William W. Chip’s letter to the editor of the FT today:
From Mr William W. Chip.
Sir, In my letter of July 8 I argued that reducing US immigration to the levels set in 1924 would do more to prevent the decline of US real wages than the government programmes proposed by Richard Florida in his Comment article “America needs to make its bad jobs better”, (July 6).
For this I stand accused by Roger Algase (Letters, July 13) of adding “flames to the fires of anti-immigrant prejudice” and “suggesting a return to the intolerant spirit” of the 1920s.
Why so? The US Congress had many motives for reducing immigration in the 1920s. Even if racial prejudice was among them, there is no chance whatsoever that a 21st-century Congress would re-institute discriminatory “national origin” quotas as part of any plan to reduce overall immigration. Nowise did I suggest they do so.
I am further maligned as “long on bias, but short on facts”. Yet Mr Algase does not (and cannot) dispute my assertion that real wages grew much faster during the low-immigration period 1924-1965 (even during the Great Depression) than during the high-immigration era that followed (or for that matter during the high-immigration period that preceded the 1924 crackdown). I await facts from Mr Algase that demonstrate that the law of supply and demand does not apply in the US labour market.
There are very few matters, beyond loving my wife and children, about which I feel certain. What makes me nearly certain that mass immigration to the US is no longer in the country’s interest is the unfailing resort, by those who disagree, to accusations of prejudice, racism and intolerance, presumably for lack of a sounder rebuttal.
William W. Chip,
Washington, DC, US
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