The title of this post comes from the tag line used in advertising on TV and elsewhere by a major chemical company in days past. In this post I am going to examine two cases where juries have awarded large sums of money to plaintiffs as a result of grievous harm caused by chemicals. Mostly I want to fill in many of the gaps commonly found in press coverage of these cases. I am going to start with Roundup.
"Roundup" is the brand name commonly used in conjunction with products containing, or designed to be used in association with, a chemical called Glyphosate. It is a chemical developed and copyrighted by Monsanto in the early '70s. Glyphosate is one of many herbicides, chemicals designed to kill weeds. To be effective, herbicides must be powerful chemicals. That means they are dangerous.
The idea is to create a chemical that it tightly targeted. It kills what it is supposed to kill. It does no harm to anything else. One major problem trying to pull this off is that there are a lot of different types of weeds. What is a weed after all? Actually, it's a plant that people don't like. That's pretty unhelpful when it comes to developing something that kills all kinds of weeds and leaves everything else alone.
But one of its primary uses is in conjunction with food crops. People have been modifying food crops for thousands of years. And what they have done is modify the crop so that it produces lots of edible parts and not so much inedible parts. That makes food crops weird. And that gives pesticide developers a way in. Weeds just want to "be fruitful and multiply". They generally have very few edible parts and lots of inedible parts. Pesticides like Roundup are designed to go after these "high percentage of inedible parts" plants.
And in the beginning Roundup was just one of many pesticides. It seemed to work a little better than lots of other ones. It seemed to be a little safer than lots of other ones. But it didn't really stand out from the crowd. And that meant Monsanto was only able to secure a relatively small slice of the pesticide market.
Then Monsanto came up with a brilliant idea. They could genetically modify food crops. Unmodified crops only felt effects from Roundup to a small extent. The modified crops felt no effect at all from Roundup. That gave Roundup a tremendous advantage.
You could spray Roundup right on your crops and they would be just fine. Weeds, however, would get wiped out. This reduced the cost of using Roundup compared to other pesticides because it was easier to apply and you needed less of it.
Monsanto was soon making money hand over fist. The made money selling Roundup. They also made money selling "Roundup Ready" seed. And they carefully engineered things so that farmers had to buy fresh seed every year.
For a long time the knock on all this was the fact that the crops had been genetically modified. There was lots of talk about "franken-food". All kinds of other horrible things were supposed to happen. Especially if the genetically modified crops escaped into the wild.
But they did reduce costs to farmers and Monsanto mounted a marketing campaign that, while not being completely effective, was effective enough that "GMO" (Genetically Modified Organism) crops came into widespread use. And generally the bad things that were predicted to happen as a result of the genetic modification failed to materialize. In fact, one bad thing that Monsanto figured would happen, didn't.
Weeds are very adaptable. Whatever we do to get rid of them seems to only work for a while. Then they somehow find a way to get around it and things end up as bad or worse than they originally were. And that's what Monsanto thought would happen. They thought that Roundup would eventually lose its effectiveness because weeds would find some way to change that would render them impervious to Roundup.
Monsanto figured they had a practical but expensive method of dealing with that eventuality. When Roundup eventually became ineffective they would just introduce a new generation pesticide. They would also simultaneously introduce a new generation of genetically modified crops. This new generation would be impervious to "son of Roundup", whatever that turned out to be. It would be expensive but by continuing to have a new countermove ready they could stay ahead of weeds indefinitely.
But Roundup has been in use for forty years and in heavy use for something like thirty years. So far weeds have not figured out how to beat it. So Monsanto has not had to go to the expense and trouble of developing and rolling out second generation products. No one was more surprised by this development than Monsanto.
Almost from the very beginning various groups and individuals sued Monsanto over Roundup and "Roundup Ready" seeds. All of these suits revolved around the "harms" GMO crops represented. Or actually, "were likely to" or "could" or "might" represent. But none of these predicted harms ever came to pass. It was touch and go in the early years but Monsanto was able to successfully defend itself against these suits, roll out their products, and make bails of money. What could possibly go wrong?
Recently something has gone wrong. And it came from an unexpected (to Monsanto) direction. In August of 2018 Dewayne Johnson (no -- not "The Rock" -- another guy with the same name) won a lawsuit against Monsanto. And the jury decided the company should fork over $289 million. The difference was that Johnson's suit had nothing to do with GMO or frankenfood or any of that stuff. Instead Johnson claimed Roundup had given him cancer. Johnson was a groundskeeper. He had routinely sprayed Roundup all over the place as part of his job.
An appeals court later reduced the payout to $78 million but that's still a lot of money. And even if his lawyer was working on a "contingency fee" of 20% (it is frequently a much higher percentage), that's close to $16 million. That's enough money to tempt other lawyers to follow the now established template. So you will now find lots of "call the law firm of . . ." TV commercials trolling for people who can credibly claim to have been exposed to substantial amounts of Roundup in the past and are currently suffering from some form of cancer.
So what do I think of this? Let's start with the science. There isn't any. There are no scientific studies indicating that Roundup does or does not cause cancer at high exposure levels. There are lots of things that might cause cancer and there is a limited amount of money to fund these kinds of studies. No one has funded a decent study designed to determine whether Roundup at high levels of exposure does or doesn't cause cancer.
Well, is it likely? There is not enough information to say. But, as I observed above, herbicides are strong chemicals. So it is reasonable to think that a herbicide might cause cancer. What we do know, however, is that the small amounts of Roundup that most people are exposed to should see little or no increase in their chances of getting cancer. As to people like Mr. Johnson who are exposed to a lot of Roundup, that's an open question. Careful study might yield a "yes" answer. But it also might yield a "no" answer.
In the meantime, Monsanto was sold to Bayer, the giant German chemical conglomerate. As part of the deal Monsanto told Bayer "these law suits don't amount to anything and can be ignored". That was true during the frankenfood/GMO era. It remains to be seen how things will turn out in the cancer era. Don't be surprised if Bayer starts funding studies But it will be years before the results are in. In the mean time we'll just have to watch and wait.
And the whole litigation history of silicon breast implants provides guidance. I went into a lot of detail here: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/03/fake-boobs.html. But the bottom line is that, while scientific investigation eventually found them safe, a lot of lawsuits were lost in the mean time. And a lot of money was paid out as a result of those lawsuits. (And the FDA just forced the recall of a new design because it seems to result in a relatively small increase in medical problems.)
I didn't see the whole "Roundup causes cancer" thing coming. But, if someone had told me that studies had shown that to be true, I wouldn't have been surprised. If, on the other hand, that same person had said "Johnson's Baby Powder is dangerous stuff" I would have said "don't be ridiculous". It turns out, however, that recent lawsuits indicate that some jurors in some cases have decided that in some situations baby powder actually can be very dangerous. So what's going on?
In a word, asbestos. Baby powder is just talcum powder. Talcum powder, in turn is just talc, with perhaps some corn starch mixed in. Talc has been around forever. Johnson & Johnson has been selling Talc based products for well over a hundred years.
It is a very soft clay-like substance composed of Magnesium, Silicon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen. It is notable for being soft and inert. It doesn't do anything. It just feels soft and absorbs small amounts of moisture. In short, it gives you that "silky soft" feeling and pretty much doesn't do anything else.
Since it is the most benign of products, and since it has been around forever, what could possibly go wrong? That was certainly my feeling when I started hearing about these lawsuits. They sounded like they were completely frivolous. Johnson & Jonson, the company that makes the product, is large and rich. So, if you win, they can afford to pay and pay promptly. That's what I thought was all that was going on for a long time.
Then I learned that asbestos might be involved. Asbestos is truly nasty stuff. Under the right circumstances it can give you cancer. And some cancers caused by asbestos are truly horrible. And when it comes to asbestos and cancer the evidence is 100% solid from a scientific point of view. Here's the deal.
Asbestos is a threadlike fiber. The threads are hard. The points on the ends are sharp and have little trouble poking holes in pretty much anything. If under normal circumstances you poke your skin with one of these threads the result will be a small sharp sting. This is annoying but not life threatening. But remember this behavior. I'll be getting back to it shortly.
The long, thin, threadlike nature of asbestos makes it easy to weave it into a cloth-like form. This can be wrapped around things. That is not what makes asbestos interesting. What makes it interesting is it's thermal insulation properties and its ability to withstand high temperatures. If you wrap a cloth-like piece of woven asbestos around a heating duct or a hot pipe then it will keep the heat inside the duct or pipe so that the heat goes to where you need it and is not lost along the way.
The house I grew up in had a big "octopus" furnace. The burner was enclosed in a large round shell. Out of the top sprouted various heating ducts that went to various parts of the house. The result looked vaguely octopus-like resulting in the nickname. The furnace and ducts were all wrapped in a thin layer of asbestos cloth. And in this configuration the asbestos was completely safe. But there was a problem, a problem that took a long time to diagnose.
Long fibers of asbestos are, at worst, annoying. But asbestos is also brittle. So long fibers can easily get broken into short fibers. And those short fibers can get into the lungs of people. And specifically, asbestos fibers of a particular size can get into the alveoli. As air enters the lungs it travels down smaller and smaller passageways. This trip ends in small sacs called alveoli.
This is where the real work of the lung happens. On the inside of the wall of the alveoli is a little sac of air. On the outside of the wall of the alveoli a blood vessel. Oxygen moves through the wall from the sac to the blood. Carbon dioxide moves through the wall from the blood to the sac. An inhale pushes fresh air into the alveoli. An exhale pushes stale air out of the alveoli.
If asbestos gets into the lung what happens depends on how long the asbestos fiber is. If it is a long fiber then it gets stuck in one of the relatively large air passages. This is annoying in the same way it would be if an asbestos fiber poked a hole in your skin. If the fiber is very small it just floats around like a spec of dust and nothing bad happens. But if it is small enough to get into an alveoli but still big enough to poke a hole in the wall of the alveoli then bad things happen.
The lung has a zillion alveoli. So damaging a few makes no significant difference. But if enough of them get damaged you start running into trouble. This happened to my mother. Late in her life she had a lot of trouble getting enough oxygen into her blood because a relatively high percentage of her alveoli had been damaged. That's bad but it is possible for things to get way worse.
Besides damaging alveoli asbestos can cause cancer, specifically lung cancer. That's really bad. My mother lived to the rip old age of ninety-five. At the end she had a lot of problems. Fortunately for her, her list of problems did not include lung cancer. So she passed away peacefully after a long full life.
A lot of research was done on asbestos to determine if it caused cancer, specifically lung cancer. This was because the law suits related to asbestos and lung cancer dragged on for decades and a whole lot of money was involved. The firm scientific conclusion that eventually emerged was that asbestos caused lung cancer. But we now know cancer is cancer. If something can cause one type of cancer it can cause other types too.
But remember this is a probabilistic result. What asbestos actually does is increase the likelihood that you will get cancer. Some people who are exposed to a lot of asbestos don't get cancer. Some people who are exposed to only a little asbestos get cancer. It's not one of those "if you drink a large dose of cyanide you will surely die" things.
And there is the whole business about particle size. It is impossible to accurately calculate the quantity of particles of exactly the right size a person has been exposed to over his or her lifetime. There are also other factors that contribute to whether or not a specific person does or doesn't get cancer as a result of asbestos exposure.
Now let me dispose of a red herring the asbestos industry threw up as part of their defense. Asbestos is a single very specific mineral. But it is part of a family of minerals. Each one is technically a different mineral because each has a different unique chemical formula.
But all of the minerals in this class behave effectively the same when it comes to cancer. They share the physical characteristics of asbestos. As far as we know they all have a similar effect on cancer probabilities. So the common perception that "if it looks like asbestos it is asbestos" is technically wrong but correct, from a practical point of view.
That didn't stop companies from arguing in court that their specific product technically wasn't asbestos. It was this similar mineral but not the same mineral. And, since the law suit specifically said "asbestos" they should be let off because their product was not asbestos. The courts and juries didn't buy this line of defense. They just decided the companies were being weaselly and that justified giving the plaintiff even more money.
Anyhow, for our purposes it is important to understand that it is well established that asbestos causes cancer. And the plaintiffs in the first successful suit claimed that was what was going on. Johnson's Baby Powder contained a small amount of asbestos. All of a sudden the argument the plaintiff was making made perfect sense to me. I had trouble with the whole idea that talc caused cancer. I had no problem at all with the idea that asbestos caused cancer.
The first of the lawsuits Johnson & Johnson lost involved a woman who had used a lot of Johnson's Baby Powder over a long period of time. She died of ovarian cancer and her family sued. They claimed that asbestos in the baby powder she frequently applied to her crotch area had somehow traveled all the way from there to her ovaries. There it had caused the ovarian cancer that killed her. Ovarian cancer is really nasty stuff. The jury in that case awarded her heirs $72 million. I believe the case is still being appealed.
Even so, that was enough to open the floodgates. We are now also bombarded with commercials asking us if we have used Johnson's Baby Powder and are now dealing with cancer. So far, various law firms have convinced more than 11,000 people to take them up on their offer of help. Needless to say, this has had a negative impact on Johnson & Johnson's share price.
And a contributing factor in both suits has been allegations of bad behavior on the part of the company. In the case of Monsanto their supposed sin was that they didn't sufficiently warn people who used Roundup in large quantities that Roundup might give them cancer. Monsanto argued that, since it doesn't cause cancer, they had no duty to warn.
The science currently supports that line of argument. But it has so far not been persuasive to jurors. Similar arguments, which turned out to be correct, were similarly unpersuasive to jurors in silicon breast implant cases a decade or so ago. Only time will tell us how this difference of opinion over whether Roundup is carcinogenic or not will eventually shake out.
In the case of Johnson & Johnson, the company has argued that there is no asbestos in its product. The problem with this argument is that there is a substantial amount of evidence dating back decades that says asbestos is a common contaminant found in many talc mines. How much asbestos? Not much. How thorough was the testing? Not very.
But it is obvious that it has always been in the interest of Johnson & Johnson to suppress evidence of asbestos contamination. And for a long time Johnson & Johnson knew or should have known that asbestos contamination was a serious possibility. Prudence would have dictated that they check for it frequently and carefully. Apparently, this was not done.
So, while the case for asbestos contamination is not open and shut, there is a lot of evidence in favor of it out there. Here too only time will tell. But, if I were a betting man, I would bet against Johnson & Johnson on this one.
I haven't completely proved or disproved anything here. I do hope, however, that I have provided a more complete picture of what's going on and what is known and what isn't. The only thing I know for sure is that a lot of lawyers are going to make a lot of money working on one side or the other of these cases.
And maybe you now find chemistry more interesting. It's not all confusing formulas scribbled on dusty blackboards. Sometimes it's a matter or life and death.
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Immigration - A History
This post is in many ways a companion piece to a recent post on Plantation Economics. (See: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2019/06/plantation-economics.html). I am going to take a look at immigration in the US. And I am going to take a historical perspective. And I am going to divide the history of the subject into three phases. Here goes:
Phase 1 - About 15,000 years ago to about 1500 C.E. (the now preferred designation, which stands for "Common Era", which replaces A. D., which stood for Anno Domini, which translates as "in the year of our lord").
The beginning date is very uncertain. It could be off by a couple of thousand years. Before that time there were no humans in the Americas. But at that time humans started migrating from northeast Asia, roughly Siberia, across to what is now Alaska. From there they moved South, first into North and Central America, then quickly thereafter all the way to the southern tip of South America.
The details are hard to nail down. Sea Level was much lower then than it is now. So if these people moved along the coast, the coast they moved along is now submerged. As a result, archeological evidence of their passing is hard to find. It is also possible that they moved into the interior of Alaska and then moved their way South along a path that was located a goodly distance away from the coast.
But in any case this migration took place before the monstrous glaciers that comprised the last ice age receded completely. So the combination of sea level rise and ice age related glacial activity would have wiped a lot of the archeological record away. What survived this is spotty and ambiguous enough that no one is sure if one, the other, or both routes were employed.
It is only when you get to the southern part of North America and parts South that archeological evidence is easier to come by. Here there is more data to work with. This data appears to indicate that once humans got South of the ice they moved quickly to populate pretty much every corner of the Americas from the frozen North (and South) to the steamy tropical jungles of the equatorial zone. This same archeological evidence indicates that there were no humans occupying any part of the Americas before about 15000 years ago.
As far as we can tell, this particular immigration door slammed shut between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago and there hasn't been any significant additional immigration via this route since. So there was no migration before about 15000 years ago and no migration after about 10000 or 13000 years ago. Why?
We don't know. We know that if it is within the capability of humans to move into a previously unoccupied area, they do so. So it apparently was only possible to make this trip for a relatively short (by geological standards) period of time. The best guess is that this is related to the double whammy of first an ice age then sea level rise. There was a short "goldilocks" period when the ice had diminished enough to permit travel but sea levels hadn't yet risen enough to shut it down by interposing a water barrier.
At the peak of the most recent ice age the glaciers were too thick and covered too much area to permit passage. Humans couldn't bridge them. Then sea levels rose as the ice melted as the most recent ice age passed its peak and died away. In the end the resulting sea level rise that accompanied the melting of this enormous amount of ice caused Asia and North America to become separated by open water. And the width of the resulting open water was enough to block passage.
This means that the societies created during and after this window of immigration evolved without additional influence from the rest of the world. As far as we can tell, these people didn't even know the rest of the world existed. (There was a tiny Norse invasion in roughly 1,100 C. E., but it was of short duration and had no lasting impact.)
So what can we say about these "phase 1" immigrants? Their technological level was broadly "stone age" or "Neolithic". They did little or no work with metal. But they were expert at making and using wood, bone, and stone tools. They had sophisticated pottery and weaving. (They were able to weave baskets that could be used to hold and store water.) They learned to survive and even thrive in very demanding climates and locations.
They were at various times and places able to construct large hierarchical societies that were capable of building and maintaining large (for the time) cities. In various places they created and maintained sophisticated irrigation systems. At some times and in some places they developed hieroglyphic languages and carved complex inscriptions into stone buildings and monuments. That's a substantial record of achievement..
Phase 2 - About 1500 C. E. to about 1900 C. E.
The European invasion of the Americas that stuck began in about 1500. It started out as exploration missions. But, on the theory that "if you map it, you own it", the various European powers that paid for the exploration expeditions quickly started taking political control of the areas they explored. This initially meant sending explorers, then soldiers, then bureaucrats to administer the captured lands, extract its wealth, and ship it home. But profiting off this captured territory quickly evolved into a long term proposition. And that meant sending people to settle there permanently, to immigrate.
Initially only immigrants from the European country that ended up in control of an area were encouraged to immigrate into that area. That meant Portuguese in what is now Brazil, Spaniards in the rest of South America, Central America, and parts of North America, British in other parts of North America, and so on. But, while most immigrants followed this pattern, the difficulty and expense of trying enforce such an immigration pattern made it ineffectual. So, a looser policy of permitting pretty much any European to immigrate as long as the bulk of the immigrants remained of the right kind came to more accurately represent actual practice. Immigration by people from other parts of the world, however, was actively, and generally effectively, opposed.
That was the general situation for roughly the first half of this period. And it continued to be the general situation for much longer in much of the Americas. But now I am going to focus to the parts that became the US and ignore the rest of the Americas. In short, I am going to focus on the immigration policy of the US.
What became the US was politically dominated by immigrants from the United Kingdom. And the U. K. constituent that came to dominate the others, at least politically and culturally, were the English. So after the US got up and running, immigration from the U. K. in general, but England more than perhaps other areas, continued to be welcomed. All you had to do was find a way to get there.
One early technique to encourage immigration was the "indenture" process. A rich person would pay your passage. In exchange you became an "indentured servant". You were required to work for him for little or no wages beyond room and board for a set period of time, often seven years. After that your period of indenture was up and you were free to do whatever you wanted to do. This method eventually went out of favor because people would skip out early and there was no effective police to enforce the terms of the indenture.
But initially the US, from a practical point of view, consisted of only a thin band of land along the Atlantic coast. Once you traveled a relatively short distance inland you encountered the "frontier". As time passed you had to travel further and further to reach the frontier but it was still there. And the existence of the frontier had a profound impact on the politics of immigration.
One of the defining attributes of the frontier is that it has no sharp boundary. Let's say you start out in a "civilized" or "settled" area. As you travel toward the frontier things change slowly as the accoutrements of civilization become less and less pronounced. Eventually you reach a place that can only be described as the "wild frontier". But at no point in your journey did you cross a sharp edge between one and the other. Things changed gradually. And the point of all this is that without a sharply defined edge there is no well defined boundary.
And without a well defined boundary there is no place to put border control facilities. The US had a certain amount of border infrastructure on the Atlantic. There was a sharp edge between ocean and land. There were ports that tended to operate as choke points for people moving from one to the other. But there was nothing like this on the frontier side.
And that meant that anyone could enter the US by traveling somehow to the frontier and then entering the US from there. Even if there was an interest in blocking entry for a particular immigrant there was no practical way to do so.
So there was no compelling reason to try. And that thinking resulted in an immigration policy of "no policy". Even where it was practical no effort was made to block people from immigrating. It was not that there was nothing. Goods entering the country were extensively tracked so that various taxes, quotas, and exclusions could be rigorously enforced. To do this the US maintained an extensive enforcement infrastructure.
But the Customs Service restricted its activities to goods. Until the twentieth century the bulk of the funds used to run the entire Federal government came from customs duties. So an effective and efficient customs system was critical. But none of that applied to people. There was no "import tax" on people. And there was no other reason to track people so they weren't.
Except, of course, for slaves. But slaves weren't people. They were valuable commodities and were treated as such. But once they were inside the country the customs people had no interest in them. Fugitive slaves eventually became a problem that the Federal government became involved in. But that has nothing to do with immigration policy. Everything changed with the end of the Civil War. With the slave trade gone the US slammed the door on immigration from Africa.
During this period the US was expanding rapidly. Frontier areas were continuously being transformed into civilized areas. And that took people. The thinking was "there's plenty of room for everyone". And, of course, "everyone" was taken to only apply to Europeans. There was all that frontier to the West that needed filling up. So immigration by the "right" people was encouraged. The more quickly people immigrated the more quickly the frontier could be civilized and incorporated into the US.
This thinking did not extend to the natives that had been there before the European invasion. It turns out that they were highly susceptible to common European diseases while the native diseases had little effect on the Europeans. So sixty to ninety percent of the natives were killed off by disease shortly after they came into contact with Europeans. The Europeans also had superior war fighting capabilities. As a result, when it came to a fight, the natives could not mount an effective defense.
So they fought a slow holding action. At first Europeans only occupied a small portion of the continent. But as the two groups came into close contact the natives, wrongly referred to as "Indians" in the US, more correctly referred to as "first nations peoples" in Canada, lost population, power, and control. They were eventually shoved into various niches and played no role in immigration or immigration policy.
Piece by piece, the central part of the North American continent was gobbled up by the US. Initially the direction of growth was primarily to the West from the Atlantic coast. But the US also grew South to the Caribbean Sea. Then it hopped across the center and annexed California on the West coast. Expansion continued from there North up the Pacific coast. And a pincers movement, consisting of a primary movement West from the eastern US, but supplemented by an eastern movement from California and the other west coast states, was destined by geographic considerations to meet in the middle. It did so in about 1900.
Phase 3 - 1900 C. E. to the present
When the results of the 1890 Census were released the US government declared that the Frontier was no more. All parts of the US now had been settled, at least minimally. This was technically not true. There were some "continental" states that hadn't yet joined. And Alaska and Hawaii didn't become states until 1959 and 1960. But none of these places were seen as repositories for large populations. So, as far as the average person was concerned, the whole frontier expansion was now over and done with.
And the closing of the frontier was not a surprise. It was easy to track progress as maps of the US were updated to include annexation after annexation. There were minor differences of opinion about exactly when the frontier closed. But the relentlessness with which the goal had long been pursued meant that these differences of opinion had little practical effect. So the declaration that accompanied the publication of the 1890 census results was quickly and widely accepted.
The closing of the frontier had a profound psychological effect on immigration policy. The justification for a wide open immigration policy had suddenly disappeared. If more people came where would we put them? The idea that there would no place for immigrants to go to was ridiculous. But that was how people started to see things.
The real concern had to do with employment. People got it into their minds somehow that there were only a certain number of jobs. For an immigrant to get a job it followed that a native must lose a job. So native born people and immigrants were in direct head to head competition for jobs. A win for one group was a loss for the other group. This too was a ridiculous argument. Nevertheless, consciously or unconsciously, it represented the thinking of a lot of people.
Before about 1900 no one cared much about immigration. As long, of course, as we are talking about European immigration. People had strong opinions about immigration from elsewhere. But the closing of the frontier changed all that. On the ridiculous theory that "they are coming to take away our jobs", all of a sudden it became important to keep track of people coming into the country.
It also became important to differentiate between "native born" people and foreigners when it came to people who were already in the country. So starting in about 1900 laws were put into place and bureaucracies were created to set the rules and enforce them.
Ellis Island went into business as an "inspection station" for immigrants in 1892. The main building, which is now a museum, was built a short time later in 1900. A relatively small number of other facilities were created to process immigrants. There was one at Angel Island in San Francisco bay, for instance. But mostly what were created were "Ports of Entry", facilities located wherever there was a significant amount of cross border traffic. These were set up to handle people entering or exiting on a temporary basis for business, tourist, or other short term reasons.
And with this interest in the movement of people came a serious interest in documentation. The original "passport" was a letter of introduction. It was from one king to another saying "this is to introduce you to so and so. He is authorized to represent me in the following matters." In other words, it identified what we now call diplomats.
In 1900 most people in the world were still illiterate. They had no use for paper and they definitely had no use for what we would now call identification papers. But the US had made a strong push toward universal education in the 1800s so by 1900 most people in the US could read. Also, by 1900 most people in the US had a birth certificate.
But as an identification paper a birth certificate is a joke. It specifies that a person was born in a certain place and at a certain time. But the only identifying information it provides are the sex of the individual and the date the birth took place. The fact that a person has physical possession of a specific birth certificate provides no guarantee that the possessor is the person that birth certificate was issued on behalf of. Yet the birth certificate was, and still is, the foundational document for identification of native born people in the US.
It's ridiculous but the whole subject of immigration is riddled with the ridiculous. Along with the creation of inspection stations for immigrants and ports of entry the first laws setting out immigration policies for the US were passed at this time. At this point it should be no surprise that these policies were designed to codify the then prevailing prejudices.
Subsequent updates have allowed immigration law to track the evolution of prevailing prejudices. They have always specified preferential treatment of some people, tolerated other people, and completely excluded still other people. And for the most part these policies have categorized people based on country of origin. What has changed over time is which countries are "in" and which countries are "out".
It has always been easy for English people to immigrate. The boundaries of which parts of Europe join the English in the "preferred" category has changed over time. It currently generally includes anyone from western Europe. On the other hand, people from Asia and Africa have generally found themselves in the "excluded" category, as have people from Central and South America.
There are people you would think would fall into the "preferred" category but they don't. You'd think the skilled and well off would receive preferential treatment no matter where they were born. Not so. You would also think people could put themselves into the "preferred" category by fighting for the US, either by joining the US military and deploying into a war zone, or by fighting under the sponsorship of and on behalf of the US. Again, you would be wrong. What category people are put into makes absolutely no sense at all.
What makes even less sense are people who end up in the US due to US policy. The poster child for this group is slaves. People are generally familiar with their story. But there are other groups whose story is less extreme but also less well known. Here are a couple of examples.
Business interests in California imported thousands of Chinese to build the first trans-continental railroad. Why? Because they were cheap and worked hard. But when construction was complete they were all supposed to immediately go home. They never would have been in the US in the first place if they hadn't been invited. But one day they went from valued employees to some kind of unspecified menace.
To a lesser extent, Japanese people were also encouraged to relocate to the US for various reasons so they did. After they had settled in and been around for a while various groups at various times decided they were some kind of "yellow peril" and they were literally driven out of their "Japan town" ghettos. Then there were the World War II internment camps.
Germans and Italians living in the US had cultural and other connections back to the mother country, just as the Japanese did. And all three countries were on the enemy side in the War. The Germans operated extensive spy rings in the US. They also mounted extensive propaganda operations aimed at, and often originating from within, the US. These were much more substantial than anything the Japanese could even imagine. But neither Germans nor Italians were interned in substantial numbers during the war. Only the Japanese were.
The current bugaboo is Latinx (the preferred term for people not only from Mexico but also from the rest of Central America, and to a much smaller extent, South America). But here the pattern closely follows that of the Chinese. At the behest of the agriculture industry, particularly the part located in California, a "Bracero" program was initiated during World War II.
The impetus for the program was a perceived shortage of field workers. There is no shortage of workers that cant be remedied by increasing wages and benefits, and improving working conditions. But all that costs money. It would have cost more money to get Americans to build the railroad. importing Chinese reduced costs. It would have cost more money to get Americans to work in agricultural fields but importing Mexicans reduced costs.
The idea was that these people would be imported to do a specific job then they would go back home. But, like the Chinese, the Mexicans decided it was a good idea to stay, once they had a chance to look around.
There was no formal program to import Chinese to work on the railroad. Local industrialists just went ahead and did it on their own. They could do that because at the time there were no immigration rules. There were lots of immigration rules when the Bracero program was started so it was an official program of the US government. And people were paying attention by then so the Bracero program drew a lot of opposition from the start. That opposition built to the point where the program was ended in 1964.
But by then it was too late. The program got Mexicans, and later other Central Americans, used to the idea of traveling North to the US for work. It didn't take long for them to figure out they were better off staying there year around. And if they were going to reside in the US full time it made sense to also bring their families North. So they did.
In every case the key was employment. If there hadn't been jobs for these people they wouldn't have come. Or they would have quickly returned home. So why were there jobs? It made sense for employers to hire these people. They were hard working, didn't make a fuss, and they worked cheap. In short, this was an actual example of a foreigner taking a job from an American. Americans wouldn't work as cheaply nor under such poor working conditions.
But the situation was not caused by the foreigners. It was caused by American business people trying to save money by keeping wages and benefits low, and by providing poor working conditions. And, of course, it later became important that the workers who were enduring these conditions wouldn't complain because they were in the country illegally. Employers sought out illegal immigrants and clandestinely encouraged illegal immigration for just that reason.
The Bracero program only applied to agricultural field workers. But soon business owners in other industries noticed. So they started hiring these same people to work in restaurants as dishwashers and busboys, as maids and housekeepers in hotels and motels, in landscaping, and so on. Undocumented immigrants were soon finding work in any industry that used a lot of unskilled or low skilled people.
The trend eventually became widespread enough to attract notice. So laws clamping down on the employment of undocumented immigrants were passed. But, whatever the letter of the laws said, the way they were actually enforced was similar to how prostitution laws are enforced.
When it comes to prostitution, the women gets arrested and is expected to take the fall. The man, on the other hand, gets sent home. You can't have prostitution without Johns. But Johns get protected by the process while the prostitutes don't. Is it any surprise that in the long run prostitution laws, even if vigorously enforced, are unable to stamp out prostitution?
The same dynamic took place when it came to enforcing the laws against employing undocumented immigrants. Employees who were undocumented immigrants had the book thrown at them while the employer was let off the hook. You can't have workers who are undocumented immigrants without businesses who are willing to employ them. But again, only one party to the illegal act gets punished.
This puts even more power into the hands of employers and makes it even more lucrative for them to hire these people. Why? Because they can take even more advantage of them since they have even less ability to push back. For an employer there is a nearly unlimited upside and no downside.
And that's the reason we have roughly eleven million undocumented immigrants in the US. If the balance is changed so that the weight of the law falls heavily on employers then the situation will change. Undocumented immigrants would not be able to afford to live here so they would find somewhere else to live.
The Trump Administration has no plans to change the balance to be harsher on employers. They will continue to tighten the screws on employees while making it easy for employers to skate. After all, he is one of the employers benefitting from the current situation. He routinely employs undocumented immigrants at his golf courses and hotels. Cracking down further on undocumented immigrants while letting employers continue to get off will only tend to further reduce his labor costs.
And his supporters have no problem with this double standard so he will also pay no political price. Examples of routine employment of undocumented immigrants being routinely employed at Trump properties have received widespread coverage in the press. There has been no push back from his supporters on this subject. There has, in fact, been no reaction at all.
I am now going to dig deeper into the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs so if an immigrant takes a job it puts a native out of work. When it comes to the kinds of jobs now being done by undocumented immigrants it is true that employment in these job categories by natives has plunged. But what about the economy as a whole?
More generally, what happens when you add a large number of people to the workforce? Well, it turns out that we have already run that experiment several times so we know what happens.
After World War II ended a lot of children were born. A whole lot. Far more than at any previous time in US history. One of those children was me. That's right. I am a member in good standing of the "baby boom" generation. And my generation had a big impact on the number of people looking for work.
When we were children you would think that we would be a drag on the economy. We take up a lot of the time and energy that our parents could otherwise be putting into productive labor. In spite of that the economy boomed. One reason was that our parents had to buy a lot of stuff for us: food, clothing, housing, etc.
That additional purchasing was good for the economy. Then roads and schools and a lot of other stuff had to be built to handle us. The list goes on and on of all the stuff that had to be done to handle all of our needs. And all that additional activity was good for the economy and, therefore, good for employment.
Okay. But, what about twenty years later when we started entering the job market? Shouldn't unemployment shoot up. After all, there are only so many jobs, right? Wrong! Employment is very elastic. It can expand tremendously as long as consumption expands at the same time. It takes more employees to make all the stuff that gets consumed by a larger population base. That's what happened when we were young. There were lots of jobs because lots of stuff needed to be made to meet the needs of all us kids.
The details changed but the trend continued as we started entering the job market. Lots of additional employees were needed to make all the additional stuff all those additional employees needed. And we were buying cars and homes and starting families. And have I mentioned that there were a whole lot of us? So we needed a lot of cars and homes and other stuff. We had money to spend and we spent it. And the economy grew. It grew enough to easily employ all of us. Our impact on the job market was positive, not negative.
At about the time that the wave of baby boomers passed its peak there was another structural change that resulted in a lot of additional people looking for jobs. In say 1900 a woman's place was in the home. That made sense at the time because it took a lot of work to maintain a household. So much had to be done by hand.
But as the twentieth century progressed that changed. Many labor saving devices were introduced. Women no longer need to slaughter livestock or put up preserves for the winter or clean house with a broom and hand wash clothes with a washboard. Various labor savers like the supermarket, premade clothes, home appliances, etc., meant that by the second half of the twentieth century, homemaker, was not even close to being a full time job.
So a lot of women entered the workforce. Or perhaps I should say, reentered the workforce. They had worked hard in 1900 keeping house. That just wasn't recognized as a "real" job because it wasn't paid employment. But women started getting paid employment in large numbers a couple of decades after the end of the Second World War..
Again, if it was true that "there are a fixed number of jobs", then logic would dictate that unemployment levels would rise precipitously. But they didn't because again the economy proved elastic. If you can increase consumption to match the increased production produced by the increased number of people in paid jobs then everything will be fine.
And that's what happened. Families shifted to using foods that had been more highly processed like frozen pizza. The ate out more. A whole "day care" industry that had not really existed before sprang into existence. Women bought more cars than they had before. They now needed to drive to work. And on and on.
Economies are good at expanding to provide more jobs when there are more people looking for work if demand also goes up. A large influx of people or a large influx of people seeking paid employment for the first time almost inevitably results in the economy expanding. All that is necessary is that these people have money to spend.
They spend the money. But they can easily replace the money they initially spent from the money they are paid at their newfound job. This in turn forces the economy to expand job opportunities so that the additional stuff these people want to buy with the money they are now earning can be produced. So additional jobs magically appear. It helps if these are jobs that pay well because then these people can spend more and grow the economy more.
What hurts the economy is employers gaming the system to drive down their labor costs. Employees are both producers and consumers. But if employers game the system to drive down wages then people have less money. And as a result they consume less. And that decrease in consumption is bad for the economy and bad for jobs.
Now there is a relief valve. People who are not earning more can borrow more. Most of the economic growth over the last forty years is as a result of consumers taking on more debt. That works as long as they can keep up on their payments. In 2008-2009 consumers quickly found their ability to keep up on their payments sharply curtailed. So they defaulted on their debt, and they drastically cut back on their spending. And that turned a dip into a crash.
Right now, consumer debt is going up again. That's got a lot of smart people worried? Why? Because at the same time a lot of consumers are taking on additional debt they have no savings to speak of. And that means they have no ability to safely ride through even a minor economic setback. And that sounds exactly like the situation the economy was in back in 2008. Consumers had no economic cushion then. They have no economic cushion now.
Another worrying trend is that a lot of higher wage jobs, so called "family wage" jobs, have been replaced by jobs that pay a lot less. Unemployment is at a historic low but people's average income is also low. Adjusted for inflation, it is significantly lower than it was in 2008. Consumers are squeezed. The only way they can make ends meet is by taking on more dabt. So they do. But it makes the economic situation of many people and, therefore, the economy as a whole, very fragile.
This should be a big concern. But it isn't being talked about at all. Even so, people's level of anxiety is high. They know something is wrong. They just don't know what it is. And that leaves them unsure about what should be done.
So what's a good demagogue to do in circumstances like these? Find a convenient skapegoat. And the skapegoat of choice right now is immigrants, legal or otherwise. They are not responsible. In fact, allowing lots of immigrants into the US right now would be very good for the economy for several reasons.
But immigrants are a good diversion. They have been used successfully in the past to direct attention away from whatever real problems important people want ignored. The tactic has worked well over and over for at least the last century. So far it seems to again be working just fine.
We are focusing on an imaginary problem (immigration) instead of focusing on what's really wrong (how much people are being paid these days and other issues I will leave for another day). And, as it was with the railroad magnates of yore, and as it is with the businessmen who are now profiting mightily off of the labor of undocumented immigrants, things are working just fine for important people. And what's good for the rest of us just doesn't matter.
Phase 1 - About 15,000 years ago to about 1500 C.E. (the now preferred designation, which stands for "Common Era", which replaces A. D., which stood for Anno Domini, which translates as "in the year of our lord").
The beginning date is very uncertain. It could be off by a couple of thousand years. Before that time there were no humans in the Americas. But at that time humans started migrating from northeast Asia, roughly Siberia, across to what is now Alaska. From there they moved South, first into North and Central America, then quickly thereafter all the way to the southern tip of South America.
The details are hard to nail down. Sea Level was much lower then than it is now. So if these people moved along the coast, the coast they moved along is now submerged. As a result, archeological evidence of their passing is hard to find. It is also possible that they moved into the interior of Alaska and then moved their way South along a path that was located a goodly distance away from the coast.
But in any case this migration took place before the monstrous glaciers that comprised the last ice age receded completely. So the combination of sea level rise and ice age related glacial activity would have wiped a lot of the archeological record away. What survived this is spotty and ambiguous enough that no one is sure if one, the other, or both routes were employed.
It is only when you get to the southern part of North America and parts South that archeological evidence is easier to come by. Here there is more data to work with. This data appears to indicate that once humans got South of the ice they moved quickly to populate pretty much every corner of the Americas from the frozen North (and South) to the steamy tropical jungles of the equatorial zone. This same archeological evidence indicates that there were no humans occupying any part of the Americas before about 15000 years ago.
As far as we can tell, this particular immigration door slammed shut between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago and there hasn't been any significant additional immigration via this route since. So there was no migration before about 15000 years ago and no migration after about 10000 or 13000 years ago. Why?
We don't know. We know that if it is within the capability of humans to move into a previously unoccupied area, they do so. So it apparently was only possible to make this trip for a relatively short (by geological standards) period of time. The best guess is that this is related to the double whammy of first an ice age then sea level rise. There was a short "goldilocks" period when the ice had diminished enough to permit travel but sea levels hadn't yet risen enough to shut it down by interposing a water barrier.
At the peak of the most recent ice age the glaciers were too thick and covered too much area to permit passage. Humans couldn't bridge them. Then sea levels rose as the ice melted as the most recent ice age passed its peak and died away. In the end the resulting sea level rise that accompanied the melting of this enormous amount of ice caused Asia and North America to become separated by open water. And the width of the resulting open water was enough to block passage.
This means that the societies created during and after this window of immigration evolved without additional influence from the rest of the world. As far as we can tell, these people didn't even know the rest of the world existed. (There was a tiny Norse invasion in roughly 1,100 C. E., but it was of short duration and had no lasting impact.)
So what can we say about these "phase 1" immigrants? Their technological level was broadly "stone age" or "Neolithic". They did little or no work with metal. But they were expert at making and using wood, bone, and stone tools. They had sophisticated pottery and weaving. (They were able to weave baskets that could be used to hold and store water.) They learned to survive and even thrive in very demanding climates and locations.
They were at various times and places able to construct large hierarchical societies that were capable of building and maintaining large (for the time) cities. In various places they created and maintained sophisticated irrigation systems. At some times and in some places they developed hieroglyphic languages and carved complex inscriptions into stone buildings and monuments. That's a substantial record of achievement..
Phase 2 - About 1500 C. E. to about 1900 C. E.
The European invasion of the Americas that stuck began in about 1500. It started out as exploration missions. But, on the theory that "if you map it, you own it", the various European powers that paid for the exploration expeditions quickly started taking political control of the areas they explored. This initially meant sending explorers, then soldiers, then bureaucrats to administer the captured lands, extract its wealth, and ship it home. But profiting off this captured territory quickly evolved into a long term proposition. And that meant sending people to settle there permanently, to immigrate.
Initially only immigrants from the European country that ended up in control of an area were encouraged to immigrate into that area. That meant Portuguese in what is now Brazil, Spaniards in the rest of South America, Central America, and parts of North America, British in other parts of North America, and so on. But, while most immigrants followed this pattern, the difficulty and expense of trying enforce such an immigration pattern made it ineffectual. So, a looser policy of permitting pretty much any European to immigrate as long as the bulk of the immigrants remained of the right kind came to more accurately represent actual practice. Immigration by people from other parts of the world, however, was actively, and generally effectively, opposed.
That was the general situation for roughly the first half of this period. And it continued to be the general situation for much longer in much of the Americas. But now I am going to focus to the parts that became the US and ignore the rest of the Americas. In short, I am going to focus on the immigration policy of the US.
What became the US was politically dominated by immigrants from the United Kingdom. And the U. K. constituent that came to dominate the others, at least politically and culturally, were the English. So after the US got up and running, immigration from the U. K. in general, but England more than perhaps other areas, continued to be welcomed. All you had to do was find a way to get there.
One early technique to encourage immigration was the "indenture" process. A rich person would pay your passage. In exchange you became an "indentured servant". You were required to work for him for little or no wages beyond room and board for a set period of time, often seven years. After that your period of indenture was up and you were free to do whatever you wanted to do. This method eventually went out of favor because people would skip out early and there was no effective police to enforce the terms of the indenture.
But initially the US, from a practical point of view, consisted of only a thin band of land along the Atlantic coast. Once you traveled a relatively short distance inland you encountered the "frontier". As time passed you had to travel further and further to reach the frontier but it was still there. And the existence of the frontier had a profound impact on the politics of immigration.
One of the defining attributes of the frontier is that it has no sharp boundary. Let's say you start out in a "civilized" or "settled" area. As you travel toward the frontier things change slowly as the accoutrements of civilization become less and less pronounced. Eventually you reach a place that can only be described as the "wild frontier". But at no point in your journey did you cross a sharp edge between one and the other. Things changed gradually. And the point of all this is that without a sharply defined edge there is no well defined boundary.
And without a well defined boundary there is no place to put border control facilities. The US had a certain amount of border infrastructure on the Atlantic. There was a sharp edge between ocean and land. There were ports that tended to operate as choke points for people moving from one to the other. But there was nothing like this on the frontier side.
And that meant that anyone could enter the US by traveling somehow to the frontier and then entering the US from there. Even if there was an interest in blocking entry for a particular immigrant there was no practical way to do so.
So there was no compelling reason to try. And that thinking resulted in an immigration policy of "no policy". Even where it was practical no effort was made to block people from immigrating. It was not that there was nothing. Goods entering the country were extensively tracked so that various taxes, quotas, and exclusions could be rigorously enforced. To do this the US maintained an extensive enforcement infrastructure.
But the Customs Service restricted its activities to goods. Until the twentieth century the bulk of the funds used to run the entire Federal government came from customs duties. So an effective and efficient customs system was critical. But none of that applied to people. There was no "import tax" on people. And there was no other reason to track people so they weren't.
Except, of course, for slaves. But slaves weren't people. They were valuable commodities and were treated as such. But once they were inside the country the customs people had no interest in them. Fugitive slaves eventually became a problem that the Federal government became involved in. But that has nothing to do with immigration policy. Everything changed with the end of the Civil War. With the slave trade gone the US slammed the door on immigration from Africa.
During this period the US was expanding rapidly. Frontier areas were continuously being transformed into civilized areas. And that took people. The thinking was "there's plenty of room for everyone". And, of course, "everyone" was taken to only apply to Europeans. There was all that frontier to the West that needed filling up. So immigration by the "right" people was encouraged. The more quickly people immigrated the more quickly the frontier could be civilized and incorporated into the US.
This thinking did not extend to the natives that had been there before the European invasion. It turns out that they were highly susceptible to common European diseases while the native diseases had little effect on the Europeans. So sixty to ninety percent of the natives were killed off by disease shortly after they came into contact with Europeans. The Europeans also had superior war fighting capabilities. As a result, when it came to a fight, the natives could not mount an effective defense.
So they fought a slow holding action. At first Europeans only occupied a small portion of the continent. But as the two groups came into close contact the natives, wrongly referred to as "Indians" in the US, more correctly referred to as "first nations peoples" in Canada, lost population, power, and control. They were eventually shoved into various niches and played no role in immigration or immigration policy.
Piece by piece, the central part of the North American continent was gobbled up by the US. Initially the direction of growth was primarily to the West from the Atlantic coast. But the US also grew South to the Caribbean Sea. Then it hopped across the center and annexed California on the West coast. Expansion continued from there North up the Pacific coast. And a pincers movement, consisting of a primary movement West from the eastern US, but supplemented by an eastern movement from California and the other west coast states, was destined by geographic considerations to meet in the middle. It did so in about 1900.
Phase 3 - 1900 C. E. to the present
When the results of the 1890 Census were released the US government declared that the Frontier was no more. All parts of the US now had been settled, at least minimally. This was technically not true. There were some "continental" states that hadn't yet joined. And Alaska and Hawaii didn't become states until 1959 and 1960. But none of these places were seen as repositories for large populations. So, as far as the average person was concerned, the whole frontier expansion was now over and done with.
And the closing of the frontier was not a surprise. It was easy to track progress as maps of the US were updated to include annexation after annexation. There were minor differences of opinion about exactly when the frontier closed. But the relentlessness with which the goal had long been pursued meant that these differences of opinion had little practical effect. So the declaration that accompanied the publication of the 1890 census results was quickly and widely accepted.
The closing of the frontier had a profound psychological effect on immigration policy. The justification for a wide open immigration policy had suddenly disappeared. If more people came where would we put them? The idea that there would no place for immigrants to go to was ridiculous. But that was how people started to see things.
The real concern had to do with employment. People got it into their minds somehow that there were only a certain number of jobs. For an immigrant to get a job it followed that a native must lose a job. So native born people and immigrants were in direct head to head competition for jobs. A win for one group was a loss for the other group. This too was a ridiculous argument. Nevertheless, consciously or unconsciously, it represented the thinking of a lot of people.
Before about 1900 no one cared much about immigration. As long, of course, as we are talking about European immigration. People had strong opinions about immigration from elsewhere. But the closing of the frontier changed all that. On the ridiculous theory that "they are coming to take away our jobs", all of a sudden it became important to keep track of people coming into the country.
It also became important to differentiate between "native born" people and foreigners when it came to people who were already in the country. So starting in about 1900 laws were put into place and bureaucracies were created to set the rules and enforce them.
Ellis Island went into business as an "inspection station" for immigrants in 1892. The main building, which is now a museum, was built a short time later in 1900. A relatively small number of other facilities were created to process immigrants. There was one at Angel Island in San Francisco bay, for instance. But mostly what were created were "Ports of Entry", facilities located wherever there was a significant amount of cross border traffic. These were set up to handle people entering or exiting on a temporary basis for business, tourist, or other short term reasons.
And with this interest in the movement of people came a serious interest in documentation. The original "passport" was a letter of introduction. It was from one king to another saying "this is to introduce you to so and so. He is authorized to represent me in the following matters." In other words, it identified what we now call diplomats.
In 1900 most people in the world were still illiterate. They had no use for paper and they definitely had no use for what we would now call identification papers. But the US had made a strong push toward universal education in the 1800s so by 1900 most people in the US could read. Also, by 1900 most people in the US had a birth certificate.
But as an identification paper a birth certificate is a joke. It specifies that a person was born in a certain place and at a certain time. But the only identifying information it provides are the sex of the individual and the date the birth took place. The fact that a person has physical possession of a specific birth certificate provides no guarantee that the possessor is the person that birth certificate was issued on behalf of. Yet the birth certificate was, and still is, the foundational document for identification of native born people in the US.
It's ridiculous but the whole subject of immigration is riddled with the ridiculous. Along with the creation of inspection stations for immigrants and ports of entry the first laws setting out immigration policies for the US were passed at this time. At this point it should be no surprise that these policies were designed to codify the then prevailing prejudices.
Subsequent updates have allowed immigration law to track the evolution of prevailing prejudices. They have always specified preferential treatment of some people, tolerated other people, and completely excluded still other people. And for the most part these policies have categorized people based on country of origin. What has changed over time is which countries are "in" and which countries are "out".
It has always been easy for English people to immigrate. The boundaries of which parts of Europe join the English in the "preferred" category has changed over time. It currently generally includes anyone from western Europe. On the other hand, people from Asia and Africa have generally found themselves in the "excluded" category, as have people from Central and South America.
There are people you would think would fall into the "preferred" category but they don't. You'd think the skilled and well off would receive preferential treatment no matter where they were born. Not so. You would also think people could put themselves into the "preferred" category by fighting for the US, either by joining the US military and deploying into a war zone, or by fighting under the sponsorship of and on behalf of the US. Again, you would be wrong. What category people are put into makes absolutely no sense at all.
What makes even less sense are people who end up in the US due to US policy. The poster child for this group is slaves. People are generally familiar with their story. But there are other groups whose story is less extreme but also less well known. Here are a couple of examples.
Business interests in California imported thousands of Chinese to build the first trans-continental railroad. Why? Because they were cheap and worked hard. But when construction was complete they were all supposed to immediately go home. They never would have been in the US in the first place if they hadn't been invited. But one day they went from valued employees to some kind of unspecified menace.
To a lesser extent, Japanese people were also encouraged to relocate to the US for various reasons so they did. After they had settled in and been around for a while various groups at various times decided they were some kind of "yellow peril" and they were literally driven out of their "Japan town" ghettos. Then there were the World War II internment camps.
Germans and Italians living in the US had cultural and other connections back to the mother country, just as the Japanese did. And all three countries were on the enemy side in the War. The Germans operated extensive spy rings in the US. They also mounted extensive propaganda operations aimed at, and often originating from within, the US. These were much more substantial than anything the Japanese could even imagine. But neither Germans nor Italians were interned in substantial numbers during the war. Only the Japanese were.
The current bugaboo is Latinx (the preferred term for people not only from Mexico but also from the rest of Central America, and to a much smaller extent, South America). But here the pattern closely follows that of the Chinese. At the behest of the agriculture industry, particularly the part located in California, a "Bracero" program was initiated during World War II.
The impetus for the program was a perceived shortage of field workers. There is no shortage of workers that cant be remedied by increasing wages and benefits, and improving working conditions. But all that costs money. It would have cost more money to get Americans to build the railroad. importing Chinese reduced costs. It would have cost more money to get Americans to work in agricultural fields but importing Mexicans reduced costs.
The idea was that these people would be imported to do a specific job then they would go back home. But, like the Chinese, the Mexicans decided it was a good idea to stay, once they had a chance to look around.
There was no formal program to import Chinese to work on the railroad. Local industrialists just went ahead and did it on their own. They could do that because at the time there were no immigration rules. There were lots of immigration rules when the Bracero program was started so it was an official program of the US government. And people were paying attention by then so the Bracero program drew a lot of opposition from the start. That opposition built to the point where the program was ended in 1964.
But by then it was too late. The program got Mexicans, and later other Central Americans, used to the idea of traveling North to the US for work. It didn't take long for them to figure out they were better off staying there year around. And if they were going to reside in the US full time it made sense to also bring their families North. So they did.
In every case the key was employment. If there hadn't been jobs for these people they wouldn't have come. Or they would have quickly returned home. So why were there jobs? It made sense for employers to hire these people. They were hard working, didn't make a fuss, and they worked cheap. In short, this was an actual example of a foreigner taking a job from an American. Americans wouldn't work as cheaply nor under such poor working conditions.
But the situation was not caused by the foreigners. It was caused by American business people trying to save money by keeping wages and benefits low, and by providing poor working conditions. And, of course, it later became important that the workers who were enduring these conditions wouldn't complain because they were in the country illegally. Employers sought out illegal immigrants and clandestinely encouraged illegal immigration for just that reason.
The Bracero program only applied to agricultural field workers. But soon business owners in other industries noticed. So they started hiring these same people to work in restaurants as dishwashers and busboys, as maids and housekeepers in hotels and motels, in landscaping, and so on. Undocumented immigrants were soon finding work in any industry that used a lot of unskilled or low skilled people.
The trend eventually became widespread enough to attract notice. So laws clamping down on the employment of undocumented immigrants were passed. But, whatever the letter of the laws said, the way they were actually enforced was similar to how prostitution laws are enforced.
When it comes to prostitution, the women gets arrested and is expected to take the fall. The man, on the other hand, gets sent home. You can't have prostitution without Johns. But Johns get protected by the process while the prostitutes don't. Is it any surprise that in the long run prostitution laws, even if vigorously enforced, are unable to stamp out prostitution?
The same dynamic took place when it came to enforcing the laws against employing undocumented immigrants. Employees who were undocumented immigrants had the book thrown at them while the employer was let off the hook. You can't have workers who are undocumented immigrants without businesses who are willing to employ them. But again, only one party to the illegal act gets punished.
This puts even more power into the hands of employers and makes it even more lucrative for them to hire these people. Why? Because they can take even more advantage of them since they have even less ability to push back. For an employer there is a nearly unlimited upside and no downside.
And that's the reason we have roughly eleven million undocumented immigrants in the US. If the balance is changed so that the weight of the law falls heavily on employers then the situation will change. Undocumented immigrants would not be able to afford to live here so they would find somewhere else to live.
The Trump Administration has no plans to change the balance to be harsher on employers. They will continue to tighten the screws on employees while making it easy for employers to skate. After all, he is one of the employers benefitting from the current situation. He routinely employs undocumented immigrants at his golf courses and hotels. Cracking down further on undocumented immigrants while letting employers continue to get off will only tend to further reduce his labor costs.
And his supporters have no problem with this double standard so he will also pay no political price. Examples of routine employment of undocumented immigrants being routinely employed at Trump properties have received widespread coverage in the press. There has been no push back from his supporters on this subject. There has, in fact, been no reaction at all.
I am now going to dig deeper into the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs so if an immigrant takes a job it puts a native out of work. When it comes to the kinds of jobs now being done by undocumented immigrants it is true that employment in these job categories by natives has plunged. But what about the economy as a whole?
More generally, what happens when you add a large number of people to the workforce? Well, it turns out that we have already run that experiment several times so we know what happens.
After World War II ended a lot of children were born. A whole lot. Far more than at any previous time in US history. One of those children was me. That's right. I am a member in good standing of the "baby boom" generation. And my generation had a big impact on the number of people looking for work.
When we were children you would think that we would be a drag on the economy. We take up a lot of the time and energy that our parents could otherwise be putting into productive labor. In spite of that the economy boomed. One reason was that our parents had to buy a lot of stuff for us: food, clothing, housing, etc.
That additional purchasing was good for the economy. Then roads and schools and a lot of other stuff had to be built to handle us. The list goes on and on of all the stuff that had to be done to handle all of our needs. And all that additional activity was good for the economy and, therefore, good for employment.
Okay. But, what about twenty years later when we started entering the job market? Shouldn't unemployment shoot up. After all, there are only so many jobs, right? Wrong! Employment is very elastic. It can expand tremendously as long as consumption expands at the same time. It takes more employees to make all the stuff that gets consumed by a larger population base. That's what happened when we were young. There were lots of jobs because lots of stuff needed to be made to meet the needs of all us kids.
The details changed but the trend continued as we started entering the job market. Lots of additional employees were needed to make all the additional stuff all those additional employees needed. And we were buying cars and homes and starting families. And have I mentioned that there were a whole lot of us? So we needed a lot of cars and homes and other stuff. We had money to spend and we spent it. And the economy grew. It grew enough to easily employ all of us. Our impact on the job market was positive, not negative.
At about the time that the wave of baby boomers passed its peak there was another structural change that resulted in a lot of additional people looking for jobs. In say 1900 a woman's place was in the home. That made sense at the time because it took a lot of work to maintain a household. So much had to be done by hand.
But as the twentieth century progressed that changed. Many labor saving devices were introduced. Women no longer need to slaughter livestock or put up preserves for the winter or clean house with a broom and hand wash clothes with a washboard. Various labor savers like the supermarket, premade clothes, home appliances, etc., meant that by the second half of the twentieth century, homemaker, was not even close to being a full time job.
So a lot of women entered the workforce. Or perhaps I should say, reentered the workforce. They had worked hard in 1900 keeping house. That just wasn't recognized as a "real" job because it wasn't paid employment. But women started getting paid employment in large numbers a couple of decades after the end of the Second World War..
Again, if it was true that "there are a fixed number of jobs", then logic would dictate that unemployment levels would rise precipitously. But they didn't because again the economy proved elastic. If you can increase consumption to match the increased production produced by the increased number of people in paid jobs then everything will be fine.
And that's what happened. Families shifted to using foods that had been more highly processed like frozen pizza. The ate out more. A whole "day care" industry that had not really existed before sprang into existence. Women bought more cars than they had before. They now needed to drive to work. And on and on.
Economies are good at expanding to provide more jobs when there are more people looking for work if demand also goes up. A large influx of people or a large influx of people seeking paid employment for the first time almost inevitably results in the economy expanding. All that is necessary is that these people have money to spend.
They spend the money. But they can easily replace the money they initially spent from the money they are paid at their newfound job. This in turn forces the economy to expand job opportunities so that the additional stuff these people want to buy with the money they are now earning can be produced. So additional jobs magically appear. It helps if these are jobs that pay well because then these people can spend more and grow the economy more.
What hurts the economy is employers gaming the system to drive down their labor costs. Employees are both producers and consumers. But if employers game the system to drive down wages then people have less money. And as a result they consume less. And that decrease in consumption is bad for the economy and bad for jobs.
Now there is a relief valve. People who are not earning more can borrow more. Most of the economic growth over the last forty years is as a result of consumers taking on more debt. That works as long as they can keep up on their payments. In 2008-2009 consumers quickly found their ability to keep up on their payments sharply curtailed. So they defaulted on their debt, and they drastically cut back on their spending. And that turned a dip into a crash.
Right now, consumer debt is going up again. That's got a lot of smart people worried? Why? Because at the same time a lot of consumers are taking on additional debt they have no savings to speak of. And that means they have no ability to safely ride through even a minor economic setback. And that sounds exactly like the situation the economy was in back in 2008. Consumers had no economic cushion then. They have no economic cushion now.
Another worrying trend is that a lot of higher wage jobs, so called "family wage" jobs, have been replaced by jobs that pay a lot less. Unemployment is at a historic low but people's average income is also low. Adjusted for inflation, it is significantly lower than it was in 2008. Consumers are squeezed. The only way they can make ends meet is by taking on more dabt. So they do. But it makes the economic situation of many people and, therefore, the economy as a whole, very fragile.
This should be a big concern. But it isn't being talked about at all. Even so, people's level of anxiety is high. They know something is wrong. They just don't know what it is. And that leaves them unsure about what should be done.
So what's a good demagogue to do in circumstances like these? Find a convenient skapegoat. And the skapegoat of choice right now is immigrants, legal or otherwise. They are not responsible. In fact, allowing lots of immigrants into the US right now would be very good for the economy for several reasons.
But immigrants are a good diversion. They have been used successfully in the past to direct attention away from whatever real problems important people want ignored. The tactic has worked well over and over for at least the last century. So far it seems to again be working just fine.
We are focusing on an imaginary problem (immigration) instead of focusing on what's really wrong (how much people are being paid these days and other issues I will leave for another day). And, as it was with the railroad magnates of yore, and as it is with the businessmen who are now profiting mightily off of the labor of undocumented immigrants, things are working just fine for important people. And what's good for the rest of us just doesn't matter.
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