Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
alypius skinner wrote: I'd like for you or someone to attempt a crude, ball park estimate for me of the net gains from immigration in a specific case. All these examples are odd because you initially ask for "net benefits," but then switch to benefits for the *initial inhabitants and/or their descendants*. But since you asked: How much better off is Yugoslavia today as a result of past immigration than it would have been if it had tightly restricted immigration? There is massive uncertainty, but I'd guess about the same. It's hard to say which wars would have replaced the wars they wound up fighting if their policies were different. I will say that without the Serb nationalism needed to sustain strict immigration controls, the whole area could easily have spent the century as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which case they would all be far richer. But how much better off is the *average* Palestinian--most of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza strip--as a result of Jewish immigration? And since immigration makes their lives so much better, why is there so much unrest? Here's another case where foolish nationalism has prevented the realization of obvious economic benefits. If the Palestinians would just abjectly surrender and accept Israeli rule they would at least be relatively well-paid unskilled laborers. In a generation or two they would be average citizens of a First World nation. A third example: American immigration to the Mexican state of Texas certainly benefited the immigrants; but as a result, half of Mexico was, a generation later, off limits to most Mexican citizens until today. How much did the average member of the receiving party benefit from allowing large scale Anglo immigration to Texas? If Texas remained part of Mexico, it would probably just be another poor area of Mexico, so it's hard to see the loss even for Mexicans. American Texas + Mexican immigration has been far better for Mexicans than a Mexican Texas. If current immigration policies in the United States give the Democrats a permanent lock on the White House beginning in 2008, and eventually a lock on Congress as well, how much better off will the receiving party and their posterity be as a result? In California, would Cruz Bustamante be a frontrunner in the special election for governor in the absence of large scale immigration from Mexico? I agree that Mexican immigration helps the Democrats. But the effect is mild. Blacks are about 30 percentage points more Democratic than you would otherwise expect. Hispanics are only about 15 percentage points more Democratic. I suspect a big part of this gap is not that Hispanics share Democratic ideology so much as Democrats show less hatred towards them. (And unlike practically every other case of alleged "political hatred," hatred of Mexican immigrants is very real). Furthermore, Mexicans they have low turnout in U.S. elections. I've heard claims of extensive voting by illegal immigrants, but I doubt it's more than a few isolated cases. If political effects concern you, illegal immigration is really *better* because they are even less likely to vote. It is also worth pointing out that *non-immigrants'* enthusiasm for the welfare state is probably significantly lower because they think their money will go to foreigners. Even if immigrants all voted for a bigger welfare state, it's quite possible that the net effect is to shrink the welfare state by eroding native support. That's a common explanation for the big European welfare states - due to their cultural homogeneity, they know that any taxes they pay go to help other people like themselves, so they don't mind high taxes so much. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] "But being alone he had begun to conceive thoughts of his own unlike those of his brethren." --J.R.R. Tolkien, *The Silmarillion*
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
alypius skinner writes: > > Another example is Palestine. Now I know the natives of Palestine had no > control over immigration policies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; > that was a British decision. But how much better off is the *average* > Palestinian--most of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza strip--as a result > of Jewish immigration? And since immigration makes their lives so much > better, why is there so much unrest? > In the case of Palestine, you have to consider the fact that most of the current Palestinian (Arabs) are, like the (Israeli) Jews, descendents of relatively recent immigrants, from the 1870s onward, but mostly between WWI and WWII. Starting in the 1870s, around the same time the Jews started immigrating from Europe, Arabs started immigrating from what is now Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc. After WWI, immigration from French-mandate areas (Syria, Iraq) skyrocketed. Also British Palestine included what is now Jordan, and there was free movement back and forth between what is now Jordan and what is now Israel/West Bank since there was no border until 1922 or 1923. (After 1923 Jews were not permitted east of the Jordan river, but there was no restriction on non-Jewish movement across that border.) Basically, in the 1870s, what is now Israel/Palestine/Jordan very sparsely populated, and the unrest is between two distinct groups of immigrants (and their descendants) who vastly outnumber (and are both intermingled with) descendants of the pre-1870 population. --Robert Book
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
> > Of course, if the losses from immigration restrictions are greater than > you might think, the gains of weaker restrictions are also greater than > you would think. When you double the number of immigrants, you will be > admitting a lot of people with a lot of surplus, not just marginal > immigrants. > I'd like for you or someone to attempt a crude, ball park estimate for me of the net gains from immigration in a specific case. Less than 100 years ago, Kosovo was a mostly Serbian region of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Then high levels of legal and illegal immigration from neighboring Albania made it a mostly Albanian region. How much better off is Yugoslavia today as a result of past immigration than it would have been if it had tightly restricted immigration? How much better off are the few remaining Serbs who have not been driven out of Kosovo or killed than they would have been if foreign immigration had been tightly restricted for the last 100 years? (Of course, one can always argue that the immigrants benefited, but how did the "receiving party" benefit? How was it in their best interest to "open the doors?") Another example is Palestine. Now I know the natives of Palestine had no control over immigration policies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; that was a British decision. But how much better off is the *average* Palestinian--most of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza strip--as a result of Jewish immigration? And since immigration makes their lives so much better, why is there so much unrest? A third example: American immigration to the Mexican state of Texas certainly benefited the immigrants; but as a result, half of Mexico was, a generation later, off limits to most Mexican citizens until today. How much did the average member of the receiving party benefit from allowing large scale Anglo immigration to Texas? If current immigration policies in the United States give the Democrats a permanent lock on the White House beginning in 2008, and eventually a lock on Congress as well, how much better off will the receiving party and their posterity be as a result? In California, would Cruz Bustamante be a frontrunner in the special election for governor in the absence of large scale immigration from Mexico? ~Alypius
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
Bryan Caplan wrote: Here's a better way of framing my previous point. If we measure the deadweight loss of immigration restrictions using a deadweight loss triangle, we are implicitly assuming that immigration restrictions are like a tax. But they are more analogous to a price control. The standard deadweight loss triangle shows a *minimum* estimate of the harm of, say, rent control. But without free prices, it is possible and indeed likely that many people who do not get an apartment were high-value users, *not* marginal ones. Similarly, with immigration restrictions, many people with a lot of surplus are excluded, and marginal immigrants may be let in instead. A Beckerian auction system would solve this problem, but under the current rationing scheme the losses of immigration restrictions are probably many times greater than the simple deadweight cost triangle. Of course, if the losses from immigration restrictions are greater than you might think, the gains of weaker restrictions are also greater than you would think. When you double the number of immigrants, you will be admitting a lot of people with a lot of surplus, not just marginal immigrants. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
--- Bryan Caplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > All it claims is that immigrants reduce wages. > But this is by definition balanced by the extra surplus enjoyed by > employers. If the surplus is general to the economy, then is it not the case that in industries with competitive markets for labor and capital goods, and with substantial competition in the goods markets, providers of labor and capital goods earn their marginal products and firms have zero economic profits, so the surplus goes to land rent? If so then it is not employers qua firms who get the surplus, but the landowners. Firms which rent their premises would get no surplus from being employers. Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
>I know some immigrants send some of their money to relatives in their >previous countries, but they can't send all of it; most must be spent >in the host country. And even if they send the money out of the county, it eventually leads to a greater demand for exports. >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/03/03 01:35PM >>> > alypius skinner wrote: > > > This article argues for "net drain." > Bryan Caplan wrote: > Actually, it doesn't. All it claims is that immigrants reduce wages. > But this is by definition balanced by the extra surplus enjoyed by > employers. Do any of these studies take into account the effect of immigrants on demand? It would see these people have to eat. I know some immigrants send some of their money to relatives in their previous countries, but they can't send all of it; most must be spent in the host country. This would drive up demand for products, and therefore the wages for labor used to make those products, at least partly offsetting the downward pressure on wages from increased labor supply. --Robert
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
> alypius skinner wrote: > > > This article argues for "net drain." > Bryan Caplan wrote: > Actually, it doesn't. All it claims is that immigrants reduce wages. > But this is by definition balanced by the extra surplus enjoyed by > employers. Do any of these studies take into account the effect of immigrants on demand? It would see these people have to eat. I know some immigrants send some of their money to relatives in their previous countries, but they can't send all of it; most must be spent in the host country. This would drive up demand for products, and therefore the wages for labor used to make those products, at least partly offsetting the downward pressure on wages from increased labor supply. --Robert
Re: immigration: net gain or net drain?
alypius skinner wrote: This article argues for "net drain." Actually, it doesn't. All it claims is that immigrants reduce wages. But this is by definition balanced by the extra surplus enjoyed by employers. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
immigration: net gain or net drain?
This article argues for "net drain." ~Alypius Skinner http://vdare.com/sailer/unhappy_labor.htm August 31, 2003 Unhappy Labor (Investor/Taxpayer) Day? By Steve Sailer For our fellow Americans who actually are laborers, it's no longer such a happy day-or year, or career for that matter-because the Immigration Tax falls most severely on their wages. I'm not the most sophisticated political philosopher (as last week's column no doubt showed). But somehow I don't think any philosophy could justify sticking your fellow citizens at the bottom of the ladder with the biggest bill. UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center, of all places, recently attempted to estimate how much heavy immigration costs American workingmen. (Click here to download their 184k PDF file). Sociologist Lisa Catanzarite looked at many different occupations across 38 major metropolitan areas. She found that the higher the percentage of "recent immigrant Latino men" [RILM] in each local job, the lower the wages paid to citizens and established immigrants. She writes: "The pay penalty in occupation-MAs [Metropolitan Areas] with 25% RILM [recent immigrant Latino men] amounts to $2,369 per year; at 15% RILM, the penalty is $1,421, and at 5% RILM, $474. These are substantial wage discounts, given that annual earnings average $21,590. In other words, in occupations with 25% RILM, workers earn only 89% as much as workers in comparable fields without RILM." In other words: all else being equal, if the makeup of your occupation's local labor pool changes from 0% new immigrant to 25%, your income shrinks 11%. Of course, it could drop even further-because percentages of RILMs are often much higher than 25%. Catanzarite notes: ". many metropolitan areas. have witnessed the emergence of "brown-collar" occupations. That is, occupations where immigrant Latinos are over-represented, largely in low-level service, construction, agriculture, and manufacturing jobs, including waiters' assistants, gardeners and groundskeepers, cooks, farm workers, and painters, in MAs such as Anaheim-Santa Ana, Chicago, Fresno, Jersey City, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Diego. Immigrant Latinos constitute as much as 40-71% of workers in many of these fields." That mass unskilled immigration drives down the wages of the unskilled will not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever heard of the Law of Supply and Demand. But apparently doesn't include Dr. Catanzarite. She blames instead "the devaluation of work performed by low-status groups." I mentioned Catanzarite's explanation to my wife. She replied: "That's just childish thinking. Grasping the concept of supply and demand is part of growing up." Still, Dr. Catanzarite is a sociologist at a Chicano Studies program, so you shouldn't expect too much. I feel more inclined to congratulate her on the half-full glass-ness of her analysis. In contrast, I'm much less forgiving of the staffers of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, who routinely assure us, in violation of everything taught on the first day of Econ 101, that immigrants take jobs that Americans just won't do-no matter how much we're paid. Of course, investors less blinded by ideology than the WSJ Edit Pagers have to worry about immigration, too-especially if they hold state government bonds. Standard & Poor's downgraded California's bonds to BBB on July 26, only two levels above junk. And immigrant-magnet New York has the second worst credit rating. In fact, an interesting new study has found that the proportion of foreign born in a state's population in the 1990 Census correlates quite strongly with how badly a state's long-term bonds are rated in 2003. It's not hard to understand why importing cheap labor eventually produces a budget mess like California's. Initially, high wages attract young foreign men. They bring strong backs and are too scared of the government to demand much in services. But they drive up the percentage of the economy that's kept off the books and untaxed. As these young men get settled, they send for their women. Their big families begin flooding the public schools, emergency rooms, and prisons. Then the young men turn into middle-aged men whose backs aren't so strong anymore. So they start going on worker's comp and disability. Due to the "rotten borough" problem - the paradox that voters in immigrant districts have more impact than voters in the rest of the state, because non-citizens are counted for apportionment purposes - the immigrants who are eligible to vote (or who vote fraudulently) elect a disproportionate number of legislators. Thus California's Hispanic Democrats cast only 8% of the votes in 2002, but elected 20% of the legislators. Almost all of these legislators are liberal Democrats. They do what liberal Democrats do: vote for more spending. So current mass immigration means not just an unhappy Labor Day, but an unhappy investor/taxpayer fiscal year. However, mass immigration apparently still makes
