Letters

From the July 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Thus, the rotten core of the open- borders ideology--the implicit belief that workers are simply objects to be used, to be factored into an economic equation. Those working for immigration reform actually show immigrants more respect by acknowledging their humanity and taking into account their ongoing impact on the societies they seek to join.

Mark Krikorian

Executive Director

Center for Immigration Studies

Washington, D.C.

Glenn Garvin puts a functional face on absorbing legal and illegal immigrants. The dirty, poorly paid, and sometimes dangerous jobs that immigrants take are but stepping stones to bright futures, writes Mr. Garvin, including entrepreneurship and graduation from Ivy League colleges as early as the second generation. Work disdained by native Americans turns out to be a gift of (and for) capitalism as desperate Latinos, Asians, Caribbeans, and others penetrate our inner cities. Libertarians come into fortuitous agreement with liberals in rejecting the xenophobia of California's Proposition 187. Let's hear it for porous borders!

Not many potential sweatshops turn out like the happy mix at Kingston in Fountain Valley as described by Mr. Garvin and feted by Fortune and Inc. Take the latest revelation in Los Angeles, where workers paid even less than the minimum wage (and some who had not been paid at all) were caught turning out designer jeans that were sold in mainline America for $65 a pair. Did these workers quit their jobs and go on to college? And what of the migrant field workers who pick our crops? Despite the efforts of the farm workers union to promote their welfare and elevate the job above one to be left to illegals, are conditions that much better than yesterday? Do the children of farm workers attend school full time and are they as free as anyone else to make their way in the world? Not if they are needed in the field.

Mr. Garvin needs to tell us why market forces that (anecdotally) provide miraculous opportunities and successes in the second and third generations require such misery in the first. Personally, I would rather pay an extra 50 cents a head for lettuce than continue to benefit from the lowest wage the migrant labor pool will bear. The question for Garvin and for REASON is how the "free market" of owners and consumers can be brought to reward the paying of a living wage and the "affordability" of healthy and safe working conditions.

Denton Porter

Long Beach, CA

Glenn Garvin replies: To say I'm perplexed by some of these responses doesn't go nearly far enough. I have read and re-read my story several times, and cannot for the life of me figure out where Richard T. Dumont got the idea that I was trying to pass myself off as a spokesman for the Urban Institute. Let me just state it clearly: I am not a spokesman, ostensible or otherwise, for the Urban Institute. Though I'd be happy to consider the job, if the price is right.

To further my confusion, I cannot tell whether Yeh Ling-Ling is attempting a deception, or simply got bored with George Borjas's most recent study of immigration. It is certainly true that Professor Borjas identified $114 billion in U.S. economic losses due to immigration. But then he proceeded to identify $120 billion in gains, leaving the balance sheet $6 billion in the black. (As to my article's alleged "greatest misrepresentation," I refer Mr. Dumont to the following two letter writers' calls for an immediate moratorium on all immigration.)

I admire the brass of Mark W. Nowak, who is willing to misrepresent my story in the very magazine in which it appeared. Alas, my regard does not extend to his economic sources. The Donald Huddle study to which he refers has been thoroughly refuted and even economists who share his opinion of immigration hang their heads when it is mentioned. Professor Huddle sent students to Houston construction sites to count the number of illegal aliens at work; he then simply assumed that each had displaced a native-born worker. From there it was an easy step to projecting the numbers onto the rest of the United States and came up with a million lost jobs in the construction industry alone.

And finally there's Mark Krikorian, who grieves that immigrants will work under harsh conditions for low wages here. His solution is to let them stay in the Third World and buy the products they make there under conditions that are assuredly far worse than those in the United States. In other words, low wages and harsh conditions are perfectly OK as long as they remain decorously out of sight. (That seems to be Denton Porter's point of view, too.)

I have no idea what Mr. Krikorian is talking about when he contrasts "economic growth" and "economic development." But I do know that the rest of his assertions--that immigration accentuates the gap between rich and poor, and takes jobs from unskilled Americans--are by no means "undisputed." Julian Simon, to name just one of many economists, has argued that immigration does not skew incomes; and in my original story I covered David Card's study that showed that even mass, abrupt immigration has little impact on jobs or incomes.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.17.10 @ 12:40AM|#

chjy

سهمي|12.11.10 @ 4:47PM|#

asfasg

قبلة الوداع|8.12.11 @ 11:33PM|#

thank u

منتديات العراق|8.16.11 @ 4:21AM|#

thank you

http://www.iraqn.com/
http://www.v9f.net/chat