I realize that some of my co-bloggers at Vox Nova don’t much like the Acton Institute. Which is unfortunate – in my opinion, because while not everything available through Acton is worth reading, they do put out a lot of good stuff. For example, this article by Andrew Yuengert, entitled The Stranger who Sojourns with You: Toward a Moral Immigration Policy, does an excellent job, in this man’s opinion, both of summarizing Catholic Social Teaching with regards to immigration, and of applying the findings of modern economics to the issue.
Yuengert’s analysis begins, as any Catholic analysis must, with the right to migrate:
Catholic social teaching brings a word to the policy conversation that is seldom heard. This word, which the popes speak quietly but insistently, is rights. The Catholic social tradition consistently asserts a very broad right to migrate; this perspective immediately transforms the debate. More precisely, rights-language reverses the perspective from which the issues are currently addressed. Immigration policy is evaluated from the point of view of the immigrant, not from the point of view of the host country.
The right to migrate grows out of the right of workers to provide support and sustenance for themselves and their families, as well as the right to economic initiative, both of which are themselves firmly established in Catholic Social Thought.
Of course, as I’ve noted before, the notion of rights contained in Catholic Social Teaching is different from the notion of rights common in American political thought. As such, the Church has long recognized the right of state’s to limit immigration when this serves the common good. Yugengert quotes John Paul II as follows:
Rights are concretely employed in the concept of universal common good, which includes the whole family of peoples, beyond every nationalistic egoism. The right to emigrate must be considered in this context.
Nevertheless, talk about the right to migrate does serve an important role in orienting our thinking on the immigration issue:
Once the matter of a right to migrate is introduced, policy arguments—which merely attempt to calculate the recent costs and benefits of immigration to native workers and to government budgets—are exposed as inadequate. Rights-language challenges policy makers to factor the interests of immigrants into their calculations.
Having established the moral framework in which Catholic discussion of the immigration issue should occur, Yuengert uses the findings of modern economic to address two arguments often made in favor of immigration restrictions. First, he takes up the claim that immigration hurts native workers, particular those with few marketable skills:
The most that can be said is that immigration can account for perhaps one-quarter of the increase in wage inequality over fifteen years (a three-percent fall in the wages of unskilled workers), although some argue that it has had a greater effect. It is important to recognize that even a small decrease in the wages of unskilled native workers represents a hardship for those at the bottom of the wage distribution; hence, even a small impact should not be taken lightly. Nonetheless, restrictions on immigration alone would not prevent a loss to unskilled natives. Restrictions on imports of goods made with low-wage labor would be necessary in order to shield low-wage natives from indirect competition with low-wage workers. There are more desirable alternatives for improving the lot of unskilled native workers, such as providing native children with a better education and reducing the high school dropout rate.
It is important to recognize that immigration will not benefit United States natives very much if it does not appreciably affect wages and profits. On the one hand, if the rise in immigration cannot account for much of the relative fall in unskilled wages, then there will be little benefit to natives as a group. On the other hand, if immigration has had little effect on the wages of native unskilled labor, then there is no defensible economic ground for opposing immigration. Although one might argue that even a modest fall in the wages of unskilled natives provides sufficient ground for restricting immigration, such a calculation must weigh the wage decrease for native unskilled workers more heavily than the significant increase in wages that is enjoyed by immigrants from much poorer countries.
Yuengert also looks at the claim that immigration imposes severe fiscal burdens on government provision of social services:
It turns out that over time, immigrants are net contributors to federal budgets, because immigrants do not request social assistance in the form of Medicare or Social Security services. In addition, immigrant children fare well in school and often better than native children. By obtaining greater education than their own parents, immigrant children can also be expected to be net contributors to government finances, rather than drains. Evidently, then, these two time frames yield very different pictures of a typical immigrant’s use of government services, and his contributions to public revenues. For example, the positive contributions of immigrants (and their children) to the Social Security and Medicare systems will only be realized over several decades, and will be invisible in short-term analysis.
The whole thing is well worth reading.
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