Guest Workers

I'm not a huge fan of the idea of "guest workers." Given the public's limited tolerance for immigration, I'd rather just push for as many full-fledged normal immigrants as possible. But different countries have different political cultures, and circumstances change, so it's always worth thinking about. And I don't think these arguments from David Frum are very persuasive.


He starts with a study showing that guest worker programs are a highly effective form of foreign aid:



He retorts:


1) The chart underscores the point, familiar from the economic literature, that the largest share of the economic gains from immigration accrue to the immigrants themselves. Which is nice for them, but raises again the question: What's the benefit to the citizens of the host society?


2) In the U.S. context, guestworker programs bump up against a legal constraint: The 14th amendment, which confers citizenship on children born on national territory. Once that happens, they are not guests any more.


3) Theoretically, the US could repeal birthright citizenship. But that would be to invite the growth of a permanent subordinated caste of non-citizen visitors, like the Athenian metics – not exactly a source of social stability.


Taking this backwards, I agree that repealing birthright citizenship would be a mistake for the United States. But of course many developed countries have different traditions and different rules in this regard, so the finding that guest worker programs are highly effective foreign aid is extremely relevant to those places.


On two, birthright citizenship is hardly an insurmountable objection to a seasonal migrant labor program. Humans have a nine month gestation time, so you could simply ban pregnant women from programs oriented to genuinely seasonal work. You also need to have some kind of baseline in mind. How effective has declining to implement a guest worker program been? For most of America's history, there were no formal controls on the southern border so this wasn't an issue. But starting in the mid-sixties, it became difficult to cross the border legally. That didn't eliminate the demand for seasonal labor, instead it meant we had a large quantity of unauthorized seasonal migration. People didn't like that, and we began investing in enhanced border security. That, in turn, has tended to replace unauthorized seasonal migration with longer term unauthorized migration. You can't compare the complications of a real world guest worker program to a magical world of perfect, costless border control. You have to compare it to a real world scenario.


On (1) of course the majority of the financial gains of a program to allow people to temporarily migrate in order to do work will alight to the person actually doing the work. He's also bearing almost all the gross costs! Host citizens get some benefit at low cost, that's the case. It's also possible to adjust this at the margin through the tax code. You, for example, could charge payroll tax on guest worker salaries and not give them Social Security benefits.




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Published on December 31, 2010 05:41
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