Back To The Future...

Source: Wapo

Robert Samuelson has an excellent piece up today looking at some hard immigration truths, will we find the spine to reverse this trend in time? It seems doubtful...

President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics -- immigrants, their children and grandchildren -- increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers.

Does this look like a harmonious future?

It gets gloomier...

Testifying recently before Congress, University of Illinois economist Barry Chiswick -- a respected immigration scholar -- said this of low-skilled immigrants:

"Their presence in the labor market increases competition for low-skilled jobs, reducing the earnings of low-skilled native-born workers. . . . Because of their low earnings, low-skilled immigrants also tend to pay less in taxes than they receive in public benefits, such as income transfers (e.g., the earned income tax credit, food stamps), public schooling for their children, and publicly provided medical services. Thus while the presence of low-skilled immigrant workers may raise the profits of their employers, they tend to have a negative effect on the well-being of the low-skilled native-born population, and on the native economy as a whole."

The conclusions are sobering, especially in the face of the happy-happy joy-joy smoke the President wishes to blow up our butts.

Read it!

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