{"id":100267,"date":"2016-07-06T07:41:14","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T15:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=100267"},"modified":"2016-07-06T07:42:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-06T15:42:08","slug":"donald-trump-causes-charles-murray-to-change-his-mind-on-low-skill-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=100267","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump Causes Charles Murray To Change His Mind On Low-Skill Immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"

AEI<\/a>: But there are certainly going to be politicians, even if Trump should lose badly, who present a cleaned up version of the Trump agenda and say \u201cI can sell that.\u201d So you\u2019re going to have a populist, Trump-like candidate, and then some candidates pushing a more conservative, free-market agenda.<\/p>\n

Well, Jim, maybe I\u2019m a good example of the positives that can come out of the Trump phenomenon, because it\u2019s forced me to rethink. You know, I\u2019ve never really wrote about immigration, never published much on it. But my own attitudes have always been that government has to be able to secure its own borders, and if controlling our borders meant building a fence, that\u2019s OK with me. And I just don\u2019t love immigration but I especially love high-skill immigration, and I\u2019ve been sympathetic to the notion of low-skill immigration creating problems for working-class Americans but I haven\u2019t been energized enough about that to actually write anything about it. Well, I think that was a mistake on my part.<\/p>\n

I am now prepared to support extreme restrictions on low-skill immigration, whereas I wasn\u2019t before and I\u2019m not doing it because I\u2019m scared of the Trump phenomenon, I\u2019m doing it because I\u2019m saying to myself I wasn\u2019t paying sufficient attention to a really legitimate grievance. Now, what I\u2019d like to see is a lot of people on the right embracing that kind of appropriate response to Trump and then redoubling our efforts to explain why free trade is such a good thing \u2014 because there you can explain this is a win-win situation, protectionism is a lose-lose situation, and I think that we have to stick by our guns in something like that.<\/p>\n

On immigration, my concern is that I see that a lot who say \u201cWe need to build a wall\u201d or \u201cWe need to deport illegal immigrants\u201d, and they move from that to \u201cWe need to stop even legal immigrants if they\u2019re low skill\u201d, and then they move to, \u201cwe can\u2019t let in the high-skill immigrants either\u201d and \u201cWe can\u2019t let foreign students study here.\u201d <\/p>\n

I think you\u2019re being too pessimistic there, Jim. I think that there is no constituency out there for stopping high-skill immigration…<\/p>\n

Got you. I asked the Twitterverse what I should ask you. One question is, of course, do you still stand by \u201cThe Bell Curve\u201d?<\/p>\n

Duh. Of course I do. Look, Jim, the dirty little secret about \u201cThe Bell Curve\u201d is that it did not push the scientific envelope at all. We were in the scientific mainstream. Every single significant statement we made \u2014 scientific statement we made \u2014 has not only not been refuted; they have been confirmed by subsequent research. Now, if you\u2019re saying do I stand by the things that people said, \u201cThe Bell Curve\u201d said, no, because we never claimed those things in \u201cThe Bell Curve.\u201d The rap on \u201cThe Bell Curve\u201d was that Herrnstein and Murray wanted to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks to whites in IQ, which is not even an issue in \u201cThe Bell Curve,\u201d let alone not a major issue. But unfortunately that\u2019s the way the book has been characterized. Do I stand by \u201cThe Bell Curve\u201d as it was actually written? Sure, totally.<\/p>\n

What should policymakers know or understand about IQ?<\/p>\n

That it is an all-purpose resource that has, because of our economy and the improvements in our educational system, allowed people of high-ability who disproportionately earn a lot of money, to create a new class in the United States, a class that did not exist 60 years ago. A cognitive elite. And unless you take into account all of the effects of that class at the top and a class at the bottom that has gotten the short end of the stick in this very valuable general resource called intelligence, unless you understand the dynamics of that, you are going to pursue solutions in social policy that don\u2019t have a snowball\u2019s chance in hell of working.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t buy that theory and you think people\u2019s intelligence quotients are very malleable, then what are policy solutions that you\u2019ll pursue?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll go around saying things like, \u201cEverybody should go to college.\u201d The reality is the percentage of 18-year-olds who can thrive in college \u2014 I\u2019m not saying get through college, I\u2019m saying thrive in college \u2014 is actually about 10-12% of the population. Now insofar as we have about 35% of the population with B.A.s, obviously a lot more people can get through it, but the actual cognitive demands are such that it is actually and educational experience that a relatively small proportion of the population can really profit from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AEI: But there are certainly going to be politicians, even if Trump should lose badly, who present a cleaned up version of the Trump agenda and say \u201cI can sell that.\u201d So you\u2019re going to have a populist, Trump-like candidate, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29604,161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-murray","category-immigration"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t