inquiries about immigration status in most cases. But that hasn't stopped a fiery debate on the rule. That debate isn't strictly logic-based, but it expresses a general sense that local authorities don't want to bring any power to bear on crooks who flout their indifference to the laws of the land—and a detailed look at procedures suggests there is some validity in that view.

LAPD Chief William Bratton may be the most politically astute cop on the planet, but with his accurate, dismissive comments about the controversy, he's playing into the hawks' sense that nobody takes their concerns seriously. If you're that way inclined, you can draw a pretty compelling picture of a city where officialdom fiddles while illegals murder Stanford-hopeful athletes, slaughter interesting filmmakers, and ethnically cleanse the local black population. That kind of argument by anecdote is always cheap, but in this case it has a special piquancy. It's in the nature of all immigration to create concentrated costs and distributed benefits, and if you're the person who got beaten up by pandilleros or sent home from an overcrowded emergency room, you enjoy extra credibility on this issue.

Some immigration hawks really are driven by an honest sense of law and order, and fear of crime is particularly susceptible to anecdotal support (except when crime-rate statistics overwhelmingly argue against that fear, which, in L.A., they don't). It's an interesting paradox. Nearly all trends are going the way the restrictionists want. Some researchers say that border crossings peaked back in 2000. In any case, the current economy stinks, dampening the attraction of the U.S. for prospective border jumpers. Tougher enforcement has made the border quieter, while even professional immigration hawks applaud the superior "tone" of a nation with fewer migrants. In L.A., it's likely that Special Order 40 will be modified, possibly in ways that would allow cops to use gang members' illegal immigration status against them.

Yet the rhetoric about immigration remains as passionate and hysterical as ever. And so government officials respond to the hysteria, but since they know in their hearts that the immigration crisis is a solution in search of a problem, they do so with a vain, affected quality that reveals the very condescension restrictionists find so infuriating.

In the end, immigration hawks will never be happy because what they really want is somebody to say "I feel your pain"—and mean it.

Tim Cavanaugh is opinion Web editor at The Los Angeles Times.

Data: Arrivals Down, Panic Up

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A new report from the Immigration Policy Center reminds us that immigrant arrivals have been down since well before the current eruption of nativist sentiment. The annual flow of immigrants to the United States was at its height in 2000. The Census Bureau and Social Security Administration predict it will continue to decline until at least 2015.

According to the study’s author, University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers, “proponents of the negative story of the immigrant future have ignored this recent leveling and decline. Instead, they have averaged data from the last 12 to 14 years and concluded that immigration is continuing at record levels.” Myers notes that the flow to gateway states like California is way down. Immigrants are instead heading straight to places such as Missouri and the Carolinas, where they’re finding jobs and forming small communities.

Mi Visa Es Su Visa

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:48:00 EDT

Travel abroad much? Get ready to leave your fingerprints all over the world:

The U.S. government today will order commercial airlines and cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly and burdensome. [...]
"If we don't have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it," [Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff said recently. "We have to decide who is going to win this fight. Is it going to be the airline industry, or is it going to be the people who believe we should know who leaves the country by air?"

The exit fingerprints come on top of the new 10-finger entry prints being rolled out this year, which is estimated to expand the 90-million strong foreigner-fingerprint database by more than 20 million a year (the DHS says it will keep the prints on file for 75 years).

But wait, we're just talking about foreigners, right? Fat chance:

Other countries are also joining the biometric bandwagon. Japan last year began collecting some fingerprints when foreign visitors enter the country and the European Union is considering it. These countries are also talking about sharing these databases.

Already, more than 160,000 U.S. citizens have applied for newly required ID cards, featuring Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips, to travel to Western Hemisphere destinations that previously accepted common driver's licences. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who never needed passports before now have them.

As in all things immigrational and consular, there is no such thing as unilateral armament, though the U.S. does get to play harder ball with smaller countries due to its size and power. In the words of French Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, "We are open to some demands, but we want reciprocity." And since the U.S. just signed deals with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia and Malta to get these formerly dodgy countries within shouting distance of the reciprocal "Visa Waiver" program in exchange for onerous security and privacy concessions that the existing Visa Waiver countries (like France) probably wouldn't accept, expect the EU to make more and more noise about how full biometric data collection for its Grand Canyon-visiting citizens amounts to the same as, well, a visa.

The upshot is that immigration restrictionists (particularly those motivated by security concerns) will continue getting what they want -- in this case, a trigger mechanism for hunting down furriners who overstay their visas, which is either the largest or second-largest category of illegal immigrants in the United States. The bad news is threefold: As Kerry Howley said yesterday, when restrictionists win, the economy loses. As James Bovard said in our February 2004 cover story, database management and point-of-entry security mandated by Washington can be an ugly thing.

And as I've been trying to say for years, whatever we impose on the world, the world will get around to imposing on us. It's getting increasingly hard to believe that there once was a time you could get a one-way stand-by plane ticket to Europe without ever attracting undue attention or entering a gargantuan database, and then slip entirely off the grid, ignoring whatever pointless and short-lasting visa (or spending) requirements they talked about in the Let's Go book. Are we much (or at all) safer after having traded that liberty in?

Walls of Paper

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“There is a smart way to protect our borders, and there is a dumb way to protect our borders,” Hillary Clinton explained at a February debate in Austin. Obama agreed. The smart way, he added, involves “deploying effective technology.” The “dumb” way, which both Obama and Clinton voted for, involves building a hideous steel barrier on land taken from inconveniently situated Texans.

Thus has advanced our immigration debate since the great failure of comprehensive reform in 2007. Walls are for neanderthals. Civilized people do not try to keep poor, entrepreneurial, much-needed workers out of the country with bricks and mortar; rather, they achieve this through the use of technology. On this, all three prospective presidential candidates agree. Each supports an expanded employment verification program, which would involve a hugely expensive surveillance apparatus and bureaucracy in order to monitor the employment choices of every American and foreign national. What an appalled ACLU calls “a permission slip to work” has come to represent the middle ground, though it’s likely to be far more devastating than any fence.

A bill known as the SAVE Act (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007) represents an extreme version of this fantasy, a barrier built of paper and databases rather than mere concrete. The bill’s co-sponsors, Democrat Heath Shuler and Republican Tom Tancredo, are currently attempting to force a vote on the issue by collecting signatures for a discharge petition. If they succeed, they’ll force reluctant legislators into the awkward position of voting on an unworkable bill that seems, at first glance, a reasonable attempt to enforce the law.

Fewer than one percent of American employers currently use the E-verify system, which checks the immigration status of American and foreign workers against imperfect federal databases. By all accounts, the Social Security Administration is struggling under this burden; SAVE would increase the number of users by around 13000 percent (pdf). Every employer would be forced to send information about every potential hire, citizen or otherwise, to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which would send the information on to the Social Security Administration, which would send the information back to USCIS. In cases where either agency finds a discrepancy, USCIS will issue a “temporary non-confirmation” that the worker can in theory contest within eight days. Given the 4.1 percent error rate of the SSA database, millions of legal workers may have to fight for the right to accept a job. According to the agency, 17.8 million of its records contain discrepancies, and most of those pertain to citizens.

Employers are not supposed to act when presented with a “temporary non-confirmation”; they’re supposed to relay information to employees, allow employees to contest the finding, and wait for another response from DHS. But the costs of E-verify are significant even when it functions properly, and waiting around while potential hires wrestle with data snags is even costlier. From the perspective of an employer with a bunch of interchangeable potential hires, it's most efficient to simply run everyone through the system and fail to hire people with problematic records. Pre-employment screening is illegal, but a study commissioned by the DHS last year found that nearly half of participating employers were ignoring at least some mandated worker protections.

While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.

No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.

The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That's worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.

In the end, E-verify will not “turn off the tap,” “dry up the pool of jobs,” or “turn off the magnet.” It will simply encourage workers underground, where they will be more vulnerable to abuse and less likely to pay taxes. But SAVE’s supporters may be doing more than they know to slow the flow of willing workers into the United States. Rises and falls in the flow of undocumented immigrants do not track enforcement efforts; they track the state of the U.S. economy. If legislators manage to quicken the onset of recession by reducing the flexibility of American employers, draining billions in tax revenue, and preventing Americans from going to work, they'll get exactly what they've been wishing for.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

Absolut Faux Pas

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:26:00 EDT

Did you hear the one about the Swedish vodka company recently purchased by a French conglomerate marketing to Mexican consumers that pissed off U.S. bloggers? Ah, the perils of globalism! In early March, Absolut ran an ad in Mexican magazines as part of its "In an Absolut World" campaign. The ad featured a map of North America from the 1830s, when Mexico still controlled great portions of land it eventually coughed up one way or another to the United States. If the real world were as perfect as it sometimes seems when you're smashed on vodka, Absolut suggested coyly, the Dallas Cowboys would be Mexico's team, not America's, and the Beach Boys would've had to settle for Nebraska girls.

Apparently, Absolut's ad agency put too much faith in news stories that we gringos are so geographically illiterate we think maps are just promotional posters for globes. But as any border patrol vigilante worth his margarita salt can tell you, what happens in Mexico City doesn't always stay in Mexico City. The controversial Absolut ads crossed the Rio Grande via the Internet, and U.S. bloggers with anti-immigration leanings, already sensitive to the idea of being undermined by an army of dishwashers and day laborers, demanded a boycottini.

But do these angry patriots really believe drunken Mexicans fantasize about owning Salt Lake City? Do they really believe Absolut wants to decrease the size of its most lucrative market, America? It's just an ad, part of a campaign that portrays a glibly "idealized" alternate universe. In another ad in the campaign, men get pregnant instead of women. In a third, the Almighty Bartender reaches down from the heavens to dump ice cubes into an ocean that is presumably hot with the sweat of boiling dolphins. As much as Absolut may position itself as a light-hearted advocate for gender equality and the War on Climate Change, it's mostly a light-hearted advocate for selling as much vodka as possible—and it's not above sucking up to its many different constituencies to do so.

Indeed, over the last three decades Absolut has done a brilliant job of this. In 1980, vodka had a reputation as a cheap commodity that was so generic even Communists couldn't screw it up too badly. Then the Swedes began exporting Absolut in those chic medicinal bottles. And running ads in virtually every magazine big enough to earn a spot on your local newsrack. (Possibly the one thing Martha Stewart Living, The New Republic, Garden Design, Scientific American, and Hustler have in common is that they've all run Absolut ads.)

The spare but glamorous layouts of those initial Absolut ads transformed vodka's status from cheap commodity to yuppie status item: They were like a pair of designer jeans that got you drunk! Over the next 25 years, Absolut employed a strategy of versatile monotony, producing more than 1,500 ads that followed the same simple template as the first one—a depiction of the bottle plus a short phrase beginning with the word "Absolut."

As the campaign progressed, it grew more and more abstract, and thus more and more effective. The boastful language of the earliest ads ("Absolut Perfection," "Absolut Gem") gave way to puns that said nothing about the product itself. A bottle wrapped in chains was paired with the phrase "Absolut Security." A bottle turned on its head was paired with the phrase "Absolut Yoga." The company was no longer selling itself as a maker of vodka; it was selling itself as a maker of witty but empty advertising. In the same way that vodka is so tasteless, odorless, and colorless it can be mixed with just about anything, the Absolut brand was so meaningless it could be mixed with just about anything too.

Thanks to this chameleon-like ability to appeal to so many different kinds of consumers, Absolut is the most popular imported vodka in America. It's the third largest liquor brand worldwide. Two years ago, however, it decided to finally retire its traditional ads. Last year, it unveiled its first "In an Absolut World" ads; unlike their empty, eye-catching predecessors, these ones convey actual messages, often with a progressive slant. And that, Absolut has learned in the wake of its fantasy annexation of a sizable chunk of the American West and Southwest, is a recipe for trouble.

Still, is a single controversial ad grounds for boycotts and disownment? Last year, America drank approximately 1.68 billion shots of Absolut. Think of all the drunken hook-ups that represents! Think of all the business deals Absolut helped seal, the concerts and football games and slow Thursday afternoons it enhanced. Plus there's the question of whose "perfect world" Absolut's border realignment really represents. Ultimately, more Mexico would just mean less America; the net result would be fewer illegal immigrants invading the U.S. in search of a better life. That doesn't sound like a Mexican fantasy at all. Instead, it's a scenario nativists would toast.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Scrap the Visa Cap

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Shikha Dalmia advises Congress to pass pending legislation to scrap the cap on skilled worker (H1-B) visas. This cap is currently so low (65,000) that in April last year it got used up within a day of these visas becoming available, leaving thousands of left over engineers to be scooped up by America's competitors. America should worry less about keeping unskilled immigrants out—and more about keeping skilled immigrants in. Otherwise, it'll lose the race for the most crucial resource in the knowledge economy: intellectual capital.

Read this article at the Wall Street Journal.

Conspiracy Theory of the Day

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:26:00 EDT

From The Australian:

Sonny Bono, former husband and singing partner of superstar Cher, was clubbed to death by hitmen on the orders of drug and weapons dealers who feared he was going to expose them, a former FBI agent claims.
Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.
"It's nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree. There's zero evidence in this autopsy report... to show such an accident happened. Instead, there's powerful proof he was assassinated.
"This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins," Mr Gunderson told the paper.
The former agent, who has been researching Bono's accident for the past decade, said top officials linked to an international drug and weapons ring feared the singer-turned-politician was about to expose their crimes -- so they had him killed on the slopes.

Link via our totally sane friends at the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, who add in their e-mail alert: "Rep. Sonny Bono was an outspoken American patriot who worked tirelessly to halt the illegal alien invasion of our nation AND focused his efforts on halting illegal aliens bringing drugs and weapons into the U.S."

Watch a stoned Sonny do a PSA against marijuana here. UPDATE: That link no longer works. Try this one.

America Diversifies Its Portfolio

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:05:00 EDT

The popularity of inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric aside, it appears that Americans are none too concerned about preserving a homogeneous national identity:

In contrast, Europeans, to varying degrees, would rather just have more of same. A neat new paper scopes out attitudes toward immigration and immigrants in the U.S. and Europe. Responses to a pair of statements are plotted above, with a pretty clear showing for American cultural and religious openness and love of diversity:

It is better for a country if almost everyone shares the same customs and traditions.

It is better for a country if there are a variety of religions among its people.

Penalize Peter to Deport Pablo?

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Reasonable people can disagree about the best solution to illegal immigration. But everyone can agree that, whatever the solution, it should not compromise the right of ordinary Americans to work. Yet that's precisely what a bill sponsored by U.S. Reps. Heath Shuler, D-N.C., and Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., would do.

Read the rest of the article at The Detroit News.

What Kind of American Will They Ask Next?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:00:00 EDT

The OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano, one of my favorite writers, is hanging up his nationally syndicated alt-weekly column "Ask a Mexican" after years of explaining to baffled and/or angry gringos why brown folk wear pants to the beach, sell oranges on freeway off-ramps, and hate on the Guatemalans. From his assimilationist adios:

[L]ike Mr. Dooley, Olle I Skratthult and The Katzenjammer Kids before me, this column's time has come: It's no longer necessary to explain Mexicans to Americans because Mexicans are Americans. Gracias for all the fights, the propositions of sexytime explosion, and the slugged-back tequila shots after book signings, but there's a little ranchito in Zacatecas waiting for me and a barefoot muchacha ready to cook me dinner. Vaya con Dios, America, and always remember: Order the enchilada-and-taco combo TO GO.

The punchline, though, goes to my vigilant anti-Reconquista pals at the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, whose subject header on its e-mail alarm was: "Gus Arellano Claims Mexicans ARE Americans and Then Retires!"

Keith Richards Must Be Rolling Over in His Coffin

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:49:00 EDT

Can loud-mouthed British performance artists be barred from entering the United States on grounds of "moral turpitude," due to tales of licentious drug use and staged crucifictions from a new tell-all memoir? Even though they claim to be sober for several years now? Yes they can!

reason on the increasingly oxymoronic Visa Waiver program here.

No Emparedado de Bistec con Queso al Estilo Philadelphia

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:41:00 EDT

The debate about English as the official language of the United States rages on, but the most popular of the Anglo-Frisian languages is now the official language of Geno's Steaks, the iconic cheesesteak purveyor in Philadelphia.

In a 2-1 vote, a Commission on Human Relations panel found that two signs at Geno's Steaks telling customers, "This is America: WHEN ORDERING 'PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH,'" do not violate the city's Fair Practices Ordinance....
[Shop owner Joe] Vento has said he never refused service to anyone because they couldn't speak English. But critics argued that the signs discourage customers of certain backgrounds from eating at the shop.

Geno's owner was pessimistic after a negative ruling from the commission a year ago found probable cause against Geno's for discrimination:

Vento had threatened to go to court if he lost. His attorney, Albert G. Weiss, said he was "pleasantly surprised" by Wednesday's decision.
"We expected that this was not going to go our way," Weiss said.

For more, watch Tucker Carlson interview the deliciously archetypal owner of Geno's, who makes the excellent point that it's unlikely people who don't speak English will be offended by the sign, since they can't read it.

Immigrants Don't End Up in Prison

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:16:00 EST

From a Public Policy Institute of California comes a study finding that immigrants, legal and illegal, in California are not more likely to show up in prison than native-born Americans. Some findings:

• Foreign-born men make up about 35 percent of the state's adult male population, but they are roughly 17 percent of the state's overall prison inmates.
• U.S.-born men are jailed in state prisons at a rate more than three times higher than foreign-born men and are 10 times more likely to land behind bars.
• Male Mexican nationals ages 18 to 40 - those more likely to have entered the country illegally - are more than eight times less likely than their U.S.-born counterparts to be imprisoned.
• Those who entered the country when they were 1 year old or younger make up about 0.8 percent of those institutionalized.
The low crime rate among foreign-born Californians can be seen in the crime tallies for cities such as Burbank, Glendale and Norwalk, which large proportions of the state's immigrant population call home.
From 2000 to 2005, those cities experienced crime dips far greater than cities with smaller immigrant populations.

More here, courtesy of San Jose Merc-News.

I haven't read the actual study, whose summary at least counters the notion that immigrants are the Professor Moriaritys of crime in America. And whose main point is consistent with other studies on the issue.

Alas, Tony Montana, the world was yours.

reason on immigration here.

Update: I added the actual link to the SJMN story above. Some commenters below ask whether deportations deflate the number of immigrant prisoners. The study, which again I haven't read, apparently takes something like that into consideration. See this SF Chron summary.

Insane Musings on the Future

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:30:00 EST

reason Senior Editor Kerry Howley recently sat down The American Scene's Reihan Salam for wide-ranging conversation about Hillary Clinton and feminism, the politics of fertility, the brain-draining effects of liberal immigration policies, and much more.

Click below to check out the conversation.

Discuss this video at reason's Hit & Run Blog.

The Perils of Single-Issue Voting

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:20:00 EST

Way back in that kinder, gentler era of November 2000, Hamlet-like Slate commentator Mickey Kaus explained that one of his great motivating considerations in leaning toward Al Gore for president was to ... prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency.

In 2008, Kaus' single issue is restricting immigration, so he's leaning toward ... Hillary Clinton!

Ending Global Apartheid

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:07:00 EST

Imagine an economic distortion so massive that its effects dwarf those of all existing tariffs, quotas, and subsidies. This distortion is relatively new and inarguably regressive; created by policy makers in wealthy countries such as the United States, Sweden, and Japan, it keeps people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Guatemala earning fractions of what they otherwise might for the same work. Some of the poorest people in the world are hit hardest, and the policy further impoverishes the poor while reducing economic opportunities for the rich.

Here in the United States we call this distortion “border control.” Lant Pritchett, a former World Bank economist, has focused his considerable intellectual firepower on diminishing its economic influence, pushing for more cross-border mobility and a freer world market in labor. Pritchett thinks the citizens of wealthy countries can be convinced of the benefits that even the privileged would enjoy in a more open regime. But he is primarily interested in the huge potential benefits for the world’s would-be migrants, people now stuck in economically unviable countries, often in preindustrial economies, fenced in and shut out.

Born in Utah and raised in Idaho, the 48-year-old Pritchett is the son of a Mormon bishop and a graduate of Brigham Young University. He left Boise for Argentina at the age of 19 to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the first of many explorations of entrenched poverty and its causes. After picking up a Ph.D. at MIT, he stamped his passport in 40 more countries, often as a research economist with the World Bank. Today he’s back in Cambridge co-editing the Journal of Development Economics and teaching at Harvard, where he conducts a class on development with his friend and mentor, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Pritchett is the author of a powerful new book that catalogues the staggering gains to be had from a liberalized immigration regime. Let Their People Come (Center for Global Development) relates, simply and unrelentingly, the voluminous data on global migration. If the 30 affluent countries making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) were to allow just a 3 percent rise in the size of their labor forces through loosened immigration restrictions, claims a 2005 World Bank report, the gains to citizens of poor countries would amount to about $300 billion. That’s $230 billion more than the developed world currently allocates to foreign aid for poor countries. And foreign aid is a transfer: The $70 billion that rich countries give leaves those countries $70 billion poorer. According to the World Bank study, wealthy nations that let in 3 percent more workers would gain $51 billion by boosting returns to capital and reducing the cost of production.

The aggregate gains from a regime of completely open borders are so large as to seem unreal, but immigration policy is perhaps best understood at the level of the individual. According to World Bank economists Martin Rama and Raquel Artecona, data from the 1990s show that a Vietnamese laborer who moves to Japan will make nine times what she would at home, adjusted for purchasing power. A Guatemalan will find wages for the same work increase sixfold in the United States; a Kenyan who moves to the U.K., sevenfold. “These wage gaps create pressure for migration,” Pritchett writes, “because they are not primarily explained by differences in the characteristics of people. Wage rates are predominantly characteristics of places.” The biggest single determinant of how well off you will be is not the college you get into, the color of your skin, your gender, or your work ethic; it’s the country listed on your passport.

Pritchett’s thesis is the kind of thing that sends conservatives and liberals alike running to reinforce the barricades, and he isn’t one to shy from controversy. He compares the world’s system of mobility restrictions to South African apartheid, a system that provoked Western opprobrium precisely because a privileged class allocated mobility rights unjustly. Apartheid, like fettered labor markets, was a system that “sharply limited the mobility of people, that kept people in disadvantaged regions with no economic opportunities, that destined millions to lives without hope, and that split workers and their families—merely because of the conditions of their birth.” The analogy to labor markets, Pritchett points out, is almost exact, with the notable exception that labor restrictions uphold much larger inequalities than apartheid ever did.

If there is one group of people he does not have to convince, it is those unfortunate enough to have been born in economically stagnant countries. Pritchett estimates that labor flows would be at least five times greater if people were free to move. What’s keeping so many would-be migrants in place? “Men with guns,” Pritchett says. His message is less a call to arms than a call to lay them down, less a provocation than a vision of a richer, better, freer world.

Senior Editor Kerry Howley interviewed Pritchett (whose book can be downloaded at cgdev.org) in August. Comments may be sent to letters@reason.com.

Reason: You worked for the World Bank while writing this book. The World Bank provides assistance to nation-states, and here you are saying that many, if not most, of the extremely poor would be better off just leaving. Shouldn’t someone focused on development encourage people to stay and make their country economically viable?

Lant Pritchett: There are two elements to that. I’m reasonably convinced that the argument that more foreign aid is a way of preventing more people from coming because it will make people better off isn’t consistent with the empirical work that’s been done. If we succeed in making Africa richer, there is going to be more pressure in outward migration rather than less. A lot of people in Africa are not creating pressure for immigration because they are just too poor. The idea that aid and migration are substitutes is just not consistent with the experience of the world.

The second thing is, we shouldn’t create hostages. We shouldn’t keep people locked in place within some arbitrary post-colonial boundaries just so we can continue with the bold experiment of trying to make nation-states develop. People should be free to move.

Reason: And if we got rid of those boundaries, what would the world look like?

Pritchett: The key to predicting that is price differentials [differences in prices charged for the same product in different places]. If you look at what has happened with enormously successful trade liberalization in the past 40 or 50 years, price differentials have fallen a lot. The only remaining enormously egregious price differential in the world is in the price of labor.

But I think the question of what would happen if world barriers to labor were erased tomorrow isn’t that interesting because it’s not going to happen. And to some extent it’s good that it won’t happen immediately. If the world were thrown open to labor mobility today, I suspect it would cause massive disruption of a kind that nobody really wants.

Reason: You consider barriers to the movement of people more problematic than remaining barriers to the movement of goods.

Pritchett: At this stage we have more or less eliminated most of the barriers to goods. Quantitative restrictions are almost eliminated around the world. Relative to when I started working as a trade economist in the early 1980s, the world is completely liberalized. So the incremental gains from anything that could happen as a result of WTO [World Trade Organization] negotiations are just infinitesimal. If we did everything, all the remaining goods liberalization, the monetary gains would be between half and two-thirds of the gains from just allowing 3 percent more workers into the OECD. Given the current enormous wage differentials, a minor relaxation of people mobility easily swamps all remaining liberalization on the goods side. There are almost no tariffs left over, say, 20 to 25 percent, and yet wages for unskilled labor differ not by percents but by an order of magnitude—workers in some poor countries make 8 cents an hour, not 8 dollars an hour.

My main point is that we’re giving all this intellectual and political and analytical attention to mopping up that last little bit of trade liberalization. Which is a good thing; I’m all for it—but let’s get our eyes on the next big prize.

Reason: Why has it been so hard to refocus?

Pritchett: To some extent it’s the March of Dimes phenomenon. March of Dimes cured polio. They found a polio vaccine. Once the organization that was set up to find a polio vaccine found a polio vaccine, what did they do? They raised money to cure other diseases. You keep doing what you’re good at. So we have this enormous machinery around goods liberalization. It’s going to continue doing what it’s doing. And they dominate the agenda. So people who are concerned about poor people still have the issue completely framed by this obsolete machinery.

GATT [the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] frames the debate because GATT has been an enormous success. People concerned about cotton subsidies say, “Let’s make the Doha round of WTO negotiations more favorable to the poor.” But they’re still buying into the whole agenda framed by GATT and the WTO, which has the persistence of a successful organization. They found the polio vaccine; they just can’t quit.

Reason: You’re offering strategies for poverty alleviation, but the left seems largely hostile to this agenda.

Pritchett: The left is right to be deeply ambivalent about this. They’re wrong about where they end up. They’re legitimately concerned about the increase in inequality inside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and particularly the United States, which is an enormous social and economic issue. They worry that if we let in more workers it will be bad for those who are doing the worst in America. They fear that if poor people come to the United States, they might cause deeper inequality here.

Being against migration to the United States is wrong for two reasons. One, I don’t think it gets the scale of the poverty in the United States vs. poverty in the rest of the world right. Second, if you are really concerned about inequality in the United States, there are many things you can do that would be better than blocking other people from coming to our country. I don’t want to say that people who are concerned about inequality in the U.S. aren’t right to be concerned about inequality in the U.S. But I think taking that concern and using it to keep people from coming to the United States is victimizing the world’s true victims in favor of people who happen to live closer to you.

Reason: It seems strange to worry more about inequality within the arbitrary boundaries of a nation-state than about much larger global inequalities.

Pritchett: Exactly. I’ve never understood a view of the world in which the place in which a person was born becomes the key factor in whether you care about them.

Reason: Is there a legitimate concern about brain drain? About skimming the best and brightest from developing countries, leaving them worse off?

Pritchett: Again, I think there are some elements of legitimate concern about that, particularly since the political economy of immigration will lead rich countries to do more and more skimming rather than less and less. But that said, it’s the same path you take toward free trade. Rather than say you’re against free trade, let’s put the emphasis on fair trade. When it comes to brain drain, let’s get more unskilled migration rather than saying let’s stop all migration that could cause brain drain.

That’s the turn that the more sophisticated NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] have taken on trade, where they really have moved from a free trade to a fair trade agenda, which has its downside but is enormously positive relative to an anti-trade agenda. But they haven’t taken that same turn at all on the immigration issue. We say, look, let’s have migration that’s the best possible for everyone. Profitable, welfare-improving trade is usually driven by differences. And there’s nowhere the differences are larger than in the endowments of unskilled labor.

Reason: Why have attitudes about free markets in labor not evolved alongside attitudes about free markets in goods?

Pritchett: I would push back on the premise. The average citizen, if asked, is against free trade, particularly in Europe. The proportion of people against free trade is almost as high as the proportion of people against migration.

The comparison isn’t quite fair: One issue is usually phrased incrementally—should we have more immigration?—vs. overall free trade. That raises an important political economy question. What the world managed to do on free trade is build in mechanisms that created political coalitions and a momentum toward freer trade. That worked in spite of the fact that if you ask the citizens on the street, their reaction might not have been pro–free trade. That is political genius. And we really do have the founding fathers of the post–World War II system to thank for having created mechanisms that have led to this enormous progress that domestic politics doesn’t necessarily favor.

Reason: Milton Friedman has pointed out that open borders are incompatible with the welfare state.

Pritchett: I would have thought Milton Friedman would have taken that as an argument for open borders.

The free mobility of labor is incompatible with the welfare state if every person who is physically present in a location to perform an economic service automatically comes into the same set of welfare benefits as a local. That needn’t be the case.

This is what liberal democracies find hard. But it’s not impossible. You have to confront the injustice of the world and say this person is better off even without the welfare benefits, and this process is good for the world.

Reason: You then create a division between first- and second-class citizens. Isn’t that worrisome?

Pritchett: The world now is divided into first-class citizens of the world and fifth-class citizens of the world. The idea that we wouldn’t help a peasant trying to eke out a living on a side of a mountain in Nepal by letting him work in the United States, just because we have to, if he comes to the United States, endow him with all the rights of U.S. citizens—I think that moral calculus is backward.

So the first answer is: Milton Friedman is wrong. It’s not incompatible with a welfare state; it’s incompatible with a welfare state that doesn’t differentiate between people within its territory. Singapore manages to maintain an enormously high level of benefits for its citizens with massive mobility. Kuwait has one of the highest immigrant populations in the world, and you can’t ask for a more cradle-to-grave welfare state than what Kuwait gives its citizens. So it’s obviously possible to maintain whatever level of welfare state you want and have whatever level of labor mobility you want, as long as you’re willing to separate the issues.

Reason: The political scientist Robert Putnam has done research showing that diversity correlates with diminished feelings of trust within a community. It seems plausible that higher levels of immigration could erode support for a welfare state.

Pritchett: Again, this depends on how migration is structured. No one looks at the H1-B holders, or the au pairs, both of which are temporary mobility labor schemes, and says, “Gee, this undermines the welfare state.” I think it is an issue only if you insist that mobility across the border for people who provide an economic service automatically endows them with a full set of political rights.

The world would be a much better place if that were not true. One of the awkward paradoxes of the world is that Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and Nepalis are enormously better off precisely because the Persian Gulf states don’t endow them with political rights. Because if you said to Kuwaitis, every Bangladeshi who comes in is going to acquire the full entitlements of Kuwaitis, I’m sure the Kuwaitis would cut the flow of Bangladeshis to zero. The Bangladeshis have been made enormously better off by the ability to work in Kuwait.

No one responds to Putnam’s research by saying we should make America less diverse. The logical consequence of that line of thinking is, let’s resegregate America; let’s re-create nondiverse communities. I think Lester Maddox used to say something like that in the ’50s.

Reason: I take it that you believe property rights are foundational to wealth creation. Do citizens “own” their countries? And if you think just anyone should be able to come over the borders, are you denying citizens their property rights in their country?

Pritchett: I agree that citizens have a property right to their country. But the beautiful thing about institutions that create property rights is that they’re a free good. If we allow in another 10 million, 20 million, 30 million people, then what has created American wealth—its economic institutions that allow entrepreneurship, that allow free markets, that allow people to innovate, that allow people opportunity—none of that is eroded by letting in more people.

America isn’t Kuwait. The wealth of Kuwait is that they’re sitting on this pool of oil. The wealth of America is that we have developed fantastically successful economic institutions. Those institutions are not zero sum. No one has suggested we should have limited America’s natural population growth because with 300 million people there are fewer benefits of our institutions of property rights to go around. It’s the same thing with migration.

Reason: You argue that it’s not morally permissible to discriminate on the basis of nationality. But at what point do you have to stop letting people in because the sheer numbers threaten institutions of wealth creation? What’s the limit?

Pritchett: To say it’s not morally permissible doesn’t create black and white. Right now all kinds of things that cause much smaller differences in human welfare get much more attention. If we say we are going to discriminate against ethnic Indians in Mexico vs. other citizens of Mexico, there would be a hue and cry across the world. But if we say we’re going to discriminate in favor of people of Mexican descent born in the United States vs. people of Mexican descent born in Mexico, this creates absolutely no moral outrage.

Another example: The differences in well-being between people born in poor countries and people born in rich countries are orders of magnitude larger than differences between the genders within those countries. But books written about gender probably outnumber books written about this point by 100 to 1.

That said, citizens do have a right to control their country in favor of its existing citizens. So let’s create a mechanism in which citizens can feel perfectly confident that their legitimate rights and concerns are protected, which at the same time leads to more benefits for more people in the world. I am never talking about open borders. Open borders in the current environment is a nonstarter. It might take us 50 years to get to anything like that. What I am saying is: Let’s figure out ways of protecting the concerns people have about their country while at the same time allowing for more migration.

Think of free trade. I think now, in this liberalized environment, if you look at the kind of compromises made early on in the ’50s and ’60s, unwinding the prewar restrictions, you’d think they were going so slowly; they weren’t bold. The free trade ideology didn’t necessarily win the day, but in the long run it did.

Reason: So you do see progress.

Pritchett: I think so. The future is incredibly difficult to predict, and certain attitudinal things shift overnight. Just prior to World War I, every single European country had a monarch. Twenty years later, the very idea of monarchy was regarded as ridiculous. No one in 1910 would have predicted that. I don’t rule out the possibility of a very rapid shift in the attitude toward this issue. It’s possible that 20 years from now people will look back and say, “Well, that was just a ridiculous idea that we had to shut down labor mobility.” Not only will labor mobility seem politically acceptable; it will become so triumphant that the opposite is unthinkable. This can happen very fast when it does happen. I’m 48 years old, and I lived through America’s attitudinal shift toward the environment. And it happened overnight.

Reason: What role does technology play in all this? Does a strong regulatory state with a well-maintained, centralized database enable more immigration because people feel safer? Or would that technology just allow rich countries to more effectively keep people out?

Pritchett: It’s hard to tell how much of the backlash against illegal immigration is against immigration and how much is against illegality. There is a legitimate concern that the law should be obeyed. Massive gaps between de jure and de facto are socially dangerous. So I’m pro-immigration, but I am not pro-illegality. I think you should do something about reconciling the legal situation for the people inside our country. I’m dubious about the “live in the shadows because the regulatory regime is unjust” strategy.

Reason: You worry that it gives immigration a bad name.

Pritchett: Exactly. During Prohibition, alcohol sales became associated with organized crime. But there was nothing intrinsic about having a drink that linked you to organized crime. I would much rather repeal Prohibition than allow bootleggers to flourish, because Prohibition is a dumb idea.

Reason: The electronic employer verification program has the potential to enforce immigration allowances that are egregiously low.

Pritchett: That doesn’t worry me.

Reason: It doesn’t?

Pritchett: I think I have more of the opposite worry, which is the general taint of illegality around the natural process of people moving across borders for economic opportunity. If we could eliminate that, that would be a big win.

Reason: What role do international institutions have to play in knocking down barriers to labor, if any?

Pritchett: I think they’re going to have a very modest role, at best. In part it’s embedded in the term international, if by international you mean cooperative agreements among nation-states. I don’t think any country is going to enter into a binding international agreement that gives up control over its borders, and I don’t think international organizations are going to play a role in free labor in the exact same way that GATT played a role in free trade.

Reason: It’s taken as obvious that our duties to our neighbors come before our responsibilities to far-off populations, but that raises the question of who our neighbors are. What will it take to expand that moral community beyond the nation-state?

Pritchett: That doesn’t have to happen. We don’t have to come up with some sort of completely cosmopolitan, completely globalist morality to move ahead on labor migration. I think it’s going to happen in the other way. I think we’re going to move ahead on migration; people are going to become more and more exposed to the fact that people from other places in the world are, in very deep ways, human beings exactly like us; and eventually, in an unpredictable way, the attitude toward this will shift.

The thrust of my book is, let’s look for politically acceptable mechanisms with which to make incremental changes that are feasible now. If we wait for the grand shift to happen, we’ll be waiting forever.

Reason: You are probably often accused of thinking too much like an economist. What if the numbers don’t capture the cultural damage caused by immigration: the loss of what it means to be an American, the loss of the sense of community. How do you address that?

Pritchett: The narrow answer is that what it means to be an American is to be open to migration. Being an American is an open idea, not a closed idea. It’s not a blood relationship. The idea of being American is an idea of being open to people from other places coming and making a contribution. I think we’ve lost sight of that.

The broad answer is that there have to be political mechanisms to address these things. I’m not proposing some economic theocrat be put in charge of immigration policy and superimpose people’s legitimate concerns about community and culture on top of it. I just think all those concerns can be addressed if we’re more creative about the kind of policies we’re willing to consider. For instance, the issue of temporary vs. permanent mobility: If you have to say that every person who comes across the border has a right to stay forever, you can’t separate the economic question of who should be physically present in our nationally controlled territory to provide economic services from the question of who can determine our future culture. I want those questions separated. If you separate those questions, we can create more economic benefits.

Reason: What’s the ideal size for a guest worker program?

Pritchett: There is definitely not an “ideal size.” Maybe I’m too unprincipled, but if we can establish that this is a good thing for poor people, I’d be happy with a small one.

What complicates the American situation is that we already have more people present in the country illegally than would be admitted by the most massive guest worker program that anyone would dare propose. So you can’t say we’ll repatriate every single illegal immigrant and replace them with a guest worker. That’s not even feasible. We have an unusual situation—that we have pushed the problem into the shadows. I’d be happy to get the mechanics of a guest worker program established, so it’s accepted this is something we can do, and then work toward a bigger one.

Reason: Will American voters ever have the stomach to do what it takes to keep temporary workers temporary? If you become pregnant as a guest worker in Singapore, you’re sent out of the country. Is that going to be possible in a more democratic, egalitarian society like the U.S. or Sweden?

Pritchett: Given the things that democratic egalitarian societies have been willing to stomach, in both recent and current history, I find it difficult to believe that the hardest of all moral things they would have to do is get tough enough to have a guest worker program. Not to criticize America—which I love; I’m an American—but to say that a country that had Jim Crow laws in my lifetime doesn’t have the stomach to have a guest worker program? It seems pretty inconceivable to me.

You’d be doing something tough that is in the interest of enormously greater global justice. We have found the stomach to do morally reprehensible things without any greater interest of global justice. We’re willing to put millions and millions of young African Americans behind bars for drug offenses.

You can’t enforce the border at the border. You have to enforce the border behind the border. And you can’t enforce the border behind the border unless citizens believe the enforcement’s fair. If people become convinced that sending pregnant temporary workers home is a necessary part of a fair and legitimate system of migration, we’ll be willing to do it. If we don’t think the system we’ve created is fair and legitimate, we won’t be willing to enforce it. The conundrum we’ve backed ourselves into is that we have a system that no one thinks is fair or legitimate.

Immigration in South Carolina

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:28:00 EST

Listen to Kerry Howley's commentary at Marketplace about a new controversial anti-immigrant commercial produced by Republican Senate candidate Buddy Witherspoon.

If You're Going to Live in America...

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:17:00 EST

you should at least learn to speak and write in English.

Votes Americans Won't Cast

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:52:00 EST

Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlán Calderón, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown Peril for just $3 an hour plus room and board.

Guests in the Machine

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:54:00 EST

The towers of Marina Bay Sands will reach 50 stories into the sky, narrowing in the middle and splaying at the tops and bottoms, arching toward the water’s edge like giant joysticks in play. A thumb shaped pier, known as the “sky garden,” will hover above the complex, and a lotus-shaped museum will flower from the bay itself. Together the towers will house 2,500 hotel rooms and lord over the heart of the casino complex, a million-square-foot convention center that will sweep from the feet of the towers to the edge of the South China Sea.

Singapore’s first casino, a $5 billion project on some of the most expensive property in the world, has been billed as a microcosm of the city itself. Ambitious, futuristic, pristine, and not especially humble, it is the ideal urban physiognomy of a country straining to stand out among its much larger neighbors. “People know Singapore,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong assured his countrymen in a 2006 address to the nation. “They no longer think that Singapore is somewhere in China. They know Singapore is special.”

Three miles from Marina Bay, in Singapore’s Little India, many thousands of young Bangladeshi and Malay men gather every Sunday—their one day off—to eat, drink, and spend. Weaving through piles of coconuts and stacks of steaming naan, men shout to one another across streets packed tight with bodies. Here the air grows sweaty, the streets smell of garlic, and incense fumes waft from vendor to buyer. This is not the aseptic, polished Singapore of Marina Bay. It is the muscled hodgepodge that will take the Bay blueprints, unload ships full of steel, and build a casino.

As the world gradually learns to locate Singapore on a map (it’s on the tip of the Malaysian Peninsula), Little India is expanding. The Ministry of Manpower says the construction industry will need between 40,000 and 50,000 more foreign workers if projects like the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort are to rise from the page. When the visas are granted, these workers will add to a non-resident workforce of 670,000. That may not sound like much by the standards of the United States, where 670,000 doesn’t even capture the number of undocumented workers who cross the border in a single year. But Singapore is a city-state little larger, and far more densely populated, than the city of Chicago. Its growing foreign population is party to a radical experiment in labor mobility.

If any nation has reason to feel threatened by country-level disparities in wealth, Singapore does. The city-state is an oasis of prosperity in a region packed with countries far poorer than, say, Mexico. Yet it has shown itself to be more open to immigrants willing to work than is the relatively empty, relatively well-protected United States. Using the latest data available, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs puts Singapore’s foreign-born population in 2006 at 42.6 percent. In the U.S., the proverbial nation of immigrants, the foreign born comprised 12.9 percent of the population that same year.

That gap is likely to grow, as neighboring countries spill workers and Singapore’s hungry economy sucks them in. The economy created 176,000 net new jobs last year, with foreigners filling half of those slots, and the Ministry of Manpower predicts that 450,000 new jobs will be created over the next five years. The country’s birth rate is below replacement level and among the lowest in the world, offering little hope to Singaporean isolationists. Employers know they cannot rely on natives to fill their payrolls, and they will increasingly draw from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere to stave off shortages.

If larger economies were to introduce guest worker programs like Singapore’s, the impact on migrant welfare would be enormous. The number of foreign-born residents in the wealthy countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is now a mere 7 percent of the total population, as compared with the Asian city-state’s 43 percent. The Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimates that if OECD nations were to administer small temporary labor schemes, with the imported workers totaling just 3 percent of the countries’ labor forces, the result would “easily yield $200 billion annually for the citizens of developing nations,” dwarfing the $60 billion the same countries offer in official development aid.

Beneath these clean numbers lurks a tangle of ethical quandaries and unanswered questions. For those who want a less restrictive regime, these programs are a compromise and an accommodation. There is no constituency for a policy of open borders in any of the wealthy countries of the OECD, and government-run guest worker programs are a politically viable means of increasing mobility. Like tightly regulated medical marijuana dispensaries, they are a highly regimented alternative to prohibition. In a political environment where full mobility is as unlikely as full drug legalization, such incremental change may be the only alternative to stasis.

In the United States, where guest worker plans have been part of a heated conversation about immigration reform, supporters of mobility rights are operating in an extremely hostile political environment. The events of 9/11 have intensified American nativism, and age-old debates about collective identity are now infused with the lexicon of terror and national security. Five minutes of talk radio should make clear what pro-immigration groups are up against: a fear of chaos, an aversion to illegality, a need for structure and predictability. Singapore, a country best known in the United States for the caning of a graffiti artist, has found a way to combine an obsession with order and a highly fluid economy of movement.

But for supporters of immigrant rights, it has never been clear that this compromise is one worth making. In the United States, opponents of guest worker programs point to historical abuses of Mexican migrants, seemingly threatened ideals of political equality, and America’s history as a land of assimilation and settlement. They question whether the United States can invest in such a program without losing the very values that make it a place worth breaking into. Such moral probity may be heartfelt and is surely anguished, but it ultimately does little to help the poor in the developing world make their lives even a little less wretched.

Guest Workers in Singapore
Gener Manalac said goodbye to his children, and to the Philippines, on June 25, 1993. Things had gone sour for the family ever since the Filipino government refused to renew the lease for Subic Bay, the U.S. naval base where Manalac and his wife earned a solid living for his family of five.

He worked as a crane operator, and she in the military commissary. When the base closed following a contentious political debate in the Philippines, he and his wife were immediately jobless. “The government closed the base,” he explains, “and offered no alternatives.” He describes it as the worst time of his life.

Manalac looked for work but never really expected to find it in central Luzon, where his family waited anxiously as money began to run out. When a recruiter from Bahrain showed up looking for construction workers, he knew his future was no longer in the Philippines. He tried Bahrain, hated it, and returned to look for something else. The something else was Singapore.

Fourteen years later, Manalac is still here. He is now a supervisor for a construction company, and he helps build condos and cluster houses for Singapore’s growing population. His family is still in the Philippines, and he has managed to keep his kids clothed and in school with remittances he sends home monthly. His older daughter is studying to be a nurse, his son a computer engineer. His youngest daughter is 17 and studying English. Manalac has seen his children three times since he left that day in 1993, and he winces as he talks about the separation.

It’s not the experience of fatherhood he might have hoped for, but Manalac is delighted with his good fortune. Fifty-two and no longer trim, he smiles broadly as he describes his climb up the ranks of the construction industry. In 2000 he was promoted; suddenly he was in charge of a team of newly arrived immigrants. He works 15-hour days, six days a week. In what spare time he has, he studies conversational Mandarin in hopes of better communicating with his Chinese coworkers.

And yet Manalac is very much a guest in this country. He says he’ll remain for as long as they’ll have him, though he doesn’t presume to have any right to stay. If he were fired or became unable to work, he’d have to leave within seven days. He is subject to regular medical examinations to ensure that he is HIV-negative. He can’t bring his children here. He can’t bring his wife here. Were his marriage to fail, it would be illegal for him to marry a Singaporean. Were he female, a pregnancy would mean repatriation or abortion. The Singaporean government has made itself very clear: Foreign workers are here to build a nest egg, not to build a nest.

Perhaps the most significant restriction on Manalac is the nature of his work permit and the limits of his freedom to find employment. Only select industries are open to foreigners. On my way to meet Manalac in his apartment in the suburbs, I asked the taxi driver whether he too was a guest here. He laughed. A foreign taxi driver? Absurd.

Manalac is permitted to work only in construction, and only for the employer who brought him here. If he is unhappy with his employer or feels he is being mistreated, he can return to the employment agency and request a new job, but the process is cumbersome and can be difficult to navigate.

None of this seems to bother him in the least. It’s just part of the deal, and the deal has worked out well for him. He says he harbors no resentment toward the government of Singapore: He is angry at his home government for depriving him of a job, not at Singapore for giving him one. He has never really had to wade into the bureaucracy; never had to fight to stay or to change employers. Those that have faced such problems have reason to feel more conflicted about the well-guarded doors Singapore opens for the region’s poor.

If there is one collective experience that should give the world pause about guest worker programs, it is the plight of Indonesian maids. Unlike male workers who are given housing, a day off once a week, and regulated hours, domestic workers often live with families with full control over the terms of their employment. They run a higher risk of abuse than other foreigners, and Asian tabloids are full of horrific headlines to that effect. There are stories of maids being burned with hot irons, scalded with boiling water, sexually abused by male employers and then physically abused by jealous wives.

Behind a locked iron gate in one of Singapore’s outer suburbs live a hundred or so women with stories that might not be quite so tabloid-ready, but painfully illustrate the vulnerabilities of foreign nationals at the mercy of hostile employers. Many claim they have not been paid or have been illegally deployed to do work they weren’t contracted for, and some say they’ve been physically abused. Their cases are wending their way through the court system, and they are biding their time in a shelter set up by a privately funded NGO called the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, or HOME.

Adjudication can take a long time. When I visited HOME, a 29-year-old Indonesian woman named Sri Uli Darti explained that she had been living in the shelter for a year and a half, before which she had been doing time in a Singaporean prison. Loquacious and poised, Sri was something of a media star in July 2007, and her self-possession distinguished her from many of the other women who quietly waited along with her in the Singaporean suburbs.

Two years ago, Sri ran away from the home of her employer, Tan Kok Quan, a prominent lawyer with a firm specializing in intellectual property and real estate law. She had been with him and his wife for nearly three years before she became exasperated enough to leave. The pay was too low, she thought, for a now-experienced maid, and Tan wanted her to do work she considered dangerous, like washing windows from perilous heights. She wanted out, so she went to the Indonesian Embassy and asked for shelter.

The embassy didn’t want her; they gave her back to the employment agency that had brought her here. But she wasn’t there long before the police showed up to retrieve her and place her in a cell at Changi Women’s Prison. The lawyer who had employed her had accused her of stealing a bag of rare coins, and he said he could prove it with the remittance slips Sri had left in her room. The slips added up to more than they had paid her, he argued, so she must have been sending the stolen moneyback to her seven siblings and other family in Northern Sumatra.

Sri was terrified and desperately wanted to go home. She could explain the remittance slips: She had a boyfriend who had given her $6,000, which she sent home to her family. Singaporean employers tend to frown on domestic workers with relationships; there is a fear that they will become pregnant and have to be repatriated, leaving their employers liable for the cost of the return trip. (There also seems to be an assumption that foreign maids are especially libidinous.) “No one would believe me,” she recalls.

In Singapore, the state provides legal counsel to foreign workers only if they face the death penalty. Those who can’t afford it, and few can, hope for pro bono help. As expected, Sri lost. She was sentenced to pay S$3,000 that she didn’t have—the equivalent of about $2,050 in U.S. currency, approximately a year of her pay—and to spend two weeks in jail.

HOME volunteer Lim Tanguy Yuteck visited her in prison and offered to take her case for free, if she wanted to appeal. “She wept during the entire interview,” Lim recalls, “and looked as if her entire world had collapsed.” HOME paid her S$10,000 bail, and Sri began a long period of waiting at the shelter.

Finally, on July 14, 2007, a high court reheard Sri’s case. The judge deemed the prosecution’s case too speculative, and she was acquitted based on lack of evidence. The Straits Times ran a picture of her bawling with relief under the headline “Maid’s 2-Year Nightmare Ends with Acquittal.”

Guest Workers in America
“Give the Senate some credit,” James Suroweicki wrote in the June 11 New Yorker: “In shaping the current immigration-reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everybody hates.” Hates was an understatement. President George W. Bush had been pushing for some sort of guest worker program since before the 9/11 attacks, and as that idea inched closer to realization in 2007, his critics grew more vitriolic. Right-wingers who fervently believed the U.S. government would succeed in rebuilding the Middle East excoriated Bush for his starry-eyed idealism, and left-wingers who wanted amnesty suddenly came out against the entrance of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.

The New York Times complained that no worker should be sent home; National Review complained that no worker would go home. The New Republic said the plan fell within “the tradition of the African slave ship,” and the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which wants more deportations of peaceful undocumented workers, called it “morally dubious.”

In Asia and the Gulf States, the term guest worker is most often associated with domestic workers like Sri and construction workers like Manalac. In the United States, the term is almost universally associated with farm workers, and very often with abused, impoverished, exploited farm workers. Memories of the United States’ largest experiment with transient labor have not aged well, and they haunt proposals to bring more workers, agricultural or otherwise, across the border.

The original Bracero Program was an exception to the restrictive 1917 Immigration Act, which prohibited both illiterate immigrants and those “induced…to migrate to this country by offers or promises of employment.” Mexicans, needed to tend farms and lay railroad track, would not be subject to these restrictions. The Bracero Program known to most came later, between 1942 and 1964, during which time millions of Mexicans found work on U.S. farms.

The second Bracero Program was an agreement be-tween two governments. The U.S. government would permit entry of migrant workers and collect paycheck deductions of 10 percent to be deposited in accounts in Mexico. During their time here, migrants were at times housed in dreary camps, used to break strikes, and subjected to abuse. Many returned home to find their promised savings nonexistent.

When President Bush raised the specter of a temporary worker program in 2004, opponents were many and bracero was the first word on their lips. Opponents also spoke of Germany’s experience with Turkish guest workers in the 1960s, many of whom came on one-year visas and never left. As the novelist Max Frisch put it: ‘’We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” The workers who stayed depended heavily on the German welfare state, but they were not granted the option of German citizenship until very recently. The program’s failures have contributed to the idea that “temporary immigration” is a bureaucratic misnomer, a utopian futility akin to a “drug-free zone.”

These historical examples illuminate the obstacles any guest worker plan faces, but they can obscure what we know to be possible in countries like Singapore: large-scale temporary migration. They also fail to account for the guest worker schemes in place in the United States right now. The H2-B Visa program brings thousands of au pairs, hotel workers, and farm workers to the United States every year. Aspects of the program are cumbersome and problematic, but it is not associated with high rates of permanent migration.

Any guest worker scheme is going to involve a large and fallible bureaucracy; such programs are an alternative to prohibition, and their terms must be made palatable to many constituencies if they are to survive. In order to placate Singaporeans who worry that foreigners will push them out of work, the government imposes levies on employers who hire non-Singaporean workers and sets limits on the percentage of a company’s workforce that can be foreign. Manalac, for instance, costs his employer S$80 a month in fees and contributes to the “dependency ceiling” on foreign hires.

Other functional programs have devised a series of incentives that encourage workers to return home. Some, such as South Korea’s, involve some amount of money being withheld until workers leave. Other countries actively enlist the help of governments such as the Philippines, which has an incentive to maintain the goodwill of countries that employ Filipino citizens. Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, has suggested decreasing the sending countries’ quotas relative to the number of immigrants who fail to return, which would in turn encourage such countries to provide incentives to returning workers.

In the United States, the plan President Bush was pushing drew crucial lessons from the bracero experience and other experiments in extending mobility rights. Immigrants would need a job offer in order to gain entry, but—crucially—they could change jobs once here. Employers would not be able to threaten workers with deportation, but only with unemployment, the same threat hanging over native-born workers’ heads. The program was designed to maximize opportunities while minimizing abuse, affording foreigners the same protections as their American coworkers.

As originally conceived, the new program would issue 400,000 two-year visas, each renewable up to three times. In May 2007, the Senate slashed that 400,000 to 200,000. In June, they inserted a sunset provision ensuring that the program would end in five years if not renewed. Later that month, they put the whole tortured immigration bill, the largest proposed overhaul in decades, out of its misery.

If support for a guest worker program was hard to find among elites, it wasn’t among Americans generally: A May 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll found 66 percent of the nation supporting “a program allowing people from other countries to be guest workers in the U.S. for a temporary period of time, and then be required to return to their home country.” In 2006, 79 percent told Time pollsters that they supported a guest worker program for undocumented workers already in the United States.

But opposition to an American guest worker program is loud and deeply impassioned, if not broadly shared. Though it’s probably the only politically viable way to significantly increase legal immigration, supporters of immigrant rights are as likely as not to oppose a program that invites immigrants to work but not to stay. “There is little that is more antithetical to the American ideal than a guest worker,” explained the center-left editors of The New Republic in April of 2006, echoing a 2005 piece from the hard-right Human Events that explained, in fine detail, why the “guest worker plan is un-American,” and foreshadowing a May New York Times editorial that called the guest worker program “a shameful repudiation of American tradition.” The pieces referred to different plans, but none of them bothered with the details; the broad outlines of any guest worker plan strike many as offensive.

“Until now,” the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote in 2005, “the American ideal of an immigrant has been someone who comes here with the ambition to work harder, earn more, save more, perhaps start a business, and succeed in the free-enterprise system.” Guest workers also come to earn and save, but Schlafly was getting at something else: The American ideal of an immigrant is someone who becomes an American.

Because U.S. immigration is so readily conflated with Americanization, the mythology of America’s immigrant past cuts against acceptance of a guest worker program. The story of the American Dream does not include a chapter for those who want to take the money they’ve earned and buy a home with a white picket fence and two-car garage in Mexico. The narrative allows no space for transience. Even the terms we use, from “anchor baby,” to “chain migration,” belie an inability to accept the essentially fluid nature of world migration patterns.

“There is that traditional mythology—that the rest of the world is just dying to be American,” says the Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey. “In the past that wasn’t true. There was heavy return migration of Italians and Poles in the 20th century, but it gets lost in historical memory.”

Because the collective memory is largely shaped by the immigrants who stay, it’s easy to forget how many came and left. According to the historian Mark Wyman, author of Round-Trip to America, at least a quarter of the 23 million immigrants who came to the states between 1880 and 1930 eventually made their way back home. The return migration rate for Italians was even higher, at 50 percent.

Statistics show a similar fluidity today, though these numbers tend to get lost in our culturally narcissistic debates over contemporary immigration patterns. Massey heads Princeton’s Mexican Migration Project, which has been collecting data on immigration for 25 years. In 1997, the Public Policy Institute analyst Belinda Reyes used that data to conduct a study of 42,000 documented and undocumented immigrants from western Mexico. Fifty percent, she found, returned in two years; 70 percent in 10 years. The immigrants who decided to stay were also the most desirable from a policy perspective: the most educated and the most integrated into the labor market. Those most likely to leave were uneducated men—the demographic that peoples guest worker programs from Saudi Arabia to Singapore.

One would expect return migration to increase as the cost of travel drops, and indeed this is what researchers have found. But the cost of border crossing has risen sharply since 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act militarized the border. Human smugglers charge more for their services, and the risk of death has trebled. The result, says Massey, is that return migration has halved. “People used to circulate, but now they don’t, because the cost of reentry is too high. Rather than go out and have to face the gauntlet again, they just stay,” he says.

Massey attributes the growth in the population of undocumented workers over the past two decades to the fact that circulation is more difficult than at any point in history. “In-migration has been fairly flat for 20 years,” he explains, “The explosive growth we realized in the 1990s and 2000 is mainly due to a reduction in out-migration.” Militarization of the border has encouraged huge numbers of workers to stay up north, cementing the idea that American immigration is intrinsically permanent.

Tolerating Inequality
HOME is one of a few new Singaporean organizations advocating improvements in the treatment of guest workers, and if the burgeoning immigrant support infrastructure in Hong Kong is any guide, there will be more to come. These nascent organizations suggest a decreased tolerance for the abuse of foreigners within Singaporean borders. “The Ministry of Manpower has been in the dark ages for the past century,” says Jolovan Wham, HOME’s executive director. But as Jolovan deals with a phone call from a Bangladeshi worker on his mobile phone, an administrative call on his landline, and a family of Sri Lankan refugees in our presence, he explains that the concept of foreign worker rights is becoming slightly less alien.

For HOME, “equal rights” means a minimum wage, decent housing, and at least a single day off from work every week for women like Sri. They’d like foreign workers to be able to move between jobs, and to move into whatever sectors they like. As Jolovan tells it, the government has a total of two responses for everything HOME advocates: “social stability” and, oddly, “free markets.”

Employers are tied to the foreign workers they sponsor through S$5,000 bonds they receive only when the worker is repatriated. If workers were allowed some amount of freedom to change jobs, there would likely be periods during which they would be jobless, leaving no employer responsible for them. “The government is afraid there will be riots,” says Jolovan, “afraid that large numbers of workers hanging around without jobs will lead to social unrest.”

The government’s response to HOME’s request for more regulation is to defer to the market. But given the state-created lack of mobility within the labor market, it’s not at all clear that this makes sense. Workers can’t shop for a good wage once they’re in Singapore, so the usual reasons for giving competition free rein are not in play. “It’s not free,” says John Gee, president of Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), another foreign worker advocate organization. “That’s the nonsense about the argument. In so many issues we come up with, we’re told, oh well it’s better left up to the market. But the market isn’t operating.”

Despite their criticisms, neither of the organizations that represent foreign workers is pushing for anything like an end to the program. It’s easy to see why: The gains to the immigrants themselves are highly visible. Talking to immigrants in Singapore, it can seem as if the city-state is supporting all of Southeast Asia. Manalac lives with four other foreign workers in a spacious apartment in the suburbs; each is supporting dependents back home. Reyaz Uddin, a young Filipina accountant, is helping to send five of her seven brothers and sisters to school back home. “Also some nephews and nieces,” she explains, “we’re a close-knit family.” Her pay doubled the moment she started working in Singapore, and she seems not at all perturbed by the responsibility of caring for her family. “Maybe I’ll go to Hong Kong next,” she says, with the air of a well-off retiree deciding where to summer.

Little India is dotted with remittance centers, small windowed shops with plastic chairs full of men waiting to send money home to mothers, wives, and children. The need to send cash home has spawned an industry in itself, with over 100 remittance transfer companies now competing to send cash faster, cheaper, and more reliably from Singapore to origin countries. According to a 2006 report from the Asian Development Bank, immigrants in Singapore are sending home between $500 million and $700 million annually.

Thanks to the efficiencies of the remittance system, these immigrants are able to direct their money to parents and children rather than watch it dissipate as entire villages stake a claim. Some guest workers hesitate to visit their homes simply because, as comparatively wealthy and newly high-status returning workers, they will be asked to share their new wealth with distant cousins and relatives they didn’t know they had. In a 2005 study of Bangladeshi migrants in Singapore, the sociologists Md. Mizanur Rahman of the Asia Research Institute and Lian Kwen Fee of the National University of Singapore write that Bangladeshi villagers see money earned abroad as “easy money,” to be generously expended.

The same analysis found that migrants spend a considerable amount of money on “prestige goods” that will help accord them high-status positions when they return. One of Manalac’s five housemates has stuffed his closet-like bedroom with an electric guitar collection and a flat-screen TV. Migrants spend money “conspicuously in order to indicate that it has been earned easily (which is prestigious) and are lavish in their generosity to fellow villagers as well as to village causes in order to secure the goodwill of the community and a higher social standing.” Back home in Bangladesh, prominently displayed Singaporean goods reflect “families’ access to the foreign labor market, a source of prestige for their households.” Families who have sent guest workers abroad are referred to as “Singaporean families.” When outsiders visit a Singaporean family they expect to see goods bought in Singapore, all of which signal heightened status.

It is possible to acquire enough skills and time in Singapore to become a permanent resident, and therefore exempt from visa renewals or employment levies. The vast majority of low-skill foreign workers don’t plan on it, and no one expects them to try to assimilate while they’re here. No one demands that they learn English or teach their kids Singaporean history. “Hierarchy and segregation are part and parcel of the Singaporean psyche,” says Leong Chan Hoong, a psychologist at Singapore National University and an expert in the public perception of foreign workers. “Because of that, you are able to accept foreign workers more readily. You are assured that you will have some space, that your social, spatial identity will not be compromised with the huge influx of foreigners coming in.”

Superficially, it’s strange that states like Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are more welcoming to large numbers of immigrants than the United States and Western Europe. Singaporeans exhibit personality traits that predict hostility to immigrants—a comfort with hierarchy and traditionalism, for example—while residents of the U.S. and U.K. are more likely to exhibit immigrant-friendly traits like egalitarianism and openness to change.

Partly, this is explained by contrasting modes of government. Singapore’s authoritarian regime is unabashedly pro-immigration; it’s not clear that a democratic Singapore would be so welcoming. As important, Chan Hoong explains, is Singapore’s willingness to accommodate conservatives through policies of segregation that Americans would probably find odious. Singaporean conservatives mirror the American right in their fear of cultural erosion and social disorder, but they have largely been placated by a system that invites immigration while emphasizing legality and distance. A comfort with hierarchy expresses itself as a comfort with inequality, and countries that can tolerate inequality can allow huge influxes of poor people.

The Great Migration
To liberal American opponents of guest worker programs, Sri and Manalac are branded second-class citizens, members of an underclass. The editors of The New Republic locate them within a tradition of slavery. It would be better for Manalac and Sri, in other words, if they’d never had the opportunity to come, best if they’d stayed home and scraped by. Their decision to renew their status simply signals the continuation of this confusion and a false consciousness that propels them toward exploitation.

This ordering of priorities—equality first, migration later—should strike students of American history as odd. Over the course of the 20th century, millions of America’s second-class citizens made progress in just the opposite way. They moved north, to cities where they weren’t always welcome and certainly weren’t treated as equals. The story of black progress in America is intimately connected to their mobility rights, and a North that refused to let them travel until they had attained full equality would have greatly decelerated their political, social, and economic advance.

Between 1914 and 1970, 7 million Southern descendents of slaves left en masse for cities in the North and West. The changes wrought during these years—especially during the peak decade of the 1940s—would horrify anyone crying crisis in 2007. Chicago was 2 percent black in 1916, 33 percent black by 1970.

As in Singapore and the United States today, laborers were needed. The cause today is prosperity; the cause then was war. Soldiers heading to the battlefield left labor shortages behind, even as World War I was stimulating the industrial economy. Robert S. Abbott, founder and editor of The Chicago Defender, used his position at the country’s most widely circulated black paper to launch a campaign encouraging the migration; or as he called it, the exodus. For Abbott, this was biblical—a “flight out of Egypt” and on to “the Promised Land.” Supplementing the rhetoric was practical information for helping the poor black Southerner move North: rail timetables and job listings.

White Southerners typically refused to circulate The Defender, and with good reason. The paper was encouraging their labor supply, once literally captive, to pack up and leave. Many of those who did leave were escaping a sharecropping system that often as not left blacks in deep debt at the end of the growing season. Southern whites threatened to throw recruiting agents in jails and arrested blacks near train stations for “vagrancy,” but were unsuccessful in stanching the flow of bodies. The gains for blacks were just too huge.

“That moment in the black rural South,” Nicholas Lemann writes in his history of the Great Migration, The Promised Land, “was one of the few in American history when virtually every member of a large class of people was guaranteed an immediate quadrupling of income, at least, simply by relocating to a place that was only a long day’s journey away.” In 1925 the Howard University philosopher Alain Locke wrote of the “New Negro,” a self-actualized, assertive, urban black man borne of a generation of serfs, elevated from the sad status of his parents simply because he fled the rural South. “Money and dignity,” writes Lemann, “were indisputably in greater supply in Chicago than in the [Mississippi] Delta.”

Not even the effusive Abbott would argue that the blacks who stepped off the train from the Delta during WWI, or at any point afterward, were stumbling into an egalitarian utopia. Housing and labor discrimination were endemic. Like Manalac and Sri, Chicago blacks could not drive yellow taxis or marry anyone they wanted. They had to be physically present to fight for space in white neighborhoods, to picket for equal pay, to agitate for their civil rights. It’s harder to demand just treatment from behind a fence.

The gains for immigrants today are at least as great as they were for itinerant blacks during the first half of the 20th century, simply because the differences in pay for the same work have ballooned. “The gaps in income across countries are now much larger than gaps within countries,” the Harvard economist Lant Pritchett writes in his book Let Their People Come. “Nearly all of the earnings gap between workers in poor countries and rich countries appears to be due to their location, not their personal characteristics.” Pritchett argues that no development intervention comes close to helping individuals from developing nations the way simple, temporary relocation does, and a guest worker program would allow these gains to be broadly shared.

Moral Harms
This dynamic of mobility and advocacy has profound implications for the immigrants of the future. In Singapore, maid abuse is becoming less acceptable and is increasingly seen as déclassé. The government is insisting on better housing conditions for workers as NGOs draw attention to unscrupulous employers. And yet it’s not clear how much the government can liberalize its immigration regime without engendering a backlash that cuts against mobility. A U.S. program would require the same awkward balancing act between compassion and political viability. The existence of a program would depend on a supportive political constituency, but that constituency would likely erode if such workers’ advocates demanded that immigrants receive public services.

As Americans struggle with the implications of immigrants who come to live but not to stay, their single greatest objection to a guest worker plan may have nothing to do with migrant well-being. The gains for immigrants are demonstrably too big and the need too great to lend credibility to those who cast all guest workers as victims. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, migrants send $62.3 billion in remittances to Latin American and the Caribbean last year, keeping 8 to 10 million families above the poverty line. The unexplored opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation are massive and undeniable. But it seems dirty. “It simply feels exploitative and un-American to allow migrants in without giving them a shot at becoming citizens,” writes Jacob Weisberg in Slate.

The economist Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, has expressed this objection in somewhat loftier terms. In a critique of Harvard’s Pritchett, Summers explains: “Lant’s kind of compassionate libertarianism carries the risk of a morally problematic coarsening that we resist in many other ways.” The problem with guest worker programs, in other words, has nothing to do with the good of guest workers, and everything to do with the moral harm that proximate poverty might cause to their hosts. Allowing workers entry to the United States might be mutually beneficial for employer and employee, all the while producing corrosive cultural externalities. Summers seems to think that guest workers will inure Americans to a system of class stratification and undermine a shared, naive sense of global solidarity.

The moral calculus, then, is to be weighed between the welfare of potential workers and the preservation of an idealized American narrative. Does it reflect better on the American character to lock poor people out than to permit them entry on limited terms? Guest worker programs do clash with deeply held mythologies about our relationship to the global poor. We live in a state of relative political equality nested awkwardly within a deeply unequal world, and it can seem better, kinder, to keep the inequality outside, walling it off and keeping our hands clean. Perhaps American egalitarianism, like a dress too precious to be worn, is a value too dear to expose to the real world. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, has written, “Americans prefer unknowing.”

In the end, the best argument for a guest worker program isn’t Manalac’s experience, but Sri’s. I met Sri a few days after she had been acquitted. She was planning her first trip back to Indonesia in four years, two years of which she had spent battling false accusations in a foreign system stacked against her. Asked what she would do next, she said she’d like to earn some capital to start a business in Indonesia. How would she earn that capital? She smiled. “I’ll come back to Singapore.”

Host countries are right to worry about the moral complexities of a legally divided society. But if they lock down the borders and slam shut the gates, it won’t be Sri they are protecting.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason.