Immigration and the economy

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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3 Responses

  1. M. Farmer says:

    The decrease doesn’t tell us much about the effect on our welfare state — it was bound to decrease after the first flood, unless everyone in Mexico came across. It’s sort of like Obama claiming unemployment claims dropping from 750,000 — it had to moderate unless everyone became unemployed. There might be a correlation between the health of our economy and the number of illegal immigrants, but the fact that it’s still high with no hiring going on tells me that the health of the economy is not the main factor.Report

  2. Trumwill says:

    Seems that the reduction started before the economy really hit the skids. Farmer may be right that it was probably going to happen anyway. It will be interesting to see, though, what the number will be for the two years of economic meltdown. The last number is only really looking at six months or so of utter mayhem.

    If we were to get serious about stopping employment except by way of legal immigration, it would be particularly interesting to see what would happen to the numbers then. I certainly have a lot more sympathy for those that come here to work than for those that come here for our public services. I really think that there are more of the former than the latter, but it can’t really be proven either way.Report

  3. Jason Kuznicki says:

    Nearly all complaints about immigrants and unemployment resolve to the same hash of lump-of-labor thinking and, frankly, xenophobia.

    Consider that one never, ever hears that we should refrain from having kids lest the labor pool be exhausted. On the contrary, the people who worry most about immigrants taking away jobs also frequently worry about the dearth of white babies.

    Yet they too eat away at the lump of labor, if only we were to use the same (il)logic on them as we do on Latinos. Report