NYT's Bi-national Eduardo Porter: "How to Make America Greater: More Immigration"
02/07/2017
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
From the New York Times:
How to Make America Greater: More Immigration

FEBRUARY 7, 2017

Eduardo Porter

ECONOMIC SCENE

President Trump will make America smaller….

If workers could move seamlessly across borders, wages of similar workers would tend to converge.

And that would be great for American workers because …
The wage gap is a measure of the barriers that remain: An hour of work by a Pakistani in New York costs 6.5 times what an hour of the same Pakistani’s time costs in Karachi.
This Pakistani example may be lifted from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash about a borderless world:
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
  • music
  • movies
  • microcode (software)
  • high-speed pizza delivery
Not surprisingly, many libertarians assume Snow Crash is a utopian novel.

[Comment at Unz.com]

Print Friendly and PDF