February 8, 2019. Peter Irwin presented "What's Behind The Wall?" Peter examined the preoccupation with a wall on our southern border, the
rationale for its need and the underlying values at issue.
Following Peter's talk, I (Ira Glickstein) made the first Comment from the Audience, commending him for a well-prepared and presented talk, but noting my disagreement with most of it.
The day after his presentation, Peter initiated an interactive email discussion with me and he has graciously given me permission to share his (and my) emails verbatim on this Blog. I hope others will chime in with your Comments by using the Comment feature of this Blog. advTHANKSance!
For clarity, Peter's email text is in BLUE, Ira's text is in RED.
PETER to IRA 2/09/2019
Hi Ira,
As a follow-up to your point yesterday, I'm curious - what
would your immigrant cutoff be?
In 2017, we had 44,410,000 immigrants living in US (about
14% of our population), according to our Census Bureau. But 25 countries
or territories had a higher immigrant share of their population according to
the PEW Research Center. According to a report of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), our country had the highest number
of asylum applications (33,000) in 2017.
Cheers,
Peter
IRA to PETER 2/11/2019
Peter: I’d admit about 1,000,000
immigrants per year. Mostly on the basis of some well-recognized benefit to the
US (need for their capabilities), but also people related to law-abiding
citizens and legal residents already here.
If there was a special emergency where
the government of some country was discriminating against some minority group
of people due to their religion, race, or economic status, I might temporarily
go above 1,000,000 per year if that group of people had some special
capabilities that would benefit the US.
When my grandparents immigrated here from
Europe in the early 1900’s, they did so legally, passed health checks, had
sponsors who were already here, etc. Also, they came at a time when the US
needed workers, including non-college educated blue collar labor. Now, with
industrialization increasingly automated, and, with artificial intelligence and
computers increasingly able to duplicate most repetitive, rule-based, work,
including much white collar labor, we no longer need much of that type of
labor.
As I said in my comment after your talk,
I enjoyed it, but did not agree with much of it.
Love, Ira
PETER to IRA 2/11/2019 3:00PM
Hi Ira,
Thanks for your reply. …
I certainly agree that those who would predictably benefit
our country should be admitted. (Note that many legal and illegal
immigrants from the south come here intending to link up with family members
already here.) But what should be the basis of our "benefit"
prediction and your 1 million/yr limit? There are many businesses in the
US that depend upon cheap labor that few citizens are willing to do - e.g.,
picking crops, home-care for indigent. An owner of a company recently
told me that he could not find low-pay workers in his area and might lose his
business (I recall the conversation but cannot recall the person or his
business). With unemployment so low, how many jobs that our able citizens
would like to fill do you believe that illegal immigrants take away? If
your idea of those who would benefit our country envisions immigrants with
higher education, won't such people compete with our educated citizens and
cause unemployment among them?
Note that I did present your pragmatic argument in my talk:
Against Lady Liberty’s broad
invitation, the practical argue - “What if everyone did?” Should we have
no limitation on immigration? We cannot take in every sparrow fallen from
a tree, every tired and poor person “yearning to breathe free.” We would
be over-run with immigrants, as we already are, and the character of our
country would be changed. We must control the rate of immigration and
wall out those who would violate our laws by entering illegally.
One other relevant issue is the increasing percentage of our
population that is elderly and retired. Absent an increase in procreation
or immigration, we will have insufficient tax revenue to fund Social
Security. Increasing our national debt potentiates this problem, and the
windfall in lower taxes and business profits going to the wealthiest will
eventually have to be paid by our children and grandchildren. Trump has
enriched his billionaire friends at our expense. Yet that misguided
audience comment from the back focused on a few welfare dollars going to the
poorest among us! How easily attentions can be misdirected.
Best wishes,
Peter
IRA to PETER 2/12/2019 10:30AM
Peter: Before we continue this
interesting conversation, I’d like your permission to post our emails,
verbatim, on a Blog I created for The Villages Philosophy Club last September.
That Blog, https://vilphil.blogspot.com/, has not
had much use lately and I’ve been thinking of discontinuing it. However, a
spirited, collegial conversation about a topic, immigration and border
security, that is quite current and important and controversial, could
spark interest.
Please reply with your permission.
advTHANKSance
Love, Ira
PETER to IRA 2/12/2019 5:52PM
Go for it!
***********************************
OK - THE COLLEGIAL DISCUSSION IS ON!
The text above is where we stand as of 2/12/2019.
I (Ira) plan to reply to Peter tomorrow and we'll go on from there.
Meanwhile, others who wish to join in may scroll to the bottom of this Blog posting, click on the Comment hypertext, and post your reactions. Let's continue our high-level discussion!
Love (and respect) Ira
************************************************************
IRA to PETER 2/12/2019 8:58PM
Peter:
In your recent email you say, in part:
“… There are many businesses in the US that depend upon cheap labor
that few citizens are willing to do - e.g., picking crops, home-care for
indigent. An owner of a company recently told me that he could not find
low-pay workers in his area and might lose his business (I recall the
conversation but cannot recall the person or his business). With
unemployment so low, how many jobs that our able citizens would like to fill do
you believe that illegal immigrants take away? …”
Indeed! A major benefit of increased undocumented immigration into the
US (and Western Europe as well as other stable countries with booming
economies) is what you call “cheap labor”.
(However, I do not think our current
3.7% unemployment is what you call “so low”. It should be lower, perhaps 1-2%)
Who benefits from “cheap labor” immigrants? Well, businesses that deal in farming, home-care, and others that use
lots of relatively low skilled labor, as well as the customers of those
businesses who get good products and services at lower cost.
For example, my wife and I live at Freedom Pointe Independent Living
which uses lots of wonderful service-type labor, mostly recent immigrants as
well as “minorities”. They prepare and serve our meals, clean our apartments,
maintain our facilities, do landscaping, and so on. I don’t think any of
the service-labor at Freedom Pointe are actually undocumented, but the presence
of undocumented and documented immigrants in Florida undoubtedly depresses the
wages Freedom Pointe has to pay to our documented service workers. We love our
servers who work very hard, very competently, very honestly, and lovingly. Our
excellent cleaning lady, from South America, had to wait many years for her
husband to legally join her in the US, which he did last year. He works two
jobs. They have a son who is doing well at a local school.
If not for these recent immigrants, American citizens would have to be
hired at higher hourly pay, labor costs would rise, corporate profits would go
down, we’d have to pay more, and the quality of our services might decline.
So, count me as a beneficiary, if only indirectly, from the 10 to 20
million undocumented people at work in the US, 99% of them honest,
hard-working, loving people.
But, who gets penalized? Well,
American citizens who, for whatever reason, have limited qualifications, and
can only do “cheap labor”-type jobs. And, we taxpayers are penalized because
our taxes have to be used to subsidize low-skilled citizens and residents who
can’t (or won’t) find jobs, as well as the policing required to keep the peace
in the depressed, often violent neighborhoods where they are forced to live.
Absent so many immigrants who work hard for low pay, and absent the
undocumented who work hard for low pay because they are afraid to complain
because they may be deported, companies would have to pay more and improve
working conditions to attract American-citizen employees. It is great that
“minority” workers now have the lowest unemployment levels in history, but
wages are stagnant. They (African-Americans and Latino-Americans and others)
are the real victims of excessive, undocumented, immigration.
You continue: “… If your idea of those who would benefit our country
envisions immigrants with higher education, won't such people compete with our
educated citizens and cause unemployment among them?...”
Yes, of course immigrants with higher educations do compete with
college-graduate American workers, and do depress our wages a bit. I’m a
retired engineer with a PhD who worked with quite a few first-generation
immigrants, but I never had a problem getting and keeping my job and my good
salary. Overall, highly-educated immigrants add value to our country, and work
smart and hard. They are often good entrepreneurs, so I welcome them despite
the small hit to my salary.
The key point is that automation and artificial intelligence computer
systems that cause unemployment among the low-skilled by replacing lots of
blue-collar and white-collar jobs that involve repetitive work require more
highly-educated engineers.
In the pretty-near future, more and more low-skill workers will be
replaced by automation, driving up unemployment. At the same time, we will need
more high-skill workers!
You mention “Lady Liberty's broad invitation”. Yes, the final chart in your fine talk was a photo from the
Statue of Liberty of the beautiful words of Emma Lazarus:
The
New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" [emphasis added]
As I pointed out in my Comment after your talk, those
moving words end with “the golden door”.
Well, I’ve never seen a functional DOOR that was not firmly installed
in a WALL of some type.
Thus the “... tired,
… poor, … huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were intended, by Emma Lazarus, to pass through a GOLDEN DOOR in our BEAUTIFUL and
SECURE WALL, and, if qualified, be legally admitted to what many of us believe
to be the greatest country in the world, our experiment in a great free
republic. I think, absent a special crisis, about 1,000,000 deserving people
should be welcomed thru that wall every year, to enhance and preserve our
freedom.
Love, Ira
PETER TO IRA 2/14/2019 11:25 PM
Greetings Ira,
With grandchildren visiting, I have little time to
reply. But you raise many points worth discussing, and I enjoy the
engagement.
1. Most economists think 4-5% is a reasonable
expectation for unemployment. Your suggestion that it should be 1-2% begs
the question, Why? Let's consider why some are unemployed and the
consequences of near full employment.
- Who is unemployed - youths
first joining the workforce, the incapacitated, the unfit, selective job
seekers, those in training, those in transition between jobs, those who
choose not to work (e.g., a parent who prefers to focus on child rearing,
especially pre-school), etc. Do you think these folks amount to no
more than 2% of the unemployed?
- Near full employment prevents
growth - career advancement requires some unemployed to replace
employed. Do you feel that people should be forced to take jobs
below their skill level or jobs that do not afford them a living wage for
their families or jobs that force both parents to work? (Note that
communism promises full employment but fails to provide motivation to
perform better.)
- The more people at work, the
more competition in hiring, the higher the wages, the greater the
inflationary pressure that lowers everyone's income but causes special
suffering among the poor. Is there not an inflection point at which
employment for the few left unemployed causes hardship for the majority by
virtue of higher prices?
2. Who gets penalized by "cheap labor"
immigrants? It is not clear to me that there are many unemployed citizens
willing to take the sorts of jobs that undocumented (cheap labor) immigrants
take - e.g., picking crops and home care for indigents. Those citizens
that do take such jobs often do not perform as well, both because they feel
they deserve better employment or better pay and because they often do so in
transition to better jobs. Thus, they are transient and a headache to
employers. The undocumented cannot get better jobs without bringing
themselves to the attention of ICE and risking deportation. Thus, they
are more reliable and devoted long-term employees, thankful that they can find
work which they could not find in their home country. They are often
breadwinners sending back money to support a coterie of relatives in their home
country. Recognizing the position of these workers, employers often take
advantage of them, not providing health insurance, not paying taxes, and
demanding long work hours at a low wage for difficult jobs. Begrudging
such poor people the subsistence they have earned by evading authorities and
undergoing risks and hardships that we never face reflects to me a lack of
compassion. They threaten no one. Why not offer all illegal
immigrants currently within our borders a path to citizenship? They have
suffered enough. Why find them less deserved of empathy than those who,
having the luck and special opportunity to be born in our country, did not
prepare themselves for any better than the menial employment performed by
illegal immigrants? Is tribal loyalty of more import than the brotherhood
of mankind? And where is the concern for the far larger percentage of our
countrymen being burdened by a national debt run up by the rich to enhance
their own percentage of our GDP pie? The question that is of far greater
import to a sense of justice -- Who gets penalized by tax reductions benefiting
the wealthy?
3. If citizens want higher paying jobs and feel
out-competed for low-paying jobs, will it not force them to better prepare for
employment? Will this not better adapt them for the higher technical
skills that automation will require? Ought we not focus on creating a
more educated populace rather than on enabling the poor to take low-paying
employment?
4. The golden door is a metaphor for the promise of a
valuable opportunity. It is the opposite of a wall, which is a barrier to
opportunity. The Statue of Liberty invites all who seek opportunity to
our shores. Being born here, we have done nothing to earn this
opportunity. We have just been lucky. Thus, it is incumbent upon us
not to be selfish in preventing others from sharing in our good fortune.
We ought not be foolish in absorbing so many that the fundamental character of
our nation is altered, which is the danger that Israel as a democracy faces
simply by losing the procreation race within their borders, not to mention
acceding to a "right of return" (a non-existent right not afforded
any vanquished tribe or nation and certainly not due for those who protract a
state of war and have a stated ambition to annihilate Israel as a state).
We do need to limit legal immigration and minimize illegal entry. But we
ought not be stingy in setting our limit. I do not know how you arrive at
1 million per year and would be interested in a rational basis for deciding
this limit.
Warm wishes,
Peter
IRA TO PETER 2/16/2019 5:01 PM
Peter: I too am enjoying this collegial
email engagement with you, and I agree that visiting grandchildren take
absolute priority over any political disagreement we may have!
- Misunderstanding of US
Unemployment Statistics: Your most recent email seems to me to conflict with
my understanding of who counts as “unemployed” in Official US
statistics.
You write, in part:
“Who is unemployed - youths first joining the workforce,
the incapacitated, the unfit, selective job seekers, those
in training, those in transition between jobs, those who choose not
to work (e.g., a parent who prefers to focus on child rearing,
especially pre-school), etc. Do you think these folks amount to no more
than 2% of the unemployed?” [Emphasis
added]
NONE OF THE PEOPLE IN CATEGORIES I’VE EMPHASIZED ABOVE ARE COUNTED
AS UNEMPLOYED !!!
“People are classified as
unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the
prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.” [Emphasis added]
That website gives a number of
examples of people who are NOT counted as “unemployed” even though they do not
have a job.
According to the Official US Government
rules, the INCAPACITATED and UNFIT are NOT “currently
available for work”! The same is true for those in TRAINING or who
choose to focus on CHILD REARING!
Indeed, in bad economic times some people
of working age may be unable to find a job and become so discouraged that they
stop looking. They too are not Officially unemployed because they have NOT “actively
looked for work in the prior 4 weeks”.
Do you remember when, a year or two ago, the economy and job
market ticked up, and some of the formerly discouraged job seekers started
actively looking for work again, Official unemployment went UP a bit due to the
increase in job seekers.
My wife and I had full-time jobs when we married, and, although
from that time to the present there have been weeks, and months, and years,
when one or both of us did not have a paycheck from a full-time job, NEITHER OF
US HAVE EVER BEEN OFFICIALLY UNEMPLOYED!
For example, while employed in New Jersey I was hired for a job
in in New York and it took a couple weeks to relocate. That transition period
did NOT count as Official unemployment.
When our first child came along, my wife quit her full-time job
to raise our baby. That did not count as Official unemployment because she was
NOT “currently available for work” and NOT
“actively looked for work in the
prior 4 weeks”.
She did not take a full-time job while our three children were
young, but spent the time caring for them, and going back to college to earn
her Masters in Computer Science. NONE of that time counted as Official
unemployment!
She then got a full-time job at the College, and, a year later,
at IBM.
After nearly two decades of full-time employment, my wife quit
to help care for one of our adult daughters, who had become disabled. That did NOT
count as Official unemployment because was NOT “currently
available for work” and NOT “actively
looked for work in the prior 4 weeks”. And, of course, our disabled
daughter was NOT Officially unemployed because she was NOT “currently available for work” and NOT “actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks”.
A couple decades ago, after we both retired from full-time
jobs, we were no longer available nor looking for work, so, like most
Philosophy Club members we are NOT Officially unemployed!
BOTTOM LINE: Yes, I think 1-2% is a good goal for the Official
unemployment rate. Your suggestion of 4-5% is unreasonable, IMHO.
- Jobs American citizens are unwilling to take. You seem to think I (and other taxpayers) should have
to pay to support people who refuse to take jobs that are somehow beneath
their dignity (and that foreigners should be imported to fill those jobs
you call “cheap labor”).
Well, pardon me, but I’ll be damned before I willing pay to
support any able-bodied person of normal working age who would rather sponge
off me (and you and everyone else in the Philosophy Club) than do an honest
day’s work for a day’s pay.
You seem to be on the side of employers who love to have
foreigners (both documented and undocumented) around to allow them to keep
wages “cheap” and working conditions rough and profit off foreign “cheap
labor”.
I’ll gladly pay to support our disabled, dislocated, unlucky
citizens, but not a dime for the lazy, privileged picky people who refuse to
work available, legal jobs.
And, who are the real victims of excessive immigration to
satisfy “cheap labor” job needs? It is largely those American citizens who, for
whatever reason, are qualified only for what you call “cheap labor”
jobs. And these are proportionately more “African-Americans” and
“Latino-Americans” than those of us who are called “White-Americans”.
Excessive immigration rewards the meanest and cheapest
employers.
Reduced immigration and resultant shortage of labor will
encourage employers to raise currently stagnant wages and improve working
conditions.
- Statue of Liberty “Golden Door” Metaphor?
You seem to believe Emma Lazarus was waxing metaphorical when
she wrote those beautiful words displayed at the Statue of Liberty. Well,
perhaps, but why was she so specific as to say ”Golden DOOR” rather than
“Golden Opportunity” or ”Golden Opening” or “Golden secret entrance to the US”
or some other image?
Nope, she knew we had to pick and choose among the “tired … poor
… huddled masses” and be sure to admit only those who were healthy, had
sponsors to assure they would not be a burden, and would be most likely to
benefit our Country.
My grandparents told me that when they were being
processed through Ellis Island they saw some immigrants turned back for health
reasons. Indeed, the steamship companies were required to take rejected
immigrants back to Europe, and, for that reason, the steamship companies
refused to take unqualified people to the US in the first place.
- Number of Immigrants per Year.
You question my suggested limit of about 1,000,000 per year
(with more to cover specific crisis situations). What would your limit be?
Love, Ira
16 Feb 2019. Peter Irwin has informed me that he prefers to self-publish his side of our discussion using the Comment feature of this Blog. Therefore, I invite everyone who has been following our discussion to scroll down to the Comments, click on the "Comments" hypertext, read what Peter and I (and others who may join the conversation) have to say, and post your own ideas. Love, Ira
