Book Review 
Myths of Migration
4/5 stars
"A thoughtful look at a charged topic." 

Of the book: 

-669 point citations
-1.8/page
-23 chapters@16 pages per

For people who don't want to read the book, I would say the 3 biggest themes are:

1. Immigration is a Rorschach blot test: whatever you project onto it is what you already believe. 

2. Public policy favors more well-off people, and immigration policy is universally the same thing from one country to the next in that regard.

3. Migration, both legal and illegal, are informed by economic calculus and incentives. A good economy will attract more immigrants and a bad economy will cool them off.

There are some good things that this book has going for it:

1. It is on the Basic Books Label. (I've read only good books from that label, with one notable exception.)

2. It is fabulously easy to read and impressively well written for someone who speaks English as a second language (and had to do all of his sourcing in a foreign language).

The essays are all free-standing and can thus be read out of order or reread later for some of the interesting things.

3. It is a very thoughtful book.

There are, however, a few other things that make me less confident in the knowledge that I gained from this book:


FIRST IS THAT the author is a sociologist, and I think an economist co-author would have been helpful for some of the discussions of the microeconomic aspects. 

-Primo: A lot of the discipline is giving intellectual scaffolding / camouflage to ideas that are essentially political in nature. (p.144: "... real causes of these problems are not immigration, but deliberately policy choices that deregulated labor markets, decreased job security, we can trade unions, eroded workers rights, depressed wages and increased income inequality.")

-Secundo:  Sociology has not moved into its maturity, it is not really that well-respected as a discipline. (Not without reason!)

SECOND IS THAT the author is carrying around a lot of White Guilt. He seems to use it to make a lot of false symmetries, which makes this whole book somewhat suspect: 

1. Equate the European colonization of The New World as equivalent to gate crashers from Central and South America into the United States. (Or at least to not treat the European colonization as motivated by economic incentives.)

The first was people who came and found no republic set up and they built one. The second are people that are entering an existing republic and undoing the existing structure. 

2. He (myth 4) seems to assume that just because something has been true in the past then it will be true in the future. So, White Christian Germans were thought to be unassimilable about a century ago, and it turned out to not be true. Therefore, medievally-oriented Muslim Arabs will take the same direction as Germans did and just be a piece of cake to assimilate.

Unlikely. (Lindy's law: something is likely to happen as long is it already has been happening; The Arabs are likely to stay mentally in the 7th century as long as they have already been there.)

3. (p.203) The ONLY reason that some immigrants are arrested is because police seek them out and prosecutors prosecute them at a higher rate than they do non-whites. (It's like Haitians in Miami / other similar examples don't even exist for this author.)

4. He seems to find a way to talk away a lot of things--especially things that might be important to people who have to actually live with immigrants. (p.230: "The Latino workers... wouldn't speak English... There were also annoyances such as the driving habits of the Mexican workers, who often didn't have licenses and frequently ignored traffic rules. The immigrant workers would parked cars in front yards and leave garbage cans and trash strewn on the lawns destroying the grass.... They came from places in the Mexican countryside where a perfectly kept lawn was not a thing.")

THIRD IS THAT Some of his observations are just technically untrue / on-the-facts wrong. 

1. (p.137). Multiplier effect. Author talks is if this is something that is undisputed, but it's just...... not. There are disagreements about both the magnitude and direction of said multiplier.

2.(Myth 9, p. 154): "The root cause of the growing lack of affordable housing across the West is not immigration, but a sharp decline in the stock of social and rent protected housing units because of changes in housing policies." 

Just....NO. (" Social housing" is his word for housing projects/section 8.) Housing projects have been such a bad idea in The States that local governments have had to stop funding them or actively tear them down. (You would not expect something good to happen when people occupy houses that they will never own and for the upkeep of which they are not responsible. And if you know that, you know that it is a bottomless pit for government revenue.) 

They are serious reservoirs of crime that create extremely expensive policing costs and fodder for the criminal justice system. (If Latisha has 6 sons by 7 different men and none of them are present in the children's lives, then jail is a very likely outcome for several. Incarceration is not cheap.)

In case we forgot, he comes back to rent controlled housing again in Myth 11

3. (Myth 12) Author says that immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born people, but does he only mean violent crime? And does it have to be illegal for it to be bad? And can it be that overall is the same, but some are disproportionately criminal in specific sectors? 

For example: we have medical fraud cases around here in the Southeast Michigan newspapers on a weekly basis, and almost 100% of them are Arab. (Michigan is 1.555% Arab.) 

4. Author seems to assume that gaps in income between different ethnic groups are *always and everywhere* because of discrimination. (Myth 10) But then, in the very next chapter he is producing the concept of "downward mobility" (=more contact of immigrant groups with lower class natives and assimilation thereto) to explain immigrant criminality. 

Sloppy reasoning, and you can't have it both ways.

5. Reality does not exist for this guy. If two groups have a difference in performance in general, then it just MUST be because of racism and no other reason. If you have some people decide that other people are not a good fit for them socially (blacks are the least selected group for interracial marriage) or in business contexts (It is not common for black people to be hired in Middle Eastern or Asian businesses where they can be in a position to touch cash), then it cannot be that they excluding parties have learned from their prior experiences. It MUST be racism.

6. (p.178). "Fundamental pillars of American society have remained unaltered, including... the dominance of English." (Has this guy ever tried speaking English in Miami? Or Texas?)

7. (p.281). Author derived public opinion on immigration from surveys--which are notoriously unreliable.
*******
Second order thoughts:

1. I do wonder what this means for black people. The author mentions (p. 40) that the cut off of Asian immigration was what prompted the Great Migration of blacks from the south. So, if there were no other source of labor available, then employers would use blacks. But.... If there is a lot of South American labor available, might the process reverse and employers would choose them in favor of blacks? (I deliver to factories here in Southeast Michigan, and there are quite a few where there are ZERO black people employed; most of our skilled trades unions are also very nearly 100% white in these parts.)

2. The author keeps repeating over and over again that such-and-such is such a "small amount"  or "a low percentage." That's not really the greatest argument, because only 5% of immigration to the US is Muslim, but they are 90% of our terror attacks/foiled terror attacks.

He also has said in several places that this-or-that is only some "small percent of the GDP." So if something is 2.3% of the GDP, it's actually 10% of the entire budget. (US government budget is 23% of GDP.)

Migrants are "only"  3% of the world population. 3% of 8.1 billion is 243 million people.

3. At the very end of the book he says that he is not in the business of making policy recommendations, but I do wonder: is there any way that immigration can be properly regulated? Has anybody figured out how to do this? 

4. When there are conflicts between two groups of people, they have to have started somewhere. The conflict between Hakka (Chinese for "guest people") and Punti people went on for about 1,000 years *only after the Hakka moved there*, and they are still referred to as "guest people"  1,000 years later.

Could South American immigration tip the United States into a language conflict? It will have to start somewhere. 
********

Neat factoids:

1. Haratins are blacks in Mauritania, where slavery was just abolished in 1981.

2. Segregation index means zero when completely integrated and 100 when totally segregated. Black segregation is currently 60, Asian is 39 and Latino is 51. (Above 60 is considered high.)

3. Immigration is typically done by people that can afford it, which explains why it is the wealthier people in middle income countries and not the lowest income people in low income countries.

4. Immigration increases higher incomes more than it increases lower incomes. Wealthy people take far more of the benefit of immigrants far more often than working squares.

5. Immigrants will not be enough to refresh aging populations, first because the numbers of people needed are just not feasible. (Keeping the demographic support ratio would require $593 million immigrants from 1995 to 2050. That would be 10.8 million people per year, over 10 times the actual immigration. Japan would require 553 million people over the same period.) And second because immigrant fertility levels declined two / below native levels just within one generation.

6. "Discursive gap." Politicians talk a tough game but prosecutions are less than 25 per year (This is out of a total of 11 million employers). Jail time happens for less than five people per year and finds range from $583 to $4,667 per violation. One person out of every 14,000 illegal immigrants was arrested at a work site during even the Trump crackdown (p.258).

7. Left and right wing immigration parties are divided within themselves: left wing parties favor labor unions (who are hostile to immigration), but consider freedom of movement a human right; right wing parties favor business lobbies (who want cheap labor), But consider law and order and enforcement of borders their ideological selling point. Resulting policies are correspondingly incoherent.

8. (p.307). The amount spent on border enforcement is 24% higher than the combined costs of the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, US Marshals, and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. 

9. The author breaks the imaginary link between climate change and immigration, and it's not going to make him any friends.

10. Sex work is nothing like in the movie "Taken." A lot of women come to do one job and find out that they can make better money per hour as sex workers, and they do it quite voluntarily.

VERDICT: Guarded recommendation. Second hand purchase only. 

Vocabulary: 

Haratins (Black people in Mauritania)

land subsidence

polder

Quotes: 

"War made the state and the state made war." (Charles Tilly)

"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary worker."