Leave it to a mustachioed NYT columnist...
My feelings toward Thomas Friedman are no secret, but I’m disappointed Alex Tabarrok (via Andrew) quoted this passage from Tuesday’s column without noting how problematic it was:
Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.
“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here….”
Friedman explains the quote is tongue-in-cheek. I’d like to believe the “brainy Indian” lede is tongue-in-cheek as well, except that it seems entirely in keeping with the wide-eyed exoticism with which Friedman usually treats Indian entrepreneurs. Regardless of his intentions, or those of his source, the piece takes on odd connotations.
In a best-case scenario, Friedman’s thesis — that America should welcome educated elites from the “developing world” rather than forcing them to compete with the U.S. economically — is bizarrely reverse-engineered. Indigenous elites don’t spring out of nowhere; it seems likely that Shekhar Gupta’s parents would have been as much an asset to America as he would be, but were impeded by the same regime. Is Friedman arguing that we should never have allowed such elites to develop to begin with, and used an open-door policy to maintain a monopoly on intellectual capital? Or should we use the world’s entrepreneurs as our recession cavalry?
The bigger problem is that a lot of Americans really do believe that natives of East and South Asia who come to the United States are uniquely skilled and hardworking in a way that natives of Mexico or Guatemala who come to the United States aren’t. The United States has a long history of distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants: Western Europeans from “radical” Eastern and Southern Europeans, asylees from economic migrants. At the moment, Mexican immigrants appear to be saddled in popular culture with the assumptions that they a) have entered illegally and b) are less intelligent or hardworking than their (particularly Asian) peers. Friedman’s invocation of a “culture” that requires fiscal responsibility helps reinforce the stereotype that an immigrant family from another region wouldn’t work 18 hours a day to pay off a mortgage. His complete omission of Latin America, when Mexico alone sent twice as many legal immigrants to the U.S. as China did from 2005-07, feeds into the assumption that such a family wouldn’t be able to get the mortgage to begin with.
It’s true that the current wave of migration from Asia is more heavily middle-class than the one from Latin America. But Friedman’s own argument implies that this discrepancy is due more to past immigration policy than some inherent cultural failing. I don’t yet know how I feel about the actual “buy a house, get a visa” policy that Tabarrok has so neatly (and compellingly) pulled out, but there’s no reason why a debate over this type of “immigration solution” should happen in such demographically different terms from the debate over the “immigration problem.”
There’s another way of looking at this — relaxing immigration restrictions on affluent, educated people will have an effect on wage dispersion in the U.S.: it will, in theory at least, put pressure on similarly-situated native workers and bid up the wages of those who don’t have as much in the way of capital/human capital/cultural capital.
I have a problem with the model minority myth, and Friedman is aphoristic and easy to take on — the format demands a certain level of glibness, and he goes well beyond — but I disagree slightly with your reading of the ethnic politics.
Min Zhou has written a lot about enclaves vs. ghettos — in enclaves, you see a lot of transmission of cultural capital between coethnics who occupy different class positions, etc., because those who’ve left the enclave are drawn back to it in search of economic and cultural opportunities that are unavailable outside of the enclave. That doesn’t happen in ghettos. With Mexican origin populations, you have a mix — some of the same neighborhoods demonstrate both enclave-ish and ghetto-ish qualities, so the stratification system is more differentiated: lot depends on subethnic affiliation, family networks, etc.
Asian Americans advance in the certain way economically/socially because certain pathways are blocked to them here, e.g., the idea of a glass ceiling for foreign-born Asian Americans that leads to underrepresentation in managerial roles, AAs don’t see professional sports and entertainment as a key avenue of upward mobility (partly in response to the different cultural preferences of the majority population, etc.), so presence in the U.S. — obviously — “structures” AA life-chances and aspirations in complicated ways.
Mexican Americans are really different from, say, Korean Americans, albeit unevenly depending on region of origin, family status, evangelical vs. Catholic, etc. High human capital Mexicans tends to stay in Mexico — they migrate to DF or to Monterrey, but they generally don’t come to the US. This has had a complicated effect on family structure there — the total fertility rate has plummeted in part because emigration has slowed down the modernization of family structure. Southern Europe has far lower fertility than Northern Europe because mothers are discouraged from working. Similarly, in many Mexican regions, in the center and the south in particular, remittances keep “traditional” families afloat, i.e., families in which only one spouse works, but in which fathers are absent because they’ve become migrant laborers.
Which is to say the Mexican influx poses complicated challenges that make it a distinct issue from the broader question of what the skill mix of the influx should be from the rest of the world. My sense is that we need to need through labor flows across the U.S.-Mexico border in North America-wide terms.
— Reihan · Feb 13, 04:12 AM · #
The literature I’ve read indicates that much less of the Mexican-born population of the U.S. fits the “male migrant labor” model now than it did before IRCA, so remittances these days are less “father to family” and more “U.S.-based kin to Mexico-based kin.” Of course, that underscores your point about how intimately Mexico is tied up with its emigrant population. I think the homebuyer visa would make this true for India and other countries as well, if to a lesser extent and different ways. (For “modernization of the family,” read “secularism,” “teaching of English as a lingua franca,” etc.)
The other part of this is that the wave from South and East Asia isn’t exclusively a middle-class one. I’d be comfortable with an immigration dialogue that treated “skilled immigration” and “unskilled immigration” as separate though related issues. But I’m sensitive to subtle racialization, especially as relates to social mobility, where it can all too frequently become self-fulfilling prophecy.
— Dara Lind · Feb 13, 05:05 AM · #
Glad to see you’re playing the race card on Tom Friedman. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
In reality, though, Friedman’s anti-Mexican bias is factually correct. Overwhelmingly, Mexican immigrants to America don’t do high tech. (Yes, I know the CEO of AMD was from Mexico, but he’s close to the exception that proves the rule.) In a recent Duke U. study of entrepreneurship, Chart 10 shows patent applications by non-citizen immigrants over the last 20 years. Mexicans, who make up by far the largest number of non-citizens in America, don’t even make the top 20: Chinese & Taiwanese are first, followed by India, Canada, UK, Germany, France and Russia. Heck, Turkey makes the top 20, and there are hardly any Turks in America. But not Mexico (or any other Latin American country).
Graph 5a is “Immigrant Groups Founding Engineering and Technology Companies in California.” India is out in front at 20%, followed by Taiwan (13%), and China (10%). This time, Mexico makes the chart, but with only 1%. That’s not a lot of return for having 10,000,000 Mexicans in California.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 13, 05:29 AM · #
That’s true — it’s less so, but the classic mode still has a big impact on Mexico, e.g., impact on patterns of regional inequality, etc. I don’t see this as dispositive re: what our policy should be, of course.
It’s an interesting question — remittances seem to play a pretty uneven role: hugely important in Bangladesh, important with some Indian emigres (from Kerala, Tamil Nadu in particular), but not with the kind who’d have the capital to take part in a homebuyer’s visa — as you suggest, they’re drawn from a different stratum of the population, where the main interest in the NRI relative is in “brain circulation” — more weak ties, etc. But who knows?
I just read the Friedman column. Though I don’t see any subtly anti-Mexican angle to the column, I think maybe you’re offering a critique of a brain-drain-driven strategy, and here I’d just submit that the brain-drain framework isn’t as useful as brain-circulation or the idea of training workers for export as a kind of industrial policy, e.g., Filipinos in nursing, radiologists trained in the Republic of Korea, etc. — more were supplied than could plausibly be absorbed. In India, this happened more or less by accident, but the effect was the same: the country couldn’t absorb X number of skilled professionals for a long time. Mexico didn’t pursue this kind of strategy for all kinds of reasons.
Re: the impact of this shift in US immigration strategy on the world — you could make the case that the agglomeration that would be enhanced in the US via the high-skill influx would have significant spillover benefits for the world.
Lant Pritchett’s stuff on Income per natural adds something to this:
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/15552
The influx from South and East Asia is definitely not all middle-class — I hope even Tom Friedman understands that.
— Reihan · Feb 13, 06:00 AM · #
<i>At the moment, Mexican immigrants appear to be saddled in popular culture with the assumptions that they a) have entered illegally and b) are less intelligent or hardworking than their (particularly Asian) peers.</i>
So there aren’t millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in the US? Then what’s the fuss over immigration reform all about? And as to b), if you refuse to look at the direct evidence from Lynn’s and Vanhanen’s meticulous study of this issue, which I assume you do, then what of the indirect evidence? Quick, name all the world class universities south of Rice University. Quick, name all the Noble prize winners in the sciences by Mexicans or their descendants. Quick, name all the tenured professors of math and physics at top institutions world wide who are either Mexican or of Mexican descent. That didn’t take long, did it?
— Deckin · Feb 15, 05:04 PM · #
Dara Lind,
Are you that obtuse about the differences between most of our immigrants from Mexico and our immigrants from South and East Asia, or was that just your political correctness talking? It’s OK: after the non-Asian minority housing bust, even Friedman isn’t playing that charade anymore.
— Fred · Feb 16, 01:41 AM · #