The Economist
 

Please think about the claims in these two paragraphs:

• In fact, the relationship between immigration and wages is not clear-cut, even in theory. That is because wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers. Once capital has fully adjusted, the final impact on overall wages should be a wash, as long as the immigrants have not changed the productivity of the workforce as a whole.

The argument is that wages go down, but the workforce goes up. But it goes up because you're letting more people in. For the people who were already here and working, what's in it for them? Maybe the economy is a bit more robust, but their wages are down.

• However, even if wages do not change on average, immigration can still shift the relative pay of workers of different types. A large inflow of low-skilled people could push down the relative wages of low-skilled natives, assuming that they compete for the same jobs. On the other hand, if the immigrants had complementary skills, natives would be relatively better off. To gauge the full effect of immigration on wages, therefore, you need to know how quickly capital adjusts and how far the newcomers are substitutes for local workers.

See the italicized paragraph. What facts would you need to see to believe that immigration of low-skilled workers helps domestic low-skilled workers?

The Economist
 

That in areas where there aren't any (or are very very few) low-skill immigrants, the jobs that low-skilled workers have (e.g., bus boy, valet parker, day laborer, gardener, cleaning staff) just don't exist, or exist as a very much smaller job category relative to other jobs. E.g., Dallas and LA both have more valet parking than I've ever seen anywhere. Seems plausible to me that it's prevalent because it's affordable because of the influx of workers, and it seems like more people have someone else do the gardening and cleaning.

Oooh, and handwashing cars. NEVER really saw that anywhere other than here. Or, not for cheap. So I think more people here get their cars washed than just use the drive through or wash them themselves.

ETA see, you are assuming they compete for the same jobs. So you would want facts showing that they don't compete for the same jobs.

The Economist
 

Around here you can get your car handwashed any Saturday morning when the weather is good - as a fundraiser for an athletic team or extracurricular activity at the local high school.

So obviously, the immigrants are robbing the children of California and Texas of a good education.

All the discussion on economics is interesting, but, frankly, who gives a damn? The reason to permit broad immigration is that it's the right thing to do. The US should be a home for people who have hopes and dreams, whether those hopes and dreams are to escape poverty or to escape tyranny.

So, open the borders wide, and let those who are here stay absent a good reason (crime, for example) for deporting them.

Fact is, the President hasn't been as bad on these issues as many Rs would be - he is at least looking to legalize many who are here - and no politician in their right mind is going to be as idealistic on the issues as I'd like. But I really see little reason for the wholesale closing of borders that began with the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s.

The Economist
 

What you are saying is that an influx of immigrants drives wages down to a point where it's economically feasible to hire unskilled labor to do certain menial tasks, like valet parking and hand-washing cars. In Peru, there's so much unskilled labor looking for work that middle-class families can hire full-time drivers and maids.

The Economist
 

In Soviet Russia, maids and full-time drivers hire you!



http://www.yankeepotroast.org/archives/yxsmirno.jpg

The Economist
 

For you, Coltrane:



http://www.glarkware.com/media/produ...n_u_soviet.jpg

http://www.glarkware.com/securestore...6544331.2.html

Query
 

The thing I find funny is the built in assumption that if we stop immigration, the people purchasing the services provided by immigrants will pay more for Americans to perform them.

I have a lawn service. They charge $50 a week to cut the lawn. Two nice Mexican cats show up and do a great job. If Americans did it, it would cost $100. I would not use the service, nor would anyone on my street. Consequently, there'd be two hard working Mexicans not getting paid and a business owner probably working for someone else. Should I go on to discuss the sellers of lawn equipment and trucks and weed eating machinery who don't make money because our entrepreneur chooses not to open a business because labor costs are prohibitive?

If we staunch immigration, we fuck everyone. If we don't, we fuck a sector which is getting fucked anyway.

Query
 

You'll crack when the lawn gets long and the wife starts bitching. You'll get the lawn service half as often.

Query
 

I'd just cut it myself, with a smaller, less effective mower, which guzzles gas, thus benefitting Big Oil, which is price gouging the American Worker.

A butterfly slaps its wings in China and the American Woker gets fucked... blah blah blah...

Immigration is a good thing. I like immigrants. They create great restuarant centers. Thats my position.

Query
 

Interesting typo. Stir fry, anyone?

Query
 

If we must show preference to different countries, I'd do it on the basis of their food.

Thai, Indian, Mexican, Russian, Jewish - all in.

Irish, English, Portuguese, Brazilian - please apply again next year.

Query
 

What statute sets the cost of GM health care?

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran
 

For those of us following the breast-beating on Iran, James Fallows has an interesting (if depressing) article in the latest Atlantic which war-games this possibility.

• It was at this time, in September 2004, that The Atlantic sponsored a “war game” to consider what choices the United States might have if the Iranian problem built to a crisis. War games are not a staple of this magazine’s operation, but in light of difficulties in Iraq, we wanted to play out the long-term implications of possible U.S. moves and Iranian countermoves. So under the guidance of Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who had conducted many real-world war games for the Pentagon, including those that shaped U.S. strategy for the first Gulf War, we assembled a panel of experts to ask “What then?” about the ways in which the United States might threaten, pressure, or entice the Iranians not to build a bomb. Some had been for and some against the invasion of Iraq; all had served in the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or other parts of the nation’s security apparatus, and many had dealt directly with Iran.
  
  The experts disagreed on some details but were nearly unanimous on one crucial point: what might seem America’s ace in the hole—the ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations in a pre-emptive air strike—was a fantasy. When exposed to “What then?” analysis, this plan (or a variant in which the United States looked the other way while Israel did the job) held more dangers than rewards for the United States. How could this be, given America’s crushing strength and wealth relative to Iran’s? There were three main problems:
  
  * The United States was too late. Iran’s leaders had learned from what happened to Saddam Hussein in 1981, when Israeli F-16s destroyed a facility at Osirak where most of his nuclear projects were concentrated. Iran spread its research to at least a dozen sites—exactly how many, and where, the U.S. government could not be sure.
  
  * The United States was too vulnerable. Iran, until now relatively restrained in using its influence among the Iraqi Shiites, “could make Iraq hell,” in the words of one of our experts, Kenneth Pollack, of the Brookings Institution. It could use its influence on the world’s oil markets to shock Western economies—most of all, that of the world’s largest oil importer, the United States.
  
  * The plan was likely to backfire, in a grand-strategy sense. At best, it would slow Iranian nuclear projects by a few years. But the cost of buying that time would likely be a redoubling of Iran’s determination to get a bomb—and an increase in its bitterness toward the United States.
  
  That was the situation nearly two years ago. Everything that has changed since then increases the pressure on the United States to choose the “military option” of a pre-emptive strike—and makes that option more ruinously self-defeating.
  
  ***
  
  Perhaps the American and Israeli hard-liners know all this, and are merely bluffing. If so, they have made an elementary strategic error. The target of their bluff is the Iranian government, and the most effective warnings would be discreet and back-channel. Iranian intelligence should be picking up secret signals that the United States is planning an attack. By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel “create ‘excess demand’ for military action,” as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices. The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the last five years have left us with a series of choices—and all of them are bad. The United States can’t keep troops in Iraq indefinitely, for obvious reasons. It can’t withdraw them, because of the chaos that would ensue. The United States can’t keep prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (and other overseas facilities) indefinitely, because of international and domestic challenges. But it can’t hastily release them, since many were and more have become terrorists. And it can’t even bring them to trial, because of procedural abuses that have already occurred. Similarly, the United States can’t accept Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power, but it cannot prevent this through military means—unless it is willing to commit itself to all-out war. The central flaw of American foreign policy these last few years has been the triumph of hope, wishful thinking, and self-delusion over realism and practicality. Realism about Iran starts with throwing out any plans to bomb.

Gattigap

Query
 

One could certainly argue the National Labor Relations Act.

aV

Query
 

and in Mass. the mandatory health care act. Don't know if they have plants there.