Content In Reality: Obama's Illegal Immigration Policy Will Not Cost Jobs

David Frum: Obama's Immigration Announcement: Another Loss for the Middle Class

FRUM: "Every serious economic study of immigration has found that the net benefits of present policy are exceedingly small. But that small net is an aggregate of very large effects that cancel each other out. The immigrants get higher wages than they would have earned in their former country. The affluent gain lower prices for in-person services. Lower-skilled native-born Americans face downward wage pressure. In any other policy area, people who consider themselves progressive might be expected to revile a policy whose benefits went to foreigners and the rich, and whose costs were born by the American poor. Immigration policy baffles that expectation."

Actually, FactCheck.org took a look at this a while back and found something quite different:

Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers. (emphasis mine)

And why is this?

"Immigrant workers "create almost as many" jobs as they occupy, "and maybe more," said Madeleine Sumption, policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, which is funded by a range of foundations, corporations and international organizations. "They often create the jobs they work in." In addition, "they buy things, and they make the economy bigger," she told us."(emphasis mine)

It is a common fallacy on the right to neglect the positive pressure on demand that comes from an increase in population. But what about those workers who do see a decrease in wages?

Both Griswold and Shierholz acknowledge that some workers may be harmed by an influx of immigrant labor. Griswold writes that "low-skilled immigrants do exert mild downward pressure on the wages of the lowest-paid American workers," though the overall impact on jobs and the economy is positive. Another economist, George Borjas, an advocate of clamping down on immigration, found that between 1980 and 2000 native-born Americans without a high school education saw their wages decline 7.4 percent because of immigrant labor. (emphasis mine)

The problem is that Obama's plan specifically targets students and military:

To be eligible, an individual must have come to the United States before age 16 and must have continuously lived in the country for at least five years. He or she must be living in the U.S. today and must be 30 or younger. The person must also be in school, have a high school diploma or a GED, or be a member of the military or an honorably discharged veteran.(emphasis mine)

So the kind of people who would normally see downward pressure in wages as a result of integration should be mostly unaffected by this policy.

Some more of Frum's points may be a bit misguided as well:

FRUM: "to put amnesty in place before effective enforcement measures are in place—and before authorities are certain that as many illegals as possible have voluntarily repatriated—is to invite another wave of illegal migration just as soon as business conditions improve.

"That may not seem on the verge of happening soon, but it will happen.

"In a time of very high unemployment, it seems simply reckless to invite future waves of migration—and especially of the low-skill, low-wage migration that America has mostly attracted over the past four decades."

"It's hard to imagine that the people who gain residency rights this year will be content to live forever as non-citizens, ineligible for the social services they pay taxes to support. They will want Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps. They will want the vote. And of course in time they will want to regularize the status of their parents and siblings who did not quite benefit from the policy announced today. "If and as the Affordable Care Act becomes the law of the land, they will want the benefit of that law's protections and subsidies as well."
(emphasis mine)

He may have some point with this but it still comes down to speculation. This policy does not grant citizenship and it targets people in school or the military. If it invites illegals who will join our military and help add to our educated population, this may be less of a problem than Frum suggests.

Just remember this is not the only piece of bunk coming from opponents of illegal immigration.

The Roundup

My last post said I would try to post every week. Needless to say, I am not doing so well. I have been sitting on this post for about three weeks now. Two weeks ago, I attended the annual Oklahoma Freethought Convention, which was included 505 attendees in only it's second year! Congratulations to the Oklahoma Atheists and the Atheist Community of Tulsa for doing such a great job! Last week, I was busy submitting a contract for a house. Now I have three weeks of articles to add to The Roundup as a result of my laziness. Brian Dunning I am not. Well anyway, lame excuses aside, here is "this week's" collection of recommended articles.

Content in Reality: Post ObamaCare Ruling Roundup

Content in Reality: What's Wrong with Voter ID Laws?

Content in Reality: GOP Fiasco over Fast and Furious

WP Fact Checker: Reining in the rumor about EPA ‘drones’

"It was a blood-boiler of a story, a menacing tale of government gone too far: The Environmental Protection Agency was spying on Midwestern farmers with the same aerial “drones” used to kill terrorists overseas. This month, the idea has been repeated in TV segments, on multiple blogs and by at least four congressmen. The only trouble is, it isn’t true. It was never true. The EPA isn’t using drone aircraft — in the Midwest or anywhere else." (emphasis mine)

David Frum notes a few embarrassing truths that made this rumor possible:

" 1) A readiness by important sections of the population to believe that they live in some kind of imminent police state. In this, the paranoid conservatives of the Obama era are no different from the paranoid progressives of the Bush years.

2) The aggressive recklessness of Fox News' reporting. A single phone call to the EPA could have debunked the story. Obviously that phone call was never placed.

3) The dangerous reliance of many, many young people on the Daily Show as a source of information.

4) An almost universal lack of interest in the question: even if the story were true, what would be so very shocking about it? If aerial inspection of open fields and waters by manned aircraft is a reasonable search, as defined by the Supreme Court, why isn't unmanned aerial surveillance equally permissible? If clean water enforcement is a legitimate government function, how does it become less legitimate when the inspector sits in a control room rather than in a cockpit?" (emphasis mine)

Examiner: "Now that the job numbers are in, what do they mean?"

"Republican support for policies that cost domestic jobs, their deliberate obstruction of every effort to turn the economy around, their imposition of austerity measures in the states, and even their campaign rhetoric are the cause of the slow rate at which the economy is recovering. There should be no doubt that the economy is poised for a recovery, and being held to a virtual stand-still for the sake of political gain, and the best stimulus would be to so reduce the power of the Republicans that they can do no more harm."

CFR: Canada: Lesson for the United States from an Economic Turnaround

What can we learn from Canada? They followed the Keynesian formula of surpluses in good times, deficits in bad times. They have stronger banking regulation yet lower corporate taxes. Now they are richer than us and have a lower unemployment rate. Of course there are downsides. They don’t have the big name companies the US does. And one of their biggest industries, Alberta oil sands, may not last much longer given the shift towards green energy.

Paul Krugman: Peaks, Troughs, and Crisis

I was alerted to a remarkably stupid attack on me over the subject of Iceland from the Council on Foreign Relations — and I use that term advisedly. The CFR people take me to task for measuring economic performance in Iceland and the Baltics relative to the pre-crisis peak, which they suggest is some kind of scam. Why not measure relative to the post-crisis trough, under which the Baltics look better? Oh, boy. Economists have been studying business cycles for something like 90 years, and done comparisons to previous peaks all that time; apparently these guys don’t know about any of that.

Paul Krugman: Macroeconomics and the Centrist Dodge

"For the fact is that it’s not hard to find open-minded macroeconomists willing to respond to the evidence. These days, they’re called Keynesians and/or saltwater macroeconomists. (Some devotees of Keynes claim that people like me aren’t really Keynesians – and while there are some serious grounds for the charge, part of the reason is precisely that we’ve treated Keynes as an inspiration to be modified in the face of evidence rather than as holy writ)."

SkepticBlog: No hearts are breaking for Heartland

"In Hollywood, they joke that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But in the world of non-profit think tanks and organizations whose main job is PR, bad publicity can kill your reputation in a matter of hours. It’s even worse when it’s self-inflicted, as the idiotic decision about the billboards shows. One serious blunder and no one wants to have their name associated with you, and no corporation wants their name revealed. I’m counting the days now until we hear the news that Heartland is closing its doors and going under. I, for one, will not shed a tear…."

Dr. Dave Goldberg: Stop calling it “The God Particle!”

Just to be clear, discovering the Higgs will be a huge deal. It is the last remaining particle of our Standard Model of physics, and in a lot of ways it's very different than any other particle that we've ever seen. It's the first spin-0 particle, which is fairly significant. There's also the whole "creating mass" thing that it's so famous for. We should give credit where credit is due. But let's not go overboard. I can think of at least three good reasons that referring to the "God Particle" should be a wedgieable offense.

FactCheck to Obama Camp: Your Complaint is All Wet

The Obama complaint claims we erred in saying Mitt Romney gave up active management of Bain Capital in early 1999 to run the 2002 Winter Olympics, insisting we were then wrong in saying Romney was not responsible for shipping U.S. jobs overseas.

In fact, if the Obama campaign were correct, Romney would be guilty of a federal felony by certifying on federal financial disclosure forms that he left active management of Bain Capital in February 1999.

And after reviewing evidence cited by the Obama campaign, we reaffirm our conclusion that Romney left the helm of Bain Capital when he took a leave of absence in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics – as he has said repeatedly — and never returned to active management.

Louisiana Gives Us a Taste of Mitt Romney's Education Policy

"But this has always been the Achille's Heel of the voucher movement: its virulent opposition to holding private schools to the same standards as public schools. In some places this means not requiring students to take standardized tests at all, while in other places — like Louisiana — it means requiring the tests but not using them to evaluate how well schools are doing. In other words, they want taxpayer dollars without being accountable to taxpayers."

"If your going to suggest to me, the day I got elected somehow jobs are going to immediately turn around well, that would be silly. It takes awhile to get things turned around." -- Mitt Romney in 2006