Science Vs - Election Special: Immigration

Episode Date: November 2, 2018

In the final installment of our election series, we tackle immigration: the #1 concern of Americans as they head to the polls. It's been a huge focus for President Trump... and people say immigrants are stealing jobs and driving up the crime rate. But what does the research say? There have been a bunch of new studies since we published our episode on immigration, so we've updated this to reflect what's new. Check out the transcripts, with all the citations, here: http://bit.ly/2IZ6ixc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. This is the last episode of our series looking into the big political issues for the upcoming midterm elections. And we're ending on the number one concern of Americans heading into the voting booth, according to a Reuters poll.

And that's immigration. Just in the past week, headlines about a caravan of migrants have been whirling around the country. A caravan of Central Americans heading to the US grows by the thousands. Images of migrants trudging north from Honduras through Mexico to the doorstep of the United States might look to many like a humanitarian crisis. This will be the election of the caravan.

And in that caravan, you have some very bad people. Since Donald Trump was elected, immigration has been a huge talking point for him. One of the first things he did while in office was institute a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries. And across the board, he's taken steps to make it harder for many immigrants to get into the US. Just this week, Trump announced that he wants to end birthright citizenship. Where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And it has to end.

Meanwhile, more and more science has been coming out on the effect of immigration on a country. We first released this episode last year, and since then there have been dozens of new studies. So what you're about to hear includes that new research. Here it is. Today, we're pitting facts against foreigners, as we give you Science vs Immigration. Okay, what I'm looking at, is that the wall?

I think that's the wall. Yeah, it's a bloody big fence. Restricted area, no trespass. I'm about 20 meters from the wall. I can't even, why am I so nervous? Because I'm in a restricted area that's why I'm nervous. OK, here it is. This is the wall.

This is what it's about. This is the border between America and Mexico. I kicked the wall, just so you could hear it. The wall says, made in the USA. I'm at the border between the US and Mexico, about an hour's drive away from San Diego. And despite what you might hear in the news, and as you just heard,

on this part of the border, there's already a wall. It's about 20 feet tall and is made of big metal posts and a strong wire mesh. Within minutes of kicking it, Border Patrol arrived in a white SUV. Oh! How you doing?

Hello. How are you? Good, thank you. I was just looking for the Friendship Monument. You're not allowed to actually come up to this fence, really. Oh, OK. Sorry. A fence? Wall, fence? I guess it's more of a wince.

Anyway, a recent Pew survey found that around 35% of Americans want a longer wence, one that runs the full length of the border with Mexico. And the goal is to stop immigrants from crossing that border and flooding the United States. So on today's show, we're talking about what happens when immigrants do get into the US. Specifically, one, what are all these immigrants doing to the economy? Like, are they taking American jobs? And two, are they driving up the crime rate? When it comes to immigration, there's a lot of opinions.

But then there's science. There are over 40 million people living in the US today who were born in other countries. Some came here legally, some didn't. But in total, they make up more than one in eight people in the US population. And just a quick note, before you go thinking that because of this accent, I must love immigrants, here's a psych out. I'm actually a US citizen. That's right. I was born in California. The accent is fake. No, the accent's

actually real, but I was born here, raised in Australia. Funnily enough though, being born in the US is enough to class me as an American, not only to border patrol, thankfully, but also to scientists who research immigration. So, we're going to use that definition on today's show. You're born here, you're American. That means when we say immigrant, we're talking about anyone who was born in another country and then came here. And a lot of talk in America is about undocumented versus documented immigrants. Unfortunately, much of the research doesn't

make that distinction. So we'll tell you when we're talking about documented or undocumented. Otherwise, we're just talking about all immigrants. Okay, on with the show. So if you want to find out using science how immigrants affect a nation or a state or a town, one way you can do that is to look at places that got rid of a whole lot of immigrants and you can see what happened. Beginning in 2010, a bunch of US states started passing laws that made life hard for immigrants. The goal? To get undocumented people to pick up and leave.

One of the strictest laws came from Alabama and it was named Adios Bad Hombres. No, of course it wasn't. It was called the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. And when it came into effect, police were required to verify people's immigration status during routine stops. Schools needed to find out the immigration status

of children and their parents, and Americans were prohibited from hiring, renting housing to, and even giving rides to undocumented immigrants. Since the law was passed, it has been weakened quite a bit by the courts. But still, it was strong enough to scare off quite a lot of immigrants. Now, nobody has collected specific data on how many people in total left the state after the

law was passed. But estimates using census data and the Pew Research Center suggest that perhaps some 15,000 immigrants left. Another estimate out of the University of Alabama pegged the number at above 40,000. Let's be conservative and say thousands of immigrants left the state. Speaking of conservative, some politicians were excited about all of these people leaving. Here's Scott Beeson, who was then an Alabama state senator, speaking at a rally not long after the law was passed. It is doing what it is supposed to do. It is putting Alabamians back to work. It is putting Alabamians first, which is the way it should be.

And it is saving taxpayers untold dollars. But is it? What really happens when an economy is stripped of its outsiders, when thousands of immigrants pack up and leave? We're heading to Alabama to find out. Welcome to Birmingham. Local time here is about 12.47 Central Time. From Birmingham Airport,

I drove to the tiny agricultural town of Cullman with our producer, Heather Rogers. We saw tractors, horses and some cows. Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. We saw tractors, horses and some cows. What did you do? Did you provoke the cow? I didn't. They were provoking each other. It was like the best interview I've ever done. We were heading to meet farmer Jeremy Calvert,

who for years has employed mostly immigrants on his fruit and veggie farm. Jeremy's crops grow in the rolling hills just outside of Cullman. His family has farmed here for six generations, and he loves it. There's no smell like a load of strawberries. When the weather's been dry and the berries are producing good, but the only way I know that anybody can experience that is is they've got to be right there at that right exact moment because you can't bottle it up and sell it. Jeremy's got 30 acres, and in summer, when his peach trees are heavy with fruit,

he sweats over growing the perfect peach. Nobody wants a little peach. They all have to be big and pretty, you know. Well, that means every limb on They all have to be big and pretty, you know. Well, that means every limb on every tree has to be gone over and it takes time and it takes hands to do it. To get those hands, Jeremy pays $10 an hour for workers. And for at least the last decade, he's mostly hired workers from Mexico and Central America. But after Alabama's immigration law was passed, he says those workers, who he calls Spanish, became harder to find. We noticed over a period of months and maybe a year or so, you just

don't see as many Spanish folks as you once did. And to Jeremy, the promise from politicians that losing immigrants would open up jobs for Americans didn't really pan out. He didn't get American workers in their place. And without the help, Jeremy had to pick up the slack, often working 18-hour days. When you own the operation and the job doesn't get done, the burden falls on one person, and that's me. Now, studies haven't been done in Alabama to see the effect of the law on farmers, but a survey done in Georgia, which is right next door, found that after a very similar law was passed,

farms only had about 60% of the workers that they needed. And this is the sort of thing that Sam Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama, has been studying for years. Those jobs and what they pay, most unemployed people in the US will not take those jobs. Now you might have noticed, Sam has an accent. Yes, I am from a small country in West Africa called Ghana.

But Sam has lived in Alabama for nearly 20 years. And he was one of the economists who warned the state when Alabama's immigration law was passed that there might be a negative impact on farmers like Jeremy. was one of the economists who warned the state when Alabama's immigration law was passed that there might be a negative impact on farmers like Jeremy. Immigrants typically go for the jobs that we shun. So the only way you can have people fill those jobs is to bring them in. Sam points to a study from a few states over in North Carolina that found that in 2011, in the wake of the recession, there were almost half a million unemployed North Carolinians. But when farmers advertised for more than 6,000 job openings,

only seven American workers took those jobs and finished out the season. Yeah, only seven. And the rest of the jobs? They were filled by immigrants. And Trump seems to recognise that we need immigrants to fill some jobs. Like, curiously, he let more immigrants into the US to help work at hotels, including his own. And when it comes to farming,

he has said that he wants to make it easier to let farm workers into the country, but he hasn't done anything yet. So why do we need immigrants to fill these jobs in the first place? Like, why aren't Americans running for jobs on the farm? Well, Jeremy says that he actually used to have a lot of American workers, or what he calls white workers, on his farm. That is, until the late 1990s. We could still get your average white person then, but you move forward to the 2000s and that's just not there anymore. And the data bears some of this out.

In 1990, immigrants made up just 7.5% of men working on farms. By 2012, that number had more than tripled. It's not entirely clear why these days Americans don't want to work on farms. Sam from the University of Alabama says it's partly because Americans have become more educated. More and more Americans are finishing high school and going to college. So for the most part, they want better jobs. Farm work is also really tough, though. We heard this from researchers as well as farmers like Jeremy. He's had high school football players give it a go.

And they struggled. The ones that did make it would come back and tell me, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. To run and work out on a football field in the heat of the day is one thing, but to bend your back and pick squash or pick tomatoes all day long in the rain and the heat and the cold, that's a different matter. Conclusion. Immigrants can fill the jobs that many Americans don't want to do.

In areas like farming, they're not competing for the work. But that's not true for all jobs. There are times when Americans and immigrants do compete for jobs. So what happens then? Well, let's start off with the effect on wages. That is, when immigrants come in, can it drop your pay? For this question, we spoke to Jenny Hunt, an economics professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And she, too, has an accent. So how many passports do you have? I have three passports.

I have Australian, which is the one I originally had, and then I became American before I went to Canada, then I became Canadian. Jenny helped write a major report in 2016 by the National Academy of Sciences on the economic effects of immigrants, and it's over 500 pages long. Very comprehensive. It found that some people do lose out from immigration when it comes to wages.

And FYI, Jenny calls Americans native-born. There'll be winners and losers amongst the native-born. Most research shows that people who didn't finish high school, they tend to be the biggest losers here. We did come to the consensus that there is a negative effect of immigration on very unskilled groups of native-born workers. To understand why, you need to know this. Not everyone is competing for the same work. It mostly depends on your skills and education.

So for the most part, high school dropouts are up against other high school dropouts, and people with PhDs compete with people with PhDs. And it turns out a lot of the people coming to America basically fit into two categories. Immigrants tend to be either very highly educated or very poorly educated, much more so than the natives. For example, if you're a native-born high school graduate, you're actually not competing that much with immigrants. There actually aren't that many immigrants with exactly high school.

You can think about it like this. When a prince comes to America, he's not competing with a McDonald's worker. Well, except for incoming to America. I have recently been placed in charge of garbage. Do you have any that requires disposal? So it's only people who are competing with immigrants for work who might lose wages.

And studies find that it's the low-income workers who are more likely to be losing out. While losing any money in your pay each week sucks, particularly if you're already not making much, it's important to know how much pay someone stands to lose from immigration. Well, this all depends on how you slice up the data, because you've really got to do some careful analysis here. Economists have to separate out the effect of immigration from other changes to the market, so studies vary. They've found that immigrants can drive down the wages

of low-income earners by as much as 9%, all the way down to 0.7%. Put it all together, and the National Academy of Sciences report says that the impact of immigration on the wages of Americans overall, in the long run, is, quote, very small, end quote. On top of that, most Americans, more than 90%, do finish high school. And so, on average, they shouldn't see their wages lowered by immigration. And here's something kind of surprising. Even though some Americans might lose a little bit of their wages thanks to immigration, Jenny told us that Americans, on average, won't lose their jobs because of these newcomers.

In the US, there's really no evidence. Nobody thinks the employment rate is lowered by immigrants. OK, so this raises the obvious question. If there are more people and more competition, why aren't more Americans out of a job? Well, there's something else that immigrants do when they come to a country. They create jobs. Here's how it works. When new people come to the US, they buy food, gasoline, clothes, they rent apartments, they get haircuts,

just like in that immigration documentary with Eddie Murphy. Tell me how you want me to cut this. Just to make it nice and neat. And all that spending creates jobs for people who work in those businesses where immigrants spend their money. That'll be $8. And because of this, back in Alabama, when thousands of undocumented immigrants left, Sam Addy from the University of Alabama was worried. the face was the fact that, holy smokes, don't we realise that for every single one of them who lives, we have less people buying stuff at our grocery stores? And this is true of any immigrant, documented or not. Yes, they are illegal, but their demand is real. And he says that demand,

all that spending, all those new people who want stuff, doesn't just create jobs in restaurants and barbershops, but it actually creates a cascade of new jobs. Doctors need patients, patients. But guess what? There has to be pharmacies on the side, roads to the pharmacies. So now we need civil engineers and builders and draftsmen and architects. So you can keep going on and on. And when do we get to where we need economists?

You need them all along the line. Let me make a point. And how do we know this? Back in 1980, this idea that growing demand creates jobs was put to the ultimate test. Around 120,000 immigrants fled Cuba on boats and landed in Florida over six months, most of them headed to Miami. And this event is known as the Marielle Boat Lift. Between midnight and noon today, 23 boats reached Key West, Florida.

So what happened to the employment rate of Americans in Miami when tens of thousands of immigrants landed there. Well, there was virtually no effect. That's according to several analyses... analysis... analysis... and studies. Anyway. And when you look at studies done elsewhere, say across the US and in Denmark and Germany and Israel and Portugal, well, they find that when an area gets a ton of new immigrants, it either increases unemployment for natives by a little bit or it does nothing at all.

Which really tells us that these new people come in, boost the economy, and all of their new demand, it does create jobs. An influx of immigrants does one more thing. It also fills government purses because they get more in sales and property taxes. Sam says that by icing out undocumented workers, His state ultimately lost out. Since the law was passed, the population has grown at a much slower rate, he says, than it otherwise would have. And to Sam, this slower population growth means less people in Alabama to buy stuff

and less taxes for the state. I think we shot ourselves in the foot and so we haven't been able to grow as much as we could have. So how do you know that that gap in the growth, how do you know that that's because of the law? Because there is no other economic factor to explain that slow growth. And there is a particular group of immigrants, the most highly educated immigrants, that create jobs by doing more than just buying stuff. They innovate. To track innovation, Jenny Hunt at Rutgers University looks at patents. And skilled

immigrants get proportionally more of them than Americans, which, according to Jenny, juices the economy across the board. The benefit is spread over everyone, including the low-skilled native-born workers. And we actually think that innovation not only raises wages, but it actually raises growth. The NAS report went so far as to say that the United States' prospects for long-term economic growth, quote, would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants, end quote.

Conclusion. For some people, particularly high school dropouts, immigrants can lower your wages. Still, the best science we have suggests it doesn't increase unemployment. And that's because when immigrants come, they bump up the economy, which creates new jobs. OK, so immigrants can boost the economy. But how much do they take? And do they drive up the crime rate?

That's coming up after the break. Welcome back. So we've just learnt that immigrants can boost the economy. So they give. But immigrants and their kids, they also take. They get public education, Medicaid, food assistance and subsidised housing. And according to that National Academy of Sciences report, the one that was 500 pages long, documented immigrant households are more likely to be getting some type of welfare than American

households. Add all these things up, and it makes immigrants more expensive than Americans on average. The NAS report found that the government spends hundreds to thousands of dollars on each immigrant per year. So in the short term, immigrants might be a drain on the economy. But watch what happens when this report looked at the longer term. While immigrants might take, the American-born children of immigrants contribute more in federal, state and local taxes than Americans who have been here for multiple generations. The children of immigrants straight up just earn more money and so they pay more taxes than other Americans.

Here's Sam Addy from the University of Alabama again, talking about that big NAS report. Their bottom line analysis is that immigration is good for the country. That is their bottom line. When you read it, you'll see it very clearly. Yes, when the National Academy of Sciences report added it all up that immigrants compete with some workers, help out other workers, lower some wages, boost other wages, ultimately they found that, quote, immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth

in the United States, end quote. Conclusion. Overall, immigrants do take, and they take a lot. But some of what they take is for their kids. And over time, those kiddos boost the American economy and pay a whole lot of taxes. Final question. Immigrants might, on average,

boost the US economy, but what about the crime rates? Are they boosting those too? President Donald Trump seems to think so. Here he is speaking during the election. The US has become a dumping ground

for everybody else's problems. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. And now that he's president, Donald Trump is still very much focused on the crimes that immigrants commit. And the idea that immigrants come to America and commit a lot of crimes

is something that we heard in Alabama too. While we were in Cullman, Heather and I wandered into a small but packed two-chair barber shop. Hey. Hello, girls. Where a man named Charlie Heaton has been cutting hair for decades. He knows just about everyone in town, even our farmer. Yes, I know Jeremy Calvert.

So we had a chat. He comes in here. Oh, the young boy? Yeah, Jeremy. What kind of haircut does he get? Regular. He gets a regular forming haircut. There you go.

The guy sitting in Charlie's chair is a cattle farmer, and he told Heather that he's not a fan of the Mexicans in his area. Yeah. Hey, them Mexicans ain't like everybody thinks they are. What are they like? What they like? Yeah. Them cheating lions and all that. Are all Mexicans like them? Well, them cheating lions, oh, my God.

Are all Mexicans like them? No, no, no, no, no. They might be a few good'uns. There ain't too many good'uns. I know some good'uns. I really do. Charlie, our barber was worried about the immigrants bringing in drugs. The Mexicans, they sell and buy drugs a lot more.

And this idea that immigrants bring in crime is pretty common. In fact, a 2015 Pew survey said that half of all Americans think that immigrants drive up crime. So, is this true? Do immigrants commit more crimes than Americans? Well, some immigrants have entered the U.S US without the AOK of an immigration officer. And when they do that, it is breaking US law. But a lot of people are really concerned about the crime in their neighbourhood and whether that's going up. The drugs, the robberies, the violent crimes. So does immigration drive up that kind of crime? The first thing we tried to figure out was whether

immigration means more drug crime. And it turns out, we don't really know. The research is really mixed, and that's partly because it's really hard to get any data on crime and immigration in the US. Law enforcement doesn't release info on the immigration status of people who commit crimes. But there is some research that comes from another part of the world that's also been worried a lot about immigration, and that's the UK. Brian Bell, an economist at King's College London, has looked into this. And, Brian, he's more British than a cheeky Nando's.

His family has lived in England for a very long time. We've always lived in Britain. I think we've been here since 1066. Wow. So did one of your ancestors colonise Australia or were they sent as a convict to Australia? I'm sure we didn't have any convicts in our family. Brian recently studied how two large immigrant waves to the UK affected crime.

The first were mainly asylum seekers who came in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They came from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. A second wave of foreigners came from the European Union. Mainly Polish, some Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, so all of the East European countries that joined the European Union in 2004. Brian looked at how these waves of immigrants affected violent crime rates, that is, murder, assault, rape, as well as property crimes, breaking into houses, stealing cars and shoplifting.

He said that when it came to violent crimes, breaking into houses, stealing cars and shoplifting. He said that when it came to violent crimes, immigrants had no effect. And this is consistent with other work in the field. None of these immigrant groups and none of the immigrant groups that I've seen across any study that's been done suggests any effect on violent crime. But what about property crime? Well, when the Eastern Europeans came, there was no effect At the margin, in fact, it looks like they reduced crime in areas they went to There was certainly no increase

But for the asylum seekers, that first wave? What we found was there was some small increase in property crime in areas where they went to And how big was the increase in property crime when you look at the refugees that came? So it's a really small effect. Ultimately, he found that if you had a town of 10,000 people and 100 asylum seekers moved there, the property crime rate would increase by 1.1%. Realistically, if you lived in an area where there were a collection of asylum seekers,

you wouldn't have noticed any change in the crime rate. Now, Brian has a theory for why there was a difference between asylum seekers and the other immigrants. And that is that asylum seekers who came to the UK couldn't work while their applications for asylum were under review, while immigrants from the European Union, they could work. And, you know, people who have jobs tend not to commit property crime because they've worked out that working legally is a better deal than committing crime.

And Brian says that other studies have reached the same conclusion. A study that was done in Italy using a very similar kind of approach that we did and a study in the United States that did, again, a very similar kind of approach. Both of those studies found that, on average, there was very little effect of immigrants on crime. The growing consensus here is that when immigrants arrive to a country, they don't increase the crime rate. In fact, neighbourhoods with more immigrants often have lower than average crime. Five out of six studies published in the past year or so found no link

between immigration and increased crime. And that was true for documented and undocumented immigrants. Why do you think that people are so sure that immigrants are causing crime when the evidence isn't there to show it? In some sense, you could argue it's because we're asking different questions. What academics are asking is what's the average effect? That's different from asking a question of, oh, if 10 new immigrants arrive in my town, does that mean I'm definitely not going to see an increase in crime? Well, no, it doesn't, because just like if 10 new natives arrived in your town, they might be bad people and they might commit crime.

And what about Alabama? What happened to the crime when these immigrants left? Well, in 2016, researchers from Texas A&M University tracked the crime rates in Alabama from before and after the law kicked in. And they found that when the immigrants left, the violent crime rate rose, and the property crime rate, it stayed about the same.

I put our research to Charlie over at the barbershop in Cullman and told him that it seems like, if anything, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. I can see what you're saying, because if they commit crimes, they're going to draw attention to their self and they'll get deported. I can see that statistic being right.

Conclusion. The vast majority of research shows that immigrants don't bump up the crime rate. So, when it comes to science versus immigration, does it stack up? One, what are all these immigrants doing to the economy? Like, are they taking American jobs? For the most part, no.

Immigration can lead to a little less pay for some low-income workers, especially those without a high school education. But generally, immigrants are not running people out of work because when they come to America, they bring new demand and that creates jobs. Overall, the consensus of economists is that immigrants are good for the economy. Two, are they driving up the crime rate? No. In general, immigrants do not increase the crime rate.

And in fact, they might even lower it. So bottom line, the evidence tells us that overall, immigrants are good for a country. But of course, with an accent like mine, I would say that. OK, how's this? Overall, the science tells us that immigrants make America more prosperous. And I bet you believe me right now. That's science versus immigration.

Next week, we're back to our regular science verses and we're tackling CBD. Should you be taking it? When was the first time you tried CBD? Definitely, it was in Colorado. I thought my whole body turned into liquid. That's the best way I can put it. This episode was produced and updated by Meryl Horne, and the original episode

was produced by Heather Rogers, Shruti Ravindran, and me, Wendy Zuckerman. Caitlin Sori is our Senior Producer, Production Assistance by Ben Kebrick. We're edited by Annie Rose Strasser and Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Meryl Horne. Sound engineering, music production, and original music

by Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. Thanks to Dr Anna Pildam, Professor Karis Kubrin, Assistant Professor Jorg Spenkook, Professor Kristen Butcher and Ramiro Martinez, as well as the Zuckerman family. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.