Comments for The Post's New Facts on the Economic Impact of Immigrants at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 11 out of 11 comments http://www.cepr.net Sat, 25 May 2013 05:29:34 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-454 When I came to DC metro area in the 60's construction workers were white and black. Now they are all Hispanic except for the top bosses. Unemployment in blacks approaches 50% and there are very few working-class white males except truckers, electricians, plumbers, and HVAC. Other working class whites have left the metro area for W. Virginia and other "country" areas. The country and bluegrass music live performance culture of DC has disappeared. - Robert Hume Wed, 05 May 2010 08:58:39 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-439 The right wing corporatocracy has been propagandizing its way to cheap labor as long as I can remember, and I remember back to the '50s and '60s. I lived in Oklahoma back then, and I remember when the Right to Work bandwagon came to the state. My father was a union worker, and there were many discussion in my house about how this law, if passed, would eventually destroy the unions. After the law finally passed, I asked my father how people could vote for something that was so obviously detrimental to their own well-being. He told me that the voters had been made to believe two things: that requiring someone to join a union to get a job was manifestly unfair and that employers would look out for the best interests of their workers without a union. In other words, that voters had believed the lies that people with money had told them. Some things never change. - Queen of Sheba Tue, 04 May 2010 16:56:06 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-423 "According to the Post, Americans are too lazy to meatpack" In 1985 there was a bitter strike in Austin Minnesota. The strikers had been working there forever, and they wanted to continue, but they wanted union wages. Hormel wanted to hire cheap non-union immigrant labor. The strike was broken and this was a milestone in Reaganite labor relations. - John Emerson Mon, 03 May 2010 13:41:11 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-422 I don't see how the combination of jobs going overseas to get cheap labor, and cheap labor immigrating to the US, could possibly NOT have a negative effect on American labor (especially but not only unskilled and semiskilled labor). In some of the things I've read, there were two underlying messages: a.) not very many people will be hurt (not quantified more precisely than that) and b.) The ones who will be hurt aren't really worth much anyway. - John Emerson Mon, 03 May 2010 13:36:06 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-419 There seems to be an ongoing myth that immigrants take only low income jobs from 'Americans'. I am US born, 3rd generation and very often in job interviews, I have encountered Indian/Arab men that now appear to be dominating the US Information Systems market. At a recent job fair at a large corporation, 50% of the IT department representatives were foreigners of Arab and Indian decent. Most of them did not speak English well enough to be understood. The other 50% were asian, african american and white. 3% of that group were women. I have reduced my salary by 50% (and more) and often had to waitress rather than working in a profession that I had worked in for 15-20 years. Everyone I know, at all levels of employment except the very top is effected by the large influx of immigrants - and in the economic sense, every impact is negative. - Jeanne Mon, 03 May 2010 10:23:25 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-407 If you can't condense research in a straightforward manner, then you probably don't understand it yourself. Using the word 'robust' a lot does not prove anything. - purple Mon, 03 May 2010 02:07:55 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-406 According to the Post, Americans are too lazy to meatpack and too dumb to learn computer programming (H1B). The Arizona law has a 50 % approval rate nationally, despite condemnation from the entire mainstream political class. It's a horrid law, but it does reveal a vast disconnect between the desires of big business and what has happened to wages in the US over the last 30 years. - purple Mon, 03 May 2010 02:04:33 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-405 "Combining these effects, an increase in employment in a US state of 1% due to immigrants, produced an increase in income per worker of 0.5% in that state." How was that 0.5% increase in income per worker distributed across the class spectrum? How did heavy immigration to the border states affect the economies of states farther away? Do you really believe that the pay scale for non-union immigrant carpenters (to use Dean's example) is as high as that for union carpenters? Can you not see that our lax immigration laws are one tool the wealthy elite have employed to destroy the bargaining power of labor, the upshot of which is to leave the workforce disorganized, at odds with itself, insecure, ignorant of its rights and desperate? And finally, your equation contains no factor for worker satisfaction or contentment with life. - diesel Sun, 02 May 2010 18:58:00 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-404 This post is one of the few times I've seen any professional economist mention union meatpacking jobs & immigration. In the 1960s & 70s, a good friend's father drove 40 miles each way to work at a John Morrell meatpacking plant. He was paid $22-28 per hour at the time, a wage similar to that paid to union autoworkers. Now, meatpacking jobs pay $6 or $7 per hour. The jobs are dangerous & somewhat disgusting. No one except illegal immigrants will do the work for that pay - see, e.g., the recent debacle in Postville Iowa. People in Mexico were just as poor [or poorer] in the 1960s & 70s as they are today, yet illegal immigration was not a major problem. What changed? The destruction of the unions, which changed well-paying jobs to minimum wage jobs, created a demand for illegal immigrants. People responded to the demand. In the mean time, big business has been laughing its way to the bank. - Michael Radosevich Sun, 02 May 2010 17:56:44 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-399 It's ironic that Krugman and Baker along with the racist Right solely cite Borjas who has aligned himself with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which is a hate group: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2009/spring/behind-the-mask/fudging-facts-a-look- - Anthony Sun, 02 May 2010 11:28:12 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/the-posts-new-facts-on-the-economic-impact-of-immigrants/#comment-398 Using the large variation in the inflow of immigrants across US states we analyze the impact of immigration on state employment, average hours worked, physical capital accumulation and, most importantly, total factor productivity and its skill bias. We use the location of a state relative to the Mexican border and to the main ports of entry, as well as the existence of communities of immigrants before 1960, as instruments. We find no evidence that immigrants crowded-out employment and hours worked by natives. At the same time we find robust evidence that they increased total factor productivity, on the one hand, while they decreased capital intensity and the skill-bias of production technologies, on the other. These results are robust to controlling for several other determinants of productivity that may vary with geography such as R&D spending, computer adoption, international competition in the form of exports and sector composition. Our results suggest that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP and, at the same time, promoted the adoption of unskilled-biased technology as the theory of directed technologial change would predict. Combining these effects, an increase in employment in a US state of 1% due to immigrants produced an increase in income per worker of 0.5% in that state. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15507 - Anthony Sun, 02 May 2010 11:12:09 +0100