Im-Politic: More Anti-Trump Media Bias – Including One Example That’s Homophobic

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amnesty, Bloomberg.com, deportation, Donald Trump, Gang of 8, Hillary Clinton, homophobia, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigration reform, Jobs, John McCain, John Micklethwait, Labor Force Participation Rate, labor markets, LGBT, living standards, Mainstream Media, Mark Zandi, Max Ehrenfreund, media, media bias, part-time, productivity, The Washington Post, Vladimir Putin, wages

I sure hope all you RealityChek readers have had a great Labor Day weekend. Unless it was a complete disaster, it had to be better than the last few days’ performance just registered by the Mainstream Media.

On Sunday, I reported on a truly contemptible smear of white working-class Americans delivered by Time magazine uber-pundit Joe Klein. But published this weekend along with this display of mass character assassination was a swipe at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that can only be reasonably interpreted as homophobia, and an example of outright ignorance of the basic economic concept of productivity, and of recent U.S. labor market trends. For good measure, this second piece left out information on its main source that strongly suggests major political bias.

The homophobia was delivered courtesy of no less than John Micklethwait, the current Editor-in-chief at Bloomberg.com who previously held this post at The Economist. Think I’m exaggerating? See for yourself. In the course of an otherwise informative interview with Vladimir Putin, Micklethwait pressed the Russian president in this way for his views of Trump and his Democratic counterpart, Hillary Clinton:

“[Y]ou are really telling me that if you have a choice between a woman, who you think may have been trying to get rid of you, and a man, who seems to have this great sort of affection for you, almost sort of bordering on the homoerotic, you are really going to go for, you are not going to make a decision between those two, because one of them would seem to be a lot more favorable towards you?”

I had to go over this passage several times before convincing myself that I’d actually read it correctly. Even giving Micklethwait’s language the most charitable interpretation it deserves – that the journalist meant it simply as a joke – what exactly distinguishes it from the kind of sniggering locker-room-level humor that’s now recognized as demeaning and hurtful? Therefore, is it remotely plausible to doubt that Micklethwait himself believes that such emotions are fundamentally shameful, and that his attribution of such feelings toward Trump reveal a positively vicious bias against the maverick politician?

Here’s hoping that gay activist organizations come down hard on Micklethwait’s bigotry – and insist that his resignation is needed to guarantee the integrity of Bloomberg’s coverage of both American politics and LGBT issues.

The second major media stumble came in a Saturday Washington Post Wonkblog item spotlighting a claim that Trump’s immigration policies “could put Americans out of work.”

That’s of course an entirely valid and important possibility to report on, but author Max Ehrenfreund (and his editors) failed to fulfill a fundamental journalistic obligation by omitting from his article the unmistakable anti-Trump bias of Mark Zandi, the economist who came up with this finding. Yes, the piece mentioned that Zandi is a former aide to Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. But what it didn’t tell you is that McCain was a charter member of the “Gang of 8” – the bipartisan group of Senators that several years ago launched a powerful push for an amnesty-focused immigration reform bill. Nor did Ehrenfreund mention that Zandi has also contributed to Clinton’s presidential campaign – which has been pushing immigration reform proposals even more indulgent than the Gang’s.

As for the Zandi-Ehrenfreund case that Trump’s immigration policies would backfire powerfully on the U.S. economy, it could not have been more ignorant or incoherent economically. As Ehrenfreund explained it, “deporting [millions of] undocumented immigrants would increase costs for employers, because they would have to compete for the workers remaining in the United States, causing wages to rise.”

Full stop: Amnesty supporters have maintained for years that most illegals are simply filling “jobs that Americans won’t do.” Now they’re saying that if a the supply of American labor shrank due to deportation, increasing wages would summon forth replacements who are either native-born or legally residing in the country? Do tell! Ehrenfreund and Zandi might also have mentioned that robust wage increases have been one of the most conspicuously absent developments during the weak current U.S. recovery since it technically began some seven years ago.

Just as strange was the claim that “Already, the labor force has been shrinking as older workers retire, and the unemployment rate is under 5 percent, which suggests relatively few workers are looking for jobs.” Don’t Ehrenfreund and Zandi know that much of this shrinkage has taken place among working age women and especially men? Or that the number of Americans working part-time involuntarily still remains above pre-recession levels? In other words, there’s an enormous population in the United States that would bid for better-paying jobs.

Perhaps strangest of all is the Zandi-Ehrenfreund contention that “To compensate, businesses would have to increase prices. Some firms would lose customers and could be forced out of business. ‘Asking these folks to leave is going to put a hole in the economy that’s going to cost jobs,’ Zandi said. ‘It’s going to cost the jobs of American citizens.'”

That is, Zandi and Ehrenfreund have either omitted or ruled out the possibility that many companies will eventually respond instead by either automating and/or by otherwise improving their efficiency in ways that boost their productivity – thereby laying the ground for sustainable prosperity and living standard increases going forward. These two pessimists might believe that this venerable maxim of economics no longer holds, and that “this time it will be different.” But maybe they could do readers the courtesy of explaining why?

This Washington Post article’s descent into fakeonomics hardly stops here. But the above reasoning should be enough to establish its silliness – and to prompt the question if comparably doofy pro-Trump studies would ever see the light of day in the paper.

I closed my last post by asking why recent polls show Americans’ confidence in the media has stayed even in the low double-digits on a percentage scale. These Bloomberg and Washington Post pieces don’t merit even single-digit approval.

Im-Politic: Obama’s Middle Class Champion Claims Unconvincing Even Without Trade

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amnesty, auto bailout, college costs, Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, Dodd Frank, domestic content, education, healthcare, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration reform, manufacturing, middle class, minimum wage, Obama, Obamacare, progressives, taxes, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, wages, Wall Street

In a recent Wall Street Journal interview and a recent speech to progressive activists, President Obama has made abundantly clear how irked he is by charges that his trade policy agenda is betraying the liberal ideals and middle and working class voters he says he’s staunchly championed. To me, it’s a case in point of the truth hurting. For there’s little legitimate doubt that Mr. Obama’s main achievements have left most hard-pressed everyday Americans largely unaffected – at best – and that his record is arguably even worse than many of his Democratic party critics realize.

As the president sees it, “I’ve got some of these folks who are friends of mine, allies of mine saying this trade deal [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] would destroy the American working families, despite the fact that I’ve done everything in my power to make sure that working families are empowered.” According to Mr. Obama, these efforts have included “strengthening middle-class homeownership, making sure that their 401(k)s have recovered, making sure that we’ve got much better education systems and job-training systems, fighting for the minimum wage, fighting for a vibrant auto industry” along with initiatives ranging “from Obamacare, to Wall Street reform, to student loan reform, to credit card reform, to fighting for a fairer tax code…to a smarter workplace.”

But by now it’s clear that the middle class (and I realize such labels are anything but precise) has few reasons to be especially grateful for these Obama priorities. Minimum wage hikes, for example, a centerpiece (rhetorically, anyway) of the president’s second term, affect lower-income Americans, not the middle. The same has been said – compellingly – about healthcare reform, which will also almost certainly require higher taxes for middle class Americans, most of whom were adequately insured, going forward if it’s not to explode budget.

The president has done better on tax reform, as the burden on the wealthy has risen. At the same time, the benefits to the middle class have been paltry – and in one case temporary – not to mention spread out over entire tax years.

As for the other items on Obama’s list – they’re even more problematic. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill seems off to a good start (though Republicans have expressed concerns about transparency) but Wall Street seems just as rigged against individual investors as ever. In addition, who on earth thinks that American schools and job-training systems have gotten “much better”? Who believes that higher education is becoming more affordable? Indeed, why would a middle class-oriented president have recommended taxing “529” college savings plans? Who on any rung of the economy has benefited from a “smarter workplace”?  And whereas a booming stock market has restored many American retirement accounts, there’s no reason to believe the president, as opposed to unprecedented easy money from the Federal Reserve, deserves the credit.

Particularly troubling and revealing has been the auto bailout. The president’s actions (which were rooted in decisions made by his predecessor, George W. Bush) did prevent this critical manufacturing sector from collapsing, and since the recovery began, vehicles and parts production has lead an impressive industrial rebound (from a terrifying recessionary nosedive).

But largely because the bailout both failed to protect the Detroit automakers from predatory foreign competition and scarcely required them to use more domestic content, these companies have taken the low road back to competitiveness. And the big losers have been the industry’s middle class workers.  Inflation-adjusted automotive wages are down 5.20 percent since the recovery technically began in mid-2009 – much more than the fall for overall real manufacturing wages during this period (0.75 percent), and a dreadful performance compared to the private sector in toto, where real wages are up 2.18 percent since the recession ended.

And don’t forget a middle class-threatening Obama policy that the president failed to mention: his push (abetted by many Republicans of course) to amnesty America’s illegal immigrant population and open the nation’s borders much wider to newcomers. As middle-class voters appear to sense, the huge influx of very low-income arrivals that’s sure to result will greatly increase the drain on public services, and since the rich are still so adept at tax avoidance, John and Jane Q. Public will be left holding much more than their share of the bag.

Where the president is on firmer ground is in reminding progressives that nearly all of them “have been with me“ on the above agenda – but now seem to be worried that “suddenly…I want to just destroy all of that.” He’s right to question that logic. But the real lesson isn’t that the left’s fears are unfounded. It’s that after more than six years in the White House, the president still doesn’t understand how trade policies that keep enabling business to play arbitrage games on not only the labor but the regulatory, tax, subsidy, and trade barrier fronts will inevitably sabotage even the soundest domestic reform agenda.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Nonsensical Economic Case for Open Borders

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amnesty, border security, chain migration, conservatives, Democrats, economists, family reunification, free trade, illegal immigrants, immigrants, Immigration, immigration reform, mobiity, Open Borders, progressives, redistribution, Republicans, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Let’s shift gears for the moment and refocus RealityChek’s spotlight on immigration – an issue that’s receded from the headlines, but that’s sure to come back loudly once the race for the Republican presidential nomination kicks into high gear. Just as important, the Open Borders camp seem to be getting bolder and bolder in calling for virtually unrestricted immigration.

Just within the last month, major articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Economist arguing that, at least from a purely economic standpoint, unlimited, or at least exponentially increased immigration into developed countries like the United States would promote major national improvements in worldwide and national growth and productivity rates, and in living standards.

The reasons are generally the same as those cited on behalf of unfettered free trade. That is, such Open Borders policies would result in a shift of global resources (in this case, people) to where they could be most efficiently deployed. There’s no need to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if two high profile unveilings of views that even enthusiastic immigration reformers don’t dare embrace signal the start of a campaign to portray current legislative proposals as reasonable and moderate by comparison.

The problems with such claims only start with the reality that several decades of greatly liberalized global trade and investment have resulted in the biggest winner being not a free market economy (i.e., one whose efficiency advantages were supposed to position it for the greatest gains), but an overwhelmingly communist economy – China’s.

Of course, the immediate objection will be that many global trade barriers remain in place, and so the experiment isn’t close to complete. But the growth of international trade and investment has been explosive for most of this period – till the financial crisis struck. Surely the results shouldn’t have been exactly the opposite of what the theory predicted. Moreover, such Romes are never built in a day, and a completely economically integrated world is obviously a pipe dream for the foreseeable future – and long beyond. So in terms of relevance to policymakers, what we’ve seen regarding trade so far is pretty much what we’re going to get, and it’s waving a big red flag in front of the Open Borders crowd.

But examine these new Open Borders calls on their own terms, and they look even weaker. I’ll just raise two big and related (economic) objections for now. (Obviously, huge national security problems would emerge as well, but they’re for a different post!) First, if America’s doors swung wide open, the vast majority of newcomers (and their numbers would be gargantuan) wouldn’t be folks equipped with skills or knowledge capable of enriching the country on net any time soon.

Those capable of working would be like the vast majority of illegal immigrants that have already been flooding into the country for decades – suited only for very low-skill, poorly paying jobs, and poised to strain public services whenever the economy slumped. But potential workers wouldn’t dominate the newcomers’ ranks by a long shot. For as the nation’s experience with legal immigration makes clear, the chain migration effect would kick in immediately, as dependents ranging from aged relatives to children would come pouring in.

Which brings us to the second problem I’ll deal with. The Open Borders crowd insists that the oceans of mainly young workers and especially the immigrant children America would receive can be made highly productive once they’re educated and otherwise assimilated. What’s overlooked, however, is America’s persistent recent failures in fostering social mobility. According to an academic study that’s garnered enthusiastic praise, upward mobility in the United States has remained virtually unchanged for more than half a century. And that level isn’t very high. Measured as the odds of a child with parents in the poorest 20 percent of Americans becoming part of the wealthiest 20 percent, the latest data tells us it’s only nine percent.

Revealingly, this half-century period covers periods both when the rich-poor gap has been relatively narrow (as in the 1950s and 1960s), and when it’s been a good deal wider (since then). How good, moreover, do you think this performance will be with a much greater share of the nation’s population consisting of individuals whose impoverished lives had been unimaginable to even America’s own poorest.

It’s easy to understand why nearly all academic economists hold Open Borders beliefs. The most cynical among you will observe that their jobs won’t be at stake. Others will note their longstanding preoccupation with theories rather than empirical realities. But why do so many avowed progressives favor immigration reform proposals that would super-charge America’s foreign-born population, and even buy into this purist economic case, despite constantly complaining about the lack of opportunity in the United States that exposes the latter as dangerous hogwash, and that is likeliest to drag down low-income citizens and others already living here without enabling the newest arrivals to dream the American Dream realistically?

Many conservatives contend that progressives are hoping to expand greatly the voting population dependent on government benefits and wealth redistribution – and thus certain to vote Democratic. I suspect it’s something that I personally find even more disturbing: a sense of guilt, over third world poverty, run truly wild.

Im-Politic: Will Obama’s Executive Amnesty Squander a Big Political Opportunity?

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2016 elections, Democrats, executive amnesty, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration reform, Latinos, Obama, Republicans

Some final thoughts on immigration policy just before President Obama officially unveils his executive action at 8 EST tonight:

The wide-ranging deportation protections the President is expected to announce are often described as politically motivated – an audacious gambit aimed at cementing support for Democrats among the nation’s large, rapidly growing Latino population, both by granting a popular request and by highlighting Republican opposition.

I have no doubt that politics explains much about executive amnesty and the Democrats’ broader lurch toward illegal immigrant-friendly policies over the last decade in particular. But I do doubt that unilateral presidential action is the best way for the Democrats to strengthen their image as immigration reform champions.

I’m not thinking here of polls that show general public opposition to Mr. Obama’s intentions. I’m thinking instead of the main message contained in this new post on CNN.com. In it, national political reporter Peter Hamby describes how major Republican White House hopefuls have been reacting to the impending Obama decision. Most of them have emphatically criticized executive amnesty, but their opposition has focused on process questions. In so doing, they’ve made clear that they – and the list includes (outgoing) Texas Governor Rick Perry, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Wisconsin Governor Rick Walker, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie – would really rather not talk about the substance of immigration policy.

The reasons for this discomfort – I don’t think that’s too strong a word – should be obvious, too. Any successful Republican presidential candidacy is going to need solid backing (and financing) from American business, which is chomping at the bit for immigration reform that will flood the nation with new workers and thus generate powerful new downward pressure on wages. This support will be crucial both during the primaries and during the fall campaign. Signaling opposition to the idea of loosening immigration restrictions would brand these office-seekers as anti-business on a front-line issue.

As a result, the Machiavellian in me thinks President Obama and the Democrats would be better off depriving Republicans of this procedural dodge, and maintaining and increasing the pressure on their leaders to reveal whether they’re basically for or basically against more Open Borders. What could be likelier to ensure, through election day, 2016, continuation and even intensification of the immigration divide between the Republican establishment and its more populist wing?

Instead, executive amnesty will enable Republicans to paper over these differences. Indeed, the dynamics of Washington gridlock, which practically ensure that some form of executive amnesty will remain in place for the next two years, could well mean that immigration becomes a unifying issue for Republicans.

It’s true that further delaying executive amnesty could further frustrate Latinos and other supporters, and wind up depressing their turnout in 2016. But it’s also true, as I wrote recently, that having won this victory, such voters and their leaders could decide to thank the Democrats and then keep upping the ante and asking what they’ve done for the cause lately. (It’s entirely likely, even probable, that they’ll keep expanding their demands anyway.)

All these possibilities are purely hypothetical, and the politics of immigration could take entirely different courses among both Democrats and Republicans. But I feel more confident in believing that, because the President seems about to squander an opportunity to split his opposition wide open, the payoffs he and other Democrats evidently expect from executive amnesty had better be massive.

Im-Politic: Globalization and the Vanishing White Democratic Voter

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Clinton, Democrats, free trade agreements, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, immigration reform, Jobs, minorities, Obama, offshoring, Populism, Republicans, Trade, trade Deals, voters, wages, whites

Thomas Edsall of The New York Times is one of journalism’s most incisive writers about economics and political economy. (And no, that’s not a subtle put-down.) That’s why it’s so strange to review what he left out of his column today on “The Demise of the White Democratic Voter” and on Republican attempts to change this group’s long-time loyalties.

According to Edsall, one of the keys to understanding why Democratic office-seekers have done so poorly among white voters in recent elections is the Affordable Care Act. He does indeed do a good job of explaining how Obamacare “shifts health care benefits and tax burdens from upper-income Americans to lower-income Americans, and from largely white constituencies to beneficiaries disproportionately made up of racial and ethnic minorities.” The author also rightly noted the ever greater resentment of white voters about underwriting big government more generally with tax bills that seemingly never stop rising.

But what Edsall left out is important, too: First is the Democrats’ 20-year ambivalence on offshoring-friendly trade deals, and their dramatic shift to wholesale support for immigration reform proposals featuring sweeping amnesty proposals. Second is the Republicans’ nearly equally wholesale refusal to capitalize on voter anxiety stemming from the job- and wage-killing effects of recent U.S. trade policies.

Since the 1980s, it’s been clear that Democratic party ranks include a great many voters from union families in particular who closely identify with the so-called traditional social values typically pushed by Republicans (who candidate Barack Obama in 2008 condescendingly claimed were clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”). At the same time, this group still (rightly) associates the GOP with a business establishment that’s been happy to abandon Main Street for cheaper foreign workers (whether brought into the United States or working abroad) and fast-buck financial engineering-heavy business models.

Ronald Reagan successfully appealed to many of these voters by combining vigorous defense of traditional values (often only in rhetoric rather than with action) and a series of trade policy decisions that provided major protections to key industries like autos, steel, and machine tools with big blue-collar unionized workforces. But his GOP successors in the Oval Office, the Georges Bush, strongly rejected this political and policy formula.

Of course, so have Democratic Presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – even as many of the House and Senate members elected by Democrats have staunchly opposed the last two decades’ worth of trade agreements and related policy decisions like coddling China’s currency manipulation. Small wonder that white men in particular – many of whom still relied on a shrinking manufacturing sector for their earnings and pensions – moved rightward.

Most middle class whites in particular have not been directly threatened at the work place by ever greater flows of legal and illegal immigrants (with exceptions in high tech fields flooded with H-1B visa holders). But unquestionably they have been turned off by the challenge to the rule of law and national security posed by the tacit encouragement of illegal immigration, by the use of their tax dollars to fund public services for illegals (which feeds into the broader hostility to high taxes), by the related sense of entitlement projected by the mass illegals’ demonstrations of the mid-2000s (which also included many legal immigrants and other supporitve citizens and residents), and by the multi-culturalist arguments so often used by champions of Open Borders.

Thus white voters face a choice nowadays that, if not entirely Hobson-ian, is decidedly uninspiring. On the one hand they can support a Democratic party that’s always taken the lead in creating the key economic protections crucial to creating a large, enduring middle class, but whose president is apparently determined to enact a mass amnesty by executive order, and only somewhat less determined to support more offshoring-friendly trade deals. On the other hand, they can continue defecting to a Republican party that, whatever its other perceived advantages, is only superficially united against looser immigration controls, and that’s even more enthusiastic than Mr. Obama about trade offshoring.

Some day, some national-level politician will figure out the advantages of fusing a populist economic platform with positions on social and cultural issues that can not only be called traditional, but that clearly emphasize the best of that tradition. Until then, however, it looks like winning the White House will depend heavily on whether the Democrats attract and retain enough non-white voters to offset continued loss of white supporters, and the converse for the Republicans – hardly a formula for a more harmonious and more unified nation.

Im-Politic: Globalization and Election 2014

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2014 elections, Democrats, exit polls, fast track, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration reform, manufacturing, midterm elections, Republicans, TPP, Trade

In at least one respect, the political conventional wisdom looks right as rain: Exit polls are highly imperfect gauges of the electorate after a just-concluded election (and probably an even less reliable indicator of future elections (like the presidential race coming up in two years).

Of course, I was disappointed that only one globalization-related issue made it into the polling questions: immigration, naturally. But especially important was the terrible framing. The single query focused on specific policies showed that 57 percent of respondents agreed that “Most illegal immigrants working in the United States” should be “offered a chance to apply for legal status” while 37 percent supported deportation. No other options were offered, and opinions about specific proposals like the Dream Act, and enabling illegals to legally obtain driver’s licenses and government benefits weren’t sought.

These omissions are especially important since the actual election results turned out well for critics of further loosening immigration controls.

For the record, adherents of the two parties split pretty sharply on the question. Sixty four percent of Democrats but only 34 percent of Republicans backed the legalization option. Twenty three percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans supported deportation.  

The other immigration-related question asked respondents to name “the most important” issue “facing the country.”  Only 14 percent chose “illegal immigration,” but that’s not exceptionally revealing since only one answer was permitted, and other options included “the economy” (which garnered 45 percent).  

A sharp bipartisan divide was clear on this front as well.  Of those focused tightly on immigration, 25 percent were Democrats but 73 percent were Republicans.  By contast, the split on “the economy” was nearly even.

Nonetheless, the poll does send one message to globalization activists that urgently needs to be recognized and acted on. No mention was made of trade or manufacturing-related issues. It’s true that there are few signs that these subjects played any significant role in the latest midterm elections. But at a time when good U.S. jobs are still pretty scarce, manufacturing looks anything but renaissance-y, and the trade deficits in manufacturing and with industrial powerhouse China keep hitting new records, that’s a major indictment of the trade policy critics’ movement and its leaders. They’re simply not getting the job done.

And they could be running out of time to get their acts together. Although, as I posted yesterday, the window for pushing new trade deals through Congress once they’re completed is pretty small, it’s not nonexistent. Every powerful economic interest in this country except the unions supports them in principle. The notion is already widespread among the chattering classes that the President and Congress’ new Republican leaders will be tempted to prove their capacity for bipartisanship by mounting a push for these agreements along with the fast track negotiating authority crucial to their success. And the offshoring lobby is already out with renewed calls for action.

Indeed, so far, the main cause for optimism re stopping these trade deals has been the recalcitrance of Japan in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks. Until the gap is bridged between Washington and Tokyo on opening Japan’s market wider to American farm products in particular, the stalemate is likely to continue. But it makes me wonder when the Japanese will finally wise up, sign anything in full confidence that, as usual, neither President Obama nor the most powerful Congressional Republicans care a wit about enforcing the terms, and get the powerful fast track and TPP balls rolling.

Im-Politic: Bipartisanship is Plutocratic on Trade and Immigration

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bipartisanship, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration reform, Jobs, offshoring, TPP, Trade, wages

There are now two leading candidates for the “Clueless Commentary of the Week (Year?)” award, and they both owe to the same article. So the question arises – who is more completely out of touch both with the country’s real needs and with its mood, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Thomas F. McLarty or the op-ed staff of The Wall Street Journal?

It’s hard to tell.  After all, it was the former who wrote an October 20 article arguing that the Democratic President and the Republican leadership in Congress can and should show the American people that they can work together by shafting the working and middle classes on trade and immigration issues.  And it was the latter who clearly thought it made a valuable contribution to the U.S. public policy debate.

In an unwitting sense, however, McLarty and the Journal performed a valuable public service. They reminded Americans that among the few issues that their leaders can agree on is that, during an historically slow recovery when good job creation is paltry and wages stagnant, the nation needs more (a) offshoring-friendly trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and (b) immigration reform legislation that will only flood U.S. labor markets with more low-skill, poorly educated workers. 

Moreover, the McLarty article adds to the evidence that, whoever prevails in the coming offyear elections, the most important Democrats and Republicans in the country are bent on ignoring the spirit of representative government to push through a plutocratic trade and immigration agenda. Whether they plan to act during a lame duck session of Congress, or during that brief subsequent window before the next presidential cycle begins in earnest and such deservedly unpopular policies become politically toxic, the strategy clearly is to minimize the odds that voters will punish elected officials who support them.

On the one hand, it might be fair to conclude that this simply means the U.S. electorate’s memories need to get longer. On the other, given Washington’s skill at creating, prolonging, and even worsening crises, it’s easy to understand how voter outrage could become diffused.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Liberals’ Immigration Reform Dreams are Just That

Tags

Immigration, immigration reform, inequality, Piketty, social mobility, {What's Left of) Our Economy

With its blue-chip corporate backing and its strong establishmentarian pro-globalizing/free trade bias, it’s natural and sensible to portray the Council on Foreign Relations and its flagship journal Foreign Affairs as charter members of the cheap labor/Open Borders/lobby.

So it’s a welcome shock to report that the magazine has just published an article that should bust apart for good the strange bedfellows political juggernaut that still threatens to push pro-amnesty-style immigration reform through Congress.

Nothing in the article would logically stop Big Business from pushing to loosen U.S. immigration policy further and thus pump up the country’s labor supply and drive wages down even lower. (They’ve been falling during the recovery in real terms in the private sector.) But the new piece by University of California-Davis economist Gregory Clark should prompt big second thoughts about immigration reform among labor unions and its other liberal backers – unless they’re no longer first and foremost concerned with the well-being of the existing American workforce.

For Clark has spotlighted a massive irony that I’ve tweeted about, but that left-of-center immigration reformers have refused to acknowledge: The same obstacles that they have long complained keep hindering social mobility and widening the rich-poor gap in America also mock their stated expectations that a flood of newcomers and legalized illegals will boost the economy because of their huge unleashed earnings power and potential.

The idea that immigration reform will expand the population of “makers” rather than “takers” has long been central to the liberal case for immigration reform. In the words of President Obama, “when each new wave of immigrants arrived, they faced resistance from those who were already here. They faced hardship. …But over time, as they went about their daily lives, as they earned a living, as they raised a family, as they built a community, as their kids went to school here, they did their part to build a nation….And that’s still true today.”

Much Mainstream Media coverage of immigration issues and flows strongly agrees. Take this 2006 article from the doctrinaire laissez-faire Economist: “The worry [of immigration policy critics] that America is importing a new Hispanic underclass, as some claim, is also probably unfounded. Granted, foreign-born Hispanics are less educated and earn less than the average American. But that is hardly surprising, given that so many were until recently Mexican peasants. What matters is whether they are socially mobile, and it seems that they are.”

Indeed, according to the magazine, “First-generation male Mexican immigrants earn only half as much as white men. But the second generation have overtaken black men and earn three-quarters as much as whites.”

Clark’s Foreign Affairs article exposes why such contentions represent inexcusable hopium – especially given that even long before they idolized French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book, such progressives vigorously insisted that growing inequality is baked into modern American and other forms of capitalism.

As Clark makes clear, especially because low-wage and low-skill Mexicans and other Latinos dominate U.S. illegal immigration flows and populations, “there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States” – and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. Clark even debunks the assumption that better, more generous public policies will ensure the illegal and other Latino immigrant economic success that could validate current reform efforts.

Clark’s related conclusion seems too pessimistic for me – that “the American Dream was always an illusion” for immigrants because the success of newcomers and their descendents stemmed from the high skill and education levels the first generation brought to the nation to begin with. For example, is it really true for the most part that “The Jews of the Russian Empire were certainly poor, but they were an educated elite within their home societies”? The success they and subsequent generations of late-19th and early 20th century immigrants achieved seems more the result of the genuinely greater opportunities offered by the U.S. economy of those and succeeding years.

But given the widening inequality broadly recognized more recently, his warning about the consequences of reform efforts in current circumstances sounds spot on: “Blindly pursuing that [American dream meme] will only lead to a future with dire social challenges.” Will liberal immigration reformers be intellectually honest enough to recognize that he’s right?

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Post’s Tradition of Immigration Inanity Continues

Tags

Border Crisis, Central America, drugs, immigrant children, Immigration, immigration reform, violence, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s now at the point where I cringe each morning when I open the Washington Post, dreading what transparently tendentious pro-Open Borders/amnesty immigration inanity will greet me not only on the editorial pages, but on the news pages. This morning’s edition certainly didn’t disappoint.

Just below the fold, on page one, appeared a report from correspondent Pamela Constable titled “Deportation policies may have fueled rise of gangs.” The implication couldn’t be more obvious: Many, at least, of the Central American children streaming toward the United States have been fleeing violence increasingly threatening them from drug criminals. So the longstanding U.S. practice of deporting immigrant drug gang members responsible for further immiserating many American inner cities was portrayed by Constable as a possible policy blunder, or at least a classic example of unintended consequences deserving the spotlight.

Predictably, Constable had no trouble finding supposed experts critical of what they viewed as the shortsightedness – at best – of the deportations. Since this view is widespread among the influential supporters of immigration reform, that was reasonable enough. What wasn’t reasonable was Constable’s neglect of the screamingly obvious rejoinder: Just what were U.S. officials supposed to do? Keep the gang members in the United States where they either would add to prison overcrowding even if they were convicted, or would quickly return to the streets after wrist-slapping plea bargain deals?

Of course, the policy critics quoted by Constable believe they have the answer: More U.S. foreign aid that can turn Central American countries into the kinds of places where drug trafficking and gangs won’t breed in the first place. But such initiatives – also requested by the Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran presidents at their meeting with President Obama yesterday – have a long record of failure, mainly because Central America was so ruined by centuries of Spanish colonial rule that it’s been stripped of the social and cultural prerequisites of successful economic development.

Therefore, as is so often the case, Washington is faced with an enduring condition that’s mistaken as a problem — which by definition has a feasible solution. It’s bad enough that American leaders can’t keep the distinction clear. Neither can an American chattering class whose only valid raison d’etre is realistically monitoring the government’s performance, but that keeps pretending that the intrinsic limits of human knowledge, wisdom, and good will are “news.”

Equally moronic – but more excusable, given its appearance on the op-ed page – was Colman McCarthy’s effort to compare what he depicts as the despicably un-American cruelty of today’s immigration restrictionists (the “send’-‘em-all-back crowd and the build-bigger-walls cabal”) with the vastly more welcoming attitude that he implies prevailed in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Singled out for special praise today and back in the day are “justice-seeking” immigration lawyers – like his late father.

McCarthy’s article was of special interest to me because his family lived on the north shore of Long Island, close to where I grew up. And I’m sure his father was a fine man. But what McCarthy somehow forgot to emphasize is that the newcomers for whom his father did so much pro bono or largely free work, both in the courtroom and in terms of job placement, came to the United States legally. McCarthy did mention that his father “met and befriended them at Ellis Island” – meaning that they were admitted only after passing through that official inspection station. Yet the author apparently regards immigrants who ignored the law and jumped the line as meriting the exact same status as immigrants who played by the rules.

Something else of supreme relevance overlooked by McCarthy – last year, the United States allowed more than 990,000 immigrants to become permanent, legal U.S. residents. Maybe in his next column, he’ll explain the apparent paradox of today’s allegedly inhumane restrictionists overwhelmingly supporting this influx.

A final note: McCarthy quite accurately describes how the immigrants to the Long Island of his childhood often found decent-paying jobs from the Gatsby-esque one percenters who were building palatial estates all along what would become known as the Gold Coast. Nowadays, as I documented in a recent Fortune Magazine column, America’s wealthiest employ more than their fair share of the current generation of immigrants, especially illegals. But the wages paid are generally so low that these newcomers still need plenty of social services – which are paid disproportionately by taxes from the lower 99 percent.

McCarthy has long been a pillar of the social justice community. To be genuinely true to his avowed principles, he should wholeheartedly back my proposal to boost taxes on the rich to pay most of the costs of the greater immigrant presence that he – and they – so strongly favor.

In the News: New Fortune Column on Why the Rich Should Pay the Costs of Immigration Reform

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immigrants, Immigration, immigration reform, In the News

How can Americans break the impasse over immigration policy? My new column for Fortune proposes a solution that’s as outside-the-box as it should be obvious: Make the wealthiest Americans foot the bill for the expanded government services that will surely be needed by the influx of new arrivals bound to result from comprehensive immigration reform proposals.

After all, as the article documents, the affluent have been the major domestic beneficiaries of the dramatically increased flows of both legal and illegal immigrants into the United States recently. And they’ll surely be the major beneficiaries if the leading comprehensive reform programs create a path to citizenship for the current illegal population and thereby encourage many more low-income foreigners to seek entry.

Incidentally, the article was inspired by news reports that the bottom lines of WalMart and other big retailers have been hurt lately by cuts in food stamp spending and other government programs aimed at the poorest Americans. The reason? These folks make up a big portion of these stores’ customer bases. Even worse, it turns out that many retail workers are paid so poorly that they’re eligible for government transfer payments – meaning that U.S. taxpayers are providing the WalMarts of the world with a handsome subsidy.

I hope you agree that permissive immigration policies that greatly expand food stamp and other welfare rolls result in a similarly outrageous subsidy, and that the wealthiest Americans should no longer be able to profit so greatly from mass immigration while escaping most of the costs.