Tag Archives: america

Immigration Blog

A Thanksgiving Special: Immigration to America in the Days Before H-1Bs, Green Cards and Illegal Immigration

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Immigration policy in America is difficult to understand. But it is a little easier to understand if one knows about the early history of U.S. immigration. To help people comprehend better what the world was like before the days of H-1Bs and Green Cards, below is a brief history of immigration during the decades before and after the first Thanksgiving.

Opposition to Immigration

Opposition to immigration has always existed in America, with the degree of practical obstacles to those immigrating influenced by the country’s economic circumstances and Americans’ perceptions of international events. A political cartoon once showed two Native American (Indians) on a shore watching the Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth Rock. One knowingly says to the other: “Illegal immigrants.”

Although the first settlers to America at Jamestown and Plymouth were immigrants they were not breaking any immigration laws, since none existed. In fact, it would be a long time before those coming to America would face any serious impediments or legal restrictions.

Early History

In 1607, the first immigrant-settlers to America arrived in Jamestown. To say these first settlers experienced hardship would understate the case. “The hard winter of the Starving Time [1608] reduced a population of about 500 to barely sixty . . . Everything from the horses . . . to rats, snakes, mice and roots dug from the forest were consumed, and emaciated survivors took to eating the dead.”

In 1610, the surviving settlers decided to abandon Jamestown but were soon met at sea by ships with supplies and new settlers and chose to return to the colony. The settlement became important as an example of self-government. While King James and later his son, Charles I, retained the authority to enact laws and govern the colony, the settlers had the right, they believed, to decide purely local matters and established an assembly of burgess.

Plymouth Rock

The first immigrants at Plymouth Rock endured many hardships. Unlike the Jamestown settlement, which was organized by the Virginia Company, the Pilgrims sailed to America as a group of like-minded religious individuals and families seeking freedom to worship without interference from governmental authority. “The First Thanksgiving marked the conclusion of a remarkable year. Eleven months earlier the Pilgrims had arrived at the tip of Cape Cod, fearful and uninformed,” writes Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower. “They had spent the next month alienating and angering every Native American they happened to come across. By all rights, none of the Pilgrims should have emerged from the first winter alive . . . ”

The immigrants quickly learned a lesson about food production and private property that three centuries later Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong failed to grasp, resulting in the unfortunate deaths of millions in 20th century China and the Soviet Union. The lesson was simple – people work harder when they own property and can enjoy the fruits of their labor for themselves and their families.

Nathan Philbrick explained: “The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally – the approach first used at Jamestown and other English settlements. But as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the yield. In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before . . . The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism. Although the fortunes of the colony still teetered precariously in the years ahead, the inhabitants never again starved.”

Early Colonial Period

Historian Bernard Bailyn estimates total migration to Colonial America between the founding of the Jamestown colony and 1760 of “at least 700,000,” including slaves forced to America against their will. The scale of immigration from 1630 to 1775 was large given the population size of America and the sending countries. Even in the 1630s and 1640s, concerns about religious persecution sent another 21,000 Puritan immigrants to New England. Between 1630 and 1660, an estimated 210,000 British immigrants came to America. Approximately 75,000 German immigrants arrived between 1727 and 1760, while about 100,000 to 150,000 Scotch-Irish came to the colonies from 1717 to 1760.

The pace of immigration increased after 1760. Bailyn calculates approximately 221,500 arrivals between 1760 and 1775, an average of about 15,000 a year compared to about 5,000 annually in earlier decades. And here is an amazing figure: about 3 percent of Scotland (40,000 people) and 2.3 percent of Ireland (55,000) came to the colonies from 1760 to 1775.

A Correct Prediction of How Immigration Would Transform America Into a World Power

A prescient writer in the London Chronicle in 1773 understood the significance of the large flow of migrants from Britain: “America will, in less than half a century, form a state much more numerous and powerful than their mother-country…”

And this turned out to be true. As we now know, the early immigrants and their descendants became the people who fought for American independence, giving us the country we have today.

Immigration Blog

Employers May Soon Need Approval From a Federal Database for New Hires

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It is surprising that only months after taking office on a platform of smaller government, House Republicans appear poised to enact a program that some consider to be quite a big government solution to illegal immigration. The legislation is H.R 2164, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas). It bears watching in the coming weeks.

E-Verify is an electronic employment verification that allows employers to send, generally speaking, the name and social security number of a potential new hire and get back an answer from the federal government as to whether that individual is legally authorized to work in the United States.

The key issue is not whether such a system should exist. The issue is whether the federal government should require every employer in America to use E-Verify, as mandated in H.R. 2164.

In theory it may make sense to have such a system for checking new hires. But in practice it may be an entirely different story. A new report I completed details some of the problems with making E-Verify mandatory. (A copy of the report can be found here.)

First, it is unclear whether the system will actually reduce illegal immigration in any significant way. A government report by the consulting group Westat found about half of illegal immigrants show up in the system as work authorized, primarily, it’s assumed, by using a false identity. In addition to identify fraud the system could be thwarted by employers that decide not to submit the names of employees suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Second, the errors in the databases are likely to affect individuals here lawfully who seek jobs but are mistakenly shown by the system to be not authorized to work. This could be a major problem, since even under the current system employers often go against protocols and “pre-screen” applicants. That means individuals may not even realize why they are not called back after a job interview.

Misspellings of names and naturalization can lead to errors in the database. It is not surprising that someone with the name Mukherjee or Chidambaram is more likely to have a database error than a guy named Smith or Jones.

By some estimates foreign-born individuals are far more likely to experience problems with the Social Security or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services databases than native-born. “E-Verify error rates are 30 times higher for naturalized U.S. citizens and 50 times higher for legal nonimmigrants than for native-born U.S. citizens,” according to Congressional testimony by Tyler Morgan of the National Immigration Law Center.

Third, employers should be aware that H.R. 2164 vastly increases fines not only for employing illegal immigrants but also for what may be considered paperwork violations or a failure to submit an individual through the E-Verify system. The legislation puts in place a system more complex than simply checking new hires. An employer is also required to check existing employees under certain circumstances, including if an employee starts working on a state or federal contract or is within 30 days of work authorization expiring. A government allegation that workers were misclassified as independent contractors (and not required to be checked through E-Verify) rather than as employees could potentially trigger fines of at least tens of thousands of dollars.

The House legislation provides a short window for this to be up and running. The largest employers would be required to use E-Verify within 6 months, employers with between 20 to 499 employees within 18 months, and those with 1 to 19 employees would be required to use E-Verify within 24 months. A Senate bill, sponsored by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) has a shorter window – one year for all employers – and requires all existing employees to be verified as well.

The House legislation could be marked up in the Judiciary Committee as early as this month. If it became law it could mark an enormous change in the operation of the U.S. workplace. Supporters of the bill view that as a good thing. Others are not so sure.

Immigration Blog

Call Centers, Outsourcing, and Immigration

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Globalization is not a one-way street. It’s really a multi-lane superhighway with multiple entry and exit ramps. Contrary to the view that globalization means the loss of US jobs, we see that trade and immigration that involves Indians and Americans means jobs in both India and America and an increased variety of products and services for consumers.

The Anti-Outsourcing Hysteria of 2004

During the 2004 election campaign Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry famously declared that U.S. executives who set up operations in India were, in essence, committing treason. He labeled such executives “Benedict Arnold,” after the colonial officer who switched sides and joined the British during the American Revolution. Kerry said, “When I am President, and with your help, I’m going to repeal every benefit, every loophole, every reward that entices any Benedict Arnold company or CEO to take the money and the jobs overseas and stick the American people with the bill.”

It wasn’t just rhetoric. Local lawmakers began introducing anti-outsourcing legislation at a furious pace. In 2003 state legislators introduced fewer than 10 bills to restrict work from being performed overseas. By 2004, that number increased to over 100 such bills. State lawmakers who would never otherwise receive national attention suddenly found that by introducing a bill they could garner appearances on national television with Lou Dobbs on CNN.

The vast majority of the bills did not pass and the pace of such legislation eventually diminished. However, New Jersey passed legislation that forbids work to be performed outside the United States on contracts with the New Jersey government. A legal analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy found such state bills, including New Jersey’s, were likely unconstitutional because only the federal government, not individual state governments, possesses the authority to regulate international trade. (That study can be found here.) However New Jersey’s law was never challenged in court, in part, because the state provided a generous “grandfather” policy that allowed existing contract arrangements with the state to continue.

What’s Happened Since 2004?

The past 7 years have seen changes to globalization. Indian companies have continued to thrive with US-based customers but have adopted an approach that seeks to maintain a U.S. presence with more US workers, according to recent news reports. The goal is not to mollify critics, although that might be a side effect, but rather to be close to customers and supply better service at a reasonable cost.

A lengthy Washington Post article recently detailed the efforts of India call center operations to place more employees in the United States. The key part of the article explains: “India’s outsourcing giants — faced with rising wages at home — have looked for growth opportunities in the United States. But with Washington crimping visas for visiting Indian workers, some companies such as Aegis are slowly hiring workers in North America, where their largest corporate customers are based. In this evolution, outsourcing has come home.”

Conclusion

The bottom line is important. To remain profitable employers, including Indian companies, most compete both on price and the quality of service. The idea that employers hire only employees who will work the cheapest is belied by experience. A company will soon lose customers and profitability if it hires people whose only virtue is to work for little money. Such employees are unreliable and result in labeling a company as unreliable as well. Most importantly, companies will place employees where customers can be served most effectively.

The marketplace is addressing concerns about jobs going to India and U.S. workers “losing” in the process. Globalization is a boon to Americans, who enjoy great products and services made possible by globalization, such as iPods, iPhones, Androids, flat screen television sets, gaming devices and computers that be serviced with a phone call. New restrictions on either trade or immigration that inhibit the growth of such products and services will only make Americans poorer.