Mass Immigration and the National Interest.

• Author: Dunlevy, James A.

Briggs's thesis is that U.S. immigration policy has been driven by short-sighted and ill-conceived political compromise, and that this policy has stimulated a massive inflow of those persons most detrimental to the American labor market, in general, and to the labor market fortunes of native-born minorities, in particular. Briggs introduces this theme on page one, where he defines "mass immigration" as an inflow whose chief characteristic is its quantitative size. He sharpens this definition, however, asserting, ". . . implicit in the usage of |"mass immigration"~ is disregard for the human capital characteristics of those who enter--especially in relation to the prevailing economic trends and social stresses at work within our nation."

The book comprises eight chapters, the first of which is a brief overview. Chapter two briefly reviews (the lack of adequate) immigration data and then selectively summarizes the treatment of migration in the economics literature. Chapters three through six are historical, and chapter seven is an analysis, according to Briggs, of the post World War II transformation of the American economy. Chapter eight reviews the Immigration Act of 1990 and gives the author's views on how this and other recent immigration legislation have been precisely the wrong policies for the post-war U.S. economy.

The great strength of the book is its historical chapters. In chapter 3, Briggs takes the reader from the colonial period through the first three great waves of immigration, i.e., up to the National Origins Act of 1924. Chapter 4 reviews immigration and domestic labor market trends during 1920s, 1930s, and early-1940s, a period of little to no immigration, and the latter half of the 1940s and 1950s, when the problems of large scale refugee flows came to dominate the political arena. Chapters 5 and 6 are lengthy, detailed descriptions and analyses of immigration policy since the 1960s. The spillover from domestic civil rights legislation to the move away from national origins as the basis for immigration is spotlighted. The irony that consequences of the resulting immigration legislation were detrimental to the economic mobility of native-born blacks is also stressed. In these chapters the student of American immigration can learn the political expediencies that lie behind the various categories--immigrant, nonimmigrant, asylee, and parolee--under which persons legally enter the United States. The historical material in...