Jacob L. Vigdor - From Immigrants To Americans: The Rise And Fall Of Fitting In

T HIS BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN more difficult, if not impossible, to write without the advice, assistance, or influence of many individuals.

First and foremost, I would like to thank the Manhattan Institute, and most importantly Howard Husock, for their initial interest and unbridled enthusiasm for this project. Howards continuous attention and input played a distinct role in the shaping of this book. Thanks also go to Lawrence Mone and other members of the Institutes leadership for their support, and to Mark Riebling for taking great care to read through and comment on the manuscripts first draft. I owe a significant debt to all the staff members who worked tirelessly on behalf of the project: Erin Crotty, Ed Craig, Bridget Swee ney, Ben Gerson, Michael Barreiro, Donna Thompson, Lindsay Young-Craig, Jana Hardy, and Dan Hay.

Several other organizations have either directly supported this book or my earlier research projects on immigration. The Smith Richardson Foundation, and especially Mark Steinmeyer, bear the most direct responsibility for mak ing this book possible. I am also grateful to the William T. Grant Foundation, and particularly Bob Granger and Ed Seidman, for supporting my effort and providing me a forum to discuss the project. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has also sponsored this work, and the Russell Sage Foundation funded the research project that opened the path to this one.

Ideas developed in isolation have much difficulty taking root, and I am grateful to many fellow scholars for informing and improving this research. The Manhattan Institute assembled a distinguished board of advisors to the project, including Tamar Jacoby, Phil Kasinitz, Lawrence Mead, Dowell Myers, Pia Orrenius, Jeff Passel, Peter Skerry, and Stephan Thernstrom. The expertise and insight of this group was of phenomenal importance.

At my home institution of Duke University, another set of colleagues pro vided helpful comments on this work. I am grateful to Noah Pickus, Paula Mc-Clain, Jose Saldivar, Emilio Parrado, and community members who attended the Kenan Institute symposium on immigration policy in April 2008. Id also like to thank my colleagues Charles Clotfelter, Phil Cook, and Helen Ladd, who have contributed immeasurably to my progress on this project and others.

A portion of my work on this book occurred while I was a visitor at the Australian National University in Canberra. I am grateful to Andrew Leigh for hosting my visit and providing key insights, and to Bob Gregory, Deborah Cobb-Clark, Tim Hatton, and Yuji Tamura for extensive discussions of the economics of immigration and immigration policy. While in Canberra, I pre sented many of the findings in this book at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, and I am grateful to chief economist Mark Cully and other attendees who provided helpful comments.

The actual research for this book would not have been possible without the research assistance of Parul Sharma, and the extensive historical data re sources provided by Steve Ruggles and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) project at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.

This book also owes its existence to the early and continued influence of David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, my former advisors and current col leagues at Harvard. My initial forays into the study of immigration were also informed by interactions with George Borjas and Glenn Loury.

And finally, a special category of thanks goes to my wife, Elizabeth. As a professionally trained economist, she was uniquely positioned to provide expert commentary on the material in this book, and to make the process of writing it much easier.

Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.

Benjamin Franklin (1751), Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (italics in original)

T HE ORIGINS OF modern economics are generally traced to Adam Smiths publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Franklins passage quoted above, however, illustrates a clear application of economic thought to the question of immigration. As long as there have been migrants, there have been efforts to understand the motives and forces underlying their actions and behavior. And the framework most often applied to this behavior is fundamentally an economic one. Migrants move when they perceive that the opportunities available to them in some other land are superior to the ones they face at home. Likewise, the choices they make once they have elected to move can be understood as efforts to generate the greatest opportunity for themselves and their offspring.

Franklins central argument in his three-thousand-word treatise Observa tions Concerning the Increase of Mankind was that Great Britain would do well to continue populating the colonies; he draws a clear contrast between the economic opportunities available in the colonies and in the mother coun try. Labour is no cheaper now, in Pennsylvania, than it was 30 years ago, tho so many Thousand labouring people have been imported, he wrote. The increase in population did not lead to any real scarcity in opportuni ties because the road to economic self-sufficiency, which in the eighteenth century meant owning ones own farm, was so easily trod, and the pros pects for yeoman farming so plentiful. Franklin argued that the earnings of British laborers, by contrast, were incredibly meager, to the point where a manufacturers costs to hire a British worker were lower than the costs of employing a slave in America.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the incredible contrasts in economic op portunity between the United States and other nations can still be made. In 2008, the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), equal to the value of all goods and services produced within the nations physical borders in a year, amounted to $48,000 per resident, according to the Central Intelligence Agencys World Factbook . Though eclipsed by a few smaller nations, each either oil-rich or a center of finance, the output of the average worker in America is more than four times the CIAs estimated world average. In sixteen nations, primarily located in sub-Saharan Africa, GDP per capita is less than $1,000 per year.

Now, to be fair, the value of everything produced in the United States in a given year is not distributed equally to all residents of the country. As in all economies, there is a concentration of wealth and income among a fortunate minority. But even for the worlds least skilled, poorest workers, the Ameri can labor market offers opportunities that simply cannot be matched in many other nations. A worker earning the 2008 federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour, working forty hours per week for fifty weeks in a year, will earn $13,100 before taxes. The minimal reward for full-time work in the United States beats the average income in 141 nations, and is more than double the average in the worlds most populous nation, China. Even if these earnings were to be used to support a family of four, the resulting $3,275 per capita beats the average in sixty-four nations, including the worlds second most populous nation, India. Any legal job in the United States is thus superior to the typical alternative for billions of potential immigrants throughout the world. Not surprisingly, then, millions of foreign-born aliens would jump at the chance for legal access to the American labor market. Millions more have made the jump even in the absence of legal access. Although many aspects of life in the United States have changed over the past quarter millennium, the basic arguments regarding the rationale for migration, and the behavior of migrants once they have arrived, have not.