Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Illegal Immigrants Have Little Impact on US Economy or Jobs

Sebastian Mallaby – Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants? – washingtonpost.com
People say that immigrants cause wage losses even if they don’t cause job losses. Here the story is subtle: Some studies find no evidence that immigrants pull down wages, while others find that native-born high school dropouts lost as much as 9 percent of their earnings between 1980 and 2000 as a result of immigration. But — and here comes the sane scream — there’s no way that even a 9 percent wage loss can justify the policies that immigration hawks advocate.

Not only that, since the people these undocumented workers are competing with are primarily native-born high school dropouts, US citizens should welcome the presence of these immigrant-workers as providing a strong incentive for our own kids to stay in school and get a good education!

I’m only half-kidding, by the way.

A few nights ago my spouse and I watched an episode of Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit!” on Showtime where the dynamic duo focused on illegal immigration. They had a group of six illegal immigrants spend an entire day building a segment of fence — of the sort that is being built along our border with Mexico. (Not to worry, friends, the workers were paid for their labor.) Once the fence was built, the six split into three teams of two men each and competed to see who could get on the other side of the fence fastest. One team was to go over, one team was to go through, and one team was to go under. All three teams made it with little difficulty. The slowest — the team that went over the fence — took only about six minutes.

Now just how effective do you think that additional 700 miles of fencing is going to be, hmm? We’re spending how may billion dollars on this? To slow people down by six minutes — at most? People whose presence in our country has pretty much zero net effect on our economy or crime rates??

Brilliant.

I’d call this a Halliburton Moment ¹.

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1. Halliburton Moment is my special just-made-up name for government programs that are hugely expensive but don’t actually accomplish anything other than to make a lot of money for the contractor.