Things to come: Isn’t it time for the inevitable Paul Krugman column endorsing the Schumer-Rubio amnesty plan? True, in the past, Krugman has expressed strong reservations (collected by John T. Bennett here) about the labor market effect of massive unskilled immigration. For example,
“Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.” [E.A.]
Why would that happen? Krugman explains:
“That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
But you know that’s not going to stop him from embracing amnesty now because … well, that’s just what all right-thinking people do these days. Indeed, Krugman already embraced the general concept of amnesty this year on CNN , on the spurious grounds that
“all of those negative effects that I talked about, those are happening already, those people are already here, and we’re not going to send them back, and it would be a crime against humanity to try and somehow send them to the border and shoo them out. So the economic effects are already in there.”
(This is spurious because, thanks to the ability of immigrants, once legalized, to bring in their relatives–so called chain migration–and Schumer-Rubio’s various “guest worker” programs, the pending amnesty bill would result in millions more unskilled workers than are already here, even assuming it doesn’t attract another wave of illegals.)
So where’s the NYT column? I suspect we won’t have to wait long. It’s all-hands-on-deck time …