May 02, 2005

Hurray for Ludditism!

Professor Bainbridge links to an article in the WSJ about the Pew Immigration Study. His post just consists of an excerpt, but I assume he approves since he's an open borders kinda guy. From the excerpt:

The Pew study supports the theory that immigrants are supplementing the U.S. work force, not pushing native-born Americans out of jobs...

Even where illegal immigrants do compete with native-born workers, the larger labor pool may produce more jobs overall. That is because "employers are forgoing labor-saving machinery to rely on more laborers," says Ethan Lewis of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. "That has the effect of saving jobs."

Say what? Is replacing automation and mechanization with serf labor now supposed to be a good thing? Plus ca change... Hey, at least the South's economy won't collapse.

As for the first paragraph, now see this:

The recovery from the recession of 2001 is often described as "jobless." But this is not entirely correct. My analysis of Census Bureau data shows that between March 2000 and 2004, the number of adults working in United States actually increased.

What's interesting, however, is that all the net growth in jobs went to immigrant workers. In fact, while the number of unemployed adult native-born workers increased by 2.3 million over this time, the number of employed immigrants rose by 2.3 million...

I have a feeling there will be another Bainbridge-oriented post soon. See also "The morality of delousing pens" and "Jeb in '08? Jeb in '12? P. in '16? P. in '20? Wilbur [Bush] in '24? Wilbur in '28? Cletus [Bush] in '32? Cletus in '36? W. [first clone] in '40? W. [first clone] in '44?"

UPDATE: Scrolling down the page at the Prof's site, I see that the matter has already been taken care of.

Posted to Immigration2005a at May 2, 2005 09:15 PM

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