One thing I've been puzzling over in this immigration debate: I've seen quite a few references to research by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz that found immigrants reduce the wages of native born high-school dropouts by as much as 7.4 percent (you can get the paper through Mark Krikorian's virulently rightwing Center for Immigraton Studies), but I've not found a particularly strong argument for why that's so awful.
Put it this way: if most of the crew bemoaning Hispanic-spurred wage depression were actually serious about the subject, they wouldn't have let the minimum wage fall to a 54-year low against the average wage. As a society, we've done virtually nothing to help high school dropouts in the past 20 years, save for an expansion of the EITC. But suddenly, when the question is browns taking the jobs, a howl of indignation sweeps through the land! Funny how that works. I wonder how it'd sound if more attention were given to the fact that the worst off amongst high school dropouts were not browns, or whites, but blacks, and they're in trouble for more structural reasons (like William Julius Wilson's spacial mismatch, arguing that decent low-skilled jobs have fled from the urban centers where poor blacks live).
Moreover, I have trouble judging immigrant labor a bad thing even on the merits. It's not clear to me why I should be so much more concerned about uneducated Americans than uneducated Mexicans. And that's not a one-world, every-man-is-my-brother perspective. America is pretty damn intertwined with Mexico, and much that we've done in the region has contributed to the country's relative impoverishment. That's not to say it's all our fault, or even mostly so, but if Americans are connected through citizenship, certainly I share some second-order link with the country I grew up 45 minutes away from, and that once had sovereignty over my hometown. And even assuming that link is weaker, given that the wage increase for a Mexican immigrant working in America is multiples larger than 7.4 percent, and given that that wage works, through remittances, to help support families back home where the social services are weaker and ensure Mexico's financial stability, isn't there a utilitarian argument that I should support their labor?
