--- "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yes. Our economy needs millions of these workers. > Right now, we exploit > these workers by giving them very little recourse to > American labor laws. > In addition, it breeds a culture of lawlessness > among these workers that > lead to all sorts of problems, such as unlicensed, > uninsured motorists.
What do you mean by needs? Borjas (for example) estimated that the total economic benefit for the US from immigration was fairly marginal - $8-10BB a year, IIRC - because the (very large) benefits from high-skilled immigration are largely neutralized by the (almost equally large) costs from low-skilled immigration that stem from the very high burden that they put upon social services. The assertion that our economy needs large numbers of low-skilled immigration seems questionable, to me. Australia does just fine without any such immigration. If it didn't happen, it seems to me that the outcome would be to increase the price of low-skilled labor, and this doesn't strike me as being a bad thing. If you want to argue that our economy needs large numbers of _immigrants_, that's certainly true. But the type of immigrant is at least as important as the number of immigrants. An economically and socially ideal immigration policy, it seems to me, would look a lot different from what we currently have. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
