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Bob Herbert, columnist for the New York Times, writes about the supposedly bad situation of the American worker, he concludes, American workers are in an increasingly defensive position. In a tight labor market, when jobs are plentiful, workers have leverage and can demand increased wages and benefits. But today's workers have lost power in many different ways - through the slack labor market, government policies that favor corporate interests, the weakening of unions, the growth of lower-paying service industries, global trade, capital mobility, the declining real value of the minimum wage, immigration and so on. The end result of all this is a portrait of American families struggling just to hang on, rather than to get ahead. The benefits of productivity gains and economic growth are flowing to profits, not worker compensation. The fat cats are getting fatter, while workers, at least for the time being, are watching the curtain come down on the heralded American dream. Economist...

There has been a lot of negative talk recently about immigrants and how they effect the United States. Stephen Green, writing for the Tech Central Station, has an article rebutting some of those negative comments and brings up other points often ignored in the discussions. He concludes, The New (Nuevo?) America won't be the one we're used to -- but neither was the old one, or even the America we knew just twenty years ago. Latin America will also continue to change, as we all become increasingly intertwined politically, economically, and culturally. In return for losing some control of a culture we never really controlled in the first place, we get to live with neighbors who, for the most part, are increasingly free and prosperous. For that, we can all be thankful, and maybe even a little less afraid.

We all agree that the USA has areas of improvement when it comes to immigration, but there is one fact that should not be forgotten in any discussion involving immigration. Compared to the rest of the world the USA is the most pro-immigrant. The Washington Times, in discussing the current immigration bill before congress, documents this , Ronald Reagan once said a foreigner can go to Germany and never become a German, to France and never become French, to Britain and never become English. America is the only nation where a person can move and become an American. No nation has widened its gates to newcomers with greater generosity than the United States over the past 25 years. Over that period, we admitted nearly 20 million new Americans — from every part of the globe. That is more immigrants than were admitted by all other industrialized countries combined. The percentage of Americans not born here has risen from 6 percent in 1970 to 11 percent today. That is a lot of additional p...