Posted on 06/16/2007 4:34:42 PM PDT by Cyropaedia
One-Fifth of an American
How much is an immigrant's life worth, exactly?
How do you justify a border fence? Why is it OK to consign millions of unskilled Mexicans to lives of desperate poverty? I'm told it's because Americans should care more about their countrymen than about a bunch of foreigners. OK, but how much more? Surely there's some limit; virtually nobody thinks, for example, that Americans should be allowed to hunt Mexicans for sport. So, exactly how much are you willing to hurt a foreigner to help an American? Is a foreigner's well-being worth three-quarters as much as an American's, or half as much, or one-quarter as much?
(I'm grateful to the anonymous proprietor of the YouNotSneaky blog for raising this question, though my analysis is not the same as his.) Let's do the math: When we admit an unskilled Mexican immigrant, his wage typically rises from about $2 an hour to $9 an hour—call it a $7-per-hour gain. To justify keeping him out, we'll have to weigh that gain against the harm he does to Americans.
In the very short run, most of the gains go to employers, and a substantial fraction of those gains probably go to people named Walton. In the somewhat longer run, all that excess profit gets competed away and shows up in the form of lower prices for consumer goods. At that point, even the workers who took pay cuts can come out ahead: If your wage falls by 10 percent while prices fall by 20 percent, you're a winner.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
The other thing that deliberately avoids is that it is the MEXICAN GOVERNMENT THAT HAS CONSIGNED ITS OWN PEOPLE TO POVERTY THROUGH THEIR CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE AND STAGGERING CORRUPTION. Is there a single country any where in the world that would actually allow millions of unemployed/disenfranchised Americans to go flooding across their borders decade after decade...?? NO. The Mexican governement would never allow that to happen if the situation was reversed.
Why just Mexicans?
A better question: How do we get our elected officials to finally get the damned thing built already?
America first
I mean, on my darker days, being able to buy a human tag sounds like an absolutely splendid idea.
What is Steven E. Landsberg's degree? And where is it from?
Because they flat failed to teach this guy how to think...
For the same reason that we can’t allow the 4.6 billion other people from around the world, that are even poorer than the Mexicans, to come here.
We only have so much money and so much room dummie!
Will it somehow help those Mexicans if we’re in desperate poverty with them?
| All turd-worlders should be eligible for US welfare I have an idea for spreading more freedumb. See, some impoverished folks get to be born in nations connected by land to the biggest nation of bleeding heart liberals that ever existed. They can illegally enter America, never pay taxes, mooch off government benefits for the rest of their lives, have many children, and commit the crimes that Americans don't want to commit - all in relative safety. Tell me, can 20 million+ poor wretches from Africa or Asia do the same thing? How are they supposed to get their reward for breathing air? Billions of people live in poverty and need American welfare. $30 billion for AIDS in Africa isn't going to cut it, and granting amnesty+path to citizenship to tens of millions of illegal-immigrant Mexicans falls short by far. Anyway. I mean, the far-away people are just as entitled to these government benefits as border-hopping foreign nationals, right? I am sure that there are jobs that Americans only sorta want to do that these other poor people would be more than willing to do for $4 an hour - it is just that the geographic realities make it really hard. And let's not forget about the "sweat shop" labor and outsourcing of jobs - if these foreign nationals are indirectly working for America, should they not get things like food stamps, welfare, free primary and secondary education, racist university scholarships, pathways to citizenship (so they can vote Democrat), and free healthcare? Oh, you didn't know every American already has free health-care? All you have to do is show up at the emergency room of any hospital and they are forced to care for you, citizen or not, whether you can pay or not (and even if what ails you is not an emergency). Everything from the sniffles on up. Sometimes the money-tree owning federal government steps in with medicare/medicaid to repay the hospital, sometimes it does not. But they have to be careful - it seems a lot of hospitals in certain cities are closing down from what the right-wing extremists in charge, with their fancy-pants economics, call "uncompensated cost-overruns" (code for "corporate greed" or something I am sure). There I go again, off track. Anyway, I calculate that it will only cost America $5x10^13 to provide this new entitlement program for every turd-worlder (per year), roughly $166,000 per American per year. Throw in some UN assistance, and we might be able to drop that down to $165,000. Come on federal government, you keep spending money like FDR/Johnson at a bad idea factory. What, afraid it will destroy America? Since when has that ever been a concern? Get on it! This should be running smoothly by the time the Hildabeast and Captain Sink get back from the trailer park. That reminds me - what about diversity? There are so many tropical diseases and primitive traditions that America is lacking, and so many languages I do not have to choose from when I call up my representatives to implore them to stop telling me to go away and die quietly - at this rate, it is going to take more than 20 years for America to balkanize. This is unacceptable! |
When will these lying bastards use those little keywords?
No conservative has a problem with LEGAL immigration.
No conservative has a problem with adult stem cell research.
We don’t have a problem with peace- we have a problem with injustice!
It is the border stupid.
The simple answer is that the author is a hypocrite unless he gives four-fifths of the food he currently eats to hungry Mexicans.
Four-fifths too much? Well, okay. Then he should give only a measly and near hypocritical one-fifth of his food. And also his paycheck. And also his property.
Those starving Mexicans need it a lot more than he does. Maybe one day a week he should give his job to a Mexican, willing to do what he does for a fraction of the cost. (And probably do it better.)
all the pro amnesty supporters value an immigrants life in the amount of a five thousand dollar fine.
Not all idiotic demogogues graduate from our prestigious colleges but a sizable number of them do; unfortunately they go to work for rich organizations who play poor mouth all the way to the bank.
Cause midgets are off-limits?
I AM NOT A "VIRTUALLY NOBOBY".
And I believe the limit on Mexican women should be more restrictive than Mexican men, except during rutting season.
"What if you, [my brother], and I just buy the house next door to [Landsburg's] and make it a "sanctuary" for about a dozen illegal Mexican families. We could cover most of our capital cost via rental supplemented by Section-8 subsidies. Then when Landsburg and all his neighbors flee, selling out cheaply, we buy the homes, end our "sanctuary" program by calling the ICE to come collect our tenants, and re-sell the homes in the once-more-middle-class neighborhood for *huge* capital gains.Sounds like a plan!Then we repeat the process with Tamar Jacoby's neighborhood. We can "Do Well By Doing Good"!
Its pathetic that we allow the hypocrisy of Mexico to go unchallenged, and that we allow them to pretty much set our immigration policy.
This is one of the things that drives me crazy about Bush. He will NEVER criticize those that deserve it (unless, of course, it’s people on his side).
At least Reagan spoke out against the evils of failed governments, something that went a long way towards changing them.
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