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michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” If Donald Trump wins next week’s election, it will be in large part because voters embrace his message that the country’s immigration system is broken. Today, David Leonhardt on the surprising story of how that system came to be. The very real trade offs, it’s required, and just how little it reflects what Americans really want from immigration.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It’s Tuesday, October 29.
Hi, David.
david leonhardt
Hello, Michael.
michael barbaro
It’s really nice to have you in the studio. I don’t think we’ve ever done this in person before.
david leonhardt
I have never been in the studio. I’ve always been remote in Washington. It is great to be here.
michael barbaro
Overdue. So, David, we’re talking to you today because you have been studying an issue that voters in this campaign for president consistently rank among their top concerns, and that is immigration. And yet you contend that the way we talk about this issue, the way we understand it, is very incomplete, and that we tend to think about it in far too narrow, alight as a question of what’s happening at the US-Mexico border when there’s so much more to the subject of immigration.
And we wanted you to help us understand that fuller picture and how and why immigration has become so central to this election and how it may influence the outcome of next week’s election. So that’s a lot. Where should we start?
david leonhardt
Well, first, I understand why people are so focused on the here and now. We’ve had a historically large increase in immigration under Joe Biden’s presidency. Donald Trump, of course, made immigration central to his brand even before that increase.
Our border is open. Nobody can believe it. He talks about it all the time.
archived recording (donald trump)
We’re a dumping ground. We’re like a — we’re like a garbage can for the world.
david leonhardt
Kamala Harris actually has talked a lot about immigration as well.
archived recording (kamala harris)
The United States is a sovereign nation. And I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them.
david leonhardt
She has promised that she will do a better job securing the border than Donald Trump.
archived recording (kamala harris)
And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.
david leonhardt
And when the campaign talks about it, it’s almost always focused on undocumented immigration and the Southern border. But there’s a much larger idea here, and that’s a lot of Americans feel like we have an immigration system today that the voters never chose. It’s not an immigration system they want. And I think that’s particularly resonant because so many Americans feel frustrated by the economic trends in this country over the last several decades.
And they put these two things together. They say, hey, wait a second, our lives are not going well and we have this out of control immigration system. And that is part of why immigration has just become such an intense issue this year.
So to understand how it is that we got here and how immigration seems to be this subject that never leaves politics, you have to go back much before this presidential campaign. In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1965.
michael barbaro
So, David, tell us exactly what happens in 1965 and why it’s so important.
david leonhardt
It’s a turning point. For a long time in the 19th century, we didn’t really have much immigration law in this country. If you could get here, you could enter. That’s when a lot of people’s ancestors entered. It’s when some of my great grandparents came here. Huge numbers of Jewish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Irish immigrants come here during that time. But then there’s really a backlash to the massive amount of immigration. And in 1924, Congress passes this incredibly restrictive law that reduces immigration almost to zero.
And the small amount of immigration that it does allow, they say, basically can come only from Northern and Western Europe. So it totally clamps down on immigration from Asia, and it sets incredibly restrictive caps on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
michael barbaro
The goal would clearly seem to be a whiter, more Anglo-Saxon group of immigrants?
david leonhardt
Yes. It was a very clearly racist bill, and the goal was essentially to stop the diversification of America that had been happening in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And so that really guides US immigration policy from the 1920s through the 1960s. And you can understand why, amid the excitement around the Civil Rights movement, that people look at our immigration system and they say, wait a second, at the same time that we’re passing civil rights bills and outlawing racial discrimination within our country, we shouldn’t have an immigration system that is so obviously based on race and national origin.
michael barbaro
And so what changes are contemplated along those lines?
david leonhardt
The central figure here is John F. Kennedy.
archived recording (john kennedy)
It is a proud privilege to be a citizen of the great republic, to realize that we are the descendants of 40 million people who left other countries, other familiar scenes to come here to the United States to build a new life.
david leonhardt
He’s a senator from Massachusetts in 1960, and he’s running for president. And he published a book called “A Nation of Immigrants,” which really introduced that notion into the popular vernacular. He himself comes from an immigrant family, from Ireland. He wins the presidency, of course. And he says he’s going to fix this broken and racist immigration system that we used to have.
archived recording (john kennedy)
Next week, we will send to the Congress of the United States our proposals for improving and modernizing the laws which govern the admission of immigrants into this country.
david leonhardt
And he introduces a bill that will do that, that will open immigration to people from all over the world.
archived recording (john kennedy)
We hope that the Congress of the United States will accept these recommendations. And that before this year is over, we’ll have what we’ve needed for a good many years, which is the recognition that all people can make equally good citizens, and that what this country needs and wants are those who wish to come here to build their families here and contribute to the life of our country.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
michael barbaro
And what does this bill, as it’s starting to take shape during the Kennedy administration look like? What are the tenets of it?
david leonhardt
From the very beginning, they separate out two different questions. And this is going to be important to think about this entire debate. Who? And how many? So let’s start with the who. That is what the Kennedy administration promises to fix. And they say, we are no longer going to make decisions based on where people come from. We are going to treat the whole world equally. We are going to change the who of our immigration system.
michael barbaro
To be much broader?
david leonhardt
To be much broader, and really to make decisions based on things like, can you come and contribute to our economy? We don’t care where you are from. They also say they are not going to change the how many. This is not a bill to increase immigration. So as history fans know, JFK’s legislative agenda mostly was stalled in Congress. He’s assassinated in 1963. LBJ becomes president, and LBJ takes up JFK’s legislative agenda.
michael barbaro
Right.
david leonhardt
And so this becomes a bill that LBJ tries to pass. And from the very beginning, LBJ and the people who are in charge of the bill, including Ted Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother, who is then an impossibly young senator, this becomes the first bill that he is going to try to shepherd through the Senate. And from the very beginning, all of them say, we are not changing the how many. And the promise that the bill will not lead to a significant increase in immigration is the number one promise that the bill’s supporters make when selling it.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Congressional archives reading their speeches and reading their statements. It’s the thing they emphasize more than anything else. So when Ted Kennedy, the senator who is running this bill in the Senate, opens the hearing to talk about the bill, he says the notion that this bill will lead to more immigration is highly emotional, irrational and has little foundation, in fact.
michael barbaro
Why is that promise so important, David, to those who are crafting this bill, that how many stay the same even as the who is vastly broadening?
david leonhardt
Immigration is almost always made people nervous, and it’s particularly made people who don’t earn a lot of money nervous. They get nervous that people are going to come in and take their jobs or they’re going to come in and lower wages because there will be a greater labor pool. And that’s not a crazy worry. I mean, business executives have long lobbied for high immigration in part to keep wages down and have a big labor pool. And so there’s this underlying worry, even in the 1960s, when the economy was quite good, that very high immigration would hurt blue collar workers.
And you can see this in the poll data at the time. I mean, pollsters like Gallup asked people, what do you think about changing the immigration system? And Americans very clearly said we actually would like to get rid of this old system in which we’re making decisions based on country. But when the polls said, do you want more immigration? Americans overwhelmingly said, no, we do not want more immigration. And the people writing the bill were well aware of that public opinion.
michael barbaro
Got it. And so how do the authors of the bill pull off? What I have to imagine is a somewhat tricky balancing act of making the who much, much broader, but the how many exactly the same.
david leonhardt
First, they’re going to set a quota, 265,000 people a year. It doesn’t matter where you come from. And they’re going to start making decisions based in large part on what you can add to our economy. So by 1965, Robert F. Kennedy, the third Kennedy brother in this story, has been elected a Senator for —
michael barbaro
What a family.
david leonhardt
I know. Has been elected a Senator from New York. And he has this little riff where he talks about the kinds of workers who this new bill is going to bring in. And he says it’s going to bring in a Korean radiologist, a Japanese microbiologist, a Greek chemist, a Filipino teacher of deaf children and a Turkish urologist. And then he contrasts that with who the bill will not allow in — ditch diggers. And the reason he says that is the United States already has enough ditch diggers, whereas we need more microbiologists and radiologists.
But we have enough people in this country who want to be ditch diggers and are ditch diggers. And by doing that, he’s essentially saying, we are not going to introduce a lot of competition for blue collar jobs in this country. And LBJ’s Labor Secretary goes right at this idea of labor competition, he says, it offers complete protection to American workers from labor competition. And then the second group that the bill is going to prioritize is family members. If someone’s here and wants to bring her spouse over, if someone’s here and they want to bring their kids over, and so the second group that the bill is going to allow in are family members.
But here’s where we get to the wrinkle, Michael, which is many family members in this bill don’t count toward the quota of 265,000.
michael barbaro
Why not?
david leonhardt
A year. Well, they weren’t seen as threatening to labor competition. You can imagine if you’re bringing in a young child or you’re bringing in a parent or grandparent, they’re not going to compete for those ditch digging jobs. And so relatives are largely not counted toward the quota. Now, in the moment, I think it’s important to say, there were members of Congress and critics who realized that this could be a problem. One of them was Michael Fagan, a Congressman from the Wes side of Cleveland. And he said, wait a second, why don’t we just set a real cap of 325,000 a year? It doesn’t matter whether you’re a family member or a worker, you will count toward it.
And the bill’s advocates said, no, no, no, we don’t need to do that. The family members aren’t going to be a big enough deal. We’re going to stick with this idea of a 265,000 a year cap that applies to some people, but not others.
michael barbaro
Hindsight is always 2020, but this does seem like a very big loophole, allowing essentially, if I’m understanding this correctly, a kind of unlimited number of family members to come in and not count against the quota.
david leonhardt
Yes, it does. I think one of the things that happened is that the people raising questions about the quota, like Michael Fagan, were immigration restrictionists. They were often also racists who wanted to keep the United States population heavily Western-European. And so I think it became easy for the people pushing the bill to just ignore a lot of what they were saying, even though the people pushing the bill were putting in place a system that had this massive loophole. And a bill with this big loophole passes and it becomes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And LBJ signs it at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
archived recording (lyndon johnson)
Distinguished governors and mayors, my fellow countrymen.
david leonhardt
And it’s fascinating what LBJ says when signing it.
archived recording (lyndon johnson)
Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers from 100 different places or more.
david leonhardt
He very much adopts the language of a nation of immigrants.
archived recording (lyndon johnson)
The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources, because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.
david leonhardt
And so he has soaring language about that. But he does something that presidents don’t normally do when signing a big bill.
archived recording (lyndon johnson)
This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.
david leonhardt
He promises that it’s actually not that big of a deal, and that is his way of connecting the salesmanship of the bill, the promises to the American people that this isn’t going to change the how many of immigration.
archived recording (lyndon johnson)
This bill says simply that from this day forth, those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already here.
david leonhardt
It’s only going to change the who of immigration.
michael barbaro
I have a very strong suspicion that the promise that this is not going to change all that much turns out to be wrong.
david leonhardt
You’ve noticed my foreshadowing. So what actually happens? Almost immediately, immigration begins to surge in the United States, and the overwhelming reason that it begins to surge is this loophole that allows many family members to come in without being counted toward the quota. So by 1968, our newspaper, The New York Times runs a story that says the extent of the change has surprised even those who fought hardest for it. And in 1971, The Washington Post runs a story where they interviewed Dennis Antelis, a Greek immigrant in Queens who describes having helped 24 of his family members come into the United States.
michael barbaro
One immigrant?
david leonhardt
Yes. And so you also start to see this in the numbers. So remember, the cap was 265,000 a year. And actual immigration in 1965 the year the bill passes is $300,000 a year, a little bit above the cap. By 1970, it’s 373,000 a year. This is legal immigration. By 1980, it’s 524,000 a year. And by 1990, it’s exceeded 1 million.
michael barbaro
Wow. So hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands more immigrants than the quota envisions?
david leonhardt
Yes, in some ways the loophole becomes more important than the quota itself. And when you go back and you look at graphs that show the percentage of the United States population that is foreign born, you really see the late 1960s as the point where it begins to rise because of this law.
michael barbaro
So how do Americans react to this influx knowing that it’s not what they had been told would happen?
david leonhardt
Initially, there’s actually not that much of a reaction. The growth in the immigrant population happens slowly. It happens over time. So we don’t overnight have a massive increase in the immigrant population. But one thing that starts to change this issue is in the 1980s and then the 1990s, illegal immigration becomes a much bigger deal.
michael barbaro
Just describe that and how it interacts with the rise in legal immigration that you’ve been describing.
david leonhardt
Historically, immigration at the Southern border, immigration from Latin America, just wasn’t a big issue. There actually weren’t a lot of people coming from Latin America for many decades. Many people in Latin America were too poor to make the journey. It requires some resources actually to immigrate. But by the 1980s and 90s, that’s changing and it does become more possible for people to get to the US border. People in Latin America have more money. Transportation is better. People get to the United States. They can call home and tell their relatives that they made it.
And this, of course, is the era of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. And they don’t fix the problem with illegal immigration. In part, it’s that there are backers, of course, are a lot of corporate executives. And corporate executives tend to high immigration, both legal and illegal. It gives them more workers, and it can hold wages down for businesses. And so this problem starts to build in the 1980s. And by the 1990s, it’s really a central issue in American politics. Voters look around and they say the border is chaotic. And to a lot of voters, it feels unfair.
Particularly to recent immigrants, they said, I went through this long process to get into this country. And now, I see other people skipping the line. And at the same time that illegal immigration is rising, in the background, remember, we still have the legal immigration rising that we talked about. By 1990, we’ve got more than a million people a year coming here legally in significant part because of the loophole in that law.
michael barbaro
Right.
david leonhardt
And so you put these two together. And by the 80s and 90s, you really have a very large increase in the number of people who are coming to this country, often trying to get blue collar work. And you begin to see concerns among both Republicans and Democrats and independents about how immigration is changing the United States and how it may be contributing to slow growing wages for workers.
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And there is one person in particular in Washington, a Democrat, who really tries to address this situation, and she tries to fix the unintended consequences of the 1965 law in the 1990s. And I think her struggle to do that really helps explain how we’ve ended up where we’ve ended up today on immigration.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
So, David, tell us about this Democrat who tries to fix the immigration system.
david leonhardt
Her name is Barbara Jordan. And I bet a lot of our listeners haven’t heard of her or don’t know much about her. But she really was an icon in the 1970s and 80s in the United States. Barbara Jordan grew up in Houston when it was segregated, and Barbara Jordan was Black. And she is a star student, and she becomes a star debater in college. And people who do debate often go into politics. And she goes into politics and she works on the 1960 JFK, LBJ Presidential campaign, and she rises up through Texas politics a little bit.
And LBJ, who’s gotten to know her, encouraged her to run for Congress. And in 1972, Jordan runs for Congress and wins. And two years after she enters Congress —
archived recording (barbara jordan)
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
david leonhardt
She has this signature moment during the Watergate hearings.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution. If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th century paper shredder.
david leonhardt
Where she delivers this thundering speech calling Nixon to task for breaking the law in Watergate. And this is something that millions of Americans watch, and it really makes her famous.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
She becomes a major civil rights leader. She’s known for trying to expand voting access for her Latino constituents in Texas.
archived recording
Ladies and gentlemen, in case you don’t know it, may I now present our second keynote speaker, the Honorable Barbara Jordan, Democrat of Houston, Texas.
david leonhardt
And then in 1976, she speaks to the Democratic National Convention.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
I feel that notwithstanding the past, that my presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not forever be deferred.
david leonhardt
But Jordan retires quite early because of illness. She goes back home to Texas to teach. And then in the 1990s, President Clinton reaches out to her. Both legal and illegal immigration have been rising for years and people are getting mad about it. Bill Clinton needs a way to address it and try to fix the system. And so he turns to Barbara Jordan. She’s from Texas, a border state, and she’s this renowned communicator of American values. So Clinton asks her to lead a commission that will recommend how the country can fix its broken immigration system.
And at first, Jordan says, no, she doesn’t really have any background in immigration. But she ultimately becomes persuaded that there aren’t many people who could bring the moral authority that she could to this, and also that she spent much of her career thinking about what is America? And this is a central part of that question.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
michael barbaro
And so how does she approach this assignment that Bill Clinton gives her?
david leonhardt
Well, she does what commission chairs do. She takes testimony. She travels around the country. She looks at data and evidence, and she ultimately comes to this conclusion. It’s a little bit counterintuitive. She argues that there’s a fundamental difference between being pro-immigrant and being pro-immigration. And she says we are a nation of immigrants. But at the same time, she says that doesn’t mean we should always want higher and higher levels of immigration.
In fact, sometimes, having higher and higher levels of immigration can hurt immigrants. Immigrants who came here several years ago are often the ones who compete for jobs with the very most recent immigrants. And when immigration gets too high, it can lead to a political backlash that hurts people who came here often legally, several years before.
michael barbaro
In other words, if you’re too pro-immigration, it will undermine the position of being pro-immigrant.
david leonhardt
That’s exactly right. It’s a version of in everything moderation. If you really care about the well-being of immigrants, you can’t just dial immigration up to too high of a level. And once she and the commission settle on these conclusions, Jordan then goes out and presents them to the country. And one of the more intriguing places that she does so is at a political convention in 1995 hosted by Ross Perot, who, of course, had run as an independent candidate for president in 1992 and was thinking of running again in 1996.
archived recording (ross perot)
It has been my privilege to know her for many years. Let’s give her a big Hello. Come on up.
david leonhardt
And Jordan goes there and she tells this convention what she has concluded.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
We have concluded that a properly regulated legal immigration system is in the national interest. It is in our national interest to unite families and create economic growth and protect those who flee persecution as many before, the immigrants of today seeking freedom in this land of opportunity have sought. But I said, properly regulated and I mean that.
david leonhardt
And in the speech, she lays out the case for immigration reform, for changing our laws.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
Immigration is not a right guaranteed by the US Constitution to everyone, anywhere in the world who thinks they want to come to the United States. Immigration is a privilege.
david leonhardt
She believes, yes, the United States is a nation of immigrants, but both of those words matter. We are a nation of immigrants, and we need a policy that serves the national interest.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
The commission recommendations are intended to continue the benefits of legal immigration while limiting costs. And there are costs. Good things are rarely free.
david leonhardt
She says. What many Americans believe a nation needs to make decisions about who will enter and who will not be allowed to enter.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
We are a country of laws.
david leonhardt
And she starts by talking about illegal immigration.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
For our immigration policy to make sense, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree with those who would label any effort to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is not acceptable.
david leonhardt
She’s got multiple recommendations for what the country should do to stem illegal immigration. And she specifically says that the country should put in place a system using Social Security Numbers and driver’s licenses to make it difficult for companies to employ people who are here illegally, because that will make it much less likely that huge numbers of people want to come to this country.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
The abuse of our economy by unlawful workers and those who hire them, the undermining of wages and working conditions we have fought so long to protect, these are the things that must stop.
michael barbaro
And what about legal immigration?
david leonhardt
The commission also calls for less legal immigration. It says, look, we need to continue doing many forms of legal immigration. We need to admit members of an immigrant’s nuclear family. We need to admit highly skilled workers, and we need to admit political refugees who are fleeing oppression. But we don’t need to admit so many extended family members who came in through the loophole of the 1965 law. And they effectively call for closing that loophole.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
Now, it is not that we believe immigration of extended family members are harmful, but we do not have unlimited numbers of immigrant visas.
david leonhardt
And she also says the commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete with the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
Many American workers do not now have adequate job prospects, and they are not improving. With welfare reform, many more unskilled American workers will enter the labor market. We should make their task easier to find employment, not harder, by having a priority of unskilled foreign labor.
david leonhardt
And overall, they call for a one third reduction in legal immigration to the United States.
michael barbaro
Which it sounds like would bring the system back to the stated intent but not the practical realities of the 1965 law.
david leonhardt
Exactly right. And one of the reasons Barbara Jordan wanted to make these changes is she was worried that if we didn’t, the politics of immigration would become so toxic that a future congress or president, a future anti-immigration congress or president would be able to cut down even on the kinds of immigration that are so important to what this country is.
archived recording (barbara jordan)
We cannot evade the responsibility to make the necessary choices to reform immigration. It is literally a matter of who we are as a nation and who we become as a people. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one, one.
michael barbaro
So what happens to these recommendations once Jordan and the commission bring them to President Clinton?
david leonhardt
Well, at first, Bill Clinton’s very enthusiastic.
archived recording (bill clinton)
And the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace, as recommended by the Commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
david leonhardt
He embraces the recommendations. He suggests he’s going to try to get them passed.
archived recording (bill clinton)
It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
david leonhardt
But almost immediately, political opposition starts forming and it starts forming on both sides. So on the Republican side, you hear these Republicans saying we need immigration. It leads to more entrepreneurs. It leads to a larger labor force. They don’t say it can hold down wages, but obviously that’s part of what they want. Which, of course, is exactly why Barbara Jordan wanted to keep down the right of immigration. But you also have a big part of the Democratic Party that is really opposed to immigration restriction.
It’s civil rights groups. In some cases, it is Latino or Asian-American groups that want to keep immigration high. And so the kind of things Jordan is calling for, polling consistently suggests are popular. But among activists and politicians in Washington, in many ways, political elites on the left and the right, there’s a real discomfort with reducing immigration or cracking down on illegal immigration. And so the recommendations largely do not become law. A few things do, such as a voluntary system for checking whether workers are in this country legally.
michael barbaro
Voluntary?
david leonhardt
Exactly. I mean, this idea that we’re going to say to businesses, we’re going to let you decide whether you opt in to a system that tells us whether you’re breaking the law. You can guess how effective that was. So for the most part, although some of Jordan’s recommendations become law, we continue to have the basic dynamics of the immigration system that the 1965 law gave us.
michael barbaro
I guess I don’t quite understand why Bill Clinton would have bowed to those pressures, David, because it sounds like a bunch of elites, activists, business leaders are the ones trying to torpedo this. But Bill Clinton has many political gifts, and one of them is to recognize what gets someone elected or re-elected. And it feels like what Barbara Jordan is really telling him is that high levels of immigration, legal and illegal, are a threat to working class America.
And Bill Clinton would have understood, I’d have to think, that working class America is really essential to the Democratic Party that he leads.
david leonhardt
I think two things are happening here. One, the economy just keeps getting stronger over the course of the 1990s, which is a reminder that immigration is just one force among many that shapes an economy. And it’s not the main one. And the second thing is that political elites really matter. And what has happened over the last few decades is that both of our parties became ever more dominated by college graduates and people who had the concerns and interests of college graduates as opposed to working class people.
And so Democrats become a little bit less focused on what blue collar workers want. And we see this with both trade and immigration. And in the Republican Party, those same corporate interests that have long had huge sway over the Republican Party do. And so when you think of Official Washington and the people who are making policy and who are lobbying for it, you just have much less pressure for changes to the immigration system than public opinion might suggest that you would.
michael barbaro
This is reminding me so much of what happened with NAFTA, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is that elites, powerful, entrenched forces in Washington, increasingly disconnected from working class America, see nothing but upside in globalization and free trade and don’t anticipate the ways in which NAFTA will hurt working class America, there’s not much dispute that it does.
david leonhardt
I think that’s exactly right. And I think one of the real mistakes that proponents of immigration have made, and this is both business conservatives who want more immigration, and it’s progressives who, from a justice perspective, want more immigration. I think one of the real mistakes they’ve made is they tend to argue that immigration is a free lunch. And in fact, immigration just benefits everyone. And the research doesn’t support that idea, nor do people’s everyday experiences support that idea.
Immigration has trade offs. It has enormous advantages for an economy. But it also has some costs, and those costs do tend to be borne disproportionately by working class people. And that’s part of why so many people are so anxious about it.
michael barbaro
Well, let’s talk about some of those trade offs. And I think it would be helpful for you to be as specific as possible about the upsides of higher immigration as well as the costs. Because you just mentioned that there seems to be research and data there.
david leonhardt
There is. And let’s start with the upsides. The biggest beneficiaries of immigration are immigrants themselves. Research suggests that the typical experiences that an immigrant who comes here poor remains poor, but that immigrants’ children do significantly better and the grandchildren do really well. And after just a few generations, these immigrants look like native born Americans in terms of their outcomes. And then there are other benefits for people who are already in this country. Immigrants expand the labor pool.
They can particularly cut the cost of services, and they can particularly cut the cost of services that upper income people often use — yard work, daycare, other services where large numbers of immigrants work in those industries. And in the long term, immigrants can also expand the economy. They can create more demand for all kinds of things.
michael barbaro
They become consumers.
david leonhardt
They become consumers themselves. And then finally, there’s a little bit more of a subjective benefit, which is, I think many Americans would say it’s just more interesting to live in a more diverse country, a country where fashion and culture and music and all of those things are more diverse.
michael barbaro
Right. And what about the costs?
david leonhardt
Economists have been looking at this for a long time. And I think perhaps the best summary is this 2017 report from the National Academy of Sciences, which brought together some of the biggest experts on immigration in the country and looked at immigration’s effect on all kinds of things, including on wages. And that report produced a table where they listed a whole bunch of studies, all the studies that cleared their bar for really trying to tell us something important about how immigration affects the wages of Native-born Americans.
And when you look down that chart, you will notice something. It is dominated by negative numbers, which is to say that more immigration does tend to reduce wages, particularly of the least educated, lower income workers.
michael barbaro
Right. And that makes intuitive sense, because if you have more people, especially at the lower education and skill level, suddenly seeking the same work, then supply of that work has gone up and therefore wages for it will go down.
david leonhardt
Of course, it’s one of the most basic laws of economics.
michael barbaro
Of course, the is frequently made that we are talking here about jobs that non-immigrants in the United States don’t want or are unlikely to do. What do the economists and what does the research say about that?
david leonhardt
You definitely hear that argument. And there are some jobs that Native-born Americans and immigrants who are already here probably don’t want to do. But let’s think about some of the jobs we’ve been talking about in this episode, Michael, ditchdigger’s. You imagine a blue collar job like construction, digging ditches, building houses, a lot of people who are already in this country and who are struggling to find good paying work would be very happy to do jobs like that, particularly if it paid a decent wage.
michael barbaro
Which in theory might be easier to get if immigration rates were lower.
david leonhardt
Yes, and that’s exactly how a lot of Americans feel. And I should emphasize that the qualms that people have about immigration are not just about wages. They may not even mostly be about wages. Obviously, a meaningful amount of the opposition to immigration is related to race and involves racism, obviously. But that isn’t the only thing going on. Imagine that you lived in a community in South Texas or in a neighborhood in Chicago or Denver, two cities that are magnets for immigrants. And in just a short period of time, the population of your community increased by 10 percent or even 20 percent.
Just think about what that would do to a local school in terms of how many kids were there, in terms of how many of them needed services like English as a second language. Think about the strain it would place on local hospitals and other social services. And then remember that the communities that tend to experience these strains, they’re not affluent communities. They tend to be blue collar communities, lower income communities. They are the ones that are on the front lines of the real societal strains that immigration can create.
michael barbaro
All this, of course, anticipates the rise of Donald Trump as a candidate who in his announcement for president in 2015, rails against immigrants. And the consensus that the elites in both parties have reached both Democrat and Republican, that high rates of immigration are healthy for the country. I’m curious, in doing all this research and all this reporting about immigration, how you look back on that moment now?
david leonhardt
Donald Trump, when he talks about immigration, often lies, and he often uses racist stereotypes. And it’s really important to say both of those things. And at the same time, he exposed a real vulnerability of the political elites. A lot of leading Republicans thought that the policies they pursued on both increasing trade and immigration were popular with their voters. And Trump is able to take over the Republican Party almost immediately in 2015 and 2016, in large part, because he expresses so much hostility to these policies that the elites have been pursuing on both.
And he speaks to the frustration of so many working class Americans, including Republicans, who for decades, have had really slow growth in their income and in their wealth and in other measures of well-being. And they don’t buy into what was, for a long time, a conservative vision of more trade and more immigration will help everyone. It is central to Trump’s rise as the Republican standard bearer.
michael barbaro
And David, my recollection is that Trump is not just very critical of illegal immigration, which is probably what he’s best known for, but once he becomes president, quite critical of the levels of illegal immigration as well.
david leonhardt
That’s right. So not only is he trying to build a wall at the border, and not only is he pursuing a bunch of policies that feel quite cruel, like separating families, but he’s trying to put in place the Muslim ban to try to keep out people from predominantly Muslim countries. Another example is that he called for a big cut in legal migration, specifically by cracking down on what he has described as chain migration, which is the term that opponents use for this extended family migration in which one person comes and brings a relative, and that relative then brings another relative.
And that’s what the metaphor of chain is referring to. And Democrats respond to this by really moving even further in the direction of pro-immigration than they had been in the 1990s and early 2000.
michael barbaro
In reaction to him?
david leonhardt
In reaction to Trump. Biden runs for office for president in 2020, sending a message saying, I will be different from Donald Trump. I will not violate fundamental American values in the way he has by separating families, by speaking so cruelly about immigrants. And once Biden takes office, he actually loosens our immigration policy in a bunch of ways. This is all very technocratic. It involves things like asylum rules and parole rules. But because Biden both spoke so welcomingly about immigration while running for president, including in a debate broadcast by Univision, a channel, of course, watched by many Latinos in this country and in other countries, and then loosened policies when he took office, you see this enormous surge of immigration to the United States.
And overall net immigration to the United States, combining legal and illegal under Biden is more than three times as high as it was under Trump.
michael barbaro
Wow.
david leonhardt
It’s about twice as high as it was under either Obama or George W. Bush. And immigration under Joe Biden really is higher than it’s been under any president in many, many decades.
michael barbaro
All of this brings us to where we are today. And where I think we started this conversation, David, with immigration being a major concern for voters among their top concerns and poll after poll after poll showing that voters trust Donald Trump more to tackle the issue than Kamala Harris, which, given the numbers you just described, makes some real sense, given that Harris was Biden’s vice president and oversaw this major increase in both legal and illegal immigration.
And it feels like the unique threat that the issue of immigration right now would pose to Kamala Harris is that the entire Democratic Party and brand has gotten to a place where the way it talks about immigration in general is as far away from working class America as one can imagine.
david leonhardt
Yes. And look, Donald Trump is more extreme on immigration than most Americans and most working class Americans are. And polling shows that a lot of people are actually uncomfortable about how he talks about it. But the Democrats have moved so far from where people are on immigration that Donald Trump has ended up closer to where many Americans are than the Democratic Party. And so the Democrats are really struggling to get consistent with public opinion on this issue in some ways similar to the way in which Republicans are really having a hard time getting consistent with public opinion on abortion.
And while abortion is one of the Democrats strongest issues in this election, immigration is really the mirror image of it in which a lot of voters don’t trust the Democratic Party on it. And it is a reason for them to consider voting for Donald Trump.
michael barbaro
What’s interesting, of course, is that Barbara Jordan was a Democrat and the 1965 law was passed by Democrats. And so Democrats could very well and maybe even quite naturally own this subject. And yet, from what you’re saying, the Democrats have drifted further and further from their own legacy.
david leonhardt
That’s right. And we’ve seen Kamala Harris return to that legacy in her presidential campaign. She has really mixed this idea of we need tough border security, and we are a nation of immigrants. The problem for her, of course, is that she has to both run on the Biden record. And there’s tape of her saying very different things only four or five years ago. But you’re right, Michael, that a lot of the old principles of where the Democratic Party was on immigration and where Kamala Harris is now are actually quite consistent with public opinion on this issue.
michael barbaro
What seems very clear in having this conversation with you and for me was something of a revelation, is how much our current immigration system is a broken promise. Right in ‘65, leaders of both parties said that the law they were passing would not meaningfully increase immigration. It absolutely did by a lot with real consequences — economic, social, and political. Efforts to bring it back to the promises of that law have basically gone nowhere ever since.
And whether as a voter are drawn to Trump’s very harsh at times approach to immigration, including mass deportations, we haven’t talked a lot about in this episode or Harris’s comparatively gentler approach to this question, that broken promise does feel like an important backdrop to the question of immigration and this election.
david leonhardt
It is. And it also reminds me of two larger points about our political system. One is that Washington and the politicians who make our policies really have ignored the views of working class people on many issues for a long time. And trade and immigration are signature examples. And what politicians of both parties have often done is they’ve talked down to voters. They’ve said, no, no don’t understand. Trade is good for you, or they’ve said, no, no, no, immigration doesn’t hurt your wages as much as you think it does.
And voters have rebelled and they’ve rebelled for a series of reasons, one of which is definitely that our economy hasn’t been very good for Americans who don’t have a college degree for several decades now. And the second thing is that we live in a democracy. We live in a democracy in which we elect people to pass laws. And when Washington comes to the American people, as it did in 1965, and says, hey, we’re going to pass an immigration law, and above all, we promise it won’t lead to a huge surge in immigration, and then it does lead to a huge surge in immigration.
That’s not sustainable. It simply is not sustainable in a democracy to have our elected representatives promise us one thing and then have it do the exact opposite of what they promised. Whatever you support in immigration, it doesn’t work. And so as we think about the future of immigration, solving it is going to be incredibly difficult. We continue to need immigration on some level for a variety of reasons, but I think we’re not going to get to a sustainable immigration system until Washington reckons with the past failure to produce what it promised the American people it was going to produce.
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michael barbaro
Well, David, thank you very much.
david leonhardt
Thank you, Michael.
michael barbaro
Much of this episode was drawn from David’s new book entitled “Our was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.”
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Here’s what else you need to know today. The United States is warning that North Korean soldiers are now poised to participate in an assault on Ukrainian troops operating in Russia’s Western region. Such an assault would demonstrate that as the United States has feared for weeks, North Korea has officially become a combatant in the war between Russia and Ukraine. The United States now estimates that North Korea has sent 10,000 troops to Russia in a major expansion of the war.
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Today’s episode was produced by Rikki Nowitzki, Will Reid, Stella Tan, and Alex Stern. It was edited by Lisa Chow. Fact checked by Will Pichel. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Rowan Niemisto and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.
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