[devil’s advocate]
Those trades are badly underpaid because they have been allowed to rely on illegal immigrants, who have no qualms working for a pittance, to fill the roles. The real problem being faced in Colorado is that employers won’t raise wages to market price (otherwise Americans themselves would take the jobs), not that there’s a lack of labour.
Instead of allowing the market to run its course and have businesses that fail to find employees via a fair wage shut down, the legislature replaces one set of indentured servants with another, Prisoners, retaining the status quo and exacerbating the problem.
[/devil’s advocate]
If anyone is doing any conflating here, it sure ain’t me. Although I am far more familiar with legal, employment-based immigration (it’s what I’ve earned my living doing for the past 8 years), I opened this thread for the simple reason that I’d never seen a broad-based national statistical study of the relationship between immigration and crime. I ran across the one linked above while doing some readin on developments in the field on one of the primary places I catch up on my professional reading. I found it interesting, and it’s a topic that’s been raised in the context of various immigration threads here before, but IMHO never addressed thoroughly beyond anecdote-slinging.
Anecdote-slinging isn’t a terribly analytical or comprehensive way to address an issue that’s this complex, so I wanted to discuss the study. Nothing more, nothing less. I’d intended this thread to be a discussion of immigration and crime - the study doesn’t distinguish between lawfully and unlawfully present immigrants, but it appears that even if one includes those unlawfully present in the U.S., the lower degree of criminality among immigrants is quite striking - much more than even I had ever suspected.
If you want to discuss other aspects of the immigration debate(s), it would be appreciated for purposes of this thread if you drew some relationship between those other aspects and crime among immigrants vs. native-born. We’ve had ample discussions of numerous other aspects of the immigration debate.
If you don’t think crime statistics are particularly relevant to the debate about whether, and how, the U.S. should change its policy approach to immigration, then dandy - neither do I. I’m raising the issue because I suspected that immigrants did not commit more crimes than similarly situated native-born Americans. I had no idea until reading the study that the disparities were possibly so drastic, however.
Then why are you here?
The article is cherry-picking stats largely from two very specific locations that have a problem with gangs with an immigrant component, which is not at all the same thing as saying that even in those two locations, immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans. Do you seriously not see how biased it is?
No, I’m not Mexican (or even Hispanic), though I do have an undergrad degree in Spanish. You’d have to go back to my grandparents and great-grandparents to find someone not born in the U.S. I take the issue personally to the same extent I take it personally when I see an entire huge sector of society being blamed for a huge societal problem that the overwhelmingly vast majority of them haven’t created and don’t particpate in. And yes, also because I spend a large chunk of my waking hours dealing with the fallout of U.S. immigration policy and its (frequently quite poor) execution.
You said you didn’t think the crime issue was relevant to the larger issue of immigration policy overall; as mentioned above, I agree and think that’s just dandy. However, lots of other people disagree with you on that point and are using it as fuel for their restrictionist arguments, so to me, yes, in that sense it’s important to discuss the correlation between immigration and crime - and it appears to be a negative one.
Perhaps not, but the study sure is, and I think Pizzabrat is right to be a bit suspicious.
[QUOTE=Eva Luna]
Quote:
[li]The children and grandchildren of many immigrants—as well as many immigrants themselves the longer they live in the United States—become subject to economic and social forces, such as higher rates of family disintegration and drug and alcohol addiction, that increase the likelihood of criminal behavior among other natives; [/li][/QUOTE]
Not only does this not surprise me, I’ve worked with enough illegal immigrant populations that I already knew it from experience.
One of the best reasons to oppose illegal immigration is that it creates a racial underclass, marginized and fearful. Children raised in a home where they are outsiders to society at large, unable to access the opportunities and benefits everyone else is are going to grow up quite understandably angry. The fact that a kid is a US citizen on paper is irrelevant: he’s still going to be bitter because he grew up having to watch his mother earn sub-minimum wage, because INS deported his favorite uncle, because his cousin didn’t report her rape for fear of the same.
The kid will have a lot of justifiable hostility and envy; and if the model his parents gave was that you shouldn’t let laws hinder you from securing the better life you want, it’s not hard to see why he might follow the example.
I was responding to the “in-your-face” attitude, not blatant racism/biggotry. Outside of your example of the old lady, that’s just simple biggotry. Getting in-your-face even when dealing with old women is an example of what I meant.
And actually there was a case a few months back (in Seattle?) where a 90 year old lady plugged three cops or something. So ya never know.
I’m no student of the dismal science [i.e., economist] myself. But don’t free-market economists and conservatives always blather on about the invisible hand guiding prices to thier proper levels without government interference? Don’t they talk about market corrections? Maybe we should have massive price shifts. Maybe the use of coercion and extortion to hold some prices down should end, even if the results mean a short term crisis and far-ranging, long-term changes in the way we do things and pay for things.
Atlanta. And the investigation is ongoing and looking ever more dismal for the cops who tried to execute a no-knock entry and search on a frightened woman based on false (or falsified) information. (The lady wounded three cops, but they killed her.) There is an ongoing (and very long) Pit thread following the story.
I guess there is a brand of politics out there that thinks people should take whatever job they can get if they are unemployed. The people who subscribe to this brand of politics are often the same people who claim that Americans would take up the slack for any jobs left open when we chase out the illegal aliens. Maybe people are just stereotyping you.
This is one of the weaknesses in economic theory. Sure these guys might pick watermelon for $200,000 a year, but no one would buy watermelon when those costs are passed along. And the people who won’t take these jobs at “more than minimum wage” are content with being unemployed, making ends meet in whatever fashion they can, rather than work a difficult job for not much of a difference in their standard of living. Some people think that a very minimal standard of living is worth not having to hold a job.
I’ve known a number of “itinerant RenFaire performers” who live in an old van, make enough money to feed themselves (though dumpster diving isn’t above them) and pay for enough gas to get to the next Faire (which they may, in fact, ‘borrow’ from a well meaning “Festie with a nearly real job,” like delivering pizza - or their suburban parents) and are wonderfully content with their lives (at least for a few years). Some people are really content on the edge, if it doesn’t mean having to hold a job. $200,000 a year to dress in a professional fashion, show up to work every day, and work for “the man” wouldn’t cut it - even if they did nothing more taxing than warming a chair.
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