An AnonymousCoward at Kuro5hin.org writes about "Bush's Political Suicide" and the immigration policy.#

Clearly, the fiasco in California was not confined to legal hispanic voters. Other minorities, specifically African Americans, saw the growing acceptance of illegal immigrations as unfair competition for the low skill, low wage jobs: as many illegal immigrants will work for less than minimum wage, it becomes increasingly difficult for unskilled labor to find jobs that actually pay minimum wage. Furthermore, the supply glut caused by the 4,000,000 illegal workers in the state has driven down wages to a point where even moderately skilled jobs can be filled at minimum wage, causing a decrease in the average pay scale, which manifests itself in a rise in the poverty rate and an increase in unemployment and welfare as inner city workers realize that they can make nearly as much money by accessing social programs as they can competing with the illegal labor.

Returning to the national level, it becomes clear that Bush's planned legalization of illegal labor will alienate significant numbers of voters: not only will traditional hispanic voters not be fooled, but traditional conservatives will be insulted, and - again, using California as a bellwether - non-hispanic minorities will likely feel slighted at the pandering to the specific minority group.

Richard Tallent writes about immigration.#

Cheap labor from non-citizens = bad. Immigration to grow citizenry = good. Personally, I am in favor of open immigration to citizens of most countries, as long as (a) they have no serious criminal record and (b) they aren't on a "terror" watch-list. The only numeric limit should be based on INS's ability to process the paperwork properly and handle the citizenship classes. I would then fast-track anyone who is fluent in English and who has a university degree.

Why am I for this and against off-shoring? Simple: a new citizen on our soil produces a net benefit in the economy. Yes, they "take" a job, but they create jobs (through consumption) and they pay taxes. Offshore contractors, OTOH, take jobs without contributing back to our economy. Only those who then sell that produced work stand to gain. Even they only make money in the short-term: as local jobs go away, consumption goes down and the tax burden shifts toward them.

Kim writes about Bush's immigration proposal.#

Now I have nothing against immigrants -- in fact, I'd like to see completely open borders (no citizenship), so that labor could have the same freedom of movement that capital currently enjoys. However this is not the time to be increasing the size of the labor pool. I'd rather see this proposed policy change introduced along with an increase in the minimum wage, or some other pro-labor policy to balance out the effect. But if Bush were to consider the effects of his policies on the working class, he wouldn't be Bush anymore, would he?

But... But... Minimum wage creates unemployment too!

Philip Greenspun writes about how to know that the US will be okay.#

The U.S. has the world's brightest academics, many of them who are themselves immigrants, in its universities. This lures the brightest young people here to Stanford, Harvard, University of California, Caltech, et al. Once they've spent 6 years in the U.S. getting a PhD they find that the U.S. offers the best opportunities for building a company or a group within a university and they stay, thus luring the next generation. Susumu Tonegawa is a good example of the process. Born and educated in Japan, one of the world's most sophisticated nations, he nonetheless chose to come to the U.S. for a postdoc. He eventually ended up as a professor of biology at MIT and won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1987. Tonegawa remains at MIT and any young Japanese biologist who wants to learn from him must come to the U.S. A country that has collected all of the world's smartest people should always be able to do something new, interesting, and profitable.

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A sadder way to look at the issue is one that I've brought up before in this blog. We don't bother fixing inner-city neighborhoods and schools or trying to integrate the poorest Americans into our economy because it is cheaper to bring in immigrants who already have a good education and work ethic.