Speaking at a heavily-biased Senate hearing today, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan made some rather interesting statements (link). He wants to increase immigration by high-skilled foreign workers in order to raise housing prices. And, if you're one of those American high-skilled workers, Greenspan has a plan for those he referred to as the "privileged elite":

"Greatly expanding quotas for highly skilled workers would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled... [skill shortages exist because] we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition."

The horror that we should look after our own people rather than spurring massive economic activity by lowering the wages of U.S. nurses to the levels of nurses in the Philippines.

Then, he went on to promote profiting from illegal activity, falsely saying that illegal aliens have made a "significant contribution" to economic growth. In fact, no one has ever been able to show any significant gain from illegal aliens' input to the economy, and all those analyses ignore their significant costs, both financial and non-financial.

He called for a guest workers program and said:

"Unauthorized immigrants serve as a flexible component of our work force, often a safety valve when demand is pressing and among the first to be discharged when the economy falters."

Not only is that not such a nice sentiment, but he fails to note that those who are discharged sometimes do not return to their home countries but stay in the U.S. and obtain public benefits in one way or another.

Per the WSJ:

Unskilled illegal workers marginally suppress wage levels of native-born Americans without high-school diplomas, Mr. Greenspan said. Undocumented workers also impose significant costs on some state and local governments... Mr. Greenspan said those costs are relatively small compared with the economic benefits of undocumented workers.

It's unfortunate that there wasn't anyone around to call him on all the things he's ignoring, such as the cost of giving even more political power to the far-left, racial power groups, and foreign governments and social costs such as reconquista sentiments and the feeling among many foreign citizens that our laws don't apply to them. Those are costs that a real economist would factor into the equation, yet Greenspan did not.