I hope some of you watched this program on CSPAN's Book TV, "Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization, and America." The author, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, debunks some of the myths about immigration such as that immigrants drive down American wages, that today's immigrants do not assimilate as did immigrants of the past, or that today's immigrants from Mexico or more "foreign" than immigrants of the past. He makes the argument that we need both high skilled and low skilled immigrants to keep America prosperous and growing.
The programs was a presentation of the Cato Institute. Mr. Llosa is a Senior Fellow of The Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.
The program is now available on-line and you can watch it at this link.
Below is a review of the book.
Migration has been happening, in varying forms, for millennia but it still elicits fear and mistrust, and not just on the part of the “receiving” society. Communities from where people migrate often disapprove of the migrants' decision and consider it treacherous. The recent reawakening of the debate about migration in the new millennium has evoked intense emotion particularly in the United States and Europe.
Global Crossings cuts through the jungle of myth, falsehood and misrepresentation that dominates the debate, clarifying the causes and consequences of human migration. Why do millions of people continue to risk their lives, and oftentimes lose it, in the pursuit of a chance to establish themselves in a foreign land?
The book first looks at the immigrant experience, which connects the present to the past, and America to the rest of the world, and explores who migrants are and why they move. The conduct of migrants today is no different than that of migrants in the past. And contrary to the claims by immigration critics, the patterns of contemporary migration do not differ fundamentally from those of other epochs. - See more at: http://www.independent.org/globalcrossings/#sthash.GITPvfyl.dpuf
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