Asymmetrical Information

I'm sympathetic to your argument, but I think it's worth observing that while importing "brawns" may benefit both the nation as a whole and the domestic "brains," ceteris paribus it hurts the domestic brawns by substituting for their labor. That's the baseline model anyway, the econometrics of immigration on low-skilled domestic labor are greatly disputed. Assuming for the sake of argument that there is more or less zero-sum competition between foreign and domestic "brawn," then the question is no longer no-brainer Pareto efficiency, but a moral and political question of whose ox is being gored. Myself, by both morality and interest (I'm skilled labor) I'm inclined to let the brawns in anyway, but I do acknowledge that there is at least potentially a downside to some people.

I find the ethics of favouring immigration for skilled workers extremely questionable. And not because of the need for less intelligent or low-skilled workers, as you suggest. The far more compelling case you overlook is rather how favouring skilled workers (doctors, nurses, the highly educated) removes the most-needed people from the countries that most need them. How can you possibly justify removing such people from third world countries? These are the countries which have funded their education and training (at relatively far higher cost), and which, moreover, desperately need their services!

Without making a case for or against your arguments, I think it's worth noting for clarity that Bryan's story doesn't work if there are serious externalities involved.

And the arguments about immigration always make claims about externalities. In the case of brains, it's that they make positive contributions above and beyond the gains from specialization (think increasing returns to scale and scope of research or improved dynamism of the thinking classes). In the case of brawns, there are also claims of negative externalities (increased crime, cultural clashes, potential for welfare abuse, systematic shifts in political support different from the current citizens) that are borne by the wider society and not by employers of the illegals.

There are counterarguments for all of these and some questions must be answered empirically, but a straightforward specialization/gains-from-trade model won't do much to dismiss them.

Two, because if I lived in a hut in Chiapas, and I had a choice between seeing my kids go hungry or malnourished, and breaking an immigration law, I'd cross the border by any means necessary . . .

No you wouldn't. You wouldn't produce children until and unless you could nourish them.

Assume, now, the Brains have two possible choices -- recruit "Brawns" from an allied nation; or to recruit "Muscles" from a rival nation.

I don't want to get all mercantilist here, but isn't it apparent that the Brains' best choice is to bleed their rivals by cherry picking the best workers OUT of their rivals' economy?

Particularly so if the Muscles want to work hard to try to become as Brainy as possible; while the Brawns are ungrateful wretches who don't avail themselves of any of many opportunities to do so. Brawns, in fact, want to bring Brawny customs to Brainhome while they're working, and rather than investing in themselves and the Brainy Dream -- they take the Brains' money our of the Brainhome economy and remit it to their former homeland. And the Brawny Dream, such as it is, is to go back to Brawnland as soon as possible; lording it over their former peers.

Assume you can allow more illegals "guest workers" from Mexico, or facilitate more legal "permanent" immigrants from, say, India. Which is the more profitable policy for the U.S.?

Does favoring immigrants based on genetic traits amount to human genetic engineering? Wouldn't random selection create a stronger gene pool for a nation in the long run? Do we know that highly intelligent humans are also the most disease-resistant or the least prone to mental illness?

IMO, "cultural clashes" and the potential for "shifts in political support different from the current citizens" are positive externalities: they prevent our culture from stagnating.

"Potential for welfare abuse" is the result of funding a public welfare system, not the result of a group of immigrants who come here seeking work.

It can also be argued that our current society has an oversupply not of Brains or Brawns, but of Babbles -- salesmen, managers, maybe even, gasp, entrepreneurs who are normally a little of both. Being a Babble seems to offer the best ROI for a born American; due to lack of native language skills and connections this career path is largely closed to first-generation immigrants. Isn't that a very good argument for BOTH unskilled and skilled immigration?

I don't see how Caplan's argument applies to 'altering the mix.' Importing an unskilled worker may be better than not importing one, but how could it be better than importing someone skilled? What is a skilled worker but an unskilled one with a few extra options?

This is taking the number of immigrants as given, of course.

"First, a response to readers who ask why I'm not paying attention to the fact that illegal immigrants are, well, illegal.

Several reasons."

Here's a good one: when you're having a discussion about changing the law, what the law currently is has little significance. Again, the Drug War analogy is apt. If we are talking about what drug policy should be (if any), the fact that some drugs are currently illegal is quite obviously irrelevant. So similarly if we are discussing what immigration policy should be, the fact that some people are currently immigrating illegally is also 100% irrelevant.

Seems you don't need any reasons beyond that.

Noah -
But the fact that some people came here illegally is very relevant in our decision as to whether we want to stick with the law breakers or instead favor those that followed the legal method to try to come in. Whether or not you think that there should have been a line, or that it should have been where it was, the fact is that some people followed our law and got in line, while others ignored our law and broke in. There is a selection bias question here plus a matter of basic fairness - if we're going to pick someone, do we want to favor someone that followed the law or someone that broke it?

On whether we need large numbers of unskilled, it seems strange that we're hearing these two arguments at once: 1) the reason that we need to give amnesty to the current crop of 11 million illegals (knowing that it will lead to another dozen or so million illegals entering shortly, leading to future amnesties because Jane and others don't think we should enforce our laws), is because America has far too many unskilled jobs and can't otherwise fill them; and 2) outsourcing will have horrendous consequences because we're losing all these jobs, and what will Americans do if all of our unskilled jobs are shipped overseas?

I'm confused - is the sky falling because we have too many unskilled jobs and can't fill them legally, or because we only had a few and they're being outsourced away?

Umm... who said the sky is falling in the first place? Isn't free trade the option that's ultimately best for everybody?

Max -

I agree with you on free trade and don't think the sky is falling at all. I'm just trying to get some discussion on how we can reconcile these two simultaneous, frequently expressed concerns. It seems to me that they somewhat offset each other - if we're outsourcing more and more jobs, we don't have as voracious a need to import unskilled labor; and if we have this driving need for unskilled labor, maybe we don't need to panic about outsourcing.

Jane,

I'm sympathetic to your economic arguments, and I favor high levels of legal immigration.

However, you seem to be arguing for unlimited immigration. Allow me to raise two objections:

1) Unlimited immigration, while possible and even economically beneficial in theory, doesn't work when your society has implemented a minimum wage and generous social welfare benefits.

Either immigrants will get the social welfare benefits and resentment will develop between natives and immigrants... or immigrants will be denied social equality and develop resentment toward the host nation... or both. (See Europe.)

2) The United States isn't just an economic entity. We are also a political entity. Presumably, we want to remain a self-governing nation, an enterprise that requires the education of immigrants and some assimilation into our civic institutions.

I think the United States can successfully assimilate a whole lot of people... but not an unlimited number, at least not all at once.

I've usually found DiFi to be one of the saner, more palatable, more grown-up liberal Democrats, but she's off her rocker on this one -- especially given the fact that she hails from that part of the country surely more dependent on importing brain power than any other (google up some info about the founders of Ebay, Intel, and well, Google). Though, come to think of it, she probably gets lots of angry letters from pissed off under-employed programmers lamenting the competition from very smart people from India. What better way to stop them than by telling them they can't get into the UC system (though, come to think of it again, DiFi will have to shut down the internet if she truly wants to protect the salaries of native workers).

FWIW I would have no problem looking at, and possibly adjusting, US immigration criteria (especially it this is accompanied by generous increases in overall admissions). I'm not so sure it's in the country's interest to give someone a leg up in the immigration stakes because he's got, say, a brother in Chicago if that means denying a slot to a brilliant mircobiologist from South Korea. But at the same time I'm a little leery of too agressively tilting the balance toward the highly educated or affluent. Don't get me wrong -- I think it's a good think America attracts such people naturally, and I think any signs to the contrary are cause for concern. But university degrees and business plans aren't everything. What about courage, and generosity, and altruism, and loyalty, and honesty, and passion, and work ethic. A little bit of intellectual cherry-picking goes a long way. Go too far in this direction, and you risk missing equally important attributes. Going too far in this direction smacks of socialist winner picking.

How can you possibly justify removing such people from third world countries?

How is allowing them to come here of their own free will "removing them"?

There is a selection bias question here plus a matter of basic fairness - if we're going to pick someone, do we want to favor someone that followed the law or someone that broke it?

I think one could argue that indeed a fairness issue exists, and that amnesty is rather unfair to, say, some poor devil from Sichuan here on an H1 who's only a layoff away from being sent home, and that, yes, all thing being equal, we should "want to favor someone that followed the law."

Regrettably, though, this is irrelevant, because those 11 million illegals are already here, and we're not sending them home. Won't. Ever. Can't. Ever. Happen. It's simply not feasible, and even if it were, it would be massively disruptive on American life to forcibly expel 4% of the country's population. The question is only: what are we going to do about them?

"Does favoring immigrants based on genetic traits amount to human genetic engineering? Wouldn't random selection create a stronger gene pool for a nation in the long run? Do we know that highly intelligent humans are also the most disease-resistant or the least prone to mental illness?"

A group of highly intelligent humans is more disease-resistant than a similar group of dumb humans - because the former group will tend to include people capable of combating disease by means other than the human immune system, and people capable of selling those means to everyone else.

And a stronger gene pool for the nation in the long run will be produced by a significant population of competent genetic engineers.

"It's simply not feasible, and even if it were, it would be massively disruptive on American life to forcibly expel 4% of the country's population. The question is only: what are we going to do about them?"

"forcibly expel(ing)" them is not our only option.

By enforcing laws against employers and denying taxpayer funded benefits to illegals, they will have no reason to be here. Even if they decide to stay, they should not enjoy benefits of being here while we are denying those who did stand in line.

American life has gone through many "disruptions". Don't underestimate our ability to adjust to this one.

P.B. Almeida: as I argued, by favouring/providing incentives for highly-skilled third world workers to emigrate to the US, you are directly exacerbating the numerous problems of such countries (many of which largely result from - or at the very least are greatly contributed to by - US trade and financial policies). Cf. Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner on information asymmetrics, former chairman Clinton's CEA, former Executive VP and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Overlooking this issue may be convenient to 'Business' (so lower wages can be paid, and thereby a cheaper product provided, higher profits made), but is on a human level outrageous. It seems to me that global capitalism mandates a 'race to the bottom' in which nation states must compete for the worst protection of rights to employment (as the US currently exemplifies), and consequently the lowest real wages and worst conditions. The currrent battle over youth employment in France is a fine example of this conflict (employment and economic productivity vs income stability and quality of life).

Does economic growth equal progress/development? The question remains whether people's lives get necessarily worse or better after 'labour market liberalization'. Do reduced employment rights result in higher productivity and less unemployment? Well, as the economic orthodoxy postulates, in some cases yes. But by no means always, and certainly to the deficit of the supposedly universal human aim of self-development, which many (I include myself here) argue is somewhat more important than pure productive efficieny.

But by no means always, and certainly to the deficit of the supposedly universal human aim of self-development, which many (I include myself here) argue is somewhat more important than pure productive efficieny.

Tom, UK: I'm not making the case on the basis of "productive efficiency". I'm making the case on the basis of human freedom. A rich country's obligation to help (say) Nigeria doesn't trump a Nigerian's right to live where he will, especially when there exist ways in which rich countries can help poor ones that don't entail blocking immigration (like trading with them, for instance). I would concede, of course, that permitting skilled people from developing countries to immigrate is hardly the same as aggressively recruiting them (especially in hard-to-recruit sectors like nursing).

Even if they decide to stay, they should not enjoy benefits of being here while we are denying those who did stand in line.

Alan: I readily concede an element of unfairness in the granting of an amnesty (or whatever they're calling it these days). But the immigration policy of the United States should primarily concern itself with national interest. Any reasonable cost-benefit analysis conclusively demonstrates we're better off regularizing the lives of the 12 million people now living in the shadows. We need not justify our policies with regard to certain foreigners to other foreigners. We need only make sure these policies give us a net benefit. Unfair? Perhaps. But a bit of unfairness that is in the national interest.

"It seems to me that global capitalism mandates a 'race to the bottom' in which nation states must compete for the worst protection of rights to employment (as the US currently exemplifies), and consequently the lowest real wages and worst conditions."

You're saying that countries competing for workers naturally leads them to offer low wages and poor working conditions? By competing for highly skilled workers from other countries through higher wages and other incentives, we are inevitably lowering their wages?

What you're really saying is that everyone should be forced to live the way you want them to, but global capitalism might give people choices. You're afraid that, if allowed to choose, they might not choose the job-security-for-the-lucky-few-with-jobs, stagnation-for-all policies that are important to you and hence should be forced on everyone.

Jane, what Caplan doesn't consider is that maybe the Brawns are not compatible with the society of the Brains for some reason.

Consider, as an example, a society where the Brain consensus is that capitalism and democracy are good things, and they've set up both. Whereas the Brawns, being stupid, think that socialism is a good thing, though they are attracted by the wealth of the Brains. They also believe in democracy, of course.

Now what happens? Everyone is better off when minimal numbers of Brawns immigrate. But if they get to 51%, suddenly they implement socialism, and wreck the society for everyone. If the democracy is more like ours, some of the Brains for whatever reason champion the Brawns and they need much less than 51%.

Conclusions are left to the reader.

Wake up ignorant racists!

Nothing will damage our economy and the world economy more than forcing millions of less than legal immigrants to give up their high productivity in the U.S. to go to idleness or low productivity jobs in their countries of origin!

Our standard of living is a function of world productivity. When aggregate productivity goes down, the aggregate standard of living goes down.

Forcing these immigrants out of their jobs could make the Great Depression look like the great vacation- especially in states like Texas and California which, if a go home law was effectively enforced, would lose 15-20% of their population!

Listening to a lot of talk radio these days, I feel like I'm living in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust. Suddenly the solution to all our problems is- "let's get rid of all those Mexicans".

But for the grace of God each of us could have been born on different soil. Why should freedom to pursue opportunities, especially in the land of the free, be limited to those whose accident of birth put them here?

Let's impose a reasonable fine on those who have broken the law to get here and let them get on with their productive lives. Then allow residence to anyone who can pass a background check and pay the entrance fee in the amount they have bid for a residence permit in regular and plentiful on line auctions of same. The deficit will shrink from the fees while the social security system is shored up by millions of younger workers.

The fact that people want to come here is an opportunity- not a problem.

I responded with my post Jane Galt: Modern Day Paul Erlich?

I'm about as pro-immigration as anyone I know, and it's because of being pro-immigration that I am opposed to simple amnesty for illegal immigration. How exactly do you explain to a highly skilled French engineer that he has to go home now because he played by the rules, but alas, it took longer than his 6 year H1B run for his green card application to be processed, and so he has to go home now at the same time telling an illegal day laborer he can stay? How do you possibly justify that?

If we actually need 11 million mexicans for low skilled labor, then set up a program to admit that may legally. Only allow application from without the country. Set up a legal moratorium of 1-2 years after which anyone found in the country illegally is considered a felon and therefore not eligible to immigrate. Set up a legal moratorium for employers during which you escalate towards enforcement, and after which employing an illegal carries a mandatory 2 year minimum jail sentence.

Don't tie the guest worker visas to a particular employer. If a someone holds a guest worker visa give them exactly the same labor mobility and rights as any other permanent resident or citizen. This dramatically reduces exploitation. Make guest workers eligible for unemployment on the same terms as any other worker. After one quarter without obvious support (ie, tax payments or receipt of unemployment payments) or upon application for social services, revoke the visa and deport the guest worker. Voluntary exit before deportation should be considered non-predjudicial for reentry. Forced deportation should not.

What this proposal does:

1) It evolves everyone towards legality. DeSoto's pretty conclusively shown that shadow economies are bad for everyone.

2) Don't explicitely favor law breaking, but do allow a reasonable way for people to correct their previous law breaking behavior. Anyone to *is* here illegally but leaves during the moratorium period can come back on the same terms as anyone else.

3) Don't create an underclass of workers. Treat foreign workers just like anyone else. They have the same rights, and incur the same employer costs as native labor.

4) Don't allow leaching of social service spending.

Aggressively importing Brains has some negative externalities, too. It's probably a net benefit for society as a whole, but it does tend to drive native Brains away from some professions.

I'm a (native-born) biologist with a Ph.D. Sixty percent of my peers are foreign-born, a percentage that has grown dramatically in the last two decades. My non-citizen friends tell me that the U.S. is the place to be if you're a researcher; better funding, more positions. (They are, generally, very skilled people, but the research infrastructure in their home countries is horrific.)

What this means, though, is that U.S. workers in tech fields are part of a labor pool that has about 3 billion participants (the US population, plus all other countries that can produce citizens tech-savvy enough to qualify for H1-B's.) Most other US workers compete against the US population alone--300 million. So, if you're an American and can live here no matter what you do for a living, there is an economic downside to working in STEM fields. My particular field, in fact, was listed as one of the "worst payoff for the necessary qualifications" jobs by CNN Money last fall.

It is fun, though.

If most Mexicans want to live and work in the US and the Mexican government wants them to do so, why not offer Mexico the opportunity to become the 51st state? Then all Mexicans could live in the US, most in the state of Old Mexico. Mexican illegal immigration problem solved. Viola!

And then the Brawns, feeding off of the prosperity provided by the Brains, multiply faster. And because human nature is the way it is, the Brawns have a deep seething resentment of the Brains (even though they depend on the Brains to organize a society that provides the Brawns the prosperity they enjoy) and eventually the Brawns use the very civility of the Brain society (things like democracy) against the Brains to exact revenge.

Just look at South Africa if you want a real-life example. The white South Africans used to outnumber or were at least in numerical parity with blacks. The land they occupied was sparsely populated by blacks. But they began to hire blacks to do the "brawn" work, and because the money they offered was many times better than what blacks could earn in the all-black countries, the blacks flooded into South Africa looking for work and in order to live near the prosperous white civilization and thus enjoy some benefits.

The result? Blacks taking power and engaging in an ongoing crime spree against whites. Blacks changing the employment and company ownership laws so that white men can't find jobs and can't own businesses. The white population is being gradually annihilated and the country is going to down the crapper.

This is the real life result of your idealistic economic scenario about Brain and Brawn.

The better policy is for the Brains to either do their scut work themselves, or else mechanize the scut work.

In addition to favoring skilled labour, Canada has an even simpler mechanism for improving itself through immigration: favoring the rich. Anyone with CD$800K who is willing to invest half of it in Canadian ventures may immigrate to Canada. If you are acting as entrepreneur rather than passively investing, those numbers are halved. It seems an eminently sensible and simple policy which the US would do very well to emulate. I have absolutely no hope of it being implemented.

Megan,

You're a good writer and thinker, and I agree with most of what you have to say about immigration. For my part, I'd rather hire (or live next to, or drink with) the guy who dragged himself across a hundred miles of desert to work 14 hours a day for $3/hr than any of our many native-born lardbutts sitting at home drawing a government check.

But...it would be nice to see you address the political consequences here. When you let in a worker, you're letting in your future ruler (if he gets naturalized, or has children he raises in his political image). Is it wise to permit huge numbers of poorly-educated people from quasi-Marxist backwaters to become part of our political process merely because they can make it here? Aren't we importing the screwed-up politics of those countries?

Could SOME open-borders libertarian PLEASE discuss this intelligently? Because your wonderful libertarian paradise could go to hell pretty quick if the enormous mass of immigrants your free-market priciples demanded be admitted decide they miss the socialism of their native land.

It seems to me that global capitalism mandates a 'race to the bottom' in which nation states must compete for the worst protection of rights to employment (as the US currently exemplifies), and consequently the lowest real wages and worst conditions. The currrent battle over youth employment in France is a fine example of this conflict (employment and economic productivity vs income stability and quality of life).

Flawed premise is as flawed premise does. Back up this truck for a second and go to the root of human survival: If a man doesn't work at a level of effort that provides for his fundamental needs, regardless if the work available is the type of task and income level he believes his abilities are worth, he starves to death.

Any other discussion from there is fine, and policy-in-practice may vary widely depending on desired peripheral outcomes and particular socio-economic circumstances. This is also fine, so long as the policies and procedures integrated therefrom can also be derived back to this fundamental principle. If at any point they cannot be so-derived backwards, then they were invented by dreaming and depend on root principles that are unsustainable in practice.

Income stability and quality-of-life are byproducts of wealth; but wealth had to be created somehow, and it can also be lost. In fact it will be lost if a generation born into this level of privilege decides that the privilege is somehow an entitlement.

"In fact it will be lost if a generation born into this level of privilege decides that the privilege is somehow an entitlement."

anony-mouse,

Are you really sure we're not there already?

Excellent points, anony-mouse. Communism and socialism focus excessively on confiscation and distribution, ignoring the fact that wealth first must be created. Wealthy societies (western Europe) may only see a slow downward drift at first from socialism rather than the fairly nasty plunge from communism, and they benefit also from the fact that the US hasn't largely ignored incentives and is thus still driving an expansion of the world economy. But the costs of neglecting incentives is huge and increasing from generation to generation.

"Several reasons. One, for the same reason that I don't pay attention to the fact that illegal drugs are illegal...if I can't have the laws repealed, then I'd prefer them laxly enforced."

You are paying attention. Your position is that laws making certain forms of immigration illegal should be repealed or laxly enforced. I can agree with repealing these laws. I don't agree with selective and capricious enforcement of the laws. At any rate, the issue of several million people living as second class residents in the USA deserves to be adressed in any serious discussion on immigration. These people should not be ignored, and you should not pretend that they are in the same position as those who immigrate legally. This is not the case.

Caplan's analysis leaves out technological improvement. What happens in a country like Japan, which has more "Brains" than "Brawns", and doesn't let in anybody? They develop techological solutions for the more menial jobs, creating more Brains jobs designing, building and servicing the new machines.

Even in agriculture - it doesn't take much in the way of brains to pick crops, but it does take some brains to run the sort of farm equipment common in the US but rare in India or Vietnam.

To follow up on Anthony?s point about Japan and taking it a few steps further, perhaps had we not allowed millions of illegal aliens to occupy labor-intensive ?menial jobs,? we could and would be developing technological solutions to replace these as well.

In which case a de facto open border immigration policy acts to subsidize labor-intensive industries and creates disincentives for technological innovation much the same way that trade protectionism of industries like agriculture and textiles do.

Free traders then who might support the (relatively) free flow of goods across national borders have no reason to attribute the same benefits as allowing people to freely flow across borders. Add to that the problems of crime, disease, drains on public services, and cultural assimilation that come from 11 million illegal aliens and the economic argument breaks down even further.

For a long time, the US was the biggest free trade, travel, residence, and employment zone in the world, and oddly enough, letting everyone move and work where they chose led to a remarkably strong and prosperous country.

Freedom works. It doesn't need to be twiddled to get the exact results you have in mind.

Open immigration is a good idea.

Jane,
Kapplan's thoughts might make sense if there was any evidence the US had a shortage of "brawns". Not to mention the fact that it completely ignores the brawns limited educational attainment and high rates of crime.

There are crimes that are morally wrong (theft, murder, etc.), and there are crimes that are merely violations of regulations (driving over the speed limit on an untrafficked road). IMHO, illegal immigration is definitely in the latter category. Everyone who has never violated a traffic regulation or put paper in the trash can rather than the recycling bin (if you live in a place with regulations like that) can gnash their teeth and scream about illegal immigration being a crime.

For the rest of us, a more moderate approach seems more appropriate. Unenforced laws and repeated amnesties send the message that laws do not have to be respected if you can get enough people to break them with you, and that can be very bad if they apply this lesson to other laws - say the ones against rioting and looting. But let's not cut our own throats with attempting to enforce the laws. I agree with most of Quadropole's post.

Miss Galt has made a wonderful argument for colonialism. As she must clearly recognize, Brains must control the educational system, legal system and legislative system to insure that Brainy things get done and stupid Brawny things are sh!t-canned. A libertarian regime is perhaps best, one that automatically gives the net benefit to the sharpest negotiators, the Brains.

Of course the Brawns won't like this.

You see, even when the Brains can show Brawns how much better off they are when they submit to Brain rule, Brawns will still rebel. There will always be crazies like Hitler, Mandela, Mugabe, and countless others who will want to expel the Brains, their culture, religion and belief, and see what they can come up with on their own under some foolish rubric of "self-determination".

My goodness, how much better the Arabs would be doing if they had submitted peacefully to Jewish Rule! How much better blacks of Zimbabwe would be doing if they submitted to White Rule! Arab and Black Brawns have done nothing but starve and suffer since they rejected Brain rule.

Bill,

Do you have any evidence of higher crime rates for Mexican American illegal immigrants? I've been searching but cannot find any. The crime rates I have found are for Hispanics in the U.S. The problem with those rates are:

1. The majority of U.S. Hispanics are either citizens or legal immigrants.

2. Hispanic statistics include groups that are very different from mexican Americans, including: prisoners exported by Castro from Cuba; Columbian drug dealers; and Puerto Rican citizens who have lived for generations in our entitlement culture, and thus fell victim to its assualt on achievement and accountability.

3. Most ethnic crime statistics are not age-adjusted. We know that teenage and young adult males commit more crimes in all ethnic groups. As Mexican immigrants include a a higher proportion of young males, it should not be surprising that this group has a higher crime rate than older ethnic groups.

Have you seen crime statistics that don't haev these shortcomings?

JohnDewey,

My assumption was that illegal immigrants from latin America commit crimes at about the same rate as other Hispanics in America. I'm certainly willing to conceed that assumption may be wrong.

Still, this article by Heather McDonald at least partially backs up my argument.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html

John Dewey writes:
[Do you have any evidence of higher crime rates for Mexican American illegal immigrants? I've been searching but cannot find any. The crime rates I have found are for Hispanics in the U.S.]

John Dewey, your suggestion that latin americans other than mexicans may commit disproportionately less crimes in the hispanic category is possible, but if it were true, would you advocate ending immigration from the latin american countries that are inflating hispanic alloted crimes? Have you ceded the point that high crime rates are an argument against the immigration from a certain country or group?

John Dewey writes:
[1. The majority of U.S. Hispanics are either citizens or legal immigrants.]

Immigrants necessarily lead to 2nd, 3rd, 4th generations and beyond. You can't have one without the other due to birthright citizenship, so it is fair to think about later generations crime-rates when thinking about the impact of immigration.

As Harvard immigration lover Robert J. Sampson writes in "Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals":

[Indeed, the first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background. Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/opinion/11sampson.html?ex=1299733200&en=be13bc1a15648c8d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

JohnDewey writes:
[2. Hispanic statistics include groups that are very different from mexican Americans, including: prisoners exported by Castro from Cuba; Columbian drug dealers; and Puerto Rican citizens who have lived for generations in our entitlement culture, and thus fell victim to its assualt on achievement and accountability.]

I'll let Razib from gnxp.com handle this one:
[...one half of the equation is actually tractible in terms of public policy. america has reduced immigration levels in the past. i do not know of any time when the welfare state has retreated to any extent (someone can correct me). just as michael pointed out that the majority of americans are against high levels of immigration, they are also against "big government." big deal, they still love their mortgage guarantees and federally funded pork programs, just like they hire jose to do landscaping because he'll take $5/hour while john demands $10/hour. i think getting rid of jose is a lot more feasible in the medium term than getting rid of pork projects. that's just my realistic assessment.]
-comment on the post "Jane Galt: Modern Day Paul Erlich?" www.gnxp.com

"Have you ceded the point that high crime rates are an argument against the immigration from a certain country or group?"

Oh, certainly not! As I recall, the early groups of Chinese, Irish, and Italian immigrants, especially their children, also had higher than average crime rates. IMO, our nation is much stronger because we've allowed the Chinese, the Irish, and the Italians to settle here.

I'm a great-grandchild of an Irish immigrant farmer. I'm confident the U.S. has benefitted from the contributions of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings. Many of us served bravely in wartime, just as Hispanics today serve in great numbers in our ground combat units.

"If most Mexicans want to live and work in the US and the Mexican government wants them to do so, why not offer Mexico the opportunity to become the 51st state? Then all Mexicans could live in the US, most in the state of Old Mexico. Mexican illegal immigration problem solved. Viola!

Posted by Ed at April 1, 2006 11:03 AM"

That must be an April Fool's comment. We need only look at recent history to see that this is a flawed proposal at best. Note that when proserous West Germany united with poor East Germany, the whole created was somewhat less than the sum of the parts. The German economy is a shadow of what it was with skyrocketing unemployment. That can't be allowed here.

Of course, the one benefit of this proposal is that we get rid of that "ally" Fox and gain control of a huge source of underutilized resources.

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