By Tony Ditta
The Reimagining the Economy Project invited Zeke Hernandez, Max and Bernice Garchik Family Presidential Associate Professor at the Wharton School, to discuss his new book . Faculty Co-Director Gordon Hanson moderated the conversation.
It may seem unusual for a business school professor to write a wide-ranging book on immigration — one which explores politics, crime, law, and culture — but to Hernandez it makes perfect sense. “At the end of the day,” he says “it’s people that do business, it’s people that make investments… so their movement has to be inseparable from what businesses do.”
Immigration Myths
The public discourse on immigration in America tends to be simplistic. Hernandez says that we label immigrants villains — committing crimes, supplanting culture, stealing jobs, and draining public resources — or victims — helpless outsiders whom native citizens must help at any cost. Even reduce immigrants’ effect on the economy to their direct effect on jobs and net fiscal contribution (tax payments minus benefits received).
To some extent, Hernandez is sympathetic to these ideas — he made an effort to write his book with compassion for people who have honest questions. If immigrants were indeed social dangers and economic drains, there would be good reason to be skeptical of immigration. But, the truth is that these beliefs are often incorrect, or at best require more nuance.
The Truth about Immigration
In addition to holding jobs, paying taxes, and receiving government benefits, immigrants are consumers, investors, and innovators. Each of these roles contributes to economic activity. This fact refutes both the villain and victim myths: immigrants aren’t taking anything away from people born in America, and they don’t need help, they need opportunity.
To illustrate these roles, Hernandez gives the example of Pollo Campero, a fast food restaurant which started in Guatemala but now has locations around the globe. Immigrants brought their taste for Pollo Campero chicken with them, so it opened locations in the US which have been extremely successful. If we narrowly focus on the jobs immigrants hold and the taxes they pay, we would miss this effect. We shouldn't think of immigrants’ roles in the economy in isolation.
Besides economic issues, many arguments against immigration focus on social issues like crime and cultural change, but these are built on unfounded fears rather than facts. Of course individual immigrants do commit crimes, but the data clearly show that as a whole immigrants are not dangerous. In fact, they commit fewer crimes than those born in the US. Also, immigrants do bring their culture with them, but in many ways this is a boon; cultures benefit from exchange in ideas, art, and cuisine. And, while immigrants themselves do not always fully integrate, their children do: speaking the language and participating in society as fully as any other American. Americans have been worrying about the effect of immigrants on society for centuries (starting before America was even an independent country), and thus far none of these fears have come true.
Policy and Politics
Hernandez believes that immigration is “overwhelmingly good,” but the immigration system in the United States is deeply broken.
He suggests a few specific changes such as moving immigration policy out of the Department of Homeland Security and into Commerce or Labor; immigration is not a threat to security, and its place in the government should reflect that. His more general point is that the system must be based on better models and facts, rather than fear, and it must be able to update more frequently to accommodate changing economic circumstances.
Of course, immigration is a fraught political issue, and any change will require buy-in from across the political spectrum. Hernandez is amenable to the Right’s demands for enforcement, but only if the law being enforced is reasonable. In order to be reasonable, we must vastly increase the number of people we let into the country and make the system more flexible.
He doesn’t see these changes happening quickly, but he’s optimistic about the long term. Americans will learn the contributions that immigrants make, and these contributions will only become more important over time. So, he’s hopeful that over time people will agree to a more reasonable immigration system.
