Are Immigrants "Ordinary People"?
A while back I polemically asked, “Are low-skilled Americans the master race?” The targets of my ridicule called me an elitist. But my elitism is nothing compared to this gem from Dennis Mangan:
All of his [Mankiw’s] academic theorizing about immigration or indeed about larger economic issues cannot be informed by a direct knowledge of the way these things affect ordinary people.
Query: Are impoverished foreigners “ordinary people”?
If they are, then the typical American has no direct knowledge of the way these things affect “ordinary people” either. What does an American burger-flipper know about the plight of the rural Mexican or Haitian refugee?
If they’re not, I’d like to know why. Is it because immigrants are extraordinary people? Or is it because, as far as opponents of immigration are concerned, impoverished foreigners don’t qualify as people?
That’s more elitism than even a snob like me can stomach.
The post appeared first on Econlib.
No immigrants are not ordinary people because they are immigrants. The life story of an immigrant is not the average or median life story for a person anywhere in the world, much less often the story of someone from a western and liberal society.
This isn’t as witty of a “gotcha” las it may have originally been perceived.
This is a very weak point, to be the extent of being self defeating. "Ordinary people" is a poorly defined term in both cases, far too poorly defined to carry any weight, yet here are both disputants trying to hang an argument on it. I am afraid, Bryan, that you get the shorter end of the stick, as most people understand ordinary as "working middle class people that live around here" or something like "the middle 80% of the distribution of people in the country". Immigrants are not ordinary in either case, outside of possibly some very immigrant heavy parts of cities.