Asia Financial Crisis Cannot Be Laid at Immigrants’ Doorstep

The financial crisis in Asia offers solid evidence that immigration alone cannot be blamed for economic travail. Immigrants, like anyone else in the region, enjoyed the economic good times and now are feeling the effects of the downturn caused by other social and economic factors. The possibility that a country’s most ill-paid, easily dismissed workers can account for a regional economic crisis is simply not credible.

Even before the International Monetary Fund stepped in, East Asian governments had responded to their economic crises by announcing they would expel more than 1 million “guest workers.” Malaysia planned to kick out 900,000. Thailand vowed to deport 300,000. In South Korea, when the Justice Ministry said it intended to expel 146,000 illegal workers, the Labor Ministry asked that the expulsions be delayed until August in order to avoid a possible shortage in blue-collar labor. Filipino officials complained that 3,000 Filipinos already had lost their jobs in South Korea, and President Fidel V. Ramos suggested that the 4 million Filipinos working abroad, most of them in Asia and the Middle East, might consider going elsewhere to find work.

The announced expulsions have spread to the Middle East, where the government of Oman has issued orders that the country’s 489,000 private-sector foreign workers either legalize their status or face fines and prison. It is hard to underestimate the significance of this potential expulsion: Only 33,000 Omani citizens work in the private sector.

Forced exodus of immigrants may make political sense for floundering governments in need of scapegoats. For example, Malaysia’s deputy home minister, Ong Ka Ting, said the expulsion of foreigners would open up jobs for Malaysians. Thailand’s labor minister offered a similar justification for getting rid of 300,000 immigrants. Yet, such political expediency ignores the crucial role foreign labor has played in the creation of the “Asian tigers,” which enjoyed a decade of prosperity and annual growth rates of up to 8%.

Clearly, a nation suffering from economic turmoil must care for the needs of its own citizens first. But imagine a country in which labor is scarce, productive land lies fallow and underpopulation is the most pressing problem. Such a situation existed in England after the Black Death had killed one-third or more of the country’s people. Then the English peasant occupied the same economic rung that migrant labor occupies today: landless, ill-paid, without legal recourse, often dependent upon seasonal work--the bottom of the economic barrel. With some English counties suffering a population loss of more than 50% as a result of the plague, demand rose for the labor of the peasants who survived. Accordingly, the value of their labor should have increased. Yet, England’s Statute of Labourers prohibited peasants and urban laborers from demanding higher wages.

The peasants, led by Wat Tyler, rebelled in 1381. Although historians usually trace the roots of the rebellion to an unpopular poll tax, the peasants’ grievances played a galvanizing role as well.The rebels, in the words of historians Frances and Joseph Gies, rose up against “the determination of the lords to hold down wages, raise rents and enforce labor services, in a word, to repeal the effects of the Black Death”

The East Asian governments planning immigrant expulsions may be unwittingly preparing the ground for similar political trouble at home. Expelling guest workers may indeed make jobs available to Malaysians, Thais and Koreans. But it is highly unlikely that the companies employing them will pay them higher wages than those received by immigrants. Not only would this disenchant new workers; it could well lead to labor shortages because Malaysians, Thais and Koreans may refuse to work for such low wages.

Politics aside, the question of whether immigrant labor, legal or illegal, is a potential source of economic instability in Asia remains unanswered. How were the deleterious effects of foreign labor hidden so long and so successfully during the region’s decade-long “economic miracle,” and why did the “pernicious” effects of immigrant labor appear so suddenly in late December 1997?

This is not a case of Asian countries’ borders being out of control. East Asian governments have a very good handle on the presence of foreign workers. The government of Thailand reports that of the estimated 986,849 illegal immigrants in the country, 809,309 are working without permits. The government of Oman counts 489,481 foreign workers. Such meticulous statistics indicate the role of immigrant labor: It is welcome, legal or not, as long as there is a need for cheap labor. Immigrant labor is the most easily disposable work force there is, easily hidden or ignored when times are good, easily anathematized and deported when the economy turns sour. The presence of immigrant workers is a symptom, not a cause, of economic cycles.

Recent history in the United States bolsters this conclusion. The Republican Party has softened its hostility toward immigrants not primarily because there are more foreign-born voters today, but because the country is in a period of economic prosperity. It requires no great prescience, therefore, to predict that when and if economic expansion ends, foreign laborers will, once again, be targeted as a supposed cause of the downturn. But if immigrant laborers truly contribute to a country’s economic misfortunes, justice and common sense dictate that the country admit, during the good times, that immigrant labor is a great contributor to a nation’ economic well-being.