From: Delmar Jackson (e-mail him)

I would like to make two observations regarding Miami and wages and immigration.

I am a Miami native whose family has been here since 1919. Mr. Sailer is right, all else being equal, there were no other cities like Miami in the 1980s.

I worked for Dade International in Miami for 17 years, it was a division of Baxter healthcare based in Chicago. Dade International was bought by Mitt Romney’s company, Bain Capital and it was sold off in pieces in 1998. (See A Reader Used To Have One Of 2000 American Jobs That Romney Was Asked About Destroying.)

However, before that happened, back in the 1980s, the executives of Baxter in Chicago were highly interested in moving their headquarters to Miami. In a highly unfortunate turn of events, in two separate instances, top executives from Baxter that flew to Miami to scope out their new potential headquarters for Baxter experienced attempted carjackings of their vehicle. In one case it was at the airport and in the second it was on the open highway. This was upsetting, as you might imagine, even for someone from Chicago, and the idea of making Miami the new headquarters of Baxter ended.

While the corruption and crime and drugs of the 1980s in Miami did create wealth in real estate and other areas, it also destroyed wealth by causing honest and law abiding business and employees to flee.

My second observation is I have seen Miami immigration lawyers publicly admit on local TV in Miami that the reason they need to have more immigrants to come here is that their clients need workers to work 7 days a week and native workers are reluctant to do so.

Of course, I am old fashioned, I always thought workers you needed to work 7 days a week , with the exception of sailors on ships, etc, were called slaves.

If massive immigration created a healthy economy in Miami economists have only to look at the current levels of income inequality. Miami has the third highest income inequality in the nation. Economists are often people that will pick up the morning paper form outside that a dog has peed on and tell you it must have rained last night as the paper is clearly all wet.

If an economist is going to tally the income created from immigration in Miami he needs to be honest about who the money goes to in the economy and add up the other environmental, social and economic costs.

Miami still has cocaine coming in, but the cartels wised up and stopped the public killings. Also currently there is massive amounts of money in the billions of dollars being made in South Florida from bogus IRS claims, medical billing fraud and insurance scam fraud all done by for the most part immigrant gangs who when caught skip town and go back to their home country.

See previous letters from Delmar Jackson.