Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

158 Open Borders
status can be useful to employers because of their willingness to work for low
wages and long hours and in poor conditions, and because of pressures on
the labour market. Immigration, legal or illegal, is clearly good for employers.
The Wall Street Journal favours not only increased immigration but,
consistent with its free market ideology, free movement. In January 2000
Alan Greenspan, head of the US Federal Reserve, said that ‘Not only in hightech
and in the farm area but throughout the country aggregate demand is
putting pressure on an ever-decreasing supply of unemployed labour.’ He
suggested that if growth was to continue without inflation, immigration
policies would have to be relaxed.
A different question is whether immigration is good for the native
workforce. Greenspan’s remarks tend to reinforce the widely held belief that
competition from immigrants forces down wages and deprives the locals of
jobs. But the likelihood is that immigration has little effect on wage levels
and conditions, and that its effect on employment levels is if anything
positive. A great deal has been written on this question. One neo-liberal US
economist, George B. Borjas, wrote in a 1993 OECD publication that:
The methodological arsenal of modern econometrics cannot find a single shred of
evidence that immigrants have a major adverse impact on the earnings and job opportunities
of natives of the United States.
It is nevertheless often argued that general wage levels might have risen
faster in the absence of immigrants. Another orthodox economist, Charles P.
Kindleberger, argued in Europe’s Postwar Growth: The Role of Labor Supply,
that the availability of labour was the major factor which determined
whether European economies grew fast or not. Countries such as France and
Germany which had high levels of net immigration grew faster than Britain
where there was net emigration. Kindleberger argues that this was because
immigration kept down inflationary pressures on wage levels. On the other
hand wage levels in France and Germany are now much higher than those
in Britain.
The thesis that immigrants cause unemployment seems to have little or
no basis in reality. As is well known, unemployment was higher in the
1930s, when there was hardly any immigration, than it is now. Unemployment
in Europe was lowest in the period of major immigrations after the
Second World War. It is clearly caused by capitalist recessions rather than by
immigration. Even the effects of sudden large-scale immigration on unemployment
seem to be short-lived. Nigel Harris, in a paper presented in Paris
in September 1999, says that when Algeria became independent in 1962
about 900,000 pieds-noirs (white settlers) moved to France; unemployment
around Marseille peaked at 20 per cent a few months later, but was down to
6 per cent one year later and 4 per cent the next year. The return of
Portuguese colonists from Africa had no more effect. OECD figures show a
correlation between immigration and employment levels in the mid-1990s
which is the opposite of what some people assume: the countries with lowest