04/30/2007
VDARE.COM readers seem especially enraged about Sebastian Mallaby’s April 30 Washington Post op-ed Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants? Nativist Nonsense Distorts a Critical Issue. And no wonder: it’s full of the silly, sneering snobbery I left England to escape.But Mallaby later followed me to the U.S.–argh!–although, curiously, he doesn’t admit that he’s an immigrant in this piece. He’s a former writer of the London Economist, now director of something called the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sounds ominous. (Equaly ominously, Mallaby’s article is already available on the CFR website for free).
But I was delighted with Mallaby’s article. Of course, it’s distasteful in a democracy to see Mallaby’s elitist unconcern for the fact that, even on his absurd estimate, curtailing immigration now could retrieve a quarter or more of the wage loss that even he admits immigration has inflicted on American high school dropouts. And of course Mallaby repeats various factoids about low immigrant crime rates and the high cost of border security etc. long ago exploded on VDARE.COM
However, all of this is a smokescreen for Mallaby’s self-defeating concession, in his very last paragraph, that ”the total economic effect of immigration on U.S. households is a wash”. This is his perverse way of stating the consensus among labor economists, which I reported at length in Alien Nation in 1995, and which was confirmed by the National Research Council’s The New Americans in 1997: that post-1965 immigrant inflow has been of essentially of no net aggregate economic benefit to native-born Americans.
In fact, The New Americans reported a net loss after transfer payments like education. But, hey, Mallaby’s doing better than Tamar Jacoby. She just lies about it.
What this means, of course, is that America is being transformed for nothing. The question for Mallaby is: why? Why does he (and his employers at CFR) want to transform America?
Ask him. Ask the Washington Post’s discussion thread. Ask CFR.
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