Does America have too many immigrants? That is a question which sparks heated political debate in Washington. Little wonder. Earlier this year Barack Obama pledged to make immigration reform a central plank of his second term as president.
美国的移民是不是太多了？这个问题在华盛顿引发了激烈的政治辩论。这一点都不奇怪。今年早些时候，巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)承诺称，要将移民改革作为其第二个总统任期的一项核心任务。But while that won him support among Hispanic voters, it infuriated many Republicans, particularly in the South. And with the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the issue is doubly controversial due to a perception - or fear - that immigrants are stealing American jobs.
虽然这为他赢得了西班牙裔选民的支持，却激怒了许多共和党人，特别是南方的共和党人。在失业率高企不下的情况下，这个问题更具争议性，因为人们认为（或担忧）移民眼下正抢走美国人的饭碗。Last week a curious new salvo was fired into this fiery debate from none other than the Dallas Federal Reserve. In recent years, this institution has earned a reputation for being one of the more independent-minded parts of the Fed: its president, Richard Fisher, has demanded policies to slash the size of banks, and its officials take a free-market, conservative view. (Indeed, as a sign of this Wild West heritage, it is the only western central bank I have ever seen where an official notice tells customers to put their guns aside before entering.)
近年来，达拉斯联邦储备银行(Dallas Federal Reserve)因在美联储内比较特立独行而出了名：该行行长理查德•费舍尔(Richard Fisher)要求采取政策削减各银行规模，该行官员普遍持有自由市场和保守派观点。（事实上，该行还有官方通知，让客户进门之前把枪放到一边，以突显那种西部文化传统——它是我见过的唯一这样做的西部联储银行。）不久前，正是达拉斯联邦储备银行，给这场火药味十足的辩论带来了新奇的观点。
But when it comes to immigration - of the legal and illegal kind - the Lone Star Fed is not sitting with the Tea Party core. On the contrary, it has just published a paper - under the provocative title “Gone to Texas” - arguing that immigration is good for the local economy. And it rebuffs the idea that immigrants are stealing jobs from native-born Americans. On the contrary, it insists, they tend to boost growth in a win-win way.
但在移民方面，无论是合法移民还是非法移民，这颗“美联储内的孤星”并没有与茶党(Tea Party)中坚派站在同一立场上。与此相反，它刚刚发表了一篇文章，标题富有煽动性，名为《去德克萨斯》(Gone to Texas)。文章认为，移民对地方经济有好处，并对移民偷走了美国本地人饭碗的说法做出了反驳。文章坚称，情况恰恰相反，移民往往能以一种双赢的方式提振经济增长。Now, if this conclusion had emerged in a state with few immigrants and plenty of unfilled jobs (think North Dakota), that might be unsurprising. But the picture that Fed researchers paint of Texas is eye-popping. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people living there has jumped from 1.5 million to 4.3 million, they say, noting that “Texas [now] has more immigrants than Oklahoma and New Mexico have people”, and that “among large states, none has experienced a surge like Texas has, with immigrants rising from 9 per cent of the population in 1990 to 16.4 per cent in 2012”.
假如说，这个结论出现在一个移民很少并且有很多工作空缺的州（比如北达科他州），可能就没有什么好奇怪的了。但达拉斯联储研究者们描绘的德克萨斯州呈现出一副令人目瞪口呆的景象。他们说，自1990年以来，德克萨斯州居民中出生于外国的人数已从150万增加至430万，并指出“（现在）德克萨斯州的移民人数比俄克拉荷马州和新墨西哥州两个州的人口加起来还要多”，此外，“在美国较大的州中，没有任何一个州的移民人数增长有德克萨斯州那么快，1990年，这个州的移民比例为9%，到2012年，这个数字已增至16.4%”。Some immigrants are highly skilled, lured by the fast-growing energy sector, for example.
有写掌握高技能的移民，是被一些特殊的行业吸引而来的，比如快速增长的能源行业。But most are not: two-thirds do not have a high-school diploma, two-thirds come from Mexico, and almost half - or 1.8 million people - are illegal, according to the Fed's number crunchers. If you want to find a poster child for the vision of Mexicans flooding illegally across the border to work in American fields and factories, Texas is perfect.
但大多数移民却不是这样：达拉斯联储的研究者分析数据后指出，三分之二的移民没有高中文凭，三分之二来自墨西哥，且有近一半（180万人）是非法移民。如果要找一个地方来代表墨西哥人非法涌入美国农业和工厂工作的情况，那么德克萨斯就是个很好的典型。But that has not hurt native-born Americans, the Fed insists. “When immigrants flow into the labor force, it is not just a matter of adding more workers. As long as immigrants differ from natives - which they do to varying degrees - specialization occurs,” the report observes. Furthermore, “Less-educated US natives have a comparative advantage in communications-intensive jobs, and less-educated immigrants in manual-labor jobs.” Or to put it another way, Mexican tomato pickers do not compete with American receptionists (not least because almost half of the immigrants in the study apparently have few or no English-language skills).
但达拉斯联储坚持认为，这并没有损害美国本地人的利益。报告认为：“移民加入劳动力大军，并不仅是意味着出现了更多的工人。只要移民与本地人仍然存在差别（尽管差别程度不同，但差别确实仍然存在），移民的加入就会产生专业化效应。”此外，报告还指出，“在需要大量跟人沟通的工作中，教育程度较低的美国本地人比较有优势，而在体力劳动中，教育程度较低的移民比较有优势”。换句话说就是，来自墨西哥的西红柿采摘工不会与美国接待员竞争。特别是有研究显示，近一半的移民英语水平很差，或根本就不会说英语。What immigration does do is lower the price of “immigrant-produced goods and services”, which equates to an income gain of $3.4bn-$6.6bn a year, the study suggests. And while this needs to be offset against the rising strain on public infrastructure and services, this is not such a big issue in bare-bones Texas, which has “a skimpy safety net and lower levels of publicly provided services than other large states”.
研究指出，移民所做的就是降低“移民制造产品和服务”的价格，相当于每年34亿到66亿美元的收入。虽然这种好处必然会被公共基础设施和服务面临不断增加的压力部分抵消，但在吝啬的德克萨斯州，这并不是一个大问题。因为德克萨斯州“社会保障安全网非常单薄，公共服务水平也比其他大州低”。I daresay such conclusions will horrify many observers on both sides of the political divide. To Tea Party supporters, it seems hard to believe that illegal immigrants do not displace American jobs; to leftwing economists, it seems even more abhorrent to think that businesses could be booming on the back of unprotected cheap labour. In any case, as both left and rightwing economists might point out, Texas is something of an exceptional case: its economy has been unusually fast growing in recent years, partly because of the energy boom, which has created plenty of new jobs - for immigrants and non-immigrants alike.
我敢说，这样的结论将让很多在政治上存在分歧的观察人士都感到恐惧。对于茶党支持者而言，非法移民没有抢美国人饭碗的说法看上去令人难以置信；对于左翼经济学家而言，可以靠不受保护的廉价劳动力实现商业繁荣的说法似乎更不可思议。无论如何，双方的经济学家都可能会说，德克萨斯是一个例外。该州经济近几年来增长异常迅速的部分原因是能源繁荣，这创造了许多新的工作岗位，无论是移民和美国本地人都受益于此。When it comes to immigration, the state is also unusual in political terms in that the influx of newcomers has occurred under governors of both the Democrat (Ann Richards) and Republican persuasions (George W Bush and Rick Perry). As president, Bush was also a strong advocate for immigration reform.
就移民问题而言，德克萨斯州的情况在政治上也不同寻常。因为无论是在民主党州长安•理查兹(Ann Richards)还是在共和党州长小布什(George W Bush和里克•佩里Rick Perry)主政下，移民都同样在涌入德克萨斯州。而在担任总统时，小布什也十分提倡移民改革。If nothing else, the results of the study are intriguing, particularly given that immigration reform will almost certainly rear its head in Congress soon, as Obama tries to define his legacy. The only pity is that the Dallas Fed paper did not look at another curious and counter-intuitive recent development: namely, that in the past year it seems that the flow of those unskilled Mexicans north has slowed, if not stalled. And if that continues, it could twist the immigration debate yet again - not just in the Lone Star state but in Washington too.
如果不考虑其他因素，这项研究的结果非常有趣，特别是鉴于移民改革似乎很快就会被提上国会议事日程，因为奥巴马试图留下任期“遗产”。唯一的遗憾就是，达拉斯联储的那份报告没有谈及最近另外一个奇怪的、违反常理的动向，即，过去一年来，那些低技能墨西哥人涌入美国的势头看上去有所放缓，甚至出现了停滞。如果这一趋势继续的话，可能会再次改变这场移民大辩论的局势，不仅是在“孤星”州德克萨斯，华盛顿亦然。