Things haven't been divisive enough here recently, so let's talk about immigration.
The New York Times Magazine has a must-read article out today: must-read despite the fact that I'm not sure what to do with it. But I do feel better informed for having read it. It deals with the dispute among economists, primarily the conservative Cuban emigre George Borjas and the liberal Canadian emigre David Card, regarding the effects of immigration (particularly unskilled labor from Mexico) on the U.S. economy generally and in specific sectors. If everyone reads it, our next discussion about immigration here will be much smarter. Follow me over the border for more.
I don't want to (and perhaps cannot adequately) recap all of the back-and-forth in the article, except to say that it's a particularly good indication of how smart social scientists debate critical and hard-to-approach issues.
Borjas's basic idea (a little ironic for a conservative, but I'm all for a little irony) is that immigration helps the upper and middle classes (who pay less for services and products) but hurts the lower classes who must compete with immigrants for jobs. Card responds with an argument that is new to me, at least: U.S. jobs take the form they do largely because they can rely on cheap immigrant labor. We cannot assume that if immigrants were gone, the jobs would go to other poor Americans; rather, they might be automated more than they are (as capital expenditures became more cost-effective given a higher cost of labor) or the jobs might be exported. If so, the net effect of immigration on jobs for the poor -- who wash the dishes and lube the cars of immigrants as well as everyone else -- is a positive one.
Immigration is an issue that creates a lot more heat than light in discussions within the Left. While this article leaves no doubt as to how contentious it is, it also provides some good factual bases for those arguments that I hope we'll adopt in the future. It's worth a bookmark.
Your thoughts, as always, welcome -- but do consider reading the article first.
