Unfortunately, he doesn't even mention the one step that would cost nothing and use the market in "fighting crime, alleviating poverty and inculcating the habits essential to long-term success." Namely, tightening the labor market by reducing immigration, both permanent and "temporary," legal and illegal, something Congress can do any time it feels like. Despite the recession, the federal immigration program continues to legally import something like 100,000 working-age people from abroad each month, disproportionately less-skilled, who will compete directly with the very less-skilled Americans (and earlier immigrants) that Salam is rightly concerned about. Just since 2000, immigration (legal and illegal combined) has increased the supply of high school dropouts by something like 15 percent.


There are many reasons for the stagnant or declining prospects of poor workers, immigration being only one of them. But it's simply absurd to talk about wage subsidies or minimum-wage increases or any similar government initiative to improve opportunity for the working poor until we stop subverting their job prospects through another discretionary government initiative.

Remember that Congress estimated Medicare's cost at $12 billion for 1990 (adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost $107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion. Who's going to stop it?

If you’re thinking about ways to boost the prospects of poor Americans, doing it by punishing even poorer Mexicans seems like a uniquely illogical and unappealing way to get the job done. Why not help poor Americans by targeting rich Americans and spreading the wealth around? Or by increasing the number of high-skill immigrants who we let in to offset the distributive impact of low-skill immigration? That leaves everyone better off than they would be in a no-immigration scenario. Flip the script around and imagine a country with no immigrants and no immigration. Now imagine me proposing to help the working class by rounding-up some disfavored 10 percent of the working-class population and deport them to a nearby corrupt and impoverished nation. Would anyone consider that a remotely sensible way to behave?

Nobody favors “illegal immigration” but a response focused on large-scale deportations of undocumented migrants is both inhumane and economically destructive. It would be far smarter to put into place a system that lets people who’ve come here to work do so as long as they follow the law, pay the taxes they owe, and start the process of integrating themselves and their families into American society...The fact that lots of people from all around the world want to come here and add their skills and efforts to our own is one of America’s great strengths in the world—it’s something we should be taking advantage of, not fearing.

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970-2006. We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly. (2) If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time.(3) The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it. (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above- median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade

When economics professors teach the basics of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), we usually caution our students that it is not a good measure of welfare. Unfortunately, many economists go on to give GDP far more credit than it deserves. They tend to consider fiscal and monetary policy positive if these policies increase GDP, but they often fail to ask, let alone answer, whether those same policies increase or reduce welfare. I have a term for giving GDP such a sacred a place in economists' reasoning: GDP fetishism.