July 19, 2005

"Mayor Bloomberg has betrayed all the legal residents of New York City"

The post "Mayor Mike fully supports illegal immigration" explained how Bloomberg had overturned a law - on the books since the 30s - requiring applicants for a street vendor's license to be here legally.

Now, the letters page of the NY Post has a few choice comments from his constituents:

-- Mayor Bloomberg has betrayed all the legal residents of New York City... Bloomberg, who signed this law with great fanfare, should be working on ways to provide fewer incentives to break our immigration laws, not more.

-- Illegal immigration should be prosecuted on more levels than just as a federal crime...

-- I am amazed at how uninformed Americans are of the negative effects that undocumented and illegal aliens have...

-- Descendants of those legal immigrants, who sacrificed to achieve the American dream, must cringe at the rights that are thrown at illegal aliens today...

Posted to Immigration2005b at July 19, 2005 12:01 PM

Comments

From the McKinsey Global Institute study “The Emerging Global Labor Market". Simple common sense on the negative effects of mass immigration on low wage workers.But simple assertions of common sense in the face of the open borders lobby's propaganda machine are unfortunately necessary.
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1187/
(...)
At the unskilled level, retail sector jobs are threatened by a different feature of globalization: high immigration. The barber, the McDonalds server and the WalMart employee are subject to intense low wage competition from immigrants, and large employers of low skilled labor are correspondingly active in lobbying for free immigration. The argument they use for this, the need to battle foreign competition, is spurious. If a service sector such as software is subject to heavy foreign competition, it can be outsourced; if like retailing it cannot be outsourced, it is also not subject to heavy foreign competition. Allowing high immigration thus does not protect U.S. industry significantly from foreign competition, it simply drives down wages at the bottom of the scale, so that the McDonalds server or the WalMart employee cannot make a decent living.

Since politicians are elected to represent those who have votes, and not immigrants or potential immigrants who do not have them, their duty is thus clearly to favor tight immigration controls. Such controls tend to raise wages at the low-skill end of sectors such as retailing that are not subject to significant foreign competition, without materially harming the interests of the retailers themselves.
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Posted by: perroazul del norte at July 19, 2005 01:26 PM