The Economic Well-Being of Black Americans: The Overarching Influence of U.S. Immigration Policies

[Excerpt] Of the myriad public policies that have impinged on the economic well being of black Americans over the years, none has had more overarching and continuous effects than those pertaining to immigration. Immigration policies and trends have set the stage that has allowed other outcomes to happen. From the beginning, when blacks were introduced into the British colonies that would later become the United States, to contemporary times, when the nation finds itself in the throes of the largest and longest period of mass immigration in its history, immigration policy has significantly influenced the geographical, occupational, and industrial employment patterns of black Americans. Given the harrowing experiences of black Americans as the only racial or ethnic group to have ever been collectively subjected to both enforced slavery and de jure segregation, no form of public policy should be allowed to do harm to their quest to overcome these imposed handicaps. Unfortunately, U.S. immigration policy has not held to that standard. The burden of this neglect continues to this day

The Report of the Commission on Immigration Reform (i.e. the Jordan Commission): A Beacon for Real Immigration Reform

[Excerpt] The immigration policy of the United States is steeped in legal complexities and is considered to be so politically combustible that most politicians are loathe to address the issue unless circumstances absolutely require them to act. In those instances when extant policies have become so incongruent with prevailing national interests that public pressure can no longer be ignored, the reform process has usually been preceded by the formation by Congress of a national commission or congressional panel to study the needs and to frame the appropriate policy responses before the professional politicians will touch the subject. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find another policy issue where the use of special commissions or committees has been so frequently used to identify policy shortcomings and to offer policy changes. Social security and welfare policies have sometimes relied on commissions to serve the same buffer role because they are also complex and controversial for politicians to address directly. But commissions were used to review immigration policy long before these other two public policies ever existed

George’s Contribution to Political Economy

[Excerpt] [George’s] views led to the creation of single tax reform movements at the grassroots level in several western states in the United States as well as in Britain, Australia, Canada and continental Europe. Today, several economists and institutes continue to believe in the contemporary relevance of his ideas

Thomas Robert Malthus: The Economist

As Robert Heilbroner has so aptly observed, economics has produced a handful of men whose contributions to mankind have been more decisive for history than many acts of statesman who basked in brighter glory, often more profoundly disturbing then the shuttling of armies back and forth across frontiers, and more powerful for good and bad than the edicts of kings and legislatures. One such person cited by Heilbroner is Thomas Robert Malthus

Immigrant Labor and the Issue of “Dirty Work” in Advanced Industrial Societies

[Excerpt] Of the multiple explanations for the post-World War II immigration experiences of those advanced industrial nations where the phenomena occurred, the most pernicious has been that immigrants are needed to do the dirty work. Despite the fact that efforts to characterize the general employment patterns of immigrants in different industrial societies has proved frustrating, Michael Piore observed in 1979 that the only immigrant jobs that seem common throughout the industrial world are menial jobs . Likewise, much of the debate in the United States that preceded the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of, 1986 (IRCA) centered on the efficacy of the assertion that the United States economy actually needed illegal immigrants to fill certain menial jobs that would not otherwise be filled. The general thesis of efforts made to explain these tendencies has been that the structure of labor markets changes over time. As advanced industrial societies have evolved over the past two centuries from being agriculturally based societies, their occupational opportunities have become considerably more diverse. Nonetheless, some labor economists have argued that, by the late twentieth century, many of these societies have sustained perceptible patterns of job clustering. They have witnessed the creation of a dual labor market. Under this analysis, these economies generate both primary sector jobs (i.e., jobs characterized as having high wages, good fringe benefits, job security, and promotion opportunities) and secondary sector jobs (i.e., jobs characterized as having low wages, few fringe benefits, little security, and are of a dead-end nature). The relevant question, therefore, has been how do these advanced societies find workers to fill these secondary sector jobs