One of the largest anti-illegal immigration groups in California is Save our State which was founded by Joseph Turner in 2004.

Mr. Turner has brought the fight to San Bernardino, California in the form of a new city ballot measure. According to a story from the local online paper sbsun.com [Anti-illegal immigration measure in early stages in SB by Kelly Rayburn 10/16/05] the new measure would:

1. Ban the city from funding or operating day laborer centers. (Currently, the city does not sponsor any such centers, though other Inland Empire cities do.)

2. Impose fines of at least $1,000 for anyone operating a day laborer center without proper licensing.

3. Require the city to deny business permits to companies found to employ illegal immigrants.

4. Impose $1,000 fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants.

5. Require all city business be done in English, except when federal, state or county law mandates otherwise.

Turner hopes to collect enough signatures to get the measure before voters by June.

Marginal Revolutions links to an NBER report attempting to show that immmigration does not harm real wages in the US. Tyler Cowen writes “The best of current investigations continue to support the conclusion that immigration does not hurt American real wages. “[ Marginal Revolution: More evidence on immigration and wages]

This is based on an NBER working paper that says

Recent influential empirical work [I.E. the work of George Borjas] has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different skill groups that are imperfectly substitutable, one needs to articulate a production function that aggregates different types of labor (and accounts for complementarity and substitution effects) in order to calculate the various effects of immigrant labor on U.S.-born labor.

Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S.

I simply don’t believe this. While it’s a game attempt to get around the well-known Law of Supply and Demand, I don’t see how anyone else can believe it either.

You can’t divide the labor force into unskilled foreigners, and skilled Americans, when as we know, there are large groups of unskilled Americans earning low (or no) wages, and massive programs for importing (cheaper) skilled immigrants.