Tonight I saw a video of an Episcopal bishop telling a group of priests that they should get their affairs in order. He said that if the immigration crisis continues to get worse, some of them might become martyrs for defending immigrants. Trump is really bearing down on Minnesota. He’s preparing to move an army battalion into Minneapolis to reinforce the 3000 ICE agents already there. His Department of Justice has initiated investigations to find excuses to bring charges against the Minnesota governor, Tim Waltz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, who have spoken out against Trump’s invasion.
Trump is rounding up immigrants, even those here legitimately, deporting them, putting them in prison camps, both in the US and in other countries without warrants, splitting up families, creating fear in the immigrant community.
It’s the same plan Trump has followed before: address a problem that doesn’t exist, or do something to cause a problem, and then rush in to “solve” it. He did the same thing by declaring immigration as a problem during his first term, and by invading Venezuela, and threatening to invade Greenland more recently.
In their book Good
Economics for Hard Times, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo address
the subject of immigration citing the scientific literature concerning its
causes and results. They point out that most people assume that immigrants are
poor, criminals, the dregs of society, who leave their country to escape
poverty, or to indulge in criminal activity. They think that immigrants will
take their jobs, and cause their wages to drop.
It has been the same during previous waves of immigration. People feared the Irish after the potato famine forced immigration from Ireland in the 1860’s, the Italians after failure of farming in southern Italy during the 1880’s, and the Chinese during the California gold rush. In each case the government took measures to limit immigration, just as Trump is doing now.
Most migrants have a valuable skill. Doctors, scientists, and engineers who have studied in the US often decide to stay. Even unskilled laborers usually know someone who has previously migrated to the destination country and found work. People migrate, not because they’re poor, but because they have to. They leave Mexico because drug wars make life unsafe. They leave Guatemala and Haiti because of gang violence. Some come to the US to have more opportunities. The poor don’t migrate because they can’t afford it.
Several studies show that migration doesn’t affect salaries or jobs of native workers. Migrants only get jobs natives don’t want, or in places natives don’t want to go. Employing migrant skilled workers actually helps low income natives because they provide services for them. For instance, immigrant doctors often practice in rural areas where there is a shortage. Immigration boosts the economy by improving production, and immigrants have a lower crime rate than the indigenous population. And there is definitely an advantage for immigrants. They earn more money, improve their standard of living, and usually send money home, evening out wealth between countries. So Immigration is good for both immigrants and for the destination country.
Still, people are reluctant to migrate, even within the same country, because they fear the risks of failure, of living in another environment, of losing family support. Financial incentives have been tried, but are not very effective because immigrants still fear change. What’s more effective is to remove obstacles: making costs and rewards of migration clearer, making it easier to send money home, providing some insurance in case of failure, easing integration with housing assistance, premigration matching of jobs, help with child care. What Trump is doing is the opposite.
