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  1. #1
    Senior Member Populist's Avatar
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    Immigration raises wages of many native-born workers - NOT

    National Review Online
    Tuesday, March 11, 2008

    Oops! [Mark Krikorian]

    Remember how in the mid-90s the Democrats in Congress (and their auxiliaries in the media) seized on a single study by Princeton economist David Card which "proved" that increasing the statutory minimum wage did not, in fact, reduce employment? Ted Kennedy repeatedly cited the report as a justification for the minimum wage increase he was pushing in 1996.

    Well, there's a new example of the same kind of thing in immigration. A paper a couple years ago by two economists, Ottaviano and Peri, supposedly demonstrated that immigration actually raises the wages of many native-born workers. This one paper was quickly seized upon by open-borders pundits as proof that everything else written about immigration's economic effects was wrong. Virginia Postrel hyped it at the New York Times, with Tyler Cowen taking the L.A. Times. It's been cited by the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and in various congressional hearing presentations by the Hudson Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Ben Johnson and Dan Siciliano of the immigration lawyers' lobby, and a representative of Ingersoll-Rand, plus many newspaper citations.

    And it turns out to have been a mirage. Borjas reports that he'd been trying to figure out for some time how they arrived at their numbers, and finally has: apparently, the study's conclusions only hold up because the authors counted currently enrolled high-school juniors and seniors as "dropouts."

    Moral of the story: If new research supports your preferred policy positions by overturning everything else known about the subject, see if someone else can reproduce the results first.

    03/11 08:21 AM

    http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/? ... E4ZmMwY2E=

    Prof. Borjas blog entry here:

    http://borjas.typepad.com/the_borjas_bl ... nativ.html
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Captainron's Avatar
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    What's taking place is rather like a badly botched Ponzi scam. If liberal factions--i.e., trade unions, refugee organizations, human rights groups, etc.--can gain some political clout by swelling their ranks and making a litigious presence felt they WILL be able to get some immediate rewards. Many members of those organizations will bask in the new feeling of omnipotence as businesses cower and acquiesce to demands under the threat of potential litigation or fines. I found an interesting website that details a large number of the high dollar lawsuits brought under the banner of justice:
    www.workplacefairness.org

    But how long these companies will be able to survive under the pressure of defending these actions is the question. Eventually they will turn away from the workforce that has become too expensive and/or unproductive and then the American or "Americanized" insourced workers will be out. They are paying out dividends, to be sure, in the short run but not sustainable ones. And the only way that the proponents of the scheme will be able to keep it going, or appear to, is to find new groups of "victimized workers" that they can litigate for and then recruit into their ranks. All the while, the productive workers, who are not mean-spirited enough to survive, will be gone.

    Like any sizeable Ponzi scam good PR is key. The easy way is to get PR is to locate some half-baked "expert" who supports your claims and publicize his "findings."

    Candidate Obama is at the head of a huge nationwide Ponzi scam. He is a pied piper for indolent liberals enjoying a pipe dream of steadily increasing prosperity and steadily diminishing responsibilities. The only way to keep it going is by finding new victims for class-action suits or state sanctions. No, don't oppose the flood of border crossers and smuggled human cargo. Where would you find new victims to champion?
    "Men of low degree are vanity, Men of high degree are a lie. " David
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  3. #3
    Senior Member Populist's Avatar
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    Good pts. Captainron. Obama, Clinton and the Dems preach victimhood, not personal responsibility.
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