Posted on 04/28/2015 3:14:20 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Last Monday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's Republican governor and a presumed GOP presidential hopeful, kicked the hornets' nest that is the immigration debate.
He told Glenn Beck's radio show that America needs to "make decisions about a legal immigration system that's based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages," and that this concern should be "at the forefront of our discussion going forward."
Walker's comments are significant because they're something of a reversal for him, but also because they break with the "legal-immigration-good, illegal-immigration-bad" orthodoxy of the GOP establishment.
Lumping both forms of immigration together as equally questionable makes sense from an economic perspective; market forces don't care about legal formalities like borders. But it takes near-cosmic chutzpah for Walker to say our first concern should be American wages and workers, given that pretty much every policy move by the Republican Party and the conservative movement seems designed to keep lower class incomes as depressed as possible.
By now, the battle lines on this issue should be familiar. First you get the argument from the center left and right that whenever immigrants, documented or undocumented, come to America, they bring added demand to the economy: they gotta eat, drink, put a roof over their head, get health care, and entertain themselves, just like everyone else. Even as they take on work, they increase the economy's overall ability to create jobs. So claiming immigrants "take jobs from Americans" is wrong.
This is the view of the economics of immigration from 30,000 feet, and it's right as far as it goes.
But closer to the ground, the terrain becomes more complicated. The U.S. economy isn't one big market. It's actually lots of overlapping markets, with different types of businesses and workers participating in each. And sometimes movement between these markets is easy for those workers, and sometimes it isn't. So it's possible for big influxes of low-skill, low-education immigrants to decrease wages and jobs for low-skill, low-education natives. You get more workers in particular markets, so wages go down. Meanwhile, the wealth created by those new entrants flows to other parts of the economy, so jobs in that market don't increase all that much. And the native workers in those markets can't easily hop to other markets, so they're stuck with depressed wages and fewer jobs.
You can click through the links for a fuller examination of this phenomenon. But the short version is that it's possible the second story is true, even if concrete evidence has been hard to tease out.
What this all boils down to is a problem of bargaining power. If you increase the number of workers in a market, but don't increase the number of jobs proportionally, employers can play workers off one another, driving wages down. That's why some Republicans like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — whom Walker is apparently taking his cues from — are opposed to increasing legal avenues for high-skill immigrants. Tech workers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals don't like seeing their incomes reduced either.
But immigration policy doesn't occur in a vacuum. There are lots of ways we could increase worker bargaining power, especially for low-skill Americans, while still taking in many more immigrants than we do now.
We could break up the work the economy already provides into smaller chunks that can be distributed to more workers, through things like national paid leave mandates, paid vacation, strengthened overtime laws, and a shortened work week. We could get the Federal Reserve to run much more aggressive monetary stimulus, or even fundamentally reform the way the that policy operates, so that the boost the Fed pumps into the economy goes straight to the Americans hardest hit by bad economic times. We could ramp up government stimulus spending, the generosity of the social safety net, or both, which would also create jobs. And we could change laws to make unions more powerful, so they'd be ready and waiting to take on new immigrants as members and fight on their behalf.
Full employment should really be the top line goal, and it's what the first four of those five policy options aim at. (With an expanded social safety net and stronger unions also acting as a backstop for wages when full employment isn't reached.) When there are more workers than jobs available, bargaining power is going to go down across the economy. But at full employment, the first story about immigration — about how it just grows the size of the pie, and everyone benefits — is most likely to be true, because employers aren't able to play the new workers off the old ones.
Fundamentally, the U.S. economy faces a two-stage problem: First, the share of national income going to labor is getting smaller, as more and more is gobbled up by people who own capital. Second, of that share going to labor, a bigger portion is going to elite workers, leaving the working class with less and less. That's the context in which the question of immigration has to be understood. Full employment and increased bargaining power for all workers would solve both these problems — equalizing shares between workers, and getting them a bigger slice of the pie vis-a-vis capital.
In a sane and decent world, we would open our borders as wide as humanly possible. Because letting other people immigrate to America makes their lives better; much better in many cases. And we would rely on all those other policy levers to keep the wages and jobs of immigrant and native-born Americans alike healthy and robust.
The perversity of the whole immigration discussion amongst conservatives and Republicans is that they've already rejected all these other options for increasing worker bargaining power. That the elite GOP establishment still wants more immigration even after that rejection should make their goal plain as day: keep capital's share as high as possible!
But for anyone on the right that still wants to claim they give a damn about working class Americans, trying to limit immigration is a kind of ad-hoc fallback position to keep wages up.
:..........There are 414,600 public-sector employees in Wisconsin, and it’s safe to say that few would call Mr. Walker their favorite person. The governor recalls a visit to one elementary school where a teacher asked, “Why do you hate teachers so much?”
He said his response was: “I’m not attacking teachers. The ones who make you feel under attack are your union. It’s in their best interest to get people pumped up.”...... quote from: Wisconsin's Legacy for Unions [NYT]
GOP America needs lots of new jobs.
We have sent far, far too many American jobs to China.
(not blaming the GOP exclusively for the problem, just saying the GOP needs to be the solution)
Bring them back.
“(not blaming the GOP exclusively for the problem, just saying the GOP needs to be the solution)”
The push for changing our trade laws began under President George H.W. Bush. He was a big proponent of globalization, particularly expanding trade with China and Mexico. NAFTA and tariff reduction in general were big initiatives of his administration. NAFTA was negotiated by Bush, and signed by Clinton. By 2001 the trade deficit with Mexico and Canada was 12 times the size it was at the time Bush negotiated the agreement.
Clinton continued the Bush policies. He signed NAFTA. The final round of GATT tariff reductions occurred during his first term. The WTO replaced GATT in his second term. In 1999 he signed a huge trade bill with China. Over 300 tariff reduction agreements were signed with other nations under Clinton.
George W. Bush continued the “free trade” policies. He signed CAFTA (NAFTA for the Caribbean). China became a member of the WTO. A number bilateral trade agreements were signed by Bush. His free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama were held up by the Senate.
Obama is continuing the push with the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and proposal for a free trade agreement with the European Union. Under his administration the agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia were renegotiated and signed. He campaigned to renegotiate NAFTA but nothing has been done to change NAFTA.
The record shows both parties have been aggressive facilitators of open markets, low tariffs, and export of US jobs. Don’t count on Jeb Bush to be involved in any solution to return jobs to the US.
“(not blaming the GOP exclusively for the problem, just saying the GOP needs to be the solution)”
The push for changing our trade laws began under President George H.W. Bush. He was a big proponent of globalization, particularly expanding trade with China and Mexico. NAFTA and tariff reduction in general were big initiatives of his administration. NAFTA was negotiated by Bush, and signed by Clinton. By 2001 the trade deficit with Mexico and Canada was 12 times the size it was at the time Bush negotiated the agreement.
Clinton continued the Bush policies. He signed NAFTA. The final round of GATT tariff reductions occurred during his first term. The WTO replaced GATT in his second term. In 1999 he signed a huge trade bill with China. Over 300 tariff reduction agreements were signed with other nations under Clinton.
George W. Bush continued the “free trade” policies. He signed CAFTA (NAFTA for the Caribbean). China became a member of the WTO. A number bilateral trade agreements were signed by Bush. His free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama were held up by the Senate.
Obama is continuing the push with the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and proposal for a free trade agreement with the European Union. Under his administration the agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia were renegotiated and signed. He campaigned to renegotiate NAFTA but nothing has been done to change NAFTA.
The record shows both parties have been aggressive facilitators of open markets, low tariffs, and export of US jobs. Don’t count on Jeb Bush to be involved in any solution to return jobs to the US.
For those that don’t know, The Week is a typical leftist rag. Even their editors and publishers admit it. It’s for people who can still read, but can’t think for themselves. It’s best described as a “compiler.” It takes snippets from lots of sources from the MSM, abbreviates them and puts them all in a weekly format.
That aside, this article is also typically leftist, throws all conservative groups and candidates in one pot and paints them all the same. At this point, impugning any unified policy view to the GOP-e, evangelicals, Constitutional conservatives, and plain ol’ conservatives is simply wrong. We have candidates and groups all over the board on immigration and every other policy.
This guy wants to smear all with one broad brush without talking about the issue of immigration policy in objective detail. (Talking to a liberal will give you a headache.)
The value of the article is only in seeing what the left is up to.
That’s my opinion.
Oldplayer
Both of our current political parties are selling-out American manufacturing.
Big time.
We need a new political party in America. With the principles of the GOP: standing up for individual freedoms, fighting for our rights. And economic issues of democrats like JOBS for all Americans.
That is what we need. Freedom and jobs.
Those are the things which neither political party in America is standing up for. Neither one.
Stand up GOP. Or prepare for a historic backlash.
Your choice.
And their solutions are socialist solutions.
It’s important to read the lefty “rags.”
It’s reconnaissance: “military observation of a region to locate an enemy or ascertain strategic features”
The article’s author is a leftist. I guess this leftist wants a McDonald’s burger flipper to get $15/hour, which would help workers like a rivit gun would help patch the hole in the Titanic’s hull AFTER the hull split.
We need to return jobs back from Mexico, China and other places. We need to have a favorable tax policy so manufacturers will build factories.
I’m all for immigration. Let’s bring in persecuted Christians from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Here’s an idea for some new jobs: Hire some people to deport illegals. Once that’s been accomplished, the job will go away. But, if as claimed by the pro-illegal crowd, these people are actually contributing and not just welfare leeches and criminals, all those jobs they are currently doing will open up.
Yes. And this is the Left's solution to unemployment - BIG government dicates:
"..........We could break up the work the economy already provides into smaller chunks that can be distributed to more workers, through things like national paid leave mandates, paid vacation, strengthened overtime laws, and a shortened work week........Full employment should really be the top line goal, and it's what the first four of those five policy options aim at. (With an expanded social safety net and stronger unions also acting as a backstop for wages when full employment isn't reached.)...."
-----------
The Left is enraged by what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin and they are about apoplectic that he has effectively appealed to American workers (fighting and winning).
He needs more ammunition for questions like this.
First of all, it’s a loaded question. Shovel in the word “hate”. Instant controversy.
Second, it’s a false premise. Few people hate teachers. Most of us have a problem with incompetent teachers, corrupt teachers, corrupt teachers’ unions. That’s a big difference.
He should turn it around and ask “Why do you love and want to reward incompetent teachers and corrupt teachers and teachers who have sex with students and teachers who embezzle?”
I think Walker handled it quite effectively.
I wonder if this was in front of a class?
Why stop at $15? If that’s such a great idea, then wouldn’t $1000/hour be an even better idea? What makes $15 a magic number?
I’d like to see these people explain and defend their crackpot ideas with some sound reasoning. They never will because they can’t.
(P.S. The reason $15 was chosen is because it’s enough of a raise that they can get burger flippers excited and riled up about it. That’s all. There is no sound economic reason, only an emotional reason designed to get people agitated.)
“Stand up GOP. Or prepare for a historic backlash.”
The GOP has made its bed with the “too big to fail” Wall Street banks, multinational corporations, and Chamber of Commerce. They’ve abandoned small business and the American worker. Like the wealthy urban liberals of the left they have only contempt for the middle class and those who believe in individual liberty and the American dream. Jeb Bush, John McCain, Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, and John Boehner would prefer a dinner with the heads of any five major corporations to a church dinner with middle class American any flyover country town. I suspect Jeb’s father and his brothers are the same. Their affinity is with the wealthy elites of the globe, not with ordinary people.
It is going to take a new party to change the political system. Neither party is an advocate for the average working class American citizen. Both are completely corrupt. The path we are heading down at increasing speed leads either to dictatorship or revolution.
This lefty author has a different idea for their “sane world”:
“In a sane and decent world, we would open our borders as wide as humanly possible. Because letting other people immigrate to America makes their lives better; much better in many cases. And we would rely on all those other policy levers to keep the wages and jobs of immigrant and native-born Americans alike healthy and robust.” [all those socialist ideas he describes in his piece]
Election Day: The only time Democrats care about the working class.
Bada bing!
Wow!
When lefties say things like that to me, I ask them why they don’t open the doors of their homes to anyone who wants to come in (and mooch, murder, rape, steal, destroy, ...). Few get it. Or they get it but pretend not to.
Also, in a sane and decent world where we value “diversity” and other cultures, why don’t we encourage that diversity and culture where it is? Again with the home analogy: If you really care about helping your neighbor, isn’t it better to help your neighbor fix his house than to have him move into yours?
>>”...given that pretty much every policy move by the Republican Party and the conservative movement seems designed to keep lower class incomes as depressed as possible.”<<
I almost quit reading when I ran across that line early in the article, and it turns out that I should have done exactly that.
Remember the name of the author, Jeff Spross, for future reference. What a complete idiot.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.