Re: immigration's effect on per capita GDP
In a message dated 9/4/03 11:03:22 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: No, this is a very serious point. Republican administrations are by objective measure MORE socialist. Fundamentally, conservatives in this country do not believe more in individual freedom than liberals. They repeatedly seek market interventions where they disagree with market outcomes. The only difference is a superficial anti-communism, which was really an ignorant fear that a Soviet state could out-produce western market economies. Conservatives love socialism, they just call it family values or national security. here I have to disagree with you Steve. :) The Republican party's ideology runs from classical liberal to national socialist, while the Democratic party's ideology runs from national socialist to international socialist. The Republican party may not be very good at implementing the classical liberal ideology of some of it's members, but the Democratic party has no such ideology to implement. Most of the family values, incidently, don't involve government action so much as simply trying to turn back the tide of anti-Christian sentiment which rolls off the television night after night, consistently portraying serious Christians as evil oppressors. I was sitting next to Dan Quayle one might back in Iowa when a social conservative who fits your profile tried to get Quayle to support government censorship of the entertainment media and Quayle very firmly opposed government censorship or content regulation of any sort.
Re: immigration's effect on per capita GDP
That still avoids my distinction between rhetoric and policy. on 9/5/03 3:45 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 9/4/03 11:03:22 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: here I have to disagree with you Steve. :) The Republican party's ideology runs from classical liberal to national socialist, while the Democratic party's ideology runs from national socialist to international socialist. The Republican party may not be very good at implementing the classical liberal ideology of some of it's members, but the Democratic party has no such ideology to implement. Most of the family values, incidently, don't involve government action so much as simply trying to turn back the tide of anti-Christian sentiment which rolls off the television night after night, consistently portraying serious Christians as evil oppressors. I was sitting next to Dan Quayle one might back in Iowa when a social conservative who fits your profile tried to get Quayle to support government censorship of the entertainment media and Quayle very firmly opposed government censorship or content regulation of any sort.
Re: immigration's effect on per capita GDP
Yes, an consciously so. While I think it's clear that Republicans generally push for much less government than Democrats do, I also think you're disinclined to accept what seems manifest to me, and since as you know I haven't slept much for the past 10 days, I don't have the energy to write a lengthy discourse full of evidence that might actually persuade you. :) Maybe if I ever manage to fall asleep again. :) David In a message dated 9/5/03 3:49:52 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: That still avoids my distinction between rhetoric and policy. on 9/5/03 3:45 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 9/4/03 11:03:22 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: here I have to disagree with you Steve. :) The Republican party's ideology runs from classical liberal to national socialist, while the Democratic party's ideology runs from national socialist to international socialist. The Republican party may not be very good at implementing the classical liberal ideology of some of it's members, but the Democratic party has no such ideology to implement. Most of the family values, incidently, don't involve government action so much as simply trying to turn back the tide of anti-Christian sentiment which rolls off the television night after night, consistently portraying serious Christians as evil oppressors. I was sitting next to Dan Quayle one might back in Iowa when a social conservative who fits your profile tried to get Quayle to support government censorship of the entertainment media and Quayle very firmly opposed government censorship or content regulation of any sort.
immigration's effect on per capita GDP
Robert Book wrote: Do any of these studies take into account the effect of immigrants on demand? It would see these people have to eat. Judging from the article below (Note carefully what Professor Borjas is saying here. Sure, those immigrants who work do raise overall GDP. But the bulk of that increase goes to the immigrants themselves, in the form of wages. The benefit to native-born Americans, after everything is taken into account, is infinitesimally small.), the effect of immigrants on demand does appear to be taken into account. What I want to know is whether the labor economists' studies take into account the cost of the immigrants' crime rates (which are above the native born average), their welfare dependency (again, above the national average), and the higher transaction costs and ethnic friction and rivalry that comes from high rates of immigration. Most immigrants also come from cultures that are more socialistic than the United States and, upon gaining citizenship, vote heavily for the more socialistic of the two major parties. (An exception here may be the relatively small East Asian/Oriental population, which seems to straddle the fence, although the large Chinese element seemed to lean toward the Democrats during Clinton's second term, when he was perceived as China-friendly, even though it may have been at the expense of US national security. Miami's Cubans are also an exception, perhaps because most Cuban refugees were from Cuba's more well-to-do classes and also tend to be vehemently anti-Communist. But exceptions are rare and relatively small.) It always struck me as odd that contemporary libertarians (although not von Mises or the objectivist Ayn Rand) are the strongest supporters of open borders, even though most of the people who would enter under such an arrangement would be hostile to libertarian political thought. ~Alypius Skinner http://www.vdare.com/pb/cc_times.htm Contra Costa Times December 4, 1999 Immigration policy stupid, evil and hurting Americans By Peter Brimelow IN AMERICA, WE have a two-party system, a Republican congressional staffer is supposed to have told a visiting group of Russian legislators some years ago. There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party. He added: Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called -- bipartisanship. Our current mass immigration policy is a classic example of this fatal Washington bipartisanship. It is a stupid policy because there is absolutely no reason for it -- in particular, Americans as a whole are no better off economically because of mass immigration. It is an evil policy because it second-guesses the American people, who have shown through smaller families that they want to stabilize population size. Unfortunately, our current immigration policy is consuming the environment with urban sprawl, hurting the poor and minorities with intensified wage competition, and ultimately threatening the American nation itself -- what Abraham Lincoln called the last, best hope of earth -- with cultural and linguistic fragmentation. And, of course, the current mass immigration policy is bipartisan. Both major party leaderships have tacitly agreed to keep the subject out of politics. No single figure is more responsible for this than Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., chairman of the Senate's Immigration Subcommittee. Abraham was a key figure in sabotaging the most recent chance of reform, the Smith-Simpson immigration bill, in 1996. Ironically, this was a truly bipartisan measure, proposed by Republicans but based on the work of the Jordan Commission, headed by the former black liberal Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. She recommended almost halving immigration, in part because of its impact on the poor. The economic stupidity of current mass immigration policy is illustrated by a brilliant new book, Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press). The author, Professor George Borjas of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is widely regarded as the leading American immigration economist. And he is an immigrant, arriving here penniless from Castro's Cuba in 1962, when he was 12 years old. Borjas has every reason to favor immigration. He writes movingly about his own early experiences, and compassionately about the immigrant waves that have followed him. But, as a scholar, he recognizes what he calls accumulating evidence that immigration has costs as well as benefits. My thinking on this issue has changed substantially over the years, he admits. Professor Borjas' devastating findings: The current wave of mass immigration is not benefiting Americans overall. All of the available estimates suggest the annual net gain is astoundingly small, writes Professor Borjas, ... less than 0.1 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Roughly: less than
Re: immigration's effect on per capita GDP
In a message dated 9/4/03 8:38:09 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Illegals knowingly break federal law. Many libertarians say they only break laws that shouldn't exist anyway. But this made me wonder. The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants do not have libertarians views (to put it mildly). Are they also more inclined to break other laws? A tangentially related question: does a proliferation of laws that people generally don't obey cause people to generally break other laws more easily?
Re: immigration's effect on per capita GDP
on 9/4/03 8:26 AM, Aschwin de Wolf at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Illegals knowingly break federal law. Many libertarians say they only break laws that shouldn't exist anyway. But this made me wonder. The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants do not have libertarians views (to put it mildly). Are they also more inclined to break other laws? Such as drug laws??
Re: immigration's effect on per capita GDP
on 9/4/03 3:02 PM, alypius skinner at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I thought the implication here was so obvious it did not need to be spelled out, but I guess I was mistaken (jab, jab). Importing new voters from very unlibertarian political cultures will further diminish, if not eventually kill off altogether, struggling libertarianism's already modest influence. Open borders libertarians have in effect become enemies of liberty when they pursue a strategy that is likely to diminish freedom in what may be (depending on the measures used) the free-est country in the world. It is politically self-defeating, not just for libertarians, but for us all. If immigrants arrived in numbers that made assimilation more practical, and if assimilation to either libertarian or classical liberal political ideas were a high (although admittedly very statist) priority, then the threat posed to liberty might be modest, but that is not the case. But while libertarians may be fools to import large numbers of people who will vote against both their own and America's core political values, socialistic politicians, such as those who control the Democratic Party, are wise: they are importing future socialist voters, as they are well aware. This is still an ends justify the means pragmatic argument. I don't want to get mired in a debate over methodology, but such crude utilitarianism is generally shunned by libertarians. For many libertarians, the Libertarian political agenda does not come before small-l libertarian principles. and, in fact, represents only a sliver of our total annual immigration, this argument against aggregation amounts to a mere diversionary tactic. Not at all. It is a simple point about aggregation. Saying immigrants when one means immigrants from Latin America, is misleading. Much of the opposition to immigration would seek limitations on Indian immigration for protectionist reasons. Second, I will bet the same $200 that the crime rate in either of those cities is higher African-Americans (native-born) than hispanics. You've suggested a correlation between immigration and crime, which may or may not exist, but it's still a far cry from a real link between the two. Is a significantly higher crime rate still observable when correcting for income, geographic location, gun laws, etc.? This is true even when incentives are the same. Other things being equal, a community of gypsy immigrants will still behave differently from a community of Jewish or Chinese immigrants. Possible, but how this plays out is an empirical question, not one solved by mere invocation of culture. Very often culture is invoked when underlying incentives actually differ. Further, strong Jewish support for the welfare state cannot be easily explained by incentives or self-interest, except insofar as it allowed them to forge a political alliance with blacks (at a time when blacks wielded almost no political influence!). Certainly Jews do not personally benefit in large numbers from welfare states, since they are underrerpresented on the welfare roles. Culture explains this much better than incentives. Really? What about the lack of an incentive to believe differently? What about the incentive a culture or religion gives for one to avoid the disapproval of one's peers? What about the low cost of holding such beliefs? Incentives matter. Culture is a veil in this case. A big if. Then limit the state before you further abuse its power. If the core problem is not immigration, but the scope of the state, then fix the core problem. In case you haven't noticed, the state is *not* properly limited, nor is it moving in that direction. So therefore using it to your ends is okay? Large-scale immigration from cultures more socialism-friendly than our own will only accelerate the leftish trend. Even if the state were properly limited (as it once was, to a large extent), quickly importing large numbers people with no tradition of a minimalist state would soon unlimit the government. I suspect that the US might still be much more classically liberal than it is if we had not admitted large numbers of immigrants from continental Europe (including Germany and Scandanavia as much as southern and eastern Europe). Still stuck on the ends justifying the means. If you honestly hold that view, than we are arguing past each other. One could dispute whether other cultures (such as Mexico's) are significantly more socialistic than the U.S., and whether Democrats are significantly more socialistic than Republicans. One could also dispute whether the pyramids were built by native Egyptians rather than visitors on UFO's. No, this is a very serious point. Republican administrations are by objective measure MORE socialist. Fundamentally, conservatives in this country do not believe more in individual freedom than liberals. They repeatedly seek market interventions where they disagree
