Oooh! The immigrants are coming!

I love this guy's "Oooh! The immigrants are coming!" rant:

How old is this video? Doesn't matter, really. Anti-immigrant fear-mongering is always in vogue.

Lets see, in the Northeast there was the scourge of Southern/Eastern/Catholic Europeans (note date of writing of the article). I can count my own great-grandmother among those throngs: never learned English because she lived in a Polish-only community close to the Pennsylvania/New York border. The town paper was in Polish, the court was run in Polish, everything was Polish…

In the West there was the scourge of Chinese immigrants, against which we could not resist writing some of our most shameful laws. I won’t even start into our own pre-WWII anti-Semitism…

So in the modern version, is concern over Mexican immigration valid? Is it a special case because we share a border? Because previous immigrants largely had a one-way ticket here? Because they didn’t come in the same numbers? Yes, yes, and yes. But before the previous waves, there hadn’t been such large waves. Each new wave, almost by definition, created reasons for then-unprecedented concerns. I’m confident we will pull through this one and that in 100 years we will be concerned about another group of immigrants, because we can’t help ourselves.

The common thread is an underlying economic concern (competition for jobs and resources) masquerading as social values issues, whether it is concern for our language, the “purity” of our American blood lineage, or the repugnant squalor that these immigrants brought from their home countries (also from The Atlantic).

What the video misses to me, though, is also the help from immigration. The very people that cause us to squirm and scream “they’re taking our jobs” are the ones that are making things cheaper for the vast majority of us, from computer programmers to barbers to housing contractors. Are we paying more for infrastructure? Sure we are! But how would we expect to grow an economy without growing the infrastructure base? The idea persists in too many minds that the economy is a zero-sum game, and that more people in America means less for Americans. This is simply untrue. Some specific people will be hit very hard, but in total we will improve everyone’s condition--over time.

Do you think our ascension to Sole Superpower would have been achievable without Chinese immigrants building railroads from California half-ways to the East or Southern/Eastern/Catholic Europeans growing our industrial capacity from the Northeast to the Great Lakes? I don't think so myself, but I'm always up for a good debate :-)

I'm also not opposed to the concept of a border fence, per se, I just think it won't work. Take our attempt to eliminate MS-13 from Los Angeles as an example. Deporting gang members seems  so straight-forward it must work! Nope. For those who don't know, MS-13 is stronger because we deported their illegal-alien gang members.

So how would you respond? A fence? A different idea? I'll post my answer in a day or two :-)

$4 Gas Won't Go Anywhere

Some people speculate that gas prices are a bubble. From the trends out there, I think that they are not. Here's my figuring:

If at any point the public psychology agrees that oil prices will go down, then many people will breath a hasty sigh of relief and go right back to making bad decisions. We Americans have reduced how much we drive since last year. If gas goes back to $3, we'll snap right back to driving as much as we used to or even more. We'll snap right back to buying vehicles that are really too large for our daily needs. We'll snap right back to flying and driving everywhere for vacation. Whatever reprieve a return to lower gas prices would bring would be quickly eliminated by a surge from pent-up oil demand. We WANT to drive our cars and fly our planes and commute from way too far away. That fact will disallow prices from falling.

Add to that American-centric analysis a global perspective. Does anyone reasonably believe that world oil consumption will decrease in the near- to mid- future? We have a world food crisis--and what is required to grow food? Fertiziler! And where does fertilizer come from? Oil! And here we can do the same analysis, but on a world stage. People are literally starving and rioting. In this environment food prices cannot come down. The second they do, the food supply will be overwhelmed by the demand.

What's the common problem underlying both of these? Excess demand. The worst thing is that this is not excess demand for cell phones or Nintendos. We're talking about food and gas: two commodities categories for which we would pay any price in one way, shape or form.

So the long and the short is that we have a missallocation between quantity demanded and quantity supplied. The resources will go to the highest bidders. Those who cannot bid higher go on riots or other protests. Across Europe and parts of Asia, truck drivers, fishermen and other people are protesting/striking against high diesel prices. They are lucky compared to those protesting/striking against prohibitively high food prices. And we who can drive less, buy smaller cars, and ride buses and trains to square away our financial woes are the luckiest of all.