“Naskh”
by Mike Kimel
“Naskh”
I think it was sometime in the late 90s when I first heard someone say that Reagan could never be elected to anything at the time as a Republican. This was because the Republican Party had tacked so far to the right in a decade that many who worshipped Reagan would have found his actual policies to be hopelessly leftist. I doubt Mr. Reagan would have a place in his own Party today either.
I believe a similar effect exists for the Democrats. For example, this video shows a few clips of Diane Feinstein discussing immigration in the early 1990s. While Feinstein stated in one of the clips that her views were moderate, the reality is that California Democrats have generally been left of center at every point in my lifetime.
A decade later, the stance of Senate Democrats had not changed. In 2003 senator Hilary Clinton declared herself “adamantly against illegal immigrants.” In 2006, senator Barack Obama told us that “better fences and better security along our borders” would “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.” Senator Bernie Sanders was viewed by labor unions as a reliable ally. He railed against any sort of “immigration bill… that will lower wages and is designed to increase corporate profits” and questioned the patriotism of companies that used foreign workers instead of hiring qualified Americans.
Academics weighed in on the topic too. In 2006, Paul Krugman wrote about the issue. He started off by noting that he wished that low wage migrants’ needs didn’t conflict with those of Americans, but that he had to admit they did. (He specifically discussed low wage migrants and not illegal immigrants, but there is a fair amount of overlap.). He noted that whatever benefits there are from low wage immigration, they accrue entirely to the immigrants themselves. As he noted, there is no marginal product generated by low wage immigrants left over to benefit the non immigrants. He also wrote that such immigrants depress wages, and cited figures from the National Research Council showing that low wage immigrants impose a fiscal burden on the country equal to about a quarter of a percent of the GDP. (Note: the miracle of compound growth works both ways.) He finished by stating that “you’d be hard pressed to find any set of assumptions under which Mexican immigrants are a net fiscal plus….”
Any one of those worthies might have added one more potential drawback of illegal immigration, which is the very fact that it is, or was at the time, illegal. By operating outside the system, illegal immigrants made it harder for authorities to monitor compliance across a range of issues from environmental regulations to workplace rules. Nor is it good for social cohesion. In any case, there were a fair number of reasons why the needs of illegal immigrants were incompatible with the needs of traditional labor.
Fast forward another decade, and the statements quoted above are viewed as racist by much of the Democratic establishment, probably to include the very people who said them in the first place. Only a deplorable person would say such things now.
This public change in the stance of he Party leaders came quickly and abruptly, without so much as an announcement that they, and we, have always been at war with Eurasia. The brighter of the followers realized that the guns were now pointed in a different direction and got with the program. But a substantial chunk of the party’s hoi polloi has not properly internalized the message. According to a Pew Poll, among those who considered themselves Democrats or who leaned Democrat around the time of the last Presidential election, only 46% thought it was an important or somewhat important goal to establish a way for people here illegally to stay legally. 41% thought it was important or somewhat important to increase deportations.
Despite these retrograde views, there is hope even for many of the laggards among the peasantry. After all, the suddenness in their leaders’ public stance covers over a long metamorphosis. That began with a gradual softening of opinions toward the undocumented as individuals. The very illegal-ness of the undocumented makes them another David being exploited by the Corporate Goliath. And that, in turn, made it easy, at least for a while, to paper over the fact that in general, illegal immigration harms the traditional constituency of the Party. But as demographics changed, the contradictions grew and came to the fore. A side had to picked. And it was that shift in demographics that made the decision easy for the Democratic leadership.
However, the change in demographics didn’t eliminate the conflict between the needs of old labor and the new workers. It didn’t change math, or statistics. And it didn’t change what those self-same leaders had previously said. Nor does it change the law that many of the leaders are, very literally, sworn to uphold.
It also begs a question. If these laws are so bad and so wrong, why not work to have them changed? There is, after all, a way to ensure that nobody will ever be an undocumented alien again. All it would take would be for everyone who is in the US, or would like to be in the US, to be declared a legal immigrant… or even a citizen. But this is not something anyone wants, most especially, perhaps, the illegal immigrants themselves. What they want is for their situation to be regularized and for their families to receive benefits. What they don’t want is more competition for jobs which would drive down their income, nor more families seeking benefits who might take more out of the system than they put in.
All of which leads to the second change the Party leaders have exhibited when it comes to this issue: the utter contempt they have for traditional labor interests today. People whose wages have been stagnant for decades, whose jobs are disappearing, and who believe that immigration laws should be enforced are, by definition, racist. They are the old, the past, the culturally blah, and fortunately, the soon-to-be replaced.
Why the vehemence? It is an old need, one discussed by Sinclair Lewis, but which Stalin used and abused in the old Soviet Union: the need for self-preservation. An expert or authority who publicly states a position but changes her stance out of expedience will always be on shaky ground. Any display of piety may be insufficient, any original thought may be blasphemy, all the more so for someone with what is now a tainted past.
There are, for our poor expert, only two safe positions. One is to parrot back the gospel, word for word. But the gospel is short and staying in the public eye (not to mention ahead of the mob) requires a lot of statements. Which leads to the second safe position: attacking enemies. The worst enemies for any ideology, of course, are the apostates and heretics. But even within apostasy and heresy, there are degrees. The worst of the worst are the traitors who don’t understand naskh. They don’t accept that truth can be abrogated. They refuse to abandon their long standing principles and to screw over old allies despite knowing that doing so was now in the best interests of their superiors. These people are deadly to any movement, for there can be no cause if the followers refuse to do the bidding of their leaders.
And new causes abound. There are a number of issues on which the Democratic Party has changed its position, not to say its principles, just in the last decade or so. If you cannot name a handful in the course of about a minute, you are not drinking the Kool-Aid. You are free-basing it.
In and of itself, of course, a change isn’t bad or good. On this issue – attitudes toward illegal immigration – for example, perhaps there is a good reason, a moral imperative why traditional labor should look forward to a simultaneous decrease in their earnings and a weakening of the government’s fiscal position (leading to either higher taxes, or fewer benefits, or both). Maybe the undocumented immigrants truly are more deserving than those who aren’t undocumented immigrants. But nobody has adequately explained that in a calm and collected way to the losers in this process. Nor has anyone explained why we would stop there. After all, there are plenty more people who would happily ignore the laws of the land to come here, but have been prevented from doing so by an accident of geography or circumstances. Are they less deserving than those who have already ignored the laws of the land?
All these changes in the position of the Democrats have been accompanied by one more change: a change in how the Party treats dissent. These days, where it holds positions that contradict past Democratic principles, the Party’s leadership will tolerate no questions, no contradictions, and no complaints. The Big Tent has been burned to the ground, its ashes have been scattered, and the ground on which it once stood has been salted. Those who believe in the old ways, whether because of respect for laws, or based on evidence, or even from self-interest are racist scum. That goes double if the racist scum refuse to vote for their former friends who now make a career out of denouncing them.
I note that the Republican position on this topic also has changed. The old position was to demonize illegal immigrants, but to do nothing effective to stop them since they were essentially inexpensive labor. That benefited Republican donors and undermined traditional Democratic interests such as unions.
Now, of course, the standard bearer of the Republican Party, and the loudest voices among Republicans actually do seem to want to reduce the number of undocumented people. It’s not quite Obama from 2006 or Bernie Sanders from 2007, but on this issue, today’s Republicans sound more like yesterday’s Democrats than today’s Democrats do.
I love the immediate, and very common, response to an uncomfortable discussion about the Democratic Party of, “Let’s talk about the Republicans.”
I’m trying to recall who was in control of Congress when the “one-time deal, never to be repeated” amnesty of 1986 was passed. Okay, looked it up. It was bipartisan. Republicans controlled House, Democrats controlled Senate.
That weighs in on this subject, but I’m not sure how. Needs thought.
Y’know, you can be against illegal immigration and still think it is the right thing to deal with illegal immigrants who have been in the country for a substantial period of time in a fair and just manner.
THE — APPARENTLY — INVISIBLE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM AGAIN: what’s missing from the low wage immigrant equation is of course equally missing American labor unions (see Germany, see Denmark).
I once worked as a Gimble’s department store, furniture warehouse stock man — Teamsters local 804. These guys were so testosterone overloaded I once perceived the local pres (Ron Carey) call what I took for what was intended to be a one day strike (“I’m not saying there’s a dollar there”) to get strike out of their systems.
I also spent 28 years driving a cab in NYC, Chi and SF. Equally testosterone loaded American born drivers — wholly unorganized — inexorably starved out of the job post early 1980s as low wage immigrants make that possible.
We need immigrants (what our country is based on — got to catch up to Chinese population too; down to 3 to 1 by 2050). And we need unions. Just because we are short of one (94% short!) does not mean we now need to get rid of the other.
* * * * * *
I’m working on something making out 94% of our labor/consumer market (flip sides/same thing) transactions being “irrational.” Rational meaning both sides settle with the other for the best price they can get by comparison of the values of the products (labor/goods) directly involved. Irrational if one or both sides set its price in accordance with outside (the direct transaction) influences …
… such as individual employees being unable to withhold production input to wangle for the maximum price the consumer will pay because of the market power of the employer (employee can only produce using employer assets and has no practical way to withhold labor from employer, no collective bargaining).
The latter is not rational in the sense of not trading value for perceived equal value. The latter is irrational for rather trading value for perceived inferior value because without the ability of employees to collectively bargain with the employer it impossible for employees to bargain (indirectly) with the ultimate consumer (over values directly involved in the transaction) – without collective bargaining it is take what is offered or take nothing at all.
In this sense the US labor/consumer market is 94% irrational.
* * * * * *
I’ve just woken up — last week — to understand the hidden dimension that makes it impossible to get any public discussion going on bringing back labor organizing this country. The very fact that the market is down to 6% collectively bargained labor prices makes any such attempt at discussion inherently seem about something from another place and time to most people: as such it mostly all goes in one ear and just as fast out the other.
The instant (“Madison Avenue”) answer just happens to be a page stolen from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s (Paul Ryan’s evil nephew) anti-union playbook. Walker has forced government unions (less First Amendment protected — but I think the First should apply against this) in his state to re-certify every year; a majority of membership required, not just of voters.
Can’t get voters interested in a discussion that concerns something down to 6% of non-gov workplaces? Not thick enough to stick to the ribs? How about the new Democratic Congress proposing to federally mandate union certification in every non gov workplace — one, three or five year cycle, plurality rules?
Even if (cannot imagine losing) that proposition fails a vote — or dead brained Congress fails to bring it to a vote — it will drop the issue of re-unionization right in the lap of every non gov worker — as full bodied as it can be.
Actually, mandated cert/re-cert elections is the only issue that can revive labor union density in this country. It’s do this or do nothing.
It’s not just illegal and low income immigrants influencing the economy and wage rates. Consider HB2 visas for skilled workers of various kinds. They have the same effect on a different strata of workers, often in the tech area. Then too there is the need for workers in fields (agriculture and landscaping, for example) in which legal residents, citizen and green card holders, will not work. It ain’t all that simple.
FYI — FORGOT TO TUCK THESE IN ABOVE
How the Labor Movement Is Thinking Ahead to a Post-Trump World
Rachel M. Cohen January 21 2018
[and how it is getting nowhere — my reading]
Why Not Hold Union Representation Elections on a Regular Schedule?
November 1st, 2017 – Andrew Strom
HERE WE GO AGAIN (relevant to discussion above on reforming unions instead returning immigrants — and how to!)
Florida’s House of Representatives passed a bill affecting public sector unions along partisan lines late last week. The measure, FL HB25 (18R), would require public-sector unions to petition the Public Employee Relations Commission for recertification if a union’s dues paying membership falls below half of those eligible for unionization.
https://onlabor.org/weekend-news-commentary-january-27-28-2018/
Mike
I find something discouraging: referring to politicians for either knowledge or honesty about anything.
possibly even more discouraging: referring to public economists for actually understanding anything they talk about.
Krugman failed the test first time he talked about Social Security… relying on that old Harvard rule of thumb (I went to Harvard, I don’t have to think about anything because I am so smart I know the answer without having to think). He also has changed his “analysis”…. but still doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about. Not that the people on the other side do either (well, some of them do, but the are paid liars.)
So, please, unless you went to Harvard, try to do a little actual thinking instead of relying on expert witnesses, or whatever your idea of “math and statistics” is.
Bill H,
The immediate response was mine. It occurred to me between the time I wrote the post and the time it went up. Another thing that occurred to me is that something changed at the NY Times in the last ten years. The Times, of course, is the newspaper that most influences Democrats and, not incidentally, employs Paul Krugman. That change, of course, came in the form of Mr. Carlos Slim, a Mexican national, first loaning large sums of money to the Times, and then becoming the largest shareholder. Technically, Mr. Slim in no way influences the news or editorial content, but then technically, lawmakers aren’t influenced by lobbyists, much less their largest donors.
EMichael,
Of course, and that is alluded to in the post. The question is the degree, and the change that occurred. Also, it is hard to argue that one is against illegal immigration, as you put it, and oppose any attempt at enforcement. Some obvious examples come to mind just from the last week or two. One is that the State of California has passed laws that penalize businesses for cooperating with ICE. A second is the support being given by various Democratic lawmakers toward Ravi Ragbir. His wife will even be a guest of one Democrat at the State of the Union. Nevermind that he was convicted of wire fraud, or that he was ordered to be deported more than a decade ago. Additionally, the argument about DREAMers, also a big issue in the news, would never apply in a different context. It is hard to imagine any other situation where a parent’s crime is allowed to continue because the child of the criminal benefits from it.
JackD,
This is neither to attack or defend H1B visas, which is an immigration related process that also seems to many people to be abused. However, it is different from illegal immigration, say, in that in theory at least, the person here has a skill that isn’t otherwise available to his/her employer. Of course, in practice, the previous sentence is missing the words “at the same low wage.”
DD,
Thanks for the views on unions.
Coberly,
I am not one to argue by authority, as you well know. In fact, I have written my own posts on the subject of immigration (legal and illegal) and its effect on the economy, etc. Those have usually been backed up by statistics. However, this post is not about the effect of immigration. This post is about the fact that the Democrats have completely changed their position, and have done so in a very short period of time. It is something I have noted in passing several times before, but it has never been the main topic of a post I have written before.
The reason to quote Krugman is not to say I agree with him or disagree with him. Coupled with quotes from the most recent Democratic President, the most recent Democratic nominee for President, and the most recent major challenger for the position of Democratic nominee for President, the Krugman quotes are intended to show mainstream thought among Democratic intellectuals. If I had simply stated that was mainstream Democratic thought, as I did in the past, I would have been criticized.
Kimel
Times have changed. Some things have been noticed that were not noticed before. For example, it was not noticed before that deporting people who had grown up American would be a gross injustice, whatever their parent’s “crime.”
Even Krugman is capable of learning something over time.
We can each rationalize this forever. While you do not cite experts per se in this post, you do seem surprised… or just owlish… that politicians and pundits would change their minds when conditions (political or actual real world) change. Who knew?
This seems rather over-wrought to me. I don’t hear any Democrat calling for general abandonment of all laws restricting immigration, but relief in particular circumstances. DREAMERS have grown up as Americans, and their parents were practically invited in by Reagan and left alone by enthusiastic pro-Republican employers for decades — besides the fact that breaking up families seems unnecessarily cruel. The AFL-CIO supports immigration reform proposed by the Democratic Party in the belief that bringing all immigrants out of the shadows will reduce opportunities to exploit them and get away with unlawfully low wages and unfair labor practices.
Why did some people call Obama the deporter in chief?
coberly,
Of course people change their minds. As I noted in the post, a change in opinion, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. I would be more inclined to believe this was done out of a newly discovered sense of morality if it wasn’t accompanied by an equally newly developed intolerance toward dissent. Typically movements that do not tolerate dissent are not movements that pass the morality test, at least after the fact.
As to the DREAMer example… I am going to assume an argument against your position would run like this: if I find a way to get my 7 year old son disability payments despite his not being disabled, that is on me… at least until he is 18. If he keeps receiving the disability payments after he turns 18, the one breaking the law at that point would be him. The fact that he grew accustomed to the better quality of life afforded by the disability payments doesn’t mean society is obligated to keep providing those payments.
Urban Legend,
Out of curiosity… does that apply to someone who comes to the US and has a child after arrival? Additionally, this seems like an argument against imprisoning anyone who is a parent, regardless of the crime they committed.
You clearly do not live in California.
Kimel
a better analogy would be if someone robs a bank to pay for his kids heart transplant. if he is caught ten years (or ten minutes) later, to we rip out the kid’s heart.
the reasoning you are entertaining yourself with has crossed the line into pure evil.
almost Republican.
As for the intolerance of the Democrats, I would agree with you … certainly about the kind of intolerance that comes from the far left, or people in general that you disagree with.
Personally, I am intolerant of those who think jews should be exterminated.
an example of Kimel logic:
“While Feinstein stated in one of the clips that her views were moderate, the reality is that California Democrats have generally been left of center at every point in my lifetime.”
so apparently anyone left of center can’t be “moderate.” oops… anyone who is a California Democrat can’t be moderate because California Democrats have “generally” been left of center.
Mike,
I don’t live in California anymore. I think you need to provide more evidence that the Democratic Party nationwide has actually changed its stance on ILLEGAL immigration.
Consider sanctuary cities. I suggest that city’s policies have evolved over the past couple of decades. The headlines aren’t so much about immigration policies as they are about opposing Session and Trump.
The decision by the parties to oppose each other has also evolved.
Coberly,
Your heart transplant comment only makes sense if it isn’t possible to survive in the person’s country of origin. I can assure you that people do, in fact, manage to live in countries like Mexico, Haiti, etc. Why you would think otherwise is something I do not understand.
Mike
you are talking about taking a person out of the country he grew up in, whose language he speaks, whose culture is second nature to him and sending him to a place where he does not know the language… something the classical Greeks considered right next to a sentence of death.
The fact that you don’t understand this makes me worry about you. Ever think about becoming a judge?
Arne,
OK. So here’s a question… what exactly are the initiatives or laws the Democratic Party, whether in the US as a whole or in CA in particular, actually supports that would limit illegal immigration? Because as far as I can see, the party’s position seems to be “do what you’re required to do according to Federal Law, but where not required, do not cooperate and where possible, throw sand in the works.” I provide a link upthread to an article in which the CA state AG threatens companies that cooperate with the Federal Gov’t any more than required by Federal law. Eleven years ago, Bernie Sanders said it is unpatriotic for a company to hire illegal foreign workers instead of Americans. Now, Democrats seem to be against any company trying behave in a way that Sanders once called patriotic. (If I am wrong, if there is a national Democrat figure who is in favor, please correct me.)
Coberly,
I lived 14 of the first 15 years of my life abroad. In that time, I moved around. Then I came back to the US. The most important thing for me was to stay with my family. The fact that my parents moved away from where I grew up to another country (as it happens, the one where I happened to be born, but not one I knew) meant I was better off in the “new” country with them. Family unification works multiple ways, both with everyone staying and with everyone going.
But let’s take your argument one step further. My father was an immigrant. As it happens, he did it legally. It was a long (as in many, many years) process. But when he first came to the US, he was a bit younger than the average age of the DREAMers. He was also in possession of a very rare set of skills and credentials, which is why he was allowed into the country in the first place.
Should it have been the policy of the United States to tell him he should not come because the culture was alien to him, the language was alien to him (he did speak English, along with Spanish (his native tongue), and I believe he could understand at least some written German and Russian at the time), etc.? Should he have been warned that moving to the US – leaving his country, family, and culture behind – was akin to death? Is the meaning of death somehow different for a legal v. an illegal immigrant?
Alternatively, should he have been told that there was no need for him to develop a rare set of skills in order to come to the US, because he could have simply come in an undocumented fashion?
I don’t set the rules. But I’d like to see some consistency applied to the reasoning when it comes to legal v. undocumented aliens.
Hmmm. You think some people – chiefly liberals — have altered their attitude towards immigrants. I gather you think establishing this fact — which isn’t much in doubt! — will establish that the change in attitude was for political, or perhaps psychological, reasons And thus, perhaps, less than convincing as an argument that others, undecided in their minds about immigration, should adopt the same liberal course.
I think you’re missing the point. Let me point to another controversy, the question of whether we should employ capital punishment for some crimes. An argument often made is that mistakes are made from time to time, and innocent people are unjustly convicted and sent to prison for long terms or even executed for crimes they have not committed. Thus capital punishment is flawed and should be ended. There is a counter argument that capital punishment is a necessity, despite the possibility of error, and therefore that an innocent individual who has been executed should be viewed not as a “Mistake” but as one who has perished in the service of his country. Like a soldier, in other words. Sensible, dignified, highly honored lawyers and judges and statesmen made such arguments, a century ago. Tell the truth, I was much impressed with this counter argument once upon a time. Half a century or so has made me a bit dubious, but … what the hey!
Now my thought is, it’s quite one thing to admit that the law makes errors from time to time and maybe every few years, somebody gets killed who didn’t deserve such a punishment. It’s quite another thing to contemplate that a rush to get rid of criminals, we might as a nation mistakenly execute tens of thousands of innocent people, let along that we might do so for many years.
It’s kind of sweet to contemplate a poor not-quite-sinner, known but to God, who manfully dies in error to preserve our sacred system of justice. We can do this perhaps and still think of ourselves as decent, well-meaning men. Shoving people into Auschwitz, on the other hand, was quite a bit different. Right?
So my thought is, the people whose attitudes might have changed about immigrants, are perhaps thinking of the DACE kids. It’s one thing to argue that a handful of newly born children of illegal immigrants should be expelled when quite young. (I wouldn’t make that argument myself, actually, but …) Its quite another to argue that 800,000 such kids, many of whom have reached maturity as residents of this land — this land of fabled generosity — ought to be expelled as a group, as quickly as possible.
You can argue, with some legitimacy I think, that some small number of immigrants might be expelled for harsh moral, or mechanical, or legalistic reasons, while being reluctant to extend that reasoning to nearly a million people who did not break our laws with deliberate or destructive intent, but simply accompanied their parents as children.
People to claim to be Christians in particular ought be responsive to children — “Suffer the children to come to me” I think the words are. I saw them once in some old book, and perhaps some of the inconsistent liberals you wish to criticize saw them as well..
Mike S,
But you miss a point that was brought up in the post:
Since you brought up Christians, the Israelis (most of whom are not Christian) airlifted a bunch of Ethiopians to Israel. (Operation Moses in 1984, Operation Solomon in 1991.) Do you advocate (i.e., do you think it would be the Christian thing to do) that this country make it a priority to airlift in people who would like to move to the US but are unable to do so? Which ones? There are more people who would like to move to the US than there are currently living here. Do we airlift them all, and if not, how do you decide which ones don’t get airlifted?
Or do you feel that the needs of those who are here illegally are of greater importance than the people who would come here (legally or illegally) if given a chance?
The fact is, in the real world, resources are scarce. By selecting one particular group of winners, society preens and basks in the warm glow of moral superiority. The losers… well, nobody pays attention to them.
And speaking of losers… I could also ask about the poor bastards in Ohio and Wisconsin whose income has been stagnant for the past three decades, who live worse than their parents did, and how you plan to tell them it is their duty to see their incomes decline further under more competition for their jobs, and to pay higher taxes to foot the bill too, but I think that would be piling on.
My view, BTW… there are outcomes that increase the size of the pie more than others. I think for the most part, the wisest course of action, and the one that helps the most people (not just in the US, I might add) over the long run, is picking the outcomes that generate the most growth.
“The Big Tent has been burned to the ground, its ashes have been scattered, and the ground on which it once stood has been salted. Those who believe in the old ways, whether because of respect for laws, or based on evidence, or even from self-interest are racist scum. That goes double if the racist scum refuse to vote for their former friends who now make a career out of denouncing them.”
Sounds just like Johnson in 1964 & 1965 giving up the Southern Dixicrats to put up a much, much larger Tent, on fertile ground .
“(If I am wrong, if there is a national Democrat figure who is in favor, please correct me.)”
You should read your article again and correct yourself. All you are doing is pointing out the places where Dems are trying to restrict deportation of parents of Americans. And strangely enough, your examples are always the children of parents who committed some crime(besides entering the country illegally) while you ignore the clear actions of Dems in controlling illegal immigration.
Obama was called the deporter in chief, ya’think none of those deported came from Cal?
Just another example of your usual column, you take some pieces of truth, ignore some pieces of truth, and stir.
Example?
You take Krugman’s thoughts on “migrant workers” and apply it to all illegal immigrants because there “there is a fair amount of overlap”.
Typical kimel.
A recent analysis commissioned and published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found “the literature on employment impacts finds little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers.”
Overall, the analysis called the inflow of foreign-born people “a relatively minor factor in the $18 trillion U.S. economy.” However, the analysis does cite recent research that immigration could reduce the number of hours worked by teenagers and some evidence that recent immigrants reduce the employment rate of prior immigrants.
There are, of course, other forces that have depressed blue-collar wages: increased automation, globalization, declining unionization and government policies on overtime. The Trump administration recently said it would not defend an Obama-era rule that made workers who make less than $47,000 per year (up from about $24,000) eligible for overtime.
Since the sixties, the amount of Direct Labor and its cost in manufacturing has dimished greatly due to the factors mentioned in the last paragraph and also due to reduced productivitry gains going to Labor.
Longtooth,
I know you aren’t going to get this because you put so much effort in other comment threads into defending bacha bazi and FGM, but I am a hopeless optimist so I am going to try anyway.
Some practices give one set of people rights over others, and they are not reciprocated. The dancing boys in bacha bazi – they are being abused, whether you call that culture or whatever, and on the other side, you have abusers. Similarly, Jim Crow was taking away rights from Black people and giving power over them to White people. Ending bacha bazi, or Jim Crow, levels the rights.
Now, giving an undocumented immigrant amnesty, for example, may seem, on the face of it, to be leveling the playing field…. but it is actually the opposite. It gives the undocumented person the right to compete in the US, with American workers, but it doesn’t give the American workers the right to compete in the country the undocumented person came from. It also makes the undocumented person less subject to laws. If he/she breaks a law here, he can go to his/her country of origin to evade punishment. Similarly, if he/she breaks a law in his/her country of origin, he/she can come here to evade punishment.
And then there’s the disparity it creates between people from different countries of origination. The Democrats’ current preferred approach (i.e., ignore documentation altogether) hugely advantages potential immigrants from Mexico over, say, potential immigrants from Japan, or Argentina, or Zambia, or Norway. Quite literally, just about anyone from Mexico can come here very easily. (Which, I might add, is about as undiverse an immigration policy as one could design. ) Hence my question in the post, and upthread, about where this should stop.
But that’s the leveling of the playing field look. There is another issue, and that is how things look years after the fact. Years after the fact, ending Jim Crow looks like the moral thing to do from the perspective of just about the entire population, with the possible exception of a very small percentage of people who dislike Black people. On the other hand, I wrote a post some time ago about Emperor Valens… he made a momentous immigration related decision, and for the past millenium and a half it has been considered a really boneheaded decision with catastrophic consequences. But for a decade or so, he did enjoy a bigger tent.
Finally, there is one more thing to consider, and that is something to which I alluded upthread. Consider a civilization very different from ours – the Classical Greeks. They were a small fraction of the world at the time, and they had many faults, but they developed things that have generated benefits for people which continue thousands of years later. The output that small group of people generated was unmatched in importance by the rest of the world at the time. Then they vanished. The death of that golden goose harmed the world. We would be farther along today if Classical Greece had survived another century. What the lightning in the bottle was, I suspect nobody knows, but it existed.
You could say the same thing about, say, ancient Egypt, one or two Chinese dynasties, the Italians and Dutch in the Renaissance, etc. And you could say the same thing about the US from about 1880 to the present, or at least the very recent past. You can particularly say the same thing about the US from about 1940 to maybe 1969, or perhaps the year 2000.
Now… lightning in a bottle is very, very valuable. It pays to think hard about what might kill it. I’m going to guess that the ancient Greeks could have taken in small numbers of people they called Barbarians and made them into Greeks who shared in that lightning. Could they have taken in large numbers and achieved the same results or better? Are things different this time? Why or why not?
EMichael,
I don’t think you read the post. It cites Krugman noting that immigrants of relatively unskilled people drives down wages and drives up fiscal costs. I note that means the very same people who are not facing more competition for jobs are also being asked to pay more in taxes or to get less from their government.
As to who called Obama deporter in chief – activists moving the goal posts and trying to work the ref. (Seriously – if you don’t have any memory whatsoever of what actually happened, spend a few seconds on Google.) And it worked on Obama too, despite the fact the fact this was nothing more than a change in process or even definition. This last article mentions, for instance, that in 2013, using whatever definition of deportation, 133K people were deported, with well over half having felonies or multiple misdemeanors on their record. My guess is that if only convicted murderers were deported, the activists would still have called him deporter in chief because it worked on him.
C’mon, Man!
Even you admit PKs column is about migrant workers. They are about 1/4 of illegal immigrants in the US; obviously they are low paid and uneducated; and about 1/3 of them go back home when harvests are done.
Find another study and name to make your point that actually addresses the entire illegal population.
Are the other quarters disproportionately aerospace executives with three graduate degrees apiece? Otherwise, how exactly is the quote from Krugman not applicable?
“While Feinstein stated in one of the clips that her views were moderate, the reality is that California Democrats have generally been left of center at every point in my lifetime.”
With self identification at 40% conservative, 40% moderate, 20% liberal, the median “moderate” IS left of center.
The cultural and economic anxieties of working class whites has led the Democrats to attempt to cultivate a new constituency.
Kimel
the flowering of Greek culture, to which we owe all those advances, actually happened while (because) Greece was a “center of culture” attracting people from other countries…. it was the mix that created the culture, not the Greek racial purity.
you cant see this, but your rather intense (and time consuming?) campaign against immigrants (non Norwegian) reveals an obsession which is not fueled by any rational or even well informed consideration of the facts.
btw.. i am glad you survived your childhood but i wonder if (whatever was going on) didn’t have something to do with your lack of empathy… decent human consideration… today. In any case “if i could do it, so should everybody” is not a well founded argument and is more usually seen as a justification by the rich for creating conditions of misery for those less fortunate (less gifted with “character” and “enterprise.”)
EMIchael identifies your “logical” problem above: The Chinese menu syndrome. You pick and choose what “facts” you admit to consideration and ignore or dismiss ten thousand facts that should, if we were decent and as smart as we like to think, expose your arguments as…. well… neurotic obsession.
or, to be more charitable, the common human fear of the stranger, or especially “many strangers.” a fear not unfounded in reality but one which must be carefully guarded against if we are going to have any hope of not descending into chaos (from an old Greek: “All things arise from chaos, through injustice, one against the other, and thither are they returned, in retribution, according to the order of time.”)
“Are the other quarters disproportionately aerospace executives with three graduate degrees apiece? Otherwise, how exactly is the quote from Krugman not applicable?”
Cause migrant workers are among the lowest paid workers in the country. Take them out of the equation and find the other 3/4’s. Now, I doubt many aerospace engineers will be found, but that is not the question.
You applied PKs research to all illegals. One step from “they all like watermelon”.
LJ,
Working class whites have abandoned the Dem Party since the party made black people human beings.
Otoh, I don’t remember any Dem legislation regarding labor that omitted whites in favor of others.
Then again, I can recall many Rep policies at state and federal levels that attacked the working class. Though to be fair, they did not discriminate on basis of race either. All working people got screwed.
“Working class whites have abandoned the Dem Party since the party made black people human beings.”
Well black people are going to abandon the Dem Party if they keep using the term “Chain migration”.
The Democrats stopped caring about working class Americans a little over 25 years ago.
They have been working on world poverty.
One of their solutions is to allow any and all poorly educated latinos who could cross our border, to stay here and work here. Never mind that those illegal immigrants would compete for jobs with undereducated Americans workers. Never mind that it is in direct violation of the Immigration Reform and Control Act which the US Congress enacted in 1986.
That 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was last time that amnesty was given to illegal immigrants. Now they want to grant amnesty again. And they are completely clueless as to why anyone would object.
Candidate Trump was never subtle in campaigning against illegal immigration, he railed against it. The polls showed him losing. Yet after all the elections were finished Donald Trump was sworn in as President.
His election should have convinced politicians that the electorate does not look favorably on illegal immigrants. That is a very simple truth.
Instead of acceptance, the Democratic party faithful have questioned the electoral process, and our representative government which they now view as overly controlled by the population. And they have denounced the electorate as somehow flawed. (Stupid or bigoted, or both)
If they lose in November will they give this self destructive behavior up?
EM-In terms of your memory, maybe you’ve forgotten the the body of law known as Affirmative Action Law. Are you familiar with the Revised Philadelphia Plan? How about Executive Order 11625? Of course you’re correct that those were not actions associated with the Dems.
LJ:
1. Oh, you mean Nixon’s 1971 Executive Order 11625, which came after he created the Minority Business Development Agency in 1969? http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3191
2. And you re probably including Nixon’s Executive Order 11478 which amended Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 (known as the Philadelphia Plan). I guess the Dems could not do it well enough, so Repubs made it better and stronger. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/21/executive-order-further-amendments-executive-order-11478-equal-employmen
3. Did you also mean the National Voting Rights Act signed into law by Nixon in 1970 and the EEOC in 1972. https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2017/08/nixons-record-civil-rights-2/
I was 18 years old working the scaffolds 10, 20, and 40 stories up in 68 before I went in the Marine Corp. There was about 20 of us stripping out the old caulking and caulking a white marble building. A window opened and a black tuckpointer got on the scaffold. Didn’t bother me any as I had went to an integrated high school. The next thing I knew, our foremen Marty was screaming at the man calling him every name he could think of saying he would not work with some nigger. He looked over at me and I remember the look on his face as if yesterday. Never said a word and grabbed his bag and went through the window he came out of a moment ago. By the way, we bled the same too.
Nixon might have been a liar; but, he did a lot of good things on Civil Rights that Dems started. For the record, I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I worked with my dad for the time I left high school till I left for boot camp. I was lucky having survived 3+ years everywhere they could send me, then finding the prettiest woman who would have me living between tw oof my Italian aunts, and finally getting my degrees on the VA bill and state grants.
Yea we all paid a little for good reasons. I never got chased off a scaffold, my grandparents were not slaves, and I was not buried neck deep in the dirt to stay cool as a child while my parents picked veggies in the heat of the southwest (one person’s experience who worked for me) for peanuts.
LJ, what’s wrong with you?
I just find it interesting that 35 comments, despite however many brickbats, nobody touches:
As I asked upthread – if we aren’t concerned with law, and if being in the US is a moral right that should be covered by the taxpayer, why are we not airlifting in people from distant lands? This is especially important if we want a diverse immigrant population, since the current approach is so heavily biased toward immigrants from a very specific geographic region.
Mike Kimel,
It is an interesting question.
Here is what I wrote in a comment on November 23, 2014 8:45 pm
———————————————— Start ————————————————
“I see no problems with our current legal immigration system, and I never have. And the issues today are larger than simply legalizing the latest wave of illegal immigrants:
1. One question is whether we have any need for policed border crossings? Why?
2. Why not just issue a Social Security card to anyone who crosses any US border?
3. Why do we force some immigrants to comply with our visa laws when others just move into the country?
4. Should all Americans be able to pick and choose which laws to obey and receive amnesty later? Why not?
5. And last but not least, this system is discriminating against other immigrants who are certainly just as deserving. Shouldn’t 12 million poor Africans be given the same right of immigration. How about 12 million South Americans who endure poverty that most Americans cannot even imagine? How about 12 million Chinese who are oppressed by their government and left poor. Surely there must be 12 million Russians who would like a fresh start here and would pay their own passage. Why is this discrimination acceptable?”
———————————————— End ————————————————
See: http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/11/racism-or-a-nations-reality.html#comment-2467904
Jim H,
They say great minds think alike. You, on the other hand, think like me, at least on this aspect of this particular issue. My sincerest condolences. But we are in good company. A decade or so ago, Diane Feinstein, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders might have made some of these same points. Of course, they have since transcended.
That said, I should assure that I have not plagiarized you. I don’t remember that answer you gave, though I have little doubt that I read it so there is always the possibility that some residual piece of stayed in my head. I do like your structuring of the question better than mine, though.
Mike:
Still stirring the pot, heh? How could you plagiarize Jim; his comment was from my post. You were off doing something else.
pleel’s junk is old hat. junk.
t’s been one of the prevalent socio/political positions of white supremacist in the US since the nation began. The original term for this political / socio position was “Nativist”
They come in many flavors but they all have on flavor in common:
White north-western European Protestants are the superior people.
“Nativism gained its name from the “Native American” parties of the 1840s and 1850s. In this context “Native” does not mean indigenous Americans or American Indians but rather those descended from the inhabitants of the original Thirteen Colonies. It impacted politics in the mid-19th century because of the large inflows of immigrants after 1845 from cultures that were different from the existing American culture. Nativists objected primarily to Irish Roman Catholics because of their loyalty to the Pope and also because of their supposed rejection of republicanism as an American ideal.[31]
Nativist movements included the Know Nothing or American Party of the 1850s, the Immigration Restriction League of the 1890s, the anti-Asian movements in the West, resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the “Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907″ by which Japan’s government stopped emigration to the United States. Labor unions were strong supporters of Chinese exclusion and limits on immigration, because of fears that they would lower wages and make it harder for workers to organize unions.[”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_(politics)#United_States
Typo correction:
Kimel’s junk is old hat junk
replaces: pleel’s junk is old hat. junk.
Longtooth,
Got it. You subscribe to a philosophy that is designed to privilege one particular group of immigrants over all the others, and then you accuse me of being discriminatory.
Meanwhile, you ignore what I have stated many, many times: if the word exists, I am a citizenist. I believe the government’s policies, including its immigration policy, should be to benefit first and foremost its citizens. I don’t particularly care if those citizens are black or white or asian or hispanic or Native American or whatever. What matters is that they are citizens.
“A decade or so ago, Diane Feinstein, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders might have made some of these same points. Of course, they have since transcended.”
You have not considered the possibility that their transcendence is backed by facts as much as by politics. Certainly, the folks at this page:
https://immigration.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000852
don’t agree on the facts.
Borjas: “When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. ” But if the number of workers in a largely consumer economy) is going up, so is demand for the things firms make. Is Borjas making a “Lump of Demand Fallacy”?
Davidson: “Logically, if immigrants were ‘stealing’ jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens.” Of course, when you look at aggregated data you fail to see that some people do end up losing out.
Do I like Davidson’s argument better. Is that because it fits my distaste for Trumps arguments? Probably. But it also fits my understanding of how economists ignore feedback in their models.
But why are they speaking out more forcefully now? That certainly is politically motivated. Both sides are doing more to obstruct the other. The Republican House will not bring a bill even if a majority of Congress would vote for it unless a majority of Republicans would vote for it. I don’t want Democrats to govern that way, but I do fear they will if they gain a majority.
Mike Kimel,
I never thought that you plagiarized. I was only pointing out that I had had the same sort of questions.
We were both searching for the logical limits.
Arne,
There are very few cases where demand curves don’t slope down and the condition is sustained for a long time over a wide scale. I can think of a few network effects that might qualify (e.g., build one hotel/casino in a dusty town in the middle of Nevada and nobody comes, but if a bunch of hotel/casinos go up you have Las Vegas). I cannot think of a way that low skilled labor would function that way unless somehow a big part of the costs are being transferred onto a third party. (E.g., think of Walmart and who pays for the healthcare costs of its employees, which is a topic covered here before.) “Whoops there goes gravity” may make for a nice Eminem song, but it makes for poor physics. Whoops, there goes the demand curve makes for very lousy, politicized economics.
Ya’ gotta love this constant “a crime is a crime thing” coming from a guy who berates Dems for actually believing a crime is a crime but understanding that enforcing the laws has other effects on human beings that did not break the law.
Of course demand curves slope down. But that only tells you what happens if you hold everything else constant. You missed the point.
Arne,
Let’s skip a few steps and get to the point, which is that in your story somehow the presence of the new workers didn’t just increase supply, it increased demand.
This can happen three ways
1. The new workers bring with them a fair amount of resources or create a fair amount of resources
2. There is a transfer from somewhere (ie, the government, which is to say, taxes paid by the old workers)
3. Borrowing by the new workers
The only “real” and sustainable option is 1. But the illegal workers are poor and tend to work in low marginal product jobs. So option 1 isn’t happening either.
Now, it is of course possible I missed something. So what is it that I missed? What changed?
run-I was just reacting to the comment that “omitted whites in favor of others.” I guess in theory these affirmative action rules could omit whites in favor of others.
I’m a little younger than you so I’ve never experienced that weird kind of racism in the workplace.
“he face of Fisher v. Texas, Abigail Fisher, is a young, educated and white woman who sought to undo affirmative action in the erroneous belief that the system limited her chances because of her race.
But if the court had dismantled affirmative action across the nation, Fisher, and many other white women like her, would have been sorely disappointed. The fact is that white women are disproportionately likely to benefit from affirmative action policies. You’d never know that from listening to Fisher — or her demographic.
Data from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an annual large-scale academic survey that aims to track political attitudes — show that 66 percent of young white people between 17 and 34 describe themselves as “somewhat opposed” or “strongly opposed” to affirmative action policies in employment and admissions. Among young white women, 67 percent are against affirmative action. Among young women of color — the study polls black, Hispanic and Asian American women — only 29 percent oppose it either strongly or somewhat.
Affirmative action, when it was introduced by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, originally required entities that receive federal funding to take tangible steps “to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” In 1967, Lyndon Johnson added sex to that list.
And yet, just as most people think of Title IX as being about athletics funding (there’s a lot more to it than that), the general perception of affirmative action is that it’s “just” about race.
But affirmative action has been quite beneficial to women, and disproportionately beneficial to white women. Women are now more likely to graduate with bachelor’s degrees and attend graduate school than men are and outnumber men on many college campuses. In 1970, just 7.6 percent of physicians in America were women; in 2002, that number had risen to 25.2 percent. But — and this is a big but — those benefits are more likely to accrue to white women than they are to women of color, and that imbalance has very real effects on employment and earnings later in life. In other words: affirmative action works, and it works way better for white women than it does for all the other women in America.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/affirmative-action-white-women_us_56a0ef6ae4b0d8cc1098d3a5
Kimel dismisses contemptuously “low skill” workers. He has no idea what skills “low skill workers” have. They are not low skill, they are low paid. And they are low paid because they do not have equal bargaining power…. because the skills they have are the common skills (including common sense) that the human race has had to learn over the millennia to survive.
The “high skill” folks that Kimel wants in his neighborhoods are out on an evolutionary limb, far slenderer than they realize. In any case, even today they rely on the skills of “low skill” workers to support their fancy dancing on the tightrope of “high skills.”
not quite sure what high skills the Irish brought to this country but they were not obvious to the nativists at the time. meanwhile it is not obvious that the country suffered harm from letting them in.
clearly, letting all those low skill people (called “children”) into the country impoverishes us all. if we could only keep the money the law forces us to pay for their food and housing, we could all drive new BMW’s and go to Las Vegas two times a year.
maybe we should look those seven year olds in the eye and tell them momma won’t love them unless they study STEM. everyone else is a drag on the economy.
And in all this immigration discussion happening is the absence of the effect of US international economic policy on the under developed nations. Of most concern are the nations most in our view: Mexico and South America.
Also to be included in the concern of “how did we get here” is our policy regarding the dogged determination to fight communism regardless of the cultural, tribal, religious, economic and power plays of the nation we were fighting said evil communism.
Lastly, to take a thought from Trading Places regarding how to promote a change, migration from south of our boarder has been reversed and I believe approaching insignificant do to the last recession. So it seems to me that the best way to deal with our immigration issue is to deal with the economics of the nations people are migrating from.
No one of current political celebrity is considering any of this. Nope, as with the discussion here, it’s piece meal.
As it relates to a change of the dem party, it is the loss of broad understanding, the attempt to look more interrogatively at an issue. We got the EPA and the understanding of the deeply interwound relationships in our environment of what on the surface appeared completely segmented . So much so, that Nixon got the EPA.
If there is one thing that both parties are alike regarding their personalities, It is that they both have subscribed to a reductionist approach.
Lastly, regarding the dems. They have moved to the right over time as a means to winning believing the repubs had it politically correct. This left only one direction for the repub to move. More right. The personality of the repubs becoming one which could not stop themselves. The personality of the dems being one that could not see.
“it increased demand.
This can happen three ways … ”
Invoking supply and demand tells us how the equilibrium changes if you hold other aspects constant.
What really happens is that the economy grows as you add workers. Women entering the workforce over a period of decades, children reaching their adulthood, and illegal immigrants are all new workers in the economy. How do these fit your three ways? (I don’t actually know).
Arne,
Your model assumes my point 1: ” The new workers bring with them a fair amount of resources or create a fair amount of resources”
Sorry, but I don’t believe that low wage, poor immigrants with skills that are relatively generic will shift the demand curve by more than they shift the supply curve except (as noted earlier) to the extent they receive government subsidies or borrow funds.
As I’ve noted many times, the world works the way it does, not the way we would like it to. Believing in an impossibility because it is politically desirable is not wise.
Daniel Becker,
I keep hearing that. But I have yet to see evidence. From what I’ve been able to tell spending a fair amount of looking at this, nobody is generating an accurate count of the undocumented. A substantial part of the government hasn’t wanted to know exact figures for a long time. Look at the outcry over asking about citizenship on the upcoming Census.
I’ve found that with questions about immigration, it is often useful to substitute out the US and in another country and see if we would continue to feel the same. For example… Does Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe mean that Russia has a moral obligation to allow anyone from Eastern Europe to move to Moscow, regardless of Russian laws.
Or going farther back… given that Haiti invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic.. does Haiti owe some moral debt to people from Dominican Republic who would want to move to Haiti? (That one is more speculative, of course – Haitians want to live in DR, but not the other way around.) The Haitian example goes farther back in time, but then the Haitian occupation of DR was more significant than anything the US did in Central America. (I say this as somebody who is most definitely not a fan of the US interventions in Central and South America, and who has written about the topic several times in the past.)
If your answers are not yes and yes, then you shouldn’t believe that the US has the equivalent moral debt.
My last comment was not one of morality, but just suggest that our involvement in these nations and their politics has resulted in migratory forces. Said migration to our nation.