-----Original Message-----
From: Johannes Schneider <Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net>
>Sounds nice. But what are you going to do if some of your immigrant farmers
>decide to prefer industrial wage-labour over farming? Tough work-permit
>controls? Send them back home? Reintroduce slavery?
Let them go and work in the cities if that is where better jobs are. I am for open borders for a whole host of reasons, but the farm issue just spotlights how restricting the labor supply just encourages the substitution of labor by capital and environmental exploitation.
In fact, opening the border combined with more labor-intensive agriculture would probably encourage some deurbanization of the unemployed of third world cities. Immigrants to the US are much less of a competitive threat to industrial workers here than is low-wage labor in the Third World desperate for jobs due to high unemployment.
Michael's proposals are a way to increase global employment while decreasing environmental degredation. Seems like a pretty good gain all around.
--Nathan Newman