"Ray Fischer" <rfischer@sonic.net> wrote

Supply and demand works with a given product, but one worker is not
typically replacable by just any other worker.

In the cases where immigrant workers have made the most impact,
it is undeniably true that one worker is replacable by any other
worker.

Example: WalMart.

"Ray Fischer" <rfischer@sonic.net> wrote

Supply and demand works with a given product, but one worker is not
typically replacable by just any other worker.

In the cases where immigrant workers have made the most impact,
it is undeniably true that one worker is replacable by any other
worker.

"Yang, AthD (h.c),

Because the authors are saying that immigrant labor act as
*complementary* supply to native labor. Sort of like how an increase
in the supply of right-handed mittens will effectively create extra
demands for left-handed mittens.

Besides the fact that your supply-side economics is a proven failure,
I'm not aware of any credible economists who say that.

Your exmple, in typical Bush fashion, ignores the market. A large
increase in thesupply of mittens -- as in your example -- should
lead to a drop in the value of mittens on the market.

You can challenge the empirical results, but there is nothing wrong
with the logic.

Well, besides the real world.

Supply-side economics is bogus. Real life simply doesn't work that
way.

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:15:36 -0500, "Reasoned Insanity"
<mintclovers@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's Cocaine Snorting *****"
<eacmole@/*AWOLBUSH*/mail.com> wrote in message
news:lsde42d9tqmouio6jdc9qh1j8hfo0j5kh6@4ax.com...

On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 05:58:52 GMT, No One <noone@nospam.pacbell.net>
wrote:

"Reasoned Insanity" <mintclovers@yahoo.com> writes:

http://www.cis.org/topics/wagesandpoverty.html

You might want to pop up to <http://www.cis.org/> to get a better
idea of what this site is - links with titles such as "minutemen
win one over ACLU" should give you the general idea that this is
a highly partisan site.

Well, Reasoned Insanity is a highly boased person.

But you are a lying *****. I would say you are worse.

And you are an unemployed ***** who sucks from teh teats of
society. I'm far more valuable than you.

As a consequence, poverty in the U.S. is increasingly being driven by
immigration policy. Between 1979 and 1997, immigrant households
increased
their representation in the U.S. population by 68 percent, but over
that
same period their share of the total poor population increased 123
percent.
And the gap between the immigrant and native poverty rates is
widening -
this gap tripled between 1979 and 1997.

You mean all the highly skilled people with advanced degrees who moved
here from India and China and who now work in Silicon Valley are
causing widespread poverty? Get real - these immigrants are not only
highly talented, but a pleasure to work with, and are contributing more
than their fair share to the economy.

They are contirbuting more than Mr.Insanity, who's so gainfully
employed that he posts on usent during working hours. Hey, get a real
job buddy.

Why don't you first try to prove that I don't have a job moron?

You post in the middle of workdays for weeks on end.

"Miriam Cohen" <mimiNOSPAMgal@cox.net> wrote in message
news:fnO1g.26691$iU2.26183@fed1read01...

Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's Cocaine Snorting ***** wrote:

They are contirbuting more than Mr.Insanity, who's so gainfully
employed that he posts on usent during working hours. Hey, get a real
job buddy.

Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye
By EDUARDO PORTER
CALIFORNIA may seem the best place to study the impact of illegal
immigration on the prospects of
American workers. Hordes of immigrants rushed into the state in the last
25 years, competing for jobs
with the least educated among the native population. The wages of high
school dropouts in California fell
17 percent from 1980 to 2004. But before concluding that immigrants are
undercutting the wages of the
least fortunate Americans, perhaps one should consider Ohio. Unlike
California, Ohio remains mostly free
of illegal immigrants. And what happened to the wages of Ohio's high
school dropouts from 1980 to 2004?
They fell 31 percent. As Congress debates an overhaul of the nation's
immigration laws, several economists
and news media pundits have sounded the alarm, contending that illegal
immigrants are causing harm to
Americans in the competition for jobs. Yet a more careful examination of
the economic data suggests that
the argument is, at the very least, overstated. There is scant evidence
that illegal immigrants have caused
any significant damage to the wages of American workers. The number that
has been getting the most
attention lately was produced by George J. Borjas and Lawrence F. Katz,
two Harvard economists, in
a paper published last year. They estimated that the wave of illegal
Mexican immigrants who arrived from
1980 to 2000 had reduced the wages of high school dropouts in the United
States by 8.2 percent. But the
economists acknowledge that the number does not consider other economic
forces, such as the fact that
certain businesses would not exist in the United States without cheap
immigrant labor. If it had accounted
for such things, immigration's impact would be likely to look less than
half as big. Mr. Katz was somewhat
taken aback by the attention the study has received. "This was not
intended," he said. At first blush, the
preoccupation over immigration seems reasonable. Since 1980, eight million
illegal immigrants have entered
the work force. Two-thirds of them never completed high school. It is
sensible to expect that, because they
were willing to work for low wages, they would undercut the position in
the labor market of American high
school dropouts. This common sense, however, ignores half the picture.
Over the last quarter-century, the
number of people without any college education, including high school
dropouts, has fallen sharply. This has
reduced the pool of workers who are most vulnerable to competition from
illegal immigrants. In addition, as
businesses and other economic agents have adjusted to immigration, they
have made changes that have muted
much of immigration's impact on American workers. For instance, the
availability of foreign workers at low
wages in the Nebraska poultry industry made companies realize that they
had the personnel to expand. So
they invested in new equipment, generating jobs that would not otherwise
be there. In California's strawberry
patches, illegal immigrants are not competing against native workers; they
are competing against pickers in
Michoacán, Mexico. If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the
border, the strawberries would.
"Immigrants come in and the industries that use this type of labor grow,"
said David Card, an economist at the
University of California, Berkeley. "Taking all into account, the effects
of immigration are much, much lower."
In a study published last year that compared cities that have lots of less
educated immigrants with cities that
have very few, Mr. Card found no wage differences that could be attributed
to the presence of immigrants. Other
research has also cast doubt on illegal immigration's supposed damage to
the nation's disadvantaged. A study
published earlier this year by three economists — David H. Autor of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Mr. Katz of Harvard and Melissa S. Kearney of the Brookings Institution —
observed that income inequality in
the bottom half of the wage scale has not grown since around the
mid-1980's. Even economists striving hardest to
find evidence of immigration's effect on domestic workers are finding
that, at most, the surge of illegal immigrants
probably had only a small impact on wages of the least-educated
Americans — an effect that was likely swamped
by all the other things that hit the economy, from the revolution in
technology to the erosion of the minimum wage's
buying power. When Mr. Borjas and Mr. Katz assumed that businesses reacted
to the extra workers with a corresponding
increase in investment — as has happened in Nebraska — their estimate of
the decline in wages of high school dropouts
attributed to illegal immigrants was shaved to 4.8 percent. And they have
since downgraded that number, acknowledging
that the original analysis used some statistically flimsy data. Assuming a
jump in capital investment, they found that the
surge in illegal immigration reduced the wages of high school dropouts by
just 3.6 percent. Across the entire labor
force, the effect of illegal immigrants was zero, because the presence of
uneducated immigrants actually increased the
earnings of more educated workers, including high school graduates. For
instance, higher-skilled workers could hire
foreigners at low wages to mow their lawns and care for their children,
freeing time for these workers to earn more.