http://langamp.com/borderblog/?m=200601

Equality & Immigration
The Cavalier Daily is worried about the impact of illegal immigration on equality:


Poverty today has been exacerbated by the fact that the United States is increasingly losing its character as an egalitarian nation. In the past, American equality was the inevitable consequence of settling a lightly populated continent: The United States enjoyed a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap land, alongside a limited supply of labor. This meant that labor could bargain with employers for high wages, and could afford the essential element of a middle-class life: land. Under these conditions, the market economy flourished and brought wealth to ordinary Americans.

Fast-forward to 2006 and the picture is very different. Labor is abundant and wages are being driven down by the exploitation of illegal aliens, who are often paid below the minimum wage. Census Bureau statistics show that poverty rose in 2004 for the fourth year in a row, driven by increasing poverty among whites. Land, by contrast, is out of the question for workers in many parts of the country.
It’s indisputable that immigration exacerbates inequality within the United States — poor immigrants have neither the material wealth nor the educational background to compete with their native counterparts. Though the argument above harkens back to a golden age of equality in the United States that is largely mythical it is nevertheless reasonable to worry about the impact inequality has on a nation. When we look to Latin America, where a healthy middle class is largely non-existent, we see that large disparities in wealth can have unhealthy consequences.

But examining inequality alone is insufficient to analyze the situation.

After all, inequality may be greater today than at certain points in America’s past. But living standards are higher for everyone, partly because economic systems that tolerate competition and inequality are far better at producing wealth than systems that strive for absolute equality.

A poor person in the United States who works a minimum wage job and receives welfare likely lives in an apartment or house that has central heating, telephone service, indoor plumbing and a color television set. Ameneties like these help them attain a standard of living far beyond even what America’s wealthy enjoyed a century ago. If I were poor I’d much prefer living in a country where my standard of living was constantly rising than a country where my standard of living was lower and stagnating, but more in line with the standard of living of everyone else.

As for new immigrants, they are often among the poorest people in the United States– hence the increased inequality they bear responsibility for. But every immigrant prefers a system that tolerates inequality insofar as without such a system they’d be stuck in their country of origin, where they’d be far poorer despite the fact that in the United States they begin at the bottom of the economic ladder.