“Greenspan: Blue collar wages have been crushed with mass immigration, which has widened inequality relative to white collar workers. So flood the white collar workers with cheap labor to cure inequality!”
Alan Greenspan
Ross Douthat writes:
“….Given that anxieties about immigration’s impact on native employment tend to be concentrated among working class voters (and particularly among young working class voters, who happen to be in direct competition for jobs with the beneficiaries of this policy change)…” [The Media and Obama’s Immigration Gambit, NYT, June 18, 2012]
If Alan Greenspan had his way, these anxieties will soon engulf white collar white workers as well.
See this YouTube Clip of Greenspan talking about his 2007 book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
From the C-Span transcript (begins at 3:42):
“And really the most controversial thing I’ve got in the book is to augment immigration of skilled labor. We pay the highest skilled labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would attract very substantial quantity of skilled labor which would suppress the wage levels of the skilled.
Because we skilled are being essentially subsidized by government meaning our competition is being kept outside the country.
But if we bring in a number of workers to suppress the level of wages relative to the lesser skilled, we will reduce the degree of inequality. and it’s, as I point out in the book for reasons which is really fascinating on some certain studies that have been taken, they’re not generally accepted, that the level of real income of people is not what determines whether they are happy or not. It’s their pecking order in the society. it may be a discouraging view of human nature, but that’s what we are, whether we like it or not. It really matters to us where we are. You know, if real material well being were the determinant of happiness, you couldn’t get this huge increase in per capita income without any evident increase in happiness of the people involved. And therefore, the issue of income inequality is very difficult and very important issue and must be addressed in this country.”
[…]
