So what happened? The short answer is: It’s all Bob Bartley’s fault. The legendarily pro-open-borders editor of the Journal liked to give his staffers “beats.” Bartley assigned me the income-inequality debate. From 1989 to 1991, some of the most dramatic and exhilarating years of the 20th century, while my colleagues covered wars and revolutions, I was trudging my way through reports from Brookings and AEI on what exactly was happening to the American middle class. Always the glamour jobs!
And yet, in their way, those studies and reports contained information as unexpected, startling, and radical as anything coming out of Eastern Europe. I had never appreciated the sheer scale of the immigration surge: almost 2 million legal entries in 1991–close to half the number of births that year–plus who knew how many illegals. And, in stark contradiction to all my preconceptions about immigration, the immigrants who had arrived in the United States since 1970 were not doing very well. They were arriving poor, and they were staying poor for decades. Ominous warning signs were gathering that their children would stay poor too.
It was customary to draw a sharp line dividing (bad) illegal immigration from (good) legal immigration. But the more closely you studied the issue, the more problematic that line became. “Illegal” immigration was not “illegal” in the same way that, say, illegal drugs were. Since the 1970s, the U.S. government had tacitly allowed illegal immigrants a quasi-protected status. In 1979, the Immigration Service ended its long policy of raiding residences in search of illegals. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that children present in the country illegally nonetheless possessed a constitutional right to a free public education. The promises of effective enforcement that accompanied the 1986 amnesty were never honored. I began to think that it made more sense to think of immigration policy as a whole, with a tacitly accepted “illegality” just as much a part of the structure as the genius visas for aliens of extraordinary ability. Immigrants could start legal (by entering on, say, a temporary visa), become illegal (by overstaying their visa), and then legalize themselves again (by marriage or sponsorship or amnesty).
I also began to learn that you could hardly name a social problem without discovering that immigration was aggravating it to the point of unsolvability.
Health insurance? Immigrants accounted for about one-quarter of the uninsured in the early 1990s, and about one-third of the increase in the uninsured population at that time.
Social spending? The Urban Institute estimated in 1994 that educating the children of illegal aliens cost the State of California almost $1.5 billion per year.
Wage pressure on the less-skilled? The wages of less-skilled Americans had come under ferocious pressure since 1970. How could you even begin to think about this issue without recognizing the huge immigration-driven increase in the supply of unskilled labor over the same period?
Competitiveness? How could the U.S. remain the world’s most productive nation while simultaneously remixing its population to increase dramatically the proportion of poorly educated people within it?
A 1997 study by the National Academy of Sciences found virtually zero net benefit to the U.S. economy from immigration. Immigration yielded benefits, true–but also costs in the form of lower wages and higher social-welfare burdens. Balance costs and benefits against each other, as a rational policymaker should, and you arrived at a favorable balance of $10 billion, less than a tenth of a percentage point in a $12 trillion economy.