By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2009
Tom Friedman's comments about immigration in Sunday's paper ("Openness Crucial for U.S. Economic Recovery" on page C9) only takes into account the short run.
In the long run how will openness affect our economy?
The answer to this question depends upon how population changes affect our economy with or without immigration. When average incomes rise, birth rates fall. In fact you might say that the most effective birth control method in the world is per capita income.
Uganda has an annual average income of $1,000 per person. Half of its population is under 15 years old. On the other hand, Japan has an average annual income of $40,000 while fifty percent of Japanese are over 44.
Without immigration, the United States and many countries in the European Union would be losing population. Russia’s population is already declining. China’s one-child policy puts it below the 2.1 replacement rate.
The world will eventually face a severe shortage of young people as it becomes more affluent.
The Japanese are trying to deal with this problem without large-scale immigration by introducing ever more sophisticated robots. Just getting a robot to walk turned out to be quite challenging. It seems unlikely that they will be able to replace highly-skilled people with robots any time soon.
Nations that find themselves losing population may want to reconsider their opposition to immigration if they want their economies to sustain basic services such as Social Security and Medicare.
Progress requires creative people with new ideas who contribute to the payroll tax. Economic studies have shown that immigrants are not random draws from the populations of their home countries. They are self-selected to have imagination, initiative and determination.
Rich countries must accept some significant amount of immigration to avoid sliding backward down the economic ladder.
As highly skilled workers become more specialized, companies become more choosy. It's no longer enough just to have an advanced degree in statistics. A financial firm may need a specialist in state space models while an internet marketing company may want a Bayesian specialist in decision tree models.
Whether the real wage of highly skilled workers goes up or down depends upon whether the rate of specialization and division of labor is greater than the rate of increase in available workers within each ever-more-narrow specialization.
Wages for high tech workers will go up if the division and specialization of labor is occurring even faster than the rate that such workers are becoming available.
America has a history of attracting hard-working and innovative people. While other nations and groups have continued fighting over land elsewhere in the world, the United States quietly has made off with their best and their brightest.
Before 9/11, America led the world in producing both highly educated and highly skilled university graduates. American universities attracted self-selected individuals with exceptional initiative and talent from everywhere.
This has enabled America to acquire the most valuable and productive resource of all. With greater fluidity of labor, openness to new ideas, and better acceptance of people from different cultures and traditions, America has attracted the world’s most creative and productive people.
This is our true comparative advantage.
. . .
Also see:
Bernanke's KC talk points to deeper problem in business, economic analysis
Define energy independence in terms of both oil price and quantity
Carbon tax better than trying to pick alternative energy winner
Deprive petro-dictators of oil money with a price floor on crude oil imports
Law professors propose new gas tax with categorical tax rebates
. . .
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Both the husband and wife of the family from India that I knew..
had 3 and 4 college degrees - both of them very intelligent and really lovely people. I wish them the best. But I know they could understand my loyalty to the American worker but I also have concerns for them. Families throughout the world have so many things in common and one of the most important ones is families taking care of their own - no bond like a blood bond but we all need to live in peace.
I think the Indian family
I think the Indian family you are talking about might have come to US when the times were good and hiring foreign workers made sense to expand the economy. As of now switching to protectionist mode makes sense.
Well I am an Indian and working here on H1B visa as well and hoping to gain some industrial experience before I do my PhD and return back to my home country with some value.
With respect to the family from India that I spoke of earlier..
I wanted to point out something else that I feel is important. That family had 2 children in grade school. The father told me it would be a great hardship for them to go back to India since he felt his children would not even have a chance of competing with the children in India. The reason??? Because the schools here in U.S. don't hold a candle to the ones in India and his kids would be so far behind that he felt they could never catch up. Now what does that say about our school system???? I have been gritching about the fact of how our kids are not getting educated here for quite some time. The cost of tuition, etc. is keeping more and more of our kids from getting a higher education. All of this does not bode well with our citizens competing in the global economy in the future if our dropout rates continue to escalate, people are not educated for the jobs of tomorrow, etc., etc. Obama and Congress better get their acts together on education real quick or our problems are only going to escalate. Is your government helping you or hurting you????
Not thinking globally
Any mention of "losing population" gives me the creeps. The world is not losing population. It is gaining population faster than we can possibly support it, and the cost is death by horrible means -- AIDS, cholera, dysentery, starvation, infanticide, genocide and war. To look only at the "plight" of developed countries is to indulge in unabashed elitism.
Immigration is essential, it is true. But not quite in just the way the author suggests. Immigration is necessary not just for importation of brilliant graduate students. It is essential because it is the right thing to do, to welcome people who are escaping the horrors of war, genocide, crushing poverty and political abuses. These people will do well here. They will go to school, learn our language, and show their intelligence. They will become the people the author wants here. We must be willing to invest in them and not just pick them off the shelf of some already-developed country.
When all of those people
When all of those people muhabbet are helped, then bring the right immigrants in if we need them to make our country mIRC better but right now we have Chat problems right here and our people need to be helped and put back to work.
You do see many people from other countries exploited.....
we all know of the American employers hiring Mexican workers so they can have bigger profits because they can pay these people the lowest of low wages and in many instances work them to death. Nothing makes madder to see an employer exploiting any worker whether it be an American citizen or an illegal or legal immigrant. And yet you see your elected officials time and time again supporting these low-life employers.
The family I mentioned from India advised me these big companies pay them less than they would an American worker, however, he thought it was getting better. Well, right there it tells you about the moral values of these big corporations - it gets back to the money and greed thing which has got us into the mess we are in today.
The proximate cause of our horror story today and what will probably come in the future, is people idolizing the money and it will always be that way to me until God decides it is time to really intervene.
H1-B is High Tech Slavery
Under the H1-B visa program, immigrants do not have the right to change jobs. Instead, they belong to the employer, who has the right to rent them out to third parties. This is slavery, by any other name.
If high-skill immigration is so important to America's future, why not just give them Green Cards? Bringing back slavery is contrary to what America stands for.
The H1-B visa program is un-American, and it is a threat to those Americans who are currently working in the computer industry.
I understand the world economy to a certain extent....
and have seen how it works on this level since I became friends with a family here who is from India. I met them thru my volunteering thru the Jo. Co. Community College's program of teaching English to family members of men or women working here on these visas. The husband had a tech job with H&R Block and the last I heard he was employed with Sprint.
Lovely people, they invited me into their home, we shared our cultures and I do so appreciate those experiences. But I still struggle, however, with giving a job to person from India when we have people here in our own country begging for these jobs and they and their familiies are suffering from layoffs and job losses.
So this article sounds good but I think we also need to go beyond an economist's view of the perfect world and think about what the REAL WORLD is right here in our backyard. It is hard for me not to put my fellow American at the top of the list - he will always get priority for a job here in America if he or she is qualified and ready to do the job. Call it protectism or whatever but my fellow man will be helped first. When all of those people are helped, then bring the right immigrants in if we need them to make our country better but right now we have problems right here and our people need to be helped and put back to work.