Don’t Slam the Door: How immigrants keep this country rolling
March 2002

By Tamar Jacoby

When is enough, enough?" a 48-year-old assistant office manager asked readers of the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call. "Now!" she answered. "All who are not American born and raised should be escorted out of our country."

Hers was not a lonely voice in the aftermath of September 11. Phones rang off the hook at radio call-in shows; angry messages flooded Internet chat rooms. Members of Congress soon joined in, demanding that the country stop admitting foreign students, freeze all visas for six months, even station troops and tanks on the borders.

And when a semi-retired insurance adjuster insisted in the Dallas Morning News that "we must act now to close our borders," surveys showed many Americans agreed. One poll, by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics, found that 65 percent of the public favored "temporarily sealing U.S. borders and stopping all immigration" until the war against terror was over.

The raw emotion behind these demands is understandable. Everyone agrees that we must find better ways to filter the bad guys-terrorists, drug smugglers and other criminals-from the imported labor and talent that keeps America dynamic. We need to strike a balance between openness and tighter scrutiny. But sealing the border or cutting off immigration, even temporarily, would undermine our economy and our freedom.

The numbers alone are mind-boggling. Last year the Customs Service processed 472 million people-and 141 million cars and trucks-entering the country. About 500,000 of these visitors were bona fide immigrants seeking to make a new life. Another 28 million or so were tourists, foreign students and business travelers.

Most of the others were a new kind of international commuter: truckers hauling freight from Canada and Mexico, workers getting to jobs in cities such as San Diego and Detroit, even shoppers. They all help keep the wheels of prosperity turning.

Ripple Effect

Consider Laredo, Texas (pop. 177,000), where roughly 81,000 Mexicans enter each day. If the border were sealed, Les Norton would have a big problem.

"We could survive but it would be a major, major blow to our operations," says Norton, co-owner of three clothing stores. "I invest in the stock market. I send my kids to college. I couldn’t do any of that if it weren’t for the Mexican shopper."

He wouldn't be alone. "Some of our stores do 80 to 90 percent of their business with Mexican citizens," says Miguel Conchas, president of Laredo's chamber of commerce.

Many Laredo companies also employ Mexican workers, and Conchas says a large number would have to shut down. So would freight forwarders and truckers transporting goods across the Rio Grande. That in turn would affect many other businesses-everything from supermarkets to appliance stores-where Mexican employees spend their money.

The same negative ripple effect would rock cities and towns all along the 2000-mile border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Southwest is the nation’s fastest-growing economic region. And that growth depends on a huge cross-border flow of customers, workers, parts and goods.

But open borders drive far more than small businesses in Southwest cities. Immigrant labor, legal and illegal, now provides critical manpower for many American industries-everything from hotels and restaurants to garment making, construction and even computer manufacturing.

Agriculture is the most dramatic example: Some 80 percent of our farmhands are foreign-born, according to the US Department of Labor. "People here just don’t want to harvest fruit or work in cotton fields-or do any kind of entry-level work," says Kerry Whitson, who raises plums and grapes in Exeter, Calif.

The pattern is the same all the way up the food chain. "We don't have enough people in Nebraska and Iowa to process the food we raise," says Dale Tinstman, a former executive at meatpacking giant IBP Inc. According to an American Meat Institute survey, nearly 20 percent of the meat and poultry industry work force are Hispanics, many of whom are migrant laborers.

Three years ago, Nebraska citizens and law enforcement officials asked the INS to round up illegal immigrants in the state's meatpacking plants. The INS had identified some 4800 workers when, according to Mark Reed, the agent responsible for the operation, "the very same people who invited us in the first place invited us to leave."

Without immigrants, the retail prices of meat, fresh fruits and vegetables would rise some 15 percent, says Dave Juday, an economist with the Institute for 21st Century Agriculture in Churchville, Va. "In restaurants, which are large employers of immigrants, the price increases could be double that."

New Economy, Old Economy

Cutting off immigration would also hammer high-tech companies. Foreignborn-scientists and engineers account for a third of the technical work force in Silicon Valley, says AnnaLee Saxenian, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. Fully a quarter of the high-tech companies started there in the 1990s, she adds, are run by Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs.

That's the situation now; over the next decade America will need 50 percent more people with science degrees, according to NASA administrator Dan Goldin. Where will we get them?

“The number of American-born science and engineering students is plummeting," says Jerry MacArthur Hultin, a dean at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. In fact, 48 percent of the doctorates awarded at Stevens in 2001 went to foreign students.

To ease a nursing shortage, American hospitals recruit from as far away as the Philippines-and as nearby as Canada. Joyce Farrer is one of several hundred health care workers who commute to Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital from Windsor, Ontario.

"For me, it's as if the border doesn’t exist, says Farrer, director of nursing at the Ford trauma center. Without these Canadians (or other foreign-born nurses), the hospital would have to take beds out of service.

But Canada sends us more than just nurses. Every day $1.3 billion worth of manufactured goods crosses the border-the largest trade flow in the world. About a quarter of these goods are automotive parts.

Do You Know There are: 564, 683 foreign students in the United States 4.41 million business travellers 23.25 million tourists --------------------------------------------------- Immigrants are: 20% of all medical doctors 22.7% of all Ph.D.s 81% of all farmhands 10.7% self-employed --------------------------------------------------- 26% of U.S. patents are created by foreign-born people

Sealing the border would have major repercussions for this trade. Even unanticipated delays at Customs stations can be disastrous, says Stephen E. Flynn, a national security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If trucks carrying parts for a Ford Explorer are stuck in an inspection line, assembly plants can quickly fall idle, with costs running as high as $1 million per hour."

THE CHALLENGE we face is how to isolate terrorists without isolating America. Here are some steps to take:

• Screen visitors more carefully before they get here. Last year a mere 900 State Department consular officers, assisted by 2500 foreign nationals, handled some 7.1 million visas. With that overwhelming load, officers had only a few minutes to review most applications. In some embassies, they interviewed fewer than ten percent of the applicants, and had little time to verify all the information they got.
• This must change. Consular officers must have far better access to databases-those of the FBI, CIA and our allies-with information about terrorist suspects.
• Streamline border crossings. One good idea that's surfaced since 9/11: Some travelers could go through U.S. Customs in their home countries, where there's more time for a thorough investigation. Another good idea: Cargo could be cleared in advance and then shipped through inspection stations in sealed containers.
• Meanwhile, Customs and INS agents, too, must have access to the best databases, and there must be more manpower on the border. Congress has already authorized tripling the number of agents on the Canadian frontier, and Attorney General John Ashcroft has assigned National Guard troops to assist them. Congress is also moving to require that every foreign visitor carry a tamper-resistant passport or biometric visa-one with the traveler's fingerprints or a retinal scan.
• Keep better tabs on visitors already here. There are far too many to track, but even a little more knowledge would be helpful.
• Congress is moving to insist that schools with foreign students report to the INS if they don’t show up. And an immigration bill with bipartisan support will require the INS to electronically track whether travelers leave the country when they're supposed to. That way, if the FBI needed to find someone, at least it would know whether to begin looking in the United States or abroad.

But tracking visitors makes sense only if America comes to grips with the estimated eight million undocumented workers here already. Most of them pose no threat. But as long as they must sneak in and live as criminals, the INS will spend most of its resources chasing busboys and farmhands, rather than intercepting terrorists.

Last summer President Bush discussed creating a guest-worker program so that undocumented workers could come and go legally, and some could stay permanently. September 11 temporarily derailed that proposal, but the reasons behind it haven’t changed. We still depend on these foreigners' labor, and their illegal presence here still makes a mockery of the law. Granting them a legal status and giving them modern travel documents is one of the best ways to make the borders more secure.

FOREIGNERS BRING PLUCK and grit that nourish not just American businesses, but also the way we live. “There among our best employees," says Gary Ruble, president of a small manufacturing plant in Indianola, Iowa, "loyal, hard-working, and full of gratitude for the chance to work and do something with their talents."

Despite 9/11, Rudolph Giuliani is no less committed to immigration. "We shouldn't allow what's happened to us to stop that in any way at all," he said in his farewell address as New York City’s mayor. "We should continue to be open to new people from all over the world."

One of the people who took advantage of our openness was Vinod Dham, who came here from India to get a graduate engineering degree. He planned to go home, but ended up at Intel, the giant computer-chip maker founded by Hungarian immigrant Andrew Grove.

"The system here allows you to show your true worth in a way you couldn't in India," Dham says. And so it did. Vinod Dham led the research team that developed the microprocessor that tens of millions of Americans use every day to crunch numbers, go online and send e-mails. It's called the Pentium chip.

©2002 Reader’s Digest

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