Will Wilkinson writes the best blog post I have read in some time. The issue is immigration, and more specifically, the DREAM act. With all due respect to The Economist and the Democracy in American blog, this should piece should be run as an op-ed in the New York Times, or even better, USA Today, as it deserves a very wide audience. Here is one great paragraph, but definitely read the whole thing:
The DREAM Act sends the message that although American immigration law in effect tries to make water run uphill, we are not monsters. It says that we will not hobble the prospects of young people raised and schooled in America just because we were so perverse to demand that their parents wait in a line before a door that never opens. It signals that we were once a nation of immigrants, and even if we have become too fearful and small to properly honour that noble legacy, America in some small way remains a land of opportunity.
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Monday ~ November 22nd, 2010 at 11:00 am
sardonic_sob
Subsidizing a behavior produces more of it. No. Exceptions.
Monday ~ November 22nd, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Apex
Previous posts have made it clear the author is just fine with that.
Has posited increased immigration as a solution to the housing problem without any explanation of how they pay for it or what effects it has on an economy with excess labor. The only excuse given is the lump of labor fallacy which is an easy prop to trot out in your defense apparently requiring no further explanation. I guess extra American’s can’t find work but immigrants are special and would find work.
Monday ~ November 22nd, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Adam Ozimek
My argument goes well beyond the lump of labor fallacy. To mention just one point, empirical evidence shows that the impact of immigration on house prices is an order of magnitude larger than the impact on labor markets.
Monday ~ November 22nd, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Adam Ozimek
Your statement is false. There are many instances where subsidizing a behavior won’t produce more of it. This has been a hard lesson for policymakers attempting to incentivize students for better outcomes with cash subsidies. It doesn’t always work.
More importantly, I would be happy to have more immigration.
Tuesday ~ November 23rd, 2010 at 11:33 am
sardonic_sob
No, there are no exceptions, unless you try to subsidize physical impossibilities (and you will still get increases in *attempts* to violate the laws of nature) or your subsidy is below the marginal cost of whatever it is you are trying to increase (and even on that one you have a chance of getting some people who just can’t do math or think they can game the system.) If you know some valid counterexamples, then I’m just wrong, but I’d like to see them if you have them.
I’ll grant you that sometimes the increase is very small and it’s certainly possible that in many instances the increase is small enough that it’s irrelevant for practical purposes. It may very well be that the net result of this subsidy would be vastly positive for our country. But it will still reward people who are breaking the law and therefore it will increase the chance that people will do it.
Even if I grant you that fine, nobody will break the law who wasn’t going to break it anyway if we do this, how will you console the brave child whose well-meaning but criminal parents get busted four years and eleven months into his American sojourn? For a blog oft concerned with slippery slopes, you don’t seem to mind standing on the edge of this one.
Tuesday ~ November 23rd, 2010 at 11:41 am
sardonic_sob
And re: “More importantly, I would be happy to have more immigration.”
So would I, but not under the system we have now. This law does nothing to actually improve the lot of immigrants themselves or to alter the system which allows their large-scale abuse. Encouraging them to illegally migrate by promising distant benefits to their children just provides marketing material to the coyotes and encourages them to try that much harder not to get caught rather than to enter into society as full-fledged members.
In other words, going from, “Sneak in, don’t get caught, and you can probably get a job so long as you work for cash and don’t buck your employer or worry about worker’s rights” to “Sneak in, don’t get caught, and you can probably get a job o long as you work for cash and don’t buck your employer or worry about worker’s rights *and* after five years your kids can get green cards but YOU are still screwed,” is a net gain, I guess, but not the sort of gain that actually helps the problem at hand.
Incidentally, does this law provide any kind of cover for the parents so that when the kids go to apply for their residency the ICE doesn’t just read the address on the application and go there to look for illegal aliens?
Wednesday ~ December 1st, 2010 at 8:31 am
Wilkinson vs Frum « Modeled Behavior
[...] For more from Will on the DREAM Act see here. [...]