Still, I want to know more about inequality measures controlled for immigration (if such statistics are even kept). A Business Week article I read a while back claimed that individuals were actually better off in almost all cases, but the addition of workers on the low end of the income spectrum via immigration accounted for nearly the entire rise in inequality measures. I wondered about this aloud on the list and didn't get very satisfying replies. And now Cox and Alm are using the same argument.
> Another non-nefarious cause of increasing income disparity may be
> our ever-higher immigration rates. Immigrants tend to cluster in
> low- and high-income groups. Thus it is no surprise that in the
> seven most unequal states -- New York, Arizona, New Mexico,
> Louisiana, California, Rhode Island and Texas -- about 13 percent
> of the population is foreign-born (in California, it's 25 percent).
> Among the seven states with the smallest income disparities, the
> immigrant population is only 3.8 percent.
The logic is sound (its easy to construct an example where an entire original population is better off income wise than it was in an earlier period, but due to the addition of new people at the bottom end of the income scale overall inequality at the end of the period is worse than it was originally). And inequality measures, in themselves, will not shed any light on this issue.
So, I'm going to ask again. Does anyone know whether these guys are simply cooking the numbers, or do they have a point? Are they on solid ground or are they taking a weak effect and overemphasizing it to score political points? I'm wondering because most people on the left (including myself) have claimed that working individuals have lost ground economically over the last 10 or 20 years. But if this immigration argument is correct, this story might be at least partially misleading.
Again, I'm not trying to defend wealth or income inequality. I simply want a straight answer, if possible.
Brett