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Editorial: Immigration versus jobs
Op-Ed · December 04, 2014
President Obama defended his executive orders on immigration in part because “they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican President and every single Democratic President for the past half century.”
Whether this is a true apples-to-apples comparison or not, it may be more meaningful to consider the condition of the economy, largely the job market, and the mindset of the American people.
To do that, we need to dial back to the late 1920s and early 1930s, when West Branch native Herbert Hoover was dealing with the Great Depression during his presidency. His actions on immigration were greatly influenced by unemployment in America.
Obama’s action on immigration comes just five years after the end of the recession that ran from 2007 through 2009, a recession that has been called by many, including the Federal Reserve, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
While things are improving, the effects of the recent recession still linger. Two major economic indicators are unemployment and interest rates.
Unemployment in May 2007 was 4.4 percent and rose as high as 10 percent in 2009. Today unemployment is 5.8 percent, but if you include the people who stopped looking for jobs since the recession, that figure is well over 9 percent.
One of the primary actions the Fed took to combat the struggling economy, explained on their Web site, was to issue rulings that effectively encouraged banks to lower interest rates “to near zero,” because, by law, the Fed must make decisions that maximize employment, stabilize prices and moderate long-term interest rates. As a result of the Fed’s actions, for example, the prime interest rate, the rate which most banks give to their most creditworthy customers, dropped from 8.25 percent in May 2007 to 3.25 percent in January 2009. Even though the recession ended in 2009, the prime rate has not bounced back. In fact, in nearly five years it has not moved at all from 3.25 percent. The Fed is still trying to encourage people to spend more in an effort to create more jobs.
By comparison, during the Great Depression, unemployment rose from 3 percent to 25 percent and the prime interest rate fell from just over 5 percent to 0.63 percent. Certainly, the Great Depression was more severe than the recent recession, but both made Americans acutely interested in anything that could cause those numbers to rise or fall, including immigration.
According to a summary provided by Hoover Library-Museum archivist Spencer Howard, Hoover implemented two key policies on immigration during the Great Depression: 1. Setting quotas for legal immigration from most countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. 2. Reducing the number of visas issued to “non-quota” countries like Mexico and Canada by only giving them to people who could acquire jobs that paid enough to support themselves and would not need government assistance.
Hoover’s and Obama’s reflect some of the same motivations. Both of them want to reward immigrants who work hard and contribute to American society; neither want to reward immigrants who commit crimes or collect unearned government benefits. And we believe most people would agree.
The key difference is that Hoover’s policy focused on people who came to America legally, by acquiring visas. The controversy regarding Obama’s policy is that he would allow anyone who “broke our immigration laws … to come out of the shadows and get right with the law,” he said in his Nov. 20 remarks.
These illegal immigrants, or “undocumented workers,” must meet certain conditions, though: They must have been in America for five years or more, or have children who are American-born or legal residents, must pass a criminal background check and pay “your fair share of taxes.”
What is interesting about the five-year time frame is that it means the immigrants must have come to American either before or during the recession, not after. America’s jobless population may find Obama’s executive order more palpable if they understand this, because it means that Obama specifically does not want to reward people who came here, even with the best intentions, to compete for jobs when so many Americans were desperate.
However, something else Obama said confuses this point: “Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us?” This suggests that international trade and competition are bad for the American economy; the Smoot-Hawley tariffs on trade during the Great Depression showed us that kind of thinking is seriously flawed, as it only made things worse. Still, Obama has not included anything in these executive orders that directly reduces trade.
We do believe that Hoover’s actions to reduce immigration during tough economic times make sense, so we agree with that part of Obama’s executive orders. However, we think Americans struggling to find work may need more convincing when the president wants to allow people who entered the United States illegally to compete for jobs, no matter how long ago they came.
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