Immigration can speed economic recovery
– Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. –
It’s welcome news that President Obama will turn his attention to immigration reform this year, as was announced on Wednesday by Deputy Assistant to the President Cecilia Muñoz. Economic recovery will happen more quickly if both high- and low-skill immigrants are permitted to enter the United States and work legally.
Two years ago, when Congress was considering comprehensive immigration reform, both President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Congressional Budget Office, headed by Peter Orszag, an economist closely identified with the Democratic Party, estimated that the benefits of additional immigrants outweighed the costs. If Congress allowed more immigration, then American taxpayers would come out ahead financially.
Yet, after Congress refused to pass President Bush’s plan to allow most undocumented workers to receive work visas and wait in line for citizenship, the Bush administration’s immigration policy deteriorated into a series of arbitrary raids on different companies, rounding up undocumented workers and deporting them, in many cases separating husbands and wives, parents and children.
We can do better. Although the unemployment rate reached 8.5 percent last month, the jobs are going to come back, and, as has been the case in the past, native-born Americans will want jobs that are different from those of immigrants, according to economics professor Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Davis.
Congress needs to overhaul immigration law and create an expanded temporary worker program with a path to citizenship, along with more verification to prevent workers from working illegally, and monitoring of tourists and students so that they do not overstay their visas.
Does it really matter whether the wall against the much much less affluent is built territorially? The pressure to reduce our standard of living, what a vaguely defined idea – is still there. This country doesn’t live on another planet. If the presure doesn’t come from within -it will come from without. Won’t it!
IT doesnt matter what side of the political spectrum describes the problem, the medical bills seem to doom any fix. I haven’t been able to afford it in years and at $1500/year and climbing I never will again. I called it quits when it passed $1500/year over 15 years ago.
I know people who hate illegal immagrants because they are themselves less productive, due to old age and ill health, and appreciate that they are in fact less valuable to the country than the able bodied and fully productive that are replacing them. They know they are not needed, are a burden on the system and were paid more their whole life than those who are replacing them. They may very well be costing the system more now than they were paid. Rather like decommsiioned old nuke plants, they cost more to dispose of then they actually were avble to produce during their working lives.
That’s where all the hatred is coming from and it do well for most of us to be more polite about the writer – she is only pointing out the situation. But it is obvious that she is proposing to write off a lot of the marginal citizen population in favor of fance jumpers and basically more ruthless but also brave and/or desperate, fresher, hungrier and more capable, illegal immagrants.
It’s such a stinking, raw and obvious statement about the tenuous grasp so many of us have on the homeland. I credit her with being somehwat “compassionate” but in a way that could well be strained to the point of raw violence as this situtauion is when seen in other countries of the world.
I think her point of view will win but the man who described the true bottom line – many of the new legals – if they ever become so, will quickly go either to the first class and the rest will still stay in steerage with a lot of native borns. Considering that productive labor in this country, both legal and illegal, is still surrounded by billions of much lower paid people whether they ever neter this country, will still pull the cost of living down and the age is driving the cost of actually being productive (profitable to the system) doesn’t look like it will ever be fixed.
The economist doesn’t mention the percentage of new immagrants destined for the upper decks and how many go down with the ballast? Rich people don’t keep many servatnst any more. They have been too expensive for almost a century.
My immigrant grandparents didn’t have health insurance. The system prospered because in many ways they were largely exploitable livestock with working brains.