(Ironically, this article was written by an immigrant.)
http://www.vdare.com/pb/borjas_bombshell.htm
August 29, 2003
New Borjas Bombshell: Immigration Now Impacting College Grads' Incomes
By Peter Brimelow
On Labor Day weekend, Americans' fancy resignedly turns to thoughts of
education. In much of the country, not withstanding the late-summer heat,
toddlers and teenagers have already begun trooping back into the maw of the
vast K-12 bureaucracy. And everywhere, students and their fee-paying
parents are contemplating college.
It may all be a waste of time and money. Well, not a waste, exactly. But the
rewards to education may not be what Americans anticipate - because of
immigration.
The source of this stark message: another Borjas bombshell - a new research
paper from Cuban-born Harvard University economist George Borjas, author of
Friends Or Strangers and Heaven's Door, who more than anyone has turned
around the immigration debate among labor economists by demonstrating that
the post-1965 immigrant influx has brought no significant benefit to
native-born Americans and in fact is probably costing them money, through
welfare and other transfer payments.
Borjas' new finding, euphoniously entitled "The Labor Demand Curve Is
Downward Sloping: Re-Examining The Impact Of Immigration On The Labor
Market," has been available since June as a working paper from the National
Bureau of Economic Research. It will be published in the Quarterly Journal
of Economics this Fall.
Curiously, the paper has received no attention in the Establishment media.
That's what VDARE.COM is for.
Borjas' conclusion: immigration 1980-2000 increased the workforce by some 11
percent. This "supply shock" reduced the wages of the average native-born
worker in 2000 by 3.2 percent.
The supply shock's impact differed dramatically across education groups. For
native-born high school dropouts, wages were reduced by 8.9 percent. But,
significantly, even for native-born college graduates, wages were reduced on
average by 4.9 percent.
The impact was greatest on college graduates with 11-15 years work
experience - i.e. most likely to have young families-when it amounted to 5.9
percent.
But even new college graduates, with 1-5 years experience, faced a reduction
of wages of 3.5 percent.
Think about that when you're paying tuition fees.
Of course, elementary economic theory predicts that, all other things being
equal, when you increase the supply of anything, its price will fall. But
this effect has taken a relatively long time to show up in the U.S. labor
market after the immigration floodgates were opened by the 1965 legislation.
Borjas himself couldn't detect the effect when he published Friends And
Strangers in 1990, so he said so. Subsequently, he realized that American
were moving out of immigrant-impacted areas, causing the wage effect to be
detectable only at a national level. So he said that too.
Immigration enthusiasts, politically committed to their cornucopian view of
immigration, just went on blithely citing Borjas' earlier view. Catoite
Stuart Anderson, subsequently a Bush Administration immigration official
(!), did this as late as 1995, when I nailed him for it in National Review,
in the brief period before it was effectively captured by the
neoconservative/ Beltway establishment.
The beauty of Borjas' new analysis is that he has disaggregated census data
both by education level and also by work experience. It turns out that the
impact of immigration influx on the native-born varies a great deal.
In particular, because a lot of immigrants are relatively unskilled, but a
significant minority are highly-educated, the wage impact is most intense at
both ends of the native-born education range. Previously, immigration's
impact had been thought to be felt only by the unskilled.
Of course, the fact that immigration is impacting the educated native-born
is not news to specialists like Norm Matloff, Rob Sanchez and American
refugees from Silicon Valley. But now there's striking proof of a general
effect-on the most articulate and organized sectors of American society.
The end for immigration enthusiasts is now only a matter of time.
