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May 01, 2006
Speaking of Immigration
I have a piece up at Campus Progress on the right wing's sudden, immigration-fueled concern for the working class. Check it out.
May 1, 2006 | Permalink
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Comments
Hey, quite the short tour de force on immigration's (non)effect on working class wages. Great summary.
I'd have only changed one thing:
So the impact of low-wage workers is, at worst, slightly negative, while the economy gains a bit as a whole. Quite the ringing condemnation.
I'm sure you were being snarky with the 'quite the ringing condemnation' sentence, but I suspect some non-blog readers may miss the blogsnark. "Not quite the ringing condemnation." might have worked more clearly with this audience.
Unfortunately, the low paid workers who need to understand these facts won't get to read your work, which is a great conundrum. How to reach these people?
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | May 1, 2006 7:27:28 PM
Fine work. Am I wrong to fear that this sudden access of nativist concern for low-wage workers somehow won't find expression in any policy proposals that aren't invidious to the well-being of immigrants? The importance policymakers assign to the impact of immigrants on native low-wage workers isn't determined solely by the econometric estimates they choose to warrant; it also reflects the value they assign to alternative outcomes. And the transparent bad faith of these arguments is relevant here. If everything else they do reveals that they aren't very interested in the welfare of low-wage workers, then these arguments are at a minimum unlikely to have much bearing on the real world of policy formation, except as useful fictions.
Posted by: KOH | May 2, 2006 2:06:04 AM
Are you going to be at the Campus Progress convention/workshop/whatever-they-call-it this summer? I attended last year and the panel discussion you took part in was outstanding. I'm looking forward to attending the conference again this summer.
Posted by: Zach Shoup | May 2, 2006 2:12:34 AM
KOH With that command of verbage,you should be a shoo-in as a potential bureaucrat. Was that "excess" of concern, BTW ?
Anyway, the propaganda value of a mission statement can be subverted by an understanding of what it tries to obscure rather than what it purports to illuminate.
Or, to be plebian, bullshit baffles brains.
Posted by: opit | May 2, 2006 2:51:31 AM
