Dean and immigration
The Pat Buchanan-led "paleo-conservative" crowd, which has been anti-Iraq-war for strictly isolationist reasons, writes in the American Conservative that they would go for Howard Dean if he was anti-immigration. The strangeness of this is lessened when you realize that they see Dean as a "Rockefeller Republican" in disguise (and that the neo-conservative foreign policy of the Bush Admnistration is very much against the grain of classic conservative thought). The essence of their argument is that Dean can get the "poor white vote" to help him against Bush in the general election:
Is there actually a large pool of poor, white voters who would defect to Dean? Somehow I think that poor voters, regardless of race, see Democrats as more attuned to their needs, and I'm not convinced that strict immigration policies would confer any advantage in that demographic.
As George Borjas and other immigration economists have argued, while some immigrants do benefit the overall economy, a large coterie of low-skilled workers has costs, and those costs are borne disproportionately by less-skilled and lower-paid American workers. If you are the sort of person who wishes to hire someone cheap to clean your pool, you are probably someone who benefits from a large reserve army of poor and eager workers. If you are struggling to support a family with the skills of a high-school graduate, you will benefit from a tighter labor market and higher wages that would stem from a lower rate of immigration.
Miles maintained that the first winners from immigration reform would be the black workers—a group that has lost many niches in the American economy during the past generation to new immigrants. But white workers are getting hurt as well. In a phenomenon noted by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, the white working class has been steadily fleeing high-immigration states during the last 15 years—from California to Nevada and Colorado, from New York to the Southeast. But the immigration surge has kept pursuing them, five or ten years behind, and is now beginning to have a notable impact on labor markets in the interior of the country.
Is there actually a large pool of poor, white voters who would defect to Dean? Somehow I think that poor voters, regardless of race, see Democrats as more attuned to their needs, and I'm not convinced that strict immigration policies would confer any advantage in that demographic.
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