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  1. #1
    Senior Member Populist's Avatar
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    Book Review: The New Case Against Immigration

    An early review of Mark Krikorian's (Executive Director of www.cis.org) book scheduled for release in July:
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    National Review Online
    david frum's diary
    Sunday, April 20, 2008

    David's Bookshelf 75

    What a pleasure it is when a friend writes a thoroughly excellent book!

    Mark Krikorian's The New Case Against Immigration will head any list of the outstanding public policy books of 2008.

    This is an especially impressive achievement because writing about immigration is fraught with unusual difficulties. The writer must avoid on the one hand the bogs of suffocating economic detail - and on the other, the thickets of a word or passage that can be used or misused to accuse him of xenophobia or racial animus.

    On both counts, Krikorian succeeds superbly.

    Mark's big idea is that immigration proponents are right when they say that today's predominantly unskilled, non-English-speaking immigration looks very like the immigration of a hundred years ago. The difference, he argues, is not the immigrants - it's America. Today's high-tech, high-skill, high-welfare economy cannot absorb poor and unskilled laborers the way the mass-production economy of a century ago could do.


    At the risk of sounding glib, immigrants in the nineteenth century came from towns and villages with horse manure in the streets and found the same situation in New York and Boston.
    Less glibly:

    A century ago, what economists call the primary sector of the economy (farming, fishing, and so on) still employed more Americans than any other, as it had since the dawn of humankind. Today, only 2 percent of our workforce still occupies itself in this way. Meanwhile, we've passed through the industrial phase of economic development, and entered the post-industrial era, with the tertiary sector (the service industries overall) employing fully 80 percent of Americans, and the percentage is climbing.

    ,.. The change from the old manufacturing economy has also made education much more important than in the past. ... [A]s late as 1979, college graduates earned only 43 percent more than high school graduates, but by 1995, they earned 84 percent more.

    Both as a cause and effect of these changes in the economy, the educational attainment of Americans has increased significantly. ...

    Into this twenty-first century economy we have resumed the importation of what amounts to niineteenth-century foreign labor. Between 1980 and 2000, immigration increased the number of workers in the United States by nearly 10 percent and the number of high-school dropouts by 20 percent ,,,,
    Even if it offers (low-wage) employment to first generation arrivals, America's 21st century economy will not offer satisfactory opportunity to those migrants' children if those children fail to gain education - as indeed they are failing to do. Relying on calculations by the economist George Borjas, Krikorian notes that the children of recent immigrants

    although doing better than their parents, are doing less well ln relation to the rest of America. ... If the pattern holds, then the children of today's immigrants will never catch up, still having in the year 2030 incomes 10 to 15 percent below the average for other native-born Americans.
    Persistent multi-generation disparities like these carry sinister implications for future intergroup relations and national political stability.

    Krikorian looks beyond just economics to a wide range of other challenges posed to modern societies by migration from the non-modern world. His book is thoughtful, wide-ranging, carefully researched, and always fair and moderate in tone. It's not scheduled for publication till July. But anyone interested in this crucial issue will want to book a copy as early as possible. This is a book that will anchor the national conversation on immigration in the months ahead - why not join the conversation early?

    04/20 10:07 PM

    http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q= ... dlZTgwZTE=
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  2. #2
    Senior Member Richard's Avatar
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    On the other hand their educations are as good or better than the average in those communities where they came from. They are also pre selected by their friends and their family as more likely to work and be able to return passage money. Allowing illegal aliens to remain effectively robs those communities of their best opportunity for a future. There is now a rising split between the Latino ethnic politicians here in the USA and the Nationalists in the Third World who want to see their own countries succeed.
    I support enforcement and see its lack as bad for the 3rd World as well. Remittances are now mostly spent on consumption not production assets. Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  3. #3
    Senior Member Populist's Avatar
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    Here's the brief description of the book in Amazon:

    Product Description
    [i]New research reveals why America can no longer afford mass immigration

    Mark Krikorian has studied the trends and concluded that America must permanently reduce immigration— both legal and illegal—or face enormous problems in the near future.

    His argument is based on facts, not fear. Wherever they come from, today’s immigrants are actually very similar to those who arrived a century ago. But they are coming to a very different America—one where changes in the economy, society, and government create different incentives for newcomers.

    Before the upheavals of the 1960s, the U.S. expected its immigrants—from Italy to India—to earn a living, learn English, and become patriotic Americans. But the rise of identity politics, political correctness, and Great Society programs means we no longer make these demands. In short, the problem isn’t them, it’s us. Even positive developments such as technological progress hinder the assimilation of immigrants. It’s easy now for newcomers to live “transnationalâ€
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

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