The U.S. took in more than a million immigrants per year in the late
1990s, more than at any other time in history. For humanitarian and
many other reasons, this may be good news. But as George Borjas shows
in Heaven's Door, it's decidedly mixed news for the American
economy--and positively bad news for the country's poorest citizens.
Widely regarded as the country's leading immigration economist, Borjas
presents the most comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date account
yet of the economic impact of recent immigration on America. He
reveals that the benefits of immigration have been greatly exaggerated
and that, if we allow immigration to continue unabated and unmodified,
we are supporting an astonishing transfer of wealth from the poorest
people in the country, who are disproportionately minorities, to the
richest. In the course of the book, Borjas carefully analyzes
immigrants' skills, national origins, welfare use, economic mobility,
and impact on the labor market, and he makes groundbreaking use of new
data to trace current trends in ethnic segregation. He also evaluates
the implications of the evidence for the type of immigration policy
the that U.S. should pursue. Some of his findings are dramatic:
Despite estimates that range into hundreds of billions of dollars, net
annual gains from immigration are only about $8 billion. In dragging
down wages, immigration currently shifts about $160 billion per year
from workers to employers and users of immigrants' services.
Immigrants today are less skilled than their predecessors, more likely
to re-quire public assistance, and far more likely to have children
who remain in poor, segregated communities. Borjas considers the moral
arguments against restricting immigration and writes eloquently about
his own past as an immigrant from Cuba. But he concludes that in the
current economic climate--which is less conducive to mass immigration
of unskilled labor than past eras--it would be fair and wise to return
immigration to the levels of the 1970s (roughly 500,000 per year) and
institute policies to favor more skilled immigrants.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400841509
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter