That title overstates the case a little, but I doubt I made a friend of Matt Miller after quickly dashing off to him the e-mail below, in response to his Washington Post op/ed earlier this week (“How to Preserve Our Standard of Living”):
Dear Mr. Miller:
How can you write a whole column on our educational and economic challenges without once mentioning the impact our immigration policy has had on both?
It was nice to see you refer to Michael Spence and Andy Grove, and acknowledge the need for more manufacturing jobs, but you (and Michael Lind) were advocating something completely different and less plausible last year: that a return to broad-based prosperity could be built on “in-person service jobs – such as teaching, home health services or hospice care,” as you put it in your April, 2009 FT column (which I blogged about at the time (“How not to create broad-based prosperity”).
Finally, “U.S. Elites” includes you, as an Ivy League alumnus, former White House fellow, and current fellow of a center-left think tank. You have been part of the problem. As I noted in the blog post I linked to,
Liberal think tanks such as the Center for American Progress — although they support the goal of a strong middle class in the abstract — advocate policies that work against this goal in reality. They oppose most manufacturing and natural resource industries out of concerns about carbon and global warming; they advocate policies that will make energy (and thus energy-intensive industries such as manufacturing) more expensive, for similar reasons; they oppose the vocational tracking that would support a strong manufacturing base, out of egalitarian educational ideals; and they support unskilled immigration, which lowers the wages of blue collar workers in industries such as construction.
The part of your WaPo column were you wrote about the importance of manufacturing jobs was a step in the right direction. Here’s hoping you use that as a starting point to re-assess some of your other positions, and use your connections to influence policy in a more constructive direction.
More generally, it’s disconcerting how bereft the center left in this country seems to be of actionable, constructive policies to address the mess we’re in. I get the sense that they have long taken for granted the creative power of the U.S. economy, and concerned themselves more with how to slice up the economic pie rather than keep the economy growing. Granted, this may be true, to an extent, of some of those on the center right as well, though at least they are less likely to advocate policies that would further hobble the economy.
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