Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries
are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency
rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
Here is the link.
Maybe they’re afraid of getting turned in somehow…
Three quarters in the growth in those who have no health insurance over the last decade comes from immigrant families.
Some more interesting facts about our current immigration situation.
Sailer does that all the time (perhaps he’s a perpetually nervous Woody Allen type), and criticizing a person’s writings on a topic is hardly a “personal attack”.
Not only does hospital use go up by generation so does crime, welfare dependency and illegitimacy. Education plateaus by third generation well below the national average. Since there are going to be a lot more children of immigrants than immigrants themselves, the first generation being preferable to the latter in various respects is the opposite of comforting.
This is a pattern that goes back years: Week after week, Tyler posts lots of high quality stuff, then every so often, he puts up something about immigration. And sure enough, it’s almost always much more ignorant and illogical than his average. So, his readers educate him in great detail on his mistakes in the comments.
Typically, Tyler then equivocates, and then gives up and drops the subject of immigration for a long time. But, after awhile, he puts up something about immigration again, and it turns out to be just as far below his normal standards as its predecessors. And so the endless cycle continues …
Yeah the times had a similar quote today: “Mr. Cornelius said his field research in San Diego County had shown that illegal immigrants under-used the health care system, given their health needs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/us/29immig.html
I “under-use” my roommates beer as well.
stuart, IQ is generally measured by a standardized IQ test. Tyler is not being tested. When Sailer says someone’s “IQ drops when they write about [topic]” he is not insulting their intelligence but saying that their writings in that topic compare poorly to their other ones and/or that they are not applying the same sort of rigorous thinking.
The researchers simultaneously claim that illegal immigrants are often too nervous to go to the emergency room even when they need help, but that illegal immigrants are also so self-confident that they will honestly volunteer to strangers calling on the phone the number of times they’ve gone to the emergency room.
Something does not compute …
Um, there is no incentive to lie on a survey, especially when the more sensitive questions about demographics and residency status are left to the very end of the survey. If you understood how research works, you would know that they start with the less sensitive questions and then become more intrusive towards the end. if someone is willing to answer a survey about healthcare issues, why would they lie about their visits to the emergency room, especially since they have no way of knowing that at the very end of a 30 minute questionnaire, they will be asked their residency status. That is what doesn’t compute.
Furthermore this survey is actually one of the largest surveys about healthcare being done in this country. It has nothing to do with immigration and there is no hidden immigration agenda in the survey, unlike your criticism of its methodology.
Dear JP:
Here’s another methodology problem. Say, they tell the truth about all the times they’ve been to the emergency room. Then, at the end of the interview they are asked if they are an illegal immigrant. The natural reaction, if you were an illegal immigrant nervous about getting in trouble for using the emergency room, would be to lie and say you were legal. The overall effect would be to artificially inflate the usage rate for non-illegal immigrant Latinos.
I second Steve Sailer and JD —– this is a great, informative and truly interesting blog written by two highly intelligent economists —- but when the topic of illegal immigration comes up, the quality of the posts suffer abysmally.
JP, as a libertarian sympathizer I’m familiar with the argument you use regarding how illegal immigrants contribute to society. I believe your error is that you’re not looking at all of the problems they and their descendants bring with them, in the form of crime, welfare dependancy, and the breakdown of democracy and civil society. Proper cost-benefit analysis demands accurate acocunting of both benefits *and* costs. Steve Sailer, whom you are criticizing, has written voluminously on these topics, and was instrumental in changing my mind – I used to be an open borders enthusiast before finding his site, and in the face of the trainload of facts he lays out I had no choice but to revise my opinions. His sites are isteve.com and isteve.blogspot.com if you’re interested.
pwll… unfortunately, people like Steve Sailor like to discredit any evidence to the contrary of their belief system without really assessing the merits. I’ve wasted a bunch of time on his site. The voluminous data he espouses is actually all a recycling of the same studies and a mc escher-like house of mirrors of “academic” thought that he employs by linking to other like minded individuals and studies sponsored by nationalists and or white supremacists that have little academic merit. There is a lot of conjecturing and reductionism but very little solid data. There is nothing objective about those studies. When it comes down to it, they are all citing the same studies by a small handful of pseudo-academics. People like Steve have no training in the fields that they pretend to be experts on and have somehow managed to narrow down the entirety of human experience to things like IQ or brain size. It is easy to prey on people’s uncertainties and fears and blow them out of proportion. I disagree with the over-PC-ization (is that a word?) of our world, but these folks go the other way to an extreme. I think you’ll see that under the guise of academics and objectivity lies people with an ugly agenda. Sailor is a prolific writer, poster and contributor to numerous blogs under his own name and under pseudonyms all trying to make the case for White superiority. He makes a living off of stirring up the pot for the sake of conflict. Again, I agree that we have become overly PC in this country, but people like Steve Sailor just go overboard and are a blight on our culture.
Good point Bogueronman… What needs to happen is that our laws need to actually make sense. RIght now, our laws are the equivalent of telling senior citizens to pay outrageous prices for pharmaceuticals and then criminalizing them for going to Canada for better deals since they can’t afford the lifesaving drugs. The immigration laws right now favor skilled people (of whom we already have many here in the US) and make it virtually impossible for unskilled people to come in legally. However, the demand for unskilled labor is extremely high and not waning anytime soon. If you legally let in less than 1000 unskilled people per year when we’re easily hiring millions of them, then there is something wrong with the system.
Let in the correct amount of people to do the jobs that are needed, no more and no less. Charge them $2000 to get in (which is less than they’re paying coyotes), keep close tabs on them and you’ll quickly see there is nothing to be upset about. Use the billion or so dollars to tighten up the borders and to enforce them properly. Problem solved. When demand for labor goes down a) people won’t want to come in anyways and b) we reduce the quotas.
Whoever you end up hiring to do the low-skilled labor jobs will end up uninsured in the ER, immigrants or not. If you poll ER’s in West Virginia, I think you’ll find that the unpaid ER visits are composed of poor Whites who don’t have health insurance. If you poll ERs in largely Black areas, you’ll see more low-income, underinsured Blacks in the ER. If we had a healthcare system that made it affordable for people to have decent health care, maybe we wouldn’t have to look outside the country for people to work the low-wage jobs. If there were a system that made it easier for employers to provide health insurance to low wage earners, we wouldn’t have this problem either. Either way, you’re blaming the immigrants for a problem that is endemic to our system. Its easy to scapegoat. Not only that but immigrants / legal and illegal pay taxes in a variety of ways, through their jobs, through ITIN numbers, through homeowners tax (rent paid to landlords as well as actual homeownership). There is plenty of literature that shows that what they pay in more than covers the little they take out. Illegals can’t collect unemployment, nor any other “welfare” benefits, nor retirement or medicare, yet they are largely paying into these funds. So, I’ll grant them a hospital visit or two. Then there’s the value of immigrant labor in general, which might not seem like much, but is integral to our capitalist system, particularly when we have an aging population and less native born youngsters to do the unskilled jobs. So yes, I say Yay immigration, to a certain point. We just need enough people to cover our labor needs and then close the door. Charge them $2000 to come in (less than they’re paying now to coyotes), use the proceeds to beef up the border, and keep track of people’s comings and goings. Then when there is equilibrium in the labor market, we start restricting. We all win.
JP writes “The voluminous data he [Sailer] espouses is actually all a recycling of the same studies and a mc escher-like house of mirrors of “academic” thought that he employs by linking to other like minded individuals and studies sponsored by nationalists and or white supremacists that have little academic merit. There is a lot of conjecturing and reductionism but very little solid data. There is nothing objective about those studies.”
Greg Cochran (cited in NYT, The Economist calls him “a noted scientific iconoclast”), Robert Putnam (Liberal Harvard researcher that found diversity decreases trust) Gregory Clark (UC Davis professor) and other people Sailer cites are not known white nationalists or white supremecists. They also have reams of solid data, despite what you say.
JP writes: “People like Steve have no training in the fields that they pretend to be experts on and have somehow managed to narrow down the entirety of human experience to things like IQ or brain size.”
Sailer has never said 100% of IQ is genetic. That would be absurd, as is the 100% environmental position. This makes me suspect you aren’t as familiar with Sailer’s writings as you say you are.
then you write:
“Sailor is a prolific writer, poster and contributor to numerous blogs under his own name and under pseudonyms all trying to make the case for White superiority.”
So you want us to believe that you dispassionately analyzed Sailer’s writings and sources with an open mind, but you’ve now gone so far against him as to believe that he makes up pseudonyms to artificially create support for himself? That is such an outrageous thing to just toss off without any proof or elaboration whatsoever that it’s hard to believe you ever took Sailer serious enough to truly evaluate his work. If you spent hours diligently researching Sailer’s work all the while knowing he does something as buffoonish as using sock-puppets, you are a better person than me.
JP wrote:
Whoever you end up hiring to do the low-skilled labor jobs will end up uninsured in the ER, immigrants or not. If you poll ER’s in West Virginia, I think you’ll find that the unpaid ER visits are composed of poor Whites who don’t have health insurance.
The number of low-skilled labor jobs is not fixed, make labor scarce and wages will rise or the jobs will be replaced through mechanization.
If there were a system that made it easier for employers to provide health insurance to low wage earners, we wouldn’t have this problem either.
Perhaps wages are low because we have too many laborers. Increase compensation and maybe people be able to afford health insurance. The government providing health care doesn’t make it free.
There is plenty of literature that shows that what they pay in more than covers the little they take out.
Where is this literature? If you are going to dismiss everything Sailer has written, I think have more of a burden of backing up your assertions. Does this literature include the expense of immigrants native born children? What is the tax burden of a minimum wage earner who supports a family of four? What is the tax burden who works in the underground economy?
Steve, my apologies. Please take no offense to my misspelling of your name. It was unintentional. I’ll keep it straight from now on.
As for Ben P:
Your beef should be with the welfare state in general, not immigration. You want to control wages, labor and productivity? This is not the USSR circa 1917. This is the USA. We are capitalists and free-marketeers not Bolsheviks or Stalinists with the desire to control the means of production, wages, labor supply and indeed the population itself. Immigrants actually increase the demand of labor not just the supply. Immigrants start businesses (at high rates, mind you), purchase items and contribute to our overall economy. It spurs more jobs in general and actually benefits the native population. Small businesses are actually the source of most new job creation, according to the SBA.
No one said anything about government provided healthcare. Our current system, however, dependent on lobbyists and an inefficient middle man, does not work. I don’t have solutions to that problem, but I know that limiting immigration is not one of them.
As for the literature about immigrants net gain to the economy, you made me go look through my notes but here are several analyses / studies from different organizations:
a) Smith and Edmonston, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, National Research Council 1997
b) Lee and Miller, “Immigration, Social Security, and Broader Fiscal Impacts,† American Economic Review
c) another study based on Canadian immigration escapes me right now, but it basically shows how there is a net gain in jobs generated by immigrants.
They all show either a slight gain or a significant gain when taking into account ALL the effects that an immigrant (legal and otherwise) and his offspring have on the native population and the economy. This includes not only the government outlays in healthcare, education but also the taxes paid, jobs generated, purchases made and the economic cost of labor scarcity etc. There are other analyses as well, which I will try to dig up.
I believe that a free flow of trade and labor is more conducive to a freer and more prosperous society than an isolationist country with controls on everything from labor to wages to who we can hire or who we can’t hire. I also believe that the immigration hysteria has gotten out of control and is clouding our judgement on steps we need to take to properly enable / regulate the free flow of labor across borders, in a controlled and methodical fashion. Right now we have no proper system in place so it is all a mess. We have NO system in place to bring in unskilled labor… even though we are increasingly relying on unskilled labor. So where is that labor going to come from… streaming across the border illegally, that’s where. Create a system to allow circular migration (people no longer stick around forever if they know they can come back and forth legally) that solves our labor issues. It is more complicated than that, but not much more.
Oh, and thanks to TGGP for setting me straight on Steve’s IQ comment, all that technical stuff goes straight over my head.
Correction of previous comment.
One correction, I didn’t mean to say they cost the average Ca tax payer 10,000$, this is incorrect. They cost the state on average 10,000$. So lets limit the volume.
By the way, Ben, that link to National Academies Press is fantastic. I can’t believe you can access all these great books for free… sure its annoying to have to read them all on the screen, but what a great reference to have. Definitely adding it to my bookmarks.
Isn’t the result cited here pretty much explained by selective migration? The set of people coming here to work illegally in low-wage menial jobs probably doesn’t include a lot of people with chronic illnesses, very old people, etc.
My impression is that immigrants are usually healthier than the populations of both their original and new homes.
“There is no evidence, though, that it is not at that point still higher than Steve Sailer’s…”
Good argument technique. When you can’t successfully attack the argument, it’s a good idea to attack the arguer.
I don’t see what’s so great about Tyler’s factoid, even if true.
50% less likely doesn’t equal zero. It’s still more often than they would use the ER if they weren’t here.
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