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Immigration
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Title: We Don't Need "Guest Workers"
Source: Washington Post
URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy ... 006/03/21/AR2006032101146.html
Published: Mar 22, 2006
Author: Robert J. Samuelson
Post Date: 2006-03-22 21:50:54 by Peetie Wheatstraw
Keywords: Workers", "Guest, Dont
Views: 546
Comments: 26

Economist Philip Martin of the University of California likes to tell a story about the state's tomato industry. In the early 1960s, growers relied on seasonal Mexican laborers, brought in under the government's "bracero" program. The Mexicans picked the tomatoes that were then processed into ketchup and other products. In 1964 Congress killed the program despite growers' warnings that its abolition would doom their industry. What happened? Well, plant scientists developed oblong tomatoes that could be harvested by machine. Since then, California's tomato output has risen fivefold.

It's a story worth remembering, because we're being warned again that we need huge numbers of "guest workers" -- meaning unskilled laborers from Mexico and Central America -- to relieve U.S. "labor shortages." Indeed, the shortages will supposedly worsen as baby boomers retire. President Bush wants an open-ended program. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) advocate initially admitting 400,000 guest workers annually. The Senate is considering these and other plans.

Gosh, they're all bad ideas.

Guest workers would mainly legalize today's vast inflows of illegal immigrants, with the same consequence: We'd be importing poverty. This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking; many are. Nor is it because they don't assimilate; many do. But they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished. Since 1980 the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government's poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has risen 162 percent. Over the same period, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty rose 3 percent and the number of blacks, 9.5 percent. What we have now -- and would with guest workers -- is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico. By and large, this is a bad bargain for the United States. It stresses local schools, hospitals and housing; it feeds social tensions (witness the Minutemen). To be sure, some Americans get cheap housecleaning or landscaping services. But if more mowed their own lawns or did their own laundry, it wouldn't be a tragedy.

The most lunatic notion is that admitting more poor Latino workers would ease the labor market strains of retiring baby boomers. The two aren't close substitutes for each other. Among immigrant Mexican and Central American workers in 2004, only 7 percent had a college degree and nearly 60 percent lacked a high school diploma, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Among native-born U.S. workers, 32 percent had a college degree and only 6 percent did not have a high school diploma. Far from softening the social problems of an aging society, more poor immigrants might aggravate them by pitting older retirees against younger Hispanics for limited government benefits.

It's a myth that the U.S. economy "needs" more poor immigrants. The illegal immigrants already here represent only about 4.9 percent of the labor force, the Pew Hispanic Center reports. In no major occupation are they a majority. They're 36 percent of insulation workers, 28 percent of drywall installers and 20 percent of cooks. They're drawn here by wage differences, not labor "shortages." In 2004, the median hourly wage in Mexico was $1.86, compared with $9 for Mexicans working in the United States, said Rakesh Kochhar of Pew. With high labor turnover in the jobs they take, most new illegal immigrants can get work by accepting wages slightly below prevailing levels.

Hardly anyone thinks that most illegal immigrants will leave. But what would happen if new illegal immigration stopped and wasn't replaced by guest workers? Well, some employers would raise wages to attract U.S. workers. Facing greater labor costs, some industries would -- like the tomato growers in the 1960s -- find ways to minimize those costs. As to the rest, what's wrong with higher wages for the poorest workers? From 1994 to 2004, the wages of high school dropouts rose only 2.3 percent (after inflation) compared with 11.9 percent for college graduates.

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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 16.

#5. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#0)

But they generally don't go home

Real guests eventually leave.

This isn't because these immigrants aren't hardworking; many are.

Indeed, despite the attendant pathologies, they are a step up from the previous largest minority.

In the Chicago area we've got all kinds. Probably most prominent are the Polish (one of my wife's acquaintances is an illegal polish gal) and Mexicans. Old polish ladies bereft of English seem to do a lot of the commercial cleaning in suburban office spaces.

Neither of those two groups have any illusions about blacks. My wife is slowly learning too -- experience is trumping her "education". Two things recently very much got under her skin. First, she ordered two pieces of furniture, on two different occasions, from a local furniture retailer. Delivery was probably sub-contracted. The first piece was delivered by a Mexican crew; they were efficient, careful, polite, and removed their shoes without prompting. The second piece was delivered by a black crew; they refused her request to remove their shoes. Two weeks ago we moved into our first house. We used a local mover that came highly recommended. The crew that showed up was black. I should've just turned them away. They were quite loud and quarrelsome among themselves; they didn't know how to pack, and left some items after they inefficiently filled the truck, deciding one trip was enough. They gave most of our furniture some free distressing, and padded the time they spent.

Tauzero  posted on  2006-03-22   23:19:02 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#9. To: Tauzero (#5)

Another thing your interesting post made me think of is the Brechtian quip that VDare's Peter Brimelow is fond of quoting about "electing a new people." In the case of mass Hispanic immigration it certainly appears that our plutocratic elites have decided to "elect" a new laboring class by that method. I can remember back 25 years ago seeing a TIME magazine cover that proclaimed Hispanics would "soon be our largest minority"---that didn't happen until some two decades later, so you know that some real advance planning went into that statement. I think that to be candid, blacks simply ceased to be good reliable laborers after the Civil Rights and Welfare Revolutions of the 1960's. There were too many "grievances" they had against the "White Man"; there were too many "rights" they had to assert; there was the ever inviting "safety net" of welfare and ever more feebly combatted crime that provided tempting alternatives to working for a living. Blacks through these factors essentially "priced" themselves out of the labor market, and made the captains of industry turn to a solution they'd used before: mass immigration from impoverished nations, especially Mexico.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-03-22   23:42:11 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#16. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#9)

I think that to be candid, blacks simply ceased to be good reliable laborers after the Civil Rights and Welfare Revolutions of the 1960's.

Yes. The two things combined enabled blacks to revert to phenotype, with more African-like family structure and family provisioning. The reproductive incentives made things much worse, with intelligent blacks, just like whites, failing to reproduce themselves; the worst are the most fecund. (I frequently wonder whether human intelligence is inherently self-limiting. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from psychosis.)

Whites are about 30 years behind blacks in terms of pathology, but they'll probably catch up, assuming the system does not collapse first.

Sowell rightly notes how liberal programs have had precisely opposite the promised results, and that prior to the "civil rights" movement and the "great society" American blacks had much lower rates of crime than today and much higher rates of intact families, though still not quite at the same levels as whites. Absence of welfare and the rigors of Jim Crow ironically provided an illusion of equality.

Tauzero  posted on  2006-03-23   0:15:44 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


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