Economist George Borjas probably won't be teaching at Hah-vurd for very long.

-----

Economist: Mass Immigration to U.S. Is World’s ‘Largest Anti-Poverty Program’ at the Expense of Americans

by John Binder

29 Oct 2017

Washington, D.C.

Decades of mass immigration to the United States, with more than 1.5 million legal immigrants entering the country every year, is the world’s “largest anti-poverty program” at the expense of blue-collar American workers and the middle class, says a Harvard University economist.

In an interview with Talking Points Memo, economist George Borjas detailed how more than five decades of mass immigration of low-wage foreign nationals to the U.S. have negatively impacted America’s poor, working class, and middle class in the labor force.

Borjas explains:

"Since 1965, we have admitted a lot of low-skilled immigrants, and one way to view that policy is that we were running basically the largest anti-poverty program in the world. That is actually not a bad thing at all. Except someone is going to have to pay the cost for that.

"This is the question that most progressives don’t want to face up to. They really want to believe that immigrants are manna from heaven. That everybody is really better off and that everybody is happy forever after. What they refuse to confront is the reality that nothing in the world is like manna from heaven. In any policy change, some people benefit a lot and some people don’t. And this point also applies to immigration, which has created the dynamics of where we are now.

"When it comes to how much Americans have suffered because of mass immigration, Borjas says his “rule of thumb is that if immigration increases the number of workers by 10 percent, the wage of workers probably drops by about 3 percent.”

​

“The largest loss is probably the wage drop suffered by the workers who now face more competition in the labor market,” Borjas said.

“It is not a huge drop, but it is certainly not zero. And we should all find it particularly worrisome when this wage drop is imposed on workers who can least afford it. And this obviously tends to aggravate the forces that lead to greater inequality in our economy,” Borjas continued.

Borjas said that Americans are not only negatively impacted by immigration in the workforce but also in how much they must pay in social services for new arrivals.

“The other big loss that we need to think about in terms of low-skill immigration is the increased cost of government services that we provide to them,” Borjas said. “According to the latest National Academy report, this number could easily exceed over $50 billion a year.”

The cost of legal immigration noted by Borjas is just one component of the cost of overall immigration to the U.S. For instance, a recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that illegal immigration costs American taxpayers $116 billion a year, as Breitbart News reported.

Legislation to reduce the burden of legal and illegal immigration on Americans has been set forward by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act, which President Trump has endorsed.

Under the RAISE Act, the recommendations of Civil Rights Leader Barbara Jordan would be fulfilled, as the bill would cut legal immigration levels in half — reducing immigration to 500,000 new immigrants a year — while also transforming the current low-skilled immigration system into one based on the merit and skills of foreign nationals.

(Source: Breitbart News)

 

Maybe we could use the money we now spend on illegals for healthcare for the real citizens of our country.

 

I agree. Until the Democrats figure this out they will continue to lose elections to Republicans. Of course, the Democrats have other things to learn too, but let's deal with immigration.

Immigration interferes with nearly everything else liberals want to achieve in the United States. It contributes to the growing income gap. It depletes the environment. A diverse work force is more difficult to organize into labor unions than a homogeneous work force. As more non whites move to the United States, more white vote Republican.

I like immigrants. Nevertheless, the more people there are looking for jobs the harder it is to get a job, the harder it is too keep a job, and the less the job pays while it lasts.

 

Good grief, a 180 degree turnaround on affordable healthcare! I gotta admit, I'm just a little proud of you right now.

 

Ain't this a great country?

A college professor (granted, a professor from a top tier school) issues his proclamation on some issue, and it instantly gets credibility.
Did we learn nothing from earlier instances where some whacked up professor makes a declaration, causes a shit storm, and later is found to be wrong?
Jesus

 

there are 65 million refugees.....

US will take 45,000 a year....

But plans are underway to house them closer to their own country so they can return when the time arrives...

 

As long as liberals continue to quote some nutty liberal professors that agree with them as "gospel" I'll continue to do the same with not-quite-so-liberal professors that agree with me.

 

It cannot be argued that the high rate of immigration that followed the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 has caused real wages for most Americans to rise, because they have not. I read recently that real average wages for white men have declined since 1972.

Immigration is not the only reason. I do not see how you can dismiss it as an important reason.

 

One should be able to evaluate evidence and arguments from liberals and conservatives. Just because one does not like what someone else has to say does not mean that it is not true.

 

The record's stuck...the record's stuck...the record's stuck...

 

Funny thing is....this one is not wrong

 

Just because you want to have credibility in your leftist beliefs, it doesn't mean that it's right.

 

just wait in about a year or maybe 18 months the stock market will crash and we will be in a depression worse than all 4 of those before it

 

Nah.

It'll be bad, but not as bad as you want to think.

Had a communist/socialist not been elected in '08, the world would have gotten out of the subprime crash much sooner.

Business as usual.

 

You cannot tell the difference between truth and falsehood. You only understand what you like and dislike.

 

True dat.

The Law of Rationality states that "one ought to hold only to those conclusions that are based on adequate evidence."

However, you need to look at your own side for just a moment....

The nutty college kids tearing shit up and committing other acts of violence on college campuses because some speaker might say something that "offends" them.

The number of young people who believe that all speech that they consider to be "hate speech" (basically any speech that doesn't toe the PC line) needs to be outlawed.

The entire PC culture created by liberals where a "mortal sin" is to "offend" somebody (as long as the one "offended" is in a special PC approved class, that is).

Your side is chock full of emotionalism and irrationality.

Add to this the fact that your side is made up of wannabe little dictators who want to cram their own ideology down the throats of everybody at the point of a jack-booted big government gun....

Thus your side is made up of dangerously irrational wannabe dictators, totalitarians, and thugs and are a threat to freedom loving people everywhere.

 

"Your side is chock full of emotionalism and irrationality."

Your side continues to believe that global warming is a hoax, even though storms and droughts get more serious, and summers get hotter.

Your side also continues to believe that tax cuts for the rich lead to more and better paying jobs for those who are not rich, while paying off the national debt. Never mind that this did not happen under Reagan and George the Lesser.

I do not really have a "side." I am neither a partisan nor am I an ideologue. I oppose and violate the constraints of political correctness. I agree with Charles Murray, and think that college students who prevent someone they dislike from speaking at their colleges should be permanently expelled.

I agree with Trump on immigration. I am opposed to affirmative action. I am in favor of a harsher criminal justice system than anything currently being discussed.

 

So here's the thing. This Harvard economist makes the case that "low skilled immigrants" depress wages for the middle and lower class in America.
It could indeed be the case that immigration depresses wages for the middle and lower class. The thing is, he doesn't document how he got to that conclusion. What we learned from earlier "mass immigration" was that the first generation of immigrants take low/no wage jobs, struggle to integrate, and tend to be discriminated against by us 'Mericans. But, the second generation and beyond integrate, become successful, and contribute to American Society.

This economic guru doesn't look to the longer term impact of immigration, doesn't even prove or demonstrate how it was he decided wages are depressed because of immigration, nor does he eliminate other possible causes of wage depression.

But, he's a HARVARD PROFESSOR! His position means that he is automatically granted credence for his utterings.
Nonsense.
Einstein at one point said that reliable nuclear power was impossible. A Harvard professor dismissed computers as a fad, and that the market for them would never exceed 5 computers worldwide.
Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, said in 1880 that Edison's light bulb was little more than a fad. Likewise, Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted that the electric light would go dark with the world's fair where it was introduced, never to be seen again.
And economists are infamous for "getting it wrong". They are perhaps the only "experts" who get paid whether they are proven right or wrong with their predictions; imagine a rocket scientist getting it wrong a couple of times, and remaining head of NASA engineering. An economist gets it wrong in predicting the stock market, and they get paid either way.
The notion that immigration depresses wages deserves study, and an objective look at how immigration impacts a society, but Shooter is loath to take as Gospel the spew of a Harvard economist who can't be bothered to document his conclusions.

 

The turn of the last century was also a period of glaring economic inequality, and for much the same reason: there were lots of people applying for jobs.

Now many of the deplorable, gaping hinds of flyover country dislike anyone who looks and sounds different then they do. They dislike the sight and sound of foreign languages.

I am not that way at all.

Nevertheless, I recognize that by the law of supply and demand more wage seekers mean lower wages, higher prices, and incidentally higher profits.

The higher profits are the reason Republican politicians are rarely honest about this issue. They know that most registered Republicans want fewer immigrants. They also know that the Republican donor class wants more immigrants.