Charting America's Future: Responses-2

...and "what adjustments should be made in domestic social programs to facilitate their absorption9" Moreover, they must be addressed simultaneously New Dealers and their heirs traditionally have sought to treat them separately, rejecting any sacrifice of domestic social programs in order to accommodate larger numbers of immigrants The re-examination of this stance will inevitably bring into question certain cherished objectives of liberal-New Deal policies For example 1 The New Deal style is to urge adoption of various government programs to raise minimum family income as rapidly as Congress will permit Yet what Congress will accept is likely to vary with the total cost of the programs Consequently, the desire for more immigrants may compel liberals to be less ambitious than heretofore in proposing minimum income goals 2. The long march of economic development always involves upgrading the quality of jobs and using more capital per worker Legislation to raise the legal minimum wage rate, improve job safety, and increase employer taxes lot unemployment insurance, old-age pensions and the like may all be interpreted as attempts to keep the low wage stragglers from falling further behind the leaders But even if not always intended, the clear implication of such legislation is that j obs not able to meet rising minimum standards of pay and conditions should simply disappear More immigrants, though, mean either more jobs or more unemployment One way, and arguably the only feasible way to increase the amount of available employment fast enough to meet the needs of an immigration-fed labor force is to lower the minimum wage and/or worsen conditions My remarks, I hasten to note, are intended to raise complicated issues, not to suggest policies The poor outside our gates are now able to exert political pressure as well as appeal to our collective conscience The task for liberals is to insure that the national response reflects compassion in addition to rational calculation HERBERT HIRSCH Professor of Political Science, Virginia Commonwealth University In "Undoing The New Deal" Gus Tyler throws into the pan a kernel that deserves heat and light enough to transform it into a digestible morsel He points out, sketchilv, that the "expansionist exercise" of the Kennedy-Johnson years had, by 1977, reduced "the one-third of the nation FDR described as ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clad" to 6 7 per cent He then notes that the incidence ot poverty has "since risen," as Democratic expansionism gave way to Republican "restnctionism " All this is true, but lacks sufficient substance to lullv offset the myths that have accompanied t he rest netlonist Republicans' ascent to power The most damaging of these myths holds that the problems being experienced by the American people have been created by "big government " And further, that the monster is most horribly manifested in programs to help the poor and underprivileged, which have not worked anyway It is necessary once and for all to lav this reasoning to rest Statisticians and politicians play games with poverty They define and redefine it as best suits their statistical and political needs The Federal government sets an absolute' dollar value that it calls the "poverty line," and adjusts it from year to year Even so, an examination of the period from 1962-73 shows that the extent of absolute, Federally defined, dollar amount poverty diminished over the course of those 11 years The percentage of Americans living in poverty tell from 21 to 11 per cent, and the actual number of poor persons dropped from 38 to 23 million, as Robert D. Plotnick and Felicity Seidmore report in Progress Against Poverty A Review ot the 1964-1974 Decade Most of this progress occurred between 1963-68 In the years since, Richard Nixon's policy of " benign neglect," the depressed economy of 1974-75 and consistently high levels of both inflation and unemployment have combined to put poverty back on the rise It one measures the success of a government program by the results achieved, one cannot conclude that the policv of expansionism was a failure On the contrary, the facts reveal that, despite minimal funding, balkv bureaucrats, re-calcitrant politicians, and unclear objectives—there was certainly no real commitment to the redistribution of wealth—the programs somehow managed to work...

...MELVIN W. REDER Isidore and Gladys J. Brown Professor of Urban and Labor Economics, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago Gus Tyler's "Undoing The New Deal" (NL, January 25) is "old hat " Written in the' 80s, it addresses the problems of an earlier period Although these remain with us, they have been greatly transformed by changing circumstances and the liberal agenda must be updated accordingly Let me cite just one important item never tackled by the New Deal, nor as yet very prominent in the thinking of late 20th-century liberals—the tension between a higher rate of immigration and achieving progress toward a more equal distribution of income within the United States Fashioning a position on immigration is a vital task that poses a great challenge to liberals Both in Western Europe and the U S , they have been inconsistent and confused on the subject Some have clung to the spirit of Emma Lazarus, to the belief that the concept of a free world includes the freedom to choose one's place of residence They have argued that America's position as leader of the free world, as well as basic humanitarian considerations, demand that we grant requests for political or religious asylum Some have gone even further to maintain that social justice requires income redistribution to the more numerous, more impoverished poor outside the industrialized countries no less than to the underprivileged living in them But other powerful voices in the liberal camp have echoed sentiments expressed elsewhere along the political spectrum They have urged restricting immigration to prevent the undermining of native workers' living standards by competition from "cheap immigrant labor," and to permit the institution of social programs designed to improve the lot of the native poor that would be too costly if extended to large numbers of newcomers Their case has been especially convincing when substantial unemployment provokes a clamor to reserve jobs for Americans With a few exceptions, labor unions have vociferously supported the restrictive immigration policy that has been dominant in the U S Until now, pro-immigration liberals have not fought very hard, reflecting their own ambivalence(they don't want to increase unemployment among native workers either) and a well-grounded feeling of political impotence The cause of freer immigration has never commanded much popular support A shift is taking place, however For all of its caution, the country is manifestly unwilling to take the steps that would be necessary to effectively curb the waves of immigrants, legal and otherwise, arriving on its shores today One way or another, we are going to accept more new arrivals than we have during the past half century The key issues have thus become, "how many...