It's neoclassical economic fantasy that a bunch of autonomous immigrants entering without such ties will build a stronger economy.

What? I know lots of skilled immigrants that have come here by themselves and every single one of them is successful. I bet every other reader of TPM Cafe has the same experience, too. Some are self-employed, like my brother-in-law dentist. Some have been involved with start-up tech ventures. Others are mere employees: doctors, professors, programmers, engineers.

The report you linked to talks about food service and child care as some of the leading entrepreneurial businesses. Should we have fewer doctors and engineers so that we can have more nannies and push-cart vendors?

Perhaps "new immigrants are driving economic growth in communities ranging from New York to Los Angeles," but I'm sure they are also driving out the previous residents. According to research by demographer William Frey, over 1.5 million native-born citizens (net) left NYC during the two periods he studied. And more than half a million left L.A. These cities now lead in poverty and inequality.

er...Cleveland City, OH leads with a 32.4% poverty rate, and Detroit is in second place with 31.4. Miami, El Paso, Atlanta, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Newark flesh out the top ten. LA and NYC are not even on the list. [link]

But I am curious about your inequality stat. How is that determined? What's being measured?  Is it something like George Orwell's pigs are more equal?

Neoboho

I'm just trying to understand. Do we have children left behind because of lack of education or not?
Do we need more educated workers or less?
Is US overeducated country or underducated country?

Do we need spend more money on education or less?

Do we need more educated immigrants or more uneducated immigrants?

Nathan Newman: is economics all that matters? Surely, if you want to discuss everything involved in this issue, you should be willing to note the non-economic benefits of the proposed plan and argue for or against them. Right?

P.S. I don't support the Senate bill or any form of amnesty, but I might support a bill that just had the changes noted above.

Oh yes, because after all, we often forget that Emma Lazarus' first draft of that famous poem "The New Colossus" commemorated inside the Statue of Liberty, originally read:

"Give me your tired doctors, your poor lawyers, your huddled masses of skilled high tech workers yearning to breathe free...."

I think you're on thin ice here, LonewackoDotCom2 - with no offense intended.  What you are saying pretty much describes Compton when I lived there in 1952.  Or San Francisco when I lived there in 1946. 

But the US has been described as a plutocracy equal to or even "superior" to Latin American plutocracies, so I think Dan Walter's point may not be particularly applicable to the consequences of immigration.  After all, at least some of the founders argued for the priveleged: Chief Justice John Jay - " The people who own the country ought to govern it;" Alexander Hamilton - "the rich and the well-born" (should lead the nation).

And I don't know how NYC and LA could be singled out legitimately (with respect to reason v. polemics). 

Neoboho

"Bringing families together as a goal of immigration policy should be the most humanistic goal,"
Please be more specific.

For example, do you advocate that an illegal immigrant who gets Z-visa should be able to bring right away his wife, children, parents, parents of his wife, siblings, siblings of his parents, their children, ..... ?

What about legal immigrants ?

You know full well, or should know full well, that this is a question in form only, what we know in common discourse as a "Rhetorical Question." The purpose is not to seek an answer.  It is to chop logic altogether. Return to the list of "questions" in the original comment and you'll see that none of them are questions in the truest sense of the word.  Any of them could be called out.  I called out the one I considered most problematic.

As to your other assertions.  Am I emotional about this?  Yes, passionately so.  This does not mean that I am illogical.  Emotion and logic are not enemies of each other.  

With regard to your question in your second response. 

So, please explain how many people you want to let here every year, and how you want to choose among 5 billions people who should come next year?

I'm quite happy with Nathan Newman's original observation.  One could, quite fairly, I think, call your formulation a "red herring".  The discussion was not about how many, but about under which formulation.  Newman believes admitting immigrants on the basis of family connections is important and economically valid: so do I, as my "emotional" response would indicate.

In terms of numbers?  Let me just say three things.

1. In years past, I would have made the number broad enough to include you, broken English and all, and hope you would be as generous in your welcome to the immigrant generations following.
2. If we take the number of legal immigrants since the last adjustment in the Reagan Era, add to it the number of illegal immigrants which the country has absorbed with minimum strain (unemployment is still under 5%) and then divide those two numbers by the number of years, that would give a reasonable number of immigrants per year.   And I don't care what country, religion, race, or ethnicity...vive la difference.
3. Invest in the future of these new Americans by providing education and opportunity--even as this generous country did for my grandparents, making room for me.  Anything else is mean spirited.

aMike

I don't care about neo-whatsis, I'm concerned that ol' Chappaquiddick over there is for one, still in office, which raises many questions, and that he's one of the prominent pro-(illegal?) immigration voices as well, which raises even more questions, like my favorite, 'when was that last time Congress, as a body, passed a group sobriety test'?

The world has changed, and it kind of stands to reason that our approach to immigration, legal and otherwise, is going to have to change also.
For one, our country's already trillions in debt.
The smart money people are packing up their factories and moving to countries where the hourly wages are a lot lower, ergo the cost of doing business is a lot lower, and the proverbial teeming masses are rolling over our borders in great numbers to glean up anything they can. Problem: The people that already live in the USA and call it home are in debt up to their eyeballs in increasing number, no accident there, and are now facing an endless torrent of under-the-table competition for basic employment. This is where it starts coming down to the laws, and what de facto legal standard is going to become acceptable practice at a jobsite near you, possibly your job, even. So, it bears some careful consideration when you start talking about blanket liberalization of immigration law, amnesty, scamnesty, or otherwise, other countries face difficulty in supporting their own populations, that doesn't necessarily make it our responsibility to throw our doors and wallets wide open to accomodate them, and in some cases, these tears of poverty-stricken anguish are in fact crocodile tears, yes, immigration, legal or otherwise, is a full-fledged industry, and its' proponents are doubtless well-compensated, legitimately or otherwise, and legitimacy is a very important word in this general context, as without some kind of legal standard or guideline, you may as well furlough everybody that works in the immigration office, as well as the border patrol, as their role will dwindle in significance to the point where it just won't matter anymore. I'm against illegal immigration, I don't think it's wise to establish a precedent
that will invite runaway chain migration, and simply further add to an already burgeoning problem that can well serve to drastically reshape the country in ways that these high-minded types( what ARE they smoking, and why don't they share? Hmmm) have probably failed to anticipate.

It's a big issue, and shouldn't be given a pass without serious questioning and reflection. This isn't 1970 anymore, and we can end up just like India in not too much time at all...

Two issues-- one, the need for advanced education in the economy is often over-rated.  In some ways, the US does a poor job of training the educated folks we do need (too many become lawyers and investment bankers) but the absolute numbers needed is still not that high when you look at projected job growth. 

And for the skilled jobs available, why would we want to allocate our best jobs to the highly educated from the developin world?  That's bad for our own folks aspiring too those good jobs and bad for developing nations who then suffer a brain drain.

So given a broad need for less skilled jobs-- and the kinds of jobs generated by immigrant entrepreneurs since we aren't talking about a zero sum game of jobs -- the point system makes less sense. 

Let's go back to the whole discussion of heterodox economics.  If we don't assume some neoclassical supply and demand curve for skilled labor, we then can understand that NEW job growth is sustained by a range of social institutions, including family networks that generate capital and trust to build new businesses.  So chain migration is actually an economic asset that is often more valuable than whatever individual skills a particular immigrant might have.  THAT is my point.

" for the skilled jobs available, why would we want to allocate our best jobs to the highly educated from the developin world? "

"allocate" sounds very stange.
Anyway, because US does a poor job of training the educated folks US high tech company are filled with immigrants. I don't remember last time when I was in any meeting/project where American born were > 25 %.

"given a broad need for less skilled jobs"
It's not given at all.
Our contry is addicted to cheap foreing oil and cheap foreing unskilled workers.
Techonoly can easily reduce need for both with great benefits for US as well as countries from which we export oil and chep labor and corrupting the goverments of those counties in the process.

"So chain migration is actually an economic asset that is often more valuable than whatever individual skills a particular immigrant might have. THAT is my point."

So, do you suggest that chain immigration should have higher strict priority over any other type of immigrans or there should be some other mechanism of allocating limited resorce, i.e. number of allowed immigrants per year?