A Conversation with Jason L. Riley

In your new book, you make an eye-opening case for why immigration improves the lives of Americans and is important to the future of our country. What would you say are the most pervasive myths about immigration and why are they wrong?

I think one of the most common assumptions is that immigrants take jobs from Americans, that a job filled by an immigrant means one fewer job for someone already here. This belief becomes even more prevalent in an economic slowdown like the one we're currently having. But it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how U.S. labor markets operate. The job market is not a zero-sum game. In 2006, around 55 million people either quit or were fired. Yet 57 million people were hired over the same period. In a typical year, about a third of the U.S. workforce turns over. The number of jobs in America is not static or fixed. It's fluid. And that's how we want it to be.

Another common assumption is that immigrants, and particularly illegal immigrants, are more prone to crime. But the evidence shows exactly the opposite. Numerous studies by government commissions and independent researchers over the past 100 years have repeatedly and consistently found the immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and be behind bars than the native born. This hold true for every ethnic group without exception and regardless of legal status. Between 1994 and 2005, the illegal population in the U.S. more than doubled to around 12 million. Yet over that same period, violent crime in the U.S. fell by more than a third, reaching its lowest level since 1973. Moreover, crime fell in cities with the largest immigrant populations, such at LA, New York, Chicago, and Miami, as well as in border towns like San Diego and El Paso. The problem of crime in the U.S. is not caused or even aggravated by immigrants, regardless of their legal status. Yet Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly regularly tell us that the opposite is true.

Read the Introduction from Let Them In

Introduction

The magazines and the illustrators are long gone and largely forgotten, but the images endure. Like the 1903 print from Judge, a popular political magazine of the period. It's titled, "The Immigrant: Is he an Acquisition or a Detriment?" and depicts a hulking, exhausted new arrival to America's shores. He wears ragged clothing and lumbers inland with his wife, all their possessions in tow. As human cargo ships sail to and fro in the distance, a small mob greets the man, each individual representing a voice in the raucous turn-of-the-century debate. A contractor says, "He gives me cheap labor." A workman says, "He cheapens my labor." A health officer says, "He brings disease." A citizen calls him "a menace." A politician says, "He makes votes for me." Silently determined, the man stares straight ahead, ignoring them all.

Sound familiar?

The targets have changed in the past century, but the concerns have not. Today, we're still being told that when immigrants aren't busy depressing wages; displacing workers; and overrunning our schools, hospitals, and jails, they're compromising our national security. But attacks that were once directed at Asians and Europeans—along with Catholics and Jews—are now directed primarily at Mexicans and other Latin Americans who in recent decades have comprised the bulk of newcomers. Steve King, a congressman from Iowa, compares Mexican aliens to livestock. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congressman who sports T-shirts announcing that AMERICA IS FULL, says Hispanic immigrants have turned Miami into "a Third World country." And Don Goldwater, nephew of conservative icon Barry Goldwater and an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Arizona, has called for interring illegal immigrants in concentration camps and pressed them into forced labor building a wall across the southern U.S. border.