California Lutheran University's Center for Economic Research and Forecasting projected continued slow growth for Ventura County in 2014, but the focus of its presentation on improving the economy was not job creation or affordable housing but immigration reform.
"When you walk away, my biggest hope is that everybody in this room is a supporter of increased immigration," center Director Bill Watkins said Friday afternoon to a room of about 260 people at the Serra Center in Camarillo.
The annual economic forecast event started with a video featuring an immigrant family that left their home of Zacatecas, Mexico, and came to California — where the children grew up to become successful business owners.
"A lot of people think that immigrants are a drain on society ... that they're not paying their way," Watkins said. Immigrants come to the United States with "gumption" to start businesses at a faster rate than native-born Americans and are "willing to take chances that other people aren't," he added.
Watkins said an increase in legal immigrants is the solution to a faster economic recovery locally, statewide and nationally.
Ventura County's economy is expected to continue growing slowly, with jobs reaching the pre-recession high by mid-2018 and the unemployment rate dropping slowly to 6.7 percent by mid-2015, Watkins said.
George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan spoke for nearly 50 minutes about "cheaper and more humane" alternatives to current immigration restrictions and negating major arguments against an increasingly open immigration system.
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"Imagine that you come from outer space and you see there are some people that are not allowed to move to a country where they'd like to go to get a better job," he said. "At least on the surface, it seems like a bad thing to tell someone they can't move to get a better life for themselves. If all that someone wants to do is to drive over the border and get another job, it seems odd to say that person is a criminal."
Caplan said even if the standard arguments for immigration restrictions — including protecting the country from poverty, taxpayer contributions, and American culture and liberty — were valid, there are alternatives to overcome each perspective.
Rather than preventing more immigrants from entering the U.S., Caplan said the 1 billion people earning less than $1 per day would not mind if there were policies that enforced entry fees to immigrate to the country, imposed a surtax for immigrants, adjusted welfare eligibility, required immigrants to pass an English fluency test or cultural literary test and created voting restrictions.
But the fear is that American wages would be destroyed if the United States experienced a large influx of immigrants, Caplan said.
"When economists try to figure out what would happen if there were free migration, the result is not that there would be an increase in poverty — quite the opposite. Something like a doubling of world production would happen," he said. "This is the only policy change that economists found that could do this."
Caplan said an increase in production would allow everyone to benefit from extra competition, and most Americans would see gains because they are not directly competing with the immigrant labor force.
"This is not trickle-down economics; this is Niagara Falls economics," he said.
Domestic migration into and out of Ventura County has been negative for the past 10 years, Watkins said.
The Ventura County agriculture industry is dominated by a foreign-born, largely undocumented labor force that earns extremely low wages and is made up of mostly permanent local residents, Ventura County Farm Bureau CEO John Krist said.
The Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy estimates there are 14,000 farmworkers in Ventura County who are living in the country illegally.
But Krist said immigration reform is not going to change the fact that local farms are seeing a labor shortage because fewer workers are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since the Mexican agriculture industry is improving and it is more difficult to cross the border due to heightened security.
"If you make it easier to bring people over the border to work that don't want to come here in the first place because they've got good opportunities at home, that's not going to solve that fundamental problem," he said. "Having a workforce that's constantly afraid to be out in public — that's not helpful, that's not good. So legalizing the legal status for those who are already here would open up housing opportunities for them that they're denied now because they can't document their status. That would help make our workforce more reliable."
While nearly 4,300 new jobs were created in Ventura County over the last year, the county is down 16,000 jobs compared to December 2007, Watkins said.
The construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality sectors saw job growth in Ventura County over the past year, while higher-paying sectors including professional and business services either lagged or lost jobs, Watkins said.
But the county's aging population paired with a lack of affordable housing options and jobs for young people is continuing to promote a less vigorous local economy, Watkins said.
Median home prices are up 30 percent in Ventura County compared to one year ago, Watkins said, but he does not expect that growth rate to be sustainable.