Community Costs

It is the local community as a whole that is forced to assume the costs of immigration. While many of the owners of business and capital may view immigrants-whether low-skilled or high-skilled-primarily as a source of cheaper labor, those workers can be quite expensive to the rest of the members of a community. And while some private orga­nizations may promote immigration as a way for them to express chari­table feelings, all the other members of a community end up paying most of the costs.

In myriad ways, a community subsidizes those who benefit from high immigration.

Some of the subsidy is monetary: social services to foreign workers who do not earn enough money to rise above poverty; issuance of new school bonds to educate the foreign workers' children; additional in­frastructure to handle an expanding population that cannot pay enough taxes to cover the costs; social services to American workers who lose jobs or drop into poverty wages because of the foreign job competition.

Other costs to a community are less tangible but probably more disconcerting to the American people. They involve changes-many of which are considered losses by natives-in the quality of life in a community. High immigration tends to lengthen the time it takes people to travel to work; it tends to increase air pollution, to add pressures on already vulnerable environmental resources, and to lower the quality of the schools; and it tends to add transience to a community while di­minishing social cohesiveness, decreasing public safety, and generally changing its ambiance and lifestyle.

Copyright © 1996, W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. Click here to read the entire book by Roy Beck.