Libertarian Author Charles Murray Calls for Pause in Low-Skill Immigration

Breitbart ^ | 27 Sep 2016 | Neil Munro

[oblomov]

Leading libertarian thinker Charles Murray is now urging a halt to the immigration of lower-skilled workers, because the cutoff of extra labor may persuade employers and political leaders to revive declining communities of lower-skilled Americans.

“I have had to undergo a great deal of rethinking on all of this this year… [now] I want to shut down low-skill immigration for a while,” Charles Murray told a D.C. event hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The thing that has gotten to me over this year … has been the very simple idea that the citizens of a nation owe something to each other that is over and above our general obligation to other human beings” outside the United States, Murray said Sept. 26.

A temporary end to low-skill immigration will allow a national test of various proposals to help the many Americans at the bottom end of the economic scale, Murray said. For example, amid high immigration, several million Americans “prime age” employable men are not even trying to work, at great long-term cost to themselves and society.

Once low-skilled immigration is ended, society may react in favorable directions to help lower-end Americans workers, he said. For example, the girlfriends of young men will be better able to prod their boyfriends into taking low-skill, low-paid jobs if their employers can’t hire illegals, Murray said.

But Murray says he only wants a temporary moratorium on low-skill immigration in case the new policy proves counterproductive. “I want to shut if down for a while because it may not work … [currently] we will have no good way of knowing how employers will respond until the spigot is cut off,” he said.

[Pelham]

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