An OPINION by Walter Mason, Alfred Station NY
Migration is a worldwide phenomenon that has increased a lot lately. 1
Immigration is hard for any country. Japan and Italy don’t admit many people despite shrinking and aging populations. Many countries keep immigrants in refugee camps, like Pakistan did with Afghans. The British passed Brexit partially to keep out the Poles. While we might not like to admit it, we are all somewhat xenophobic, and being comfortable in our own homes is important. On the other hand, stopping immigration isn’t going to solve anything else.
The US has problems. The rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. Health care and rent are too expensive. Bedbugs are back. We have way too many monopolies, that can set their own prices. Too many people are fat and sick. Newspapers don’t to cover the news. Nobody wants to work. Cell phones are taking over our brains. We have too many murders. Bacteria are developing resistance to antibiotics. And we just had a couple of hurricanes. Nobody thinks immigration has anything to do with these.
A recent piece of misused information is that there are “13,000 illegal immigrant murderers” running around free in the United States because of Biden. This was quickly debunked, in that the data contained all non-citizen residents not just illegal aliens and people who had committed crimes in other countries , and the data also went back more than 40 years (the question was how many noncitizen criminals were in the US not in ICE custody). 13,000 might seem like a lot, but there have been about 835,000 murders in the US in the last 40 years. About 7% of US residents are non-citizen aliens which leads to an expected number of murders of 58,450. The typical homicide clearance rate has fallen, but 55% is reasonable. So we would expect about 35,000 homicidal individuals not 13,000. This fits with conviction rates for immigrants of about ½ of native born Americans. Because criminals tend to prey on their own, most Americans can’t take advantage of the low crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods. So were all stuck with the usual home grown criminals. Deportation will not stop a migrant crime wave that does not exist.
In 1980 the Mariel Boat lift allowed, in a space of 6 months, 125,000 Cubans accompanied by some Haitians to immigrate to Florida. Fidel Castro did try to empty his island of undesirables during this time, mixing in as many as 2700 hardened criminals. A large portion of these immigrants settled in Miami increasing its working population by 7% in six months. This was one of those natural experiments, and social scientists were very interested in the affects on wages and crime. What they found was that there was no measurable affect on wages for anybody but other Cubans, and there was an increase in crime for a short time. Miami didn’t sink into the ocean, and the Dolphins still can’t beat the Bills.
The non effect of massive immigration on wages, was a surprise, especially since employers have been trying to import immigrants for years to drive down wages. The simple explanation is that immigration also creates jobs, since immigrants rent apartments and buy things. In the real world when people measure the results, the jobs created seem to at least balance the jobs taken. There is no economic law that this is the case, but in the United States right now this is true, at least when people look.
The border isn’t open. Joe Biden let 2.5 million refugees and migrants in (not 18 million), or about 0.75% of the population. Not exactly overwhelming. If the border was truly open we might have a problem, but it isn’t, and most forms of legal immigration have been capped for decades. Truthfully, we are not a friendly country to immigrants, and haven’t been for a long time (https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-legal-immigration-nearly-impossible). There is a 75 year waiting list for some immigrant categories from Mexico. This is a crisis in the countries migrants are fleeing, where things are very bad.
1 (https://publications.iom.int/books/world-migration-report-2024-chapter-1)
