Huh, Yourself

Jonah Goldberg endorses one of his reader emails:

Democrats complain about "income inequality", and at the same time support importing a bunch of low skilled/low wage workers into the US. Huh?

Look, that's moronic. It's obviously possible to both believe that something is a problem and also to not support every conceivable initiative to ameliorate it. I, for example, think it's a problem that the streets in American cities are so dirty. I don't, however, think that we should execute people for littering. Nor do I think we should import Mauritanian slaves to clean the streets. What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans are solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite.

By contrast, what really is baffling is the strain of conservative thinking which holds that income inequality isn't a problem but that then turns around and cites inequality as a reason to curb immigration. There's nothing hypocritical about rejecting certain solutions to certain problems, but it doesn't make any sense to propose a solution to something you don't think is a problem.

UPDATE: To be clear that I'm not dealing with a straw restrictionist here, Mickey Kaus is both the author of a book about why we shouldn't care about income inequality and a passionate defender of the view that we should restrict immigration to curb income inequality.

Comments

There obviously is a division here, both between the parties and within each party.

The populists don't like immigration for precisely this reason, that it's depressing American wages. There's a strain of nativism there as well, which is why resistance to immigration is more fervent on the Republican side. But there is a very substantial contingent of Democrats--the rank and file--that think illegal immigrants and globalization and free trade are taking their jobs, and they're not wrong.

On the other hand you have the liberal elites, who don't believe in American supremacy, not really. American workers are not more important than Mexican workers or Chinese workers. American children are not more important than Iraqi children or African children. To these liberals what matters is not borders or nations, but wealth and class. It's the peasants and the poor versus the global elite, the corporations and the rich.

A philosophical difference.

Posted by Korha | June 14, 2007 12:32 PM

"Mickey Kaus is both the author of a book about why we shouldn't care about income inequality"

"In this ambitious , accessible and intellectually nourishing policy treatise, New Republic senior editor Kaus proposes a plan to avoid the "end of equality" that threatens America as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. For equality and capitalism to coexist, Kaus argues, we must create a public life in which money has limited influence. Thus he calls for compulsory national service and universal health care, renovated public spaces and reformed politics. Maintaining equality would become government's goal"

????

Posted by Korha | June 14, 2007 12:35 PM

'and at the same time support importing a bunch of low skilled/low wage workers into the US. Huh?
'

Isn't it the right that wants a guest worker program? Isn't it the right that keeps wages down by making up dismissive noise everytime someone mentions raising the minimum wage?

Posted by jg | June 14, 2007 12:36 PM

Re "What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans are solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite."
----------
Er..except that the Democratic leadership shows NO interest in "compromising the interests of the global elite".

The Democratic Party spent over $600 MILLION in the 2006 cycle -- how much of that do you think came in as $25 checks?
See http://www.opensecrets.org/parties/total.asp?Cmte=DPC&cycle=2006

Again, don't they teach arithmetic at Harvard?

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 12:43 PM

Re "New Republic senior editor Kaus proposes a plan to avoid the "end of equality" that threatens America as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. For equality and capitalism to coexist, Kaus argues, we must create a public life in which money has limited influence"
----------
ha ha ha. Except that the rich use their money to ..drum roll ..concentrate wealth within the rich. By corrupting the government. By ,for example, buying political journals and hiring editors who will distract the hoi polloi/disrupt the public discourse with bullshit schemes and red herrings.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 12:52 PM

Don, "liberals" and "Democratic leadership" aren't at all the same thing. Unfortunately.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | June 14, 2007 1:14 PM

I think you concede too much to Goldberg's emailer. The liberals I know say that those low-skilled workers are going to come here anyway (due to the international income inequality between the US and Mexico). Making them legal would allow them to demand better wages and have access to services like job training programs that would help them earn more, thus reducing income inequality.

Posted by Stentor | June 14, 2007 1:19 PM

korha, kaus is talking about what you might call the equality of the public square, not about income inequality, whose meretricious affects, he believed back then (he wasn't always an idiot, after all, he's simply become one) could be ameliorated by a healthy public sphere.

personally, i'm not convinced that even illegal immigrants are having a drastic impact on income inequality. if, for instance, there were no illegal immigrants to hire as nannies, would middle-to-upper-middle class parents simply pay more for nannies who are citizens, or would they simply say "can't afford a nanny, day care it is."

the decline of manufacturing jobs and the rise of service jobs has much more to do with income inequality as far as i can tell than the simple availability of illegal immigrants to "undercut" wages.

Posted by howard | June 14, 2007 1:21 PM

What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans are solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants

Which leads me to ask -- when those same so-called conservatives accuse us moonbats, when we're in our progressive "class warfare" mode, of not appreciating that "a rising tide lifts all boats" (which presupposes, they forget, that the boats be in the harbor and someone has maintained the harbor so the tide can get into it rather than being stopped by garbage collecting, etc.) and of engaging in the "lump of labor fallacy", are they engaging in projection yet again?

*

it doesn't make any sense to propose a solution to something you don't think is a problem.

Not only that but a textbook definition of a "conservative" is one who goes out of the way to make sure that non-existant problems don't get fixed and that the solution is not worse than the problem. Today's so-called conservatives are in fact not conservative in any meaningful sense but are true reactionaries, right-wing radicals who wish to turn back the clock rather than stop it.

Posted by DAS | June 14, 2007 1:23 PM

Intellectual dishonesty is kind of Mickey Kaus's beat, don't you think?

-- ACS

Posted by ACS | June 14, 2007 1:23 PM

So... you think we can bring in millions of unskilled laborers, and have no impact on the wages of existing low skill citizens?

Do you also believe that fairies make the flowers grow?

Posted by James Robertson | June 14, 2007 1:26 PM

Yeah, income inequality isn't a problem. Why just ask anyone in Mexico, Central America, Peru, the Philipenes, 18th Century France, Apartheid Africa, and a whole bunch of other places. But make sure you're only asking the really rich motherfuckers.

Posted by ed | June 14, 2007 1:28 PM

err, isn't the point of Kaus' book that we shouldn't care about income inequality precisely because other we *should* care about more substantive kinds of inequality?

Posted by Chris | June 14, 2007 1:30 PM

'So... you think we can bring in millions of unskilled laborers, and have no impact on the wages of existing low skill citizens?'

Again. Democrats are not supportive of the guest worker program, for the very reason you point out. Democrats want illegals to become legal so they can demand higher pay and thereby lift working wages. Its the right, the party that represents business owners, that is keeping wages low, which attracts immigrant workers, which keeps wages low and drives down other wages.

Posted by jg | June 14, 2007 1:37 PM

it doesn't make any sense to propose a solution to something you don't think is a problem.

Reminds me of conservatives who dismiss global warming and in the next breath complain about the greenhouse gases generated by Nancy Pelosi's plane or Al Gore's house. They know it doesn't make sense-- it's sheer intellectual dishonesty.

Posted by Eric Siry | June 14, 2007 1:42 PM

Re "compromise the interests of the global elite",
maybe Matthew could point to the tidal wave of legislation that the Democratic leadership is passing to help the poor and blue collar workers of America.

It seems to me that while a Congressman may praise the common citizens, he sure as shit doesn't want to become one of them. By, for example, losing an election because he pissed off one of his wealthy campaign donors.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 1:48 PM

I don't really care if there's income inequality or not-but it makes sense to me that importing a bunch of low-skilled immigrants, whether they eventually become legal or no, will increase the income gap. Also, you have to realize that if you make the illegal immigrants 'legal' then you encourage lots more illegal immigrants to come-I know I would want to come here if I was a Mexican citizen and had the opportunity to become a US citizen. The more low wage immigrants that come, the wider the gap will get. If you really cared about income inequality, you'd recognize that at some point, enough immigrants can overwhelm even the most generous social welfare system.

Posted by jamie | June 14, 2007 1:52 PM

goldberg's reader's comment makes sense, but only if you assume that the inequality we should care about is all within our own country. if you think, like dani rodrik and many others, that bringing up the world's poor should be a goal of u.s. policy, the comment loses all power.

Posted by cyates | June 14, 2007 1:53 PM

Re " if you think, like dani rodrik and many others, that bringing up the world's poor should be a goal of u.s. policy, the comment loses all power."
-------
Isn't our first duty to our OWN citizens who are poor? To enlisted men/National Guardsmen returning from Iraq who will need jobs as they return to civilian life?

How much of this concern for the world's poor is merely a thin disguise used by whores for CEOs wanting cheap labor?

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 2:00 PM

Good idea, Jonah: combat inequality by deporting the people with the fewest skills. His silly-ass reasoning would, of course, apply to American citizens as well: surely inequality would be reduced if we aggressively conscripted/imprisoned the people with the fewest job skills. That liberals are against this obviously proves that we are all hypocrites.

Posted by kth | June 14, 2007 2:04 PM

there are many who are concerned with the world's poor without any interest in enriching ceos.

the question of duty to citizens is certainly an important one, and it has been discussed a lot recently

Posted by cyates | June 14, 2007 2:05 PM

I would, however, make a variant of Goldberg's point: It makes little sense for liberals to be concerned about inequality and then OPPOSE an increase in skilled immigration. Which is, unfortunately, what Ted Kennedy and some other Democratic legislators did during the recent immigration fight...

Admitting more skilled immigrants helps our economy, helps poor-but-talented Indian and Chinese folks, and reduces inequality all at the same time, which makes it somewhat baffling to me why Democrats wouldn't jump on that pony.

Sorry if that was off-topic.

Posted by Mr. Noah | June 14, 2007 2:06 PM

don, actually the single number one priority to improve the economic lives of low-moderate income households in america is some form of national health insurance, which (finally) some dems are laying the groundwork to pursue if a dem wins the oval office in 2009. other than raising the minimum wage, there isn't much the current congress is going to be able to do: it is not easy to get things done in congress when you don't have 2/3 of the votes.

as to the larger issue, crudely speaking, the american labor force is about 150M people. crudely speaking, annual immigration (legal and illegal) is said to run somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 M, and of course, these are not all people of working age. as i noted above, it is extremely hard to see how such a relatively small increment is having a major impact on wages, particularly in comparison to such macro changes as a decline in manufacturing jobs paying $20+ an hour with good benefits and their replacement with service jobs paying $10-$15/hour without good benefits.

as dean baker has noted many times, one thing we could certainly do is remove the restrictions on white collar professional immigration, which could make a downward difference at the high (although not highest) end of the income ladder.

Posted by howard | June 14, 2007 2:12 PM

plus what Mr. Noah said on the same matter, which was not off topic at all, simply better put than my version!

Posted by howard | June 14, 2007 2:13 PM

jg says: Democrats are not supportive of the guest worker program, for the very reason you point out. Democrats want illegals to become legal so they can demand higher pay and thereby lift working wages.

I don't think they want them to become legal for those warm and fuzzy reasons, but rather so they can vote (legally) and provide a power base.

Almost all Democratic leaders are strong supporters of IllegalImmigration; please don't ask me to provide the dozens of examples I could provide from my site. Most Dem leaders consistently work to prevent ImmigrationLaws from being enforced or even try to subvert them.

Some Democrats even have links to those linked to the MexicanGovernment; for just one example, a GA state Sen and a GA state Rep both marched in an IllegalImmigration march alongside a former MexicanConsulGeneral. For another example, L.A. mayor TonyVillar congratulated Mexico's president for helping to block the will of CA's voters (Prop187).

The Dem leadership has been a very strong supporter of a defacto GuestWorker program for quite some time now and I don't see that support ending.

Posted by TLB | June 14, 2007 2:16 PM

Admitting more skilled immigrants helps our economy, helps poor-but-talented Indian and Chinese folks, and reduces inequality all at the same time, which makes it somewhat baffling to me why Democrats wouldn't jump on that pony.

You have to explain to me how admitting skilled immigrants reduces inequality. It seems to me that the most obvious way to move from poverty into the middle class is to get an education and acquire a marketable skill. If you get your engineering degree only to find that the jobs have all been taken by skilled immigrants who are willing to work for less, then you're still stuck in poverty.

If we have a problem in terms of a vanishing middle class, that means there are X people at the bottom of the ladder who don't really have a path to joining the middle class. If, instead of helping them, we simply import a pre-existing middle class, maybe we can say "hey look, we fixed that vanishing middle class problem!" but in reality, those same X people are still down in the muck.

Posted by Steve | June 14, 2007 2:17 PM

The difference could be that in the end state sponsered redistribution programs, when they work, get most of the job done by making the comaparatively rich poorer, not by making the comparatively poorer richer. The creators of such programs assuredly don't mean create equality by making everyone more equal via being poorer when they start out, but that's where they always end up.

I'd agree that some solutions are worse than the problem, we could always eliminate crime if we were to create a totalitarian police state. I have a seriously hard time with anyone who might think that drastically reducing or eliminating the importation of low skilled labor is stalinism or pejorative at all. And if you think something is a problem and you're not for the best way to attack the problem, you don't think the problem really is much of a problem, I would say. Not so much as the age old problem of getting elected and not so much of a problem to let it get in the way of the solution to the electoral problem consisting of attempting to dissolve the people and elect a new one more to one's liking.

With regards to the world's and people who care about it, that's very commendable, no sarcasm intended. I'd assume such people who tend to do so are to use the current phrase 'symbolic analysts' who aren't going to be competing with unskilled immigrants in the labor market. Skilled labor is necessarily a consumer of unskilled labor. Importing lot's of unskilled labor necessarily lowers it's price versus skilled labor, with native born unskilled labor suffering a dimunation of their wages. So such a person is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and collecting a commission in the process... because he's moral? I have a tough time following that.

Posted by j mct | June 14, 2007 2:21 PM

Steve, you're oversimplifying a little.

80% of american households earn, roughly, $85K or less; half of american households earn $43K or less (maybe it's $44 or $45 by now). the inequality in american incomes is heavily concentrated at the high end.

frankly, i'm not sure what can be done at the upper .1% of the income pyramid: by the time you're up there, the game is pretty rigged.

but if thanks to increased skilled immigration, doctors and lawyers and accountants, instead of earning $200K and north earn $175K or north, we have lessened inequality without in any way keeping someone from a poor background who goes into one of those professions from being far better off than they currently are.

Posted by howard | June 14, 2007 2:37 PM

Why do the weasels like Matt think they have to distort Mickey's argument to look cool. Mickey has always pointed out the distinction between income inequality and social inequality - that is, as long as Paris has to do the same time as Juanita, or the guy from Beverly Hills has to get his drivers license under the same conditions as his garbage man, then we can live with Jobs or Gates or Buffet making more than a European mogul. Why does Matt pretend that that is hard to understand. I smell snark and prevarication.

Posted by wayne s | June 14, 2007 2:57 PM

Re "other than raising the minimum wage there isn't much the current congress is going to be able to do: it is not easy to get things done in congress when you don't have 2/3 of the votes."
---------
And yet the Republicans managed to give $2 Trillion in tax cuts to the richest 2% of the population even though they only had a slight majority in the House and the Democrats controlled the Senate.

AMAZING how that works out, isn' it?

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 2:59 PM

'I don't think they want them to become legal for those warm and fuzzy reasons, but rather so they can vote (legally) and provide a power base.

'

Yes votes are good. Sorry if I implied there was only one reason. And I understand dems have been after guest worker programs in the past. What I'm talking about is the most recent bill and what I was told concerning how it came about. Dems wanted amnesty and the repubs gave it to them so they could get the guest worker program they wanted. Dems get what they want, a path to higher wages for everyone(maybe), hopefully lots of future votes, and to avoid the specter of the US rounding up brown people and kicking them out of the country. The repubs get what they want, low wage workers still changing sheets at the MGM Grand and the opportunity to bash dems on tv and radio for wanting to coddle illegal immigrants and keep our borders open for disease carrying gay mexican terrorists to come here and date your daughter.

Posted by jg | June 14, 2007 3:09 PM

Re "as to the larger issue, crudely speaking, the american labor force is about 150M people. crudely speaking, annual immigration (legal and illegal) is said to run somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 M, and of course, these are not all people of working age. as i noted above, it is extremely hard to see how such a relatively small increment is having a major impact on wages, particularly in comparison to such macro changes as a decline in manufacturing jobs paying $20+ an hour with good benefits and their replacement with service jobs paying $10-$15/hour without good benefits."
--------

The 2 million immigrants are not a trival concern to several million Americans looking for a new job at any one time.

Job opportunities are driven by investment. If you adopt tax policies which encourage the wealthy to lay off Americans and invest in cheap labor overseas (and here), you have depressed wages and insecure employment in multiple industries.

If you let corporations know they will have a large supply of cheap labor, they will have no incentive to invest in highly productive capital that can support higher wages.

Nor will they have any incentive to risk investing in high technology that can say -- provide new energy sources -- if they can get wealthy factory-farming chickens in Arkansas using illegal immigrants.

Look at the slaves of the old South --and the white sharecroppers -- prior to 1860 versus the workers in the industrial North in that same time period. Who was better off?
Yet the Southern plantation owners were quite wealthy and opposed any change to their system.
In fact, how no need to fear any change to their system being imposed from their workers, whether free or slave.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 3:12 PM

I really hate to defend Kaus, but I may be the only one here who has read his book.

Kaus' thesis is that liberals' emphasis on money inequality is a losing game; it results in creating disincentives to work and reduces productivity. However, Kaus also agrees with the fundamental liberal principle that equality is important, and thinks that the principle needs to be defended against conservatives who want to say that it's perfectly OK for the rich to get any special privilege they can obtain.

Thus, he says that we should deemphasize money inequality but push for a strong principle of social equality, i.e., that the rich should not be able to buy their way out of fundamental obligations to society. We all should have to wait in line at the DMV, we all should have to do public service, we all should get jail time if we drive on a suspended license, etc. He doesn't like class-separating institutions like gated communities, country clubs, etc.

But, to be clear, he does not believe that money inequality has no relevance at all. He has made the point that if you take it to an extreme, i.e., Brazil, extreme money inequality can produce extreme social inequality (not to mention instability), and can be bad in itself as well. He also wants work to matter and be incentivized, so low wage workers need to earn a decent wage.

So, it isn't inconsistent to him to argue that immigration depresses the wages of low-wage workers.

That said, I can't post this without also noting that there are a lot of actual inconsistencies in Kaus' immigration position, most notably the fact that while he decries people who argue that anti-hispanic prejudice has something to do with opposition to illegal immigration, he also mouths bigoted conspiracy theories about irredentist Mexicans moving to California and trying to reclaim Aztlan for Mexico.

Having said all that, I do recommend that people read Kaus' book. Despite the fact that I am often exasperated reading Kausfiles, it is one of the best books on public policy I have ever read. I think having to do the research to back up his position focused his argument.

Posted by Dilan Esper | June 14, 2007 3:20 PM

jg says: The repubs get what they want, low wage workers still changing sheets at the MGM Grand [smear deleted]

The issue you don't seem to understand is that the Dem leadership wants the exact same thing. They just go about it in a slightly different fashion.

Let me suggest reading this article from a former VicenteFox advisor:

http://www.cis.org/articles/2006/back706.html

Posted by TLB | June 14, 2007 3:29 PM

Good post Dilan Esper.

Posted by Korha | June 14, 2007 3:29 PM

but if thanks to increased skilled immigration, doctors and lawyers and accountants, instead of earning $200K and north earn $175K or north, we have lessened inequality without in any way keeping someone from a poor background who goes into one of those professions from being far better off than they currently are.

You're kind of describing lessening inequality by making the rich people a little poorer, which doesn't seem like the paradigm we should be aiming for. The way I'd like to lessen inequality is by opening middle-class opportunities to more people from the lower brackets.

When I think about importing skilled labor, I think in terms of engineers who maybe make in the high 5 figures. I don't think it's a good thing to lower these salaries. But I guess the ultimate question is, does our economy create new skilled jobs to compensate for the effect of immigration, or are we actually shutting people out of the market altogether by importing skilled labor?

Posted by Steve | June 14, 2007 3:32 PM

No, Matt, you need to think harder about Mickey Kaus's standpoint (which is very similar to mine, although we started from different points). He believes the generous transfer transfer payments for not working that began in the 1960s were morally destructive to the American-born poor, with collateral damage to the rest of us, their fellow citizens. What we need, instead, is to rig the market system so that the American poor have larger market incentives to work than the globalized free market would provide. Thus, he backs both the EITC and changing the supply and demand balance in favor of unskilled Americans by reducing immigration of unskilled foreigners.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 14, 2007 3:40 PM

I'd also second Dilan Esper's point.

Kaus's book was quite good, and made a plausible case for the importance of supporting "civic equality" over "money equality."

However, remember that Kaus's book was written almost 20 years ago. Since that's time, there's been an absolutely astonishing growth both in American money inequality and also in the money-centric nature of American politics. Consequently, matters have reached the point at which a small, ultra-wealthy elite have pretty much bought control of *both* major American political parties, and have begun running the American government both as a financial business (unfair cuts in taxes and regulations) and also as an ideological hobby (e.g. major aspects of our Mid East policy).

This is a very bad situation for our society, and a very much worse economic/social landscape than when Kaus was researching and writing his book near the end of the 1980s.

Posted by RKU | June 14, 2007 3:54 PM

Yes, that is true about the growth of inequality.

Also, keep in mind that at some point over the last 15 years between his book and now, Mickey moved from, I believe, DC (where there aren't that many super-rich people and the immigrants tend to be more skilled than the average immigrant) to LA, where there are enormous numbers of both ridiculously rich people and unskilled immigrants.

In general, the unique DC situation gives the Washington media elite an unrealistic view of immigration's impact on the country as a whole.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 14, 2007 4:05 PM

Huh indeed ?=

You say you are not arguing with a straw man but admit you are arguing with Mickey Kaus ?!? . I'm not making any claims about you, but I personally don't have enough imagination to personally conceive of a straw man as absurd as Kaus.

On the original topic, I see hypocrisy (or extreme nationalism) in those who claim they care about inequality and oppose immigration.

I hate inequality and therefore I support immigration, because I think that people who would be desparately poor in the home countries would be less poor in the USA. That is, I don't like the US income distribution, but it is less unjust than the world income distribution. Goldberg obviously believes no one really cares about foreigners and finds it mysterious that people who claim to want to help the disadvantaged want to help the disadvantaged.

Posted by Robert Waldmann | June 14, 2007 4:27 PM

"In general, the unique DC situation gives the Washington media elite an unrealistic view of immigration's impact on the country as a whole."

I think most media elites still hire unskilled immigrants to cut their grass and clean their houses.
I can’t imagine how living anywhere else would necessarily illuminate your views on immigration. I hope the relationship between domestic labor and immigrant labor is more a read about academic journals, research kind of thing and less a, “I’ve seen it man!” kind of thing.

Posted by ChrisB | June 14, 2007 4:50 PM

That increased numbers of low skilled immigrants will lead to greater income inequality is a very dubious assumption. There may be some merit to the argument if one holds all other variables constant, but those other variables won't remain constant in the real world. We could attempt to maintain roughly equal proportions of "skilled" to "unskilled" labor if we chose to given that the demand for the former far outstrips the quantity of visas available for such workers. The proportions remaining constant, one would expect merely a larger economy, not a change in the relative wages of those two groups. Just because the number of "unskilled" workers is increased does not mean that the number of "skilled" workers must remain constant.

Anyway, regarding income inequality, we should worry about the levels of lifetime earnings and wealth, not the incomes of the lowest earners relative to the highest in any given year which isn't a very useful statistic in gauging quality of life. I had a "poverty level" income for my first year after college graduation, but I lived with my parents. I then continued to live on a near "poverty level" income, thanks to meager school loans, during three years of law school as I had no help from my parents. That I was counted among the country's lowest quintile of earners for part of my life doesn't tell you much about my lifetime earning prospects. The income inequality stats thus grossly overestimate the amount of genuine inequality as many on the low end become those on the high end in later years.

Posted by Marco Pignone | June 14, 2007 4:53 PM

Re " I see hypocrisy (or extreme nationalism) in those who claim they care about inequality and oppose immigration."
---------
I don't care about people in other nations --other than that they have a right to their own country and to deal with their own problems if they leave us alone to do the same.

If I was handling out free advice, I would suggest that they tell the Pope to kiss their ass and use birth control until they can feed their population. Maybe cut the throats of some crooked generals and politicians. But , hey , it's up to them.

My only loyalty is to the people of this country -- and any American who can't say the same should emigrate. We have deep poverty and extreme lack of opportunity in our inner cities and ,less noticably , in our rural countryside. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world --4 times worst than China. We have 40 million Americans with an annual income of less than $12,500.

Until that is fixed, the rest of the world can go fuck itself.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 4:56 PM

Speaking of the unusual situation in Washington and how it biases elite press views on immigration ...

Something I noticed after a number of visits to D.C. is how much white Washingtonians prefer African immigrants to American blacks. One reason is because on average the African blacks are much more obsequious toward whites than are the American blacks of Washington D.C., who are far more surly and slow-moving than the American blacks in, say, Chicago. The African-American checkout ladies at CVS drugstores always remind me of John F. Kennedy's saying that Washington D.C. combines Southern efficiency with Northern charm. The African immigrants, in contrast, are much more polite and thus make more desirable servants for our ruling elite. Immigrants are slowly pushing African-Americans out of Washington DC, and, to be frank, white Washingtonians aren't all that sorry to see them go.

This local pro-immigrant bias is slowly changing with the rise of Hispanic gangs in the DC area -- Matt, for example, wants to get a gun to protect himself from his Salvadoran neighbors (and to engage in target practice, we mustn't forget!)

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 14, 2007 5:09 PM

Income inequality is a meaningless concept: Sergey Brin and Larry Page increased income inequality when they became billionaires after Google went public, but they also created thousands of high-paying jobs and made tens of thousands of shareholders wealthier. The best way to reduce income inequality would be to instigate a recession or a depression.

I would think that lefties would be more concerned with increasing the living standards of the poorest Americans. If that is the case then importing millions of low wage, unskilled workers makes no sense, because it puts downward pressure on the wages of the working poor.

Posted by Fred | June 14, 2007 5:13 PM

Re Marco Pignone's comment : "The income inequality stats thus grossly overestimate the amount of genuine inequality as many on the low end become those on the high end in later years."
---------
Yeah, right.

Why don't you take a stroll through Anacostia in SE Washington DC? Or inner Baltimore. Or northwest Philly?

Come to think of it, why don't you do so at night. That way you can converse with the well-to-do locals over wine and desert at a sidewalk cafe.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 5:19 PM

"I don't care about people in other nations"

Well, at least he comes right out and says it.

And dear sweet baby jeebus, I think someone is sneaking a "Steve Sailer" parody in with this: e the "American blacks of Washington D.C., who are far more surly and slow-moving than the American blacks in, say, Chicago." Wow.

Posted by too many steves | June 14, 2007 5:24 PM

Re Steve Sailor parody and "American blacks of Washington D.C., who are far more surly and slow-moving than the American blacks in, say, Chicago."
---------

Yeah, but that's not as bad as sending thousands of Afro-Americans to die in Iraq for Haim Saban and throwing millions of them in jail for life because you've given their jobs to illegals in order get Hillary the swing votes in California, Texas, and Florida. Secure in the belief that you will still get 90% of the Afro-American vote because they are too stupid to realize how they're being screwed. I don't think even plantation owners in the Old South had the arrogance of our Democratic leadership.

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 5:38 PM

Plus, given the choice between giving inner city youth a chance to get out of the ghetto via a good education versus sucking up to the teachers unions, we know which way the vote is going to go, don't we?

Posted by Don Williams | June 14, 2007 5:41 PM

Matt,

You are too smart not to realize that you how weak your argument here is:

"It's obviously possible to both believe that something is a problem and also to not support every conceivable initiative to ameliorate it."

There is a difference between not supporting an effort to ameliorate a problem and supporting a policy that makes the problem worse.

"I, for example, think it's a problem that the streets in American cities are so dirty. I don't, however, think that we should execute people for littering."

But you do think we should enforce laws against throwing garbage in the streets, no? Obviously not with capital punishment, but with more reasonable responses like fines, right? Importing millions of unskilled workers to America is the equivalent in your analogy of emptying your kitchen garbage can in the street. You can't be in favor of clean streets and at the same time not be against people emptying their kitchen garbage cans into the street.

Posted by Harry | June 14, 2007 5:49 PM

jg:''The repubs get what they want, low wage workers still changing sheets at the MGM Grand [smear deleted]
''

Can you explain what smear you deleted?
full quote:
Dems get what they want, a path to higher wages for everyone(maybe), hopefully lots of future votes, and to avoid the specter of the US rounding up brown people and kicking them out of the country. The repubs get what they want, low wage workers still changing sheets at the MGM Grand and the opportunity to bash dems on tv and radio for wanting to coddle illegal immigrants and keep our borders open for disease carrying gay mexican terrorists to come here and date your daughter.

'The issue you don't seem to understand is that the Dem leadership wants the exact same thing. They just go about it in a slightly different fashion.'

I said they both want low wage workers right? So how am I missing the issue? I said one wants legals doing low wage work which may lead to all wages lifting and I said the other wants guest workers doing the low wage work.
Slightly different fashion? Is this where we start justifying our choice because they both suck anyway but at least the right loves the troops or something like that? They have completely different end results in mind. One wants to make a small group better off and they sell it to us by saying a rising tide lifts all boats. The other side wants to ensure everyone has a boat or at least a life jacket.

Posted by jg | June 14, 2007 6:56 PM

One reason is because on average the African blacks are much more obsequious toward whites than are the American blacks of Washington D.C., who are far more surly and slow-moving than the American blacks in, say, Chicago.

Nice use of statistics, there, Steve.

He's in rare form today, ain't he?

Posted by Jasper | June 14, 2007 6:59 PM

Matt, a good part of Kaus's book is dedicated to the work-ethic state and his plans to minimize the number of people in the under-class. Kaus's opposition to immigration reform comes because he believes that legalizing substantial numbers of illegal immigrants will worsen the condition of the underclass, particularly inner-city blacks. He is still fine with income inequality but he is fine with income inequality only after the underclass doesn't exist. In Kaus's utopia, there is no underclass, there is income inequality but social equality.

Posted by scritic | June 14, 2007 8:15 PM

The African-American checkout ladies at CVS drugstores always remind me of John F. Kennedy's saying that Washington D.C. combines Southern efficiency with Northern charm.

Seriously. They just don't have that non-black/Hispanic work ethic, as Fred would say.

Posted by Steve | June 14, 2007 8:33 PM

"Seriously. They just don't have that non-black/Hispanic work ethic, as Fred would say."

Fred wouldn't say that. He would probably say that Mexican immigrants have good work ethics; their kids, not as much. He would find the term "Hispanic" a little too general: Cuban-Americans don't have so much in common with Mexican Americans, for example.

Same with the term "black" with respect to work ethics. Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean often have good work ethics; native-born African Americans, not as much.

Posted by Fred | June 14, 2007 11:38 PM

While somebody could claim that the examples you provide in the first paragraph after the snip from Goldberg are straw-men, the logic that sustains them (But this would help this problem!) is the same as the logic that sustains the moronic argument of Goldberg and his reader. The point is that income inequality with the United States, including that to which immigration may contribute, should be something which is evaluated seriously instead of with one-liners. Read my blog!

Posted by Wido Incognitus | June 15, 2007 4:50 AM

While somebody could claim that the examples you provide in the first paragraph after the snip from Goldberg are straw-men, the logic that sustains them (But this would help this problem!) is the same as the logic that sustains the moronic argument of Goldberg and his reader. The point is that income inequality with the United States, including that to which immigration may contribute, should be something which is evaluated seriously instead of with one-liners. Read my blog!

Posted by Wido Incognitus | June 15, 2007 4:50 AM

Have you *read* Kaus' book? It cares about income inequality, it just wants to attack it by strengthening the safety net: health insurance, college opportunities, etc.

Illegal immigration hurts that too, as our overcrowded emergency rooms and urban schools (places that provide service regardless of legal residency) demonstrate.

The blogosphere spends too much time on finding examples of hypocricy and not enough talking about real research.

Posted by Jake | June 18, 2007 6:33 AM

Like several others, I have read Kaus' very interesting book and believe you are misrepresenting his position.

Posted by jult52 | June 18, 2007 9:29 AM

Sure it’s possible to oppose inequality, and not support every measure that might hypothetically reduce it. However, when you oppose the #1 step that would raise wages at the bottom of the economy AND reduce inequality, you have no credibility.

Sort of like declaring your concern about global warming, and then opposing any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions… No one is going to believe you and no one should.

The linkage between mass immigration and ever expanding inequality is strong. See Krugman’s writings on “Polarized America” (http://polarizedamerica.com/).

The linkage between mass immigration and declining wages is even stronger. In the decades after WWII, wages, productivity, and per-worker GDP rose more or less in lockstep. Since mass immigration resumed in the 1970s, wages for production workers have actually declined. Indeed, they have fallen back to the 1959 level.

If liberals / the left cared about workers, they would strongly oppose mass immigration, particularly of unskilled labor. Sadly, this is not the case. Instead, we have the likes of Teddy Kennedy crawling into bed with the worst of the bad (the “Essential Labor” coalition, Wal*Mart, etc.) to destroy the lives of American workers (including legal immigrants).

Posted by Peter Schaeffer | June 18, 2007 10:36 AM

Look, that's moronic. It's obviously possible to both believe that something is a problem and also to not support every conceivable initiative to ameliorate it. I, for example, think it's a problem that the streets in American cities are so dirty. I don't, however, think that we should execute people for littering. Nor do I think we should import Mauritanian slaves to clean the streets.

Matt 1, Strawman 0. But here in reality, there are Dems who *oppose* the guest worker portion of the grand immigration compromise precisely because it is likely to depress the wages of the unskilled already here. As noted above, it seems to be the business community that is insisting on that provision.

Which has led to Dems who support the compromise supporting the separately odious guest worker program. One might argue that politicians routinely compromise and take the good with the bad, but to argue, as Matt does, that there is no bad here, or no bad that can't be addressed short of extreme solutions, is absurd. Earnest progressives could simply oppose the guest worker program, and if that craters the bill, so be it.

In fact, that is what happened last week when the bill did crater. Let's cut to the WaPo:

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) does not like the immigration bill, either, but for entirely different reasons. Echoing the concerns of labor unions, he argues that the guest-worker program would depress wages and lead to foreigners taking good jobs that would otherwise go to U.S. citizens.

When the debate started late last month, Dorgan offered two amendments: one to kill the guest-worker program, and a second to water down the program to make it more acceptable to unions, by ending it after five years. The first failed by a large margin. But the second measure was defeated 49 to 48.

To close the gap, Dorgan and a GOP ally, Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), looked to Republicans who had voted against the sunset amendment two weeks ago but who were known to have qualms about the bill itself. The target list included five senators from states with illegal-immigration problems, or where the issue had a particular potency with conservative voters. Along with DeMint, the list named Sens. Jim Bunning (Ky.), Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), Elizabeth Dole (N.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.). Dole and Enzi face reelection next year.

After conversations with Dorgan and among themselves, four of the five decided to support Dorgan's late-night second effort. Moments before the vote, Republican leaders succeeded in talking Grassley back to their side.

Posted by Tom Maguire | June 18, 2007 6:03 PM

Why are workers, if their work is labeled from above "unskilled", due for targeting? It's not just the "worker programs" that will depress wages, it is the fact so many illegals are here now that have depressed the current wage market.

Why are those Americans who suffer now due to punishment?

And if you legalize the illegals, they will hit all sorts of new wage markets, like transportation, and depress wages there.

Democrats - why do there dreams of submersion in globalism trump the American people??

Posted by Karl | June 18, 2007 7:53 PM