[Mb-civic] Sense and Sandwiches By JOHN TIERNEY

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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May 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Sense and Sandwiches
By JOHN TIERNEY

The proletariat celebrated May Day by taking to the streets of America to
demand lower wages.

That's effectively what immigrants across America were doing yesterday, at
least according to the economists who believe that allowing more immigration
would depress the wages of unskilled workers in America. If that's true,
then the immigrants already working in low-paid jobs here will suffer if
there's a surge of new arrivals.

Yet immigrants yesterday skipped work, boycotted stores and attended rallies
to support freer immigration. Some are illegal immigrants who want Congress
to legalize their status, but many of the protesters already have green
cards. Why do they welcome new competitors for their jobs?

The clearest answers I've found come from the international panel of experts
I consulted at the Sunrise Cafe, the deli near my office where I get tuna
sandwiches. It's staffed by immigrants from five countries in Central
America and South America. They offered a couple of explanations: one
economic, one moral.

They wonder, to begin with, if new immigrants are really much of an economic
threat, and they're not alone in their skepticism. Although some economists
calculate that immigrants have depressed wages for low-skilled workers by 8
percent, many others estimate the decline is only half that much. And others
believe there's virtually no harm done, because businesses expand to create
new jobs.

To the extent that anyone's hurt by immigration, the burden falls not so
much on the people complaining the loudest ‹ American-born workers ‹ but on
the immigrants who are already here. The new immigrants have a harder time
competing for jobs against English-speaking natives than against fellow
immigrants.

Patricia Cortes of M.I.T. calculates that a 10 percent increase in
immigration would reduce the wages of low-skilled natives by less than 1
percent, while causing an 8 percent reduction in the pay of the low-skilled
immigrants already here.

Some of the immigrants at the Sunrise Cafe suspect that their wages might be
affected, but they're still committed to the pro-immigration cause. Although
they went to work yesterday, they vowed not to do any shopping, and most
planned to go to a rally or march after work.

They told me they didn't see themselves as activists marching for Latino
civil rights or political power. They said they supported freer immigration
not to help themselves ‹ they were already citizens or had green cards ‹ but
simply to give others the same chance they'd had.

"People need to support their families," said one of the cashiers, Carmen
Salcedo, who arrived three years ago from Panama. "Here you can earn four
times as much as you could earn in my country."

In between grilling sandwiches, Jorge Alvarez said he couldn't blame anyone
for leaving El Salvador, as he had 19 years earlier. "There are not enough
good jobs there," he said. "If people want to work hard, it's not fair to
deny them the opportunity to come here."

The reasoning at the deli makes more sense than what I've been hearing from
some intellectuals who want to restrict immigration in the name of social
justice. Although more immigration may be a net benefit to the American
economy, they've argued, it's not fair because it hurts low-income Americans
and exacerbates the gap between rich and poor.

But even if you accept the debatable economic premise that low-income
workers are significantly harmed, the argument fails on moral grounds. It
flunks the famous "veil of ignorance" test of John Rawls, the quintessential
liberal philosopher who stressed protections for the least fortunate members
of society. Social rules are fair, he wrote in "A Theory of Justice," if you
would endorse them without knowing what your position in society would be.

Suppose you were setting immigration policy from behind that veil of
ignorance. Which of these would you choose?

(1) Restricting immigration to protect some of the lower-paid workers in
America from a decline in wages that would be no more than 8 percent, if it
occurred at all.

(2) Expanding immigration to benefit most Americans while also giving some
non-Americans living in dire poverty the chance to quadruple their income.

You don't need to slog through "A Theory of Justice" to figure out this one.
You can get the answer at the Sunrise Cafe ‹ and an excellent sandwich, too.