Forbes on Inequality

[Brett Knowlton]

I was reading Forbes on a recent flight and ran across an article about
inequality.  Not surprisingly, it suggested that all the fuss over
increasing income and wealth inequality was way overblown.

The point was this - inequality has increased over the last decade or two
solely due to immigration.  This was based on a recent study by some
academic economist (unfortunately I don't remember the name), who claims
that if you remove recent immigrants and analyze the rest of the
population, inequality has increased only slightly (they also claim that
the immigrants are doing better too, but not only did they not give any
evidence for this claim its beside the point), and that even the poor have
gained economically.

My question is - do they have a point?  Or is this study the equivalent of
the Bell Curve, junk numbers and analysis to "prove" and idoeological axiom?  

Brett