From Slate.com:
Jun. 13th, 2007 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseHow much is an immigrant's life worth, exactly?
Basic premise: We keep immigrants out because we're supposed to care more about our fellow countrymen than about them. Yes, but how much more?
Most of the article deals with math on the effects of admitting an unskilled immigrant into the U.S., specifically with how much his wage increases vs. how much our wages decrease (without factoring in things like new business opening up due to falling wages or any number of other ways a free market balances out/benefits from fresh labor). While math is not my forté, I've always found economics interesting; most interesting of all, however, is the conclusion:
Accounting for all that, it turns out that the immigrant's $7 gain is worth about five times the American's $3 loss. In other words, to justify keeping the immigrant out, you'd have to say he's worth less than one-fifth of an American citizen.
By contrast, there was a time when the U.S. Constitution counted a black slave as three-fifths of a full-fledged citizen. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley has recently apologized for the ravages of slavery. How long till politicians apologize for the ravages of our restrictive immigration policies?
Basic premise: We keep immigrants out because we're supposed to care more about our fellow countrymen than about them. Yes, but how much more?
Most of the article deals with math on the effects of admitting an unskilled immigrant into the U.S., specifically with how much his wage increases vs. how much our wages decrease (without factoring in things like new business opening up due to falling wages or any number of other ways a free market balances out/benefits from fresh labor). While math is not my forté, I've always found economics interesting; most interesting of all, however, is the conclusion:
Accounting for all that, it turns out that the immigrant's $7 gain is worth about five times the American's $3 loss. In other words, to justify keeping the immigrant out, you'd have to say he's worth less than one-fifth of an American citizen.
By contrast, there was a time when the U.S. Constitution counted a black slave as three-fifths of a full-fledged citizen. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley has recently apologized for the ravages of slavery. How long till politicians apologize for the ravages of our restrictive immigration policies?
