Min ærede medpunditokrat David Gress har i sit sidste indlæg, med udgangspunkt i U.S.A., sat fokus på fordele og ulemper ved indvandring og sat spørgsmålstegn ved visdommen af at tillade indvandring af ufaglært arbejdskraft.
David Gress henviser til en bog af Gunnar Viby Mogensen, hvis konklusion blandt andet lyder:
Bare fordi USA er bedre i stand til at få indvandrere i arbejde, betyder det altså ikke, at indvandrere er en nettogevinst for samfundsøkonomien. Om de bliver det, afhænger af deres menneskelige kapital, altså evner og uddannelse
David Gress når herefter selv frem til, at:
"Forskningen i indvandringens økonomi er nået langt ud over den naive liberalismes krav om åbne grænser og tro på, at al indvandring er af det gode, for den beviser blot, at arbejdskraft strømmer dertil, hvor den er efterspurgt, og det gavner alle. En liberalisme, der også er naiv i og med, at den ganske overser historie og kultur, som dog er faktorer, der i høj grad påvirker den sociale kapital."
Punditokraternes redaktør har i en kommentar, ihvertfald indirekte, også istemt sig David Gress' kritik af den traditionelle liberalismes "naive" begejstring for arbejdskraftens frie bevægelighed.
Begge de nævnte medpunditokrater, har utvivlsomt langt større indsigt i økonomi og samfundsvidenskabelige analyser end undertegnede, der på disse områder vel dårligt nok kan kaldes amatør. På trods heraf vil jeg tillade mig at pege på en række forhold, som synes at rokke ved de konklusioner David Gress når frem til.
Cato Institute fik i Maj 2005 foretræde for det amerikanske Senats Komite vedrørende immigration. Her fremlagde Cato en præsentation baseret på en række data, der synes at pege på at indvandring hidtil har netop har medført en nettogevinst for det amerikanske samfund, samt den enkelte amerikaner såvel faglært som ufaglært. Cato skriver bl.a.:
The impact of immigration on the small segment of the U.S. workforce that competes directly with immigrants is more than offset by the lower prices and wider range of goods and services that all workers enjoy because of immigration. Americans also benefit from higher returns on investment, and from the opportunities created for more skilled native-born workers in those industries that depend on immigrant workers to meet the needs of their customers. The comprehensive study by National Research Council in 1997 concluded that immigration delivers a "significant positive gain" of $1 billion to $10 billion a year to native-born Americans. And those gains from immigration recur year after year.
Jeg vil ikke gå dybere ned i de undersøgelser præsentationen er baseret på, dem kan læserne selv dyrke (i fodnoterne) og sammenholde med de data der måtte pege i den anden retning.
I stedet vil jeg dykke ned i den konkrete virkeligheds verden, hvor der findes en række eksempler på, at små amerikanske samfund er blevet afhængige af ufaglært udenlandsk arbejdskraft, mennesker med lav social kapital, som holder økonomien i disse lokalsamfund kørende.
En meget tænksom og nuanceret artikel er skrevet af Christopher Caldwell, der er senior redaktør på Weekly Standard, der bestemt ikke kan beskyldes for at være naive liberalister, især ikke på udlændingeområdet. Caldwell har besøgt "Sussex County" et amt i delstaten Delaware, hvortil der er indvandret et stort antal legale og illegale og ufaglærte indvandrere fra Guatemala, der hovedsagligt arbejder på kyllingeslagterier. Artiklen beskriver de mange facetter af den massive indvandring, både positive og negative:
In the past decade, the Anglo-Saxon Methodists have not just encountered immigration–they have suddenly become a minority. Georgetown had 4,896 people in the 2000 census, 32 percent of whom described themselves as Hispanic. It is hard to find an official in Georgetown who believes that percentage was accurate even at the time it was compiled.
Conservative estimates of the town's Latin American population put it at 3,000. Other guesses run over 5,000, higher than the official population of the town. That might not be far off, to judge from the outlying concentrations of Guatemalans and Mexicans–like the chock-a-block County Seat trailer park, hidden in a forest northeast of town, where mobile homes of 1950s and 1960s vintage are festooned with Christmas lights as if this were Central America.
The majority of Delaware Guatemalans come from near Tacaná, in San Marcos province. Most can use Spanish as a second language but speak an Indian language–usually Mam–at home. They are leaving their mark. On Race Street, there is a place called Central Service where you can do laundry, get guanábana juice, wire money, cash checks, and watch the World Cup.
Som David Gress rigtigt skriver vil en så massiv indvandring af ufaglært arbejdskraft fra fattige lande medfører visse kulturelle sammenstød, hvilket også har været tilfældet i Delaware:
Workers have sometimes crowded into rooms to the point where they were sleeping in shifts. A worker who came back from his night shift job at 2 A.M. and found his bed occupied would wander the streets of town alone to kill time until his bed freed up. This kind of normal Latin American behavior scared the dickens out of the locals. In 1993, an immigrant who had been out drinking drove his car across a median strip and hit a popular high-school cheerleader, killing her instantly and sparking tensions. Bob Ricker, a longtime fire chief and former mayor, infuriated immigrants when he said: "It is their job to bring themselves up to our level, not bring our society down to theirs."
A Latino congregation hoping to worship at a local Methodist church while they built a church of their own got a lukewarm reception. Worries were expressed about the "spread of disease" from too close contact with immigrants, according to one parishioner. At a church meeting to clear the air, a local custodian stood up and shouted, "You're going to regret bringing these people in here!" There was bitter resentment of the local chicken companies, whose need for labor, it was said, had changed the town beyond recognition.
Men tilsyneladende har attituderne blandt den lokale befolkning ændret sig:
Sitting at a desk in a tiny cabin at the front of the used-car lot he runs, Mike Wyatt, the mayor of Georgetown, says the town really didn't have any idea what was happening to it until it had become a different place altogether. "The demographics started changing in the early 1990s," he recalls, "but people didn't wake up to it until about 1997. Back then, everybody hated them [indvandrerne]. Today, I would say that 85 percent understand them."
"When they arrived, they were the sorriest looking people you ever saw in your life," says Carlton Moore, a real estate developer who works on projects in Kimmeytown. "But they were always willing to work."
Hvad med indvandrernes efterkommere? Bliver de uuddannede, arbejdsløse og kriminelle medlemmer af dårligt integrerede parallelsamfund med lav "social kapital", som det kendes fra Europa?:
Given their vulnerability, their high levels of illiteracy, and the language barrier, one naturally expects the children of these immigrants to be struggling a bit. They are not. They are doing extremely–almost shockingly–well. Latinos make up 40 percent of the student population at Georgetown North elementary school, and that percentage is steadily rising. They will make up 55 percent of the first graders who arrive on the first day of school next month. Thanks to No Child Left Behind laws, there is a bevy of data broken down all sorts of ways on school progress. Hispanics in the third grade at Georgetown North are outscoring both whites and blacks in reading comprehension.
This should not surprise us as much as it probably does. Obsessed as we are with upward social mobility, Americans harbor a sneaking assumption that only educated parents can have educated children. Learning, the thinking goes, is a matter of playing Mozart in pregnancy and keeping the Classic Children's Books strewn tastefully about the bedroom. This is quite wrong. You don't learn by aping the learned classes–you learn by taking the work of learning seriously. Latino children come to school as ready to work as their parents do at the plant
Caldwell slutter af med en pragmatisk konklusion:
We should be aware of what we're doing, though. If the border is controlled–and if the book is thrown at all those Mam-speaking chicken workers with their phony IDs and their alcoholic binges and their unusually hard-working children–there will be a price to pay.
There is not a demand in Georgetown for a certain quota of different-looking poor people. There is a demand for people from Tacaná who have two decades' experience in the peculiar Delaware economy of chicken, soybeans, and retirement homes, and two decades of ties to the community out of which that economy grows.
It is not, in fact, certain that the economy of Sussex County could survive without them, for Delawareans have gotten too old and too rich to maintain it on their own. Those who maintain it for them are a conservative force, made necessary because, as Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote in The Leopard, "If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change."
Også Reason, hvis holdninger til immigration givetvis bedre end Weekly Standards kan betegnes som præget af "naiv liberalisme", har i en artikel beskæftiget sig med de mange ufaglærte indvandrere, der arbejder i små lokal samfund i USA.
Artiklen tager udgangspunkt i to historier fra hhv. LA Times og Associated Press, der fortæller, hvordan en række større razziaer mod illegale indvandrere med efterfølgende anholdelser har medført, at økonomien i to små amerikanske bysamfund er gået i stå, da de lokale forretninger var afhængige af indvandrernes indkøb, leje af boliger m.v. Dette udsagn fra ejerne af, en lokal forretning er ganske sigende:
The B&S convenience store, owned by Keith and Regan Slater, the mayor's son and grandson, has lost about 80 percent of its business.
"These people come over here to make a better way of life, not to blow us up," complained Keith Slater, who keeps a portrait of Ronald Reagan on the wall. "I'm a die-hard Republican, but I think we missed the boat with this one."
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