JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

05/19/08 02:18 PM

In response to a JTA article today:

These people aren’t “undocumented”. They are criminals. A merciful US government is sending those who have committed fraud back to their home countries instead of applying the 10 year prison sentence called for by law for their crimes.

As to assuring them social services, the costs have already near-bankrupted Los Angeles and turned the city into a third world country with potholed streets, failed hospitals, and emergency rooms, routine power failures, and overcrowded schools because the city budget and infrastructure is so strained. In addition the load on the traffic system is massive; on a recent day when the illegal immigrants demonstrated instead of going to work, LA’s famous gridlock vanished. The costs of incarceration and prison crowding have also increased significantly because of the high influx of illegal immigrants convicted of felonies.

This writer, a professional economist, finds the studies claiming a net benefit from illegal immigtants to be deeply flawed. Empirical data is to the contrary.

Lest I be accused of being unsympathetic, my grandparents were legal immigrants. I support legal immigration and during my professional career have assisted others to enter the country and work legally when a genuine labor shortage could be shown for particular jobs.

As long as employers can obtain cheap illegal workers they will have an incentive so to do. By eliminating that labor pool when Americans are willing to work will cause wages and prices to adjust for economic efficiency, and end the subsidy paid by those who experience poor streets and social services to those who benefit from artificially below market wages and prices.

David Sternlight, Ph.D.
Los Angeles

05/19/08 06:30 PM

You Her Sternwhip do not understand what you talk about. For a doktor in economics no less,, you exhibit much ignorance (crossing the border without papers is not a crime, but a civil offense against Immigration policy, That is why nativists & racists in Congress kept trying to criminalize border crossing, but failed miserably each time.) there is no 10 yr penalty in prison as you claim. Better look at the law before you put yr foot in yr mouth.
Thus your silly premise about deputized, armed, unformed bounty hunters breaking and entering, raiding families in the night as example of the U.S. generosity is hokum, sheer bunk.

The raids are an indisputable trauma for all victims, esp. their children. (search the Urban Institute report on individual harm inflicted by the raids.) What is quite appalling is yr attempt to dehumanize immigrants (read Mexicans) as criminals, whereas in fact immigrants have lower crime rate than resident native born. It is a lie that LA is a 3rd world country, even Mexico is a 2nd world county, not 3rd. Why do you blame latinos for crowded freeways and not Jews or Irishmen. Why do you presume you should take up room in a city that has been a Latino settlement for over 200 yrs. From where comes your arrogance, presuming we agree that you have rights and priveleges the “criminal” immigrants do not have.

Did you know Herr Doktor, that it was a crime for Jews to emmigrate from Austria after the invasion, Germany, then Poland without authorization..  You Mr. Smartass better not call them illegal beings. You sound like a neo Know Nothing who like your antecedents insisted that immigrants were ruining New York, degrading American culture, immoral, underminimg the American workingman, and were incapable of becoming an American because they hated democracy.
Read the speeches of labor leader Dennis Kearney of San Francisco who had the very same, exact complaint about the unAmerican subhuman “Chinaman” and should all be rounded up and deported and never again permitted entry into the U.S.

When the Know Nothings took power in Sacramento and Calif congressmen pushed through the Chinese Exclusion Laws in 1882. Further, please give us reference of your research on the effect of immigrants on wages that you find so “flawed.” David Card, the eminent economist, former head of the Economic Dept at UC Berkely, past president of the American Assoc of Economists and former editor of the peer reviewed scholarly journal, NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH has published two research papers on immigrant’s affect on wages.

You should look them up, they might just give you a little pause. In the last year alone, both micro and macro studies of the economic contributions of immigrants have been nearly unanamous in findings of the astonishing entreprenurial impetus to our economy coming from immigrants. They include over 24 studies done statewide and many more on cities and town. The evidence is no longer antedotal. You might also look up the article in the NY Times of Jan ‘07 on Misstatemen of costs of immigrants . You might also read:
http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2295

Pity the poor immigrant, and salute to the successful one, but shame on the stuffed patriotic American nativists (they have always wrapped themselves in the flag) who renounce and denounce the legacy of their own immigrant forebears, no matter how many generations back they arrieved, storm-tossed, tired, huddled and full of trepredation.  This county was settled by immigrants, founded by immigrants. The history of the U.s is a history of immigration. Woe unto those who would revile their own patrimony.  --Mo

05/19/08 10:29 PM

Well said, Mo !!! My hat off to you.

05/20/08 03:22 PM

Personal attack, populist rhetoric, and assertion is no substitute for reason. “Power to the people” does not mean “power to me and my friends”.

Little complete cost/benefit analysis has been done on the cost and quality of social services in heavily illegal-immigrant-impacted communities since it is ideologically unpopular with “liberal” academics. The vast bulk of illegal immigrants are the poor seeking jobs; as such they add to the tranche of social costs imposed on society by those in lower income groups. Much of their income is remitted outside the US, putting further pressure on the dollar.

There is nothing anti-Mexican in calling costs and benefits of illegal immigration where they fall, any more than it is anti-feminist to tot up the costs and benefits of teen pregnancy.

If illegal immigration weren’t “illegal”, the INS couldn’t deport those without legal immigration or citizenship status.

Since municipal budgets are limited and the Federal Government is not willing to transfer the full costs imposed on communities by Federal lack of enforcement of immigration law, the only option open to many heavily impacted cities is to, in effect, lower the quality of social services through reduction of benefits, increases in waiting times, and closure of facilities. It is widely reported that emergency rooms are badly overloaded by impoverished illegal immigrants going there for routine complaints, since such facilities are required by law to serve them at no charge. This is one of the causes of rising hospital and medical costs to the wider community and the closure of many emergency care facilities. In Los Angeles we have seen many such closures, the failure of a major hospital, and the near-failure of another. In effect others are subsidizing the costs of social services for illegal immigrants.

As to crime rates, the proportion of illegal immigrants in the felony prison population has risen dramatically, overburdening and overcrowding prisons and forcing judges to give “revolving door” sentences, and prisons to give early release to felons simply because of capacity limits of prisons.

We’re talking about a total illegal immigrant population in the US of millions, not a few heart-wrenching cases seeking sanctuary at local churches.

It is also true that although native born children are citizens with every right of their fellow citizens, many would not exist to impose social costs on the school system if their mothers weren’t here illegally. This writer participated in the design of the Los Angeles Universal Preschool System and is well familiar with the demographics. As an individual, one has one’s ethical values; as a professional economist one has to do honest analysis. Thus in the accounting of social costs and benefits of illegal immigration, those costs must be included. To do otherwise is inaccurate economics, no matter how distinguished the researcher.

A sure sign of dishonest argumentation is name-calling. Further deponent sayeth not.

David Sternlight, Ph.D.
Los Angeles

05/20/08 10:31 PM

There was no “name calling” per say, it was your “source” of information that was challenged, weak areas, so to speak.
Take it easy.

05/21/08 03:41 PM

An attempt to smear a writer of factual arguments with references to Nazism such as “Herr Doktor” etc. IS name-calling rather than rational argumentation.