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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (19062)	5/18/2006 12:18:33 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 540811

The whole culture and color thing is a huge subtext in the immigration debate. Look back over the successive waves of immigrants in the US and you always find those here already don't believe the new generation will ever assimilate, and their presence will undermine a cherished ideal of constancy in American society (which is usually a myth but it's the belief that counts.) It's like every generation saying that the younger generation has no manners or values, and everything is coming apart. It is a standard ritual in human nature.

To: epicure who wrote (19062)	5/18/2006 12:51:47 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540811

There's another BIG sub-issue in the immigration debate. Blue collar workers are feeling their wages being squeezed by illegals. Employers say the illegals will work harder and longer, but it's also true that they'll work cheaper. It's a big issue now with the boom in home construction, remodeling, and landscaping. Everybody's hiring illegals. They can't put illegals into union jobs, the unions won't let them. But employers don't like unions anyway.

To: epicure who wrote (19062)	5/23/2006 10:47:31 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540811

Whether or not immigration is a win economically is a very complex question. Not just because any remotely solid answer to the question would require a lot of information, some of which might be unavailable, and much of which might be uncertain; but also because the question itself can have different meanings, or at least different parts. Legal and illegal immigration might have different effects, immigration at half our current level might have a different effect (in nature or direction not just size) than immigration at our current level which might have a different effect than immigration at 3 times our current level. Also immigration has a different economic effect on different people and regions. Immigration probably does increase our GDP. It might reduce our GDP per capita, not as much by hurting current Americans but by adding people with lower average incomes in to the average. It probably does drag down wages for some sorts of jobs. By doing so it lowers costs, so it might help people who don't directly compete with low skilled immigrants. Its possible that the effect of the lowered wages is exaggerated. If the wage demanded in certain jobs was higher some of those jobs might be done overseas, so instead of having illegal immigrants, or low skilled legal immigrants doing the jobs they might be done by people in third world countries. OTOH some of the jobs are services that can't be imported. You can provide computer tech support from India, I've also read about tutoring provided over the phone and internet from overseas, you can import crops instead of picking them here, but the person who cleans your office or house can't do so from another country, neither can someone who puts up a fence for you or fixes your deck. All of that assumes that the average immigrant (counting both legal and illegal immigrants) has less skill and/or education than the typical American. I don't think that is an unreasonable assumption but it should be explicitly stated. If you don't agree with the assumption than the rest of the statement breaks down for you. Also all of that relies on educated guesses and applying basic economic ideas to the situation, but its not like I've conducted, or even read in detail, a study of the economic effects of immigration.