It was smart politics for President Donald Trump to endorse the immigration plan proposed by Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue last week. Their plan is badly flawed, but that’s partly beside the point -- because it has little chance of ever being enacted.
The endorsement was smart because it appeals to Trump’s base, and even more because it invited the kind of criticism that weakens his critics. Not for the first time, that invitation proved impossible to resist.
The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act would reduce legal immigration by roughly half, mainly by narrowing eligibility for entry based on family connections. In addition, employment-related immigration would be controlled using a new points system based on factors such as ability to speak English, level of education, and skills.
This is a bad plan mainly because it would fail to increase the inflow of highly skilled immigrants -- a group that the U.S. needs a lot more of. Skilled immigrants raise U.S. wages and productivity. Lack of skilled immigrants holds back the economy and pushes employers in crucial areas such as information technology to invest and create jobs abroad. The U.S. lets in far fewer skilled immigrants in relation to the domestic population than countries such as Canada and Australia (which use points-based systems that the administration has called models for its approach).
The most effective criticism of the Cotton-Perdue plan, and a charge that’s capable of carrying weight with wavering Trump supporters, is just that: The country needs more skilled immigrants and this plan doesn’t provide them. The weakest criticism — weak mainly because it’s false — is to suggest that any and all immigration, legal or illegal, from PhD engineers through semi-educated casual laborers to elderly siblings without prospect or intention of working, is good for the country.
That isn’t the explicit position of most of Trump’s opponents. They don’t argue for “open borders” as such. But you don’t have to be a bigot to think that’s what their arguments add up to.
I’m an immigrant, in favor of a liberal immigration policy -- and not just for immigrants with degrees and skills. Unskilled immigrants fill gaps in the labor market too, and do valuable work that lowers prices and thereby raises aggregate living standards.
Yet the case for high levels of unskilled immigration isn’t open and shut. One body of evidence suggests that the effect of low-skill immigration on wages at the bottom of the labor market is small or even zero. Other research suggests it can and does hurt the least-educated or otherwise disadvantaged Americans.
Critics of Trump’s approach tend to ignore such inconvenient findings or suggest that they don’t matter -- so what, if the losses are limited to a small minority of people (who, by the way, are losers to begin with and probably voted for Trump). Well, Democrats are supposed to be worried about poverty and inequality. If the pressure hurts the poorest Americans, that makes the issue more serious, not less.
Another response is to say that anti-immigrants are getting worked up over a problem that no longer exists. The share of unskilled immigrants in the total has fallen a long way in recent years, so what need is there for new measures to reduce it?
It’s a good question. New immigrants to the U.S. are indeed better educated than they used to be. As of 2015, a surprisingly high 48 percent of newly arrived immigrants were college graduates (up from 27 percent in 1990). On the other hand, that means roughly half of them weren’t. And only 23 percent of newly arrived immigrants from Latin America had degrees.
Note that one reason for the impressive rise in educational standards is that illegal immigration has fallen sharply over the past ten or so years. This in turn is partly due to stricter border enforcement -- a policy Democrats are reluctant to praise (even though President Barack Obama prosecuted it). And some of the forces holding down illegal immigration, including the shifting balance of economic opportunity north and south of the Mexican border, may be temporary.
Substantively, it’s too soon to say that the issue of low-skill immigration has gone away. Politically, in any case, the question is as salient as ever.
Merely recognizing that smart restrictions on immigration are warranted, that unskilled immigration can be problematic, that America’s unusually generous treatment of extended-family members should be re-examined, and that the immigration laws should be enforced, would strengthen the case against Trump. It would improve the prospects of the right kind of reform, aimed first and foremost at increasing high-skill immigration. And it would deny Trump an easy opportunity to shore up his support.
- Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist and writes editorials on economics, finance and politics. He was chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times, a correspondent and editor for the Economist and a senior editor at the Atlantic. He previously served as an official in the British finance ministry and the Government Economic Service.
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