Two immigrants debate immigration: a conversation about who wins and who loses when America opens its golden door.

• Author: Dalmia, Shikha
• Position: Discussion

Even as the mighty Statue of Liberty beckons the world's "poor and huddled masses" to America's shores, Americans themselves have been ambivalent, to put it mildly, about how many newcomers ought to be welcomed and from where. To the extent that a pro-immigration consensus has existed, it was always an uneasy one. But Donald Trump's meteoric political rise after embracing an extreme restrictionist agenda has shattered that fragile status quo, dividing pundits and public, academics and analysts throughout the 2016 election season. There's an absence of good polling data to shine a light on how immigrants themselves feel about this issue, but it's clear that even they don't all agree.

George J. Borjas is a celebrated Harvard University economist who emigrated from Cuba to the United States with his mother at the age of 12, three years after Fidel Castro's regime took over the country and confiscated his father's garment factory. He has made vital contributions to many fields of economics, especially immigration, and has a new book, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, out this month. In it, he challenges the notion that immigration is "universally beneficial."

Shikha Dalmia is a Reason Foundation analyst and a native of New Delhi, India, who came to America 31 years ago as an idealistic student looking to escape the corruption of a socialistic mixed economy. She writes extensively about immigration and firmly believes America shuts the door on outsiders at its economic and spiritual peril.

What follows is a spirited exchange between the two on the empirical claims and proposed policy prescriptions in We Wanted Workers.

Dear Professor Borjas:

Let me congratulate you on a book that is a model of clarity. We Wanted Workers systematically walks readers through the immigration literature. Along the way, it offers a sense of the immensely knotty methodological problems that bedevil the dismal science. Also, I agree completely that the "overreliance on economic modeling and statistical findings" on this subject is a regrettable development that fosters the notion that "purely technocratic determinations of public policy" are possible. In fact, the scientific hubris underlying such efforts prevents a full airing of the normative and ideological commitments that ultimately do--and perhaps should--guide policy.

That said, the more I read, the more despondent I got. The publisher's teaser promises that the book "takes a fresh and thought-provoking new look" that parses the claims on the "two extreme poles" of those calling for "tougher laws...in a racially tinged discourse" on one end and those pushing for "more open policies" on the other. But the book focused almost exclusively on the second target while largely ignoring the first, even when its own facts warranted a smackdown.

You point out that the pro-immigration camp's claims that America is a magnet for the "best and brightest" are overblown because which foreigners--high-skilled or low-skilled--make a beeline for America depends on how well their skills are rewarded in their own country. Highly egalitarian countries such as Denmark lose their highly skilled workers because, relative to less-skilled counterparts, their labor is rewarded less well, whereas the reverse is the case in highly inegalitarian countries such as Mexico. That's an interesting thesis, but it doesn't explain India, my native country, which has extreme inequality and is among the biggest "donors" of high-skilled talent. It was odd that you shoehorned India into the same category as Canada and Australia as a country with "less inequality."

But America's genius is not that it draws the best people but that it draws out the best from people, which is why even the world's "wretched" manage to make something of themselves here. Indeed, the essential thing for "success" is not a college degree but drive, which those with the cojones to uproot themselves and make the difficult schlep to a foreign land have in spades. This process of self-selection has served America--and immigrants--so well that even the restrictionist lobby hasn't questioned it. But you devote a whole chapter to lamenting the forces of "self-selection" that thwart Uncle Sam's efforts to ensure that immigrants who come to America are "exactly the types the country is looking for." Putting more faith in government over markets to properly regulate labor flows isn't very American!

But even if one accepts that the "best and brightest" trope is oversimplified, it's at least pardy true. Not so with the poisonous myths of the restrictionist right about anchor babies and chain migration. These things occur, but are hardly widespread phenomena. Consider chain migration. Restrictionists allege that letting immigrants sponsor non-nuclear family members sets off a chain reaction as immigrants sponsor their relatives to come to America who sponsor more relatives...until entire Third World villages are emptied into America! But the only "non-nuclear" relatives that citizens or permanent residents are allowed to sponsor are siblings. What's more, there is a strict annual national quota on the number that can be admitted from each country. This produces long wait times that currently touch 23 years for siblings of Filipino immigrants, making widespread chain migration a virtual impossibility. You acknowledge all these facts but never connect the dots to say as much. There are many such omissions.

We Wanted Workers confirms the hardline restrictionist narrative that low-skilled immigrants don't assimilate economically, meaning that their wages lag behind other groups. I appreciate that you blame this not on their ethnicity, as is the wont of the racist restrictionists, but on their entering skill levels, which track the nations they come from. Comparing German and Mexican immigrants, you note that the 30 percent wage gap that existed between them in 1920...