What do people like Michelle Malkin and Phyllis Schlafly have in common with radical environmentalists? Both camps, normally ideologically opposed to one another, support severe restrictions on immigration. They often argue with an apparent ignorance of economics. A Constrained Vision visited CPAC today and came away with some sour notes on Schlafly debating immigration with the Manhattan Institute's Tamar Jacoby.
Immigration is one of those things I don't know much about, but my instinctual reaction to the subject is that a coherent conversation cannot be had without understanding the economics underlying labor markets. Unfortunately, I am not conversant enough in economics, or its application to labor, to discuss immigration at length, but my sense is that, on net, immigration is a good thing, even if it depresses wages for unskilled laborers (which is a common complaint of anti-immigration foes on the right).
Markets are generally dynamic, and it is folly to believe, as anti-immigration forces on the right contend, that low-skilled laborers should be paid more than the market is willing to pay them. In essence, this is the same muddied thinking that unions use when complaining about "dumping," NAFTA, free trade, outsourcing, and all manner of other applications of free markets. But little, if anything, substantive is said about the nature of free markets, when these people complain and cavil. Rather, both the anti-immigration right and the pro-union left evince an ignorance of economics in favor of rhetoric.
