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Cato Daily Dispatch for November 5, 2003

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

San Francisco Voters Approve Living Wage
Fox Lobbies for Immigration Reforms for Mexican Migrants
Free Speech under Attack on Campus

San Francisco Voters Approve Living Wage

"Voters in one of the nation's most expensive cities decided overwhelmingly that employers should have to pay their workers a minimum wage that mirrors the cost of living," The Associated Press reports.

"Proposition L, which imposes an $8.50-per-hour minimum wage on virtually all employers in the city, passed with 60 percent of the vote Tuesday."

In "Keeping the Poor Poor: The Dark Side of the Living Wage," Carl F. Horowitz, a Washington, D.C.,-area consultant on labor and other national issues, writes: "Decades of research have shown that the minimum wage harms the least-skilled workers from poor families while heavily benefiting young workers from middle-income households. Several studies critical of the living wage come to similar conclusions. The main beneficiaries of the living wage are public-sector unionized employees because of the reduced incentives for local governments to contract out work. Instead of exploiting grievances of the marginally employed against 'greedy' employers, advocates for the poor should focus their energies on building the skills of the poor."

Fox Lobbies for Immigration Reforms for Mexican Migrants

"After flying over a desert where hundreds of his compatriots have died trying to sneak into the United States, Mexican President Vicente Fox began a personal campaign Tuesday to sell Americans on reforms that would make crossing the border legal for more Mexican migrants in search of work," the Los Angeles Times reports.

"Reviving an effort disrupted by the Sept. 11 attacks, Fox began a three-day swing through the U.S. Southwest by telling Arizona's political leaders that an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws, his top foreign policy priority, would be in the economic interests of both countries."

In "Mexican Workers Come Here to Work: Let Them!" Daniel T. Griswold, associate director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, writes that "migration from Mexico is driven by a fundamental mismatch between a rising demand for low-skilled labor in the U.S. and a shrinking domestic supply of workers willing to fill those jobs. . . . Mexican migrants provide a ready source of labor to fill that gap. Yet immigration law contains virtually no legal channel through which low-skilled immigrant workers can enter the country to meet demand. The result, predictably, is illegal immigration and all the black market pathologies that come with it."

Free Speech under Attack on Campus

"As campus officials look for ways to accommodate the growing diversity of their student bodies, an increasingly vocal number of students--most of them white and predominantly conservative or Christian--say there is little room for their opinions and beliefs," according to USA Today.

"On campuses large and small, public and private, students describe a culture in which freshmen are encouraged, if not required, to attend diversity programs that portray white males as oppressors. It's a culture in which students can be punished if their choice of words offends a classmate, and campus groups must promise they won't discriminate on the basis of religion or sexual orientation - even if theirs is a Christian club that doesn't condone homosexuality."

Censoring campus speech is the focus of one of the chapters of George Mason University Law School Professor David E. Bernstein's new book, "You Can't Say That!" Using actual events as background, Bernstein explains how many of America's universities are increasingly limiting free speech on campus in the name of political correctness and how this has produced damaging effects.

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org