"Better not to come."

MEXICO CITY -- Lorenzo Martinez, an illegal immigrant who has lived in Los Angeles for six years, has a message for his kin in Mexico's Hidalgo state: Stay put.

The steady construction work that had allowed him to send home as much as $1,000 a month in recent years had disappeared. The 36-year-old father of four said desperation was growing among the day laborers with whom he was competing for odd jobs.

Sporadic employment isn't the half of it. Martinez said anxiety also was running high among undocumented workers about stepped-up workplace raids, deportations and increasing demands by U.S. employers for proof that they were in the country legally.

"Better not to come," Martinez said of anyone thinking about crossing into the U.S. illegally. "The situation is really bad."

The undocumented hesitate to enter a less-alluring U.S. (Los Angeles Times, 26 Dec 2007)

"They just want to stand outside and throw rocks..."

Summer vegetables are ripening in fields across North Carolina, but farmers fear the bounty could go unharvested if a growing labor shortage continues.

Now with the collapse this week of the immigration bill in the U.S. Senate, some farmers say they are angry and weary of waiting for help from Washington.

"They just want to stand outside and throw rocks. You wonder whether any of them want to do anything," said Thomas Joyner, president of Nash Produce, a Nash County cooperative that sells sweet potatoes, cucumbers and tobacco. Joyner was sorting freshly picked cucumbers late into the night Thursday and didn't realize until daybreak that the immigration deal had been scuttled, at least for now.

"They still can't solve it," Joyner said.

[...]

...farmers argue that replacing immigrant workers with American labor is impossible. They say they advertise all their jobs, and few if any domestic workers respond.

"Americans today don't want to sweat and get their hands dirty," said Doug Torn, who owns a wholesale nursery in Guilford County.

Immigration Defeat Threatens N.C. Crops (The News and Observer, Raleigh, NC, June 9, 2007)

Meet "Marcus Biko"

With respect to the proposed immigration reform package, Cobb's got a good idea:

First of all, if I had 5000 cash to spare, I would get in line and get one of these new biometric foolproof ID cards. I mean what a great deal. Who cares if I don't get citizenship for 13 years. I've got an unassailable ID. I'll be Marcus Biko from Botswana. Who's going to prove I'm not? I was clever enough to get over here, sorry I don't have any records of that, I destroyed them out of paranoia. Do I have any relatives in Botswana? No my family was killed. Try the embassy. Do I have a bank account? No. I just show up, wait in line and get certified as Marcus Biko. Who's going to check when there are 12 million others in line too?

If I had $5K lying around unoccupied, I might follow Cobb's lead, although I think I'd have a slightly harder time convincing people that I'm Steve Garvey.

Paul Rubin: Evolution, Immigration and Trade

Public policy pays surprisingly little attention to evolutionary psychology. Yet there are many human intuitions and behaviors that influence contemporary policy issues -- sometimes in ways that are no longer useful or perhaps even harmful to humans flourishing. These intuitions are sometimes referred to as "folk economics," and one area in which they often emerge is the international economy.

Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum -- if a particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of another.

This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day, we often see the gain of some people and assume it has come at the expense of others. Economists have argued for more than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether domestic or international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else the exchange wouldn't occur. Economists have also long argued that the economics of immigration -- immigrants coming here to exchange their labor for money that they then exchange for the products of other people's labor -- is positive sum. Yet our evolutionary intuition is that, because foreign workers gain from trade and immigrant workers gain from joining the U.S. economy, native-born workers must lose. This zero-sum thinking leads us to see trade and immigration as conflict ("trade wars," "immigrant invaders") when trade and immigration actually produce cooperation and mutual benefit, the exact opposite of conflict.

Paul Rubin, "Evolution, Immigration and Trade," The Washington Post, May 7, 2007

Hat tip: Hit and Run

Illegal Immigrant Visas (and Mastercards)

While US officials dither over immigration policy, business is quietly recognizing the immense power of the underground economy... and bankers, quite sensibly, are loath to leave all that business to the check cashing stores and Western Union:

In the latest sign of the U.S. banking industry's aggressive pursuit of the Hispanic market, Bank of America Corp. has quietly begun offering credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers -- typically illegal immigrants.

In recent years, banks across the country have begun offering checking accounts and, in some cases, mortgages to the nation's fast-growing ranks of undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic. But these immigrants generally haven't been able to get major credit cards, making it hard for them to develop a credit history and expand their purchasing power.

The new Bank of America program is open to people who lack both a Social Security number and a credit history, as long as they have held a checking account with the bank for three months without an overdraft. Most adults in the U.S. who don't have a Social Security number are undocumented immigrants.

Bank of America Casts Wider Net For Hispanics (Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2007; subscription required)

It's news to me that you can even open a checking account without a Social Security Number, much less get a credit card.

When I moved to New York City ten years ago, opening a checking account here was like applying for a low-level security clearance, and I thought (mistakenly, it seems) that the Patriot Act recently made banking restrictions (requiring proof of identity to open accounts) even tighter.

Guess not:

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said banking products aimed at illegal immigrants "reinforce the need for a temporary worker program" that the Bush administration has been promoting. That program would screen, tax and otherwise regulate immigrant workers and, the administration contends, would squeeze out illegal workers who now use forged or stolen documents to get jobs, driver's licenses and occasionally credit.

Anti-money-laundering regulations passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks put more pressure on banks to verify customers' identity and watch for suspicious transactions, but they don't require banks to ascertain whether account holders are in the U.S. legally. Most banks require a Social Security number or ITIN to open an account, but regulations also allow them to accept other government-issued forms of identification in some instances, including passport numbers, alien identification numbers or any government-issued document with photo showing nationality or place of residence.

Update: This article is available at AOL Money also - no WSJ subscription required.

They're good arepas, too

Manuel A. Miranda was 8 when his family immigrated to New York from Bogotá. His parents, who had been lawyers, turned to selling home-cooked food from the trunk of their car. Manuel pitched in after school, grinding corn by hand for traditional Colombian flatbreads called arepas.

Today Mr. Miranda, 32, runs a family business with 16 employees, producing 10 million arepas a year in the Maspeth section of Queens. But the burst of Colombian immigration to the city has slowed; arepas customers are spreading through the suburbs, and competition for them is fierce. Now, he says, his eye is on a vast, untapped market: the rest of the country.

In the long run, like bagels, “you’re going to have arepas in every store,” predicted Mr. Miranda, whose innovations include a “toaster-friendly” version (square instead of round), and an experimental Web site that offers online sales nationwide. “But I don’t have the connections. I don’t know the people who can advise how to take us to the next level.”

Immigrant Entrepreneurs Shape A New Economy (New York Times, January 6, 2007)

A few random thoughts and observations.

(1) I've tasted these arepas, and for mass-produced arepas they are indeed quite amazingly good. (I grew up eating cornbread, and I have yet to find any variant of cornbread that I do not enjoy eating.)

(2) Lawyering skills, depending on the area of law you practice in, are not necessarily all that portable from state to state in the Union; to be trained and certified in another country's legal system, and then to emigrate as Mr. Miranda's parents did is truly a leap of faith, because you really are abandoning your luggage at the station.

(3) We seem to have a very different experience of immigration in New York City from the rest of the country. New York City's economy, from top to bottom, depends on the energy and drive of immigrants.

(4) Mr. Miranda will, no doubt, ultimately connect with the right people to help him take his business to the next level; I devoutly hope that the quality of the arepas does not suffer.

Immigration economics 101

Foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four U.S. technology startups over the past decade, according to a study to be published Thursday.

A team of researchers at Duke University estimated that 25 percent of technology and engineering companies started from 1995 to 2005 had at least one senior executive — a founder, chief executive, president or chief technology officer — born outside the United States.

Immigrant entrepreneurs' companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to the survey.

Their contributions to corporate coffers, employment and U.S. competitiveness in the global technology sector offer a counterpoint to the recent political debate over immigration and the economy, which largely centers on unskilled, illegal workers in low-wage jobs.

"It's one thing if your gardener gets deported," said the project's Delhi-born lead researcher, Vivek Wadhwa. "But if these entrepreneurs leave, we're really denting our intellectual property creation.

Wadhwa, Duke's executive in residence and the founder of two tech startups in North Carolina's Research Triangle, said the country should make the most of its ability to "get the best and brightest from around the world."

Immigrants behind 25 percent of startups (AP via Yahoo! News - January 4, 2007)

Simulated US citizenship test

...for naturalization candidates, at MSNBC. Here you go, citizen.

I scored 100%. How'd you do? (Be honest.)

Hat tip: The Modulator.