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Comment by digz | Hacker News Reader

This study was done by a 'non-partisan' group that's heavily backed by unions. Doesn't seem too non-partisan to me when you consider how significantly anti-immigration unions have been over the last century.

The data may be valid, but the interpretation is always the most important... and a union-backed group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank hardly seems unbiased.

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It's kind of funny that unions are anti-immigrant: I think this (along with their past tendencies to be anti-black, etc) have hamstrung a lot of them. Immigrant laborers and American-born laborers have a lot more in common than not: they should both be pushing for higher-wages, more job availability, and better working conditions. As such, the unions should be embracing, rather than rejecting, new immigrants, and making sure that laws are passed to protect the immigrants' interests (such as eliminating the H1-B in favor of more green cards, say), because they are essentially the same interests.

Unions are not terribly interested in overall productivity/output. Their goal is to maximize the value to their constituents (either through wages or working conditions). By decreasing/holding stagnant the supply of labor available, they are able to force wages to be higher than they should be. Of course, as economists understand, this causes all sorts of problems.

Unions really aren't that different from corporate lobbyists...

What's more impressive I think is how vehemently anti-immigration (and to your point, anti-black at various times) the Democratic party has historically been (mostly driven by union influence) and how quickly that seems to have been forgotten by most.

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