>Since anti-immigrant sentiments are not 'rational,' especially in that
>contradictory ideas (immigrants take away jobs/immigrants are spongers)
>seem to coexist in ideology without discrediting each other (and they are
>therefore immune to rational refutations), how do we fight back?
Hi Yoshie,
The evidence that immigrants take away jobs has always been contested. As Pasinetti puts it, the people who are most likely to be lured abroad are the more than average educated ones or those willing to invest a certain large amount. They bring with them knowledge and 'brain.' In the most spectacular cases, the phenomenon has become known as the 'brain drain', but the phenomenon has wider implications. For the countries they leave, they represent losses of embodied technical knowledge and of entrepreneurship. [for example, in America there is budding organization called, I believe, TiE--the Indus entrepreneur; in Silicon Valley, more than 30% of the start ups have South Asians in one of the top most positions, says my father--rb].
Traditional economic theory teaches--and this is often taught by asian immigrants in international trade courses--that the immobility of labor does not matter to achieve factor price equalization or whatever, but the movement of labor does matter to what kind of system we have, including the glaring differentials in productivity growth across nations that has made per capita income in, say, the US at least 60 and perhaps 80 times higher than, say, India.
This bellyaching about immigration as America sucks up the human and money capital from all over the world is rather pathetic. At least the great advantages the US derives need to be noted as well. Of course with the children of immigrants there is doubtless some regression to the mean and thus the great advantages are self correcting to some perhaps substantial extent:)
As for counteracting downward pressure on wages from greater competition, the Labor Party is fighting for a $10 min wage. If enforced, that would make undercut employer preference for illegal immigrant employees whose wage standards having been determined in underdeveloped conditions make acceptable the ridiculous current US minimum which puts an American worker in such relative inequality to other Americans that the work effort required by such jobs is quite difficult to accept and meet. Who found it surprising that a rise in the min wage is not correlated at all with rising unemployment? But foreign workers are often not judging their position immediately in relation to other Americans but to their conditions in their home country. An absolute improvement in conditions softens the low and humiliating relative standing within the US--that seems like a plausible candidate for why class consciousness may have been less sharp in the US than Europe in the days of mass immigration. So double or triple the min wage and then open the borders while fighting for wage standards, instead of simply IPR's, in trade agreements. Indeed if America is going to suck up the world's talent to lead the technological frontier, then at the very least it could allow the least restrictive IPR regime.
yours, rakesh