It's the War on Drugs, Stupid

In college, I took a course with George Borjas, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Borjas is a controversial conservative economist who focuses on immigration issues. A Cuban immigrant himself, Borjas has been widely criticized for arguing that immigration is hurting the U.S. economy, particularly by decreasing wages and job opportunities for low-skilled Americans. I knew all of this before taking his class, but (A) he was the only economist at Harvard who taught a whole class on immigration (sound familiar?) and (B) I was on an "open mind" kick at the time that was highly overrated.

In the end, I thought Borjas' class was fair, and I actually grew to like the guy personally. I always suspected that he was a bit of a showhorse, however, picking topics and reaching conclusions that were guaranteed to draw media attention.

I can now make up my mind: in mid-September Borjas released this paper arguing that immigrants not only take away jobs and decrease the wages of African-Americans, but that by increasing black unemployment rates, they indirectly lead to higher rates of black incarceration. Borjas does this by tracking employment, wage, and incarceration data from 1960 to 2000.

(Good media strategy, George: argue that the fastest growing demographic group in the country is actually putting the second-largest minority group in the country in jail. You win the Shiny Happy People Award for Neighborhood Relations.)

Problem? I'll leave the economic critique to the economists, but I'll put on my law student hat to point out that Borjas in no way accounts for the drastic changes in federal drug laws in that same time period. This is a glaring mistake, as that period included both the 1971 declaration of the War on Drugs by Richard Nixon, and the 1988 founding of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, home of the super-coolly-named "Drug Czar." Borjas does account for the number of cocaine busts carried out by the DEA in 1980-2000 by creating a so-called "crack index"--no joke--but even he admits that does not account for other aspects of "the criminal-justice response to the crack problem."

Overall, I have to say that I'm very weary of articles that exploit the tension in relations between Hispanics and African-Americans. The New York Times released figures last Sunday showing that Hispanics and African-Americans together comprise 35.8% of the U.S. population (follow this link and click on the infographic; you'll note that Hispanics clock in at an incredible 20.5%). With so many shared socioeconomic interests, if Hispanics and blacks work together, this nation could be due for a major progressive revival come 15 or 20 years, when larger portions of the Hispanic population attain citizenship and/or reach voting age. This will not happen, however, if Hispanics are cast as a direct threat to the black community, something that Mr. Borjas and his colleagues have willfully or negligently accomplished.