Thursday, December 27th, 2007...11:41 pm

Home Is Where You Never, Ever Leave. Ever.

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Megan McArdle responds to my response:

I am of the opinion that the positive externalities outweigh the negative ones, particularly when we consider, as I believe we should, the benefits to the migrants. But there are ways to amplify the negative externalities, and setting up a program that explicitly prevents assimilation seems like a big one. So does setting up a program which, in order to actually make it work as promised, would require massive changes to American institutions such as gender discrimination laws.

So Megan is of the opinion that there are ways to amplify the negative externalities associated with guest worker programs, and not allowing a path to citizenship is one of them. But the question is not “Is a guest worker program better than vastly increased legal immigration with a path to citizenship?” Obviously not. The question is “Is the only politically viable way to increase legal immigration worthy of our support?” The answer will depend on how you weigh the value of an immigrant’s tenfold increase in her wages against the perceived negative externalities.

And about those externalities–and the “massive changes to American institutions.” It’s not at all obvious that a guest worker program would be as disruptive as this implies. We have guest worker programs. They’re not great, but they’re functional, and they’re not associated with pockets of permanence or high crime rates. You don’t need to massively change American institutions, it turns out, to get guest workers to go home. Here’s James Surowiecki:

Guest workers are also, paradoxically, less likely than illegal immigrants to become permanent residents. The U.S. already has a number of smaller—and less well-designed—temporary-worker programs, and there’s no evidence that workers in those plans routinely overstay their visas. Mexican workers, contrary to popular belief, do not, generally, intend to live their entire lives in the U.S. Instead, as the sociologists Douglas Massey and Jorge Durand concluded after a comprehensive study of immigrant attitudes and behavior, most want to work “for short periods to generate an alternative source of household income . . . or to accumulate savings for a specific purpose,” like buying a house in Mexico. This is harder to do as an illegal immigrant than as a guest worker, both because illegal workers are paid less and because when an illegal goes home he runs the risk of getting caught. One remarkable study found that after border enforcement was stepped up in 1993 the chances of an illegal immigrant returning to Mexico to stay fell by a third.

Permanence is not a given. Now for the other complaint: impermanence. Megan assumes a certain corrosion in a culture of transience, but chances are that your neighbor’s au pair–a guest worker–does not treat America like a rental car. I have been transient in every city I have ever lived in, but I didn’t find myself littering the streets of London, Los Angeles, or Rangoon. As a tourist in Mandalay and Hong Kong–places where I have even less buy-in– I rarely felt a need to trash hotel rooms. Mostly, in Singapore, I detected extreme gratefulness from people given the chance to feed their children and send their brothers and sisters to school. Where is the evidence that immigrants, given the chance to work, will reciprocate by mistreating their neighbors?

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