That's pretty much what he said on Marketplace Radio this morning. He touted his support of immigration generally, and of course he has always been a strong supporter of more open in trade , but he said that if employers can hire high-skilled immigrants then they won't have to raise wages for the jobs they fill. This was a beauftiful statement of what I call "loser liberalism." Reich wants trade and immigration policies that depress the wages of less-educated workers. [addendum -- I was unfair to Robert Reich here. The implied trade and immigration policy does have the effect of redistributing income upward, but Reich has been a strong advocate of other policies, notably labor law reform, that have the opposite effect.] He would then toss them a few crumbs to lessen the pain for these losers. But when it comes to policies that could tilt the playing field the other way, so that less educated workers benefit from immigration (lower wages for highly-educated workers, means lower prices for the goods and services they produce and therefore higher real wages for those in the middle and bottom) Reich gets on Marketplace Radio to denounce them. Maybe one day Marketplace will have a commentator who doesn't think it's bad to allow the market to reduce income inequality.
--Dean Baker
