The Immigration Equation

The day I met George Borjas, cloistered in his office at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard while graduate students from Russia, India, China and maybe Mexico mingled in the school cafe, sipping coffee and chattering away in all their tongues, the United States Senate was hotly debating what to do about the country’s immigration policy. Borjas professed to be unfazed by the goings-on in Washington. A soft-spoken man, he stressed repeatedly that his concern was not to make policy but to derive the truth. To Borjas, a Cuban immigrant and the pre-eminent scholar in his field, the truth is pretty obvious: immigrants hurt the economic prospects of the Americans they compete with. And now that the biggest contingent of immigrants are poorly educated Mexicans, they hurt poorer Americans, especially African-Americans, the most.