Tara Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute made good points on immigration

on CSPAN today. Virtually every caller disagreed with her, no matter which line they called on. Most claimed that illegal immigrants steal jobs and sap social services. Jacoby said they don't steal jobs, and they only sap social services, if they do, because the US has its head up its ass about how many immigrants should be legal each year. She argues that the numbers should be raised to a realistic amount. I thought I heard her say the number is in the tens of thousands now. For the whole country! She says we're in a period similar to Prohibition now, and as with Prohibition, it's not workable and will have to be changed.

The Republican rank and file wants the borders to be closed, forceably, and enforcement to be more stringent. I think the Democrats should take the lead on bringing a repeal to this Prohibition. We should be arguing for raising the number of legal immigrants to a reasonable level, one that will reduce the numbers forced to cross at risk to their own lives and limbs. This is the only rational approach to the issue, and it will keep latinos voting Democratic, which can only be a positive thing. We should be proud to be the party of immigrants in a nation of immigrants.

from her. It may be that she sees her position as pro-business. But she made all sorts of points that I would make in a debate with a winger about immigration, though my angle is human rights and freedom of movement.

The corporate side of the Republican Party wants open borders and cheap wages.

The culture side of the Republican Party wants closed borders.

It's a fascinating fight, and shows who really has Bush's ear since he ain't stopping immigration.

For the life of me, I don't know what the Democrats' position is on immigration. I really don't.

She's anti-living wage, anti-minimum wage.
She and her point of view which you have been bamboozled by, would cut the heart out of the American working class.

Unfuckingbelievable!

I am not advocating adopting her program point by point or even at all. Good grief, man! Calm down.

I have no intention of calming down.

How? If the borders are sealed and all illegal workers are kicked out, will the middle managers who lost their jobs in the dot com boom start picking lettuce and taking care of other people's garden's?

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Why? What do you have against them?

PS: I'd like to have a reasonable discussion with you, and I will gladly if you lower the level of hysteria in your posts. :hi:

Their countries have less. Great then they can work there and build their countries up. Shouldn't that be what they do?
Are their countries overpopulated? Not my problem. They should work at controlling their birth rates. I'm more than willing to help them do that. My country, the USA, is ALREADY OVERPOPULATED TOO. We don't need to reach 350 million people living in this country, EVER.

I have nothing against them, but they are NOT my fellow citizens. I have fellow citizens living quite nearby THAT NEED BETTER PAYING JOBS, that need jobs PERIOD.
Allowing fly by night contractors to import coolie labor at will isn't helping AMERICANS. You presumably know this term, "Americans"--you have some familiarity or recognition of the phrase fellow Americans??? I'm speaking of people, who as my fellow citizens, HAVE A PRIOR CLAIM ON MY LOYALTIES AND ALLEGIANCE.

AND A PRIOR CLAIM ON YOURS, TOO!

(Fat fucking lot you care about THEM.)

I knew you weren't the great progressive you were pretending to be.

,...which advance the Mexican people's interests. Isn't that a progressive position?

;)

I want to see Mayor Lopez beat the crap out of Vincente Fox. Is that progressive enough?

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I'm not even going to bother reading your opus.

So true. Does no one consider that the Corporatist Oligarchs and their Quislings fully understand the free market effect of unregulated and unlimited labor?

Past periods of labor shortage brought increased investment in automation, thus leading to increased wages and living standards. So for me, open borders is a regressive, not Progressive, position, as it will lead to a race to the bottom for the vast majority of workers.

The same number of people will be coming. The difference is, the number of *illegal* workers will go down.

PS: Mr. Blankenship seems to believe that all these workers have to be sent back home now, or the scarcity that adds value to labor won't be realized.

:applause:

:eyes:

"You REALLY want to pretend you don't understand what floods of 3rd world temporary workers do to a manual labor market?"

exactly!

don't agree that immigrants use more of the social services. It has been my experience that they give to this government far more than they take.

She pointed out that undocumented workers paid $7 billion into SS last year, and none of them will see a dime of it.

You see they are torn between the fact that they can't stand minorities but on the other hand they love cheap unregulated labor. I guess cheap unregulated labor exploitation won.
hah, money always win.

when the lack of regulation would end and more sane regulation would follow. The way things are now, she claims, is far from ideal for anyone in the situation, whether they be workers or employers. What is needed is for the problem to be dealt with reasonably and head on. Americans need to recognize that immigrants are a vital part of the culture, society and economy and, as always, they add far more than they deplete.

Cheap labor always wins with the Cons. It is the organizing principle of the modern party...along with crony capitalism and imperialism.

of legal immigrants from the Americas and make it easier for them to work here? Or is that not consistent with progressive politics?

It is a good idea to encourge legal immigration.

All of us are immigrants here, except Native Americans. What right does this generation have to close the doors on those trying to get in behind us?

None. Free immigration and freedom of movement are fundamental rights. They're central to what America stands for.

:kick:

are immigrants.

the one saving grace of the Cold War was that it seemed to keep Americans humbler. Now American elitism and ethnocentricity run rampant

and so was Keith Richburg

But why was she full of cxrap. I didn't hear hear an ounce of crap coming out of her, though I only saw the last 20 minutes or so.

She is a bigot who views immigrants as "potential slaves/servants" and I'm not kidding.

I've watched her before. She needs to be stopped.

On edit: BTW, google The Manhattan Institute and "eugenics".

I'm willing to believe that anyone who spends any time at all at the Manhattan Institute is to be viewed with a great deal of skepticism. But I didn't hear her say anything unreasonable this morning. I understand that her frame is the capitalist frame. Nevertheless, I didn't hear her saying anything remotely bigoted today.

she is a bushgang shill

It's not legitimate to dismiss someone's arguments with an epithet. Please be more specific with your charges.

around the half way point of her time on air she told a lie.

wht epithet did I use?

Which she may well be, but I was looking for more substance. I don't want to defend her. My point is merely that she made a number of points about immigration, unpopular on both sides of the aisle, that I thought were well taken, specifically about the net gain immigration represents to the nation, contrary to popular belief. She may want immigration legalized for all the wrong reasons--i.e., to provide a cheap and uninterrupted supply of labor. I think if it's legalized, it must benefit the immigrant workers as well as all American workers.

Half the party wants to close the borders and half the party wants cheap labor that comes from unfettered immigration. Whoever wins this fight is going to determine the future of the Party.

Democrats, of course, seemingly have no opinion on this issue.

the borders. I think the party should push to rationalize the immigration policy. We should be for more freedom of movement between the US and other countries in the Americas. We should make it easier for Mexicans, for example, to apply for lengthy stays in the US in which they will have many more rights and protections than they currently have.

foreign workers not immigrants imported then deported after being paid subminimum wage without taxes or benefits.
REAL NICE.

please educate yourself on this issue.

Thanks for putting the words in my mouth.

;)

and that's EXACTLY what they mean.

I actually said she made good points THIS MORNING on CSPAN. I did not say I agreed with every fucking thing she said. Good grief, man!

was that you wanted to raise the total resident "guest worker" numbers to the point that people no longer sneak in.

That's the same as saying we have an open border. Come get jobs in America, compete for the highest lowest bidder, make people hoping to live at a tradition first world standard of living UNEMPLOYED, work at half what the minimum wage is, contribute to sprawl and ecological despoilation of this country, help developers perpetuate their reckless cycle of unsustainable, unamanaged, suburban development/decay/flight to further exurban distances by providing them with MORE AND MORE 3rd world labor.

What you ACTUALLY SAID is fucking terrible.

I said the number of people from the Americas should be raised. What is the alternative? The status quo is unsatisfactory, agreed? Are you on the side of the Barney Fifes training their pistols on the Arizona border trying to keep out the riff-raff? Is that the answer?

Not new citizens, GUEST WORKERS. Green card holders. Temporary CHEAP LABOR whether legal or illegal.

You can't be serious about this childishly silly dichotomy you just proposed --or ARE YOU????

"Either you are with the idiots at the border or you are with me, Burtworm"?

You aren't really SERIOUSLY saying that, are you? You aren't REALLY saying our options are vigilante lynch mobs, or open borders ARE YOU?

Are you pretending that you haven't been employing a childishly silly dichotomy yourself? Either I agree with you or I'm a fascist coolie hiring sucker of the right wing?

Let's lower the temperature a little and try to be reasonable, shall we? Please.

What is the alternative to the present situation? How do you propose to fix it?

But thanks for posting. My SO is actually working with a task force that she's a member of, and it's interesting to hear that some conservatives aren't complete sheet-wearers (or hypocritical business interests) when it comes to immigration.

Is she a bigot? She seemed reasonable enough, for someone who works at the MI.

She's NOT pro civil/human rights, at all. She's not interested in the best interests of either immigrants or Americans but rather a tool for the corporacrats.

despite an onslaught of ignorance about the drain immigrants are on the US economy from all sides. Obviously we don't want to adopt a system that permits coporations to abuse and exploit immigrants as much as or more than they already are being exploited. But we don't want to perpetuate the myth that these immigrants are more costly to the US than they really are. They are a net gain, not a net drain. And not just to corporations.

,...laws or basic humane programs to address poverty and homelessness or advancing economic justice.

pressure Mexico.

:think:

She is parroting a message developed by her Corporate masters to best sell unlimited immigration in order to flood the American workforce with cheap labor, thus destroying the last remnants of worker rights.

I have no problem with a regulated guest worker program, where employers have to prove a bona fide shortage, and pay living wages and benefits to workers hired through the program.

But the best laid plans of corporatists sometimes go astray. Why couldn't increasing the number of legal workers have the very different effect of improving conditions for workers in places where illegal workers are now being abused? Is it necessarily a negative to change the status of those who are illegal now to legal? Would that necessarily be detrimental to American workers, too? Wouldn't one effect possibly be that the wages of these workers would go up, which might actually discourage companies from hiring them over Americans, if given a choice?

I work a fair amount with her and had a pretty hard time at first accepting her because of her association with the Manhattan Institute and she is in fact a Republican, but nevertheless, she's the first to criticize the reactionary anti-immigrant sentiment coming from the right-wing, and to a growing extent, from the left.

;)

Thanks.

immigration but am less so now. Many of the jobs African Americans used to have are now being done by immigrants, some of them illegal. It is not true that Americans do not want the jobs that the immigrants are now doing. In the South many blacks were gardeners, maids, hotel workers,etc. Now, in many instances, those jobs are being given to immigrants. African Americans and poor whites cannot compete with people who are willing to work under the table for less than minimum wage. Furthermore, in some locations, the tax burden of the older residents in a community has risen substantially as the children of illegal immigrants attend public schools. I read where in one little town the property taxes almost doubled in a short period because of the great increase in the number of children of immigrants attending public schools. So, I really have mixed feeling about immigration.

They would not be able to work under the table, and in fact, enforcement could focus on those who tried to get around the reformed laws.

The important thing is to recognize that the problem can only be fixed if people are willing to fix it rationally. And the effect of legalizing immigration for economic reasons on the well-being of American workers should be a prime consideration in how the reform takes place.

Meatpacking jobs (in the midwest) paid a middle class wage ($20/hr) in the 70's. These jobs provided good health care and retirement benefits because they were unionized. As was related by a worker from this era, the social contract was that it was hard, dangerous work that left most workers crippled when they retired, and the compensation reflected this.

Over the 70's and 80's non-union plants were opened, and the unionized plants closed or the unions busted. As compensation was much lower at the non-union plants, U.S. citizens abandoned the industry, and the labor void was filled with immigrant's. Since the supply of this labor is virtually unlimited, compensation and workplace safety has plummeted.

The 70's era worker, in the interview I heard, indicated that there would be no problem attracting U.S. citizens to the industry if compensation and workplace conditions were similar to the 70's.

Here is an excerpt from a study that describes the change in the meatpacking industry in Storm Lake, Iowa:

Meatpacking And The Migration Of Refugee And Immigrant Labor To Storm Lake, Iowa
http://migration.ucdavis.edu/cf/comments.php?id=154_0_2_0

The Hygrade workforce was primarily male and of European descent. Only in its last few years of operation, in the late l970s to early 1980s, did a few women work on the plant floor. The plant’s workforce was from Storm Lake and surrounding communities. Prior to the mid-1980s, Storm Lake was almost exclusively Anglo, and this homogeneity was reflected in Hygrade’s workforce. Many of Hygrade’s workers put in thirty years or more at the plant, reflecting a low turnover. For many, their jobs supported a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. Average annual incomes were about $30,000, but some senior workers earned up to $40,000 or more in Hygrade’s last year of operation.

In October 1981, Hygrade closed its plant and Storm Lake lost five hundred jobs. Community leaders immediately set about attracting a new buyer for the plant.

In April 1982 IBP announced its purchase of the plant for $2.5 million. After extensive renovation, this became the company's first pork-packing facility (IBP previously had processed only beef.) IBP’s move into pork processing signaled a major transformation of the industry.

When IBP opened its doors in September 1982, its workforce did not resemble the old Hygrade crew. Hundreds of former Hygrade workers applied, but fewer than thirty were hired. IBP would look beyond the Storm Lake community for its laborers. Beginning wages were only $6 an hour, and health benefits become available only after six months on the job. (Today, starting wages are $7 an hour.) The new plant had higher productivity expectations than the old plant. Injury rates climbed, and high employee turnover increased the strain on local labor supplies.


It appears to me that (uncontrolled) immigrant labor fills a void that it perpetuates, low wages that make the jobs undesirable due to an oversupply of labor, the classic supply/demand relationship. All the current immigration policy of this country does is create a black market for labor, exploiting those who are here illegally, and driving down the wages and working conditions so for legal residents and immigrants the job is a step backward.

Of course, from the lofty perch of a tenured teaching position or defined benefit/trust fund annuity, the impact of the labor black market on the middle and lower class working people of this country seems to be, well, no problem at all.

...stop the flood of illegal immigration?

Or stopping the flood of immigrants? Because if you legalize the ones who are here, of course the number of illegal immigrants will go down.

do you legalize all of them?

What if you made it *illegal* to pay anyone *under* a certain wage, no matter what their nationality, illegal not to pay taxes on their employment to the locality where they're employed?

and I really had a problem with her. She kept on about how the illegal immigrants were hard workers and did the jobs no one here wanted. How the price of crabs would go up if the owners had to pay naturalized or born-here citizens to do the work and we would all lose.

My take is that generalizations are always incorrect to some degree. Not all illegal immigrants are hard-working-I'll-work-for-slave-wages people. Not all Americans feel that picking oranges or being a chambermaid is beneath them. As a college student, I did all kinds of menial labor and was happy to get my check. I have worked with illegal immigrants who did were lazy. I HATE generalizations. People only use them to make people believe they know what they are talking about and it raises my hackles.

Also, so what if the price of crab goes up because you have to pay people a living wage. Who says we have the right to cheap everything? Wal-Mart? I don't see us all demanding our beluga and Moet and Chandon at cut-rate prices because we're American citizens. If something costs more, we buy it when we can afford it or it is a special occasion. Maybe we will stop over-harvesting of our oceans if demand goes down a little because prices go up.

Anyway - that's how I felt watching her. Yes, we should allow more immigrants, but not for her reasons. My .02

Where I agreed with her, however, is on the question of whether immigrants add or detract from the nation as a whole. She may think they add because they're cheap. I think they add because they're productive. I think they should be better rewarded for their productivity, whether it means we pay more for crabs or not.

to prop up our social security system, too. Countries like Italy with a seriously aging population and almost non-existent immigration are having trouble right now.

Whether an American, foreign-born national, or pass-carrying-temporary-alien (however they are going to sell it) is doing the work, a living wage is the key to winning my heart on this matter. I don't believe in paying people poorly because they are desperate and you have them in a corner. That sucks.

Furthermore, these immigrants are paying something like $7 billion into the SS system that they'll never see a dime of. That sucks too.

Time for a beer.

:toast:

A toast to reason and persistence.

you kept replying "good grief" to blankenship, and I still have the mental image of Charlie Brown in my head! It's all good, then.

He started it. ;)

What we need is a guest worker program to stop the exploitation of immigrants and end the flooding of the labor market due to uncontrolled immigration. This will address illegal immigration by dealing with demand (employers).

Some thoughts on immigration policy from John Sayles which think sums up my feelings on this issue.

John Sayles
From:A People's Democratic Platform

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040802&s=forum


The Democratic platform should call for an end to the hypocrisy of our immigration policy. Our current policy, an enormously expensive cat-and-mouse game, most notably on our southern border, calls on the INS to enforce immigration laws that are openly expected to be ignored by countless US industries and private employers. Some sort of regulated guest-worker program is needed.

Once it is in place, if immigrants continue to enter the country illegally and can't find work, word will filter back and the numbers will decrease dramatically. While in our country, however, those guest workers need to be protected from exploitation--to be assured they will be paid for their work, that their working conditions will meet state and federal safety standards and that they will receive no less than the federally mandated minimum wage (which needs to be raised).

Employers would be required to withhold some percentage (perhaps the equivalent of federal taxes and Social Security) from wages to help defray the costs of the program. Penalties for hiring foreign workers outside of the program would be high enough (and sufficiently enforced) to end the black market in labor that is thriving now.

Protecting all workers in this country is an important first step toward the amendment or abolition of NAFTA and the protection of workers throughout the world.