Friday, June 21, 2013

Quote of the day

From Alex Tabarrok, via Bryan Caplan:
"As far as wages are concerned the only difference between immigration and birth is that birth takes longer. When your neighbor has a child it as equivalent to a worker entering the country 18 years in the future. The wage argument against immigration thus also suggests that we should have prevented the parents of the baby-boomers from having children."
Plus birth gives us workers that look like us by definition, immigration doesn't, and that bothers people. Sometimes it bothers people so much that instead of just letting people come who want to come they argue that we should choose the "best and the brightest" - whoever THAT is. And notice the people who talk like that never use the corollary. They never call the people that don't fall under their definition of "best and the brightest" the "second-best and relatively dim" or even "the worst and the dumbest".

No, they don't say that. Because that would give away the game.

3 comments:

  1. Part of belonging to a political union mean those decisions are collectively up to us, so the problem with this is if we choose to not have more children, why should we choose to have more immigration? Is it just to save the cost of upbringing? Is it the ability to self select? Should we be encouraging more domestic population growth? The problem with immigration proponents is they care more for foreigners than they do their fellow citizens, and that is the big problem they have in their position.

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  2. "They never call the people that don't fall under their definition of "best and the brightest" the "second-best and relatively dim""
    I'll say that. It's pretty much tautological.

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  3. "worker entering the country 18 years in the future"

    But that 18 years and the previous experience of the immigrant are not likely to be the same. The type of immigrants Daniel wishes to have more of will have much worse job prospects than natives. As a result many of them will end up in minimum wage jobs, in the grey economy or unemployed. That means they'll vote Democrat to get more welfare. In the long-run they'll be far more Democrat voters than today, which will push the whole political consensus to the left.

    Mentioning this though gives the game away.

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