Kerry Howley

Commentary blogger and China Hawk Arthur Waldron writes:
I had a strong sense of trouble lurking beneath the surface when a Singaporean colleague recently wrote me about the growing numbers of Chinese from the People’s Republic who are coming to Singapore. The reason: to fill jobs left vacant as native born Singaporeans continue to emigrate at […]

Glen Whitman:

Kerry and Megan would both ideally like to see expanded legal immigration, but since that’s a political dead letter, they are consulting their second preferences. Their second preferences differ, because Megan thinks the negative consequences of a guest-worker program are bad enough to make it worse than the status quo.

That’s probably a fair […]

Matt Yglesias and a mysterious Economist blogger (who is not my partner) agree: A temporary worker program isn’t any more likely to fly with conservatives than an increase in legal immigration quotas.
The question, then, is whether there’s reason to think that greater reliance on a guest-worker program (or, to be more precise, on a large […]

Megan McArdle responds to my response:
I am of the opinion that the positive externalities outweigh the negative ones, particularly when we consider, as I believe we should, the benefits to the migrants. But there are ways to amplify the negative externalities, and setting up a program that explicitly prevents assimilation seems like a big one. […]

Megan McArdle is still against a guest worker program:
What will we do with pregnant guest workers? For three to six months, at least, they won’t be working. They’ll need health care; who will provide it? Will we force companies to provide their guest workers health care, which will make them uneconomical compared to other low-skilled […]

Matthew Yglesias kindly comments on “Guests in the Machine”:
I’d definitely recommend that you give Kerry Howley’s Reason article on guest workers in Singapore a read. It’s a very thorough and balanced discussion of the way it works. That said, given that the crux of the opposition to such programs for the United States is “it’s […]