Yearning to Push Wages Down

I’m not sure how you can construe the editors of the Washington Post’ recent editorial:

PRESIDENT TRUMP says accelerating the United States’ economic growth is one of his administration’s most cherished goals. On Wednesday, he embraced a legislative overhaul to the immigration system that, if enacted, would make that goal unattainable.

Mr. Trump endorsed a bill sponsored by a pair of conservative Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, that would reduce legal immigration by about half over a decade, a shift that a broad consensus of economists believe would sap the nation’s economic vitality. It would slash the number of immigrants granted green cards for legal permanent residence to about 540,000 annually from the current level of roughly 1 million.

The legislation would achieve that chiefly by eliminating green cards granted to siblings and grown children of current immigrants and green-card holders — so-called chain migration — while holding steady the number of green cards based on job skills. Those employment-based immigrants would be selected according to a points system that would favor English speakers with higher levels of education and high-paying job offers. So much for the tired, poor, huddled masses for whom the Statue of Liberty stands as a beacon.

other than as support for open borders regardless of the potential immigrants’ skills, command of the English language, or anything else for that matter.

As I read the descriptions the point system being proposed is not unlike that used by Canada or Australia and sounds well-suited to the U. S.’s actual 21st century needs. Those needs have changed considerably since the 19th century.

Then when Emma Lazarus wrote her sentimental poem the marginal productivity of labor was rising and would do so for more than a century. Now it’s stalled. We don’t actually need more unskilled workers with poor or non-existent English.

A higher percentage of immigrants, legal or illegal, receive some form of public assistance than natives and that’s true at every level of educational attainment.

I wish the editors would take the last two words of the passage they cited from Ms. Lazarus’s poem more seriously. The implication is that new immigrants wanted and were expected to adopt our ways. The pressures on immigrants to do that are considerably less than they were then.

In short times have changed and our immigration laws should change with them.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I know what the employers hiring so many foreign workers are yearning for and it isn’t to breathe free.

Update

Is the point of Philip Bump’s Washington Post reaction piece that, since we didn’t have health care insurance, unemployment benefits, TANF, or Social Security in 1885 that we shouldn’t have them now?

My view is somewhat different. I think that, although the underpinnings of our law written into the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, our metalaw, should remain constant, our policies including trade policies, immigration policies, building codes, and so on should evolve over time to meet the needs of the present day. I’d be interested in seeing a spirited defense of the proposition that our immigration law precisely as it stands today serves our present needs perfectly but he doesn’t seem to make that.

Update 2

Josh Barro has a more rational reaction piece to the proposed immigration reform at Business Insider. The short version is “Point system—yes;reduction in number of immigrants—no”. I think I should point out that under present policy about 2/3s of new arrivals are the relatives of the workers he’s saying we need. In other words if you reduce the number of individuals without skills or command of English you could still increase the number of skilled workers brought in while cutting the total number of new arrivals in half.