Concerned that the American “melting pot” isn’t living up to its promises, Reihan argues that curtailing the influx of low-skill immigrants would actually help existing communities assimilate:
If you believe Gregory Clark, an iconoclastic economist at UC–Davis, it might take even more than three generations for the descendants of less-skilled immigrants to reach an average level of social status. Legalizing large numbers of unauthorized immigrants will definitely help them attain that social status. Yet it won’t change the fact that even under the best circumstances, the wages commanded by people with less than a high school diploma tend to be very low, and the social connections they can draw upon are usually limited to other people facing similar challenges. Moreover, while the best evidence we have finds that less-skilled immigration doesn’t have a negative effect on the wages of less-skilled natives, it does have a substantial negative effect on the wages of less-skilled immigrants already living in the U.S. These are precisely the people who have the weakest social connections to other Americans, and who need all the help they can get to put down roots in this country.
Which brings me back to the melting pot. There is an alternative to allowing today’s less-skilled immigrants and their descendants to form the bedrock of an ever-expanding underclass. There is a way to help poor members of our foreign-born population form the social connections they will need to move from the margins of American society to the mainstream. What we need to do is limit the future influx of less-skilled immigrants.
Noah Smith begs to differ:
Would an immigration “pause” really increase the rate of assimilation? Actually, it depends on math. If the chance that someone assimilates is simply a fixed percentage chance (a Poisson process), then adding more immigrants will simply leave the rate of assimilation unchanged. If immigrants assimilate at slower rates when there are more of their co-ethnics around — the “ethnic replenishment” hypothesis — then adding more immigrants will indeed slow the melting pot, and may even increase the fraction of unassimilated people as time goes on. Or it could even be that a higher rate of immigration forces more people out of ethnic enclaves, by decreasing the opportunities available within those enclaves — in this case, more immigration would mean a faster rate of assimilation.
Tyler Cowen presents a related pro-immigration argument. He contends that “developed countries that can absorb new immigrants at a modest cost should have relatively bright futures”:
If you’re not convinced that a declining population is a problem, consider Japan. In terms of real gross domestic product per hour worked, Japan has continued to have good performance, but it has a fundamental problem: The working-age population has been declining since about 1997. And Japan’s overall population has been growing older, so with fewer workers supporting so many retirees, national savings will dwindle and resources will be diverted from urgent tasks like revitalizing companies and otherwise invigorating the economy. Japan has already gone from being a miracle exporter to a country that runs steady trade deficits. Perhaps there is simply no narrowly economic recipe to keep its economy growing; Edward Hugh made this argument in his recent ebook, “The A B E of Economics.”
Japan now has two main options: encouraging more childbearing and learning how to accept and absorb more immigrants. But it does not seem close to managing either task.
The Dish 