Dueling opinion pieces on immigrant poverty from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The Journal piece (subscription only), naturally, has permanently affixed rose-colored glasses, and cites a liberal, high-immigration think tank to make the point that:
Some conservatives assert that the U.S. is importing impoverished immigrants from Mexico who are destined to remain that way. These fears are misplaced. The data show that over time Latinos can and do climb the economic ladder, much as previous immigrant groups have done.
Actually, Borjas’s work and ours show that immigrants definitely “can and do climb the economic ladder,” it’s just that each successive group is starting farther and farther behind the rest of us and progressing more slowly. That’s actually not “much as previous immigrant groups have done.”
The Post’s Bob Samuelson, on the other hand, makes clear that the poverty imported by the federal immigration program hides the modest progress we’ve made in mitigating poverty. Implicitly, he supports the point that large-scale immigration nourishes an environment for more government spending, more government intervention, more socialism.
To paraphrase Susan Sontag: Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and someone in the same period who read only the Washington Post editorial page. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of immigration? The answer, I think, should give us pause.