Anecdotal Immigration Reform
Nick Gillespie | October 21, 2005, 10:11am
Over at Tech Central Station, Ilya Shapiro tells his tale of immigration woes--and calls for a rethinking of current policy, which makes it hard to gain fully legal status absent a family connection.
The United States is losing out on a host of social contributions by maintaining its current immigration (non-)policy, while creating incentives for fraud and illegality of every kind. We have all heard about the effect that new security requirements have had on foreign students in America's institutions of higher learning. Quite apart from that -- and many of those changes are quite rational -- America is losing out on the best, most competent, idealistic people that globalization offers.
Whole thing here.
I disagree with his fears about unskilled immigrants and as "throw the borders open" sort of guy, I'm not keen to draw that sharp a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, but his is an interesting tale--especially in a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.
Kahn | October 21, 2005, 8:23pm | #
Tom Crick,
Closin' all of that would really solve the problem of all the free loaders out there..but illegal aliens are such a small part of that problem.
Tell me again, where do you live? I live less than an hour from ye merry border. Taxes here have most certainly gone up because there are so many Mexicans here. And the liberals are still bitching because their attempt to teach public schools all-Spanish got voted down.
I wonder how many more years we'll be able to vote it down though...
I know Mexicans who came here to work, started their own businesses and all. I admire the hell out of them.
I also know parts of town where it seems the Mexicans can't go to the grocery store and back without getting in a gun fight with each other. So when you say
...am I to understand that you believe the economy will improve when Americans have to pay more for things than they do now?
I have to say the reality is: immigration is not just an all-win situation economically.
But the bigger part of the problem is, you're right, the welfare state. That's what drives taxes up.
Semi-humorous true story, there's a hospital a few miles from where I live. Several times in the last five years, Mexican teens have gotten in gun fights
while driving their cars down the freeway, just happily shooting at each other like you see in the movies. They do manage to hit each other, so I guess they're good shots.
In each of these cases, they exited the freeway, drove to the hospital to get fixed up, and were still shooting at each other in the freaking parking lot while heading into the emergency room.
Kahn | October 21, 2005, 8:39pm | #
Ilya,
It's not super leverage for when you're trying to negotiate the conditions of your employment and, given that I'm not being deported tomorrow, I don't want to take a job just because they're sponsoring me.
I appreciate your problem, I saw it happen to some of my foreign friends when I was in grad school. They were bright, ambitious people who just wanted to f'ing
work....it was galling to me watching them suffer, trying to figure out how to survive, some of them at near poverty levels, long enough to get their visas changed.
I'm an engineer. I can remember many classes in grad school where I was the only American, and that includes the professor.
I have to say, people from India and China taught me things that I didn't even know you could
do with calculus. Stuff that definitely doesn't get taught in American schools. Foreigners were my very bestest math teachers ever.
OTOH, I watched these same people flunk machine design exams because they had never seen a flywheel and had no idea what one is.
My vote is that we use the American university system to brain drain the planet.
I've worked in several high tech fields over my career, mostly in large corporations (which routinely pray on small companies for innovation, because corporations can't do it themselves).
More than half of the small, innovative, high tech companies I've encountered, were started and run by foreigners. These people are not only smart, they'll work like dogs to get ahead. They appreciate this country because, where they come from there was no opportunity for them no matter how hard they worked.
Tom Crick | October 21, 2005, 9:18pm | #
Tell me again, where do you live? I live less than an hour from ye merry border.
I live in LA. I lived in North County San Diego for a long time. I worked for a community hospital in LA County for seven years; it closed down. ...and for the sake of this argument, none of that matters.
Taxes here have most certainly gone up because there are so many Mexicans here.
What taxes? Sales taxes? Property taxes? You live in one of the fastest growing areas of the country. ...in terms of home sales! State income? Federal? What taxes have gone up?
And the liberals are still bitching because their attempt to teach public schools all-Spanish got voted down.
I wonder how many more years we'll be able to vote it down though...
I keep hearing a lot about these proverbial liberals... I don't understand why their position matters.
...I know that the lion's share of Spanish speaking parents are among the most vocal critics of bi-lingual education.
So what?
I didn't go to public schools, and I don't have any children. When I do have children, I won't send them to public schools.
I see no differnce between the American born parasites that feed off our tax dollars and those that are foreign born. Relatively speaking, illegal immigrants account for a small portion of my tax burden. ...So small, that the argument regarding the burden they put on taxpayers seems a red herring to me.
...I don't ask much of my government--but if they're going to steal the fruit of my labor, I would ask that they don't use it to discriminate against people because of their national origin.
I have to say the reality is: immigration is not just an all-win situation economically.
I didn't say it was. ...there are losers in free trade too, still I'm passionate about the obvious benefits of free trade. Immigration is in some ways better than free trade--you don't have to take advantage of low cost labor across some border, the low cost labor actually comes to you! Who says you can't import a haircut?
...Regardless, saving a bunch of low wage jobs for the native born by building a fortress at the border isn't going to help the economy. Other things being equal, we should expect the economy to shrink as costs rise. ...and when the things you need to buy cost less than they did before, you live better than you did before. When the things you need to buy cost more than they did before...
The Fortress America idea might help us with security, as in blocking potential Al Qaeda infiltration--maybe. ...but no one here has even brought that up!
ANM | October 23, 2005, 2:31am | #
#1 problem with immigration: Many of these illegal immigrants will join the underclass. If and when they become citizens, they will vote to extend the welfare state like many blacks have. Hell, Martin Luther King, above reproach among both liberals and conservatives, wanted the government to hire large amounts of indigent whites and blacks. (He says the program would cost $50 billion, about $300 billion in today's dollars. See the interview here: http://www.allanfavish.com/mlking.htm I found this interesting tidbit while writing for the Wikipedia Affirmative Action article about MLK's views. It seems that real black leadership died with MLK's rise, and was buried by Sharpton and Jackson. There are a few bright spots though like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Larry Elder, but they attract far less attention than thugs like Farrakhan, Jackson and Sharpton) The most vital threat to a democracy like ours is a growing underclass, where the underclass pays little to no tax and lives off government largesse. When the top 1% of income earners pay 34% of taxes, and the bottom 50% pay only about 4%, raising taxes is not too difficult. Is levying extra tax on the richest X%, as California has recently done (I forget the numbers, but it was in the low single digits) democratic? Or majoritarian? Here's a quote from Amy Chua, written in an NY Times column:
Venezuela's problems are part of a much larger global phenomenon — pervasive outside the West yet almost never acknowledged — of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically the indigenous majorities around them. (Chinese in Indonesia, whites in Zimbabwe and Indians in Kenya are other examples.)Market-dominant minorities are the Achilles' heel of free-market democracy. In countries with a market-dominant minority, markets and democracy favor not just different people, or different classes, but different ethnic groups. Markets — even if marginally lifting all boats — concentrate wealth in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. Under such circumstances, the pursuit of free-market democracy often becomes an engine of ethnic nationalism, pitting a frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by demagogic politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority. End quote.
In America, the white majority is "market dominant" enough that there is little conflict. But the weaker minorities continually call for an extension of the welfare state. Do you really want to enhance the position of such a party?
But taking "unskilled" (a nice euphemism) inflames the problem. I argue not for no immigration, but an "enlightened" form, with the criteria being education, possibly restricted to certain professions like science and engineering, and/or intelligence tests. Also, the favoring of family members abroad should be abolished.
Immigration on net is likely an economic benefit. But is it worth the increased crime, the increased strain on the state (leading to higher taxes), the relative shrinking of the middle class? Yes, you can say that in a perfectly libertarian state without public education or health, these problems would be minimized. But the US isn't one and will probably never be.
