Who knows nothing?

WE COULD hardly expect America's most politically correct business magazine to acknowledge being beaten to the punch by NATIONAL REVIEW. But Business Week's July 13 cover story, "The Immigrants: How They're Helping the U.S. Economy," is something special: a museum piece of claims and cliches already rendered obsolete by our own June 23 cover story, "Rethinking immigration,"by Peter Brimelow.

It's all there, from the hoary "nation of immigrants" line to the sidebar portraits of immigrant entrepreneurs. No consciousness, of course, of historical absurdity (as Brimelow pointed out, all nations are nations of immigrants) or of elementary fairness (portraits of Jamaican drug posses? Russian mobsters?). What the Business Week article does have, however, is a Harris poll showing that heavy majorities of Americans, white and black, .think immigration is a bad thing and should be reduced. The magazine's reaction: nervous editorial throat-clearing about the danger that this sentiment will be exploited by "know-nothing bigots."

The principal author of the Business Week article, Michael J. Mandel, had already distinguished himself, as Brimelow pointed out, by reviewing Professor George Borjas's important book Friends or Strangers as if it were pro-immigration when in fact it demonstrated an alarming decline in immigrant skill levels. But here Mandel breaks new records in evasiveness. He cites another Borjas study to show that immigration does not affect wage levels, when it actually attributed as much as a third of the inflation-adjusted 1980s decline in high-school-dropout wages to immigration. He misstates Borjas's reason for worrying that recent Third World immigrants are joining the underclass (lack of skills, not discrimination). And he quotes Borjas to show that "only" 8.8 per cent of immigrant households were on welfare in 1980, compared to 7.9 per cent of native-born households--suppressing Borjas's point that the more recent immigrants are significantly more welfare-prone.

Mandel also manufacturers a myth we'll be hearing again: that immigrants pay $90 billion in taxes, but receive only $5 billion in welfare. He achieves this happy result by the simple expedient of omitting all other benefits that immigrants receive, notably education and health. Even Business Week's editorialists realize this in their dim way--they call for federal subsidies for heavily immigrant school districts. (Borjas also calculates immigrants are a net loss to the welfare system. This time, Mandel ignores him.)

Naturally, the fact that the 1965 Immigration Act has significantly altered the U.S. ethnic balance is nowhere mentioned. Nor how Japan manages without any immigration at all. As the Wall Street Journal noted in its article about our cover story, a great debate on immigration is beginning. But on the evidence of Business Week, the real danger to America is not from potential "know-nothing bigots." It's from actual know-it-all bigots.