Posted on 06/01/2007 9:00:25 PM PDT by rmlew
“Legal immigrants abide by the law.”
“Illegal immigrants don’t and are nothing more than criminals.”
Myself and my lefal immigrant wife surely agree and understand the distinction. However ...
“they come from the same countries, live in the same communities and families, and are often the same exact people.”
Ummmm..No..They’re not.”
Ummm... yes, they are in many cases. He is making the point that illegal and legal immigration is often mixed.
My wife’s an immigrant and her brother, also a legal immigrant from Korea, married a woman who after a few years decided to destroy his life. she plotted to take his money, fake up an abuse claim by getting into a fight with him, and sued for divorce, in the process taking his money and his son (to get child support).
Thanks to our screwed up immigration system, she got one of those super duper deals for women who claim (often falsely) abuse - Instant residency and citizenship. Then she got her own Dad to come over. Probably she heas filed for a green card for him and he’ll be hree illegally until he gets to be ‘legal’. otoh thanks to z amnesty it will happen faster. he overstayed his tourist visa and his here illegally. Her sister came as well to have an ‘anchor baby’.
A huge plot just to get into the USA by abusing the legal immigration system where they can, and evade and break the law where it doesnt suit their purposes. Yes, the same people and the same family do both. That is why the media will sometimes talk of ‘mixed status’ families, which usually means ‘an illegal family that had an anchor baby’ or ‘a legal immigrant who decided to illegally bring the rest of the family’.
Further, that is why amnesty for 12 million will really mean 30 million more people in this country. If we fail to enforce immigration laws, then any of the worlds other 6 billion people have an invitation to come here, and they wont RSVP.
“As Ramesh Ponnuru has written, “America has some serious immigration problems, but they are not distinctively problems of illegal immigration.” Calls of “Enforcement First” by critics of the Bush-Kennedy amnesty bill are surely the place to start the immigration debate, because without a commitment to enforce the rules, it doesn’t much matter what the rules are. But in the long run, the substance of the rules themselves is the more important question.”
If we cant even win the ‘enforce the rules’ debate, the latter debate on “How many immigrants to let in? Who should they be?” is like discussing angels on the head of a pin.
Sorry for the huge quote, but this is relatively easy to fix. If there is any evidence that a person has ever been in the US illegally, then they have no ability whatsoever to become legal. None. Ever.
"Sorry about the anchor baby thing, ma'am, but if you want to raise the kid yourself, ya gotta take 'em back to wherever with you. Otherwise, put him up for adoption and get on the ICE plane."
"Good news: you won the immigration lottery. Bad news: you stole someone's SSN in 1997 to get a job ... get on the ICE bus."
The only way we are really going to solve this issue is to give those who are here illegally a reason to go home.
“So blow your malthusian nonsense out your ear.”
“At what point did he suggest rejecting modern science or forming isolated communties?”
He didn’t. There was nothing Malthusian in the original article’s statements. Just simple analysis of fiscal impacts and obvious conclusions based on labor supply and demand.
what’s wrong with some moderate levels of immigration for 20 years?
These proposals to stop all immigration only play into hands of those who favor the chaos of amnesty. There are needs in some businesses (like ag businesses) who have gotten hooked on immigrant labor and resist mightily even an attempt to close the door a little bit.
I am a raging moderate on this issue - no to open borders, no to zero immigration, yes to having a moderate amount of lawful immigration.
I won’t call you names, but I will say your proposal is a wrongheaded nonstarter.
“Sorry for the huge quote, but this is relatively easy to fix. If there is any evidence that a person has ever been in the US illegally, then they have no ability whatsoever to become legal. None. Ever.”
That’s EXACTLY WHAT THE CORNYN AMENDMENT WAS ABOUT! We are going to give the Z visa to 600,000 people who not only borke the law - BUT DEFIED COURT ORDERS FOR DEPORTATION.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070606/ap_on_go_co/immigration_congress
The defeat of the Cornyn Amendment means that anyone who broke immigration law can in future ‘get right’, and it further means that *PRACTICALLY NOBODY CAN GET DEPORTED, EVER*.
Great quote btw.
Malthusian nonsense - economically, culturally and morally ignorant. In the original article.
“the chief problem that immigration creates ...is that it floods the job market with competitors... actually better that immigrants be illegal, because they cost less.”
“Malthusian nonsense - economically, culturally and morally ignorant. In the original article.”
1) The statement is correct.
2) The statement has nothing to do with Malthus.
The statement is correct:
1A)”illegal immigrants cost less” - is supported by the data that illegal immigrants cost $10 billion in taxpayer susbsidies, but would cost $29 billion if they were legalized. This makes sense, as many programs for low-income people require legal residency or citizenship. An illegal alien making minimum wage today might pay no taxes, but 15 years from now as a citizen would be able to get an EITC subsidy.
1B) As for “it floods the job market with competitors”, surely it is in keeping with the tenets of classical economics that by law of supply and demand a greater supply will lower price at equivalent demand.
2) There is nothing Malthusian about either statement, and perhaps you might retract that nonsense or find a quote from Malthus that would remotely resemble his points. The Malthusians of the modern age are the environmentalist and “Peak oilers” who keep thinking resource limits mean the end of prosperity.
The arguments against unwise immigration have to do with the fact that we are importing illiterate and impoverished people into our country. If it was an okay thing to have 20 million low wage, low skill, barely literate people, we could simply save ourselves $400 billion a year and shut down our education system.
Also, Malthus was an economist and had nothing to say about culture.
No, it is emphatically not standard economics that increasing the working population will impoverish existing workers. But it is doctinaire Malthus.
Malthusian economics predicts that increasing the population will reduce the wage level, that a huge population boom will be accompanied by a huge standard of living fall, and that the wage levels of all countries will converge over time to the level of subsistence. All are directly falsified by actual history. And marginal utility economics explains why.
Wages are set by productivity, not the number of people in the world.
Also, the number of people in the world does not change when one of them crosses a border. Workers in Mexico supply labor just as workers in Arizona do, and capital can move to utilize that labor in either case.
Actual output is what determines the standard of living. Anything that raises it, is economically beneficial not economically harmful. Changes in the utilization of resources that increase overall productivity, enrich those directly concerned, without picking the pocket or breaking the leg of anyone else on earth.
The fact that neither you nor the original article writer understand and of this, is exactly why I called it economically ignorant. You are not the only one. Half the world doesn't understand the point, and still believes Malthus's errors on the subject.
There are excellent arguments against amnesty and against illegal immigration. When instead we get arguments against immigration of any kind, they deserve to lose. Legal immigration (sustainable rates, with assimilation, etc, etc) is not economically harmful to people here. It is so beneficial it has been is the single largest cause of our actual prosperity.
It is politically stupid to try to insist on the point, as well. Not only do you change a position that deserves to win (opposing illegality, lack of control, etc) into one that deserves to lose, you also jettison half your political allies, who will not follow you over that cliff.
I had a brilliant and long response yesterday that got deleted before I posted when my computer browser crashed ... on Media Matters website.
You are arguing against multiple strawmen here:
1) “When instead we get arguments against immigration of any kind,”
Strawman alert! That’s not the argument.
2) “Malthusian economics predicts that increasing the population will reduce the wage level”
That’s *not* the claim being made to argue that making 12 million illegal immigrants legal is wrong and will cost taxpayer’s an arm and a leg.
It’s not that any given person is bad.
The claims are that *these* specific immigrants will have a huge fiscal cost to US taxpayers:
http://www.heritage.org/research/immigration/SR14.cfm
The reason is that the illegal immigrants are far *less* education, have lower skill levels and are much poorer than
Americans:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Immigration/SR9.cfm
As a result we are importing poverting and inviting a huge added cost and expansion to the welfare state.
I have no problem with legal immigration per se.
I have a problem with legalization of 12 million people we did not decide to allow to legally immigrate, both the process and result will be bad for America.
He does in fact argue against legal immigration. His whole point and the only one in dispute here, is that the conventional attitude that "legal is good, illegal is bad" is false. He is wrong, that attitude is not false, it is entirely sound. If you agree with it, then you are disagreeing with him.
He explicitly says that illegals are not as bad as legals because they cost the state less. You explicitly say that illegals are worse than legals. You are not agreeing with him. And I am arguing against his position, not whatever yours may be today.
When a man argues against legal immigration as well as illegal, which the article does, then it is not a strawman to say he is arguing against immigration, not illegality.
When a man explicitly says the problem with immigrants is the extra competition they represent for low wage jobs, as the article clearly does, and furthermore insists explicitly that this problem is just as bad if the immigrants are legal, then yes he is making the claim that legal immigration will lower the wage level.
We've had about 230 years of that experiment and wages continued to go upward with the regularity of the sun coming up in the morning. Because it is economically naive, and inaccurate.
That your argument coincides with the author on one point, but fails to do so in these two critical ones, and that I disagree with him on those two critical points, does not make my arguments against a strawman, nor the article's arguments correct.
Earlier in the thread, the specifically Malthusian proposition was defended repeatedly as supposedly common sense. Clearly, therefore, it is not a strawman, since some people here, in addition to the original author, believe it - while it isn't so.
Now, to your latest and much more limited arguments. That we should fight against amnesty because it undermines the rule of law, and we never agreed to take this group of people, I quite agree. Indeed, my point in fighting against the perception that only those against immigration of any kind are against this bill, is precisely to uphold the "illegal bad, legal good" dicotomy that the article is deliberately trying to undermine.
Second, to the argument that we should prefer more skilled immigrants to less, I quite agree. Although in truth we always need and use a mix of workers. I dislike the specific argument from public finances because it amounts to allowing the left to set people at each other's throats over welfare transfers. That is precisely the divide and rule reaction their politics counts on. I prefer to unite to reduce transfers and increase independence from the state. But it is a minor point, and to first order I agree it is more responsible to add to the population that supports itself and more, given a choice in the matter.
To me, though, the key issue is legality and serious enforcement of existing law. If the economy happened to be in a state in which extra low skilled workers would be helpful, then we could up H2B quotas. That might be as rare as you please, but we only get the option if we have a working legal system. If instead we want to select for skill we can, if we have a working legal system. It may be at some time it is strategically more critical to welcome people displaced by conflicts who took our side in them, as a means of rewarding friends and thwarting enemies.
Whatever policy is expedient, we can only enact it by being in control. Which requires both the sharp distinction "legal good, illegal bad", and serious enforcement. We will not get more of either by instead trying to sell "illegal bad and legal bad too, maybe worse" - which is what the original article is trying to do. Because it won't sell. Because it doesn't deserve to. While "legal good, illegal bad" does.
” He does in fact argue against legal immigration. His whole point and the only one in dispute here, is that the conventional attitude that “legal is good, illegal is bad” is false. “
He does not argue against legal immigration in general, but argues against current existing mix of legal and illegal immigration and how they are intertwined.
You are arguing against a generality that wasnt put forward - that is the strawman. He is making specific claims, most of the them well-backed up by facts.
1) One of them is that legal immigration flows support illegal immigration flows, and I can personally vouch for examples where I’ve seen that happen.
2) Another is the economic argument, and I just would suggest you reread the point. There is a vast difference to impact on “economy” as an abstraction (which may be positive if all you do is sum GDP), and on specific players in the economy, such as taxpayers who get socked with higher tax bills to pay for the welfare for imported impoverished people.
“When a man explicitly says the problem with immigrants is the extra competition they represent for low wage jobs, as the article clearly does, ...”
is he saying anything wrong? Putting some label on the statement doesnt refute it. This line of argument he makes happens to be true.
OTOH, where you are correct is to point out that as a general rule immigrants can and often are a net plus for economy and society. There is a problem here:
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“Indeed, my point in fighting against the perception that only those against immigration of any kind are against this bill, is precisely to uphold the “illegal bad, legal good” dicotomy that the article is deliberately trying to undermine.”
We are in violent agreement there. I think it is bad politics and to some extent bad policy to mix the two.
I am pro-legal-immigration and anti-illegal-immigration.
Nevertheless, I am basking in the glow of victory (for now) against amnesty.
That argument is fundamentally based on a notorious and notoriously stubborn, nigh ineradicable, piece of economic blockheadness and blindness, apparently all too natural among men. Which originated with Malthus and metastasized into a doctrinal cancer with Marx.
Yes, he is saying something wrong, specifically where you think he is saying something commonsensically right. No, this line of argument that you say is true doesn't happen to be true. Your continued inability to grok that a Malthusian economic theorem is utterly false does not make it basic economics, or obvious, or common sense, or true. It is not false because it is labeled, it is false whether the label is known and understood historically or not.
You acknowledge that immigration has been a net benefit to the economy. OK, how? What is the specific mechanism whereby an increased population of competing workers, *increases* the average net wealth of everyone?
It does. If it didn't, legal immigration on a vast scale would have impoverished this country, when in fact legal immigration on a vast scale made this country the wealthiest society in human history.
We didn't become the wealthiest society in human history by watching the average level of wages sink ever lower as the population rose. Instead, the average level of wages rose relentlessly as population rose. Why? What specific economic mechanism was (and is) at work?
Malthus and Marx, and the adage you sign off on in the article, have no explanation for this patent fact. Marginal utility economics (and specifically the theory of factor incomes) does.
I am glad we agree on political practicalities of opposing illegal immigration, and I am very pleased this horrible bill is dead for now. But to me it is at least as important that people actually grok the economic point, that other men working neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
"Thou shalt not covet" extends to thy neighbor's *job*, as a principle of economics, as well as morality.
Your continued attempt to assert an argument that doesnt fit continues to be unconvincing. there are concrete facts at hand that a 200 year old theorem has no relevence to one way or ‘other. malthus didn’t understand economic growth - he *also* wasnt faced with an economy that adds more immigrants than ever before in its history.
I will try one last time and be done with it.
1) One key argument is that the specific people who came here illegally are no better for our economy as legal immigrants. Since the only net change is in governmnet benefits then any free market lover should agree with that.
2) Another key arugment is that Classical economics is based on supply and demand and Larger supply of labor will impact wage rates to be lower than they otherwise would be. To assert otherwise is to defy multiple studies which have confirmed the effect. The fact is that other things being equal, if immigration were lower,the wages would be higher in certain industries. Doubt me?
Take a look at this study:
“• By increasing the labor supply between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average annual earnings of U.S.-born men by an estimated $1,700, or roughly 4 percent. • Among those born in the United States who did not graduate from high school — roughly the poorest one-tenth of the work force — the estimated impact was even larger, reducing wages by 7.4 percent. • The negative effect on U.S.-born black and Hispanic workers is significantly larger than on whites, because a much larger share of minorities are in direct competition with immigrants. • The reduction in earnings occurs regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or temporary. It is the presence of additional workers that reduces wages, not their legal status, but it is the uncontrolled nature of illegal immigration that makes that situation so untenable.Source: Jorge Borgas, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard”
Note the last point - illegal or legal, the impact is the same.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back504.html
You can parrot Malthus all day long and its meaningless chatter. Malthus failed to understand that economies can grow and technology can advance in ways to utilize the same resources better. But Malthus was confused because *HE SAW THE VERY EFFECT WE SEE TODAY* in the in-migration of rural people to cities that created an “iron law of wages” for a time period... only when the industrial economy grew to absorb all the natural workers in the economy (of England at the time) and rural/urban populations fully shifted, did the wage levels rise in tandem with the labor market tightening.
If in USA version A, w had 0.5 million legal immigrants a year and in USA version B, we had 1.5 million immigrants a year, 1 million legal, and .5 million illegal and mostly poor lowskill workers ... WHICH WOULD HAVE HIGHER WAGES FOR UNSKILLED LABOR?
If you argue that the differences dont matter, then why the curious coincidence that in the 1950s and 1960s, when immigration was low, the “rising tide lifts all boats” was true, but in the 1990s and 2000s decades, a time of the largest immigration of our time, we curiously are seeing *no increase* in median earnings for non-college degreed workers. Indeed, declines ...
“Why do illegal immigrants force down wages? “That’s how markets work,” responds Cappelli. “It’s hard for the average person to understand that these are markets. If illegal workers left the U.S. tomorrow, what would happen? Some people think nobody would do those jobs. If that were to happen, companies would change those jobs, and wages would go up. Yes, companies would hire the people who are not necessarily doing those jobs now. This goes on in every labor market. There are no jobs that we can think of where, over time, work doesn’t get done. It doesn’t happen.””
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1482
Your argument on this point is not with Malthus at all but the data collected by Borjas and others.
3) Claim of “net benefit to economy” ... what does ‘the economy’ mean to us? “the economy” works as a proxy for the experiences of the members of the economy, but does not when you have large immigration inputs. Consider: If 1 billion of the poorest of the world cam to the US in short order, you would find that (a) our GDP would skyrocket and (b) “most people would be upwardly mobile”. Good? Not good for the 290 million already here and crowded out by higher taxes, poorer services and higher inequality. Even if the world’s net standard of living went up, the std of living would go down for Americans. it would be not different that if we up and decided to give our selves a 20% tax on all wages that was dedicated solely to sending money to people in a third world country.
Higher GDP as an abraction doesnt help people whose standard of living is notably lower than it otherwise would have been.
Thus argument about “benefits to the economy” such as the WSJ often makes miss the point - what’s the benefit to the economic condition of the American citizens here today? Will it help them? Or hurt them?
3b) “You acknowledge that immigration has been a net benefit to the economy. OK, how?” Your failure to distinguish between the subset of immigration that is good and the subset that is bad is the issue.
*SOME* immigration is helpful and *SOME* immigration, whether legal or illegal is hurtful ... moderate levels of immigration based on skill levels helpful to the economy - good. massive chain migration of impoverished illiterates - net drain. The main differences are net impact on taxpayers, since unskilled and non-workers do not ‘pay their own way’ through life and become added burdens on taxpayers also how they impact wider economy through earnings and spending.
4) “when in fact legal immigration on a vast scale made this country the wealthiest society in human history.” False. Our freedom, our rule of law, our limited govt created the environment for opportunity that lead to our wealth. Low levels of immigration in 1920s to 1960s didnt stop America from becoming and remaining the richest economy on earth. Indeed one can look back on that period as our hey-dey relatively speaking.
5) “What specific economic mechanism was (and is) at work?”
The specific mechanism at work that refuted Malthus was/is technology. Technology will advance however whether immigration is high or low. Immigration of low wage illiterates will hardly advance our technology, otoh high-skill technologists with PhD may help advance technology (and has in the past).
One can conclude from that and previous comments on good v bad immigration - we should have a simple and selfish policy on immigration: Those who can afford to pay a lot of money to get a green card (eg $50,000) and/or prove high level of skill and high earnings (so net taxpayers) should get in, the rest should stay away.
I disagree with a moratorium, but agree with one thing:
No more that 10% of green cards should got to any one country; maybe it should be lowered to 5%.
Mexico takes too many of the green cards away from other countries.
And far from being ignorant of large scale population growth aided by immigration, Malthus specifically cites US population growth at the end of the 18th century as evidence that population increases "in geometric ratio" aka exponentially. You are right to say he did not understand economic growth (neither do you, since you think it is caused by technology), but he did know that economies grow. He just thought they grew linearly as resources were used - the original limits of growth argument - and that therefore population growth (as an exponential) would always swamp it eventually.
Far from being a dead idea, Malthus's mistakes are at the root of virtually every contemporary anti-capitalist ideology. The green opposition to development is essentially Malthusian (finite resources being their replacement for the role of land in his system). Ecology based criticisms of capitalist economics that think they are basing themselves on Darwin do not realize that Darwin is a transfer of Malthus's ideas to biology. The same is true of Marxism, and secondarily of its derivatives, including the labor market theories of prominent Keynesian-socialists (including Samuelson, cited by one of your study sources on the point). And of course protectionist "restrictionism" of the stripe being discussed in this thread. All of it is Malthus retold in pieces by people ignorant of the origin of their own ideas.
"the specific people who came here illegally are no better for our economy as legal immigrants. Since the only net change is in governmnet benefits"
Repeating the culturally ignorant claim of the original article will not make it true. Of course legal immigrants differ from illegal ones in hosts of ways besides access to government benefits. Starting with the fact that legal immigrants are law abiding while illegal immigrants are criminals. Kinda culturally relevant, that one!
It is balderdash to claim that our legal immigrants are worse for the country than the illegals are just because the legal ones are (legally) eligible for transfer payments. The illegal ones are clearly worse for the country in hosts of ways starting with the undermining of law, then the systematic illegality and mendacity that follows everything they touch, etc.
While legal immigrants are frequently quite uninterested in transfer payments for exactly the same reasons they abided by laws in the first place - they are typically self reliant individuals whereas illegals have shown themselves to put personal expediency above the law etc. Moreover, not being legally eligible for transfer payments no more stops illegals from receiving various kinds of support, than the laws they broke coming here stopped them from arriving. Scams by the hundreds follow forged documents etc. It is a hopelessly naive argument, and everyone with the slightest common sense sees that illegal immigrants are worse for the country, not better as the article tries to claim.
"Classical economics is based on supply and demand and Larger supply of labor will impact wage rates to be lower than they otherwise would be"
This is exactly the Malthusian nonsense in question. That you still do not even acknowledge that it is controversial, controverted, and factually wrong, shows how deep your own ignorance of the subject is. Chesterton once defined a bigot as a man incapable of entertaining the contrary of a proposition. You can't even understand that in maintaining this, you are taking a position that needs to be defended by rational argument and supported by actual data; that it is widely known to be false empirically, and that theoretical explanations of why this widespread expectation is false, have been available for well over a century.
"to defy multiple studies which have confirmed the effect"
On the contrary, the study you yourself cite below acknowledges that virtually all previous studies (to that one published in 2004) found no correlation between immigration and domestic wages. Clustered at zero and not statistically significant. The author of the paper you cite tries to manufacture such a correlation by breaking the data into many more classes based on his proxies for education level and prior experience. If you look at the actual data he generates as a result, instead of just citing his conclusions, you will see they form a nearly perfectly random scatter plot, centered again around zero.
He then tries to find the correlation he wants in a regression line fitted through that scatter plot, with a very slight and negative slope. But presents nothing as to the statistical significance of said fit or its confidence interval compared to a null hypothesis - because it doesn't have any.
But there is a much more basic conceptual problem with that paper. It pretends that the economic growth actually observed is automatic (your "other things equal", expect they aren't) and in no way depends on the immigration for which it controls. This assumption is unwarranted, since we know increasing population by itself increases economic growth. A given trade may be centered in locations with no immigrants, but benefit from the increased demand a large population earning high wages created by profitable employment growth, etc.
An actual control would have to compare, not two trades both in a growing economy stimulated by population increases, one of which has green people and another blue people involved in said trade, but an economy stimulated by population increases and another that is static.
The article also attempts to present changes from imaginary baselines as falls, when there is no actual fall seen anywhere. Per capita real wages rise throughout, always, while population is increasing.
Here is the actual history as opposed to inferences from barely above zero slopes of lines through scatter plots manufactured from arbitrary sub-categories. From 1790 to 1860 US population increases 3% per year (a cumulative rise of 8 times). Real per capita income increases 1.84% per year. From 1860 to 1920, US population increases 2% per year (a cumulative rise over 3 times), real per capita income increases 1.65% per year. From 1920 to 1960, US population increases 1.3% per year and real per capita income rises 2.24% per year. From 1960 to 2005, US population increases 1.1% per year - note well, slower than ever in US history - and real per capita income increases 2.22% per year, as fast as in the previous period.
Overall, the fastest economic growth happened with the fastest population growth, 4.9% in the first huge period, 3.7% and 3.6% in the next two, and 3.34% in the last. But is large and positive throughout, as population increases by large amounts throughout, and always real per capita income is rising, right along with population growth, at roughly 2% per year.
No Malthusian can explain why. They wave their hands, they cite technology, the pretend it is inevitable, they assuming it away with "other things being equal". Samuelson himself has literally no explanation of ongoing economic growth. He merely observes it and acknowledges its existence, while the macroeconomic theorems are instead about a general equilibrium (opposite of a thoroughly unstatic, indefinite growth process) that is not observed.
"other things being equal"
But those other things include the increase in overall output caused by more people working, so no, they are not equal. It is one entry accounting - imagine all the products and services made by immigrants existed, imagine all the jobs in truth supported by the existence of that extra output existed, but were produced without any extra labor time. Well yes, if you deliberately imagine something that is the definition of higher productivity (same output with less input), you will imagine that higher wages could be supported by that imaginary higher productivity. But there is no reason whatever to think that extra output would be created without those extra inputs. All you ever see is both occurring together, or neither occuring.
The average hourly earnings of US workers in 1980 were $12.16 ($6.57 nominal, the rest is inflation) and in 2000 were $13.75, in chain weighted 2000 dollars. Hourly earnings rose 13%. Meanwhile the number of jobs increased 44%, by 40 million all told. There is no reason whatever to think the hourly earnings increase would have been larger had the number of added jobs been lower. On the contrary, it is vastly more likely the whole economy would have grown much more slowly had it not created (and filled, profitably) so many new jobs.
Real income of US workers is simply not declining. The number of people working exploded, and the amount each makes rose modestly as well. The average US standard of living increased markedly, primarily because many more households now have two incomes, because there are vastly more jobs. So far from immigrants having taken all the domestic worker's jobs, large numbers of the domestic worker's wives as well as the immigrants have all found net new jobs, while wages for all involved have increased, and not just nominally but in real terms.
And no, Malthus was not misled by seeing the iron law of wages in action. He never saw the iron law of wages because the iron law of wages is theoretical poppycock and has never happened, anywhere, at any time. Greater numbers of people working directly increases overall economic output, and acts as a decided stimulus to, not a restraint on, per capita economic growth. The period of its enourmous upsurge in population is when European economies pulled away from the rest of the world, and never looked back. Population growth and economic growth, per capita as well as overall, are highly and positively correlated, and statistically significant at any level of confidence you please.
The contrary notion is false, no matter how widespread or seemingly commonsensical.
Of your two USA versions, the latter would almost certainly have higher wages after any appreciable period - say 25 years - simply because overall economic growth would be significantly higher, and in the long run that would swamp any half a percent static effects on relative wages of this group or that. US real wages have increased *40 fold* as population increased *75 fold*. Only staggering foolishness could possibly fixate on relative 1% to 5% differences, one-off, in such a process. Keep both huge multiplication processes going, and everyone is going to get obscenely rich, by all past standards.
To keep it going, yes we need the rule of law, we need to control those titantic processes, we need to encourage assimilation, etc. But effectively because those are the way to maintain our ability to absorb and use new population, and new and ever greater population brings prosperity (and power), not because we need to fear or prevent a higher population of workers.
Your later arguments suffer from the delusion that increased population is increasing only overall GDP but that it is reducing per capita GDP. This is not remotely the case. The real economy has exploded by 40 * 75 = 3000 times (real, after price changes), making 40 times as much income (every year) for each of 75 times as many people.
This is so outside the bounds of any static anything or anything Mathusian statics can comprehend, that it is a downright scandal that we are still sitting here arguing about it. What the heck will it take in the way of explosive and world transforming success, before people believe that capitalist growth (including utterly unstatic population explosion) is good for us?
Since the massive reality can apparently be ignored, I'll try the opposite extreme. Imagine two Americas, one as it is now but with illegal immigration controlled, present illegals removed, but ongoing continued legal immigration and ongoing burgeoning population - the position I call for - and on the other hand imagine yourself personally alone on a howling wilderness of North America, without another human soul present or ever having been present, left to fend for yourself as best you can, with your bare hands and naked body your only instruments.
Which is a wealthier society?
Fine, now reason.
Do other people working enrich you or impoverish you?
As Reagan would say:
“There you go again.”
You are arguing before you read and understand. I am pro free market and pro-capitalist. So are many of the conservative opponents of unlimited immigration. Let me try again, one last crack at trying to correct misperceptions ...
1) “ It is balderdash to claim that our legal immigrants are worse for the country than the illegals are just because the legal ones are (legally) eligible for transfer payments. The illegal ones are clearly worse for the country in hosts of ways starting with the undermining of law, then the systematic illegality and mendacity that follows everything they touch, etc.”
You mispresent the argument and attack a strawman. The argument is that legalizing the illegal immigrants of today does not help make them an asset. It’s not an argument about today’s legal immigrants vs today’s illegal immigrants; probably the former are more upstanding.
Your argument is to compare a group of criminals versus law abiding citizens. The real question is: if we legalized rape and let rapists out of jail, would we have a safe, better, more law-abiding society wrt rape? of course not. Of course legalizing illegal immigrants wouldnt magically make them have the higher skills, higher income and less dependence that today’s illegal immigrants have. And thus arguments that amnesty would make them better is no more than bait and switch.
you attack a strawman.
2) “neither do you, since you think it is caused by technology”
!!! You do not realize that our standard of living increases and growth are caused by technology? All the stats on USA from the civil war to 1929 and you dont understand that it was the industrial revolution that helped make that happen? the mind boggles. I guess maybe the fact that I’ve worked in a $200 billion industry created and sustainted by technological innovation gives me a little better understanding of how this works. Technological innovation can create new products (new markets & growth; think iPod, PC, cell phone) or improve efficiency of existing production (electrical motor, brayton cycle turbine); the latter leads to productivity improvements which leads to high standard of living, as standard of living is predicated on the production & services/person.
Sure, we can also grow economically as population increases, but it would be quite uninteresting and underwhelming to live in a USA that has huge population but the standard of living of 1790 USA. We can see that kind of life in India and China, and its not desirable.
Since immigration doesnt by itself destroy technology, it wont by itself cause lower GDP per capita overall (another strawman, that was never the claim), but neither does immigration or population growth by itself create high standard of living. If it did Africa, India and China would be the world’s paradises.
3) “bigot as a man incapable of entertaining the contrary of a proposition”
Thus, you might look in the mirror. I merely provided data and studies that backed up the empirical claim that immigration has an effect that depresses wage rates. To believe such an empirical claim does not disprove capitalism’s benefits nor does it make one a marxist. You’re the one with the rigid thinking here. You’re not thinking that immigration could have complex effects that help in some cases, hurt in other cases; that can help one group (ag businesses get to stay more competitive) and hurt other groups (meatpacker workers get sustituted for cheaper labor).
4) As for the empirical claim ...
“On the contrary, the study you yourself cite below acknowledges that virtually all previous studies (to that one published in 2004) found no correlation between immigration and domestic wages. Clustered at zero and not statistically significant. The author of the paper you cite tries to manufacture such a correlation by breaking the data into many more classes based on his proxies for education level and prior experience.”
Another strawman. It’s not about all wages on average overall. Once again, the claim was/is about the fact that native-born low skill workers are getting hit by immigration’s impact. So you ‘refute’ another strawman about wages in the whole economy and decry as irrelevent the specific point by Borjas. the specific data point was:
“Among natives without a high school education, who roughly correspond to the poorest tenth of the workforce, the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent.”
Now, you tell me ...
“The average hourly earnings of US workers in 1980 were $12.16 ($6.57 nominal, the rest is inflation) and in 2000 were $13.75, in chain weighted 2000 dollars. Hourly earnings rose 13%.”
you consider that an impressive number? Or less than satisfactory, given that the economy grew, what about 50% from 1980 to 2000? And this average is across both skilled and unskilled, right? Now go look up the increase based on education level ... and then gender only, ie male non-college wage levels. ... it will be enlightening.
Also you mention that previous studies showed no correlation ... yet Borjas explains why they are self-defeating due tothe very mobility of labor *within* the US to equalize impacts of ‘disparate immigration impact’ studies...
“More recent research raises two questions about the validity of interpreting near-zero cross-city correlations as evidence that immigration has no labor market impact. First, immigrants may not be randomly distributed across labor markets. If immigrants tend to cluster in cities with thriving economies, there would be a built-in spurious positive correlation between immigration and wages.
Second, natives may respond to the wage impact of immigration by moving their labor or capital to other cities. For example, native-owned firms see that cities in Southern California flooded by low-skill immigrants pay lower wages to laborers. Employers who hire laborers will want to relocate to those cities. The flow of jobs to the immigrant-hit areas cushions the adverse effect of immigration on the wage of competing workers in those localities.
Similarly, laborers living in Michigan were perhaps thinking about moving to California before the immigrants entered that state. These laborers learn that immigration reduced their potential wages in California and may instead decide to remain where they are or move elsewhere. Moreover, some Californians might leave the state to search for better opportunities.
The flow of jobs and workers tends to equalize economic conditions across cities. As a result, inter-city comparisons will not be very revealing; job flows and native migration effectively diffuse the impact of immigration across the national economy. In the end, all laborers, regardless of where they live, are worse off because there are now many more of them.”
So prior studies showed no/little impacts because they were flawed studies that wouldnt account for self-compensating aspects of our dynamic economy.
let’s get to real, ground facts.
I work in a global technology business with immigrants and with outsourcing. Our company and managers are not stupid. If and when it is cheaper to do projects in India or China, we go there. A lot of companies do. Hiring in US is consequently less than it might have been in certain tasks and jobs. This is the *real* free market in action, and to deny the supply/demand impact on labor costs is to deny econ 101. When labor markets are tight, wages go up; we couldnt even hire a freshout PhD for $100,000 at the top of the bubble in early 2000; when labor markets are not tight, wages are flat or sinking. the converse - since the bubble, many wages and market availability was much easier, in 2002-2005. the amount of hiring I got to do: ZERO. the place where all hiring on net basis is happening - “low cost centers” ie India and China. Now Microsoft wants more H1Bs. we now why - they want to get more brains for less dollars. The flipside: Without the H1Bs, they would have to bid up to pay for programmers, and people would switch careers if the wages were high enough. The supply would be there, the supply is *always* there - at a higher price. I know. I work with H1Bs.
For meat packers, there is a history of hiring illegal aliens since the 1980s:
http://www.ktvotv3.com/Global/story.asp?S=5831797&nav=1LFs
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/19/business/NA_FIN_US_Immigration_Raid_Lawsuit.php
When the Swift plant opened in Cactus, wages were approximately $20 (€15.27) an hour,” said another plaintiffs attorney, Michael Haygood. “Now, the average wage is approximately $12 (€9.16) to $13 (€9.93) an hour. Illegal immigration has fueled this depression in wages.”
see also Lou Dobbs:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1625454/posts
“The meat packers are confirming what we know,” says University of Maryland economics professor Peter Morici, “and that is that this large group of illegal aliens in the United States is lowering the wage rate of semiskilled workers, people who are high school dropouts or high school graduates with minimal training.”
In fact, a meat-packing job paid $19 an hour in 1980, but today that same job pays closer to $9 an hour, according to the Labor Department. That’s entirely consistent with what we’ve been reporting — that illegal aliens depress wages for U.S. workers by as much as $200 billion a year in addition to placing a tremendous burden on hospitals, schools and other social services. “
“according to the University Of Maryland as reported by Lou Dobbs, meat packers in 1980 earned $19 hour.Now that the immigrants have taken over in this industry they earn less then $9 hr.”
Now you can believe a few things:
1) these claims that meatpacker wages fell are untrue (go ahead, figure out the average meatpacking wages, and convince me they are 13% or above from 1980 to 2000 in real terms, I dare you.).
2) that the claims are true but “overall” the economy is better for it anyway and therefore we should just suck it in and live with it. Maybe it is, but try telling that to those whose standard of living is lower than it was 25 years ago because of these changes.
3) that the claims are true and that, irrespective of the fact that GDP numbers might look okay while this is happening (since the meatpacking companies are producing more), we should be concerned about the impact to our society, ie working class non-college-educated workers, as a result of these changes. See the comments in this post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-weissman/meatpackers-immigrants-_b_20119.html
Yeah, from lefties most of the comments, but they can not be adequately responded to with a simple “immigrants help the economy” cheerleading. If they help the ‘economy’ mainly by improving profit margins and driving down wages and thereby increasing inequality, there are many people who see that as a *problem* not a *solution*.
5) Perhaps we are seeing the human and cultural dimension and aspects beyond raw GDP numbers. you argue irrelevent and strawman points, without addressing the concrete realities and problems from illegal and related low-skill immigration.
These problems cant be waived away with peaens to immigrants past or analogies to situations in our history that are not fully comparable.
Your error is in:
1. failing to distinguish between the two cases of “all other things being equal” versus “this effect is absolute”. I am not asserting an absolute as you seem to think, but a relative statement that wages are lower than they otherwise would be when you increase labor supply relative to demand in a particular category. Such nonsense like thinking I’m claiming per capita income is falling etc.
2. failing to discern between the overall average impact and the disparate impact on subgroups.
3. failing to recognize that the welfare state and USA of long ago are two different situations. In the past the poor huddled masses were mostly on their own (although their poverty kicked off the start of the welfare state in the form of progressivism). Failing to notice that most immigrants are dependents who could/would be Govt dependents, not workers, skews analysis.
I will repeat again my bottom line:
“*SOME* immigration is helpful and *SOME* immigration, whether legal or illegal is hurtful ... moderate levels of immigration based on skill levels helpful to the economy - good. massive chain migration of impoverished illiterates - net drain. The main differences are net impact on taxpayers, since unskilled and non-workers do not ‘pay their own way’ through life and become added burdens on taxpayers also how they impact wider economy through earnings and spending.”
This is not a black-or-white issue, where all immigration is only bad or only good. But this is an issue where real defenders of free market economics need to be careful about defending an ‘open borders’ policy that brings about, in reality, many of the claims of the anti-capitalist left make against corporate America: Inequality, abuse of workers rights, corruption, lack of improvement in standard of living from one generation to the next, etc. As a result, allowing this to continue will shift (perhaps already has shifted) our politics to the left in many different ways. Dangerous politically, dangerous culturally, and dangerous economically.
Nothing you have said would change/dispute that assessment so perhaps you can agree with it and call it a day.
PS. A coda on the meatpacking data, what happens when you make the illegal immigrants go home:
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/003974.html
Illegals were removed - people were hired:
“ The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday. ... “
“Local 22 union president Dan Hoppes said Tuesday that 40 to 50 new workers have been hired at the Grand Island plant since the raids.”
They raised wages to get the job filled, and they were:
“The United Food and Commercial Workers filed grievances over the company’s interviews, although after the workers left, the Marshalltown plant raised its starting wage from $9.55 to $11.50 in an attempt to fill the vacancies, said Jim Olesen, the union’s local president.”
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