Immigration Debate

You are incorrect. The highest level of immigrants ever in this country based on figures by a respectable research firm being used is 10-13%.
The current bill will allow in the next decade a 25% immigrant population based on allowing family to be brought over with no limits to children and wives. Further, siblings and parents can also be brought over. So, it is possible that 25% may be a lower than expected estimate.

That?s great news. Ask Europe what low birthrates and emigration does to an economy.

So you endorse adding to the existing welfare system to promote reform? We won't even be able to detect possible amnesty fraud.

1. There is a huge potential for amnesty fraud. In order to receive amnesty and a Z visa and be put on a pathway to citizenship, an illegal immigrant must demonstrate that he or she was in the U.S. illegally and employed on January 1, 2007. However, the standard to demonstrate residence is very loose. The illegal immigrant need merely produce two affidavits from non-relatives asserting that he or she was working in the U.S. on the appropriate date. The affidavits could even come from other illegal immigrants. It is doubtful that the Department of Homeland Security has any real capacity to separate true affidavits from bogus ones, especially in the crush of processing millions of applications in the space of a year or two. Consequently, the potential for amnesty based on fraudulent documents is very high. In the 1986 amnesty, an estimated 25 percent of the amnesties granted were fraudulent.[20] In the last 20 years, the underground industry producing fraudulent documents has grown vastly larger and more sophisticated. In this round of amnesty, the fraud rate could be as high as or higher than in 1986, resulting in millions of additional amnesties.

Pay attention. I said that I?m for open borders, not the current law. In this thread, I?ve already explained why deficit spending is a good thing.

I disagree with this assessment. Most generational immigrant families worked hard, got an education and instilled those values in their children and so on. You're assessment doesn't account for 1st generation immigrant families that did not even make the census counts, so how and where did you even come up with this banal tripe?

and Chickpea, the fact that you and so many other immigrants worked so hard to gain citizenship in a "legal" fashion and faced such difficulty only proves how ridiculous it will be to process and grant amnesty to 12 million current illegal aliens and without trying to differntiate who is most deserving and isn't commiting fraud.
My Dutch BIL just was sworn in last month after 5 years in the process. Further he worked and was educated here in the US, had credit here, married my sister (In Holland), had 2 children and always worked for an American Company. When he lost his job and had the qualifications to work for a Federal organization, who wanted to hire him, but couldn't because he didn't have citizenship yet and it required security clearance, he was forced to move his family to another State and accept another position.

OK, disregard that because I can?t find the article right now anyway. I read it several years ago and I?ll see if I can dig it up. It?s an aside from the real argument, but my point was that we are doing something to corrupt them, they are not inherently corrupt. As for Chickpea and your brother in law, would you make the argument that slaves freed in the 19th century should have had to go through as much trouble as the ones that were freed by generous masters (getting lucky due to where they were born) or escaped through much hardship because that?s how those in the past obtained freedom?

6th Gen - A friend has a couple questions for you regarding your immigrant crime rates and the effects of minimum wage:

1) I'm curious as to how minimum wage SPECIFICALLY keeps black teenagers unemployed. (maybe he has a good reason, or some evidence but I'm afraid to ask in case his reply is something like "black teenagers burst into flames when they are paid exactly $5.15 an hour. And don't even get me started on what happens to them in 2 years when they are paid exactly $7.25!!!!")

2) He refers to "suburban whites" and "poor blacks", but what about suburban brown people (like meeeeeee)???? She's a 1st generation born of legal immigrants if that info will help you formulate the answer.

Thanks in advance.

6th Gen - A friend has a couple questions for you regarding your immigrant crime rates and the effects of minimum wage:

1) I'm curious as to how minimum wage SPECIFICALLY keeps black teenagers unemployed. (maybe he has a good reason, or some evidence but I'm afraid to ask in case his reply is something like "black teenagers burst into flames when they are paid exactly $5.15 an hour. And don't even get me started on what happens to them in 2 years when they are paid exactly $7.25!!!!")

2) He refers to "suburban whites" and "poor blacks", but what about suburban brown people (like meeeeeee)???? She's a 1st generation born of legal immigrants if that info will help you formulate the answer.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.amatecon.com/etext/mwe/mwe.html

by Thomas Sowell


The presently proposed minimum wage legislation raises two major sets of issues: (1) the question of the real effects of minimum wages, as such, and (2) the effect of the new principle of automatically escalating minimum wage levels, tied to earnings elsewhere in the economy.
Because of inflation, minimum wage levels have been periodically reviewed, and therefore the general issues and growing evidence on the actual effects of the Fair Labor Standards Act have also been reviewed. What an automatic escalation provision means is that we stop looking at the evidence. And we would stop at a time when a growing body of research by independent economists around the country is documenting the negative effects of the minimum wage law?and particularly its devastating impact on job opportunities for minority teenagers.1
Minimum wage laws have been aptly described as ?anathema to economists.?2 Even though 88 percent of academic economists supported the ?war on poverty,? 61 percent of those same economists opposed the minimum wage law.3 In short, this is not opposition based on philosophy or political leanings, but on economic analysis and on the mounting factual evidence that the law increases unemployment among the very people intended to be benefited. Moreover, economic research has also revealed a disturbing correlation between teenage unemployment rates and teenage crime rates.4 In view of this, this seems like a particularly inappropriate time to stop looking at the evidence by putting in an escalator clause that will give the law a life of its own, independent of its effects on people.
The minimum wage law might be discussed in terms of philosophical, political, or economic theory, but the real issues turn on facts. The crucial factual question is whether eliminating wage rates below some designated level also eliminates jobs. As a realistic matter, few people of any philosophical, political, or economic persuasion would want to see either (a) job-seekers unemployed with a hypothetical right to a ?living wage,? or (b) people employed at very low wages when they could be equally fully employed at normal wages.
While facts are crucial, they are not easy to get, for a number of reasons which will be discussed. It will also be necessary to consider a number of standard (or stereotyped) arguments about the minimum wage effects which have persisted over the years. Finally, I would like to venture a few suggestions about the continuing need to assess the impact of the law and some ways that assessment might be improved.
Factual Studies

There are serious problems inherent in trying to study the unemployment effects of minimum wages, as well as other problems that derive from the way the U. S. Department of Labor chooses to approach the issue.
One problem that plagues minimum wage effects studies is getting statistical data for the specific workers directly affected by the minimum. Such workers are often only a small fraction of the total work force. Even where a substantial proportion of the directly affected workers lose their jobs as a result of a minimum wage increase, this effect can be lost statistically in the random fluctuations in employment of the much larger number of workers whose wages were always above the minimum. The statistical extraction of the relevant changes is analogous to trying to receive an electronic signal through a heavy background of static noise. Different economists use different methods and devices to mute the background statistical ?noise? in order to read the signal. As a result of their different procedures for grappling with this problem, economists' numerical estimates of the unemployment effect of the law differ?a variation seized upon by proponents of minimum wages5?but it is increasingly clear that the consensus of these studies is that the law does cause substantial unemployment, and that is more fundamental than the question of exact numbers.
One of the simplest ways of reducing the statistical ?noise? in the data is by selecting some age-group which is known to receive very low wages, so that a relatively high percentage of the people in the category chosen are earning low enough wages to be directly affected by minimum wage changes. Teenagers are an obvious choice, and nonwhite teenagers even more so. Here the serious unemployment effect of minimum wage rates has been repeatedly demonstrated by economists operating independently of one another and using different statistical methods.6
Extremely high unemployment rates among black teenagers have been so highly publicized in recent years, and so automatically attributed to employer discrimination, that certain historical facts must be noted. Large racial differences in teenage unemployment are of relatively recent vintage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were no such large differences, and indeed, black youngsters 16 and 17 years old had consistently lower unemployment rates than whites in the same age brackets.7 Surely no one is going to claim that there was less employer discrimination then than now. We all know better. What was the difference, then? Minimum wages had not yet begun the rapid rise and spreading coverage which has been the dominant pattern since then.8
The unemployment effect of minimum wages can also be seen in international comparisons of countries that do and do not exempt young people from the adult minimum wage. In countries where such exemptions are slight or nonexistent?such as the United States and Canada?youth unemployment is some multiple of adult unemployment. But where there are exemptions that are large and cover a number of working years?as in England, Germany and The Netherlands9?there are no significant differences between youth unemployment rates and adult unemployment rates.10
These findings may reflect the special vulnerability of teenagers as an inexperienced and relatively unskilled group?or they may reflect the greater statistical ease of determining the facts for this group. A recent survey of minimum wage studies notes ?the lack of acceptable continuing data on low-wage adults.?11 The same things known to be happening to teenagers may also be happening to other very low-wage people, who happen not to be grouped together statistically. There are some scattered clues that this is in fact the case. For example, an older study of domestic servants, before they were covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, showed that their ranks tended to be increased in the wake of minimum wage increases, suggesting the displacement of low-skill women from other employment that was covered by the act.12
Factual studies by independent (usually academic) economists must be sharply distinguished from studies by the U. S. Department of Labor. The Labor Department itself has recently been forced to acknowledge the gap between its perennially optimistic conclusions and the consensus of independent studies, the latter ?using advanced economic and statistical analyses.?13 The crudity of the Labor Department studies has been scathingly criticized by academic economists.14 However, even so, the actual numbers appearing in Labor Department studies of minimum wage effects often show employment declines in the wake of minimum wage increases, even though the stated conclusions of these very same studies may be that the minimum wage did not cost people their jobs.15 Congressman Dent is correct only in the narrowest sense when he asserts that ?Not once in the history of the minimum wage has there been an adverse report? from the Labor Department about ?the lessening of job opportunities.?16 In this context, such a statement is far from reassuring. It will hardly be the first clean bill of health given by an agency evaluating itself or the legislation on which its own appropriations and staff depend. This is especially unsurprising to me, as one who worked inside the Labor Department on minimum wage research, and who personally experienced the pressures to reach conclusions consistent with the department's interests.

Assumptions and Claims

The economic analysis which concludes that minimum wages increase the unemployment of low-wage workers rests essentially on the belief that labor is no exception to the general rule that less is demanded at a higher price than at a lower price. Attempts to overturn this basic economic principle usually reduce to one of four assumptions or assertions: (1) there is a fixed number of workers demanded, more or less without regard to wage rates; (2) low-wage workers are victims of employer monopoly power rather than low productivity, so that raising their wage rates will not price them beyond their value to the employer and therefore will not price them out of a job; (3) higher wage rates will cause employers to use labor more efficiently, so that workers will then become more valuable, and so will not lose their jobs; and (4) the increased ?purchasing power? caused by higher minimum wages will lead to a greater demand for goods, and therefore a greater demand for labor, offsetting any tendency toward unemployment. These arguments will be examined in order.

Fixed Demand
The idea that an employer ?needs just so many men? is an old one, which dies hard. Factually, it can hardly stand up in the face of declining employment after wage increases, or the virtual elimination of such occupations as Western Union messenger and elevator operator (despite the continued existence of telegrams and elevators). As a theory, it implies that the substitution of capital?and of higher priced labor?is impossible. The problem arises not when the theory is stated directly and explicitly, but when it is implicitly assumed (and therefore insulated from critical scrutiny), as in the belief that more jobs for teenagers mean fewer jobs for adults.

Employer Monopoly Power
Under special conditions, where there is only one employer in a labor market or a group of employers acting in concert, wages can be kept below what equally productive workers would earn otherwise. There is a special economic theory for such ?exploitation? situations, and a minimum wage increase under those conditions would not produce unemployment.17 Unfortunately, low-wage workers are very unlikely to be in such situations. All sorts of firms, industries, and even households employ unskilled workers, and collusion under these conditions is out of the question. Even such a staunch advocate of minimum wages as the late Senator Paul H. Douglas noted that the market for unskilled labor was one of ?almost perfect competition.?18 The sad fact is that low-wage workers are not so much underpaid as under-skilled, and there is no easy way around this problem without pricing them out of a job.

Efficiency
Theories of offsetting rising wages by increasing efficiency have long been used to claim that minimum wage increases will not reduce employment. Unfortunately, those who argue this way have not distinguished real efficiency?larger output from given combinations of input?from a mere substitution of one input for another as their relative prices change. The examples they cite of ?better? or ?more efficient? methods of production after a minimum wage increase are methods well-known to employers before the imposed wage change, and were not used then simply because they were not the cheapest methods available under the previous input prices. If higher wage rates lead to the substitution of capital for labor, then by definition there will be more output per unit of labor; but it is mere word play to call this more ?efficiency? if the product now costs more to produce and society has to support unemployed workers as well.

Purchasing Power
The doctrine that workers' increased purchasing power after a minimum wage increase will sustain employment has many problems connected with it,19 but the most fundamental problem is that it assumes the very thing that is at issue: that the workers keep their jobs and work as many hours as before. If not, their hypothetical right to a higher wage rate will not buy anything. Workers can only spend real earnings, not hypothetical rights. Once this is realized, it is hardly necessary to go into the other deficiencies of the theory, such as the fact that inflationary increases mean that more spending power is not more purchasing power.

Conclusions

The minimum wage law addresses a serious social problem, but creates no new options for dealing with it. In fact, it simply reduces the set of existing options available to the parties?employers and employees?who must voluntarily agree if there is to be a job. Trying to make people better off by reducing their options seems questionable even as a theory. In practice, what has happened is that fewer transactions (less employment) have taken place when there were fewer options open to the parties. It would be very surprising if it were otherwise.
The great unsolved problem remains of what to do about the poor in general, or the low-wage workers in particular. Low-wage workers are not changed by calling them higher-wage workers, any more than students are improved by calling them B students instead of C students. The tragic educational results of the process of upgrading by fiat is hardly a recommendation for extending this practice into the economic sphere. In both cases, it is of course much harder, much slower?and more heartbreaking?to try to create real skills and real achievements. And yet nothing else will really do the job.
Automatic escalation compounds the problems of the minimum wage law by making it possible to close our eyes to its effects hereafter. This seems unconscionable when those affected are poor, vulnerable, powerless, and inarticulate. If the Congress does not monitor what happens to them, there is no other powerful institution to do so. The set of incentives confronting the U. S. Department of Labor makes it unrealistic to expect it to critically evaluate minimum wage effects, and nearly forty years of history make it painfully apparent that it has no intention of doing so. Labor unions have their own imperatives and constraints. For them, the minimum wage law presents the same kind of opportunity that a tariff presents to a business firm. It is a way to price competitors out of the market. That this is accompanied by humanitarian statements may be a matter of rhetorical, or perhaps political, interest but it changes no economic fact. In the Union of South Africa, minimum wage laws were applied to native black Africans for the explicit purpose of stopping their competition with European workers.20 In the days of the British Empire, British unions and manufacturers attempted to get minimum wages applied to India for similar reasons, though with different rhetoric.21 American unions and businesses have been doing something very similar in Puerto Rico and other affiliated territories where minimum wages are set by tripartite boards of mainland Americans, often from competing firms.
The point here is not to depict anyone as particularly evil. The point is that powerful institutional incentives exist to use the minimum wage laws for purposes very different from those announced in the Fair Labor Standards Act, and that these institutional incentives are likely to persist through turnovers of personnel in the future as in the past.
Special interests, recognized as such, may be kept within bounds. For the special interests revolving around the minimum wage laws, Congressional oversight seems especially needed, and therefore automatic escalation seems especially dangerous.
Finally, my hope would be that some way might be considered to have the statistical analysis of minimum wage effects performed by some organization other than the agency whose own fate is intertwined with that of the Fair Labor Standards Act.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


1. Marvin Kosters and Finis Welch, ?The Effects of Minimum Wages on the Distribution of Changes in Aggregate Employment,? American Economic Review, June 1972; Thomas G. Moore, ?The Effect of Minimum Wages on Teenage Unemployment Rates,? Journal of Political Economy, July/August, 1971; Michael C. Lovell, ?The Minimum Wage, Teenage Unemployment and the Business Cycle,? Western Economic Journal, December 1972.
2. Peter B. Doeringer and Michael J. Piore, Internal Labor Markets & Manpower Analysis (D. C. Heath & Go., 1971), p. 182.
3. Jacob J. Kaufman and Terry G. Foran, ?The Minimum Wage and Poverty,? Readings in Labor Market Analysis, ed. J. F. Burton, Jr., et al. (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 197 1), p. 508.
4. Belton M. Fleisher, The Economics of Delinquency (Quadrangle Books, 1966), Chapter 3.
5. ?... the estimated magnitude of these employment impacts and the distribution of these impacts vary among the studies.? Statement of Assistant Secretary of Labor, quoted in Minimum Wage Legislation (American Enterprise Institute, 1977), p. 14.
6. See note 1 above.
7. Employment and Training Report of the President (Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 242, 243.
8. Minimum Wage Legislation, p. 2.
9. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Youth Unemployment and Minimum Wages, Bulletin 1657 (Government Printing Office, 1970),p.138.
10. Ibid., P. 149, Table 10.1. It should be noted that The Netherlands did not have a minimum wage before 1966, so the entry in the table for 1960-64 is misleading.
11. Minimum Wage Legislation, p. 15.
12. Yale Brozen, ?Minimum Wage Rates and Household Workers,? Journal of Law and Economics, October 1962.
13. Quoted in Minimum Wage Legislation, p. 14.
14. George Macesich and Charles T. Stewart, Jr., ?Recent Department of Labor Studies of Minimum Wage Effects,? Southern Economic Journal, April 1960. See also Thomas Sowell, ?The Shorter Work Week Controversy,? Industrial and Labor Relations Review, January 1965.
15. Numerous specific citations of Labor Department studies are listed in Sowell, op. cit. p. 243.
16. Representative John Dent quoted in Minimum Wage Legislation, p. 10.
17. Albert Rees, The Economics of Work and Pay (Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 75-78.
18. Paul H. Douglas, The Theory of Wages (Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), p. 78.
19. See Sowell, op. cit., pp. 241-242.
20. P. T. Bauer, ?Regulated Wages in Underdeveloped Countries,? The Public Stake in Union Power, ed. Philip D. Bradley (University of Virginia Press, 1959), p. 346.
21. Ibid., p. 332.

:roll: All original thoughts, I see. :roll:

Very long and well documented post. Could you please highlight where it says that the minimum wage keeps black teenagers unemployed? It just says that many think the minimum wage laws hurt those they are designed to help, then talks how hard it is to prove that.

This isn't the article I read, but it addresses the situation.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/01/01/good_waves?mode=PF

Good waves
If there's a link between urban crime and immigration, sociologists say, it's probably not what you think
By Drake Bennett | January 1, 2006

AMONG OTHER THINGS, 2005 was the year that the Boston Miracle seemed to become a distant memory. The storied drop in the city's murder rate in the 1990s had drawn scholars, politicians, and police chiefs from around the country to observe and learn from Boston's crime-fighting prowess. But the murder rate has been climbing since it bottomed out in 1999, and this year it jumped to a 10-year high. Coming at a time when murder rates continued to fall in other big cities like Chicago and New York, the upsurge has sent local politicians scrambling for solutions, and examining what it was that worked so well last time.

To be sure, people have been dissecting and disputing the causes of the dramatic nationwide '90s decline in crime since it first showed up as a trend. Some credit innovative policing policies or tougher sentencing, others point to improving economic conditions or an aging population, still others the end of the crack epidemic.

The fact that the 1990s also saw one of the greatest influxes of immigrants in the country's history isn't often mentioned in these discussions. Crime, it has long been assumed, is one of the inevitable costs of immigration. As George W. Grayson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, wrote in the Washington Post opinion pages this summer, ''the evidence is overwhelming that an influx of poor immigrants-whether Italians, Irish, or Poles in the 19th and early 20th centuries or Hispanics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries-does bring crime, unruly drinking, public urination, unemployment, overcrowded dwellings, and property damage."

It may be surprising, then, to find agreement among several leading criminologists that immigration does not cause crime-and may even reduce it. None of them would argue that immigration is the most important factor everywhere, especially since the recent rise in Boston's murder rate comes as its foreign-born population continues to grow. But the increased flow of immigrants to major American cities nationwide, argues Robert J. Sampson, a Harvard sociologist and lead author of a major recent study on the topic, ''has been one of the more plausible explanations that we've seen for the decrease in the violence rate."

. . .

Skepticism about a link between increased crime and immigration isn't entirely new. Working in the 1920s and '30s, at the end of the country's last great wave of immigration, criminology pioneers Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin found that immigrants had lower crime rates than both native-born Americans and second-generation immigrants. It was American culture, Sutherland and Sellin concluded, that caused crime, and the less exposure to it one had the less likely one was to be a criminal.

Published earlier this year, the study led by Harvard's Sampson echoed these earlier surveys. Sampson and his colleagues followed a diverse group of nearly 3,000 Chicago youths from 1995 to 2002, and found that immigrant kids were less likely than peers of similar socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in everything from gang fights to arson to purse snatchings. Not only that, but even nonimmigrant kids who happened to live in immigrant neighborhoods were less likely than otherwise to be involved in violence.

Part of the explanation for this, Sampson says, is that immigrant families, while often poor, are more likely than other poor families to have stable, two-parent households, one factor widely understood to decrease the odds of violent activity.

But that didn't explain everything. In Sampson's study, simply being a first-generation immigrant, no matter what one's parents' marital status or one's education level, made one less likely to end up committing a violent crime. And while the immigrants in Sampson's sample were predominantly Latino, the trend also held for the African and Caribbean immigrants he followed.

Sampson and others can only hypothesize as to why. ''New immigrants," suggests John Hagan, a sociologist at Northwestern University, ''tend to be a self-selected group who are highly ambitious, energetic, innovative." Immigrants, it's been repeatedly found, are significantly more likely than their nonimmigrant neighbors to have jobs. Hagan suggests that they're also less likely to be interested in something as possibly ruinous as crime.

Ramiro Martinez, a sociologist at Florida International University, has come to similar conclusions by studying homicide rates among Latino and immigrant communities in Miami, El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, Chicago, and other cities. In each, he has found immigrants heavily underrepresented-especially considering their socioeconomic status-among convicted murderers. Andrew Karmen of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has found analogous results for New York state.

In fact, Martinez points out, some of America's best-known border towns have the country's lowest murder rates. ''San Diego, for example-a place that captures the public imagination with all this concern about losing the borders to Mexico-has one of the lowest homicide rates for any major American urban area in the United States." El Paso, another city seen as bearing the brunt of the swelling ranks of illegal immigrants, regularly ranks among the country's safest cities.

. . .

There are limits to the data in these studies. For one thing, they focus on violent crime rather than property crime, which is more prevalent. And little work has been done on immigration's effect on nonurban crime-perhaps understandably, since big cities both absorb most of the country's immigrants and experience most of its crime.

No studies, furthermore, have been able to determine whether illegal immigrants-who tend to loom particularly large in public fears-are as crime-averse as legal immigrants. On this front, though, criminologists have at least been able to make informed guesses. Sampson, for example, points out that 75 percent of the immigrants in his study listed themselves as noncitizens. While many of those may have been in the process of applying for citizenship, a good number, he suspects, were simply illegal. And Martinez claims that he's seen very few illegal immigrants in the prison populations, homicide reports, and detectives' assessments he's studied. ''They're laying low," he says, and committing a crime would only get them noticed.

Some, however, take issue with these findings-and not just anti-immigration activists. Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University political scientist, has done detailed surveys of crime and quality of life throughout Chicago. Even when he controlled for poverty, he found an increase in the concentration of Spanish-speaking immigrants in a neighborhood increased ''crime, social disorder problems, and physical decay."

In part, Skogan argues, this is because Chicago's immigrants are largely young and male, and young males are invariably the most crime-prone segment of any population. In addition, he says, immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, drive up crime by serving as easy targets for what Skogan calls ''specialty gangs" who target illegals because ''they can't report crimes, and they're walking around with a lot of cash-they're called 'walking ATM machines."'

Skogan also points out that immigrant experiences vary widely, especially in the second and third generation. While Chicago's immigration is largely Mexican, ''if you're talking about New York, for example, it's a more complicated mix of people coming in."

Sampson readily admits that the immigrant effect weakens with each successive generation. Like Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin, Sampson finds that the children of immigrants are more crime-prone than their parents, the third generation more crime-prone still. Why that is, he admits, is ''really the $64,000 question, that's really at the forefront of the research."

What it suggests, though, is that the causes of crime lie less with immigrants than with the country that they, like generations of new arrivals before them, are busily assimilating themselves into.

:roll: All original thoughts, I see. :roll:

WTF are you rolling your eyes at? Your penchant for arguments with no basis or anecdotal evidence never ceases to amaze me.

Very long and well documented post. Could you please highlight where it says that the minimum wage keeps black teenagers unemployed? It just says that many think the minimum wage laws hurt those they are designed to help, then talks how hard it is to prove that.

Here's another article now that I've established some credibility for Sowell, since few here know who he is.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-11_15_05_TS.html

November 15, 2005
Ignoring Economics
By Thomas Sowell

Many people are blaming the riots in France on the high unemployment rate among young Muslim men living in the ghettoes around Paris and elsewhere. Some are blaming both the unemployment and the ghettoization on discrimination by the French.

Plausible as these explanations may sound, they ignore economics, among other things.

Let us go back a few generations in the United States. We need not speculate about racial discrimination because it was openly spelled out in laws in the Southern states, where most blacks lived, and was not unknown in the North.

Yet in the late 1940s, the unemployment rate among young black men was not only far lower than it is today but was not very different from unemployment rates among young whites the same ages. Every census from 1890 through 1930 showed labor force participation rates for blacks to be as high as, or higher than, labor force participation rates among whites.

Why are things so different today in the United States -- and so different among Muslim young men in France? That is where economics comes in.

People who are less in demand -- whether because of inexperience, lower skills, or race -- are just as employable at lower pay rates as people who are in high demand are at higher pay rates. That is why blacks were just as able to find jobs as whites were, prior to the decade of the 1930s and why a serious gap in unemployment between black teenagers and white teenagers opened up only after 1950.

Prior to the decade of the 1930s, the wages of inexperienced and unskilled labor were determined by supply and demand. There was no federal minimum wage law and labor unions did not usually organize inexperienced and unskilled workers. That is why such workers were able to find jobs, just like everyone else, even when these were black workers in an era of open discrimination.

The first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, was passed in part explicitly to prevent black construction workers from "taking jobs" from white construction workers by working for lower wages. It was not meant to protect black workers from "exploitation" but to protect white workers from competition.

Even aside from a racial context, minimum wage laws in countries around the world protect higher-paid workers from the competition of lower paid workers.

Often the higher-paid workers are older, more experienced, more skilled or more unionized. But many goods and services can be produced with either many lower skilled workers or fewer higher skilled workers, as well as with more capital and less labor or vice-versa. Employers' choices depend on the relative costs.

The net economic effect of minimum wage laws is to make less skilled, less experienced, or otherwise less desired workers more expensive -- thereby pricing many of them out of jobs. Large disparities in unemployment rates between the young and the mature, the skilled and the unskilled, and between different racial groups have been common consequences of minimum wage laws.

That is their effect whether the particular minimum wage law applies to one sector of the economy like the Davis-Bacon Act, to the whole economy like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 or to particular local communities like so-called "living wage" laws and policies today.

The full effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was postponed by the wartime inflation of the 1940s, which raised wages above the level specified in the Act. Amendments to raise the minimum wage began in 1950 -- and so did the widening racial differential in unemployment, especially for young black men.

Where minimum wage rates are higher and accompanied by other worker benefits mandated by government to be paid by employers, as in France, unemployment rates are higher and differences in unemployment rates between the young and the mature, or between different racial or ethnic groups, are greater.

France's unemployment rate is roughly double that of the United States and people who are unemployed stay unemployed much longer in France. Unemployment rates among young Frenchmen are about 20 percent and among young Muslim men about 40 percent.

There is no free lunch, least of all for the disadvantaged.

It was American culture, Sutherland and Sellin concluded, that caused crime, and the less exposure to it one had the less likely one was to be a criminal.

There are limits to the data in these studies. For one thing, they focus on violent crime rather than property crime, which is more prevalent. And little work has been done on immigration's effect on nonurban crime-perhaps understandably, since big cities both absorb most of the country's immigrants and experience most of its crime.

Some, however, take issue with these findings-and not just anti-immigration activists. Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University political scientist, has done detailed surveys of crime and quality of life throughout Chicago. Even when he controlled for poverty, he found an increase in the concentration of Spanish-speaking immigrants in a neighborhood increased ''crime, social disorder problems, and physical decay."

In part, Skogan argues, this is because Chicago's immigrants are largely young and male, and young males are invariably the most crime-prone segment of any population. In addition, he says, immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, drive up crime by serving as easy targets for what Skogan calls ''specialty gangs" who target illegals because ''they can't report crimes, and they're walking around with a lot of cash-they're called 'walking ATM machines."'

Sampson readily admits that the immigrant effect weakens with each successive generation. Like Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin, Sampson finds that the children of immigrants are more crime-prone than their parents, the third generation more crime-prone still. Why that is, he admits, is ''really the $64,000 question, that's really at the forefront of the research."

What it suggests, though, is that the causes of crime lie less with immigrants than with the country that they, like generations of new arrivals before them, are busily assimilating themselves into.

I read this article as saying that the employment & family structure were more responsible for the immigrants lower crime rates than anything else and that as they became more Americanized, their tendency to commit a crime became higher. NOT that they became more criminalized with each successive generation, but that as they adjusted to their new society, the key factors that differentiated them changed.

Let me get this straight, 6thGen. You are in favor of opening up all borders and allowing anyone to come and go as they please, yet you are against the public being allowed to walk on the beach? You don't seem to be on the same page with yourself on this one.

I read this article as saying that the employment & family structure were more responsible for the immigrants lower crime rates than anything else and that as they became more Americanized, their tendency to commit a crime became higher. NOT that they became more criminalized with each successive generation, but that as they adjusted to their new society, the key factors that differentiated them changed.

My point was that crime increases through generations, and we need to figure out why and address that.

Tapa boca, esta muerto

Let me get this straight, 6thGen. You are in favor of opening up all borders and allowing anyone to come and go as they please, yet you are against the public being allowed to walk on the beach? You don't seem to be on the same page with yourself on this one.

I never said that the public should not be allowed to walk on the beach. I said that private property owners should be allowed to use their property as they wish, within legal bounds, and that the state should not forcefully take property. You said that they should give up the property or the state should sieze it without compensation if the property owners do not wish to just give up something so valuable.

Many people are blaming the riots in France on the high unemployment rate among young Muslim men living in the ghettoes around Paris and elsewhere. Some are blaming both the unemployment and the ghettoization on discrimination by the French.

France's unemployment rate is roughly double that of the United States and people who are unemployed stay unemployed much longer in France. Unemployment rates among young Frenchmen are about 20 percent and among young Muslim men about 40 percent.

Very informative article!

However, it stated that the reason black men were employed at the same rate was that they worked for LESS money. Once they had to be paid the same amount, discrimination became a key factor and then the disparity in employment rates was seen. These examples were BEFORE the civil rights movement and the passage of laws outlawing descrimination.

I believe part of the problem in France is that such descrimination is not illegal and with such high unemployment rates, they are choosing to employ their countrymen rather than immigrants. Steps that are being taken to preserve the French culture are being seen as racist and are creating more rage like that shown in the Paris riots.

Very informative article!

However, it stated that the reason black men were employed at the same rate was that they worked for LESS money. Once they had to be paid the same amount, discrimination became a key factor and then the disparity in employment rates was seen. These examples were BEFORE the civil rights movement and the passage of laws outlawing descrimination.

I believe part of the problem in France is that such descrimination is not illegal and with such high unemployment rates, they are choosing to employ their countrymen rather than immigrants. Steps that are being taken to preserve the French culture are being seen as racist and are creating more rage like that shown in the Paris riots.

Scooterbug,
I'm not trying to be glib or condescending, but have you ever hired someone? If you have, you should know that it is virtually impossible to discriminate based on race. Further, it is in your interest to hire the best candidate for the job, regardless of race. I know that doesn't always happen, but in practice, race does not play a role in hiring. Blacks may have been employed because they work for less, but that's likely because they offered less to their employer. Setting a floor does not allow them to choose to work for less, nor does it allow an employer to hire workers with limited skill. As for France, I'd argue different based on what I've studied in economics, but I've met Frenchmen and I've been to Paris a few times, so I realize that race plays a part in hiring, more than it does here, but state regulation of employers is far more responsible for high unemployment.

Scooterbug,
I'm not trying to be glib or condescending, but have you ever hired someone? If you have, you should know that it is virtually impossible to discriminate based on race. Further, it is in your interest to hire the best candidate for the job, regardless of race. I know that doesn't always happen, but in practice, race does not play a role in hiring. Blacks may have been employed because they work for less, but that's likely because they offered less to their employer. Setting a floor does not allow them to choose to work for less, nor does it allow an employer to hire workers with limited skill. As for France, I'd argue different based on what I've studied in economics, but I've met Frenchmen and I've been to Paris a few times, so I realize that race plays a part in hiring, more than it does here, but state regulation of employers is far more responsible for high unemployment.

That was my point - the examples in the article were prior to our anti-discrimination laws, when they were treated as second class citizens. The racial issues & disparities cited no longer apply here, but might in France.

That was my point - the examples in the article were prior to our anti-discrimination laws, when they were treated as second class citizens. The racial issues & disparities cited no longer apply here, but might in France.

So are you satisfied with Dr. Sowell's explanation as to how minimum wage laws disproportionately affect black teenagers?

Panama City Beach made Paul Harvey today. He was talking about how the local police is rounding up "bunches" of illegals by going out to job sites and parking the patrol cars and waiting to see who runs.

Not making this up.

So are you satisfied with Dr. Sowell's explanation as to how minimum wage laws disproportionately affect black teenagers?

No. You just posted about how minimum wage laws might actually be hurting those they are trying to help (but they can't prove it) and then had another post on blacks vs. whites in employment w/ no examples after 1950.

If, as you stated in your pervious post, it is virtually impossible to discriminate in current US hiring, and they are all being paid the same minimum wage, I fail to see how they are disproportionately affected.

Panama City Beach made Paul Harvey today. He was talking about how the local police is rounding up "bunches" of illegals by going out to job sites and parking the patrol cars and waiting to see who runs.

Not making this up.

See post #41...........wondered how long it would take for the broader media to catch on. PC must be so proud!

No. You just posted about how minimum wage laws might actually be hurting those they are trying to help (but they can't prove it) and then had another post on blacks vs. whites in employment w/ no examples after 1950.

If, as you stated in your pervious post, it is virtually impossible to discriminate in current US hiring, and they are all being paid the same minimum wage, I fail to see how they are disproportionately affected.

Wow. There are fewer jobs if employers are arbitrarily forced to pay higher wages. Try this exercise, what do you think would happen if the minimum wage was $100,00 per year?

See post #41...........wondered how long it would take for the broader media to catch on. PC must be so proud!

Oops--my bad. (I can't read these political threads all the way through. My prescription for Xanax is about out, and I try to save it for real issues...)

Oops--my bad. (I can't read these political threads all the way through. My prescription for Xanax is about out, and I try to save it for real issues...)

Right on, NoHall!

Wow. There are fewer jobs if employers are arbitrarily forced to pay higher wages. Try this exercise, what do you think would happen if the minimum wage was $100,00 per year?

No, your sources said that if employers have to choose between paying several highly skilled and highly paid workers and a large number of low skill and low pay workers to produce the same amount, they will choose the former. They did not say that raising the minimum wage to help people earn above the poverty level would cause massive unemployment.

It's not arbitrary, which is why it is reevaluated to reflect inflation at certain intervals. The minimum wage is just that - the bare minimum you can pay someone by law. The current minimum wage is $5.15. I used to make $5+ an hour as a seasonal agricultural worker w/o a high school diploma over 10 years ago. You can't live on that. The last time I saw a "hiring" sign at a local fast food restaurant they were offering $9-11 an hour to start, so $7.25 in 2 years isn't exactly the assinine $100K you suggested.

Oops--my bad. (I can't read these political threads all the way through. My prescription for Xanax is about out, and I try to save it for real issues...)

I meant for more info on the topic, not that we were already aware of it ;-)