Posted on 07/18/2013 3:09:40 PM PDT by neverdem
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, one of the chief promoters of the Senate’s Gang of Eight plan, recently took to the Corner to dispute my concerns over how the Senate bill would negatively impact Americans’ wages. Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s argument is contrary to both common sense and the best available academic evidence.
Politico reported this week that “Big Business, Senate Republicans and Democrats backing immigration reform have a target in their crosshairs: House Republicans.”
Why is the business lobby so eager to pass the Senate bill? Is it because they believe its large influx of low-skill workers will increase wages or reduce them? The question answers itself.
But let’s look at the CBO report. CBO concluded that average wages would decline for the next dozen years, while unemployment would increase. This is not in dispute. But Mr. Holtz-Eakin says not to worry, the decline, he alleges, will only be “20 cents a day.” First of all, it’s a bad sign when even the supporters of the bill have been reduced to arguing about the degree to which it will reduce wages. Wages today are lower than they were in 1999 and Americans have been through a prolonged recession — we need wages to go up, not to flatten or fall even further.
As to how much they will go down, Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s figure of 20 cents a day represents a drastic misrepresentation of the CBO report (which itself substantially understates the harmful impact that the Senate bill will have on workers). To arrive at his 20-cents figure, he assumes an equivalent wage reduction across the board. In his own words, Holtz-Eakin explains that his calculation “includes the salaries of the future Lloyd Blankfiens, Lebron Jameses, and Justin Biebers, as well as middle-class workers. . . .That means wage and salary earnings per worker will be $74,556 on average. These are the earnings that will be reduced 0.1 percent. . . . About 20 cents a day.”
Averaging all of these salaries together is of course very misleading. The typical salary for a U.S. worker is nowhere close to $74,556. And the wage effects of the immigration bill will be highly varied — Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfien is likely to see his take-home pay increased while a low-income U.S. citizen will experience a much, much steeper reduction than 0.1 percent. Under the bizarre methodology that Holtz-Eakin employs, Mark Zuckerberg could increase his earnings by $1 million and 1,000 workers could see their wages fall by $1,000 in a year — and the average overall wage would be unchanged.
But this is not just a theoretical exercise: Dr. George Borjas of Harvard has found that high levels of immigration are already hurting workers. The average yearly income decrease over the past five decades has been 3.2 percent, with native workers losing $402 billion in income annually to immigrant workers. At the same time, businesses who employ immigrant labor see their profits increase by $437 billion per year. In a separate study, Dr. Borjas showed that the average native-born worker has his or her wages reduced by $140 per month as a result of high levels of immigrant labor.
Holtz-Eakin also avoids the question of unemployment. A recent Center for Immigration Studies report observed that 1.3 million fewer native-born Americans have jobs today than in 2000, even though the native-born working-age population has increased by more than 16 million. Meanwhile, 5.3 million more immigrants found jobs over that time, with the size of the working-age immigrant population growing by around 9 million. The immigration bill will dramatically worsen, not improve, this trend. There is a reason why people earning under $30,000 prefer, by a 3-to-1 margin, a reduction in total immigration to an increase.
Polls show the GOP lost the last election because we failed to connect with lower-income Americans. Republicans lost this vote by a record margin. So the GOP needs to do some soul-searching. We can either follow the Norquist and Holtz-Eakin example and try to lecture struggling Americans that we’re only going to marginally reduce their wages and only slightly increase their unemployment, or we can give voice to these struggling Americans of all backgrounds and articulate a rational immigration policy that promotes upward mobility, economic assimilation, and rising wages.”
— Jeff Sessions represents Alabama in the United States Senate.
They must be physically removed, preferably by primary.
The new GOP needs to be the party of Main St.
Don’t they need a soul first?
PING
Yep.
Soul searching first assumes that the subject of the search actually has a soul.
The GOP has no such thing.
Sessions gets it.
Thanks very much.
KILL the SENATE’S BILL and NO NEW BILLS!
How stupid can the GOP be?
Answer: Totally stupid.
Souls are worn out and linoleum carpet pieces have covered the holes in the shoe.
PING
I’d say they need to do some searching for a spine first.
Do spineless jelly fish have a soul?
Some where along the line Americans are going to realize America can't continue to subsidize her citizens when they are able bodied but lazy. Honest work is never menial no matter what it is....gaming the system is encouraged by people like Obama...promising you welfare...many take the bate and wind up with nothing. Having a soul means taking responsibility for yourself; being dependent on the government is a dead end. Churches and other charitable organizations have been replaced by a soul-less power mad government.
The GOPe has gone corporate. They couldn’t care less about the average taxpayer in the middle class.
The Open Border Lobby is flooding Congress through K-Street with a ton of money.
With this the GOPe shows absolute contempt for the average taxpayer.
The GOPe is too stupid to read the writing on the Wall Street party.
I’m sorry, I only read cursive.
LOL.... see what they did there? Soul & GOP in the same sentence! Too funny!
He remarked that he was hearing the same type of feedback all day. LOL.
I agree with you, yoe. Yet, soul-less Churches and non- well spring charity, has deeply contributed to this nanny-state Gov’t. As always, there is a solution. Do the next right thing, no matter what.
The GOP are finished - and at minimum, Conservatives need to be finished with the GOP.
They are nothing more than the political Judenrat for the Democrat MarxoFascists.
Elections are not going to fix this mess. Especially when the entire electoral process has gone Soviet and the Chicago machine now owns the whole national process.
Conservatives are hated by BOTH the Democrats/Marxists and the GOP Ruling Class and their sycophants.
They now rule over us, together - expanding their power and insanity upon us all.
Doing the next right thing, no matter what is helping those who need help for the moment...not for a life time. I was raised in the Great Smoky Mountains where I was told that even during the Depression, excepting welfare for more that a month was not an option if you could walk. Disability cheats and food stamp cheats are breaking the camels back...don’t you think?
No one can be that stupid, they are serving a master and doing his bidding whether they know it or not. We can never defeat them if we keep blaming stupidity for their actions.
The GOP has always been the “me too!” party.
Reagan was an aberration that the establishment hated, tried to destroy, and then successfully cashed in on for 20 years by paying lip service to.
This is the norm for them, and too many people are content being runner-up so long as they get their money and token positions.
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