Here's the core reason why I think most (not all, but most) of those saying they oppose immigration because of its effects of lower-income native workers are not really serious or, worse, just covering straight-up nativism with a faux charitable concern.

In the Bush 2007 budget, a grand total of $177 million was appropriated to enforce our wage and hour laws. Compare that to the $13 billion in the 2008 Bush budget for border enforcement -- nearly ONE HUNDRED TIME AS MUCH spent for border enforcement as for wage enforcement.

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With the news of a deal struck by some Senators, here's my initial problems with the deals:

• I'm unimpressed by a deal that delays citizenship for up to 14 years for those being granted new "Z visas"
• At the same time, the deal brings in 400,000 new guest workers each year with NO option for citizenship, the perfect second-tier workforce to undercut worker solidarity since they have no long-term future here
• And the abandonment of most family reuninfication in future legal immigration undercuts one of the most admirable real "pro-family" aspects of our immigration policy.

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At last someone connects the dots of screwed up flights and union-busting in the airline industry. And it comes from the Wall Street Journal ($) which highlights how low wages are undermining service, both by making recruitment of skilled workers harder and because existing workers don't have enough time for increased workloads:

That's not good news for passengers, as the combination of fewer and less experienced workers is causing more service problems. Planes sit on tarmacs because airlines are short on gate workers. Service on planes is slower because many airlines are flying with fewer flight attendants. When bad weather hits, tight staffing may mean more delays or canceled flights.

The New York Times similarly today highlights how experienced workers are beginning to leave the industry.

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The celebration of bubbles as delivering wonderful excess that the next generation of entrepreneurs can spin into more down-to-earth uses is an attractive proposition by folks like Daniel Gross, but it ignores the opportunity cost of what WASN"T invested in during the speculative flurry. Bubbles are a suck for capital, for labor and most of all for creative skills that are pulled away from more useful endeavors. When the best and brightest minds are focused on useless dreck (can we all say Pets.com), they aren't focused on real innovation.

And the idea that we now have lots of useful excess broadband fiber is true, but largely irrelevant since what was most neglected in the dotcom boom is laying fiber to the home so people could actually use these wonderful Internet doo-hickies. And the result was that the US slipped from world Interent leader to only 16th in the world interms of the percentage of residents with broadband subscriptions. Japan, Korea, Sweden, Canada, and Switzerland are just a few of the countries with wider access to high-speed Internet for their citizens, largely because their investments were not so spectacularly out-of-sync with consumer needs.

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