Let them eat frijoles

April 30, 2007
Sebastian Mallaby is a columnist and former editorial board member for the Washington Post. He is also the Director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies. His latest opinion piece, “Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants? Nativist Nonsense Distorts a Critical Issue,” is just more of the same ignorance, class bigotry, and intellectual dishonesty that are the Washington Post’s standard contribution to the nation’s immigration debate.

Reader Mark Mendlovitz of Los Angeles points out this let-them-eat-cake nugget from a section in the Mallaby piece attacking American policies that require foreign nationals to respect our laws, or, as Mallaby terms it, “truly vicious counter-immigration policies.”

“Is it right,” Mallaby writes, “to push native workers’ pay up by 2 percent if that means depriving poor Mexicans of a chance to triple their incomes? Of course it isn’t.”

Even leaving aside the laughably amateurish economic reasoning by which the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies director comes up with the 2 percent figure, it would be difficult to come up with a more ignorant and callous sentence.

Mallaby claims in the piece that the economic impact on American families of importing hundreds of thousands of illiterate unskilled peasants and their families every year “is a wash” and adding them to the labor supply exerts no downward pressure on wages. That these statements fly in the face of common sense to the point of absurdity doesn’t faze Mr. Mallaby. [removed]

“Moreover,” argues Mallaby, “the alleged downward pressure on wages comes less from the 400,000 illegal immigrants who show up each year than from the 35 million immigrants already here, two-thirds of them legally.”

In other words, you see, according to this Washington Post shyster, illegal immigrants don’t drive down wages because legal and illegal immigrants drive them down more.

Mallaby displays his gross ignorance of the world outside the United States when he argues that it is wrong to enforce our immigration laws and protect Americans from wage losses if poor Mexicans can gain more by breaking them. Apparently, the director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies is ignorant of the fact there are nearly five billion people in the world living in countries poorer than Mexico.

What about them? By breaking our immigration laws, those billions can increase their relative consumption levels by an even greater factor than Mexicans can. Wouldn’t that make it even more wrong to enforce our immigration laws against those billions?

Ignorant of this larger world, Mallaby leaves the question unasked and unanswered. But since he does advocate, with a remarkably ugly indifference to the plight of the less fortunate among us, a U.S. policy in which “concern for high-school dropouts [Americans]…must be weighed against the aspirations of migrants,” we can guess what his prescription would be were someone to clue him in.

Sebastian Mallaby, like the editorial page of the Washington Post in general when it comes to the immigration issue, crosses the line from mere foolishness to outright hostility to the American people.

smallaby@cfr.org

Craig Nelsen

Tags: AgJobs · Council on Foreign Relations · economics · immigration · labor shortages · Washington PostNo Comments

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