On Thursday, the ever-industrious Center for Immigration Studies released a powerful new study The Impact of New Immigrants on Young Native-Born Workers 2000 -2005, having as is normal pre-released advance copies to the media.

The study found that young native-born workers are being seriously hurt by immigration:

Over the 2000-2005 period, immigration levels remained very high and roughly half of new immigrant workers were illegal. This report finds that the arrival of new immigrants (legal and illegal) in a state results in a decline in employment among young native-born workers in that state. Our findings indicate that young native-born workers are being displaced in the labor market by the arrival of new immigrants.

• Between 2000 and 2005, 4.1 million immigrant workers arrived from abroad, accounting for 86 percent of the net increase in the total number of employed persons (16 and older), the highest share ever recorded in the United States.
• Of the 4.1 million new immigrant workers, between 1.4 and 2.7 million are estimated to be illegal immigrants. This means that illegal immigrants accounted for up to 56 percent of the net increase in civilian employment in the United States over the past five years…
• It appears that employers are substituting new immigrant workers for young native-born workers. The estimated sizes of these displacement effects were frequently quite large.
• The increased hiring of new immigrant workers also has been accompanied by important changes in the structure of labor markets and employer-employee relationships. Fewer new workers, especially private-sector wage and salary workers, are ending up on the formal payrolls of employers, where they would be covered by unemployment insurance, health insurance, and worker protections. [VDARE.com emphasis]

(The last point is well illustrated in an article based on the study but amplified by original reporting at the website Think and Ask.)

In other words, this study completely contradicts the tendentious and puerile publication from the Pew Hispanic Center last month which was so immediately and widely acclaimed in the MSM.

No doubt this is why, as of Saturday evening, virtually no coverage could be found via Google News. An honorable exception is the New York Times: Illegal Workers Supplant U.S. Ones, Report Says by Julia Preston September 22, 2006, which however was masked by a sob story on the front page by the same writer on the problems of California fruit farmers inconvenienced by a faltering in the influx of immigrant workers this year.

Maybe the other media juggernauts are looking for their own immigration-boosting stories to “balance” their coverage.

But I hope the CIS is not holding its breath.

It has never been easy to be a cop, but the presence today of millions of illegal aliens makes the job enormously more difficult and dangerous. That hazard is multiplied for police who work in a sanctuary city, where they are prevented from asking about immigration status, knowledge which should be part of every officer’s toolbox. In such places, the criminal is given an edge and law enforcement suffers.

We don’t know whether Houston’s sanctuary policy had a direct connection with the murder of Officer Rodney Johnson on Thursday, for example by making the city a more attractive place for the accused killer, illegal alien Juan Leonardo Quintero, to settle. We do know that the accused was previously deported in 1999 for sexual indecency with a child, so he may have wanted all the advantage he could get.

Officer Johnson had stopped Quintero for speeding, found he didn’t have a license, then cuffed him and put him in the back of the squad car. Quintero somehow was able to draw a weapon which Johnson had missed, and then shot and killed the officer as he sat in the driver’s seat. Quintero was quickly caught and was arraigned Friday.

Rodney Johnson truly was one of Houston’s Finest and had been recognized more than once for his heroic actions in the line of duty.

As a member of the department’s Southeast Gang Task Force, Johnson earned two Lifesaving Awards and one Medal of Valor from the state of Texas.

According to HPD, he rescued a physically challenged driver trapped in rising floodwaters in January 1998.

That same year he rescued mentally challenged people trapped inside of a burning house, HPD said.
[HPD: Suspect in officer's murder in U.S. illegally, KHOU 9/22/06]

Johnson served in the U.S. Army as a military police officer from 1984 to 1990 when he was honorably discharged. He then worked in corrections and graduated from the Houston police academy in 1994.

He is survived by his wife, Joslyn Johnson, an officer with the Houston police, and the couple’s five children.

The loss of Officer Rodney Johnson is another American tragedy caused by Washington’s refusal to defend the nation’s borders and deal appropriately with criminal aliens.

James Kurth at the American Conservative is addressing the issue of distribution of wealth:

In 1914, Henry Ford paid his factory workers $5 a day, twice the going rate, with the aim of creating a broad middle class able to buy the cars they were building. Today, that project isn’t faring so well: The Economist reports that in the U.S. “the gap between rich and poor is bigger than in any other advanced country.” And it’s growing. According to the Congressional Budget Office, from 1979 to 2001, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent of U.S. households soared 139 percent, while the income of the middle fifth rose only 17 percent and the income of the poorest fifth climbed just 9 percent. Last year American CEOs earned 262 times the average wage of their workers—up tenfold from 1970.

…….

Of course, U.S. agricultural and manufacturing businesses want to hire illegal immigrants, too. However, the really animated core of the political lobby that supports illegal immigration—its mass base, so to speak—is composed of rich homeowners, who desperately want someone to do their dirty work and to do it cheaply. Although they are the largest beneficiaries of the American way of life, including the rule of law, when it comes to the issue of illegal immigration, the rich do everything they can to undermine the American way for the vast majority of other Americans. There is nothing conservative about these actions by the rich; rather, the true conservatives are the less well-off who oppose illegal immigration and who are trying to preserve (and conserve) what was once an established and respected order.

But immigration policy is only one example of the most serious problem with increasing economic inequality: the holders of great wealth—especially if they are organized into a political lobby of similar holders of great wealth—can buy not only more goods, more capital, and more people. They can also buy (through the vehicle of campaign contributions) more important people: politicians and other public officials and therefore public policies. [The Rich Get Richer, September 25, 2006 ]

I think the incentive structure here is a bit more insidious than Kurth realizes. Mass immigration can have a tremendous effect on property values.

Even property owners that make no use of the labor of illegal aliens can amass significant wealth if they just happen to own property in an area where immigration is tolerated. Many prominent economists–including Nobel Prize winners Vickery of Columbia and Simon of Carnegie Mellon felt that increases in property values should be taxed preferentially compared to earnings–particularly those earning of people of modest means. Even tax-hating Milton Friedman admits that a tax on land is the “least bad” of the available range of taxes.

I personally feel that Conservatism is doomed as a political ideology-in part because so many prominent conservatives went all out pushing measures like Prop 13 and wound up with a tax structure that defends and entrenches some very substantial concentrations of wealth–and in the process largely forgot about how many Americans have little or no opportunity to accumulate any substantial property.

I’ve tried addressing this issue in some of my other articles. Kurth’s article gives me hope that something constructive might happen in the way of producing a workable political consensus.

Mexican President Vicente Fox was in New York City at the United Nations and he gave a speech.(Resalta Fox la solidez de las instituciones, Siglo de Torreon, September 19th, 2006)

Fox talked about a lot of things in his speech. He defended Mexico’s political institutions, condemned terrorism, had good things to say about peace, respect, development, dialogue and cooperation, defended indigenous rights, defended rights of the handicapped, spoke up for reform of the Security Council and peace in the Middle East.

But he didn’t even mention one of his favorite topics.

Regarding the UN speech, a newspaper caption in the Mexican media reads “In a discourse in which he did not take up the migratory subject…”

It’s highly uncommon for Vicente Fox to make a speech on U.S. soil that doesn’t mention immigration. So following the journalistic “Man Bites Dog” principle the Mexican newspaper thought it worthy to point out that fact.