President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%↑
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd
(D) Adam Frisch
52%↑
48%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
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CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
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CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
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CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
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40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
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State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
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July 05, 2007 07:39 PM UTC
19 Comments
Tancredo and his ilk accomplish nothing but to hurt the Republicans. Karl Rove knows this, which is why he told him to “never darken the door of the White House” ever again. The fact is, the Tancredistas are a small but vociferous one-issue minority in the Republican party that consistently overplay their hands and squander what opportunities they have. Of course, there is a compelling mandate for reform in immigration, but Tancredo and his followers are not capable of taking advantage of this fact. Their arguments quickly degenerate into prejudicial pandering that does nothing to give them credibility with the public at large. Before you know it, Tancredo is busy speaking at white-supermecist meetings, and reminding us that Hispanics are breeding too rapidly and will destroy our white culture, heaven forbid. His shtick may play with some, but ultimately, the more successful he is, the more damage he’ll do to his own pet cause and to the Republican party.
The non-stop focus on Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, and Jon-Benet to the exclusion of minor items like the Iraq war has already destroyed our culture.
Here’s hoping the immigrants can bring some sanity back to it.
…of folks who would hope against hope that he could win the R nomination….let alone the presidency…I’m sure he speaks for the majority of R’s and not a few Dems.
The fact is that just a few years ago he was a voice crying in the Sonoran wilderness, now many agree with him in principle, if not specifics. Reminds me of that quote about first they laughted at me, then they ignored me, then they fought me, then then agreed with me. Something like that. We are seeing it before our eyes.
Tim, your post is typical of those who support open borders and oppose the enactment of workable, enforceable and honest immigration and labor laws.
The immigration bill lost because enough voters became aware of its weaknesses to oppose it. S 1639 was poorly written, designed to make immigration and related labor laws more difficult to enforce, unworkable, unenforceable and dishonest.
If an honest and workable bill is brought before Congress, Tancredo and those who opposed S 1639 are likely to support it.
Big If.
Meanwhile, there is no question Tancredo has a right to reap the rewards of his fight for border security, and I hope he stays in Congress to continue the fight for improved immigration, border security and labor laws.
On the offset, the bill looked all nice, but the more I learned about it the more it stank.
The use of the race card doesn’t surprise me. The bill wasn’t debateable on the merits, but you had to debate with something.
Just think, if the fairness doctorine was in place, we could have had a half hour of “this bill is crap”, followed by a half hour of “your racists”. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Immigration Thunderdome….
Anyone that starts spouting off about people wanting open borders is more concerned about rhetoric than the real issues. No one wants an open border. The debate is between comprehensive immigration reform and “enforce the laws on the books.” Tancredo has called to a halt to all immigration. He will never support comprehensive reform. S 1639 had some flaws, but something should have been passed. Now we have open borders for another two years because of people like Tancredo. Rather than work for real reform, they’d rather stand their ground and have nothing accomplished.
I do think you will get your wish that Tancredo stays in Congress. After 6 months of campaigning, Tancredo is still at 1% support according to a Fox News poll released this week. I guess his rhetoric isn’t being bought either.
though, like advocacy for a gas tax, few people have the guts to contemplate it, since the zeitgeist is so adamantly decided on the matter (it’s called “group-think”). There was a discussion about Libertarians on another thread recently: True libertarians should favor completely open borders. Economists are in complete agreement that, all other things being equal, the free flow of labor and capital across borders would produce greater aggregate wealth in the world (the other things that might not be equal are the potentially destabilizing reactions of those who are violently opposed to the idea). German reunification involved the absorption by West Germany of an economically stunted East Germany, to their mutual long-term benefit (many in West Germany were opposed to the costs that the reunification would impose, and has imposed, on them in the short term, though the impetus of nationalism gave reunification a bare majority in the national plebescite that decided the matter). The EU has been busy absorbing Eastern European countries whose economies are weaker than Mexico’s. In any case, open borders with Mexico is far from an absurd notion.
As for Skeptic’s comment about not speaking up if you don’t know the issues, I’d suggest that not only is it poor form to accuse someone of ignorance for disagreeing with your position, but it is even worse to do so in response to a quite reasonable observation while yourself advocating a position that is in fact a bastion of ignorance. I *do* understand the issues, and have outlined them in other posts in other threads: There are too many variables interacting to make simple determinations about the net costs and benefits of liberal v. conservative immigration policies. One can, a la Tancredo, list the negatives exclusively in order to justify his extreme position, but that is neither reasonable nor productive. The fact is, we need massive immigration in this country to ofset our untenable demographic trend toward too many retirees per worker, and our economy benefits from massive immigration of unskilled workers by keeping consumer prices down, which increases consumption, which stokes the economic engine and produces more jobs. There are indeed negative impacts as well, but they do not stand in isolation, and I have yet to see any attempt at a thorough analysis that takes both the positives and negatives into consideration at the same time (if anyone knows of one, conducted by university economists rather than by a partisan think-tank, please let me know).
But, beyond the positive and negative impacts on the American economy, there are other considerations that support a liberal immigration policy. They involve, in short, a shift from nationalism to humanism. There is nothing inherently just about the distribution of wealth and poverty in the world, and The Unites States has not acquired its relatively vast wealth simply by the virtue and hard work of its citizens: There was a lot of vicious theft and exploitation involved as well. A liberal immigration policy not only contributes to the production of more overall wealth in the world (a global good), but it also contributes to the distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, rather than vice versa. A country that claims to be humanity’s guiding light, that claims to be virtuous and humane, but that acquired its wealth and power in part on the backs of African slaves and at the expense of Native Americans (robbing their land and nearly exterminating them completely in the process), not to mention the theft of a large and rich tract of land from the very country to whose emmigrants we wish to deny entry, has good reason to think beyond its own short-term material self-interest when contemplating what policy it wishes to adopt.
To do so would not even be a sacrifice in the long-term, since our future prosperity and security depends above all else on our recovery of the respect of the rest of the world. We need, for our own sake, to start acting in ways that might earn that respect.
…I suggest that we shut down our post 6th grade educational system, save a boat load of money, and then reap the benefits of cheap labor. If low educational levels are so good for us, what the hell have we been doing since the Civil War?
Milk is good too, but it is not a complete diet. A robust economy requires many factors of production, and highly developed human capital is certainly a very valuable one. But there is plenty of labor that doesn’t benefit from being performed by a Ph.D. On the other hand, there are plenty of tasks that do require highly educated people to perform them. It is certainly a reasonable goal for a nation to seek to concentrate more of the latter type of job in its economy, and to export more of the former type. That is precisely my argument, since importing workers is in many ways identical to exporting relatively unskilled jobs. Therefore, the corrallary to that would have to be improving and extending the education of our children, not the contrary.
However, let me reiterate that the issue of importing cheap labor involves a complex mixture of pros and cons from the perspective of our own immediate material self-interest. I have already listed many of the pros. Many of the cons are discussed enough by others not to require repitition here. Among one of the less obvious cons is the fact that the availability of abundant cheap tends to be a disincentive to technical innovation in the production process, since when labor is cheap enough, there is no incentive to seek alternatives. This factor diminishes economic competitiveness over the long term (one of the reasons for Japan’s spectacular post WWII economic growth, for instance, was the lack of cheap labor on the islands, and the subsequent need to invest in state-of-the-art automation. Of course, the Marshall Plan’s subsidization of the initial stages of that process helped immensely as well. Conversely, the abundance of cheap labor in underdeveloped nations creates a self-reinforcing drag on economic growth, for the reason already stated).
My argument isn’t some simplistic tripe about how wonderful cheap labor is, as you imply. My argument is that we live in a more complex world than is admitted by people who rely on simplistic, linear analyses of such complex matters. A good step toward improving our ability to deal with those complexities will be when relatively intelligent people such as yourself recognize this fact, and let go of their safe and comfortable cognitive havens in favor of navigating the open conceptual sea. We might yet discover new worlds of possibilities, if we (continue to?) improve our collective ability to do so.
…It isn’t complex. Labor is a commodity. The more of it there is, the less the value. Cheap labor enthusiasts, going back to the Victorian era, knew this and made sure that plenty of labor existed by, for instance, using children. Child labor laws were a method of reducing the pool of labor, and sure enough, employers had to pay the adults more after that.
Here’s another corollary: If cheap labor is so good, why haven’t the Japanese imported lots of the same?
Americans used to do the jobs that the illegals are doing. Many American still want to, but between the low wages offered, and the work cultures, it has become a fait accompli.
I am perfectly willing to pay more for food and services if they are provided by Americans.
Labor is NOT A commodity. If it is like commodities, it is Many commodities. Labor isn’t even close to fungible. A PhD in ancient assyrian can not be directly retasked to be a plummer. Only on the lowest end is there any fungibility, and studies have shown that labor shortages for low skill jobs don’t lead to higher wages they lead to more capital expenditure.
Actually what drove up wages were unions fighting terror tactics of corporations, Ford’s view that workers were also consumers, and increasing specialization destroying the fungibility of labor.
Japan doesn’t import labor because they are xenophobic, not to protedct wages. The fact is their anti immigrant stance combined with their low birth rate is leading them to a demographic disaster in the next 15 years.
My grandma owned a bar when I was a kid, I’ve worked in the food & beverage industry all the way through college and still have many friends in the business. Over my 40 years the only people I have ever seen washing dishes are illegals, ex-cons, mentally ill/disabled and teens.
As I’ve stated before there is 1 place illegals hurt, at the margins. 1st jobs, “unemployable”, and reentrents have a tough time against motivated imigrants. This does have cascade effects as immigrants push themselves up the value chain, i.e. dishwasher to line cook or laborer to framer in construction. The answer is better teen/ex-con/disabled employment resorces and job skills training.
This has already gotten too long, and I certainly don’t mean to gang up on you Parsing, you are one of my favorite polsters.
I do have a problem with the misuse of H-1b visas however.
you are isolating one thread of a far more complex dynamic. I have explained it thoroughly and clearly enough that if you had any desire to understand what you apparently don’t know rather than cling to what you think you already know, you would have had the opportunity to do so. It was a simple. brief primer in microeconomics, as applied to this issue.
First, I never claimed that “cheap labor is so good.” I simply pointed out the advantages, that exist alongside the disadavantages, of Mexican immigrant labor in the American economy. I *know* you are capable of grasping the “subtle” notion that something can have both pros and cons associated with it. The fact that you can identify the cons in no way disproves the existance of the pros. If you had paid any attention to my posts, you would have recognized that I had already described the “lesson” you provided me with above. It is one aspect of a more complicated system.
The reason the Japanese didn’t import *more* labor (they did indeed import quite a bit) was that the costs of doing so exceeded the benefits in their situation, which included the actual costs of transporting the labor to the islands as well as the lost opportunity of replacing destroyed capital equipment with state-of-the-art equipment without the normal transaction costs of having to scrap functional but outdated equipment (since we already did that for them).
Second, the protectionist ideology that you are advocating has an abysmal history, in almost all circumstances serving to erode the economies of those nations that engage in it by disengaging them from the global economy in which they will eventually have to compete. Successful development strategies, such as those of the Southeast Asian countries, used export-oriented strategies instead, finding a niche that they could successfully fill in the global market rather than protecting indigenous industries from global competition. While the brand of protectionism you are advocating is of a different sort, it is subject to the same systemic constraints. By protecting American labor against global competition in any and all sectors, we raise production costs and price ourselves out of the market. You have yet to in any way address that simple and irrefutable fact. (The sectors in which high-paying jobs can be productively “protected” are information-intensive sectors, in which the cost of human capital is naturally high).
You may be willing to pay more for products produced by American workers, but consumers in general will pay the least they can for the same commodities. You can’t wish away the law of supply and demand any more than you can wish away the laws of thermodynamics.
Mexican immigrants aren’t children who need to be protected from exploitation. The supply of labor in the world can (an should) be limited by protections of that sort, but shouldn’t be limited by artificially banning legitimate job-seekers from the local labor market. Doing so distorts the local labor market, since it will in the end have to participate in a global economy.
You’re right that your argument isn’t complex. Unfortunately, it isn’t complete either. And as a result, it isn’t correct.
If we were debating how long it would take a feather dropped from a height of 50 meters to reach the ground, and how fast it would be going when it landed, I might argue that, since the acceleration of all objects in Earth’s gravitational field is 9.8 meters per second squared, it’s a simple calculation: The feather would take just over 3 seconds to land, and it would be traveling just over 30 meters per second at the moment of its landing. You would undoubtedly notice the flaw in my otherwise impeccable reasoning: I had left out air-resistance, which, in this case, is so significant a factor as to render my calculations totally inaccurate.
It’s unlikely that I would have any emotional commitment to my analysis of the falling feather, beyond my desire to be right, and would pretty quickly yield to your identification of other factors which affect the outcome of the analysis. But, in the case of immigration, it’s pretty obvious that you DO have an emotional commitment to the outcome of the analysis, and that you are focused on one quite relevant aspect to the exclusion of others because it serves that emotional commitment. You know, however, that there are indeed other factors involved in the analysis of immigration: Demography (e.g., our national urgency to increase the ratio of workers to retirees in this country), economic externalities (e.g., lower prices and thus increased consumption and thus increased economic growth, partially counterbalanced by decreased wages and thus decreased consumption on those whose wages are affected and thus decreased economic growth), global economic growth (reducing barriers to the movement of capital and labor accelerates aggregate economic growth), redistribution of wealth and economic opportunity from the wealthier to the poorer (Mexican workers are far poorer on average than American workers), and so on. Yet in all of your replies to my posts, you have only repeated the one factor that interests you: The suppression of American wages, which is beneficial to capital interests, and thus undoubtedly supported by capital interests at least in part for that reason. But just repeating over and over again the correct formula for the acceleration of objects in free fall in the Earth’s gravitational field does not make air resistance any less relevant. If you don’t include all significant variables in your analysis, your analysis will arrive at false conclusions, as yours has in this case (i.e., that the only, and only important, consideration in this debate is the intentional suppression of wages by capital interests).
Obviously, that’s NOT the only, or only significant, consideration in this debate. It is a far more complex matter, with far more variables in play. To reduce it to just that one aspect that reinforces your well-entrenched ideological predisposition is precisely the same technique employed by other people to maintain other kinds of arbitrary opinions, many of which you would be appalled to be associated with.
The most important thing we, collectively and individually, can do to confront the myriad challenges to human welfare in this world is to shake the habit of placing our conclusions before our analyses. Without that first step, we will continue to be just a bunch of territory-marking apes chanting at the alters of our various tribal gods.
There’s really only one way to prevent people from coming to the USA: make conditions here worse than they are in the countries from which people are coming. Luckily, with 2 terms of the Bush administration, we are on our way to achieving that goal!
More seriously, it seems to be simple economics. There is a supply of labor willing to work at a certain wage level, and there is a demand for labor at that wage level. I thought that’s what the Republicans were all about: letting the laws of economics work their magic without interference from government.
That’s the problem with our system of representation. All the issues get shoved into 2 parties. If we had some sort of proportional representation, Tancredo and Co. could form a party centered around immigration issues and possibly pick up a few seats.
you transition from your lucid observation in paragraph two to your advocacy of representation by Tancredo in paragraph three. Tancredo is more adamant about obstructing the free flow of labor than anyone! He in no way represents the laissez-faire orientation you seem to be attributing to him (or was the juxtaposition of the two paragraphs just happenstance?).
Let’s see…
Tancredo’s been in Congress for more than a decade and has clearly identified illegal immigration as his premier issue.
The immigration reform bill FAILED, which means that we still have the same set of immigration laws in place that we had when Tom started in Congress and that Tom complains about when railing against illegal immigrants.
Funny, his “Tancredo for President” doesn’t list any immigration legislation he has actually introduced and passed over the last 10 years he’s been in Congress.
The LA Time article quotes Tancredo’s immigration position as follows:
“I have a solution,” he told a Friday night crowd of about 100 at the Quality Inn in downtown Des Moines. “It’s a radical one. Scary. Enormously controversial.” Then he paused and spaced his words for effect. “It’s called: Enforce … the … law.”
The illegal immigration issue has been with us for many decades. Politicians want to use the issue to grandstand and call attention to themselves, but, in my opinion, don’t really want to do anything about it, including Tancredo.
..Every time I’ve had to fill out that I-9 form since 1986 I’ve just fumed. I, born here, have to follow the law, while millions of those born elsewhere present their false documents or aren’t even asked to provide them.
If employers had the sanctions imposed that were promised in 1986 we would not have this illegally undocumented worker problem.