A reader writes, regarding my previous item on Cape Cod and immigration:

Guys, the demagoguery is even worse this year. I read in the Boston Globe that the Cape business owners are complaining that they can’t get the foreign help at nearly the number they need, while the Boston politicians are bloviating about there being no jobs for the city’s teens.

Of course, the Cape ’s foreign workers have historically been of the Irish and Eastern European variety, while most of the city’s students are persons of color. The oh-so-precious denizens of the Cape seem to have added a white hood to the Izod polos and whale belts!

Of course, I doubt if Cape Cod’s employers are Ku Klux Klan style bigots–they may be the reverse, and feel “uncomfortable” hiring black teenagers for menial jobs. But look at these two Globe stories:

• Cape employers left scrambling | Immigration impasse has high season arriving without foreign workers, By Jenna Russell , Boston Globe, April 11, 2008
• The teen job crisis , By Andrew Sum and Don Gillis, Boston Globe, March 13, 2008

Google Maps tells me that Cape Cod is an hour and a quarter from Boston. Why on Earth would they go to Washington to get permission to get people from Poland and Ireland?.

Robe Imbriano is an African-American TV director, and thus, presumably has pursued that “middle-classness” that Jeremiah Wright says you shouldn’t.

Nevertheless, members of his family have spent time in jail, according to him. Discussing his MSNBC documentary Lockup: Getting Out, he writes

Leonard Marks, the parole chief in our film, says at one point that he doesn’t know a single family that doesn’t have someone in jail, prison, or on parole. My family wouldn’t be an exception. In fact, it’s a standard tale of the extended black family in America . I’ve had family on both sides of this story – addicts behind bars, cops and security guards (sometimes, both).

I know this story because it’s been a part of my life for decades – kind of like growing up singing, then getting to college only to see that there’s an entire department dedicated to studying music. Seeing the incarceration pandemic extend past my family and sweep the nation, I decided to study it too

The same web page says that “Away from the networks, Imbriano has written a frequently republished op-ed piece for the New York Times about his difficulties as an African American catching a cab in New York.” It happens to be still online, and in it he wrote

Just as people on foot nod their heads in recognition at those they find vaguely familiar, cabbies, too, signal pedestrian acquaintances, particularly those of my stripe. You accelerated. Now, you weren’t off duty. If perhaps I had been mistaken, my doubts were soon resolved when, at the next block, you stopped for the fairly well-dressed man at the corner of 67th Street and Broadway.

The white man at the corner of 67th Street and Broadway.

Through the tears that the sub-zero wind brought to and blew from my eyes, I saw two more of your colleagues pass underneath my raised arm. My raised black arm. Until we meet again, Mr. T57030T.

Until we meet again. [I've Got Your Number, March 4, 1990]

They actually did meet again, since the New York Taxi Commission read the New York Times, called him and asked him to make a formal complaint, which resulted in a fine of fifty dollars and a reprimand to Mr. T57030T. That’s in Read All About It!: Great Read-Aloud Stories, Poems, and Newspaper Pieces for Preteens and Teens , which as far as I can tell is the only place it’s in print, but still means that this is used as propaganda in the school systems.

It drew a response, from another New York taxi driver:

Cabbies Practice Passenger Selectivity to Protect

March 22, 1990

LEAD: To the Editor:

To the Editor:

Robe Imbriano’s ”I’ve Got Your Number” (Op-Ed, March 4) is unfair, perhaps even slanderous, to the 42,000 taxicab drivers of New York City, of whom I am one. I am sorry Mr. Imbriano had the misfortune to be passed up by a driver, presumably because he is black. And since the driver thereafter picked up a white passenger, yes, that driver was unfair to Mr. Imbriano, who is a law-abiding, middle-class black man.

But as a white driver who has picked up thousands of black people in the six years of weekends in which I have moonlighted, driving until 4 A.M., let me say that cab drivers have only one effective way of protecting themselves against the murderous thieves who prey on us. And that is to exercise experienced discretion in whom we pick up.

No amount of Taxi and Limousine Commission regulations or Op-Ed complaints can change the fact that in recent years as many as 17 drivers have been murdered annually, hundreds wounded and beaten, thousands robbed or defrauded. The average is six felonies every day committed against New York’s cabbies. Unfortunately for Mr. Imbriano, 85 percent of these crimes, against white and black drivers alike, are committed by black men 16 to 40 years old. Half of New York’s cab drivers are themselves black and act no differently from white drivers.

J. R. GREEN
New York, March 7, 1990

This last is unlikely to be reprinted often. I found it in the footnotes of Paved With Good Intentions, and the New York Times has it online. (Good for them, by the way. The Paper of Record may be a record of lies and treachery, but at least we can now see the record.)

But remember, the man who had a cab driver fined for not picking him up says that members of his own family, no doubt looking very much like him, are criminals. He calls them “addicts behind bars,” who are part of an “incarceration pandemic,” but what that means, apparently, is that they were part of what Steve Sailer refers to as the “crack wars.”

Now, I understand that Imbriano isn’t guilty of any of these crimes in that he’s never actually physically attacked a cab driver, but I would have a lot more sympathy for his inability to to get a cab on a freezing cold day if he weren’t the kind of man who calls a crime wave an “incarceration epidemic.”

That kind of thinking is responsible for a lot of the crime in America, and in that sense, he’s as guilty as a white liberal Democrat like John V. Lindsay.

Last week Lou Dobbs had a very good show about H-1B. At issue is the new bill by Senator Cornyn to raise the H-1B cap.

Dobbs asked Bill Tucker an excellent question and Tucker fired off with the perfect answer: H-1B visas go mainly to low skilled entry level jobs!

It was a great report, except that Dobbs blew it right towards the end by showing undue respect for Cornyn.

DOBBS: This is, to me, shocking. Senator Cornyn, in most other respects, has demonstrated himself to be an able senator, man of integrity, and a well-informed senator. There is no possible explanation that this sponsorship is anything more than a reflexive, acquiescence to the demands of corporate lobbyists, putting intense pressure on Lieberman and Cornyn and all the other senators involved. This is so disappointing when it comes to Senator Cornyn. [ LOU DOBBS TONIGHT Aired April 15, 2008 - 19:30 ET]

This isn’t the first time Dobbs has coddled Cornyn. Every time Cornyn is on the show Dobbs gushes all over him. This is just one example:

“I will tell you straightforward. I think the Kyl-Cornyn legislation, if Senator Cornyn were here I would call it the Cornyn- Kyl legislation, I think a reasonable, intelligent basis to proceed.” Lou Dobbs, Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN, March 28, 2006

What was Dobbs thinking? The Kyl-Cornyn bill was an amnesty bill with a huge H-1B increase, so Dobbs’ assessment was just plain wrong. I could write a book about Cornyn’s efforts to push H-1B increases–he has been trying to push H-1B increases ever since he became a Senator in 2003. In 2004 he was co-sponsor of the Kennedy amnesty bill and more recently in 2007 he co-sponsored the SKIL bill. The SKIL bill could be the worst escalation of guest worker visas and green cards ever, and Cornyn is still trying to get it passed either as a stand alone bill or as an amendment to something else.

I don’t know how else to put it–Cornyn stinks on H-1B and he stinks on almost every other substantial immigration issue.

Bottom line is this: It shouldn’t have taken Dobbs this long to get a clue. Dobbs invited Cornyn back to the show. If that happens hopefully Dobbs will put an end to the love fest.

I’ve been trying all day to blog on Jason Riley’s “Immigrant Scapegoats“ [Wall Street Journal Edit Page, April 24, 2008] and now the amazing Michelle Malkin’s co-blogger See-Dubya has beaten me to it.

Riley, who is apparently about to publish a rah-rah immigration book, is not even above the silly smear that critics of immigration policy are “anti-immigrant”, even though e.g. George Borjas and I are immigrants. Of course, supporters of the nation-breaking post-1965 immigration onslaught are really guilty of treason, so I guess we might as well respond by describing Riley as “anti-American”.

I was amazed (well, not really, nothing surprises me with immigration enthusiasts) to see Riley commit this elementary economic error:

The common assumption is that a job filled by an immigrant is one less job for a native.
But this reasoning is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our labor markets operate. The U.S. job market is not a zero-sum game. The number of jobs is not static. It’s fluid, which is how we want it to be. In 2006, 55 million U.S. workers either quit their jobs or were fired. Yet 57 million people were hired over the same period. In a typical year, a third of our workforce turns over.

Immigrants help keep our labor markets flexible. And flexible labor markets – the kind that minimize the costs to a business of hiring and firing employees – enable workers and employers alike to find the employment situation that suits them best. Flexible labor markets make it easier for an employee who doesn’t like his job to find another position somewhere else. And flexible labor markets make it more likely that an employer will expand his workforce or take a chance on a less experienced job-seeker.

A better fit between employers and employees increases productivity and makes markets more responsive to consumer demand. In the end, employers, workers and consumers are all better off.

Even if this were true–and it omits the cross-subsidies that Milton Friedman acknowledged made mass immigration impossible in a welfare state - it ignores the critical point that, while Americans in aggregate may be “better off”, the individual Americans directly competing with immigrants may very well be worse off. Immigration causes a redistribution of income within the native-born community, basically from labor to capital. And it’s not small.

The really amazing (but see above) thing about this is that the point was made, not just by me in Alien Nation thirteen years ago, but by the Wall Street Journal Edit Page’s late favorite immigration enthusiast economist Julian Simon (he was actually a marketing specialist but he was willing to fake it) in his Economic Consequences Of Immigration back in 1990.

In other words, this riposte has been around for eighteen years, but Riley (or, let’s hope, his editors on the Edit Page) still haven’t heard of it.

American mmigration enthusiasm is a complex thing, very often motivated by unspoken ethnic insecurities. But one major factor, alas, is sheer stupidity.

Email Jason Riley