The Great Illegal Immigration Debate
The Hoover Institution has a roundup of arguments on the issue of illegal immigration. Accept that doing without illegal immigrants would entail an economic penalty (Russell Roberts)? Benefit from them economically in a regulated manner(Timothy Brown)? Save Mexico by forcing it to deal with its problems instead of exporting them (Victor Davis Hanson)? Worry about destabilizing Mexico by not accepting illegals (Stephen Haber)?
What's clear is that the illegal immigration problem is a hugely important issue, upon which the future of direction of North America, including the United States, depends. What is even more remarkable is the extent to which this issue has been muted, evaded and misrepresented by identity politics. The roundup at the Hoover Institution brings up the more important points. The question is whether anyone is listening.
Plus, if you come to a fork in the immigration road, take it. Oregon illegals demand driver's licenses.
Correction
I received this email from Russell Roberts and have made a correction in the text accordingly. I am sorry for being sloppy.
Wretchard,
I believe you misinterpreted what I was saying.
I think immigration is good for most Americans and the immigrants. But of course we could get by without immigrants, we'd just be poorer on average. The jobs they do now would either be done at a higher cost or not done at all. But I certainly didn't mean to suggest that we'd be better off without immigrants.
38 Comments:
Back around 1980 I heard a very interesting statistic.
It was said that if we had still employed the telephone switching system of 1910 (Hello, Central, give me the bakery on Elm street) that 70 years later it would have required the entire female population of the U.S. just to operate the phone system. Now admittedly, if all of the ladies were at work the number of phone calls made would drop drastically, but it is also clear that the automatic switching technology has been essential to such communication advances as cell phones and the Internet.
But when it comes to the sort of jobs that most illegals do, it’s still pretty much 1910. By using so much of Mexico’s surplus population we are avoiding technological developments that could eliminate our need for it. If we can have some little solar-powered robots trundling around on Mars it should be child’s play to build one that can cut my grass without me doing anything more than sharpening the blades once every couple of years or so. And who knows what other developments would result from that impetus?
Another item I read recently was that a U.S. farming company was so frustrated in getting adequate “stoop labor” in the U.S. that it has started some farms in Mexico. If crops can be grown profitably in Mexico then why is there not a Mexican company taking advantage of that market opportunity? The answer to that question no doubt leads right back to Mexican culture itself.
Right,
UC Davis had mechanized solutions for many agricultural tasks in the '70's, some were starting to be put to use when the flood of cheap labor put an end to it.
Australia uses a lot in Vineyards, not sure if it's throughout agriculture.
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The "safety valve" argument is bogus on it's face:
How can you argue that eliminating (by migration) a large portion of the healthy, industrious labor pool will benefit Mexico in anything but the most short term view of things?
It simply delays the inevitable.
RWE notes that ideally these laborers should be doing the same job in Mexico, but the illegal employment businesses here have set up a vicious cycle for decades.
As he says the Mexican Culture is part of the problem, but the rest of the problem is our illegal subculture which not only robs them of the labor, but enables needed reforms in Mexico to be deferred.
Not to mention the devastation wreaked on our hospitals, schools, highways, and etc.
VDH on Immigration
What I hate about the whole illegal question is that a herd of illiterate foreigners who don't speak my language are *demanding* that I accept them as my neighbors and pay for them to live the lifestyle I have worked to attain myself.
I should have a say in who my neighbors are, and it shouldn't involve having to leave the neighborhood of the United States of America to escape them.
Well,
Mike Medved says you are a radical xenophobe hater.
Of course Michael moved from your area to the opposite end of the Pacific Coast several years ago.
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As VDH says, it's a class thing, and you plebes will just have to learn to live with the rules made by your superiors.
There are some aspects that are often left out of the "debate".
1. Along with the traditional illegal immigration comes an actual political/criminal invasion. There are the politicals that are agitproping to create Aztlan and the massive criminal element that fills our prisons with violent offenders and our streets with outrageously aggressive gangsters.
2. The standard issue illegal immigration has, in many respects, cut off our lower economic elements from any real aspect of ever escaping the shackles of welfarism.
The escape avenues are cut off by the flood of illegals filling the lower level employment areas that were, traditionally, the way in which lower skilled persons were able to build the skills and resume to work themselves up out of government assistance.
3. The same agitpropers who stand for the status quo are also, often, standing for any other issue that dissolves the concept of national sovereignty.
RWE hit the nail on the head. The phenomena is called capital deepening: http://tinyurl.com/ynnqgz
Cheap overseas and immigrant labor tend to suppress it. The Japanese, Chinese and Italians (before the Euro) used cheap currency policies to encourage it. It remains to be seen what effect the weak dollar will have on it.
Seen in this light, low US savings rates were a perfectly rational response to foreign monetary and emigration policy.
No, nobody is listening.
Immigration isn't a rationally framed issue. This isn't a place for facts and figures. Immigration has been framed like clubbing baby seals - purely emotional. And the immigration issue is only about Mexicans.
Actually pretty smart on the part of the pro-Mexican immigration lobby.
Mexican immigration is a net drain on America - a well known fact to the thinking crowd. Mexico itself is a semi-socialist, crime-ridden, backwater stinkhole of a country that the US props up with 17 Billion dollars annually in illegal wage money flowing across the border.
Other than improving the quality of Mexican resturants, Mexican culture has done nothing positive for the US.
After two generations, the Vietnamese are our doctors, the Indians are our engineers, the Chinese are our scientists and the Mexicans are still our berry pickers.
Mexican elites now are actively interested in the question: how do you make Mexico into a first class country.
The first thing is property reform. From what I understand they are already considering de soto property reforms. Fully 1/3 of the mexican economy is informal--so it can't be taxed or borrowed against.
I think that all Mexico's illegals should be sent back to Mexico. While many are unskilled or criminal--a significant group will have aquired some serious skills that Mexico needs.
The third thing is something the USA can do. Kill the cost of water desalination and transport. Most of Northern Mexico is a desert. If you could pipe cheap fresh water to the hinterlands from the coasts you could triple the size of Mexico. I discuss this problem in more detail here.
"If we can have some little solar-powered robots trundling around on Mars it should be child’s play to build one that can cut my grass without me doing anything more than sharpening the blades once every couple of years or so."
Ask and you shall receive.
http://www.friendlyrobotics.com/
I personally have no need of an illegal maid, because I already have one of these:
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=122
There's a mop one too (with an auto-instant-dry feature) that I'll probably get sooner or later, since most of our flooring is either hardwood or tile.
Numbers USA Free Faxes to Senators and Representatives
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Free Fax: Ask the Presidential Candiates to SAY NO TO AMNESTY!
La Raza was agitating on the U of Washington campus back in the 60's when I was there. Same demands as now. Take back the southwest, it was stolen.
Kick 'em all out.
Rwe said:
"By using so much of Mexico’s surplus population we are avoiding technological developments that could eliminate our need for it. If we can have some little solar-powered robots trundling around on Mars it should be child’s play to build one that can cut my grass without me doing anything more than sharpening the blades once every couple of years or so."
This is a very perceptive comment.
Years ago I had the opportunity to tour a deep gold mine in South Africa (the East Rand Propriatary Mine or ERPM). The ERPM was an enormous gold mine and once the world's deepest mine. Touring that mine was extremely interesting. At the time, there were huge numbers of men working underground at the ERPM (about 10,000 people on one shift). Most of the people there were quasi-legal workers from Mozambique. They worked in extremely hard conditions, i.e. the heat was unbearable and the humidity extremely high. At the mine face, the ceiling height was about 3-4 feet so we were on our hands-and-knees. We were also in constant danger of instant death due to wall bursts (we were almost 3 kilometers underground so the pressure in the surrounding rock was beyond belief).
Here's the amazing part: The mining was done mostly with 19th century technology, e.g. hand held pneumatic drills. The only mechanized technology that I saw was the underground train that brought us from one mine shaft to another.
The ERPM was right on the verge of bankruptcy. Their labor costs were very cheap as was their technology overhead. However they could not afford to upgrade to more modern technology. This was ironic because the gold ore (the Witwatersrand Reef) essentially went on forever (there was no danger that the gold would ever run out). The mine that I visited did eventually shut down even though the gold ore was still there.
A few years later, I had a conversation with some Australian mining engineers. An Australia miner can sometimes earn about $100,000/year. One skilled Australian miner using automated equipment while in an air conditioned environment can mine about the same amount of gold as 10 unskilled Mozambique laborers working in appauling conditions. Unlike the ERPM mine, the Australian mines were still profitable because the Australians had not gotten stuck in the trap of using cheap unskilled workers operating obsolete technology.
It's not that intuitive but the use of cheap unskilled labor can actually be a trap that brings a company to ruin.
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I dwelt in the regions of San Francisco Bay Area for most of a decade. One scene I vividly recall seeing every time I passed through such affluent suburbs as Los Gatos, Palo Alto, Atherton, and Pleasanton. It is the image of elegant streets, over-arched with sycamores and palms, receding into the distance, separating the estates with their multi-million dollar homes. Parked in stolid ranks along the sidewalks Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches and the odd Lamborghini proudly displayed their stickers confirming they'd passed California's stringent anti-pollution regulations.
On a sunny morning the only humans to be seen were the regiments and battalions of gardeners and yard-men, sweeping their leaf-blowers in relentless zeal.
The leaf-blowers belched a steady stream of thick oily smoke.
No regulations there.
No requirements that the engines be inspected, tested, or maintained to any standard. The exhaust accumulated as the sun approached the zenith, and gave me a nostalgic reminder of how California *used* to smell in the days of my youth. Especially if there were asphalt crews about filling in pot holes.
The point is that it is the most wealthy residents who were utterly blind to the pollution they were creating merely to make their lawns appear neat.
It's also worth pointing out that many historians note there were extraordinary minds investigating mechanical principles, steam power, extraordinarily precise gearing and clockworks thousands of years ago. The factor that seems to have been primary in preventing any of those from leading to an industrial revolution before the birth of Christ, is the dependence upon slave labor.
Essentially, the patricians reasoned when presented with a scheme for using steam to power a winepress or a carriage, "Why should I pay a fortune for some devilish contraption that only one person knows how to make, when I have unlimited numbers of slaves to carry me about, cook my food, wash my garments, and peel my grapes?"
Sad but true:
Professor Hanson's comment that La Raza and the Wall Street Journal's position on immigration are almost identical.
DUST-UP: IMMIGRATION '08
Mark Krikorian - executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and author of the forthcoming book,
"The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal" (Sentinel).
and
Tomás R. Jiménez - assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Americans Kidnapped In Mexican Border Towns
The abductions are part of a drastic increase in violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, which is infested with armed drug cartels and human smugglers plowing their way north. Just last month Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff confirmed that U.S. Border Patrol agents are regularly under siege by smugglers and he assured the violence will definitely increase this year.
Chertoff made the alarming announcement days after a 32-year-old Border Patrol agent was murdered by Mexican smugglers who deliberately struck him with a sports utility vehicle. The agent, Luis Aguilar, tried to stop the vehicle as it sped through California’s Imperial San Dunes Recreation Area.
Chertoff called it a heinous act of violence and revealed that assaults on Border Patrol agents had increased 44% in the last few months. The Homeland Security secretary said agents are regularly attacked with firearms, knives, bats, steel pipes, vehicles, boats and slingshots.
ot:
Hewitt:
Tomorrow's radio show is dedicated to an extended interview with Douglas Franz and Catherine Collins, authors of the new, riveting and very important book
Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...And How We Could Have Stopped Him.
This is the true story of A. Q. Khan
--the Pakistani scientist who stole key nuclear technology from Europe, oversaw the building of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, and then sold the know-how and many parts to Libya, Iran and who knows who else.
It is an alarming tale of the world we live in, and deserves a wide, wide audience and a close read.
Not only does it provide a comprehensive but readable introduction to Pakistan and its political history since independence, it is also a primer on proliferation and the rogue states' many efforts to obtain the ultimate weapon of terror.
KRLA 870
"If we can have some little solar-powered robots trundling around on Mars it should be child’s play to build one that can cut my grass without me doing anything more than sharpening the blades once every couple of years or so. And who knows what other developments would result from that impetus?"
Someone else has already posted links to robot mowers, but here is a link to my article on the economic effect of their widespread adoption:
http://ideasinprogress.blogspot.com/2007/04/make-robot-mow-lawn.html
Thanks for the affirmation, folks, but the disadvantages of relying on cheap labor is only half the equation.
We have a problem not with just one group of people. In the 60’s the blacks and other poor people were told that it was wrong to be “working for chump change.” Being on welfare came to be seen by these groups as being morally superior to “being in a dead end job.”
Blacks found that they could support racial demagogues, scream about being disadvantaged and the crimes of “institutional racism”, assert their sacred right to adopt the ghetto culture, vote as a mindless block - and be rewarded accordingly. This has only done the “leaders” and the criminal element of their culture any good but they keep right on doing it. A smaller percentage of blacks voted for Pres Bush than voted for Ronald Reagan.
The Republicans have concluded that they have lost the black population for all time. Nothing they do helps fix this. Dr. Walter Williams even wrote, “It’s time the Republicans looked at blacks and asked ‘What have they ever done for us?’” They know they cannot have any real political power if they lose Hispanics as well, and are desperately trying to prevent that - just as the Democrats just as eagerly try to sign up a new lockstepped voting block. And aside from that, in most places it is far easier to look around and see hard-working Hispanics than it is to see blacks and poor whites trying to lift themselves up.
There are several important factors most people overlook in the discussion of Mexican immigration. Overlooking them really limits our ability to address the situation both rationally and effectively.
First, there are two sorts of Mexican immigrants, and I don't mean legal and illegal. They come from two entirely different sections of Mexico and go to two different sections of our country.
Northwest Mexico (Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja) is the source for the west coast. Those Mexicans have generally been bandits and ne'er-do-wells since the area was settled. Not everyone, obviously, but let's say that if the rest of Mexico considers it a Bad Neighborhood that's probably worth noting.
Very different is the whole I-35 crowd. They come overwhelmingly from Michoacan, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, and other parts of central and southwestern Mexico.
The I-35 stream began in earnest after US drug policy changed in to early '80s. Lots of young Mexicans had earned good money harvesting pot for export. When that income dried up they headed north.
Second key point: Sneaking into the US is something of a rite of passage for the I-35 crowd. It demonstrates daring, initiative, and creativity -- which makes for much better husband-material. What Mexican girl in her right mind would wish to marry one of the 'flojos' ('lazy guys')? For the guys coming across it's a triple; good money, access to better girls, and a chance to impress their parents.
Third key point: The demographics in Mexico are no longer what we think they are. Birthrates have fallen rapidly and the stream of young people even wanting to head north will probably dry up in about 15 to 20 years. Current immigration pressure and problems are not something that will last indefinitely.
In my opinion it's also quite valuable for people on both sides of the border that all those remissions to Mexico -- and 20% of the population in our town is now Mexican -- go directly to other Mexicans, bypassing completely the generally corrupt nexus of government and banking officialdom.
You want an Hugo Chavez en Mexico? Chase 'em all out of the States, dry up the $20 billion or so of remissions -- which probably makes Mexico our largest recipient of foreign aid -- and force them back into a country where a majority of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops are crooked ... and the oil revenue is on the verge of drying up.
At a minimum you'd get a strong PRD government in Mexico, which might as well be Venezuela.
Despite what the politicians say, there are worse potential problems than what we currently have with illegals.
The observation that the Republicans have concluded that they have lost the black population for all time ... [and that] the Democrats just as eagerly try to sign up a new lockstepped [Hispanic] voting block. will be true for the short and medium term. But the problem is that it cannot be true in the long run.
Like the addict who feels "better" taking more drugs rather than quitting, the Democrat strategy will one day reach a point where it produces organ failure. It relies on an energy transfer which cannot be indefinitely sustained. The way out of the cycle is guaranteed, but finding an escape before system collapse is not.
So the conservative challenge shouldn't be to find ways to 'restore' some long-vanished normalcy but to identify ways to harness the near-revolutionary energies that will inevitably arise. Ronald Reagan found a way to harness the crisis of Communism. He succeeded in part by being the real revolutionary.
Although I am a regular reader, I almost never comment because I customarily do not know enough about the topic.
I would like to alert Belmont Club readers to the following contentions, worked out by the pseudonymous 'La Griffe du Lion'. If accurate, they are certainly relevant. In an advanced technological economy there may be a definable long-term economic detriment to importing -- not work, or even workers -- but large numbers of *people* who, with all their virtues, on average tend to be of lower mean IQ than the residents of the country they come to.
===
Contention 1: In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ equal to or greater than 106.
source
Observation 1: White Europeans, across nations, have similar IQ distributions, whereas the IQ distributions of third-world immigrants and their progeny [including Mexico] are about a standard deviation lower.
source: Widespread. This refers to some relevant review articles and other studies.
Contention 2: Each percentage point increase in the third-world immigrant population will eventually cause the per capita GDP of a Western nation to drop by approximately 0.76 percent of its zero-immigrant value.
source
Illegal immigation is a plus only if you are a journalist or banker or a politician.
If you are a carpenter, roofer, bricklayer, plumber, mechanic, machinist, machine operator or any other profession that is derided as "semi-skilled" then you have seen your wage standard dramatically reduced.
The illegal immigrants live in a cash economy and do not pay their fair share of taxes. This amounts to over a thousand dollars per family. They consume resources such as schools and public health that are a net drain on us all.
Wretchard:
The problem is, using your example, is that Communism was, in the long run, not a threat because it was unsustainable. As you so aptly put it, the Communists would have to depend on the Capitalists to sell them hanging rope, because once the commies took over rope production would become impossible.
So, if we had not fought the Cold War, or if Ronald Reagan had not upped the ante with “My plan is they lose and we win” then the commies would have lost anyway in the long term – and brought all of the planet’s civilization down with them. Capitalism is what you get when you leave people alone, and once the Communists had descended to the point where they could no longer accomplish anything but leave people alone – ta da, Capitalism triumphs!
Triumphs over a devastated land, that is. Last I heard, we were still shipping money to Russia to pay them to clean up the nuclear mess at their largest submarine bases.
When the USSR collapsed, the Western Left said “Ya see, we told ya so! It was not that much to worry about.” The Right said “Not much to worry about! It was worse! Look at that mess! Those people could cross thread a bowling ball!” Or as they say in the Czech Republic “The Communists turned an aquarium into fish soup. Now all we have to do is turn fish soup back into an aquarium.”
So, in the long run, the Hispanics – and the Blacks – will realize that their embrace of the Democrats led to fish soup, and that even that is running out. Then what do we do?
As you say, revolutionary forces are at work. Millions of people have rejected their homelands and embraced the American Way of Life. That should be an enormous strength for the U.S.; that it is viewed as an enormous unsolvable problem shows just how badly we are handling it.
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Politicians act like they still believe our public schools and universities continue to teach and inspire good citizenship.
The Dream act,
that'll do it!
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Meanwhile LA Unified graduates less than 50%,
and Detroit 25%!
PC all the way.
Support your local teachers union.
Russell Roberts
" The jobs they do now would either be done at a higher cost or not done at all."
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They certainly would be done at higher cost than the slave labor camps growing tomatoes in Florida.
And Carpenters might again make more than I did in the 1970's.
They don't now.
This is a *good* thing?
As Professor Hanson says, it's a class thing.
The upper classes that benefit from low, welfare state subsidized wages and domestic help think it's a good thing.
The working classes, watching their jobs and wages erode, don't.
Part of the problem with the Great Illegal Immigration Debate is that we are not, in fact, talking about illegal immigration. At least, not according to President Fox of Mexico. Here is an excerpt of some comments of his from yesterday:
"A reasonable temporary guest worker program would solve many problems by providing documented foreign workers who need good wages for the American economy, Fox said. Fox said most Mexican immigrants don't want to become American citizens; they want to help their family and then return to their homeland. 'They like better tacos, tortillas and chilies than hot dogs or hamburgers,' he said."
Folks, I invite you to look up the definition of "immigrant". Any dictionary you care to. An immigrant is someone born in one country who moves to another country to live. Permanently. Someone who enters another country to work and go home is not an immigrant. So these people are not illegal immigrants, they are illegal aliens.
Good comments.
Immigrants (illegal and otherwise) have only one economic effect worth talking about, they bid down wages in the employment sectors they compete in.
The benefit flows to the consumers of the goods and services they produce (maids and gardeners). The cost is to those they displace from the labor market - low skilled low wage people.
In summary immigrants make the affluent, more affluent, and the poor, poorer.
In and of itself, this doesn't concern me that much, because all forms of trade have moreorless the same effect.
What concerns me is the effect on social cohesion. Nation states work in large part, because of the perception we are all responsible for each other (to some degree). This percieved collective responsibility is the basis for most social and welfare programs and the taxation necessary to support them.
So the economic consequences of immigration are minor in comparison to the corrosion of social cohesion necessary for a nation state to work.
We are already seeing the consequences in Europe, as governments cut off social benefits to immigrants.
And in closing, I'll note that you can have the benefits of unlimited cheap workers without immigration. Singapore has the largest proportion of migrant workers outside the Gulf. Something like 30% of the entire population. Illegal immigrants are for practical purposes non-existent in Singapore. Taxes and fees paid by employees of migrant workers are a major source of government revenue. Bidding down of citizens wages by migrant labor is almost non-existent.
And before anyone claims the Singapore model can't work in the USA or Europe or Australia, I'll point out that every single one of those non-immigrant migrant workers in Singapore paid a large amount of money just to get the opportunity to be a migrant worker, typically between 3 and 6 months income.
The preferred terms are
"Undocumented Residents"
or
"Undocumented Citizens"
Sheriff Joe Arpaio Asked by Small Business Owners and Residents to Tackle Street Crime Crisis
(Phoenix, AZ)
Faced with a growing criminal element engaged in trespass, solicitation, loitering, drug dealing, sexual harassment, public urination and defecation and other street crime, small businesses have had to bear additional costly business expenses to employ off-duty sheriff’s deputies for protection.
“Day laborers,” the vast majority of whom are illegal aliens, have been often involved in area street crime issues."
Phoenix Police routinely ignore the street crime problem, responding very selectively to only the most egregious crimes that simply cannot be ignored due to violence or loss of property.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is the only law enforcement agency enforcing both federal and state immigration laws in Arizona.
The community letter reads in part...
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But Phoenix is a walk in the park compared to Los Angeles, the Gang Capital.
The Mexican government publishes small easy to carry comic books that instruct in easy terms, because thats who it is intended for,how to sneak across the border and hide from authorities.
Mexico's way to empty the trash.
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I've been studying public policy, economics, and human capital for a number of years. Some of my conclusions regarding taxation and illegal immigrants can be found here, just add a http:// in front of the hubpages.com part:
hubpages.com/_jarrodhaze/hub/Illegal-Immigrants
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