George J. Borjas - Heavens Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy

IMMIGRATION POLICY AND THE
AMERICAN ECONOMY

GEORGE J. BORJAS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1999 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

K NOCKIN O N H EAVENS D OOR Copyright 1973, 1974 by Rams Horn Music.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Borjas, George J.
Heavens door : immigration policy and the American economy / George J. Borjas.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-05966-7 (cl : alk. paper)

1. ImmigrantsUnited StatesEconomic conditions. 2. United StatesEmigration and immigration
Economic aspects. 3. United StatesEmigration and immigrationGovernment
policy. 4. United StatesEconomic conditions1981. I. Title.

JV6471.B675 1999 325.73dc21 99-12997 CIP

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TO JANE

WITH LOVE

Mama, take this badge off of me
I cant use it anymore
That long black cloud is comin down
I feel like Im knockin on heavens door

Bob Dylan

I N ONE SENSE , this is a very personal book. I am, after all, an immigrant. To be more precise, I am a Cuban refugee. My familylike millions of other families who have found themselves in similar circumstancesbenefited immensely from being granted the opportunity to live in the United States, giving us access to political privileges and economic opportunities that most people in the world cannot even imagine. And yet this book will surely be interpreted by some as presenting an unfavorable view of the economic impact that immigration has had on this country.

Part of the problem is that the immigration debate, like most debates over social policy, frames the issues in black and white: one must be in favor either of wide-open borders or of highly restrictive immigration policies. Because the political lines are so clearly delineated, many of the participants in the policy debate quickly associate new evidence or new arguments with one of the two opposing camps. However, as with most things in life, there is a large range of policy options in varying shades of gray.

The evidence that I present in this book indicates that immigration imparts both benefits and costs on the United States. As a result, the evidence does not support either of the two extremes in the immigration debate. Yet because the book is not a paean to immigration, I fear that it will be quickly pigeonholed as supporting the position of those who view immigration as inherently harmful and want immigration into the United States to be greatly curtailed, or perhaps even stopped altogether. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The typical ode to immigration focuses on the stereotypical anecdotes of the few from the huddled masses who arrive in the United States penniless, and yet go on to win Nobel prizes and lead multinational corporations. Instead, this book presents a great deal of evidence that the bulk of the huddled masses will not go on to win Nobel prizes or lead multinational corporations, and that a fair number of those immigrants tend to have less than favorable impacts on many American workers and taxpayers. In my view, these facts do not necessarily suggest that the United States would be better off without immigration. Rather, they suggest that immigration could be much more beneficial if the country pursued a different type of immigration policy. So before moving to a more detached discussion of how immigration affects the United States and what I think should be done about it, let me start by briefly describing the immigrant experience from a very different perspectivemy own.

I have been thinking about immigration for a long time. In fact, I remember the first quiet rumblings about emigracin soon after Fidel Castro rolled his tanks into Havana. I was eight years old. My family had been part of the entrepreneurial class in prerevolutionary Cuba. They owned a small factory that manufactured mens pants. The entire family worked at the factory, and they hired an additional thirty or so employees. Although we lived a comfortable life, the scale of the operation was much too small to allow my family to accumulate much wealthlet alone transfer it out of the country in the pre-Castro days. At the same time, however, the factory was much too threatening for the ideological forces against entrepreneurship and individual incentives. A year or so after Castros triumphant march into Havana, the factory was confiscated, and my familys means of support suddenly disappeared.

I remember some of the initial gatherings where my family discussed migrating to the United States. I listened attentively as they talked in hushed voices about the mechanics and difficulties of getting a permanent residence visa. The green card, as that magical piece of paper is commonly known, permits a person to enter the United States permanently. Those conversations, of course, were entirely in Spanish, and it was then that I first heard about la residencia the Cuban jargon for this permit.

At the time, however, my young and impressionable mind did not equate la residencia with a bureaucratic piece of paper (which, at that time, was actually green). For in Spanish, la residencia also means a substantial-looking place of residencean estate or a mansion. So my initiation into the intricacies of U.S. immigration policy consisted of discussions of how my family could possibly finagle its way into getting this residencia in Miami. What did we have to do to get one? How much would it cost? How would we pay for it?

Needless to say, I quickly began to daydream about the Hollywood lifestyle that life in America entitled a person to. My residencia in Miami would surely have dozens of rooms, a swimming pool, beautifully landscaped grounds, and so on.

Probably because of my fathers long illness, we were unable to leave Cuba soon after Castros takeover in 1959. My father died just before the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and it wasnt until after his death that my mother began in earnest the process of filing all the paperwork required to leave the country. Her efforts, and the very generous assistance of the Catholic priests who had taught me in school during the prerevolutionary days, finally paid off on the morning of October 17, 1962, just about a week before the Cuban missile crisisand the permanent shutdown of the freedom flights that had carried tens of thousands of Cubans to a new life in the United States. We boarded a Pan Am propeller plane at the Havana airport and landed in Miami an hour later. Although it is less than two hundred miles from Havana to Miami, it immediately struck mein those first few minutesthat the two places were quite different. Whereas Cuba was a dark, moody, and frightening place, Miami was bright and bold. Havana was dead, nothing was possible because the prison walls surrounded everything and everyone. Miami was alive!

I remember my disappointment, however, when we arrived at our residencia . It was most certainly not the mansion that I had envisioned in my dreams. My mother and I landed in Miami penniless (yes, that old clich is often true), lived in what social scientists would now kindly call housing for the economically disadvantaged, and faced a difficult trek ahead. Somehow the mansion that I thought we had been promised turned out to be a rundown two-story apartment building. My mother and two of her sistersas well as a small brood of cousinsshared a small apartment on the second floor. On the left side of the apartment building was the back entrance to a bar, and a freeway overpass dominated the landscape about a hundred feet away. Our situation was quite common in those early days of Miamis Cuban community. Some of our neighbors were former teachers, lawyers, and doctors who worked in factories and waited tables during the day, and then attended various types of schools at night to acquire the training that would allow them to eventually reenter the professions they had left behind.