05/07/2013
(Canadian) Frum: Doing a job Americans afraid to do!
Jeff Sessions may be right! In a development as significant in the word of public controversy as seeing the first migrant birds of the season on the wing, punditry entrepreneur David Frum has dared to risk his privileged position at The Daily Beast and associated MSM perquisites by writing an immigration-skeptic column. As befits his NeoCon Royalty status, this was then picked up by Real Clear Politics today.
A Nonsense ConsensusMay 6, 2013 amusingly dwells on the same Euro row parallel cited by Peter Brimelow in Comprehensive Immigration Reform” — And The Myth Of “Getting It Behind Us — both pieces must literally have been being written at the same time. Frum saysAcknowledging with Mickey Kaus the extreme polarization of this controversy —TWENTY YEARS ago the leaders of Europe agreed on a bold step: a new currency called the euro. They promised that the euro would improve life for everybody — and denounced all opposition as ignorant, xenophobic, and backward. Their words gained extra plausibility because many of the opponents of the euro really were ignorant, xenophobic, and backward.
Yet the backward critics were right, and the enlightened proponents were wrong. And so it is with the immigration debate in the United States.
Nothing unifies the American elite like immigration. From Barack Obama to Paul Ryan, from the editorial board of The New York Times to that of The Wall Street Journal, from the offices of Facebook to those of Goldman Sachs, everybody who counts more or less agrees.
Frum goes on the give a coldly lucid account of the Cheap Labor Lobby’s lies:
He concludes accusing the 'American elite' of ignoringFor most Americans, the dominant economic fact of the past 15 years has been the deteriorating market for their labor … Unemployment still exceeds 7 percent even as we approach the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy; nearly half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed…
What employers mean when they refer to labor shortages is “shortage at the wage we prefer to pay.” Here’s how this preference operates in the labor market. Back in the mid-1970s, meatpacking was an industry overwhelmingly characterized by native-born labor.
Meatpackers earned an average of $17.41 an hour…Over the next three decades, native-born labor in the meatpacking industry was displaced by immigrant labor, much of it illegal. Wages correspondingly collapsed. By 2006, meatpackers averaged $11.47 an hour, more than $5 less than the average manufacturing wage — which had itself declined nearly $1.25 over the same period.
… the arithmetic that the harms of immigration fall on poorer Americans while the benefits mostly accrue to wealthier people and to immigrants themselves… since people like you dominate politics and media, you get one more advantage on top of all the others: the gratifying feeling that you are on the only side of the immigration argument that is entitled to a respectful hearing.
David Frum has a long history of correct deviationism on immigration, even raising the issue of an immigration moratorium during his Frum Forum exile.
Since his rescue by The Daily Beast in early 2012, however, there has been all but complete silence. And there is nothing in this column which is actually new.David Frum is a professional opinion surfer. Could he be getting ahead of a demand for comforting rationalizations by a Treason Lobby in defeat — by offering the idea that the unobtainable might not be entirely desirable?
H/T CIS
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