Social media has turned Republican & Democratic Parties into host bodies for 3rd party candidates.
Thanks to a commenter for the pointer, although Tyler Cowen also saw it.. The analysis strikes me as very Gurri-esque.
And get this line:
Each party has an unmentionable Issue X that divide its voters. Each overestimated their ability to keep X out of the campaign.
Speaking ow which, let me say one more thing about immigration. If you believe that immigration is the main reason (or even a major reason) that low-skilled workers in America are having a tough time, then (a) you are entitled to make a big issue out of immigration but (b) I do not share your belief.
To get back to an economy where low-skilled workers can earn the sort of incomes, relative to highly-educated workers, that they could earn in 1965, you would have to squeeze an awful lot of toothpaste back into the tube: computers, the shift from goods to services, the emergence of China and India, and the decline of the traditional family. You could send home 100 percent of the illegal immigrants and I think at best a tiny amount of toothpaste gets back into the tube.
I’ll grant you that low-skilled American workers would have plenty of problems without the inundation of immigration we’ve had in recent decades. But doesn’t the overload of unskilled immigrants just make things worse for them?
Also, the bad effects of excessive immigration are not necessarily limited to the depressing effect on the wages of low-skilled workers. But I’m sure you disagree with that, too.
I suspect, however, that you would not change your opinion about immigration even if – hypothetically – you were presented with irrefutable proof that it has a net negative on American society as a whole. Because I get the strong impression from all high-immigration advocates that they operate from the moral axiom that it is illegitimate for a government to give priority to the interests of its own citizens over those of outsiders. The more “charitable” view this as rent-seeking; the more unhinged compare it to Nazism.
The debate largely takes place about the impact of policies on American citizens because that’s the value shared by all participants.
When it comes to caring about non-citizens, I’d phrase the difference in values less starkly. Almost everyone cares more about themselves than their friends, more about friends than acquaintances, and more about acquaintances than strangers. The moral question you raise as I’d phrase it is whether caring drops to zero at the border rather than whether it drops with distance.
If in your hypothetical the benefit to an immigrant from taking a job is 100 times the gross harm done to the low skilled native who was temporarily displaced (leaving it as a subject for debate whether there was net harm to current citizens as a group after considering second order effects). I can imagine someone with an internationalist temperament saying that they care more about the citizen, but not 100 times more.
“To get back to an economy where low-skilled workers can earn the sort of incomes, relative to highly-educated workers, that they could earn in 1965, you would have to squeeze an awful lot of toothpaste back into the tube: computers, the shift from goods to services, the emergence of China and India, and the decline of the traditional family. You could send home 100 percent of the illegal immigrants and I think at best a tiny amount of toothpaste gets back into the tube.”
I think this is well said and the crux of the issue — folks like me who disagree with you (at least I hope) should acknowledge that those factors you list do play a role in helping to keep low-skill wages down (or low-skill families from flourishing, in the case of the break-down of the two parent family.) BUT, I would argue with you about (a) just how much toothpaste gets back in the tube if we adopt a sensible immigration policy and (b) how much easier it might be to tackle some of our other problems (i.e. the decline of the traditional family.)
You are a delightful opponent on this issue — this is true of only a few smart internet personalities.
If you wanted to start a business that relied heavily on low skilled labor would you prefer
1. An open flow of low skilled labor in the country
or
2. A constricted flow that could be dramatically altered at any time
Your view only makes sense if you look only at supply, and view low skilled labor as an intrinsic quality (also you have to ignore real wages to a degree and focus on nominal).
I agree that the cake is already baked up to some point, even though I think immigration played an important role along the way, but two issues:
1) Less importantly – Why keep digging?
2) More importantly – If there is no path back to the 60’s for the working class, and technology is only going to push us further along the path, then some measure of public support is politically inevitable. And probably more than a little. If so, why do we want to expand the pool of the formerly working + extremely low wage class that will require this support? Does it help the pool we have to split the pie up further? Is it libertarian to increase the number of dependents on the state when you know that’s exactly what you are doing?
I think immigration and the minimum wage are the most talked about issues because they’re easy to grasp and the most visible targets.
Changing them could both incrementally improve the plight of the working class (possibly), but I think the hard part of the problem is that the most important impediments are much more scattered and lack a clear villain, so there’s no political will to fix them.
In particular, the hodge podge of supply-side restrictions that distort where people can live, how they can attend school, and whether or not they can consume health care create huge amounts of artificial scarcity that disproportionately affect the lower class.
Each of these sectors desperately needs its own version of a Wal-Mart.
Again the primary issue is not that immigrants are now a major cause of unemployment, it’s that the open borders policy pushed (secretly) by both parties will in the future lead to a number of obvious problems (budget, assimilation, employment, etc).
I think those issues ultimately run downhill of the fact that large blocs of people lack the appropriate human capital to be employable.
That is probably true, but it doesn’t address my comment.
My point was that a lot of people’s immigration issues are employment issues in disguise.
I consider this an unknown. If immigrants are more employable because they are cheaper, are they dodging some fixed costs placed upon employing natives?
I agree with Kling and Bechtel (who seem to agree with each other) and add some more things.
Most politics now seems to be about dramatic emotional issues of very high impact to the individuals involved, but low or no impact to society as a whole. So they make for leverage and drama but may not be good topics for national or even state level government to address.
1. If all “illegal” immigrants were magically teleported out of the US tomorrow, would employment among non-high school graduates change at all? After a year? 5 years?
2. If all murders of all sorts went to zero in the US tomorrow, would it change *median* life expectency by more than a few days? (Even if the murder rate in the US is much worse than say much smaller Sweden, it’s still a rare thing in our lives, though obviously huge to those it befalls.)
3. If some “medicare for all” system was somehow magically created, would it change median life expectency, median sound health, or even median consumption and application of useful health care at all? (Keep in mind the reports that substantial numbers of people who are eligibile for *medicaid* – literally free – choose not to bother with it…)
4. The US already does a better-than-anybody job of “tax the rich” (the highest effective progressivity in the world) – would outright expropiation actually yield more net resources for governement programs to use? After 5 years? After 10?
5. Would massive funding, or vouchers, or any other “radical” restructuring of education have any actual effect across an entity the size of the US?
6. Would a carbon tax actually change CO2 emissions in any meaningful way, and would any change actually be faster than that wrough by technology change alone?
And for all of these (and I’m sure more) there are cases of “somehow made it worse” and “well, yes, a little bit, but created problem …”
And none of them address a variety of structural realities, that are also very difficult to fix. (Could we *really* expend medical education, thus increasing supply and lowering prices, *and* attract more people with the right qualities to such careers? In any reasonable period of time?)
Today in the US you cannot successfully run for office by announcing “we’re actually very near the efficient margin of how things can be, therefore I promise not to screw with anything!” So instead office seekers promise to do various levels of radical but in the end hopeless things….
I agree that we’re probably close to the efficient margin on things like taxation, energy production, and high end medicine.
I think we’re pretty far off from the margin on things like housing policy, education and low end medicine.
High end medicine and low end medicine are hard to tell from each other because they’re bundled together in your insurance, but consistent access to 1980’s era medical care at cheap prices would greatly behoove many many people (myself included)………probably for Hansonian reasons.
I think there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in education, but the issue is that improvements in education would take a long time to manifest, even if they’re important and substantial.
The low-hanging fruit in education is that it can be made cheaper.
Hence the reason it’s low hanging fruit.
Isn’t Trump’s defining feature and appeal that he will say anything? I don’t see his stance on immigration as all that remarkable. I think the most you can say for certain is he knows it will get play.
I also don’t understand the constant charge of racism agains his supporters. Had anyone asked them? What I see them saying is mostly about appreciating someone willing to be offensive.
I know meaning is old-fashioned, but just assuming something incorrect about immigrants (that Mexico sends us criminals) is not racism. In fact, saying Mexico sends us their worst is a non-racist statement if racism means they are all bad. Now who this appeals to and how cosmopolitans assume people take it to me is speculative. But Trump…he be trollin. And I think people mainly like that. And the knee jerks overreaction to anything “racist” means of course he is going to go there.
I’m not even sure I can say that I wish he hadn’t made the debate about immigration. In one debate they were bear-baiting Russia and China. Less of that too, way less!
Well if you mean a well paying factory job then no but a higher minimum wage then yes.
Immigration bears on many more fronts than just unskilled wages though, social costs, cultural costs, budgetary costs, assimilation, integration, public goods, resources, borders, law, crime, terrorism, skilled protectionism, language, values, views.
You like to say that exit is better than voice. The best way to think of these candidates – Sanders yes, but Trump especially – is as a choice for a kind of ‘exit’ from the establishment lane of the respective party’s politics, because voice hasn’t been working.
It’s an exit because many people believe that nothing short of voting for these fringe candidates can really teach the party establishments a necessary lesson and make them pay attention and listen again. Maybe it still won’t be enough, but every other ‘voice’-like thing has been tried and proven ineffective.
The party establishments play a vitally necessary role in a democracy of mediating and tempering the chaotic whims and caprices of popular impulses. But the current elite stewards of both parties have become so insulated from and unrepresentative of their own constituencies that they threaten to neutralize the ability of their institutions to perform this essential function and to abandon the field to the fringe. Glen Reynolds likes to say, “we need better elites.” They are to blame, but we are all going to pay the price.
True enough. But three things.
1. If things are bad for those folks already, then why squeeze even more toothpaste and makes things worse? What’s wrong with the logic of, “if you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.” Even Reform Conservatives like Reihan Salam (and even Thomas Friedman too) say that while we should be humane towards the illegals already present, we should also get immigration under control now to help tighten-up the supply side of the low-skill labor market for the sake of both natives and immigrants that are already here.
2. The family-breakdown problem is not independent of the low-skill-wage problem. Decent earning power is part of what makes a man ‘marriageable’. If you mitigate the latter problem, you will probably ameliorate the former.
3. The truth is that our political system doesn’t know what else to do about the problems of the lower working class except to throw more money at them, one way or another, to help them afford a better lifestyle. It certainly has no demonstrated competency at doing anything else.
And it’s reasonable to predict that if things get worse in the future then more and more resources are going to be allocated towards that class to keep them afloat and to contain what would otherwise be a lot of negative externalities originating in a lot of social pathology and anti-social behaviors.
But it’s also a reasonable position to say that our society has no politically stable and affordable way to sustain generous subsidies for the low-skilled working class while simultaneously permitting de-facto open immigration of tens of millions or more low-skill workers.
Items in the toothpaste:
1) If you use 1965 shouldn’t Japan be before the emergence of China and India? Anybody who complains about the US union manufacturer model, I go back the terrible US cars were in the 1970s and how Japan Inc.out competed them in the 1970s and 1980s. (However Japan is even better example as they are truly sitting on a true demographic spiral.)
2) It is Change of the traditional family not just breakdown. I would put on top because in 1965 the market supported higher male wages to female wages and the goal of most married women was a good home. After WW2, that is how we go the baby boom and kept a low divorce rate as women did not have divorce options. (It should be noted there was more housework in the 1965.) Realize many of the successful women of today were PTA or leaders in 1965 of yesteryear.
3) The best to make on illegal immigration is the total of illegal aliens has stabilized at ~11 – 12M the last 6 – 7 years. Living in Southern California I can tell the number of illegal immigrants is not as high as it was in 2007.
Arnold,
Everyone knows about automation. Nobody expects everything to magically change back to the way it was. Japan has automation too, probably more of it, but it hasn’t caused the kind of problems immigration/NAMs have caused in the west. There is no inherent reason why getting richer (increased economic potential) should cause social and cultural collapse.
Automation doesn’t explain Ferguson/Burning of American Cities, political correctness, why every major city has large no-go zones, why our entire educational system revolves around racial issues, disparate impact lawsuits, etc.
Maybe 1965 jobs aren’t the same anymore, but why aren’t 1965 social statistics or 1965 social mores possible? People make a big deal about how some things have improved since the crack epidemic in 1990, but I always go back pre-60s revolution social statistics and everything that came after it looks dramatically worse no matter what date you pick (and BTW, in my own city we are already back to 1990 murder stats). Are you telling me that because we got richer there was just no way to avoid crime and social breakdown? How does that make sense?
I don’t think this is hard to figure out, places without NAMs don’t have these criminal and dysfunctional problems, even when drugs are illegal (the favorite hobby horse to explain away everything). You add NAMs and systems break, just look at the rape statistic breakdown in Sweden. Japan has more automation then us, where are the riots and kangaroo courts? There will always be some down and out whites, but they are limited in numbers and don’t behave as badly as their NAM counterparts. They also don’t organize socially and politically in the same way.
Even leaving aside the supply/demand labor issues for a moment, lets just talk about three things:
1) Immigrants of the kind America gets are net tax liabilities, as will be true of their descendants. This puts strains on the system for obvious reasons.
2) Immigrants reduce social capital and social trust, even outside the political context. This can be seen in the statistics or just walking through large swaths of many American cities.
3) Immigrants vote for leftists, and without even the parts of leftism you probably like. A world without immigrants is one that would be less leftist, and a world where they are one day a majority will be leftism without any of the liberal components.
This is what a majority NAM world will vote for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk
If this were an educational problem we could claim assimilation would fix it. But its not an educational issue, its a genetic issue. That’s why assimilation hasn’t happened. And don’t say the western government will stop this from getting out of hand, because it hasn’t. They have their own sharia courts in their western urban ghettos. They give into every demand they make, because votes are votes and EBT cards are corporate bottom lines. That’s what happens when your elite has no positive vision for human existence beyond amoral striving.
Even when being in the west does make people less “Islamic/third worlder” its not because they become more western, its because they devolve into a kind of secular thug underclass culture typified by American blacks.
On the issue of families I think that a world without immigrants would make things easier. For one its a world that would be less leftist and therefore policies would support families. This would also be true in the cultural and social arena in addition to the political. How do you expect to promote Charles Murray’s virtues in a world of permanent leftism and tribal big man racial politics? Any group that did succeed in creating a positive feedback loop would create a “disparate impact” and be torn down.
Most families just want to live in a safe neighborhood, have a decent education for their children, pay for social insurance in case someone gets sick, and otherwise be left alone by the government. Within their specific voluntarily chosen communities they may have different social mores, and they would like the option to actually choose those communities and live the way they want (not be told they are un-diverse and they aren’t allowed to live the way they want because it violates some liberals idea of the correct way to live). It would also be nice if you could choose your neighbors without having someone with the racial dot map spreadsheet tell you your community is now racist so we are section 8-ing a bunch of thugs in there.
You want stable families, let people be Mormons. The PC left doesn’t want to let people be Mormons though, god forbid someone actually succeed in life instead of being an androgynous childless urban striver. That’s a DISPARATE IMPACT, and besides those backwards hicks don’t embrace their sterile modern “values”. It doesn’t matter if most normal people reject PC, they get NAMs to vote 90% in their favor in exchange for free cell phones and the right to blame whitey for their failures.
In my own city the local government resembles some African countries. The headlines of our black mayor and black police chief are pathetic. The Lt. Commander of police had his own son stab his roommate to death in a knife fight. This is the world of the majority NAM voter.
You want to import more of those people?!? Why?
What it comes down to is a vision of the purpose of life. I think the purpose of life is for people to find fulfillment through work, family, community, and faith based on the classic values of white middle class society. I think government policy and social mores should all be oriented in that direction. If something isn’t helping normal people live safe and fulfilling lives its counter productive.
What open borders people want, by default of their actions, is to recreate the third world in America. As someone else put bluntly:
“Reminder: This is what america does. It uses unprecedented and unsustainable prosperity to import illegals to slaughter animals and fry their meat so that we can stuff it down blacks throats until they’re too fat to walk.
It literally trains people in the cutting edge of math, science, finance and management to erect offshore platforms to suck up the carbonized remains of extinct species in order to provide the necessary fuel for the mexican-black cycle.
I guess i never really grasped the goal of civilization before. Why did Newton discover calculus? What are Maxwell’s equations for? Why did Mendeleev deduce the periodic properties of elements? The answer to these and to all questions: to stuff blacks with fried meat until they become crippled from overeating, then to provide them with heroic medical care until they gracelessly expire.”
I look at what current NAM populations have done to my friends.
One is a doctor at the hospital. She works long shifts fixing up gunshot and stabbing victims one after another. It’s drained her, every day you see the weariness in her eyes get deeper and the spark in her soul get dimmer. This was an intelligent, high energy, empathetic, and faithful person. Instead she spends it fixing up blacks who shoot each other until she’s completely drained. Think of what that person could have done with their life instead.
Oh and BTW, she’s from Germany and Arab refugees have flooded her home town and turned it into a wreck. You wouldn’t think someone that does doctors without borders and loves Jesus could go shitlord, but everyone has a breaking point. When she realized what was happening to her family back home, that was it.
Another works in schools in the bad part of town. She tries and tries but they never improve. She came home one day with her face caved in, black and blue with her teeth fucked up. Why does she had to endure that? What is being accomplished? Why are we using up good people on lost causes?
We went to serve in the soup kitchen a year ago. It was all black people, and they were in designer Nikes and had Beats headphones. While we were serving them inside one of them was breaking into my friends car in the parking lot. My own car has been broken into six times in this city.
You want to import more of those people?!? Why?
All of these people could be focused on achievable objectives. Bettering themselves and bettering people like themselves. Instead all of their energy goes into keeping the mexican-black cycle afloat, against an ever growing tide that can only end in disaster in our majority non-white future.
That’s an awful lot of toothpaste, Arnold.
See: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hispanic.htm
And then tell me if the best thing to happen to Ferguson would be for a it to gain a enough Hispanic immigrants to become 30% Hispanic. Even more if the immigrants come from Vietnam and China.
In defense of Trump (I know, I know), he hasn’t mainly criticized immigration for hurting workers. He’s mainly criticized (illegal) immigration for crime and drugs, and as a matter of national security. And to the extent there’s a subtext here, it’s more racial/cultural than economic.
His main economic pitch is on globalization and trade. Which I think has very plausibly hurt unskilled workers (as one would expect from basic trade theory — essentially all of their income is from exactly the factor that is much more abundant in the rest of the world relative to the US).
I have an interesting related story.
I have a friend who is a low skilled worker. He is a difficult employee and goes from construction job to job with big gaps of employment in between. He is quite anti-immigration in the context of job competition.
He lives in a very low rent trailer park. It is among the worst housing in the city that I live in. He often tells me how bad it is living around the other people in the trailer park most have broken lives full of crime and drugs. So one one day we are driving out of the trailer park and we see these Mexican guys and says those guys are good guys. I though that it is interesting, they are less problematic than most of the other people in the trailer park. I think it is interesting that though the average Mexican immigrant might be have more problems than the average USAer they improve his trailer park. They give some normality to the area. I think good immigrant people from poor countries are willing live in low cost areas because it is better than where they come from and they can save money. So the net effects might be bad but if you are at the very bottom the flow can be a positive for you.
Also: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/hispanic.htm