The Times Tackles the Economics of Immigration

The New York Times has a welcome editorial today encouraging the incoming Obama administration to avoid the traps that mired the previous administration in an immigration policy that pleased few and broke up hundreds of thousands of families.

In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans. If you ignore and undercut the rights of illegal immigrants, you encourage the exploitation that erodes working conditions and job security everywhere. In a time of economic darkness, the stability and dignity of the work force are especially vital.

This is why it is so important to reverse the Bush administration’s immigration tactics, which for years have attacked the problem upside down and backward. To appease Republican nativists, it lavished scarce resources solely on hunting down and punishing illegal immigrants. Its campaign of raids, detentions and border fencing was a moral failure. Among other things, it terrorized and broke apart families and led to some gruesome deaths in shoddy prisons. It mocked the American tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrant workers.

But it also was a strategic failure because it did little or nothing to stem the illegal tide while creating the very conditions under which the off-the-books economy can thrive. Illegal immigrant workers are deterred from forming unions. And without a path to legalization and under the threat of a relentless enforcement-only regime, they cannot assert their rights.

The Times highlights the common sense idea that if you depress wages and working conditions at the very bottom of the labor ladder, it will exert a downward pull on those higher up the ladder as well.  By giving immigrant workers the power to assert their legal rights in the workplace, wages and workplace conditions for that whole sector of the economy will improve.  The Times hints at something many of us are wondering is: in the midst of a recession, will Obama take the opportunity to reform immigration policy in a forward-thinking way that embraces the economic benefits of immigration, rather than bowing to fear of the outsider and fueling further economic retraction?