Arnold Kling notes an article from the Milken Review, where Giovanni Peri writes:
U.S.-born workers are climbing the educational ladder, acquiring interactive/analytic skills and progressively leaving the manual jobs that would put them in competition with immigrants. If the trend continues as expected, the day is not far off when virtually all manual labor will be performed by foreign-born labor. This implies large wage gains for native workers, since they will be able to specialize in language-intensive and interactive tasks that are typically far better paid.
While some people shudder at the prospect of a more stratified society with immigrants at the bottom, keep in mind that the biggest gainers by far in this situation are the immigrants themselves.
Right, our current immigration system is the perfect policy for
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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It isn't half of Americans who are going to be disadvantaged, but 80% and perhaps 90%. The pyramid will grow wider at the base.
Americans who have no inclination towards sales or highly interactive professions will be, and are, SOL. The jobs for intelligent but not terribly (human-)communicative people are vanishing, because capital does not go into fields which use them. Computer programming was the great counter-trend career, but not post-H-1B.
Most pure programming positions are only open to people under 30 and willing to work in Silicon Valley or in any of a handful of expensive, immigrant ridden "tech corridors". That excludes Americans except those who happen to be from the Bay Area and can stay with parents for what will amount to their entire programming career!
If the trend continues as expected, the day is not far off when virtually all manual labor will be performed by foreign-born labor.
The trouble with this is that those immigrants then become Americans, who are able to vote, whose welfare we are then compelled to consider. Back in 2005, for example, I remember hearing that, in spite of the economic boom, the number of people living in pooverty had increased by 1 million in 2004. Never mond that many (most?) of those were immigrants. The story didn't mention it. We were compelled to consider their welfare. The press didn't draw the distinction between immigrant and native.
And even if their welfare is improved over their homeland, their kids won't really care, comparing it only to other Americans, and finding it lacking will grow resentful.
The data points that matter: relative wages will fall, commutes will be longer, taxes will be higher, housing (especially in decent neighborhoods) will be much higher, water will be in short supply (in the West) and politics will be lefter.
It's one giant pyramid scheme, that compels us to import an increasing number of immigrants in order to keep the economy growing. WHen does the music stop? Doesn't matter, 'cause the elites who wanted it will all be dead, their options will all be cashed in, and they'll have no more laundry to wash.
Re: pyramid schemes: I guess that's why so many Mormon politicians are so supportive of unrestricted immigration. Mormons are extremely fond of pyramid schemes. Pyramid schemes comprise no small part of the Utah economy.
Ah, yes...
The Practical/Ideological Bait-and-Switch
Start by predicting that a certain policy will yield practical benefits for some person or group (perhaps society at large). When the prediction turns out to be incorrect, don't admit you were wrong. Instead, argue that it doesn't matter because the policy is ideologically or morally correct regardless of its outcome.
This bait-and-switch is possibly the biggest scam in arguments by libertarians . Indeed, the complete inability to distinguish the practical and the moral appears to be common among libertarians. It's as if they suffered from a sort of cognitive colorblindness.
Kling and Peri don't really care if the immigration policy they are touting is a mistake. They support mass immigration even if it hurts the nation. When the "large wage gains for native workers" fail to materialize, and if they aren't allowed to ignore their mistake entirely, these two will mostly likely fall back on arguing that the policy is still correct because the free movement of labor across national borders is correct according to libertarian principles. They won't have sold the policy to the public on those ideological grounds but that is how they will attempt to justify their mistake later.
"If the trend continues as expected, the day is not far off when virtually all manual labour will be performed by foreign-born labour."
If you want a textbook example of where this story ends check out South Africa.
In 1900 there were only 3 Mio. Blacks and 2 Mio whites in South Africa. Due to the mining bosses importing cheap black labour from Malawi, Rhodesia, Mozambique and other states, and the high birth survival rates due to hospitalisation provided by whites, blacks eventually swamped whites. The whole "armed struggle" saga with Mandela was the desire by those blacks, many of whom were foreign to South Africa, to obtain political power knowing they would displace whites.
Apartheid was a belated and unworkable attempt by the whites to try and prevent the obvious from happening.
The 2 culprits were:
1. High birth rates due to western medicine
2. Importing cheap black labour
Now whites are leaving in droves and becoming the intellectual slaves of other countries.
As far as I am concerned the US is heading this way. Then we will see how much of that self-righteous "non-racialism" will survive the eventual fighting for spoils which ensues when blacks or Latinos tip over 50%. 50%, that's the magic number.
Tommy wrote: "They support mass immigration even if it hurts the nation."
Why?
Here is part of the answer, I think (PDF):
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/CofCchap7+Ref.pdf
In my estimation, most religions are Pyramid Schemes. They succeed wildly because they "pilot out" only when you are dead, and can't send word back either way.
Utah is full of people who can be mean as cat dirt but who will roll over invariably for anyone using the right phrases and affecting the right attitude. Mormonism has produced a caste of super-salespeople/squared-away types and another caste of dumbbells who, not quite understanding the Mormon doctrine and staying away from the LDS official structure to avoid the 10% tax, still consider themselves nominally Mormon. That group finances and forms the majority of participants in most of the multilevel marketing activity in America.
You can have free trade with a selective immigration policy that filters out the poorly educated -- or
you can have unrestricted immigration that dumbs down the electorate and leads to protectionism. But you cannot have both unrestricted trade and immigration.
The open borders right are leading us down the road to protectionism.
is this economist not aware that the trend is toward a less educated, less intelligent population, not a more educated, more intelligent population?
the high school graduation rate is about 69% and dropping. it will probably drop to 60% by 2050 and the mean american IQ will fall to, oh, 95 or so.
how is the US going to compete with china in 2050 when everybody here is a mexican high school dropout?
In re the general question of "The Delusions of Economists, Part Umpty-Ump Million" - as far as I can see, the fundamental problem with the demographics of the thing is political, not economic.
I'd be more than happy to absorb tens of millions of low-IQ third-worlders, if I thought for a second that, once given the right to vote, they'd be inclined to vote for limited government, the rule of law, sanctity of life, right to keep & bear, etc.
But every single shred of evidence I've ever seen indicates that these kinds of people UNIFORMLY vote for politicians who support bigger government, more regulation, more taxes, more corruption, less respect for the rule of law, less respect for the sanctity of life, less respect for the right to keep and bear, etc etc etc.
Which is to say: If there were such a thing as a stupid but moral people [who were somehow smart enough, or at least moral enough, not to fall for the bill of goods being peddled by a bunch of high-IQ shysters, like Charles Shumer, Rahm Emanuel, and Michael Bloomberg], then I'd be happy to welcome them.
But I just don't know of any evidence that such a people exist.
Speaking of economists delusions,I just happened to come across an article by that Gladwell guy that Steve drove away( :D )-the one about Irelands dependency ratio and its economic success. He quotes some econ guy(forgot the name)ruminating about Europe. The guy says since Europe has lots of older folks and Africa has lots (and lots) of younger folks,why,shucks!,if they could just stick a whole bunch of Africans into Europe,you'd have a great economy! :0
It's possible that the IQ of China is going down even faster than that of the USA. I've confirmed with a Chinese person living in China that the one-child policy only applies to Han Chinese and that even among the Han the poor are often allowed to have more than one child. And there are a lot of these poor/minority people, enough to make China's official rate actually slightly above replacement rate. China may be 91% Han today but it's not hard to imagine that even with virtually no immigration the Han's share of the population could drop to 70% or lower by 2050 and that the younger generation of Han Chinese will have an average IQ much lower than what they had had for all of recorded history.
In my estimation, most religions are Pyramid Schemes. They succeed wildly because they "pilot out" only when you are dead, and can't send word back either way. - revilo jr
That assumes, of course, that the primary motive for religious adherence is the desire for postmortem salvation or eternal life. It's part of the reason, of course, but religion serves a useful social function and, given the higher birthrates of practitioners, a Darwinian one as well.
Revilo,
If you'd read the Book of Mormon you'd understand that most of the people who believe in it just aren't very good at applied math. The Book of Mormon features a group of about 2 dozen people from 2 families migrating to the New World. Within a few generations they are fighting wars where thousands of people are dying.
The inability to understand why that ain't so leads to their buying into pyramid scams and open borders, too.
peewee: It's possible that the IQ of China is going down even faster than that of the USA. I've confirmed with a Chinese person living in China that the one-child policy only applies to Han Chinese and that even among the Han the poor are often allowed to have more than one child.
As bad as our demographic situation is in the USA [and I don't think very many people have spent much time thinking about just how bad it's going to be], the situation among the coastal Asian nations is catastrophic - almost beyond the point at which there is any possibility of hope.
If you look at lists of nations by IQ and by TFR [Total Fertility Rate, i.e. children per woman per fertile lifetime], then you'll see that they're almost perfectly inverted, with Hong Kong having both the highest known mean IQ [at 107], and the lowest known total fertility rate [at 0.98, where a minimum of 2.10 is believed to be needed just to tread water]:
IQ and the Wealth of Nations
List of countries and territories by fertility rate
TOP 10, IQ
1) Hong Kong 107
2) South Korea 106
3) Japan 105
4) Taiwan (ROC) 104
5) Austria 102
5) Germany 102
5) Italy 102
5) Netherlands 102
9) Sweden 101
9) Switzerland 101
BOTTOM 15, TFR
15) South Korea 1.28
15) Latvia 1.28
13) Poland 1.26
13) Slovenia 1.26
11) Moldova 1.25
10) Ukraine 1.24
9) Bosnia and Herzegovina 1.23
9) Japan 1.23
7) Belarus 1.22
7) Czech Republic 1.22
5) Northern Mariana Islands (US) 1.21
5) Lithuania 1.21
3) Republic of China (Taiwan) 1.12
2) Singapore 1.07
1) Macau (PRC) 1.03
1) Hong Kong (PRC) 0.98
If things don't improve soon, i.e. if smart people don't start making babies again, then we may be looking at a demographic crisis the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the Romans and the Greeks stopped making babies, circa 350AD-450AD, which threw the world into almost a millenium of Dark Ages.
PS: Ambrose Evans Pritchard recently asserted that China's working-age population will peak in 2015, after which time, of course, it will collapse [owing to the insane, suicidal folly of 1-Child].
Aren't half the kids in any population below the median in book smarts, by definition?
With Hong Kong having both the highest known mean IQ [at 107], and the lowest known total fertility rate [at 0.98, where a minimum of 2.10 is believed to be needed just to tread water]
If you look closely at the list you'll see a fairly strong correlation - not perfect, but strong - between population density and fertility rates. It's only natural: fertility declines with increased crowding. It also declines when natives find fewer and fewer spaces that are safe for them to live in.
Modern multiculti leftist Western governments have gotten very fanatical about protecting immigrants and racial minorities from even perceived slights from the natives while doing next to nothing to protect the natives from the minorities and immigrants. Here, effective government has actually been our curse.
The net result is that immigrants aren't filling a population gap that would be there anyway - they are, quite literally, replacing Americans, Brits, Swedes, and so on.
Noah: we're talking about a decline of the median.
Well, if you really believe that the average American is 2/3 of a SD above the average Latino immigrant in potential intelligence doesn't this work?
Moreover, I think there is a strong reference to mastery of English. Surely you agree that almost all native Americans have a much stronger command of English than the average Latino immigrant.
For example, one of the problems with IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that it takes the individual model and tries to scale it up to the country level.
This suggests that smarter countries are wealthier because they specialize in smarter work and poor countries specialize in less intelligent work.
The problem from a development standpoint is that "If only that were true there would be no such thing as world poverty"
The problem is not that there are no research parks in Africa is that there are not enough sweatshops.
But every single shred of evidence I've ever seen indicates that these kinds of people UNIFORMLY vote for politicians who support bigger government, more regulation, more taxes, more corruption, less respect for the rule of law, less respect for the sanctity of life, less respect for the right to keep and bear, etc etc etc.
I don't know about that. Pew data suggests that Business Conservatives and Hardcore Liberals are about matched in education.
Additionally, god and guns conservatives and union democrats are matched the same as well.
Besides, I would be shocked in support for "the sanctity of life" isn't negatively correlated with education.
When Bush said "family values don't end at the border" he knew what he was talking about.
Free market capitalism may stop at the Rio Grande but Christianity is going strong.
I think you have this one partially wrong. Peri is very out to lunch. However, Arnold Kling's comments were at least somewhat sane. I quote
"So it's a win-win. We get more nannies, lawn-care workers, waiters, and hotel maids, the immigrants get more money, and our kids learn skills that keep them out of competition with the underclass. All we have to lose is our self-concept of an egalitarian society...
I can see why economists have difficulty selling our pro-immigration position."
Peri, by contrast, might be a good replacement for "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas" Karl Rove.
As for Peri, he is a very smart, but ultimately dishonest economist. In one paper he claimed that 90% of American workers were high school graduates. This assertion was a key part of his model for complementary effects from immigration. I can't come up with any number higher than 85% and truth is probably substantially lower. If you exclude GED's then the number might be 70%.
However, the deeper flaw was Peri's willingness to ignore adults outside of the labor force. They are almost all potential workers and they are the group most in direct competition with immigrants. This observation came from someone else over at Marginal Revolution.
Peri also used a national CPI to deflate wages in California rather than a local one. Of course, using a local CPI would have demonstrated major losses from immigration.
Peri has a different paper out where he recognizes the housing cost impact. However, he treats it as a gain by calling it "housing income". Only Peri could try to turn unaffordable housing into a "benefit" of immigration.
I don't know about that. Pew data suggests that Business Conservatives and Hardcore Liberals are about matched in education.
Don't know about "business" conservatives vs. "hardcore" liberals, but 2004 exit poll data showed Reps and Dems each getting 49% of the college grad vote (including those with post-grad education).
Income levels showed pretty strrong correlation with political party, however. 55% of voters making over $50k voted Republican, while 56% of voters making less than $50k voted Democrat.
Additionally, god and guns conservatives and union democrats are matched the same as well.
I doubt that, because union members are by definition mostly non-college grads (except maybe pilots and a few others). "God & Guns" conservatism has nothing to do with education or income levels.
Besides, I would be shocked in support for "the sanctity of life" isn't negatively correlated with education.
My guess is that there's little to no correlation, negative or positive. White Christians are better educated than most people like to believe.
When Bush said "family values don't end at the border" he knew what he was talking about.
Hispanics (like blacks) may talk the social values talk, but they don't walk the walk.
If you'd read the Book of Mormon you'd understand that most of the people who believe in it just aren't very good at applied math. The Book of Mormon features a group of about 2 dozen people from 2 families migrating to the New World. Within a few generations they are fighting wars where thousands of people are dying.
The inability to understand why that ain't so leads to their buying into pyramid scams and open borders, too.
I have always believed Mark Twain was right when he called that work of not very good fiction "chloroform in print". It's my contention that many Mormons secretly agree.
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