Oct 9th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
More People = Easier Housing Slump
I’m fairly certain this won’t be adopted, but it does seem right to say that if we encouraged more immigration we could bolster the housing market. In essence, the price boom led to a construction boom which led to the bursting of the bubble. Fundamentally, with only so many families in the country, there’s no need for all the houses we have. The housing bust has caused a construction bust, so over time population growth will eat up the supply overhang. But that could happen more quickly if population growth was faster — i.e., more immigrants. At a minimum, if we stopped trying to drive illegals out of the country and instead put them on a path to citizenship, that would help.
71 Responses to “More People = Easier Housing Slump”
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October 9th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Hmm. To buy houses, wouldn’t they need one of those “job” thingies that are in short supply? Or would we just take independently wealthy immigrants?
October 9th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Matt,
I know numbers aren’t your strong suit, but 50% of the mortgage defaults (and probably about 75% of the dollar value of defaults) are in just four states — California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona — all with huge Hispanic immigrant populations. That’s not a coincidence.
Your proposal is what drunks call their favorite hangover cure — a little more hair of the dog that bit you.
If you want to understand how Karl Rove’s plan to win Hispanics to the GOP helped get us into this mess, read:
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080928_rove.htm
October 9th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Er, a sensible person would realize that given the pressures on natural resources generated by the American lifestyle, we should think very hard about whether we want a much bigger population in this country. A sensible person would also think that IF we wanted more Americans, the sensible thing to do would be to discourage abortion, not encourage immigration. The birth rate in “Blue” states is already far too low.
Matt, of course, isn’t a sensible person. He’s a cosmopolitan globalist liberal, which is the opposite of sensible.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I mean, really. Destroying our own children with vacuum tubes and saline solution, and then importing more people from abroad to fill up the holes in our economy and society, is utterly ridiculous. It’s as ridiculous as overindulging in Twinkies and hamburgers, and then trying to get your stomach stapled. But then I suppose Yglesias in favor of that too.
What happened to trying to live our individual and collective lives in accordance with nature?
October 9th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
A quarter acre and a mule?
October 9th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Yes, Hector, because infants buy houses.
/eyeroll
If it were in accordance with nature, there would be no borders and everyone would just live wherever they wanted to. I would find something oceanfront in California and talk politics to anyone who threatened my land until they went away. If I had to get the land by talking politics until they abandoned their home, I would do that, too.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Geez brother, just how many people do you plan to pack into this place? When The Economist headlined with “Half A Billion Americans” by 2050, it wasn’t a target they were daring us to meet or beat.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
@Hector – and exactly how will all of the little babies help ease the housing slump? Do you expect BofA to give them NoIncomeNoCreditNoDownpayment loans for their own little McMansions?
October 9th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
“Or would we just take independently wealthy immigrants?”
This is probably going to end up sounding like a Steve Sailor rant, but here goes. Our immigration policy has one main flaw: we import poverty. We’d be a lot better off importing engineers rather than lettuce pickers. To some extent, we do make an attempt to favor people with marketable skills. We certainly do it for great basketball, hockey, and baseball players. But our current immigration and visa policies still make it too hard for good engineers and scientists to study and do research at our universities and companies. We really should think about whether we want our policies to provide a chance for some of the world’s poor or to improve our economic competitiveness. Maybe we can do both, but if I had to choose, I’d chose the latter. And if we do the latter, maybe we can make enough money to improve the lives of the world’s poor and allow them to stay in their home country.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
How in the fuck did this comment thread become about abortion? What, are we going to put fetuses to work now?
October 9th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Well sure, I mean more immigrants will help:
* Reduce the unemployment rate
* Help curb runaway development and environmental destruction
* Help reduce pressure on our superb infrastructure.
Feel free to add to the list.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Re: But that could happen more quickly if population growth was faster — i.e., more immigrants.
Well, yes– if the immigrants were mainly solidly middle class people bringing substantial assets and good credit histories with them. This isn’t a “Steve Sailer” comment, but I do think we need to recognize that that fruit pickers aren’t going to take that backlog of exurban McMansions off our hands. Their grandchildren may well live in those houses (or similar ones), but it does take a while (at least a couple generations) for immigrants to climb the success ladder.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I’m fairly certain this won’t be adopted, but it does seem right to say that if we encouraged more immigration…
I personally have high hopes President Obama will introduce comprehensive immigration reform that will, among other things, allow for at least a modest increase in immigration. My guess is he won’t get to it before mid-terms, though — 2011 is a better bet.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
…but it does take a while (at least a couple generations) for immigrants to climb the success ladder.
That’s BS. Many immigrants purchase homes within a short while of arriving in the states.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Fostert,
We should “import engineers”? Great, so then we can deprive countries like India and Brazil of their most educated and skilled workers.
Massive immigration is bad for the societies who produce the immigrants and the society that receives them. It is good for no one except the cosmopolitan globalists who are free to indulge their fantasies of a borderless world.
Just to make it clear, I don’t think that America needs a particularly higher population. I think that _some_ states are growing too slow, including my home state, but the country as a whole is growing too fast (due to immigration) which is putting more and more stress on global supply of fossil fuels and other resources.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
This is basically the argument in Dowell Myers book, though he looks at more than just homeownership:
Immigrants and boomers: Forging a new social contract for the future of America.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
“We should “import engineers”? Great, so then we can deprive countries like India and Brazil of their most educated and skilled workers.”
That is obviously a valid observation. And, yes, India is suffering a brain drain. But what if we couple the immigration with economic aid? My proposal would be this: if we import an Indian engineer, we donate money to an engineering program in India to provide research facilities and scholarships. And if we take an engineer from China, we do the same for China. I’ve paid for the engineering educations of three children in India. It’s damn cheap compared to the US. Let’s say we donate 15% of an imported engineer’s salary back to the country he came from. That would pay for two engineers to be trained in the home country. And the economic benefits of the imported engineer would far outweigh the cost of the donations. Both countries would win that way. And maybe I wouldn’t have to donate so much money to India to help them out.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
And if we do the latter, maybe we can make enough money to improve the lives of the world’s poor and allow them to stay in their home country.
It won’t be as much of a help as it hurts them to drain their economies of their smartest people to fill holes in American expertise. Wonderfully, the right-wing polices which discourage high-end labor without a comparative discouragement on low-end labor help to retain brainpower in poorer countries while freeing those countries of some of the burden of their own vast impoverished masses. Hence right-wing xenophobia brings up the third world at the expense of the US while liberal cosmopolitanism brain drains the world to feed the engineering appetite of the American empire….
October 9th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
We should “import engineers”? Great, so then we can deprive countries like India and Brazil of their most educated and skilled workers.
Hector: I thought you were all about human dignity and the rights of the individual. Do you really think it’s just to deny an individual a better life, or the freedom to pursue happiness, in order to prop up another country’s economy? Seems to me that’s awfully close to using a human being as a means to an end…
In general, if we’re smart enough to give our own economy the benefits it derives from having to compete with others (and generally we are), we ought not to deny the citizens of other countries the benefits they’ll experience if their governments are forced to get their acts together in order to compete with us for the talents of their best and brightest.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
“We” shouldn’t do anything regarding immigration. Including set up the current arbitrary quotas. Immigration should be left up to the labor markets. What makes anybody think that government’s central planning can determine the needs of the labor market better than the actual labor market? When the labor markets determine what they need without interference, immigration takes care of itself.
It seems clear that immigration can ease the housing slump. Even if the immigrants are low skilled workers. They create a larger demand for housing and provide inexpensive labor that has no real mirror in the native. This is a dynamic allows for growth the same way that cheaper products allow for the consumer’s dollar to have more buying power. There remains a huge blind spot to the fact that people are a very valuable resource.
In addition, it seems immigrants are not particularly vulnerable to mortgage defaults. In fact, it may be the opposite:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/immigration/la-me-immighome6-2008oct06,0,1279877.story
October 9th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
And, yes, India is suffering a brain drain.
Actually, the brain drain India used to suffer but no longer does is one of the factors that has forced her to enact sensible reforms. These reforms have lifted millions of people out of poverty, and alleviated suffering on a massive scale. And yes, now India is a magnet for the best and brightest all over the world. Win win for everybody.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
“US while liberal cosmopolitanism brain drains the world to feed the engineering appetite of the American empire….”
That’s unfortunately true. Read my proposal in comment 17. With the right mechanism, everyone can benefit. I guess I’m proposing “liberal interventionalism,” but on an economic level. The key thing is for us to more than repay the costs to other countries.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
This sounds like a topic for Mickey Kaus.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Jasper, I’d like to share your optimism about India, but color me unconvinced. I’ve read similar stories when traveling in India. But you know what? All the engineers I’ve met in India would rather work here. I’d agree that the situation is getting better in India. But they still have a long way to go. So many people don’t really have any opportunity (like say 600 Billion of them). They need better education at all levels. And so many people are still shut out because they can’t afford it. And now they’re talking vouchers. Yeah, the illiterate parents will do a great job of selecting schools for their children.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
fosters, we do “import poverty,” but the people we import become almost immediately far less poor than they were in their home countries. Immigration is the most effective anti-poverty program ever.
And anyone who thinks this country is overpopulated gets to get out more. Both the sparesely populated portions of this country, and to the truly crowded parts of the world.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Immigration contributes to the false and pernicious idea that we are all totally free agents who should be able to shape our lives into whatever we choose. It offers support for the lie that establishing the well-being of the members of society is up to individuals themselves, instead of in large part the responsibility of society. It undermines a person’s solidarity with his family, his occupational group, his religion, his nation, his class, and his fellows, and contributes to a dystopia of autonomous, unrooted individuals. It creates a world where individuals have no attachments, no roots, and nothing for which they will give their lives.
I honestly can’t see why you think such a world would be in the least appealing to any sensible person.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3855517.stm
October 9th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Japser, you thought Hector was “all about human dignity and the rights of the individual?” Are you new around here? Hector thinks people who are born in poor countries have an obligation to stay there and remain poor, rather than moving to somewhere where they’d be better off. Hector thinks people should do what Hector wants them to do, pretty much.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Too Many Steves,
Liberal cosmopolites like you are responsible for the Islamization of Lebanon. Take a bow.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Matt,
senseless house construction is what got us into this mess in the first place.
I explain here.
http://outtheotherear.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/want-forward-thinkers-on-the-economy-turn-to-environmentalists/
October 9th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
It creates a world where individuals have no attachments, no roots, and nothing for which they will give their lives.
Hector: America is a nation of immigrants. Americans have attachments, roots, and often, as I’m sure you’ll be aware, a willingness to die for their country.
Japser, you thought Hector was “all about human dignity and the rights of the individual?” Are you new around here?
Well, he’s a rather vociferous opponent of abortion rights, and the kind of terminology I used is something such folks often employ to support their position. Apparently in Hector’s particular case individuals lose rights after they’re born.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Believe it or not, I actually wrote my comment #27, about how Hector mostly believes people should do what Hector wants them to do, before I saw Hector’s comment above it. I’m in his head, man!
October 9th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
“(like say 600 Billion of them)”
Oops. 600 million. It sure seems like 600 billion though. You can’t swing a cat without hitting twenty people in the head in India. But then again, you don’t see many cats in India. Maybe that’s because stray dogs are everywhere.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
By the way, it’s not that I want to reduce immigration by legal fiat. I think mass immigration is an evil, but there are reasons for it. It’s a result of other evils, mostly the kind of economic system we have in the world today, globalized capitalism with its core-periphery inequalities that would make the Roman Empire shudder. We should try to make mass immigration unnecessary, rather than make
it illegal, but we shouldn’t pretend that it’s in any way a “good” thing.
By making it unnecessary, I mean specifically that education and economic development in third world countries should focus on bettering the lives of whole communities rather than individuals. Development efforts should keep communities together and instil a sense of mutual loyalty, solidarity and interdependence, rather than encouraging the most capable individuals to escape to the West.
Mass immigration is the flip side of dependent capitalism. Both encourage the educated middle and upper-middle classes in developing countries to look to Europe and the United States instead of to their own country and its heartland. Which is great for the core country, and terrible for the periphery.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I’d agree that the situation is getting better in India. But they still have a long way to go.
Fostert: I don’t dispute the notion that India still has “a long way to go.” It’s obviously still a very poor country by Western standards. I’m just saying closing the door to educated Indians is not part of a successful strategy to help India develop. The West needs to keep the pressure on the governments of developing countries, lest they flag in their efforts at reform.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
“Hector thinks people who are born in poor countries have an obligation to stay there and remain poor, rather than moving to somewhere where they’d be better off.”
In fairness to Hector, I don’t really think he thinks that. My understanding is that Hector’s parents are immigrants from India (am I right, Hector?). For the record, both my parents’ families came to the colonies in the 1720’s. All y’all are immigrants to me. But that’s fine, I like immigrants. They add some color to what would otherwise be the pasty whiteness that my ancestors add to this country.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
This seems dumb, so I guess Matt was just joking. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough people in America who want to buy houses. It’s that there aren’t enough people in America who want to buy houses at the extravagant prices they fetched during the housing bubble. I don’t see how letting a bunch of poor people into the country is suddenly going to spark demand for $400K, $500K and $600K homes.
Once the prices fall to levels that reflect market realism and make houses more attractively priced, they will start to move again. And with the prices again matching mortgage amounts that are at appropriate risk levels for the people buying the homes, banks will be willing to make mortgage loans again.
One problem is that for our upper middle class and affluent opinion leaders, the problem isn’t that our country has been awash in knock-off colonials and ranches overpriced at Windsor Castle levels. It’s that the market value of their own overpriced house has been dropping! And they are mad about this, and seem to think that we should be pursuing national policies designed to make sure they don’t lose money on the stupid deals they made. Let’s put more emphasis on the people lower down on the ladder who have been trying to climb up, but have found several rungs above them have been cut away.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
“It’s obviously still a very poor country by Western standards.”
Well, I would say this: poverty is very much a state of mind. In that sense, the Indians aren’t as poor as we would think. They’re tough people who don’t expect much (to expect otherwise would be delusional). They can be happy without owning anything. But they surely would appreciate better education. I think we should give it to them. We already take many of their engineers. We should replace those engineers at a two to one ratio.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Hector, you know why people leave their home countries to go elsewhere? Because opportunities suck pretty badly where they are. My great-grandfather had a fairly productive farm. He had around 14 grandchildren. Given that the family farm is currently run by 1 of his great-grandchildren, I have to wonder what you’re expecting the other several dozen of us to do with our lives. More than 50 years after my parents and their cousins came to the USA, economic opportunities are still poor enough that no one wants to move back to the home country. For countries like India and China, it’s not as though there’s some sort of population decline problem being caused by the exodus.
Even first-world countries like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany suffer from very dense populations, a high cost of living, economic barriers that make life in the USA preferable for many people, even (particularly) at the top of the professional scale.
As far as the USA’s immigration policies, I always wondered why H1-B (professional needs) and O (unique ability) visas were “separate categories” for immigration. Why is the USA fostering immigration for people who don’t fall into these categories? Look, this isn’t the 19th century: we’re not trying to settle the western territories.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Let’s just give all the red states to China to service the national debt, and go from there.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
By making it unnecessary, I mean specifically that education and economic development in third world countries should focus on bettering the lives of whole communities rather than individuals. Development efforts should keep communities together and instil a sense of mutual loyalty, solidarity and interdependence,
Translation: we should support policies in which everyone knows their place.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Re: Many immigrants purchase homes within a short while of arriving in the states.
I don’t doubt that may be true of software engineers from India or small businessmen from the Middle East. Please reread what I wrote! I did state that middle class immigrants might help solve a housing over-supply problem (though in fact I doubt that there is one nationally). I specifically mentioned poor, unskilled immigrants as being unlikely to buy middle class houses. And let’s not kid ourselves: that’s the bulk of our immigration and it will be as long as there’s a huge income differential between Mexico and the US.
Re: Immigration contributes to the false and pernicious idea that we are all totally free agents who should be able to shape our lives into whatever we choose.
People have been migrating from one place to another since the days of homo erectus– otherwise we’d all be living in Africa still. Wanderlust and “The grass is always greener…” is a part of human nature and on the whole a beneficial aspect of it.
Re: It undermines a person’s solidarity with his family, his occupational group, his religion, his nation, his class, and his fellows
This is far less true nowadays than it used to be. The Internet and cheap cell phone service (and cheap airfare to some extent) keeps us connected to whoever we want to stay connected to.
October 9th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I’m a little confused when progressives see immigration as a good thing because it allows people to escape poverty and dead-end situations that are devoid of opportunity, but then oppose voucher programs that hold exactly the same promise for inner-city youth, who in this very country are trapped in some of the most hopeless and bleak situations one could imagine.
In fact, typically they turn out the exact argument that’s being made by Hector — voucher programs are bad because they pluck the best students (and public funding) from bad schools and make them even worse. I really think that progressives should take another look at vouchers, and that they would do so if they didn’t have the luxury of taking the minority vote for granted.
In the interest of disclosure, I support both immigration and school voucher programs. My family came here from Italy in the 50s because opportunities in Southern Italy were poor. They could’ve gone to Northern Italy instead, as many did, but in truth that would’ve been even more difficult, even though they would’ve known the language. People would have been less accepting and things even more foreign. It would’ve been no less uprooting, and likely considerably more miserable. Of course, they had no real allegiance to the country that exiled my grandfather for his political views less than 20 years earlier.
There’s no doubt that mass immigration has many negative consequences, as well as positive ones. I tend to think that the positives outweigh the negatives in many situations, but I also agree with Hector in the sense that no nation that cares about its people in the least would or should encourage or tacitly approve of mass emigration from its borders. But if a country does care about its people that little, those people should be given a chance out of the nation that has essentially forsaken them.
October 9th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Time for a real rant. We should understand that we are all immigrants in this country (okay almost all). My family may have come here a long time ago, but they were immigrants too. And they were immigrants to a country that didn’t even exist yet. But people like them and others that came after created a country based on ideas, not ethnicity. They wrote a Constitution that put laws above any man. And the Constitution above any Leader. In short, they did some really kick ass things. We are better for it, and the rest of the world is better for it too. What we are is a group of unrelated people who agree to an idea. And it doesn’t matter who we are. It’s only the idea that matters. Agree to the idea, and know hope.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
…or we could just bulldoze the excess houses. Problem solved.
October 10th, 2008 at 12:38 am
I should be really getting to sleep, but there’s a lot here to repond to.
Look, I like immigrants. I think America is a better place for them. One of the things I dislike about the part of the country I currently live is that the economy is in the toilet, so not many immigrants come here. And one thing I love about Boston is its cultural diversity. In one day I can converse with a Dominican immigrant about planting sweet potatoes, a Guyanese immigrant about life under the Burnham regime, a Vietnamese immigrant about how his country liberated Cambodia, an Armenian immigrant about the practices of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and an Ecuadorian immigrant about shrimp farming. (I haven’t actually had all these conversations in a single day, needless to say, but you get my drift.)
I don’t think there’s anything wrong or bad about an individual person or family coming to the U.S., any more than I think there’s anything wrong with an individual family deciding to have five children or just one. However, the fallacy of composition applies here. Mass immigration _in the aggregate_ has many negative effects as well as some positive ones, just as if everyone decided to have just one child, or five, we would suffer serious problems (demographic in the first case, ecological in the second.)
I actually may have overstated my feelings about mass immigration. Hugo and JonF have given me some thoughtful correction to think about. I certainly believe that international development needs to focus on bettering the lives of communities, not individuals. And that one of the most serious risks of Westernization, and industrialization, is that solidarity and interdependence will be lost. But it’s true that immigration has always been a feature of the human landscape. Many diasporas are many centuries old, the Jews and Armenians among them. It hasn’t detracted much from the richness of Jewish or Armenian identity over the centuries, that I can see. And it’s also true of course that sometimes immigrants are vitally necessary. Immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, for example, are going to be the saviors of my Church, and are going to rescue it from the horrid pseudo-secularism into which too many Episcopal parishes appear to be slipping. I can’t be anything less than grateful and I hope that more of them come in.
The idea of a cosmopolitan, globalized world, in which people no longer feel loyalty to anything other than their own wishes, really frightens me. So does the idea of a homogeneous, cookie-cutter world in which all national cultures have been melted down into some formless, cosmopolitan soup. But perhaps that’s not the inevitable result of massive immigration, and perhaps new cultures, new loyalties, and new solidarities will be born that are every bit as rich as the old. I can only hope that this is the case, even as I fear that it may not be.
October 10th, 2008 at 12:45 am
There are a few cases in which I think mass emigration is probably the best of a set of terrible solutions. Haiti is ecologically degraded enough that I don’t really see any way for them to economically develop. And Iraq has no future other than a civil war that we had a large part in unleashing. I seriously think we should consider taking in a lot more Haitian and Iraqi refugees. Maybe they could get settled in the New England and Rust Belt states- it would certainly keep us from hemorrhaging more electoral votes to Texas and Utah.
I don’t, however, feel comfortable with saying that any random person in any country has a _right_ to immigrate to whatever country they want. To say that would be really to embrace the erosion of all loyalty, rootedness and solidarrity.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:19 am
Ignoring the Pretend Crusader, who should really just spend his time at a Renaissance Fair, and the not-Pretend Bigot.
Immigration happens because of arbitrage: cultural arbitrage, economic arbitrage.
But immigration to fill up all the shitty fall-down houses that have been built (in many cases, by immigrants) in shitty ways on shitty plans to support shitty lifestyle patterns? How about employing people — immigrant, born-in-the-USA, whatever — to knock the fucking things to the ground? It’s Keynesianism writ large. And really, the land mass of the United States is pretty damn big and empty.
As far as the USA’s immigration policies, I always wondered why H1-B (professional needs) and O (unique ability) visas were “separate categories” for immigration.
And you missed out the EB-1s. It’s because the system is a massive kludge, based upon anachronisms, stupid distinctions and rules created for the benefit of legislators who wanted corporate support and/or votes from citizens. It needs scrapping and rebuilding, like those subdivisions of shitty McMansions.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:19 am
You go, Hector. I disagree, but I got to hand it to you. But I happen to like the mixing of cultures. I think it’s good for all of us. And, it’s inevitable. There are two ways to look at it. Accept what will be, or fight what will overtake you. Cultures have always come and gone. But more than anything, they’ve mixed. And created new cultures. Why not let that happen? America has always been a changing mix of people, so why stop changing?
October 10th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Re: We should understand that we are all immigrants in this country (okay almost all).
Anyone who was born here is not an immigrant. So what if your ancestors came from elsewhere? They aren’t you. And that really applies to everyone without exception, including Native Americans. Their distant ancestors came from somewhere else too.
October 10th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
There’s no doubt that mass immigration has many negative consequences, as well as positive ones.
There’s also no doubt that employing the term “mass” immigration allows the xenophobes and restrictionists to set the terms of the debate. A hundred years ago the US was permitting something like a 1.5% annual net influx. Now that was arguably mass immigration. Today our laws allow at best a rate something like one third of that. Heck, even if you throw illegals into the mix, the US at best takes in perhaps 30% more immigrants than it did a century ago, despite experiencing something like a 400% increase in population and (ballpark estimate) a four or five thousand percent increase in the real size of the economy. Oh, and this is all set against the backdrop of a country whose whose people are having far fewer babies than once upon a time. The fact is current immigration numbers coming into the US are modest by historical standards, and eminently absorbable.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
There’s no doubt that mass immigration has many negative consequences, as well as positive ones.
There’s also no doubt that employing the term “mass” immigration allows the xenophobes and restrictionists to set the terms of the debate. A hundred years ago the US was permitting something like a 1.5% annual net influx. Now that was arguably mass immigration. Today our laws allow at best a rate something like one third of that. Heck, even if you throw illegals into the mix, the US at best takes in perhaps 30% more immigrants than it did a century ago, despite experiencing something like a 400% increase in population and (ballpark estimate) a four or five thousand percent increase in the real size of the economy. Oh, and this is all set against the backdrop of a country whose whose people are having far fewer babies than once upon a time. The fact is current immigration numbers coming into the US are modest by historical standards, and eminently absorbable.
I didn’t say, I don’t believe, and I certainly didn’t intend to convey the idea that the U.S. is undergoing mass immigration at the present time. Sorry if I was unclear, I probably should’ve said mass emigration anyway, since I was focusing on the country losing the immigrants.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Hugo,
That looks sensible on the surface, but when you probe deeper there is a flaw in your argument.
As Hector mentions, it would be preferable if the home countries of immigrants improved living conditions so that immigration was less attractive or necessary. It would also be preferable if public schools offered the level of service they are supposed to offer. The difference is that we have no authority or duty to improve the living conditions in foreign countries. We do have the authority and the duty to improve public schools. Vouchers are a means to provide services to a tiny fraction of the students to whom an educational opportunity is owed at the cost of abandoning the majority.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
As Hector mentions, it would be preferable if the home countries of immigrants improved living conditions so that immigration was less attractive or necessary. It would also be preferable if public schools offered the level of service they are supposed to offer. The difference is that we have no authority or duty to improve the living conditions in foreign countries. We do have the authority and the duty to improve public schools. Vouchers are a means to provide services to a tiny fraction of the students to whom an educational opportunity is owed at the cost of abandoning the majority.
That’s a fair point, but it presumes that we are much more able to improve the quality of urban education, and much more quickly, than the countless dollars and effort we’ve poured into it would suggest to this point. I’m all for improving urban public education, I think we can do it, and I agree that vouchers are not a substitute for that, but it’s not a zero sum game either. While we are working on our public schools, what are we supposed to say to the kids who are trapped in intolerable situations — too bad, we’re working on it, maybe your kids won’t have to endure this? It’s unacceptable, and it’s not changing anytime soon. I was educated in urban public schools (unlike most progs who oppose vouchers, let’s face it) in NYC and I believe in public schools, but the fact is we’re no more able to snap our fingers and improve, say, D.C. schools (at least, in time for the kids currently attending them) than we are to improve living conditions in third world countries. Your point is well taken, but I don’t think it completely obviates mine.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Hugo,
I think both you and Njorl have good points.
In principle, I don’t like the idea of vouchers at all. In practice, it seems likely that vouchers are a necessary evil at this point in time. As you point out, many of our public schools are pretty dysfunctional, although it’s not always certain with whom the blame lies. We can and must fix the problem, and turn our urban public schools into true vehicles of education and opportunity. But that transformation is going to take a long time- and the more we fail kids today, the more we set their kids and grandkids up for failure as well, it’s not the sort of thing where you can simply postpone dealing with the problem for twenty years.
If we are going to have private and parochial schools alongside our public schools (and that appears to be a choice our society has made) then it makes some sense to have them available to a broader slice of society than the rich and the upper-middle class.
By the way, thanks for visiting my blog- I would welcome your intelligent and thougtful comments anytime!
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