Many Americans have largely unexamined views on immigration. They react to immigration-related events, such as the child separation policy of the Trump administration. But a lot is at stake for us — for our democracy — which calls for a move from a reactive mind set toward a more strategic one. The public needs to be confident that its elected representatives, and the press, thoughtfully discuss and debate this most important issue.
Let’s explore what a strategic approach to immigration might be. For example: an immigration policy that is more conscientious about formal education. Thinking this way should lead to radically conflicting ideas, which are precisely what is needed to stimulate productive democratic discourse.
To be sure, it’s tempting to focus on immigration of highly skilled persons. We want them. But since we liberalized our immigration laws in 1965, we have granted only a small share of all green cards to persons specifically for their work skills.
Globally, many more people with college and advanced degrees are migrating. In part this is due to greater formal education in many countries. It’s also due to economic globalization. What can we do now to take advantage?
Well, recent immigrants to the United States are markedly better educated. Since 2010, among green card awardees, close to half have been college graduates, well above the college completion rate of native-born Americans, which stands at about 30 percent. As recently as 10 years ago, new immigrants did not arrive with an education advantage.
Washington had not forecast, planned or encouraged this phenomenon. What happened was that many more people from India and East Asia simply began arriving, relatively well-educated. In about 2011 they began to exceed the number of new arrivals from Mexico and Central America where education levels, while improving, is still very low compared with American standards.
Can we set a strategy that favors skilled immigrants by purposefully extending this trend? What would it take to start a “points” system such as Canada uses to score immigrant applicants? Can we realistically project skilled workforce needs?
Big Language Barrier
Now, let’s focus on a major problem inherited from 30 years of migration: Very large numbers of Latin Americans are here, legally or unauthorized, with little formal education and limited English. This is our situation, unlike that of advanced countries that have expressly encouraged skilled workers and closely watched their borders, such as Australia and Canada.
Despite what we like to think about our “knowledge” economy, some 25 million jobs — 15 percent — do not require either much formal education or English language proficiency. At the lowest level of education, 5 million workers today have no more than an eighth-grade education. Four million of them are foreign-born. They comprise a special underclass marked by far greater economic and social isolation and vulnerability to exploitation than native-born workers, even if these foreigners feel better off than they were in their home countries.
Within our native-born labor force, barely 1 percent have an education level of eighth-grade or lower. Among Mexican and Central American workers, that share is 34 percent, or about 3.3 million workers. For the rest of the foreign-born labor force, it’s 4 percent, or about 600,000 people.
In all likelihood, at least half — and possibly more — of these 4 million foreign-born workers are living here illegally. Many of them likely came to the United States over the Mexico-U.S. border during the 1990s and early 2000s. (The unauthorized population has been flat to declining for about 10 years.)
These 4 million workers crowd into farming and low-level construction jobs, cooking, housekeeping, groundskeeping and building cleaning, among other occupations. The jobs can be socially isolating. It is easy to avoid, for years, learning more than rudimentary English.
Waiting tables, retail sales and personal-care jobs are often off limits for many of these foreign workers because of their limited English, as well as a lack of social skill sets that native-born Americans take for granted.
A Workforce Vision
Any underclass of workers with limited options, large or small, stains our economy and civil culture. This major predicament calls for innovative ideas. Some will be provocative.
First, we need to inquire about the jobs requiring little formal education and few demands to speak English. Are they transition jobs or dead ends? Are they vulnerable to employer abuses? Do they often not pay a livable wage? Roughly a third of them are filled by foreign-born workers. Their presence complicates making these jobs more attractive. Native-born workers are likely better able to demand their legal rights and drive up wages.
Automation will eliminate some of these jobs, but most will remain. What would it take to remove foreign-born workers from these jobs and preserve them for native-born Americans? As many of the foreign-born are likely unauthorized to work, to require all employers to verify the work status of their employees will likely go a long way to achieve this goal. The mechanism, E-Verify, is in place. That might well raise wages, improve compliance with labor laws and improve job quality.
This would severely disrupt businesses and entire industries (such as smaller dairy farms) that have depended on a low-wage, foreign-born workforce. The households of these workers, many of them here for decades, would be upended. And what if some industries are starved for workers and could not be rescued by mechanization? Industries have withered in the past from lack of workers.
Instead of removing foreign-born workers, we might do the opposite: add millions to fill more of these 25 million jobs and encourage native-born Americans to seek better employment. That might be done through large-scale, long-term guest worker programs set up for specific industries, such as the California farm sector. Native-born Americans would effectively be removed from the labor ranks of these industries, remaining as managers.
Can American society tolerate such an explicit division of the workforce into stark categories based on nationality? And do we have the determination to train native-born Americans to obtain better jobs elsewhere?
Perhaps long-term guest worker programs could be used to fill the jobs with little formal education requirement that are growing, such as personal aides. English language proficiency is needed.
English instruction could be a core service — before people come here. And we could favor sourcing of workers from English-speaking countries such as Nigeria.
We need to adopt a constructive approach to the debate over immigration. Bring to the table alternative solutions for burning issues, be it refugees, family reunification, skilled workers or the predicament of the large numbers of poorly educated. Don’t discard any proposals prematurely.
Through collective inquiry, we might arrive at sensible strategies. Without such inquiry, we struggle in the dark.
Peter Rousmaniere, of Woodstock, blogs about immigration issues at www.workingimmigrants.com.