The Migration Package Deal
Kerry Howley | December 27, 2007, 12:20pm
Megan McArdle is still against a guest worker program:
What will we do with pregnant guest workers? For three to six months, at least, they won't be working. They'll need health care; who will provide it? Will we force companies to provide their guest workers health care, which will make them uneconomical compared to other low-skilled labor, or will the taxpayer foot the bill? Do we ship them home? Do we rewrite our constitution to exclude their babies from citizenship.
That's one troubling question. Here's another: do we let the guest workers date and marry American citizens, as they will? Because if we do, we'll find a lot of our guests have become permanent members of the household.
These are hard questions, so I'm going to avoid them. Economist Lant Pritchett answers them better than I can in an interview in the February issue of reason, but he also recognizes that the details of any such plan don’t matter nearly as much as most of us think they do.
Here's why: Citizenships are club memberships you happen to be born with. Some clubs, like the Norway club, have truly awesome benefits. Others, like the Malawi club, offer next to none. Membership in each club is kept limited by club members, who understandably worry about the drain on resources that new members might represent. Wishing the U.S. would extend more memberships in 2008 isn’t going to get you very far.
Conceptually, for whatever reason, most of us are in a place where we think labor market access and citizenships ought to be bundled. A Malawian can’t come work here, we think, without the promise of a club membership, which is nearly impossible to get. This is an incredibly damaging assumption for two reasons: (1) memberships are essentially fixed in wealthy democratic societies (2) uneven labor market access is a major cause of global inequality. Decoupling the two leads to massive gains, as we see in Singapore, without the need to up memberships.
Here’s another way to think about it: Clubs have positive duties toward their members, including those of the welfare state. But the negative duty not to harm outsiders exists prior to clubs, and denying people the ability to cooperate with one another violates their rights in a very basic way. Our current policy is one of coercively preventing cooperation. In saying “we can’t let people into this country unless we confer upon them all the rights and duties of citizenship,” you are saying that we need to violate their right to move freely and cooperate unless we can give them welfare benefits. But that’s backwards.
This is why humanitarian economists can be enthusiastic about even a tiny guest worker program; the bundling of labor market access and citizenship is an obvious obstacle to global prosperity. Establishing the two as distinct matters.
So will we send home pregnant guest workers? I hope not, but maybe. Will we force companies to provide health insurance for young, healthy people who come here wanting to work? Probably. Will we allow guest workers to marry Americans? I don’t see why not. But none of these concerns comes close to justifying a system that locks people into poverty and out of our labor markets based on conditions of birth.
John | December 27, 2007, 3:08pm | #
Timothy,
First person to call the other one racist is generally the loser of the argument. Too bad you are not smart enough to argue on your own terms and have to resort to name calling. Keep working at it though, maybe someday you will get better and be a little smarter than you are today.
Quality of life has nothing to do with the color of the people but the number of people. I don't want to live in a country of a billion or 500 million. There are too many people here now. If you had open borders, that is what we would have.
Further, if all things were equal and the US had the same welfare state as Mexico, which is to say no welfare state, then open borders would be ideal. But that is not the case and the welfare state is not going away.
As far as economically, this country should have immigration, but it needs the right kind of immigration. It is a myth that the US has always been a dumping ground for unskilled labor. The waves of immigrants who came here in the 19th century were highly skilled for their time. They were tradesman and farmers who filled a need. We need immigration of the world's best and brightest, not the worlds uneducated and desperate. The influx of unskilled labor is a net looser for everyone but the unskilled.
" Low Levels of Education Create Deficit. The findings of this study show that the primary reason illegal households create a fiscal deficit at the federal level is that their much lower levels of education result in low incomes and tax payments that are only 28 percent that of other households. Thus, even though the costs they impose are estimated to be only 46 percent those of other households on average, there remains a significant net deficit. Whether one considers their use of services low is a matter of perspective. Because illegals are not even supposed to be in the country, many Americans are angered by the fact that they receive any services at all. This is especially true of transfers to households like food stamps or cash payments from the Child Tax Credit. Although many Americans are upset about their use of public services, there is little evidence that illegals come to America to take advantage of public benefits. Most illegal aliens come for jobs, and the vast majority are in fact employed. But low levels of education mean they unavoidably create large costs for taxpayers. "
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalconclusion.html
We have every right as a country to determine who moves here. If the Pakistani PHD engineer wants to come here, I say come on in. 100 million low skilled workers who can barely make minimum wage, no thank you. Further, the influx of cheap labor makes labor cheaper in relation to capital. This lowers productivity and overall wealth. More expensive labor means more investment in capital and higher productivity and higher wages and standard of living.
John | December 27, 2007, 3:40pm | #
"John,
Your history is so unreal, I don't even know where to begin in correcting you. How 'bout we start with JamesTown in 1607 and work our way forward?"
Let's start with that dumbass. Jamestown was a corporation that sent urban people to a wilderness. They had lots of skills but not the right ones. I defy you to show me one source that describes the colonists at Jamestown as unskilled. That is just not true. Try again.
"On October 1, 1608, a company of settlers arrived aboard the English vessel Mary and Margaret with the Second Supply. The journey took roughly three months. The company recruited these as skilled craftsmen and industry specialists: soap-ash, glass, lumber milling (wainscot, clapboard, and ‘deal’ – planks, especially soft wood planks) and naval stores (pitch, turpentine, and tar). Among these additional settlers were eight "Dutch-men" ( consisted of unnamed craftsmen and three who were probably the wood-mill-men--Adam, Franz and Samuel) "Dutch-men" probably meaning German or German-speakers), and Polish craftsmen, who had been hired by the Virginia Company of London's leaders to help develop manufacture profitable export products. There has been debate about the nationality of the specific craftsmen, and both the Germans and Poles claim the glassmaker for one of their own, but the evidence is insufficient.[6] Ethnicity is further complicated by the fact that the German minority in Royal Prussia lived under Polish control during this period.
William Volday/Wilhelm Waldi, a Swiss German mineral prospector, was also among those who arrived in 1608. His mission was seeking a silver reservoir that was believed to be within the proximity of Jamestown.[7] Some of the settlers were artisans who built a glass furnace which became the first factory in America. Additional craftsmen produced soap, pitch, and wood building supplies. Among all of these were the first made-in-America products to be exported to Europe.[8] However, despite all these efforts, profits from exports were not sufficient to meet the expenses and expectations of the investors back in England, and no silver or gold had been discovered, as earlier hoped."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown,_Virginia
