Haitians in Ohio and the Immigrant Economy

Right now the debate over immigration in America is so stupid it makes my head hurt.

Anti-immigrant Americans want to complain about crime and violence and cat-eating and what-all. But this is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes, sure, but every number I have seen, whether from the FBI or individual states, shows that they commit fewer crimes than the native born. No doubt there are towns out there where immigrants commit most of the crimes, because those are places where most of the young men are immigrants. Some immigrants do drugs, but, again, not as much as the native born. When people point this out on Twitter/X, the usual response is just to say "You're Lying!" Sigh.

Immigrants do have a high rate of severe mental health problems, but I've never seen anyone cite this in opposition to immigration and anyway the rate of schizophrenia isn't high enough to be a real economic or social problem.

That doesn't mean there are no reasons to oppose immigration. Pro-immigration (or anti-Trump) people have been passing around this interview (summary here) with one of the Ohio factory owners responsible for drawing a lot of Haitains to Springfield:

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So from a factory-owners's perspective, immigration is great. They get people who will do repetitive drudge work all day for mediocre wages. Because however bad working in a factory in Ohio might be, it beats the heck out of being shot by gangsters in Haiti. So, win-win for the factory owners and the Haitians.

But you could ask a different question: is there any way we could convert those dreary factory jobs that upstanding native born Americans don't want into something better? Is it, maybe, that the manufacturers can get away with offering low wages and drudgery because they are competing, not just against whatever US-born workers might be doing instead, but against conditions in Haiti and Venezuela and Vietnam?

(Pro-Trump Republicans like to say that Harris supporters are communists, but imagine a real communist sharing a video casting a factory owner as the hero and the lazy workers as the bad guys.)

A more rational case against immigration would go like this: life in the US is better than life in most places because we limit how many people we take in. If we take in too many that will drag life here down toward conditions in the rest of the world. So long as there are immigrant workers desperate for any kind of job, companies have no incentive to change their work practices toward something better for workers. Step one toward making life in America better for working people, therefore, is to limit the number of immigrants. And maybe the social pathologies of the working class might actually be reduced if we focused on this, and people who could get less miserable, better-paying jobs might be more likely to stay sober and get married and so on.

I think this is wrong, but at least it makes sense. Alas, I've been reading takes on the Haitians in Ohio story for two days and I have not seen this argument made even once. All the anti-immigrant people are fulminating against crime and disorder and community breakdown, which manifestly are not happening.

I believe that immigration is great for the US economy. I believe that the only reason it is still thriving is that immigrants study harder in school than the native born, get more education, work harder, found more companies, and generally do more to make the country thrive than the native born. I have never seen a single credible number that refutes this. That does not mean all immigration is good, or that we couldn't come up with a better system for deciding whom to admit, or that the current number is the best one, or anything like that; just that on net, immigration is a plus. I would like to see companies work harder to recruit workers and change their processes to make them less onerous. I have a feeling, though, that this is not going to happen. I imagine that if we tried to force (say) chicken processors to improve conditions the jobs would just all move to Mexico. (Or, if they didn't, the price of chicken would soar.) Any given level of technology seems to come with its own forms of drudgery.

But this is America in our era: if you want a good life, in economic terms, you have to get a lot of education and put it to use, or else throw yourself into some kind of blue-collar work and get ahead by working hard. You must live a life of bourgeois discipline: getting up every day, getting dressed, going to work, making your numbers, etc. If you fall off that path via depression, drug use, chronic injury, or what have you, your life is going to be hard. Some people fantasize that ending immigration would reduce this pressure, that it would lessen the competition and mean everybody gets more for working less. I think the opposite is true, that in fact hard-working immigrants sustain the rest of us. 

But at least this is an argument worth having. Who is eating cats is not.