Cordell, Arthur: ECOM wrote:
Illegal workers contribute to the pressures on the underclass.
Might we say that even though we no longer have a military "draft",
we still have conscription for the Industrial Reserve Army? One
lemma here is that a reason it is important for students not to
cheat on tests is so that they will not unfairly
be granted examptions from service to their country in the
great Patriotic Price War. (Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?
Son, I was unemployed, thus helping keep labor costs down.)
\brad mccormick
Allowing
the union movement to atrophy (often by union bosses who are overpaid
and have forgotten why unions were created in the first place) adds to
the problem.
arthur
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*From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *On Behalf Of *Karen
Watters Cole
*Sent:* Tuesday, May 23, 2006 2:45 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* RE: [Futurework] It's About Identity 2: America's Great Wall
Karen wrote: From what I’ve read, the /economic studies are mixed/
whether illegals drive wages down for other workers.
Arthur wrote: If the illegals didn't drive down wages or, at least,
disallow wages to rise then all of economic theory must be wrong. I
can't see how illegals would have no impact and I believe that their
impact is to affect the lowest paid workers in our society who can't get
increased wages: Asking for more means the employer would turn to the
illegal instead.
Some argue that much of those decreases are the result of the loss of
union jobs, not illegal workers /per se/ and have to be factored into
overall changes in the jobs economy. Here are a few items:
From Center for American Progress:
*Alan Krueger*, the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at
Princeton, argues that the best available economic evidence suggests
that increased immigration has little impact on wages for low-wage
domestic workers. He also argues that if we are serious about helping
low-income workers, we need to act now on measures that can have a much
larger impact, like increasing the minimum wage. Krueger's paper
concludes by discussing the importance of protecting the rights of
immigrant workers--to maximize their contribution to our economy and to
prevent exploitation of both these workers and domestic workers. Read
complete memo
<http://www.americanprogress.org/atf/cf/%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A521-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/krueger_immigration.pdf>
(PDF)
*Let's do immigration right***
How to avoid the mistakes we made when we argued about free trade.
By Gene Sperling, for Fortune magazine, April 18, 2006: 7:22 AM EDT
NEW YORK - The boiling debate over the economics of immigration may give
you an eerie sense of déjà vu, and no wonder: Its superheated rhetoric
recalls the polarized and exaggerated arguments over open trade and
globalization in the 1990s.
Foes of immigration try to brush off legitimate macroeconomic studies
like the *1997 National Research Council* report that shows immigration
adds $10 billion a year to the economy, and the work of academics like
Giovanni* Peri *and* *Gianmarco* Ottaviano*, who found that immigration
raised average wages by as much as 2.5% in the 1990s.
Instead, the critics often point to real problems that immigration
aggravates, like bloated state budgets and reduced opportunities and
wages for low-skilled minorities. But then they pin the blame entirely
on the worker influx - not unlike trade critics who rightly complained
of disturbing economic inequality in Mexico, but wrongly implied that
NAFTA was the primary culprit, not simply a policy that failed to cure it.
Meanwhile, supporters of immigration have been repeating mistakes from
the trade debate too. Many of us who fought for market opening back in
the '90s made blanket statements about its benefits for jobs and the
economy while pooh-poohing or ignoring its harsh impact on particular
communities and groups of workers.
Supporters also tend to gloss over the degree to which significant
increases in immigration can depress wages and even cost jobs of
low-skilled U.S. workers. Harvard's George* Borjas *and Larry* Katz*
have found that between 1980 and 2000, predominantly low-wage
immigration from Mexico depressed the wages of U.S. high school dropouts
by 7.7% compared with those of their college-educated peers.
While there is no shortage of cases where increased immigration hurt a
specific group of low-skilled workers, few are as vivid or devastating
as what befell African-American janitors 25 years ago in Los Angeles.
After seeing steady gains through the work of their union, SEIU Local
399, the janitors were making a solid $12 an hour in 1983 (equivalent to
about $24 an hour today). Then /nonunionized/ companies using workforces
94% made up of illegal immigrants earning less than $4 an hour stole
away the best contracts.
The result, according to a Government Accountability Office report, was
that unionized black janitors saw their ranks collapse from 2,500 in
1977 to 600 in 1985 - with only 100 still making top wages. Yet the woes
of such groups may get lost in the wash in large economic studies.
Acknowledging immigration's impact on low-skilled workers is not a call
to close U.S. borders, deny our heritage as a nation of immigrants, or
ignore immigration's compellingly positive effect on prices and
productivity. Rather, it is recognition that, as with aspects of trade,
we need to offset the harm that tends to concentrate on those who are
already most vulnerable to economic change.
For low-income workers affected by immigration, buffering the costs
could mean raising the minimum wage or expanding effective programs for
at-risk minority youths, like the Job Corps, which takes disadvantaged
kids out of their neighborhoods for intensive training and education.
Business advocates as well as advocacy groups for Hispanics and African
Americans might also propose boosting the earned income tax credit both
for individuals and for families with more than two children. Today this
subsidy doesn't provide extra help for larger families or offer more
than a few hundred dollars to the childless working poor. Enhancing it
might keep these folks out of poverty, compensate for wage losses they
may suffer from greater immigration, and provide a stronger incentive
for them to stay in the workforce.
Addressing real harms to vulnerable workers is a far better course than
either turning our backs - or shutting America's doors.
/Gene Sperling is a former National Economic Advisor, Senior Fellow at
the Center for American Progress, and author of "The Pro-Growth
Progressive" (2005)./
http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/17/magazines/fortune/immigration_fortune_050106/
*Related*
NYT 041606*: Cost of illegal immigration may be less than meets the eye*
Even economists striving hardest to find evidence of immigration's
effect on domestic workers are finding that, at most, the surge of
illegal immigrants probably had only a small impact on wages of the
least-educated Americans — an effect that was likely swamped by all the
other things that hit the economy, from the revolution in technology to
the erosion of the minimum wage's buying power.
When Mr. *Borjas* and Mr. *Katz* assumed that businesses reacted to the
extra workers with a corresponding increase in investment — as has
happened in Nebraska — their estimate of the decline in wages of high
school dropouts attributed to illegal immigrants was shaved to 4.8 %.
And they have since downgraded that number, acknowledging that the
original analysis used some statistically flimsy data.
Assuming a jump in capital investment, they found that the surge in
illegal immigration reduced the wages of high school dropouts by just
3.6 %. Across the entire labor force, the effect of illegal immigrants
was zero, because the presence of uneducated immigrants actually
increased the earnings of more educated workers, including high school
graduates. For instance, higher-skilled workers could hire foreigners at
low wages to mow their lawns and care for their children, freeing time
for these workers to earn more. And businesses that exist because of the
availability of cheap labor might also need to employ managers.
Mr. Borjas said that while the numbers were not large, the impact at the
bottom end of the skill range was significant. "It is not a big deal for
the whole economy, but that hides a big distributional impact," he
said. Others disagree. "If you're a native high school dropout in this
economy, you've got a slew of problems of which immigrant competition is
but one, and a lesser one at that," said Jared *Bernstein* of the
Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
Mr. Katz agreed that the impact was modest, and it might fall further if
changes in trade flows were taken into account — specifically, that
without illegal immigrants, some products now made in the United States
would likely be imported. /"Illegal immigration had a little bit of a
role reinforcing adverse trends for the least advantaged," he said, "but
there are much stronger forces operating over the last 25 years/."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/business/yourmoney/16view.html
ALSO SEE
*Q&A: Illegal workers and the US Economy
*http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5312900**
*Replacing the undocumented workforce*
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1002793&ct=2145825
<http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1002793&ct=2145825>
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Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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