Home thoughts - former California Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron K. Unz's support for current immigration levels - Editorial

NATIONAL REVIEW was happy to endorse Ron K. Unz in California's Republican primary to punish Governor Pete Wilson's Bush-style betrayal of his party's anti-tax principles. We applaud Mr. Unz's courageous campaign for the California Civil Rights Initiative, the potentially revolutionary anti-quota measure due on the ballot in 1996. And we appreciate his civility in his pro-immigration article starting on page 54 of this issue. Nevertheless, in essence his argument is that of a romantic dreamer. To the extent that it beguiles conservatives, it can only hasten the erosion of the American nation as we know it.

Like most immigration enthusiasts, Mr. Unz appears to be unaware of the recent evidence of deteriorating immigrant skills provided by the 1990 Census, or of the reappraisal of immigration that has been going on among academic economists for the last decade. (Recommended reading: "The Economics of Immigration," a definitive survey article by Professor George J. Borjas in the December Journal of Economic Literature.) The usual happy-talk anecdotes can no longer outweigh the ominous reality that, for example, immigrant welfare participation is now 9.1 per cent, in contrast to an average participation by native Americans of 7.4 per cent and a white-native of around 5 per cent. This is a disturbing change. As late as 1970 immigrants were less prone to welfare than natives. All by itself, this is conclusive evidence that our immigration policy is broke and needs fixing. Similarly, the optimism about immigrants' fiscal impact is now widely questioned.

Significantly, Mr. Unz makes the mistake of leaving out refugees, notoriously welfare-prone, from his estimate of immigrant welfare participation. But this trick, first played on Mr. Unz and a pliant media in a recent much-publicized report by the immigration-enthusiastic Urban Institute [see "The Week," August 29], is obviously fraudulent. At over 100,000 a year, the refugee inflow that was institutionalized by the 1980 Refugee Act has become a substantial component of legal immigration. If Mr. Unz does not like the undeniably catastrophic result, he could propose reform--but he does not, nor does he propose reform of any other aspect, legal or illegal, of our chaotic immigration system.

Not being aware of recent evidence, however, is only part of Mr. Unz's problem. More serious is his failure to think through the immigration issue in principle. Thus he should ask himself, when next tempted to over-generalize from his experiences with Korean grocers and Hispanic busboys in California: Who performs these functions in the 45 U.S. states not yet seriously affected by immigration? Or in Japan, where there has been essentially no immigration at all?

Not only does Japan have groceries and restaurants, but its economy has grown far faster than the United States', for a reason that goes to the heart of Mr. Unz's case: marginal increases in labor, especially the relatively unskilled labor that is perversely selected by our current immigration policy, are not particularly important as a factor of production--especially in a huge, deeply capitalized economy like that of the United States. Indeed, Mr. Unz unwittingly concedes this point by stressing how many immigrants are in low-wage, i.e., economically marginal, jobs.

Immigration can bring benefits, as--debatably--in Mr. Unz's Silicon Valley. (Although even if immigrants were responsible for all of Silicon Valley, which they emphatically are not, that's still only 2 per cent of U.S. output.) But overall, it achieves very little that Americans could not do for themselves with appropriate policies. This reality is widely, if quietly, conceded even by economists who share Mr. Unz's immigration enthusiasm. As Professor Julian Simon wrote here in 1993: "I don't claim to show that [immigration] is 'necessary'; we can live nicely without it."

IT IS in this context that Mr. Unz's political prescription must be judged. Crudely put, he is telling conservatives that rape is inevitable and they should relax and enjoy it.

Of course, rape is not inevitable. Legal immigration was stopped dead in the 1920s by legislation; illegal immigration in the 1950s by the Eisenhower Administration's Operation Wetback. Both could be stopped--or reduced--again.

And the rape may not be enjoyable. This is exactly what Mr. Unz's own numbers suggest. He concedes that "nearly all" Asian and Hispanic leaders are liberal Democrats, but protests that "40 to 50 per cent" of the Asian and Hispanic vote goes Republican--which by our (admittedly literary/political) computation means that 50 to 60 per cent of their vote goes Democratic. Additionally, he asserts that Hispanics are "classic Reagan Democrats." But the Census data show that welfare participation and family dysfunction among most Hispanic and some Asian groups are already radically higher than among white Americans, in some cases approaching those of black Americans.

And speaking of black Americans, they may well be disproportionately responsible for some social problems, as Mr. Unz bluntly says. If so, is it wise to exacerbate their plight by exposing unskilled workers to intense wage competition? Black Americans are, after all, Americans--which many inhabitants of Mr. Unz's San Jose are not and may never be, regardless of their crime rate.