Archive for the 'Immigration' Category

Jan18th2010

The Best Way To Help Haiti Victims

Paul Romer gives my preferred solution:
There is a natural complementary approach that is a much better bet than giving colonialism another chance–letting Haitians migrate somewhere with better governance and rules. This is the surest answer to the question posed in the beginning. It can give them access to the urban infrastructure, buildings, equipment, and the […]

Mar26th2009

The Future Of Immigration

From a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper:
This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early […]

Mar11th2009

The Protectionist And Anti-Immigration Congress

The Harvard Crimson reports:
Troubled financial institutions that recruit heavily from Harvard may soon face restrictions on hiring international students if they accepted federal bailout funding. Under a recently passed amendment to the federal stimulus bill, companies participating in the Troubled Assets Relief Program—a government financial-rescue plan implemented last fall—will face more restrictions in hiring H-1B […]

Feb12th2009

Anti-Immigration Surfaces

First it was “buy American only”, now its this:
While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants […]

Aug20th2008

A Cure For Real Estate Markets Downturn

Given by Alan Greenspan:
“The most effective initiative, though politically difficult, would be a major expansion in quotas for skilled immigrants,” he said. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that […]

Jun27th2008

The More The Better

George Will makes the case for immigration we can all agree on:
Two-thirds of doctoral candidates in science and engineering in U.S. universities are foreign-born. But only 140,000 employment-based green cards are available annually, and 1 million educated professionals are waiting — often five or more years — for cards. Congress could quickly add a zero […]

Apr8th2008

Krugman On Immigration

CATO’s Will Wilkinson, in discussing Paul Krugman’s recent book, writes:
In Krugman’s view, if the working class contains many members without the franchise, it is itself disenfranchised. So it is that Krugman pretty nearly celebrates one of the most shameful chapters in 20th century American politics: the progressive (read: “racist”) imposition of strict immigration controls to […]

Mar5th2008

Republicans And Immigration

John McCain, as everybody had been expecting, has officially clinched the Republican nomination. This just goes to show something I had believed all along: Republicans, as a whole,  are not anti-immigration.
The Republican relationship with immigration is a lot like the Democrat relationship to education - you have a few people that make alot of noise […]

Jan7th2008

Quote Of The Day

“It’s not just that they’re brown; it’s that they’re brown and want to use your stuff. Let more people in, the argument goes, and they’ll end up on welfare, their kids crowding your schools, their parents crowding your hospitals. You could argue that the economic concerns are just masking mass racism, but that doesn’t explain […]

Dec4th2007

Quote Of The Day

“A mere 65,000 H-1B visas for foreign professionals are allocated in the U.S. each year. And this year, as in the previous four, the quota was exhausted almost as soon as the applications became available in April. This effectively means that more than half of all foreign nationals who earned advanced degrees in math and […]

Sep13th2007

Immigrants Attraction To The United States

Historian Victor Davis Hanson makes an interesting comment:
One final thought here. Why would deported illegal alien and activist Elvira Arellano, who according to the LA Times, “symbolized inhumane treatment of migrants to some,” wish to return to the US?
News reports suggested she does in petitioning the Mexican government for a diplomatic visa. Surely she might […]

Aug29th2007

Quote Of The Day

“One particular consideration I think is underdiscussed is the fact that much of the labor illegal immigrants provide substitutes for women’s home labor. And I don’t just mean nannies for rich women. I mean cleaning services, and food processing, and dry cleaning, and grocery delivery, and all the other things that make it possible for […]

Jun13th2007

Quote Of The Day

“The principal way rich countries disadvantage the poor world is not through unfair trade, or through intrusive and ineffective aid, or by forcing repayments of debts. The primary policy pursued by every rich country is to prevent unskilled labor from moving into their countries. And because unskilled labor is the primary asset of the poor […]

Nov27th2006

Quote Of The Day

“Language is the keystone to politics. This past week I gave some lectures about illegal immigration. I noticed how the supporters of open borders so often prefer to demonize their opponents as “anti-immigrant”, hoping to reframe the debate into Americans’ supposed animosity against individual arrivals, legal and illegal. And why not when a rational defense […]

Nov10th2006

Quote Of The Day

“Open immigration to America worked well during the 19th century because the government did very little for immigrants and their families. How immigrants voted after becoming citizens also mattered little because government decisions were not so important. With the growth of government during the past half century, neither of these conditions continues to hold, so […]

Oct31st2006

Bush Signs U.S.-Mexico Border Fence Bill

Everytime I hear the news that Bush signed the U.S.-Mexico Border Fence Bill, I think of two things, one is this picture below:

…and the second thing is, immigration marches made this more likely, they woke up the wrong sleeping giant.