Posted on 05/01/2009 12:42:37 PM PDT by La Lydia
WASHINGTON - Congress should enact "badly needed" immigration reforms to bring in both unskilled and skilled foreign workers if it wants to maintain the nation's economic vitality, former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan said Thursday. Greenspan called for both a temporary worker program for low-skilled jobs and for an increase in visas for highly skilled workers...in testimony at the first Senate hearing this year on the prospects of an immigration overhaul.
Noting the "very large participation" of undocumented workers in both low- and high-skilled jobs, he said, "if you were to remove either of those groups, the economy would be very much in trouble."...Greenspan was the star witness in the first hearing chaired by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), brought in to lay out an economic rationale for immigration reform at a time of economic crisis...The subcommittee's ranking Republican, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, said he agreed with Schumer on many of his goals for immigration legislation. But later he questioned if it were possible to pass a bill this year.... Though Greenspan acknowledged Americans would like to see "the number of illegals decreased," he said "illegal immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy."...
Schumer polled the second panel of experts for the top obstacle, and three of four said it was legalizing undocumented workers already in the country. Meisner said it created the political problem when Americans think "that legalization is rewarding lawbreaking."...Schumer responded that the biggest fear of Americans is that a new overhaul, like the 1986 amnesty for undocumented workers, would not stop the influx of illegal immigrants in the future. "Their biggest fear is that it's going to happen again and again and again," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Go away Alan. Haven’t you done enough damage? Trying to finish it off so we’re all working for $3/hour?
I wonder how often Andrea gives him his insanity pills?
Oh, and take your leftist wife with you, too, Alan ...
Here comes the OBL crowd. I expect the WSJ to endorse the idea soon.
Anyone ever try to tell people at a job you no longer work at how to run things?
Did they listen?
Go away Alan. Haven’t you done enough damage? Trying to finish it off so we’re all working for $3/hour?’
When you and I are being offered $3 per hour- the illegals will work for $2/hyr.
Greenspan should have to live for a year on what I make and see how the real world is.
Dear Alan,
Go f*** yourself.
Regards,
Wolfie
Guess the dozens of other legal routes aren’t helping any more than the illegal routes so we need even more legal routes.
Idiots like Greenspin need deportin.
Yeah, Greenspan, we should listen to the guy most responsible for the housing bubble for advice on any other subject...
“Go away Alan. Haven’t you done enough damage? Trying to finish it off so we’re all working for $3/hour?”
Gosh, I can’t say it better than you did.
What the hell...............just get rid of the borders all together. They don’t do anything with them anyway.
So Greenspan doesn’t want high skilled Americans to get high skilled jobs and Robert Reich doesn’t want high skilled Americans to get the jobs that the Stimulus Package would created. This is the American With NO Abilities Act.
Alan, you’ve done more damage to this country than you know or will ever admit, and you did it while calling yourself a libertarian (even though you were the country’s biggest central planner). Go away. That’s all. Thanks.
Wasn’t Greenspan the one who helped bring the economy to where it is today? I guess the pompous ass hasn’t heard that 600,000 AMERICANS are losing their jobs monthly. How ‘bout we do a little AMERICAN “reform” first before we worry about Mexico’s unemployed.
To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if Greenspan doesn’t want you getting a job and Reich doesn’t want you getting a job, you might be a conservative!
Alan Greenspan was brain-dead when he was head of the Fed. Now he is even worse.
Greenspan and his handler’s policies are the reason the *world’s* economy is in such a mess. (actually, they made the mess to take our savings)
I don’t think anyone should take his word on immigration.
How exactly will that help anyone? Seen the hoards at HD lately? Pretty quite isn't it. There are enough houses now for years and years to come.
Progressives, all alike, just different sides of the same coin. Beck has it right.
I am tired of liars shoveling this $hit. We have employment appraoching double digits and this buffoon is calling for amnesty?
She probably puts a tape recorder next to him while he sleeps too.
Damn. I’ve been out of steady work for over 6 months. s Is this all that is needed? /s Bastard.
11% or more unemployment plus the country is literally broke due to illegal immigration and Greenspan wants MORE people? He is insane and has zero credibility. He left short term rates too low for too long after 9/11. Idiot.
I wonder what Greenspan's opinion is on abortion which has killed 50 million of America's future skilled and unskilled workers since 1973.
The only reason to allow in more foreign workers is to drive down wages. You can hardly expect most american’s to support that position. If we had a labor shortage, instead of 10% or more unemployment..then there would be some reason.
Right now the US has an excess of unskilled, uneducated workers(and none workers). What we need is more capital to employ them.
Greenspan is no different than the RINO’s and democrats when it comes to saving his own hyde. Boris Yeltsin in “Midnight Diaries” said he knew communism didn’t work. He only became one so he could survive.
Y’know, when people say “the economy”, they all mean different things.
To some....it’s unemployment
To some....it’s stock market levels
To some....it’s low, moderate inflation
To some....it’s trade
To some....it’s corporate profits.
To some....it’s the trade deficit
To some....it’s the rate of business formation
Greenspan is in a different camp. What he’s saying here, and he’s right, is that it would really, really help his banker buddies, if US wages were driven much lower, and if the selective enforcement of laws, never mind the Constitution, would really really help out his pals with all the congressites they could buy off.
bring ayn rand back to life, this guy has lost his mind
Like any other rabid skunks, they need to be properly dispatched and disposed of.
Self deleting what I would like to see happen to Greenscum and his butt ugly skank wife.
Next we'll have some Obama czar making corporations hire these illegals and train them to do our jobs.
(there's already a trend to lay folks off and hire them back as *temporaries) We can't blame all of this on Barry. This *Socialist* agenda has been blooming for many decades in this country. He's the one whose policies will send it over the top.
Not if we replaced these illegal alien workers with American workers and legal immigrant workers.
As this thing continues, more Americans are going to finally wake up to the harsh reality that giving jobs to illegals, while 10 million Americans are out of work, hurts all of us.
GLOBALIST SCUM
Hey, Greenspan, you also thought the the free market and all the fine folks in the financial industry would prevent any serious problems from arising in the subprime market.
Are you keeping a scorecard?
Something like “Meals on Wheels”.
What does he care.Old fossil needs to go the hell away and take thatthing you call a wife with you.
“Dear Alan,
Go f*** yourself.
Regards,
Wolfie”
AMEN!
“Y’know, when people say “the economy”, they all mean different things.
To some....it’s unemployment
To some....it’s stock market levels
To some....it’s low, moderate inflation
To some....it’s trade
To some....it’s corporate profits.
To some....it’s the trade deficit
To some....it’s the rate of business formation
Greenspan is in a different camp. What he’s saying here, and he’s right, is that it would really, really help his banker buddies, if US wages were driven much lower, and if the selective enforcement of laws, never mind the Constitution, would really really help out his pals with all the congressites they could buy off.”
BINGO, and the man in his own words to support that view:
“The presumption that you could incrementally defuse a bubble was a fantasy. Clearly, you cannot defuse these things, unless you hit them right on the head and break the economy. Essentially, break the potential profitability that is engendering that sort of stuff. We could have basically clamped down on the American economy, generated a 10 percent unemployment rate. And I will guarantee we would not have had a housing boom, stock market boom or indeed a particularly good economy either.”
The Federal Reserve is a Banking Cartel, it is NOT free market. /FED!
STFU!
Sincerely,
Us
More like illegal alien eaters on paws.
Well dumba** that is the track record!!!
I’m contemptuous of this type of either-or extreme coming from one allegedly so brilliant and prescient that we trusted him with our economy et al. During this guy’s career, he became the master of convoluted conversational nuance in front of Congress, but now, in hindsight, the dynamics of the situation eluded him and could only have been addressed with either a feather duster or a sledgehammer. BS.
If the market is getting out of control, you don’t have to go on a binge of six or seven or eight rate rises until 3000 points come out of the DJIA before you let up, Fed- meeting-after-Fed meeting to quash it. Likewise, when it’s 1999 and the NAS has grown 85% in under a year or when it’s 2003-6 and the housing market has screamed 15% annualized for 4 straight years, both deltas being essentially unmatched in recorded history, IT’S A BUBBLE. When dentists and auto mechanics are quitting their jobs to become daytraders, IT’S A BUBBLE. The Euros, not they are to be emulated in particular, but they are much much more cautious wrt rate rises and drops.
In between smashing the guts out of the economy and injecting it with a near-fatal dose of methedrine has got to be some kind of middle ground of moderation. Greenspan’s theory that he knows what’s best, while insisting that none of these signs are readable in real time is a cruel joke. The Fed, for whatever good it has done in times of economic stress, has created periods of economic distress just as often, IMHO.
I maintain my view that these guys at the Fed and Tsy can talk a great and apparently wise line about what they want and what think should be done, but in the end, they have an allegiance to the banks that are the primary bond dealers and who are the biggest buyers and sellers of securities. There were plenty of people who raised the alarm about housing prices, and the transmission mechanism would have led straight to FNM/FRE had Gspan been motivated to look. He wasn’t. There are commonly available charts showing house prices going back 75 years that show a remarkably rigid relationship between incomes and home prices. And when that ratio gets out of whack, from nominally 3:1 to 10:1, it didn’t take a genius to know that things had gotten ridiculously out of control. His loyalty resided then and resides now with the bankers who had him on speed dial. I don’t have an issue with McDonalds being most concerned about their franchises and their franchisees. But whatever McD’s does, you don’t hear them expressing concern about Carl’s Jr or Burger King. Their motives are transparent.
Ping!
Apparently he doesn't think so. And why are they always in service of the other side?
Jimmy Carter, Tony Bennett, even Nancy Reagan for cryin' out loud.
Rip Van Greenspan just woke up.
Somebody tell him there's no economic vitality to maintain, it all croaked.
Mostly due to whackjobs like him...but him in particular.
Right! I’m surprised this old fool has the nerve to crawl out from under is rock...he did SUCH a great job on our monetary system!
UGH.
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