Forbes/Bloomberg Immigration Debate

Check out this great pairing of back-and-forth articles on immigration in Bloomberg and Forbes.

First, from Bloomberg, comes Ramesh Ponnuru’s Don’t Blame Immigrants for Your Flat Paycheck. Ponnuru is not in favor of increased immigration, but he takes to task immigration restrictionists’ citation to “dubious evidence” in support of claims that immigration hurts the middle class. “If you want to know why middle-class living standards aren’t rising as fast as they used to,” Ponnuru writes, “don’t look to immigration for an explanation.”

Instead, Ponnuru concludes:

Higher immigration brings big benefits to immigrants and modest benefits to the economy as a whole. It poses a risk of making life worse for Americans with low levels of schooling. And only a small minority of Americans is in favor of it. The smaller the number of immigrants, on the other hand, the more likely they are to assimilate culturally, economically and politically, and the less likely they are to place a strain on American society.

It seems to me then, for all those reasons, that we should refrain from increasing immigration and should perhaps even reduce it. But one thing lower immigration will not do is boost middle-class paychecks.

Adam Ozimek over at Forbes has responded to Ponnuru’s piece in Smarter Immigration Critics. Ozimek applauds Ponnuru’s criticism of “popular arguments,” though he nudges him to see that he is “underestimating the potential upside to high skilled immigration.”

-KitJ