Bloomberg on Immigration
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As the Senate prepares for a vote, possibly as soon as today, on final passage of a bill to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, it’s great to see Mayor Bloomberg weighing in. He did it with an opinion piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that drew significantly from an April 12, 2006, article on this page by Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute. Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, who was chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor from 2003 to 2005, demolished the myth that immigrants lower wages of native-born Americans. She cited studies showing that immigration may even increase American wages.
Wrote Mr. Bloomberg yester day, “Recent studies put the lie to the old argument that immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans and significantly depress wages.” Mr. Bloomberg, in a way that we haven’t heard even President Bush or Senator McCain articulate, made the case for increased legal immigration of both skilled and unskilled labor. To the extent that the immigration issue has become a crisis in America, that’s the way we see it – not as a problem of lack of assimilation of Mexican-Americans, nor as a post-September 11 security issue, though the security issue is a legitimate one. No, the main problem is that there is a shortage of legal labor that is threatening to crimp America’s economic growth. As Mr. Bloomberg put it, “to keep people and businesses investing in America, we need to ensure that we have workers for all types of jobs.”
It was not just the substance of Mr. Bloomberg’s piece in the Journal but also the tone that struck us as just right in this debate. It is no doubt not a coincidence that both the leading voices that we admire in this debate – Mayor Giuliani is the other – are leaders of this city. No one can lecture New York City on the security issue; we lost 3,000 of our friends and neighbors on September 11. And no one can lecture New York City on immigrants, either. We are blessed with, and depend on, huge numbers of them, documented and undocumented. Yet this is an issue that also extends beyond New York, as the turmoil in the Congress shows. What a great issue for Mr. Bloomberg to carry into the national debate as he wrestles with the question of whether to run for president.
