Countries usually set borders and immigration policies to protect their national integrity and economies. If I suspected that many conservatives were actually serious about a united world without borders that would promote peace and prosperity for all, I would salute them. I am wary enough of ulterior motives to realize that a leaky border policy that would let "those people" in, is only done to help line someone's pocket.
Realize this conservatives: Those immigrants with amnesty would be subject to the same wage protections as other Americans, so the cost of your cleaning lady will go up. Your sweatshops will then be subject to OSHA protection, the next time a Democrat is in the White House. Finally for those so predisposed, they will not feel so compelled to abandon their old culture, which will hamper conversion their rates.
The anti-Christianity of the Racist Right
ajax18 wrote:But Harmony with the money we're saving on food, aren't we just paying it right back in taxes anâ social programs? I'm not just talking about immigrants. I'm including trailor trash like myself working at WalMart competing with the Mexicans for these crappy jobs. The only person that really gains is WalMart. Higher paid people may think they're saving money but are they? Do they really want to catch my diseases or wait on me four a half an hour to find their stuff because I can't afford a pair of glasses?
You try living even a middle class life when you're paying out 40% of your wages for food. It's impossible.
The idea that cheap labor is good for the country as a whole doesn't seem to add up for me. You also left out the future resentment and envy that immigrants will feel toward the upper class. Whatever social problems and disparity of wealth exist now, I think they will be further inflamed once you add racial differences to the mix.
What future resentment? Did you not see where crock mentioned things like soccer fields for their children? Do you think there's many soccer fields, where they came from? Think again. No matter how bad it seems to us here, for them, it's paradise. They come a place where there's no jobs, no running water, no electricity. They're a century behind us, and they're willing to risk their lives and their children's lives in order to come here. Read up a little on what life is like in the backward villages. It might surprise you, and it might give you a little more understanding of what motivates them to risk so much for what we consider so little.
Health care, although not perfect. is better than any other nation in the world of any particular size.
I couldn't disagree with you more on this. Speaking strictly of healthcare, a white man like myself would be far better off living in Russia.
Look I don't hate Latinos. I just don't want them ruining my country, and that is exactly what illegal immigration is doing. It is not a victim less crime and as far as I'm concerned it is malum in se. Good and bad really only have meaning based on the perspective.
The idea that within a hundred years there will be no more blonde people seems like a disaster in diversity of the human species, since we now worship this new god called diversity. While I have nothing against other races doing their thing somewhere else, I'd prefer to keep at least a pocket of my own race the way it is for now. In other words, don't come to my country and expect me to adopt your culture. Latino women are definitely beautiful, but when the whole damm world becomes brown, it sort of loses it specialness.
Secondly you never answered my point about the unquestionable overpopulation going on in undevleoped countries in general. If they want their quality of life to improve at all, they're going to have to tone it down a bit, for our sakes but also their own.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
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_rcrocket
Ajax: As you leave the Church (I don't know where you are on that journey) I hope you come to know that your attitudes are racist. Who is to say that a blonde person is better than a brown person? I would submit that blondes are the barbarians and pagans brought into christianity at the point of a sword by brown-skinned people.
I cringe when I hear comments among my friends or in Church about the declining number of blondes on our soccer teams and elementary schools. Members of the Church should have no basis for saying such things. I celebrate the use of our church buildings by the Hispanic community. At least they are coming to know Christ -- the very promise given to Lehi's children is being fulfilled in our day.
rcrocket
I cringe when I hear comments among my friends or in Church about the declining number of blondes on our soccer teams and elementary schools. Members of the Church should have no basis for saying such things. I celebrate the use of our church buildings by the Hispanic community. At least they are coming to know Christ -- the very promise given to Lehi's children is being fulfilled in our day.
rcrocket
You're going to have to decide what you want: cheap food or expensive food. That's essentially what this whole argument is about. Immigrant labor is used mostly in the food industry, either in the fields or in the processing plants.
There are millions of immigrants who stay very quietly under the radar, paying taxes, working hard, staying out of trouble. For their employers, they are a boon. For their fellow native workers, they are a drain. According to George Borjas, Harvard University, 2006, immigrant workers shift the net gain to the employers of immigrant workers and to every other native-born person, by about $80 per worker. That's a lot of money to gain by using immigrant workers instead of native workers, about $20 billion annually. Why? Because native-born workers want more money to do the same job that immigrant workers will do for less. How many native workers would do the jobs immigrants do, for the wages immigrants are paid?
I pay out about 10% of our Pickle wages on food. Would anyone be willing to pay out 40% of their wages to put food on the table, if it meant workers in agriculture and the food industry were paid a living wage? I doubt it. We like to talk big, but when push comes to shove, we don't want to pay more for our food. Let's face it: we're willing to put up with illegal immigrants in order to put cheap food on our tables.
Now, try educating yourself on the economics facts of the matter as they stand and then post something later on that reflects that education. The "immigrants are doing jobs Americans won't do" argument has already long ago been exploded, and rehashing it here gives it no more credibility. Food prices wouldn't necessarily rise if most of those picking our lettuce and tomatoes were indigenous Americans, for the simple reason that the wages of the immigrants doing that picking isn't that much lower than what a native American would accept anymore, as well as that labor is only a small fraction of the price of a piecc of produce as it appears at the market.
The fact of the matter is that in their absence, the free market would absorb all the workers it needed from the indigenous population, and wages and incentives would rise with that demand and the relative presence of workers in the population. Price competition for wage labor within the agricultural industry would keep prices low, just as it does in all other sectors in which market forces are allowed to function.
Which brings me to the fact that the primary reason our food is so expensive regardless of who's picking the tomatoes is that most of that food is artificially inflated by government subsidies to agriculture and it is illegal to sell produce in major markets below a certain floor. Farmers are still paid to this very day to restrict production and even destroy crops, if necessary, to keep prices high at the check out counter. Food was relatively cheap decades ago before the present immigration waves flooded the low skilled wage labor market, and there is no reason to think that it would not be if those same aliens simply went home and opened up the wage labor market in those areas to the unskilled and unemployed at home.
Indeed, the major desire for cheaper than indigenous immigrant labor is coming primarily from large corporations, which means that the American taxpayer is subsidizing the cheap labor of big businesses who are more than able to absorb indigenous Americans at wage rates they would accept (and, indeed, in the absence of the aliens would have to) and many of whom are already being subsidized by the American taxpayer through innumerable corporate welfare programs at the federal level. Who gets screwed in all of this again? You guessed it.
Its interesting that prior to 1965, when the first major immigration bill became law and the present wave of southern immigration began, our lawns were getting cut, our produce was being grown and harvested, our houses were being built, and our gardens weeded, all without the presence of anything like the present population of Third World immigrants. Food was not 40% higher than it would have been, and indeed, it was far lower in price than at present. Between 1925 and 1965, there was very little Mexican immigration, and yet none of Harmony's dire economic predictions materialized.
Another point that might be raised is that, even though migrant workers make less than what an American would accept to pick lettuce, this doesn't necessarily mean that costs would actually be higher if Americans were doing the jobs, for the simple reason that using Mexicans, especially illegals, doesn't necessarily save the consumer money. This is because the lower wages mask the fact that other costs-the disproportionate use of social services, free hospital care, and welfare benefits-are being shifted to the consumer through the lower wage. Your tomatoes may appear to be cheaper, but other costs are being passed along to you outside of the bare price you see in the supermarket.
And, in the long run your taxes are going to rise, government spending is going to bloat, and your cheaper head of lettuce is going to pick your pocket one way or another.
Harmony also misses one other important point: Illegals make up around 3-4% of the workforce, but their unemployment rate is between 5% and 7%. That means there are a number of warm bodies just sitting around living on the American taxpayer, and at least one indigenous American laying around as well who could do the same job presently held by the illegal immigrant. At a higher wage rate? Maybe, but that all depends on the dynamics of the wage labor market in various and sundry industries and businesses, something far to complex for the government to be predicting or making sure claims about in any case. In a free market, competition, innovation, improved managerial strategies and technological advancement impose a deflationary influence on prices that counterbalances the inflationary influence of high demand or initial high overhead costs. Without the immigrant subsidy, the agricultural industry would adjust to the new economic conditions (because Americans are not going to tolerate a 40% rise in food costs), just as it adjusted to the lack of a vast pool of immigrant labor for the four decades prior to 1965.
As Mark Krikorian has stated at NR Online (italics mine):
As well-meaning as such efforts may be, the basic assumption is false — there is simply no economic reason to import foreign workers.
If the supply of foreign workers were to dry up (say, through actually enforcing the immigration law, for starters), employers would respond to this new, tighter, labor market in two ways. One, they would offer higher wages, increased benefits, and improved working conditions, so as to recruit and retain people from the remaining pool of workers. At the same time, the same employers would look for ways to eliminate some of the jobs they now are having trouble filling. The result would be a new equilibrium, with blue-collar workers making somewhat better money, but each one of those workers being more productive.
Many people fear the first part of such a response, claiming that prices for fruits and vegetables would skyrocket, fueling inflation. But since all unskilled labor — from Americans and foreigners, in all industries — accounts for such a small part of our economy, perhaps four percent of GDP, we can tighten the labor market without any fear of sparking meaningful inflation. Agricultural economist Philip Martin has pointed out that labor accounts for only about ten percent of the retail price of a head of lettuce, for instance, so even doubling the wages of pickers would have little noticeable effect on consumers.
But it's the second part of the response to a tighter labor market that people just don't get. By holding down natural wage growth in labor-intensive industries, immigration serves as a subsidy for low-wage, low-productivity ways of doing business, retarding technological progress and productivity growth.
That this is so should not be a surprise. Julian Simon, in his 1981 classic, The Ultimate Resource, wrote about how scarcity leads to innovation:
It is important to recognize that discoveries of improved methods and of substitute products are not just luck. They happen in response to "scarcity" — an increase in cost. Even after a discovery is made, there is a good chance that it will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. This point is important: Scarcity and technological advance are not two unrelated competitors in a race; rather, each influences the other.
As it is for copper or oil, this fact is true also for labor; as wages have risen over time, innovators have devised ways of substituting capital for labor, increasing productivity to the benefit of all. The converse, of course, is also true; the artificial superabundance of a resource will tend to remove much of the incentive for innovation.
Stagnating innovation caused by excessive immigration is perhaps most apparent in the most immigrant-dependent activity — the harvest of fresh fruit and vegetables. The period from 1960 to 1975 (roughly from the end of the "Bracero" program, which imported Mexican farmworkers, to the beginning of the mass illegal immigration we are still experiencing today) was a period of considerable agricultural mechanization. But a continuing increase in the acreage and number of crops harvested mechanically did not materialize as expected, in large part because the supply of workers remained artificially large due to the growing illegal immigration we were politically unwilling to stop.
An example of a productivity improvement that "will not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost," as Simon said, is in raisin grapes]. The production of raisins in California's Central Valley is one of the most labor-intensive activities in North America. Conventional methods require bunches of grapes to be cut by hand, manually placed in a tray for drying, manually turned, manually collected.
But starting in the 1950s in Australia (where there was no large supply of foreign farm labor), farmers were compelled by circumstances to develop a laborsaving method called "dried-on-the-vine" (DOV) production. This involves growing the grapevines on trellises, then, when the grapes are ready, cutting the base of the vine instead of cutting each bunch of grapes individually. This new method radically reduces labor demand at harvest time and increases yield per acre by up to 200 percent. But this high-productivity, innovative method of production has spread very slowly in the United States because the mass availability of foreign workers has served as a disincentive to farmers to make the necessary capital investment.
But perhaps immigration's role in retarding economic modernization is confined to agriculture, which, after all, is very different from the rest of the economy. Nope. Manufacturing sees the same phenomenon of a scarcity of low-skilled labor yielding innovation while a surfeit yields stagnation. An example of the latter: A 1995 report on southern California's apparel industry, prepared by Southern California Edison, warned of the danger to the industry of reliance on low-cost foreign labor:
In southern California, apparel productivity gains have been made through slow-growth in wages. While a large, low-cost labor pool has been a boon to apparel production in the past, overreliance on relatively low-cost sources of labor may now cost the industry dearly. The fact is, southern California has fallen behind both domestic and international competitors, even some of its lowest-labor-cost competitors, in applying the array of production and communications technologies available to the industry (such as computer aided design and electronic data interchange)." (Emphasis in original)
Conversely, home builders, who are still less reliant on foreign workers than some other industries, have begun to modernize construction techniques. The higher cost of labor means that "In the long run, we'll see a move toward homes built in factories," as Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research at the National Association of Home Builders, told the Washington Post several years ago. But as immigrants increasingly move into this industry, we can expect such innovation to spread much more slowly than it would otherwise.
But surely immigration is needed to fill jobs in the service industry? After all, without immigrants, who will pump our gas? Oh, wait — we never imported immigrants for that and so now we pump our own gas, aided by technology that lets us pay at the pump — thus we have fewer attendants but more gas stations and get in and out faster than we used to when we trusted our car to the man who wore the Texaco star.
Other innovations suggest how, despite the protestations of employers, a tight low-skilled labor market can spur modernization even in the service sector: Automated switches have replaced most telephone operators, continuous-batch washing machines reduce labor demand for hotels, buffet-style restaurants need much less staff that full-service ones. As unlikely as it might seem, many VA hospitals are now using mobile robots to ferry medicines from their pharmacies to various nurse's stations, eliminating the need for a worker to perform that task. And devices like automatic vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, and pool cleaners are increasingly available to consumers. Keeping down low-skilled labor costs through the president's vast new guestworker plan would stifle this ongoing modernization process.
The idea that a modern society like ours requires the ministrations of foreign workers, because there is no other way to do get these jobs done, smacks of the apocryphal quote from a 19th-century patent commissioner: "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
In other words, the economic arguments for unrestrained immigration have little merit. In any case, if we really want to get to the bottom of why our government has its heels dug in regarding present levels are types of immigration, we need not discuss tomatoes or cutting grass. The real reason both parties, a number of Republicans and the Democratic Party as a whole, are so enamored of mass immigration is that, without it, the American welfare state's days are numbered. Medicare and Social Security are set to begin implosion in about ten years, and the demographic trends of the last forty years or so make unavoidable a day of reckoning for the nanny state. The Republicans, for there part, seem to be pandering, at least to some degree, to some corporate interests who desire the cheaper than usual labor (as well as to a future welfare trough, which all to many Republicans seem to desire, not to restrain, but to control). The Democrats have founded their entire party platform on the creation of dependency among various constituencies and by the distribution of government benefits to these constituencies. A large, balkanized, alienated population of foreigners who do not speak the language and do not understand or appreciate American culture, history, or values is just what the Democrats need to ensure that they never loose another election again.
Ultimately then, this really isn't about private sector economics so much as about the political implications of the bankrupting of some major New Deal and Great Society programs and the most politically cowardly way that can be found to deal with it.
I couldn't disagree with you more on this. Speaking strictly of healthcare, a white man like myself would be far better off living in Russia.
Look I don't hate Latinos. I just don't want them ruining my country, and that is exactly what illegal immigration is doing. It is not a victim less crime and as far as I'm concerned it is malum in se. Good and bad really only have meaning based on the perspective.
The idea that within a hundred years there will be no more blonde people seems like a disaster in diversity of the human species, since we now worship this new god called diversity. While I have nothing against other races doing their thing somewhere else, I'd prefer to keep at least a pocket of my own race the way it is for now. In other words, don't come to my country and expect me to adopt your culture. Latino women are definitely beautiful, but when the whole damm world becomes brown, it sort of loses it specialness.
Secondly you never answered my point about the unquestionable overpopulation going on in undevleoped countries in general. If they want their quality of life to improve at all, they're going to have to tone it down a bit, for our sakes but also their own.
Ajax, I have no worldly idea why you desire to muddy the water in this way. The immigration debate has exactly nothing to do with "race" and everything to do with politics, culture, sociology, and economics. What do you mean "no more blond people"? What kind of nonsense is this? The whole world brown? Where are you getting this stuff from?
And why on earth are you carrying the water for the international Left by shilling for their longstanding overpopulation mythology? The primary problem in the Third World is not overpopulation, but lack of the rule of law, free markets, property rights, and democratic institutions.
Good heavens, get a grip!
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_rcrocket
Coggins7 wrote:Now, try educating yourself on the economics facts of the matter as they stand and then post something later on that reflects that education.
I have educated myself. I have worked part-time as an economics professor and I have published one article on Marshallian economics.
You can't educate yourself on this issue by continuing to cite to conservative non-libertarian sources.
In truth, economists are divided, as the New York Times notes: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/busin ... nd&emc=rss
Indeed, the article notes that Ohio is an example of a state with almost no illegal immigrants, but with a very low wage rate for high school dropouts. The article limits itself to prevailing wages, and concludes there is no certain evidence that illegal immigration affects the wages of existing citizens.
But, your post is so far from libertarianism I am simply astounded that you have previously claimed on this board to be a true libertarian. True libertarians believe that regulations and laws designed to restrict economic development, and impose border restrictions, immigration and impose tariffs, will lead to economic degradation.
Government subsidies of foodstuffs has no relationship to immigration.
rcrocket
I have educated myself. I have worked part-time as an economics professor and I have published one article on Marshallian economics.
Not impressed. What you've just said above bespeaks precisely the same kind of closed minded intellectual bigotry Scratch brings to the table every time he engages an issue (don't listen to Coggins, he just quoted David Horowitz, or Bill Buckley. They aren't legitimate because they're non-Liberal sources (standing in here for non-Libertarian).
You seem blissfully unaware that modern Conservatism and Libertarianism are closely related sibling philosophies whose understandings of economics are very close, save for some issues here and there. Non-Libertarian? Why have you not read the essay by Tibor Machen (you have heard of him, I presume?)I posted on this issue? You may also want to look here:
http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail ... rder=issue
for a broad overview of potential Libertarian positions, and then read this:
http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail ... rder=issue
and then this:
http://blog.mises.com/journals/jls/13_2/13_2_5.pdf
An entire vast mass of bandwidth could be used up critiquing the pure Libertarian theory of immigration, but no need to do that here. Suffice it to say, some of theses core positions are based, as de soto makes clear, on a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist conception of political and economic structure, a conception perhaps a little more palatable than the equally fantastic Marxian conceptions of an anarchic stateless society only for its bow to individual liberty stemming from very different sentiments than those that animated Marx, but nonetheless just as well situated in the realm of fantasy.
Hopp (you've heard of him as well, I assume) takes a fairly realistic Libertarian position I think, attempting to weigh both the desire to limit the coerciveness of the state and the economic and social realties of unfettered immigration in an intellectually balanced manner--unlike your own fatally unrealistic insistence upon Libertarian ideological purity, which you've quite cleverly, if disingenuously, attempted to blend with Church teachings such that you can morally breast beat against those who disagree with you and yell "racist" from the roof tops rather than engage the facts and evidence of the issue.
Frankly, neither Hopp and especially, de soto, provide ultimately realistic or workable solutions to the immigration problem (even though they raise very interesting questions about the nature of the state and its proper place in the process) and pose as many questions as they raise, but both are superior to your moral pontification on the issue.
You can't educate yourself on this issue by continuing to cite to conservative non-libertarian sources.
In truth, economists are divided, as the New York Times notes:
Not impressed. What you've just said above bespeaks precisely the same kind of closed minded intellectual bigotry Scratch brings to the table every time he engages an issue (don't listen to Coggins, he just quoted David Horowitz, or Bill Buckley. They aren't legitimate because they're non-Liberal sources (standing in here for non-Libertarian).
You seem blissfully unaware that modern Conservatism and Libertarianism are closely related sibling philosophies whose understandings of economics are very close, save for some issues here and there. Non-Libertarian? Why have you not read the essay by Tibor Machen (you have heard of him, I presume?)I posted on this issue? You may also want to look here:
http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail ... rder=issue
for a broad overview of potential Libertarian positions, and then read this:
http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail ... rder=issue
and then this:
http://blog.mises.com/journals/jls/13_2/13_2_5.pdf
An entire vast mass of bandwidth could be used up critiquing the pure Libertarian theory of immigration, but no need to do that here. Suffice it to say, some of theses core positions are based, as de soto makes clear, on a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist conception of political and economic structure, a conception perhaps a little more palatable than the equally fantastic Marxian conceptions of an anarchic stateless society only for its bow to individual liberty stemming from very different sentiments than those that animated Marx, but nonetheless just as well situated in the realm of fantasy.
Hopp (you've heard of him as well, I assume) takes a fairly realistic Libertarian position I think, attempting to weigh both the desire to limit the coerciveness of the state and the economic and social realties of unfettered immigration in an intellectually balanced manner--unlike your own fatally unrealistic insistence upon Libertarian ideological purity, which you've quite cleverly, if disingenuously, attempted to blend with Church teachings such that you can morally breast beat against those who disagree with you and yell "racist" from the roof tops rather than engage the facts and evidence of the issue.
Frankly, neither Hopp and especially, de soto, provide ultimately realistic or workable solutions to the immigration problem (even though they raise very interesting questions about the nature of the state and its proper place in the process) and pose as many questions as they raise, but both are superior to your moral pontification on the issue.
But, your post is so far from libertarianism I am simply astounded that you have previously claimed on this board to be a true libertarian. True libertarians believe that regulations and laws designed to restrict economic development, and impose border restrictions, immigration and impose tariffs, will lead to economic degradation.
Government subsidies of foodstuffs has no relationship to immigration.
I have never, anywhere, claimed to be a "true libertarian". I have described myself as a conservative libertarian, or Classical Liberal, but never a straight libertarian. I do not think that the pure libertarian position on immigration is intellectually sustainable, as it ignores completely the very real social, political, and economic complexities of mass, unrestrained immigration in exchange for abstract theorizing regarding the state and its relationship to the individual; ideas that need to be explored, no doubt, but not at the expense of a serious understanding of economic, sociological and cultural dynamics as they are affected by such immigration.
I never claimed government subsidies had any relation to immigration. What I said was that this is one of the primary reason the price of produce, fruit (and milk) is so high, not that immigrants are doing agricultural work at a cheaper wage rate.