Poverty and Immigration

I grow a little weary of hammering the immigration issue myself, because ultimately it will be decided (and I think really has already been decided) by broad social factors outside of anyone's control. But then I see this and get irritated:

What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation. When the high school senior from the inner city doesn’t get into Harvard or Yale, she’s being isolated from the networks that could allow to reach the highest rungs of society. In all fairness, many people from impoverished communities have been able to access these networks in recent decades and it has lead to some of the greatest success stories of our time. Michelle Obama. Sonia Sotomayor. Even a story like Lloyd Blankfein’s (Goldman Sachs CEO/Chairman) is largely one of accessing networks (through a full ride to Harvard) that would have been normally inaccessible to a son of a Postal Service worker.

If you were really enamored of cheap iPods and cheap lettuce, and you wanted to make sure there would always be cheap labor available to produce them for you, what would you do? Why, you'd make sure that your cheap labor supply was unable to move, unable to mix with the better social networks described in this article, basically unable to improve itself in any way. If they could be unable to move and stuck somewhere not very near you, that would be even better. In other words, you'd push as hard as possible for border restriction.

I've been called a neo-feudalist for advocating free movement of labor. A neo-feudalist is not someone who fills his house with paid servants, as in The Remains of the Day, nor someone who fills his business with willing workers as part of a voluntary exchange. A neo-feudalist is someone who makes sure the serfs never enter the castle. Because if they did, they might, correctly, get the idea that they're just as good as the lordling. The key characteristic of a serf is not the work he does, or even where he does it, but the fact that his condition is, and is kept, hereditary. The social mobility of, say, Mexico is not within our control, but the social mobility of Mexicans is.

This will be my last post for several days as I am going on an internet-free vacation followed by a work trip. Enjoy your long weekend, and I encourage everyone spare a moment of reflection on Memorial Day.