On Immigration

What do we know?

Exciting announcement today and call to action. I recently became involved with the Esperanza Education Fund, a DC-based nonprofit that provides college scholarships and mentorship to young immigrants in MD, DC, and VA. You can learn more about the organization through their website. I will be involved in fundraising, with a goal to increase donations so that next year we can provide even more scholarships! A unique aspect of this scholarship is that the scoring considers “distance traveled” in addition to academics and extracurriculars. This means that a young person who doesn’t have stellar academic performance, but faced hardships such as interrupted education, homelessness, or working several jobs to support their family has a good chance to be selected and supported through their college education.

Before I get into my recommended articles for the week, I’d like to encourage anyone reading to get involved in an organization or just doing something good with friends in their community. If you want to think more deeply about what it means to do good, I recommend the book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur, creator of The Good Place and co-creator of Parks and Rec. If you weren’t a fan of The Good Place, don’t worry too much. I got tired of the show pretty quickly, but found the book engaging, funny, insightful, and much more humble than the title might suggest. My main takeaway from the book is that the worst way to live is apathetically/cynically. Even though your actions can often have unintended consequences, and it’s often hard to match intent with impact, it is both worthwhile and necessary to get involved in your community and try to help others.

The reason I talk about getting involved so much, and in such a general way, is that I have learned so much from my work and volunteering in several communities over the past years and have gained so much hope from working alongside others. Apathy/cynicism (I’ll treat them as the same in this post because the outcome is often the same) are deeply entwined with inaction in a vicious cycle where inaction generates apathy and that apathy fuels inaction. Just finding something that’s important to you, and that is in service of others, not your own selfish needs and volunteering with others will start to build those compassion muscles to fight off the apathy/cynicism. Even if you sometimes dislike doing it, or your initial reasons are purely selfish (to get paid, to pad your resume, meet a new partner, etc.) you will hopefully start to discover many many little reasons to keep going. Obviously, I’m excluding things like getting involved in white supremacist groups or Christian nationalism, though the psychology of action vs. inaction in those cases may be similar.

Below I’ll try to bring in some evidence to the conversation about immigration. In the Future I’ll write about my own personal experience working with young immigrants over the last several years and the many lessons I learned. Before that though, if you’ve been thinking about volunteering for a local organization or donating to an important cause, stop reading for a second and go sign up. I promise something good will come of it. And if you feel so inclined, you can donate to the Esperanza Fund to support scholarships for young immigrants and help me meet my fundraising goal.

Reading Recommendations

1. The first one is from the American Journal of Political Science. I read this several months ago, but a conversation on here led me to share it and reread portions of it. The title is Sortition as Anti-Corruption: Popular Oversight against Elite Capture and it provides an overview of a unique method of reducing corruption through democratic participation. The paper discusses the benefits of implementing a random selection system in which regular citizens rotate through leadership, rather than having a dedicated political class. It also discusses the challenges that could appear in such a system and potential ways to avoid them. From the piece:

where elected officials are demographically homogeneous and ideologically entrenched, a legislature by lot would look and think more like the general population, and it would act more in line with the genuine popular will. The point of sortition, in other words, is to achieve more authentic representation by entrusting randomly selected citizens with the task of legislation…..

Athenians originally introduced lotteries primarily to aid political consolidation: choosing officials by lot made it difficult for anyone to “systematically promote themselves or their followers,” and thus helped to “break up… concentrations of power.” In late Medieval Italian republics, similarly, lotteries helped prevent any faction from manipulating elections and other processes—publicly protecting their integrity “against the concentrated power of tyranny” (98)—while lotteries were introduced to jury trials in England (and its American colonies) to insulate judicial processes against interference by the powerful (175ff). As Alexandra Cirone and Brenda Van Coppenolle demonstrate, finally, early parliamentary parties used lotteries to “prevent capture… by party factions or groups of self-interested political elites”

2. The second is an essay I read a few years ago, but has now come up twice in the last month, so I figure it’s worth sharing. It’s called The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. I think this piece accompanies the one I shared in my Dark Money post about non-reformist reforms, and the deep critical thinking we need to do whenever we attempt major change. Freeman argues against the pervasive “structurelessness” in feminist movements of the time as only useful in a narrow sense. From the piece:

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not).

3. Finally, there’s this piece on Chomsky’s essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Every once in a while, you come across a person who is so well read and is able to bring in ideas from so many different sources and thinkers that you could spend months following all of the sources and trails to learn more about each of the ideas presented. That has been my experience with this Substack. It makes me feel inadequate in the best way possible and I learn a huge amount from every post. The whole analysis is worth reading, but I just wanted to pull out this quote from Chomsky’s essay itself:

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by “sophisticated” methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real. Responsible, non-ideological experts will give advice on tactical questions; irresponsible, “ideological types” will “harangue” about principle and trouble themselves over moral issues and human rights, or over the traditional problems of man and society, concerning which “social and behavioral science” has nothing to offer beyond trivalities [sic]. Obviously, these emotional, ideological types are irrational, since, being well-off and having power in their grasp, they shouldn’t worry about such matters.

On Immigration

What we actually know is a thorny philosophical question that I won’t get into right now. Most of knowledge is contextual, especially when dealing with socially constructed concepts. In fact, even though I’m not a huge fan of Noah Yuval Harari, I’m in the middle of Homo Deus right now, and he laid out a very concise description of the types of knowledge humans have. Basically, there is objective fact, meaning things like gravity which exists and functions independently of our ability to measure and describe it. There is also subjective experience, like feelings of fear, love, etc. which, while similar enough between individuals to describe and talk about, will always be experienced uniquely through the individual lens. Finally, there is a third area of knowledge which is intersubjective, which Harari basically defines as the stories we tell each other to facilitate social cooperation. For example, money is intersubjective in that it has no value besides what we assign to it. The United States is also intersubjective, as is Google and as was the USSR. Nations and corporations are convenient fictions that allow us to organize and coordinate large groups of people, but they only exist as long as we agree that they do (which is usually contingent on their usefulness). Corporations and nations can be dissolved by the agreement of participants.

All this to say, we have created the concept of immigration, just as we have created borders and nations. These fictions can be an incredibly useful way to coordinate and work together, but they can also bring many harms, both intended and unintended. Since immigration has been such a big topic in this and previous election cycles (at the recent Republican National Convention, people were waving signs that said “mass deportation now”), I want to take this space to talk about some of the things we know about immigration in the U.S.

1. There is no immigrant crime wave (broadly there’s not a crime wave at all).

Too much ink has been spilled on this topic already, but since Donald Trump and many other Republicans are pushing the false narrative repeatedly, it’s worth digging into the evidence. Just a few months ago, the Brennan Center for Justice published this piece debunking that claim. From the piece:

The research also shows that overall, immigrants have a similar or even lower likelihood of incarceration compared to native-born Americans, a trend that holds for immigrants from various source countries. For example, one study found that undocumented immigrants are 33 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. Indications of a negative relationship between immigration and crime also emerge when looking at conviction rates. In a Texas study, undocumented immigrants were found to be 47 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime in 2017 than native-born Americans. More recently, a study looked at census data over a 150-year period; since 1870, incarceration rates of immigrants are actually slightly lower than U.S.-born people and that gap widens in recent years with immigrants 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens.

This research from 2021 found that “Results show that immigrant concentration is negatively associated with crime counts and, most importantly, that immigrant concentration moderates the effect of structural conditions on crime. Generally, immigration has crime-reducing effects and helps ameliorate the negative effects of structural conditions on crime.”

As I’ve argued previously, what we define as crime and the way police and prosecutorial resources are directed also impact crime rates, with law enforcement much more likely to commit resource to crimes committed by the poor than those committed by the wealthy. As Michelle Alexander proved in great detail in her book, The New Jim Crow, wealthy, mainly white neighborhoods are policed much less than poor neighborhoods consisting of mostly people of color. This biased policing results in disparities in the criminal justice system, for example Alexander shows that people of different races tend to use illegal drugs at similar rates, but black people are arrested at much higher rates than white people for drug offences. That this bias exists and still immigrants, who are often non-white (more on this point in section three on race), have lower incarceration and conviction rates than non-immigrants indicates very strongly that immigrants are committing fewer crimes than those born in the U.S. See also, Popular Information’s reporting on immigrant crime and false claims by Trump.

2. Immigration contributes to economic and job growth

I don’t like the phrasing “good for the economy” for several reasons. First, it’s very vague. Second, ultra-wealthy CEOs use that phrase all the time to hide the fact that measures like the GDP often correspond more closely with the success of the wealthy than the vast majority of people. Finally, since reading Solidarity Economics (available free on their website), I have tried my best to stop using “the economy” and instead use “our economy”. This is because our economy is a form of social cooperation (yay intersubjective knowledge!) that is developed by the participation and actions of all the cooperators, whether we are aware of it or not.

Popular Information released a piece on the economic impact of immigration in May which argues that immigration contributed to the quick economic recovery from the Covid recession and that immigration has had a positive impact on the wages of less-educated workers and no impact on the wages of more educated workers. From that article:

A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reveals that contrary to conventional wisdom, the immigrant workforce in America benefits native-born workers. The study concluded that "immigrants raise wages and boost the employment of U.S.-born workers." This is especially true for native-born workers with less education. The study found that "immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers, over the period 2000-2019 and no significant wage effect on college educated natives." 

Giovanni Peri, one of the study's authors, explained this phenomenon. According to Peri, "[w]hen immigrants work in manual labor jobs, U.S.-born workers often specialize," moving into jobs with higher wages. The "complementarity" of immigrant workers means they are filling openings in sectors with labor shortages, like health care and hospitality, facilitating the hiring of native-born workers in those sectors at higher salaries. 

3. Race and racism in the United States has long been intertwined with immigration policy

This Politico review of immigration policy gives more details:

The era’s nativism rested on a complex bedrock of labor competition, religious intolerance and fear of anarchism and communism. But scientific racism was always at its core. It formed the intellectual basis of the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the annual number of immigrants from any given country to just 2 percent of the total number of persons born in that country who resided in the United States in 1890. By using 1890 as a benchmark, the law favored older immigrant groups from Northern and Central Europe. For Jews, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles, Croatians and Russians, the door effectively swung shut. (For the Chinese, that door had been closed since 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.)

The year 1924 was the high-water mark for scientific racism, which became increasingly unpopular in Depression-era America. Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his protégés Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were among the first to blast away at the edifice of “race,” proving in a series of devastating monographs and articles that human behavior and intelligence were products of environment, not blood, and that no “pure” races could even be said to exist.

The racist “great replacement theory” among many on the far right has its roots in these racist and exclusionary laws which sought to protect “whiteness”, even as that definition was contested and changed by successive generations of immigrants from Europe and the Middle East. The fact that most immigrants to the U.S. for the past few decades have been from Latin America an Asia has to do with repealing racist immigration quotas, as well as the extractive role of the U.S. in our global economy.

There are, of course, many issues related to immigration that we need to resolve. For example, huge agribusinesses and meat processors often exploit undocumented immigrants, including children as trafficked laborers working in inhumane conditions for low pay. These actions taken to increase already large profits can reduce wages for workers in specific industries (when there is enough of a labor force to fill those positions), but I would argue that these are human rights and labor issues, to be solved with policies and enforcement that protect workers (including undocumented workers), rather than through increased spending on ICE.

There is much more I could say, but I think I’ll save my personal reflection for a future post.

Purchase the Book

If you’d like, you can purchase some of the books mentioned in this post from bookshop.org. This is a way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link below), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.

Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations.

You can also use the store locator and select a local book shop for the profit of your purchase to go to. According to the website:

When you select your local bookstore on the map above and visit their Bookshop.org page, we place a cookie in your browser that identifies you as that store's customer, and the store will get the full profit from all your Bookshop.org purchases (30% of the book's list price).