Posted on 12/01/2003 11:28:35 PM PST by farmfriend
All it takes is spot-checking known suspicious employers often enough, and setting the fines high enough, so that the "expected value" (the amount of the fine multiplied by the probability of getting caught) of the penalities exceeds the savings from hiring illegal aliens instead of citizens.
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That it's imperfect.
It's just a TEST.
I agree. But it's still useful for analizing and predicting demographic paterns. It's not useful for predicting the success of any individual.
I care more about production and results. Either way, this thread is supposed to be about immigration, which is even misleading since if the government did their job with illegals, we'd not have this discussion.
Hey, I did not bring up this stuff about genetics and IQ. Blame Poohbah and hchutch.
Actually, there are very few people who can improve their score by more than half a standard deviation, and those people usually have a score at the high end. That just says that smarter people are better at learning test-taking strategies.
Every test is imperfect. The fact that it predicts income so well, and that it is hard for most people to improve their scores shows that it is a useful demographic tool.
Well, you'd have to do a formal analysis to know for sure, but given that illegals are practically willing to work for nothing, and that fines are bounded from above by political considerations, intuitively it seems to me that you'd have to have to spot check a very high number of establishments to bring make the expected value of hiring illegals negative. That would make it very costly. We're talking billions a year, I figure. I could be wrong, though, and if you have done the formal analysis, I'd love to see it.
You have the added problem that drivers liscences and birth certificates or social security cards are easy to forge, so even employers who are trying to comply are going to have a hard time weeding out the illegals.
My alternative would not cost very much. You'd have to spend some money to increase the number of passport offices and increase state department staff, but I figure $10-20 million would do the trick. You'd also have to merge the INS, passport, and social security databases, but that would be cheap. A couple million. With this system you'd get the added benefit of better airline security, less tax evasion, and less money laundering (if passports are required for opening bank accounts).
If it's done right, the inconvenience to citizens would be minimal. You go in person to get a passport once in your adult life (and one other time as a kid, maybe). Then you renew every ten years by mail. Or even if you had to renew in person, doing it once every ten yeras is not a big deal.
Ah, ah, ah -- you don't get to apply different standards to the two proposals on the table.
Inasmuch as your proposal is absolutely ruled out by political considerations (no politician who wants to keep his job is going to touch it with a ten-foot pole), you can't turn around and selectively apply it as a limiting factor to alternative options.
intuitively it seems to me that you'd have to have to spot check a very high number of establishments to bring make the expected value of hiring illegals negative
Not really. Given the fact that the problem is concentrated in the low-skill end of the labor market (so that citizens wouldn't be paid all that much even if there were no illegal competition), and illegals have to be paid at least a bare subsistence (for obvious reasons), it's not that difficult to get that "expected value" up to the relatively small difference between the two.
You have the added problem that drivers liscences and birth certificates or social security cards are easy to forge
So what exactly do you propose should be used as proof of identity to obtain a passport?
I'm intollerant of our pandering politicians squandering our U.S. Taxpayer's dollars. How's that bigoted, exactly?
You're throwing hateful labels around without even knowing the meaning of the words.
I gotta ask: Did you manage to keep a straight face while typing in the assertion that it costs about ten cents to process a passport application?
He must be planning to outsource the data entry work to Pakistan. The winning bidder, Wahabbist Whacko Jihad, Inc., actually offered to PAY for the privelege of doing the work.
I think both of these claims are false. IQ is now known to predict income far less well than other things, including other genetic inheritance (especially personality traits), parental transmission of wealth and the education and health it buys, and others. To say that "IQ is the best predictor of future income than any other variable" is clearly to be unfamiliar with current reserach. A recent useful survey article is Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, The Inheritance of Inequality, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), Summer 2002, 3-30.
As for the second claim, while it may be true that an individual can't change his measured IQ much beyond a certain age, average IQs go up in all societies over time, the Flynn effect. Whether it is a "useful demographic tool" in the sense you mean depends on whether they converge to rough equivalence across ethnic groups. Do they? That is unknown, but the claim that they don't has to my knowledge not been properly tested.
Chutch always does that when he's losing the argument. That and he resorts to race-baiting and name-calling.
It's the typical Liberal behavior I've come to expect from him on these threads.
Note, he hasn't made one factual response to anything I've said about Puerto Rico, again.
As for the second claim, while it may be true that an individual can't change his measured IQ much beyond a certain age, average IQs go up in all societies over time, the Flynn effect.
Yes, I'm quite aware of the Flynn effect, but I don't see how it is relevent to this discussion. As the average level of nutrition, as well as prenatal and infant care improves over time, one would expect average intelligence to improve over time, insofar as intelligence is partly determined by early physiological cranial development.
Whether it is a "useful demographic tool" in the sense you mean depends on whether they converge to rough equivalence across ethnic groups. Do they? That is unknown, but the claim that they don't has to my knowledge not been properly tested.
I've seen papers that can reject the null of no difference accross groups at a fairly high level of significance. We just don't have enough data to determine whether the difference tends to zero over time, however.
On way in which IQ can be a useful demographic tool is in setting education policy. The fact that most people's IQ's are below the level where they can benefit from a college education, it does not make sense to set a policy that tries to get most people to go to college. We would be far better served if we pushed for more vocational training.
Sorry. $10-20 billion.
I thought it was relevant to this part of the discussion:
"The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." — SAMUEL FRANCIS, SPEECH AT THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE, MAY 1994Let's stipulate that he means in part IQ. (I suspect that is most of what he means, but who knows.) That's an empirical question, hinging on why whites differ in the IQ distribution from other races. I am assuming that this controversy is one that suggests to those of a certain mindset the urgency of various and sundry "demographic tools," and on whose validity the empirical research should thus brought to bear.
I am also assuming that you contend that genetics -- beyond assortative mating -- explains a significant part of the difference in intelligence between whites and other races. (If you do believe that, do you have any sense of how much? In any event, Mr. Francis probably does, and bases his beliefs about immigration in part on that belief.) Whether the belief is true depends, obviously, on whether observed IQ differences remain after a complete listing of environmental differences has been equalized. The Flynn effect clearly has nonwhites in the US partly catching up to (and in the case of Asians, if I am not mistaken) modestly surpassing whites. So I'd like to see a test in which it has fully played out before I sign on to what you appear to be saying, and what Mr. Francis is definitely saying.
I've seen papers that can reject the null of no difference accross groups at a fairly high level of significance.
Can you give me any cites? I would be interested to read them. The few that I have seen all seem econometrically invalid to me.
We just don't have enough data to determine whether the difference tends to zero over time, however.
Agreed. If it does, however, I fail to see that Mr. Francis's summoning of "the genetic endowments of the creating people" is justified or interesting, at least insofar as he means IQ.
And I then also fail to see how the "genetic endowments" of whites is germane to immigration policy, a favorite bête noire of his.
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