Greenspan To Testify On Immigration
04/27/2009
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L. Gordon Crovitz writes on the WSJ op-ed page:

We Need an Immigration Stimulus
... Which brings us to our own era, and the debate on immigration reform beginning this week with congressional hearings that include an appearance by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. President Barack Obama says he wants to address the issue by the end of the year.

So begins the media rehabilitation of Alan Greenspan: Sure, he helped cause the housing bubble and the mortgage meltdown, but now he's making it up for it by coming out on the side of truth and justice by being for immigration. He's an ideologue screw-up on everything else, but at least he's right about immigration.

How much you wanna bet that nobody at the hearing will ask him about the link between immigration and the mortgage meltdown? What link? Whoever heard of such a thing?

We've all been brainwashed so many time over the last 1 to 2 generations about how Diversity Is Our Strength that it was only natural for the Smart Money to see the flood of Diverse Immigrants into California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida as a sure thing investment. The supply of land is fixed, but the demand for land in the Sand States keeps going up due to Hispanic immigration, so houses there must rise in price forever.

It usually pays to be skeptical about immigration reform, given the alliance between nativists and labor unions for tighter borders. Still, an economic downturn is the right time to move on immigration, one of the few policy tools that could clearly boost growth.

The pace of lower-skilled migration has slowed due to higher unemployment. This could make it less contentious to ease the path to legalization for the 12 million undocumented workers and their families in the U.S.

The Open Borders crowd isn't even trying to make sense these days, are they? They just intend to muscle this thing through, babbling whatever nonsense it takes.

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