The Bi-Partisan Policy Center (BPC), which functions as the D.C. mouthpiece of multinational corporations, released a report on the “benefits” of comprehensive immigration reform at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event. Does anyone doubt what the BPC’s “findings” were? After failing to receive any substantial coverage of its report, the better question is, “Does anyone care?”
The reverberations in the ever-shrinking echo chamber may be deafening to those who are calling for blanket amnesty and massive increases in legal immigrants and guest workers, but it is not enough to drown out the clear majority of American voters who oppose the Senate bill. The Chamber and its allies can spend millions to promote a faux grassroots effort to pressure House Republicans to go to conference with the Senate, and they may get a sympathetic write up in Politico, but they can’t change the current dynamic on the Hill. No doubt the U.S. Chamber can peddle a great deal of influence with politicians, but few members of either party are anxious to make “comprehensive immigration reform” the centerpiece of their reelection campaigns.
One of the unintended consequences of the Chamber’s publicized lobbying blitz is that it brings to light the utter inanity of their arguments, and no one illustrates this better than Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Holtz-Eakin, who came out of the hotbed of intellectualism that was the George W. Bush administration, was on the BPC panel and made several nonsensical statements, beginning with the claim that labor unions oppose comprehensive immigration reform. Even someone who has been semi-comatose over the last decade would know this isn’t even remotely close to the truth.
Holtz-Eakin also claimed that what the BPC was presenting was “science” that had to be accepted as the gospel truth because it was “scientific.” Any claims that mass immigration is not the panacea that cures all economic ills are, according to Hotlz-Eakin, xenophobic. Holtz-Eakin may be forgiven for failing to note that “dismal” generally precedes “science” when referring to the study of economics, but it is pure ignorance compounded by sheer arrogance to suggest that anyone who opposes using mass immigration to reinflate the housing bubble (something favored by the BPC) is a xenophobe. No one takes this sort of thing seriously, which is why no one outside their ever-shrinking echo chamber takes the arguments of the BPC seriously, either.
There is nothing remotely scientific about the claims Holtz-Eakin, and the organizations he shills for, are making. Their entire argument hinges on the mistaken belief that making the U.S. economy bigger by adding tens of millions of more people through immigration invariably leads to greater overall prosperity, which is in direct contradiction to what the economic data of the last forty years indicate. The BPC gets around this problem by constructing a macroeconomic model that conveniently produces their desired conclusions. Science is not about inventing improbable arguments to fit implausible preconceptions, and economists can never say that a prediction of what will happen twenty years in the future is an incontestable fact – at least a competent and/or honest economist would never make that claim.
The test of any economic projection is whether it is likely given past, present, and the most probable future conditions. The BPC report falls far short on all three fronts. But the Holtz-Eakins of the world have an escape hatch. If increased immigration leads to higher unemployment and decreased per capita income down the road, the excuse will be that we just need more immigration.
7 Comments
If having more people were of itself good for an economy, MEXICO and other countries sending illegal aliens would be begging their citizens to remain or return. They are NOT. They’re lobbying this country to have them remain here.
……just as FAIR is a mouthpiece for Heritage Foundation.
Right on!! Moreover blanket amnesty is totally unfair to those who came here by following the US immigration laws .
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The problem with “reinflating the housing bubble” is that it hurts as many as it helps. You may get more from your house but the price increases remove a lot of people from the buying pool and makes it impossible for them to own. Massive increases in immigration to “solve” economic problems are nothing but a Ponzi scheme, pure and simple. And we know those always eventually end, for the worse.
Yes Leland
Many of the open border pro-overpopulation folks allegate that more population density in America will help housing increase in price as multiple families share houses. LOL
Most American households would live by themselves in a studio apartment rather than a bigger house on land; than share a kitchen, let alone a driveway. Population density increases obviously drive American home prices down as wages go down too.
Leland you are saying we were founded on a ponzi scheme?…………yo9u are in denial……………..and so is SWE