Comments on: Arnold lobbies Bush, pushes ‘post-partisanship’

By: jskdn

jskdn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:23:31 +0000

Monica argues out of both sides of her mouth. She argues first that Hispanics (she doesn’t use the term immigrants or more accurately illegal immigrants thereby revealing what is probably an ethnic agenda) are doing jobs that, without their presence in those jobs, the economy would collapse. Then she argues (or more accurately cut and pastes) against “the lump of labour fallacy.” Duh! Who thought otherwise? But if illegal immigrants are creating aggregate demand in the economy and also filling jobs that help supply that demand, removing them and restricting further illegal immigration also works on both sides of that equation. The notion that an economy can’t function without an ever-increasing supply of people is ridiculous. The current prediction puts California’s population to grow from 35 million to about 50 million in very short time horizon of 4 decades due to immigration and births stemming from that immigration. Think about what endless population growth means.

But just because the economy isn’t zero-sum game doesn’t mean that there aren’t supply and demand effects and that those effects don’t effect people differently. If Monica’s first notion of essential jobs were true, then just like any commodity in a market, the price of labor for those jobs would have to rise if there is a shortage of people to do them. And given the disproportionately low education demographic of the illegal immigrant population, that would predict wage suppression of that group relative to others in the economy. And that is just what we’ve seen. In fact the sub-group of that demographic most hurt is immigrants. So stopping illegal immigration most helps the labor market power of legal immigrants.

But demand by immigrants isn’t just what they choose to buy. It is all consumption that stems from their presence including government, i.e. taxpayer provided services. The National Research Council study on the effect of immigrants put the average tax cost on native California households at almost $1200 a year. The lead author of that 1997 study said last month that he thinks that cost has undoubtedly grown with the growth of the immigrant population.

Those costs mean jobs for government employees which is why the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (a sponsor of the marches you mention) and the other big government union, the SEIU are big supporters of mass immigration. They are of course people not subject to the negative labor market forces of mass immigration. Rather they are a essentially labor trust that operates within a monopoly and the abusive power of that status is very evident.

By: Bianca

Bianca — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:25:07 +0000

Do you remember the turn out of Hispanic people in the streets of LA – the demonstration was to show, (and did indeed do an effective job it), that without the Hispanics working in LA things would come to a grinding halt.
Look around LA and other big cities and you will see a lot of Hispanics doing a lot of work; and much of the work is work that the average American doesn’t want to do.

Do you really think that we should ‘send “them” all back?’ Why not encourage the hispanics to obtain legal status and then they too will be able to contribute to the tax pool? And here is a relevant quote for you:

“…This is most plainly stated in that most antique of complaints, that immigration adds to unemployment. If there are just so many jobs to go round, it is reasoned, and if a certain number of workers are added to the labour force, unemployment will rise in like measure. The premise, that there is a fixed amount of work to be done and no more, is known to economists as “the lump of labour fallacy.” That is to say, there is no natural limit to the demand for labour, a) because consumer wants are potentially infinite, and b) because each person is both a producer and a consumer. As the economist Herbert Grubel puts it, every immigrant “brings along hands and a mouth.” The money they earn at their jobs fuels the consumption that creates them.

http://andrewcoyne.com/Essays

By: jskdn

jskdn — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:58:54 +0000

Arnold proposes a massive amnesty and calls it mainstream. Well it may be mainstream among the elites but it isn’t among majority of American voters. It’s also mainstream among the elites to lie about what they are doing and Arnold is doing just that. “A path to citizenship” is amnesty for illegal immigrants, rewarding them by choosing them among all the billions who would like to immigrate, because they are here in violation of the law. Arnold even backed away from the common useful caveat designed to obscure the truth that the amnestied that he used in his prepared text ” meet a certain criteria.” In a followup question he said don’t make amnesty too complicated because the Department of Homeland Security can’t even handle their current load; in other words, just hand out amnesty to anyone who asks. Massive fraud was part of the last amnesty and will be part of this one if it’s passed. The centrist thing to do is to say if the agency can’t handle it present duties, don’t pile on 10 to 20 million amnesty applications. What Arnold proposes isn’t reform. Rather it’s more of the same mass immigration, legal or not agenda of the elites.

By the way this is coming from man who won’t accept Cedillo’s driver’s licenses for illegals bill. That bill now includes what Cedillo had formerly compared to tattooing Jews in Germany, the distinctions that Arnold had demanded as conditions to accepting the bill. So Arnold won’t give them differentiated licenses because he knows what the polls have shown on the issue (it helped his get elected in the recall) but he thinks they should be given the whole enchilada, to use the phrase Mexico’s former foreign minister gave to his amnesty demands. What a hypocrite and a liar.