Scott Walker Versus the Wall St. Journal on Immigration

According to Gallup, only 7 percent of Americans want immigration levels to increase, while 86 percent either want them to remain at current levels (47 percent) or decrease (39 percent). With most current and prospective Republican presidential candidates tripping over each other to vie for that 7 percent, it would seem to be good politics for a candidate to break from the pack and speak for the other 86 percent essentially unopposed. That’s more of less what Scott Walker has done over the past week.

Actually, Walker hasn’t even said that immigration levels should not be increased. He has merely said that, as he put it on Friday, “In terms of how wide or how narrow the door’s open, our No. 1 priority is American workers and American wages….I don’t know how anyone can argue against that.’’

Well, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is doing so, as the Journal criticized Walker in its lead editorial on Saturday. But the Journal’s arguments weren’t up to its usual high standards, which should strengthen Walker’s confidence that he has charted the right course.

For starters, the Journal lamented that Walker has been “listening to Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions” (which is something that a lot more Republicans should do). Writing about “H-1B visas for skilled workers,” the Journal says, “Practically speaking, these visas are the only way U.S. companies can bring foreign talent to work in America.”

“The Senator [Sessions] calls claims of a skilled-worker shortage a ‘hoax.’ But the numbers suggest otherwise: The U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services announced last week that it received a record 233,000 requests from American business for the 85,000 H-1B visas available.”

But no one disputes that big business, led by Mark Zuckerberg and others, wants access to foreign labor. The question is why. Is it because there is “unmet demand,” as the Journal claims, or because corporations don’t want to pay for American workers if they can pay less for foreign workers? The Journal’s numbers tell us nothing in this regard.

The Journal then praises a group of senators, including Gang of Eight alums Jeff Flake and Marco Rubio, for having “introduced a bill to make it easier to hire high-tech workers.”

A bit later, the Journal asks, “If more people, even people with skills such as those on H-1B visas, are bad for an economy, why is the high-growth state of Texas working overtime to get people from other parts of the country to move there? Under the Walker-Sessions model, shouldn’t that depress wages and take jobs from those already there?”

This is really a reach. The Journal acts as if there’s no difference between having American workers move to a new state and having foreign workers move to the country. Texas’s outreach efforts have particularly courted American businesses, under the reasonable assumption that they help create jobs in the Lone Star State. But do you see Texas working overtime to get people to move north across the Rio Grande? By the Journal’s logic, why isn’t it?

The Journal concludes by invoking an economic straw man worthy of the White House’s current occupant. Accusing Walker of believing in “zero-sum labor economics,” it writes, “Economists call [the Walker-Sessions view] the lump of labor fallacy, which holds that the amount of available work is fixed. If one person gets a job, another loses it.” Of course, almost no one actually holds this view, certainly not Walker (or Sessions). The Journal, however, seems to hold the view that every time a person gets a job, it creates another one.

There is no dispute that immigration increases the size of the economy. The question is whether it increases the economic well-being of the typical American. In this, Walker is asking the right questions and focusing on the right ends.

When the Congressional Budget Office scored the Gang of Eight’s 1,000-page immigration bill, it estimated that, within a decade, it would increase the gross domestic product by 3.3 percent, while decreasing the gross national product per capita by 0.7 percent. Those numbers shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but they do help highlight that, while it’s easy to assert that immigration “boosts the economy,” it’s a lot harder to say that it boosts incomes on Main Street.

With immigrants’ percentage of the U.S. population at 13.5 percent (see Table 2) — the highest mark since the World War I era — and rising, immigration moderation would seem to be in order. Walker, to his credit, appears to understand this. Moreover, by showing a willingness to break from Wall Street orthodoxy even on legal immigration, Walker is helping to convey to Republican voters that, at a time when such voters are rightly skeptical of politicians’ claims, he can be counted on to stand up against illegal immigration and to undo some of President Obama’s great damage in that regard.

“Cruz opposes comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. But the Texan is a big proponent of legal immigration and making adjustments to U.S. law that would facilitate more legal immigration. He criticized Walker for suggesting that he supported limiting legal immigration if it has a negative impact on the wages of American workers.”

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ted-cruz-knocks-scott-walker-on-immigration/article/2563591

What’s amazing is that the Weekly Standard published this.

And while we’re on the subject of the Wall Street Journal and its indifference towrds the concept of “The American People”, let me ask just a little question:

Why is it that no politician advocates larger families for Americans?

150 years ago, 10 - 15 children was common.

40 years ago they were telling us there were too many Americans, and we should abort our children.

So far fewer Americans, certainly not the increasing number that would help growth on Wall St.

Thus the incessant call for more immigrants.

How about a call for more Americans? How bout making it easy for Americans to have large families again?

Didnt the Declaration say for our posterity?

Interesting, isn't it, how you never hear it from them?

And the Duggars are considered an oddity...and yet their family would have been completely ordinary in 1850.

America had no significant immigration from 1770 to 1840.

Yet it grew exponentially. Senator Seward even used this growth rate as a justification for the admission of California in his speech to the Senate.

His calculations were almost dead on:

Well-established calculations in political arithmetic enable us to say that the aggregate population of the nation now is – - – 22,000,000

That 10 years hence it will be -30,000,000

That 20 years hence it will be -38,000,000

That 30 years hence it will be – 50,000,000

That 40 years hence it will be – 64,000,000

That 50 years hence it will be – 80,000,000

That 100 years hence, that is, in the year 1950, it will be – 200,000,000

equal nearly to one-fourth of the present aggregate population of the globe, and double the population of Europe at the time of the discovery of America

The Great Wave immigrants were brought in because they replaced the millions never born because 700,000 men died in the "Civil" war, so that was 7 million babies who never existed if the 10 children per family number is used.

Obviously some of those men did have children but the point is this: the immigrants of the 1880's - 1920's simply filled a vacuum created by the war dead.

And we have a similar vacuum now: the 55 million killed by abortion.

It's not an accident that this number is close to the number of immigrants over the last 40 years. They are simply taking the place of those never born - an entire generation.

What rational nation kills itself off and then hands over its land and wealth to foreigners?

One reason for large families in the past was the high death rate due to accidents, illness and disease (and as you correctly note, war). We were a more agrarian economy and children were needed to help bring in the crops, do chores and care for animals.

We also had more stay at home (gasp) mothers. With the cost of childcare, it’s almost prohibitive to have more if both parents are working (and busy helicoptering over the kids when they’re with them).

We don’t “need” 6-8+ children per family but it would be nice if more than 2 wasn’t so off-beat.

You’ve brought up a good point and it needs to have more discussion.

If the government didn’t take so much, if we had a saner tax system, it would go a long way toward helping families manage on one salary and have the option to have larger families.

I don’t believe any of the high death rate in the past arguments.

My G-G-Grandfather had 7 kids in North Carolina and 8 more in Iowa. The first 7 rode in a covered wagon to Iowa with him since he was an abolitionist in 1852.

All of them lived and that included living through the harsh winter of 1853 in Iowa.

While it’s true that one or two would die young in many cases, they weren’t playing the averages.

They were Christian people with a huge country in front of them. They believed in “be fruitful and multiply”. They were God’s Children, and they believed that was their mandate.

I don’t have to assume this. In my family, we have their Bibles, their letters, and written history detailing this.

Another poster here last week posted Mallory Millett’s articles about the intentional undermining of the American family by her radical sister, Kate Millett.

Stunting the birthrate with abortion and homosexuality along with feminist agitation was the plan all along. Running the Overpopulation hysteria campaign was another feature of the Cultural Marxists.

It was all intentional. They understood that they could not outright kill the Americans, but possibly they could dilute their culture to the point of suicide.

For the Americans to have 10-15 children again would be more then possible. The entire Third World does it, why would it be a problem for people in the most developed country on Earth?

It would simply require that people go back to revering and loving their children, and realizing the world is a better place with their children, not a “burden on Gaia”.

I can tell you of enlightened companies that provide on-site childcare for parents who work there. Some of them are the most successful companies in America. They do it because it helps their employees be successful. We used to have “on-site child care” for everyone: it was called the farmhouse.

But we don’t work on farms mostly anymore. So we do need either a system that allows stay at home Moms or the aforementioned childcare.

What we don’t need is people in Washington DC confiscating our money and giving it to other people to raise their children. Recall that back when American families had such large families, the overall tax rate was typically < 2%. There was no income tax.

So that is the real Conservatism and immigration policies we should pursue. America for the Americans, and the more of them the better.

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