Charles Barkley makes for an interesting interview

[grysar]

There's a TNR interview with him (probably subscriber only).

I tend to agree with him on immigration:

"Illegal immigration to me is the easiest thing in the world to fix.. All they have to do is penalize the people they work for. You should get penalized. It's all poor people who argue over illegal immigration.They want poor people to--I call it divide and conquer... A lot of these politicians say things like"We've got to stop all these illegal immigrants." I am like, "That is so easy to stop." They are not working for other immigrants."

I'll have to check out his sports show at some point when it's covering something of interest to me.

Comments

[lampbane.livejournal.com]

Lou Dobbs says pretty much the same thing - the people who employ them are the ones creating the problem.

I really hate the immigration debate because I feel it's too polarized - that it's been set up that if you're against illegal immigration, you're against immigrants in general. Which isn't true - it's the "illegal" part that many people have a problem with.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure there's too much support for in anti-illegal immigration circles for increasing the amount of legal U.S. immigration though. Although that's somewhat of a gut call. I'm not sure if it's been polled.

[lampbane.livejournal.com]

Is the legal immigration rate really low, though? I don't get the feeling that it is, even with the post 9/11 atmosphere.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

I think 9/11 mostly affected more highly skilled workers and student (due to countries of origin). So yeah, it's not really the issue here.

My use of the word "low" was relative to apparent demand. The amount of illegal immigration does vary some based on the state of economy. It drops off some during recessions.

By many other standards it's probably not particularly low.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

I also tend to think that Lou Dobbs lays more at the feet of both illegal/legal immigrants than is really economically supportable. From what I've read, high illegal immigrant areas don't correlate that strongly with areas where wages are greatly depressed.

[lampbane.livejournal.com]

You mean the jobs they're taking? I saw him on CNN the other week and he said that food service, construction work, and landscaping were the major areas where you'll find illegals, and that if there was a shortage of workers like so many claim, then the wages should be going up.

It made sense in theory. But I don't have any accounts of the current wages in any of those. I do know that a large portion of the people doing construction in New Orleans are Latino, though the things I've read on that kept away from the illegal immigration angle.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

The report was actually geographically based. I think it was linked to as part of free roaming NY Times article with the arguments on both side. I can hunt it down if you want more detail.

And, actually, come to think of it I may have botched the conclusions. I think they were actually more on unemployment rates than pay rates.