Related articles:

Ernesto Portillo Jr.: Immigration answers are all in the eyes of the beholdersGuest Opinion: Kyl crucial in immigration reform Immigration reform: The time is now Immigration bill too vital to let fall by wayside My opinion Charles Krauthammer : Einstein and plumbers in same immigration line

Other articles by Paul Krugman:

My opinion Paul Krugman : Reagan was master at changing nation My opinion Paul Krugman : Homeownership isn't right for everyone My opinion Paul Krugman : Anti-regulation agenda harms public, businesses My opinion Paul Krugman : Digital age changing way intellectual goods are sold Paul Krugman: There's no need to raise rates because inflation is in checkPaul Krugman: Germany offers lessons on coping with costly gasPaul Krugman: Talk about an 'oil bubble' is simply wishful thinkingPaul Krugman: As economy stabilizes, reform effort loses steamMy opinion Paul Krugman : 'Blueprint' muddies facts in financial crisisPaul Krugman: Clinton has freshest ideas to solve mortgage crisis

General
ADVANCED AUTOMOTIVE
DISPATCHER/SECRETARY Trades/Construction
Pioneer Landscaping
Yard Person/Loader Operator Automotive
Oilstop
Oil Change Techs Production and Manufacturing
Pioneer Landscaping
Crushing Crew Trades/Construction
Paragon Electric
Electricians Administrative & Professional
Tucson Symphony
Teleservices Sales/Courtesy Rep Trades/Construction
Jacobs Electric
Electricians & Helpers

A piece of advice for progressives trying to figure out where they stand on immigration reform: It's the political economy, stupid. Analyzing the direct economic gains and losses from proposed reform isn't enough. You also have to think about how the reform would affect the future political environment.

To see what I mean — and why the proposed immigration bill, despite good intentions, could well make things worse — let's take a look back at America's last era of mass immigration.

My own grandparents came to this country during that era, which ended with the imposition of severe immigration restrictions in the 1920s. Needless to say, I'm very glad they made it in before Congress slammed the door.

As supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today's immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they're too culturally alien and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they're not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews.

Today, there's a highly technical controversy going on among economists about the effects of recent immigration on wages. No matter how that dispute turns out, it's clear that the earlier wave of immigration increased inequality and depressed the wages of the less skilled.

For example, a recent study by Jeffrey Williamson, a Harvard economic historian, suggests that in 1913 the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers were around 10 percent lower than they would have been without mass immigration. But the straight economics was the least of it. Much more important was the way immigration diluted democracy.

In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn't get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population denied any political voice.

That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age, because those who might have demanded that politicians support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic social safety net didn't have the right to vote.

Conversely, the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal and sustaining its achievements, by creating a fully enfranchised working class.

But now we're living in the second Gilded Age. And one of the things making anti-worker, unequalizing policies politically possible is the fact that millions of the worst-paid workers in this country can't vote.

What progressives should care about, above all, is that immigration reform stop our drift into a new system of de facto apartheid.

Progressive supporters of the proposed bill defend the guest worker program as a necessary evil, the price that must be paid for business support. Right now, however, the price looks too high and the reward too small.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. His Web site is www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman