On the immigration issue, socialist Democrat Bernie Sanders of Vermont sounds like the Manhattan Institute's City Journal — and I don't mean that as praise for either one of them. From Vox:
Ezra Klein
You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...
Bernie Sanders
Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.
Ezra Klein
Really?
Bernie Sanders
Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...
Ezra Klein
But it would make ...
Bernie Sanders
Excuse me ...
Ezra Klein
It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?
Bernie Sanders
It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.
You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?
I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.
From City Journal, an article by Richard Cherry, a professor at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center: "How Our Current Immigration System Impedes Black Progress: African-Americans lose out when immigration favors low-skill labor": "often lost in the debate over immigration—legal and illegal—thus far has been the way the current system hurts low-wage, native-born Americans, especially in the black community....Why shouldn't the United States adopt immigration policies such as those already in place in Canada and other countries—policies that would restrict the arrival of less-educated workers and emphasize skills that the economy needs? Such a system would be beneficial to both the economy as a whole and a significant share of black men of modest means."
I can and will post a detailed rebuttal of this argument, but for now it should be sufficient to point out how odd it is that City Journal's writer is taking the same view as the socialist Sanders, that the way to help poor black workers is to protect them from immigrant competition.