Further to Steve Sailer's demolition of the Tabarrok-Cowen-type immigration enthusiast economists in the U.S., a reader points out that one prominent British economist, Robert Rowthorn of Cambridge University, has today published a searing Op-Ed attack on mass immigration in the U.K.:

As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.

Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.

Never have we seen immigration on this scale: we just can't cope, Sunday Telegraph, July 2 2006.

Needless to say, I am interested in the fact that I outlined the same analysis in my National Review cover story on immigration fourteen years ago.

Maybe economists should investigate why this intellectual market isn't clearing.