--- "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 05:30 PM 3/17/2004 -0800 Gautam Mukunda wrote: > >What do you mean by needs? > > I mean that if we were suddenly to get rid of the > millions of illegal > workers in the country, we would have a very > difficult time finding > millions of people to work in construction, fruit > and vegetable picking, > and janitorial/custodial services.
What you mean by that, John, is that we would find it difficult to find people to do those jobs _at current wages_. The wages would go up. Some people currently living in the US who would normally not do those jobs would choose to do them. Some of those jobs would be substituted away through the increased use of capital instead of labor. > The reason we have ilegal immigration is because we > have jobs that need to > be filled. There are always jobs to be filled in any industrialized country. The reason we have illegal immigration is because the US/Mexico border has the single largest per-capita income gap in the entire world. That makes the flow inevitable unless the American government makes major efforts to restrict it - which it has chosen not to do. > I am personally very skeptical of proposals that we > should permit > immigrants of certain skills but not of other > skills. I had always > thought that the idea of government central planners > picking and choosing > what sort of labor should be supplied in the economy > had gone out of vogue > with the end of the Cold War. In my mind, isn't it > far better to let the > *market* decide what sort of labor it needs, and to > let people who can find > jobs to accept the employment that is offered to > them? No, John, because there's a difference between the two. We have the right to allow anyone we choose (or, of course, no one) into the country. It only makes sense to shape immigration policy towards ends that we want. In my case, I think that we should be trying to reduce income inequality through economically efficient means - and immigration policy is the single most powerful tool we have to do that. Markets apply where free markets exist, but immigration is already restricted. If it was a truly free market, then all my assorted relatives could come here from India freely and take high tech jobs. But they can't, because there are limitations on how many of them can come. A truly free labor market would imply open borders for the US. There are something like 2.5 billion Indians and Chinese who would like to come over here. To me this suggests that a completely open border policy (as the WSJ continually advocates) is, frankly, insane. > To the extent > that immigrants bring and produce children that need > to be educated, I tend > to consider that an investment in our future tax > base, and indeed, most > studies have found that second generation immigrants > are very likely to be > net tax contributors. > JDG This may be true _across the board_. It's unlikely that this is true for different subgroups within the pool of immigrants. Even if it is true, look, second generation is great and I'm as in favor of assimilation as any human being you'll ever meet, but we may be getting as many as a million illegals coming across the border _every year_. That's a pretty huge burden on social services. I'll look at your study, but I'd point out that Borjas's book is still the gold standard analysis of the topic. His conclusions also make sense intuitively. As a matter of social policy, they also make sense. Between them, my parents have five graduate degrees. It is not exactly a massive government distortion of the marketplace if the government decides that the total welfare of the United States is better served if people like them come to the US than, say, someone who can't read. ===== 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
