Guest Post: The Headwaters of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment by Steven A. Sklar
The Headwaters of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment by Steven A. Sklar (originally posted on an American Immigration Lawyers Association Comprehensive Immigration Reform forum yesterday)
An occupational hazard of our profession is the tendency it engenders in us to live in the details (where the devil of law practice, after all, usually resides), often to the neglect of the bigger picture. This is especially unfortunate where comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) is concerned, because it is only a wide view of immigration policy that reveals the source of anti-immigration sentiment, the subject of this post. If immigration reform is to be comprehensive, that sentiment (if only for political reasons) must be taken into account. And what better way to do that than to understand it?
In my opinion, the broadest view of immigration reform, and immigration policy generally, must consider the economy and our policies concerning the economy. I suspect few AILA members would disagree with that, and you need not have any particular interest in matters economic, as such, to experience, on a daily basis, that in a deeply distressed economy, such as we have now, sentiment runs increasingly against immigration. But I don’t think that’s all there is of value to be said on the subject. More to the point, two theories as to what causes economic distress — distress such as falling wages or rising unemployment — directly influence people’s feelings about immigration.
The theories of which I speak are the Wages Fund Theory and Malthusianism. According to the Wages Fund Theory, the ultimate source of wages paid to the laborer is the fund of capital devoted to and set aside for that purpose. That being the case (so the theory would have it), the more laborers there are, the smaller the wages that will be available on the average to each laborer. Under this view, in other words, capital being likened to the pie that feeds all, the more mouths, the less pie for each mouth. And according to the Malthusian Theory (ascribed to David Malthus, an Englishman of the 18th century), increase of population brings about the conditions of poverty because increase of population has a natural tendency to outstrip the ability of nature to produce the wealth that is needed to support population.
I mention these views because I believe they are the strongest source of anti-immigrant sentiment. Indeed, it is not too much to say that even many of our colleagues at the immigration bar are ideologically torn by their dedication to the cause of immigration and their belief in the validity of the Wages Fund Theory, the Malthusian Theory, or both.
But I put it to you that the theories are erroneous.
As to the Wages Fund Theory, it has been observed, and it is worth remembering, that, wealth being the product of labor acting upon land, the ultimate source of wages is not capital but labor itself. What is capital, rightly considered, but pent-up or stored wealth, held for the production of more wealth? And furthermore, business, whether simple or complex, is fundamentally hand-to-mouth; the flow of wages to the laborer is siphon-like, ultimately drawing upon the wealth produced by labor. Or in pie-eating terms, what the theory mistakenly leaves out of account is that with each new mouth that comes into the world, there is also a pair of hands – hands capable of labor and thus wealth production – that come with it. The studies, so welcome to AILA members, that report the benefits of immigration make this very point in a migration context: with each mouth newly admitted to this country we benefit from the arrival of another pair of hands.
As to Malthusianism, the fact is that population tends to increase, rather than decrease, the efficiency of wealth production. With population come efficiencies of scale, the possibility of division of labor, increased exchange, the development of invention, and a myriad of effects that increase the productiveness of labor. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that there are entirely man-made policies, the most significant of which are wrongful monopoly in general and widespread private speculation in land (insofar as that holds land out of use) in particular, which are responsible for the decrease of wages and the rise of unemployment. The fact is, we are entirely too ready to blame the sheer presence and increase in number of people on the planet for the existence of poverty. The fact is, while we scapegoat Nature, human arrangements that call for reform thereby escape notice.
I state these things pretty baldly here, because a thread-post entry, even a long one, can do no more than that on this subject (though interested readers can find a longer discussion of these points in a talk I gave recently to the Essex Ethical Culture Society, in text form at or in audio form. However, even in so abridged, or perhaps talismanic, a form, these ideas seem to me worth mentioning here, if only because of the AILA membership’s abiding and lively interest in CIR and the woeful state of the global economy.
Where CIR is concerned, as the late, great Ted Kennedy might have put it, these underlying economic issues are NOT going away any time soon.