Letters to the Editor
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Is there really
a Bong Hit Archipelago? Planning my next vacation already.
Meanwhile, back to economics. We are now in a situation of inequitable globalization. Capital has globalized but labor, and labor laws, have not. Capital can go wherever it wants to chase cheap labor, but labor cannot chase capital. Though it is highly problematic, the global capital horse is already out of the barn. The only way to start balancing that injustice is to allow the globalization of labor (allow people to follow the capital) and push the globalization of just labor laws (which should be getting more attention from congress than fence-building). How can one call oneself a liberal and not believe that people have a fundamental right to move and work where one wants to? Migration has been a fundamental characteristic of human society for 10s of thousands of years. Now, only the middle and upper classes have that ability - to move to other countries and work there (ever heard of an expat?). It's only the poor who we want to put movement restrictions on. So - if you're rich and sound like us, come on in. If you're poor or talk funny, stay out. How progressive.
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Good walls make good neighbors
As an American I'd need a passport, in some cases a visa, and a work permit to work in a foreign country legally, lest both that country and the US government criminalize me. Why do Mexicans primarily, feel they are better than I am when it comes to my country's laws, feel that they are more deserving than the hundreds of thousands of Asians, Africans, and Europeans patiently waiting to emigrate to the USA through proper immigration channels? I can't march down the streets of Mexico City and make demands of the Mexican government in English, I could try, but where would that get me but in a Mexican jail? It's long stopped being immigration, this Mexican wave is an invasion. Seal the border.
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Enablers but not deciders
There's so much to cover that it's impossible to fit it all in one letter, so here are six thoughts:
1) Illegal immigrants and associated problems are generally symptomatic of underlying problems, not the cause. Others have adequately covered the issues of wage depression, for instance. On the subject of schools, while illegal immigrants may cause spikes in the population of local school systems, the funding shortfalls are tied to budgets based on real-estate taxes, so any high density, low income area faces the same challenges.
2) All immigrant populations take time to assimilate. It's not that long ago that you could get newspapers in Yiddish, German, and Italian in New York City, or that some towns in Texas were German and some were Czech. Univision and Telemundo may be more visible, but they are part of the same arc of assimilation.
3) Whether or not there are illegal immigrants, wage levels and the cost of living will always vary between states in the US. It's impossible to establish a "normalized" economy without central planning. You could deport every illegal immigrant in Los Angeles and it would still be more expensive than Idaho.
4) There's nothing wrong with establishing a points system to govern future immigration, but the fact of the matter is that a points system for "high-end" immigrants combined with ongoing illegal immigration is what will serve the workforce needs of the American economy as opposed to American workers. Reducing the presence of illegal immigrants in the US isn't going to undo fundamental changes to the US economy in terms of where the jobs are. Those changes mean that there is more emphasis on high-value add work, for instance (refer to the current Atlantic Monthly article on Chinese manufacturing to get an idea of what I'm getting at).
5) Any reversal of the above trend in order to increase "reliable" working class or lower middle class jobs is going to require public investment. You can look at the UK (closest European economy to the US) to see how well that works when you get into subsidizing downward mobility. Perhaps overdue investment in the general transport and energy infrastructure in this country might be another way to get at it, but generally speaking, I suspect that we'll the period of say 1880 - 1980 was a historical anomaly in terms of universal growth / strength of labor, and the future is in managing the change.
6) You can make this an issue of principle (if "throw the bums out" is a principle), but there will be an economic impact from doing so. That may not be a fact, but I'd take it to the bank - who would be taking the rest of us to the cleaners. I somehow doubt that wages will increase, because the political and corporate management ethos in this country is cost containment and efficiency, not employment and wages. Illegal immigrants enable that, but they didn't create those conditions.
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The Professor Wants to Punish our Middle Class
First off, only an academic would propose something so blatently against the interests of our country. And how far would you push down wages here in America before you admitted that this would be bad for us? Would you ever admit that making us poor is bad?
We are the rich country, and our wages are high relative to the rest of the world. That is something that we wish to protect, not give away. People like you think that if we just let everybody on earth be an American , then the whole world could live like us. Wrong! If we let the poor unskilled of the world in here, then our standard of living here in the US would drop to match the 3rd world sh*tholes where they came from.
How about letting the 3rd world poor come in and compete for your job professor? Oh yeah, tenure protects you... It does not protect us! Take your American lifestyle ruining plan and shove it up your...
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On a lighter note...
mattwa33186 wrote:
I understand that it's a lot easier to garner sympathy for a brown-skinned day laborer who "risked everything for a piece of the American dream" - although in reality they risked nothing for a piece of American entitlement programs - than it is for a white computer programmer or electrical engineer who was actually promised the American dream and assumed he'd be able to pay off his college loans and support a family because of it. But lets get real.
[snip]
This isn't the 1880's or early 1900's when we could allow every Irishman or Pole who could scrape together the cost of passage to come here and work. The programs of the New Deal and the Great Society put an end to that forever. And it isn't the 1990's, when we needed every person who could handle algebra or manage an abstract thought to support an exploding tech industry. The rampant speculation and stock manipulation of the Clinton/Enron era put an end to that forever.
I hardly know where to start with this, aside from "welcome to the end of American exceptionalism" and "boo-hoo." As a society we (well, you, I've only been here 25 years) voted consistently for taxes, policies, and laws that favored efficiency over wages and employment, and measured success in macro-economic not micro-economic terms. However, the era of American growth far in excess of all others is over, and it's going to take real inspiration to figure out how to manage social transitions that accompany changes in the distribution of wealth through labor... if that's the kind of inspiration we're showing in dealing with peak oil and Islamic extremists, then we're well and truly screwed.
I'd write more, but I'm too busy stealing your jobs and women, using nothing more than hard work and masonic handshakes to undercut the native middle class...