With Critics of Immigration Like This, Who Needs Advocates?

Was that in the Iliad?

As someone that made under 15k a year outside the academic environment for about five years 8% was still rather insignificant to me.

Krugman also said in that editorial, that “low-skilled immigrants don’t pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they receive”. This is a basic fact of the alternative welfare society; that low-income workers aggressively parasitize the net taxpayer. The NYT allows this to be spoken of, in the context of immigration, maybe twice in a century, which is momentous in itself.
To refrain from increasing the level of aggression in society, it is not necessary to deport everyone of a certain ethnic group. If there were rational arguments in support of increasing the level of aggression in society via immigration, it would not be necessary to pose false dilemnas, nor to insinuate slippery slopes to mass murder like the antiabortionists; nor yet to use ad hominem smears of the new left type: suggesting that only racists, fascists, nativists, beggar-thy-neighbor econonazis, could call an immigration cohort undesirable.

I can relate to those who are concerned with competition from immigrants. As a computer programmer, I have first hand experience with both off-shoring and competition from immigrants on H1B visas. The competition is definitely stiffer than it was several years ago and, given the choice, I would rather not have to face it. To be truthful, I would rather not have to work for my salary at all but reality prevails.

The result is that I adapt. I spend more time working on improving my skills and working to my strengths. I am more aware of the results that make me valuable to my employer and try to exploit those to both our advantage. I am surviving and by improving my skills and becoming more results oriented I have improved our economy just a little bit.

The key is that everyone adapts and that free an open competition provides opportunities for adaptation through a more diverse and vibrant economy. On the other hand, attempts to protect jobs or salaries through legislation or closed borders have proven to be disastrous polocies over time.

Most anti-immigration sentiment is to protect our jobs. I hope we can all be wise enough to recognize that protecting jobs in the short term may be tempting, but it will make us all worse off in the future.

The point of the 8% and fraction of 1% comparison is to shoot down the nonsense pro-illegal-immigration forces sometimes spout about how illegal immigration does not exert downward pressure on wages, and does not injure any domestic American class. Which (at least if we believe Krugman) is simply not true. At all. The laws of supply and demand do, shockingly enough, apply in the case of illegal immigrants just as for the natives and the legal immigrants.

Put another way, suppose we were enforcing existing laws. Would it be right to invite in 11 million people, so the middle class could get a 0.5% increase in their standard of living, at the expense of an 8% decrease in the standard of living of the lower classes?

Now, you may think so (I think you oppose minimum wage laws anyhow, right?) but the widespread popularity of social security nets and minimum wage laws and the like makes pretty clear to me that pulling out a 0.5% gain in their own lives at the expense of (on the backs of) the living standards of the poorest among their fellow Americans probably sounds awfully callous to the majority of the public. Why? Is it because they’re economically illiterate, and don’t realise they could be realising this stupendous 0.5% increase in their income!?

No.

Or at least, probably not. It’s likely because they feel that, as citizens of the USA, they have more of a duty to their fellow citizens (e.g. the poor ones) than they have to the impoverished of Mexico (or of the Sudan, or of Bangladesh, etc.). So they’re willing to suffer some slight degradation in their own living standards in order to fund welfare or sustain a minimum wage law (leaving aside whether the minimum wage law boomerangs back to hurt lower classes themselves), or restrict illegal immigration, to help those fellow citizens.

Now, you dismiss these “low-skilled Americans,” and think they ought to be grateful for what they’ve got, and that people ought to roll their eyes at solicitude for their interests. And that’s fine for you to do. But it’s not at all surprising to me that people are going to differ from you on this point, when it comes to the situation of their fellow countrymen, however mean their estate. Their fellow countrymen who are, after all, their slacker sons and daughters.

Further, as a practical matter, it’s unlikely that we could manage total expulsion of the illegal immigrant population anyhow — this is not mediaeval France or Spain, and they are not the Jews. The more likely outcome is that we simply begin enforcing immigration more regularly, e.g. by improving border surveillance and tracking people’s visas more assiduously. And maybe deporting illegal immigrants who commit felonies.

Your line about “deporting millions of desperate foreigners” depends, for its rhetorical effect, on the idea of depriving people who have enjoyed a benefit of that benefit, rather like taking candy from a small child — something widely considered unpleasant and bad. The more probable outcome — simply not giving that benefit to people (i.e. letting them remain under the rule of their corrupt oligarchs and tyrannical dictators and socialist quacks etc.)– may be, in a universalist moral sense (i.e. one that considers the desirability of a particular policy from the standpoint of the human race as a whole) undesirable. But the American public has no problem with that that I can see.

When it comes to military affairs, for example, we could, I have no doubt, improve the lot of much of the world if we were willing simply to topple entrenched oligarchies and dictatorships hither and yon (mostly in Africa and the Near East). But the example of Iraq, in the polls, shows us that we’re not especially eager to do that. I doubt we would be, even if the outcome of freer societies the world over (or at least, less entrenched dictatorships) were demonstrably to our economic benefit. We’re “tribal,” in a sense, and quite happy with it — concerned with our welfare as a people, not merely as individuals in a denationalised market.

Bill,

Caplan’s knowledge is not useful in the real world so it makes no sense for him to be employed there. But in academia, his skills are fitting… as they are, well, academic.

An adult foreigner walking into a alternative-welfarocracy hands himself an implicit medical insurance policy, with premiums, paid by others, worth thousands a year. There is no conceptual sorting that will unlink these effects.
Likewise the police, courts and prisons’ cost per person additional of 500$ a year.
Even if one imagines a helot class of foreign residents who would be left to die at the door to emergency rooms, by operation of some law; we still have to be very restrictive of immigration now.
This is because an immigration cohort in today’s circumstance will increase the aggression on the net taxpayer. Why should immigrants be treated as sacred monkeys whose actions are outside morality; doesn’t that subhumanize them?
The implication seems to be that the immigrant can never be considered morally responsible for increasing the aggression on the net taxpayer through the taking of net public subsidy.
In actuality, though, the immigrant can greatly reduce the burden he places on the net taxpayer; by not having children until his income permits him to do so without using net public subsidy, for example.
Instead of asking this of him, it is pretended that he is exempt from morality, just because he is foreign.
A traitorism has grown and metastatized to such extent, that officials and their scholars show loyalty to the immigrant who increases the aggression on the net taxpayer. This, in spite of their owing loyalty to their fellow national, the net taxpayer, over against the foreigner who is attacking him thus.