There are two enormous issues I take with that article's reasoning, Kel.
Firstly, I despise its blinkered national perspective. According to a global perspective, and using the same arguments Borjas makes regarding the supply of labour, the exit of low-skilled workers from origin countries should improve the wages and conditions of workers in those countries.
Even if wages are subject to downward pressure from an increasing supply of low-skilled labour in the destination country, the newly arrived workers themselves are generally better off economically and often also in terms of safety and freedom than they were in their countries of origin.
Therefore the author's principal argument only makes any sense when considered solely within the borders of one country. But why would one look for an optimally just policy solution to what is, by definition, a transnational problem within such a frame? The answer is that you wouldn't, unless you were ideologically welded to the resulting unjust conclusions.
As a side note, it should be remembered that being low-skilled is not a human essence, it's a plastic quality. Every worker's skill base is constantly being altered by experience, on the job training and formal education. This article therefore deals less with the question of the qualities of workers, and more with the kinds of jobs that are available. As it is widely predicted that automation will drastically change the character of work in the next few decades with or without nett migration, and workplaces are already changing faster than ever before, the legitimacy of any argument concerning skills falls categorically into question. Â
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Secondly, Borjas freely admits that his own data and analysis show that low-skilled immigration is a nett economic benefit to the destination country in the case of the US. File that away; immigration is a nett economic benefit, according to one of its opponents.Â
However, Borjas cites immigration as a cause of increasing inequality because he finds that the greater profits secured from downward wage pressure in low-skilled sectors is unfairly distributed in the subsequent "carve up", enriching the American capitalist class and their elite professional workers.
He describes this as proving that immigration is "just another income redistribution program". But his argument describes a classic problem of political economy where two processes are in dialogue—the allocation of the costs of labour, and the allocation of the profits of production. His rhetoric only attacks the first of these processes, while assuming the second is fixed.
It is quite clear from Borjas's own premises that by a political address to the problem of the allocation of the profits of production, every American worker could secure economic benefit from migration.Â
So one may assume that the optimal solution to the problem (as should be quite intuitive, given that the US has some of the poorest and least efficient public services, and the lowest overall rate of taxation with relation to GDP in the OECD) is probably to … use politics to redistribute wealth away from wealthy Americans, and to so-called "low-skilled" workers.
