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Arthur, I would
argue that the pressures are already there – Ricardo’s Iron Laws for
example. Which is why we have welfare for the working poor. Harry ********************************* 818
352-4141 ********************************* From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Cordell, Arthur: ECOM Illegal workers contribute to the
pressures on the underclass. 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 From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/business/yourmoney/16view.html ALSO SEE Q&A: Illegal workers and the Replacing the undocumented workforce http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1002793&ct=2145825 |
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