The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board is very strongly in favor of expanded immigration and a full and complete amnesty for all illegal aliens. In fact, the board is in favor of open borders, that is, unlimited and unrestricted immigration.

In a column in Thursday’s paper editorial board member Mr. Jason Riley argues that

Immigrants help keep our labor markets flexible. And flexible labor markets – the kind that minimize the costs to a business of hiring and firing employees – enable workers and employers alike to find the employment situation that suits them best. Flexible labor markets make it easier for an employee who doesn’t like his job to find another position somewhere else. And flexible labor markets make it more likely that an employer will expand his workforce or take a chance on a less experienced job-seeker.

The idea that immigrants help keep labor markets flexible is nonsense. The number of immigrants in a labor market has nothing to do with that market’s flexibility. As Mr. Riley correctly points out, labor market flexibility is primarily about an employer’s right to hire and fire workers. One can have very flexible labor markets and no immigration whatsoever, and vice versa. Most European countries have plenty of immigrants and relatively rigid labor markets. What immigration policy can change is the size of the labor pool, but even then only in terms of raw numbers. There is certainly no guarantee that the share of emplyed immigrants will be higher than the share of employed natives.

Absurdly, Mr. Riley writes:

Social conservatives fret that too many immigrants will have America slouching toward Guatemala. The bigger concern is that too few immigrants will have us slouching toward France.

How would having “too few” immigrants make America slouch towards France? How can one even have too few immigrants? Assuming that having too few immigrants somehow would make Americans slouch towards France, how would that be a bigger concern than America slouching towards Guatemala? Say what you will about France, America’s first ally, it is a very affluent country that many foreigners are willing to risk their lives to reach. Guatemala is a spectacularly poor country that many Guatemalans are willing to risk their lives to leave. Also, according to right-wing think-tank Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, France’s economy is more free than Guatemala’s. So why exactly would America’s slouching toward France be a bigger concern?

We don’t have enough jobs!

We don’t have enough workers!

2007 edition.

2006 edition.

It’s almost surprising that there still are businesses on the Cape that caters to tourists, isn’t it? Other than for the area’s enormous popularity with tourists.

Massachusetts Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi made an interesting claim this morning in a speech to Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. The speech was largely an attack on Governor Deval Patrick’s casino proposal and part of that attack was highlighting the Speaker’s more “sustainable” economic development proposals. Said the Speaker, according to a document published by Boston.com:

The House recently passed legislation that will invest $1 billion in the life sciences industry, a bill that will allow Massachusetts to retain its spot as the top super-cluster in the industry.

It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

DiMasi had previously declined to project a number of jobs that would be created by the life-sciences bill. I think the Governor and Speaker are wildly overestimating the number of jobs that the bill will help create.

(The Speaker also said something that mystifies me a bit, namely:

We helped Target build a huge distribution center in Westfield, with 1,000 jobs in Western Massachusetts.

I haven’t found any details about that project other than in AP story from a year ago:

The economic stimulus package passed last year is paying dividends, [DiMasi] said, and increasing the tax burden would hamper progress. For example, the state’s $2.1 million investment toward a new Target retail distribution center in Westfield eventually will lead to 1,000 new jobs, he said.

So, are there 1,000 people working at the distribution center, as Speaker DiMasi is implying, or not? Is $2.1 million the entire value of the state’s “investment” in the distribution center?

The distribution center isn’t listed on Target’s corporate web site.
)

When Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick outlandishly claimed that his $1billion life-sciences initiative would create 250,000 new jobs I speculated that maybe the Governor meant it would create 25,000 jobs which over the span of ten years - the duration of the initiative would result in 250,000 worker-years (assuming an extreme front-loading of the creation of jobs).

It now seems clear that he Governor was making similar calculation when he claimed that his proposal to allow the establishment of three state-licensed casinos in Massachusetts would create 30,000 construction jobs, a number critiques found hard to believe. A newly released study by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce sheds light on where the Governor got his 30,000 figure from. Yes, Patrick was likely talking about worker-years, not payroll jobs. States the study:

Estimates of construction labor requirements were derived from the cost of large, recent casino development projects. Construction labor inputs may be measured in terms of the total amount of labor necessary to complete a project or in terms of the average number of people employed during the project lifecycle. The former is expressed in worker-years while the latter is in terms of jobs. The projected total labor requirement for the initial construction is between 30,100 and 34,400 worker-years of labor… Dividing labor requirements measured in worker-years by a three year construction period results in an estimate of 10,000 to 11,500 construction jobs during development.

So there you have it. The Governor cooked the numbers by talking about jobs when he meant worker years.

It may not matter what Patrick is babbling about. The Taunton Gazette reports that state Rep. David Flynn is saying that the Governor’s three-casino proposal is going nowhere in the Legislature.

(Link to Chamber of Commerce report via Dan Kennedy. Link to Taunton Gazette via Universal Hub.)

The Boston Globe’s Sean P. Murphy has taken a close look at Governor Deval Patrick’s claim that the Governor’s casino proposal will create 30,000 construction jobs in Massachusetts. Murphy presents evidence that suggests that the proposal will at most create 20,000 construction jobs, and that’s if casino developers build three very large casinos in the state and each casino development hires close to 7,000 workers. The one casino mentioned by Murphy that uses that many construction workers is one under development in Singapore:

In his study, [The Innovation Group economist Scott] Fisher looked at the $2.85 billion casino in Singapore being developed by Sands and projected the creation of about 6,900 new construction jobs. [Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon] Adelson has not detailed how much money Sands would spend on a casino in Massachusetts, but Fisher’s study said a casino in this state would be “comparable in scale” to the Singapore development. Under that formula, three casinos built at a cost of $2.85 billion each would create 20,700.

I assume the Singapore-based casino in question is the Marina Bay Sands resort, the first of two casinos that the island nation’s government has agreed to license in an effort to dramatically increase tourism.

In an 8-K filing to the SEC in November last year Sands reported that there are “an average of 2,000 workers on site” at Marina Bay, but I don’t know how that translates to total number of construction jobs.

It should be noted that the casino was touted as the most expensive in the world when it was announced in 2006. It’s not merely a casino but a so-called integrated resort that is expected to pull in a lot of Meeting, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions business. It’s possible that having four massive convention centers (the three casinos plus the existing one in Boston) would result in a much bigger MICE pie for Massachusetts, but perhaps it is more likely that the three additional convention halls would cannibalize existing business?

Personally, I favor the establishment of one big destination/IR/MICE casino and I really don’t care where they put it as long as it’s more than 15 miles away from where I live.

Regardless of how many construction jobs one, two or three casinos would bring to Massachusetts one is well served to keep in mind that the purpose of a building isn’t to bring employment to construction workers. The number of construction jobs is a poor reason to favor or oppose regulated casino gambling.

That said, would it kill our Governor to stop playing games with job projections?

Last year I poked fun at trade magazine Selling Halloween for writing that sexy costumes would be the in-thing in 2007. After all, sexy Hallowen costumes have been a Halloween staple for several years and probably then some. For 2008, however, Selling Halloween is seeing a bit of a different trend: The little less sexy Halloween costumes. More specifically, suppliers “are recognizing that while all women want to look sexy, not all women want to show quite as much skin.”

MassInc held a breakfast forum couple of weeks ago to discuss the state and direction of Massachusetts’ labor market. I was unable to attend but a partial transcript is available on the organization’s website (free registration required). Below are a couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

Moderator Paul Grogan, The Boston Foundation, on the state of Massachusetts’s workforce:

Talented young workers are exiting the state in larger numbers than we would like to see and they are being replaced by less skilled and unskilled immigrants. Talent has always been our salvation. That’s basically what we’ve got. We are going to have to have a human capital strategy that is very strong. I am heartened by what Secretary Bump said. A second pool of potential labor productivity is inner city young people. Enormous advances have come from the 1993 education reform law but there has been much less progress in the cities than we would like to see. There is going to be a forthcoming study on college completion among Boston students. Other cities that have done this study have shown that in the big cities, if you are an entering 9th grade in the Boston public schools, you have less than a 10 percent chance of achieving a college degree of any kind.

Grogan and Rick Lord, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, talk about the Bristol Myers Squibb investment:

GROGAN: There has been celebration of the Bristol-Myers Squibb achievement in Devens. Do you see other possibilities for this kind of approach?

LORD: The Bristol-Myers Squibb announcement was a great success. Six hundred new jobs. They really wooed the company, something Massachusetts hasn’t done a lot of in the past which other states do very aggressively. The reality is we are mostly small employers and our growth comes from employers who are here. That worked beautifully because it was at Devens and it was pre-permitted and the state gave them generous tax incentives. I don’t think we can do that for every business. We have to create an environment that is attractive for our existing employers, whether it’s permitting or workers comp we were able to tackle the business costs I’d like to see a concerted effort on health care costs. We have to tackle those issues.

Here’s a comment I made regarding the cost of the BSM deal and what it might tell us about the benefits that can be gained from the $1bn life-sciences initiative that is likely to sail through the Legislature. Here are some thoughts of mine on a MassInc report that preceded the breakfast forum.

It takes a nuclear family to raise a child.

The United States Census Bureau has released the 2004 for data for what it calls living arrangements of children in America. Just under 60% of children lived with their married biological parents, down from 61.2% in 2001.

Marriage remains a crucially important social institution. The poverty rate for white children living with at least one of their parents the poverty rate was 10.7% in 2004. For black children, that figure was 33.6%. The difference can largely be explained by differences in household compositions.

68.9% of white children lived with married biological parents while 13.1% lived with a single mom. 29.3% of black children lived with their married biological parents while 47.3% lived with a single mom.

58% of Hispanic children lived with their married biological parents, down from 60% in 2001 (but not much different from the 59% in 1996). 25.7% of Hispanic children are below the poverty line and 22.7% of Hispanic children live in single-mom households.

In conclusion, the most pressing need for change in America is to increase the number of children who live with both their biological parents. I’m sure that’s what people who demand change and claim to be the change they want have in mind.

Detailed tables here.

There’s much one can say about Dunkin’ Donuts, but the coffee peddling giant isn’t a baby killer.

Dunkin’ Donuts is apparently pleased with the results of its “flatbread” and “personal pizza” trials and is now planning on rolling out the concept nationwide in an attempt to increase sales after the morning rush.

I’ve visited stores that sell the trial items but I can’t remember having tried any of them, mostly because they look pretty disgusting (my wife insists we shared one of the pizzas and says we didn’t like it. She’s obviously never wrong so she must be right). I guess they must have been racking up enough sales to make the menu expansion worthy of nationwide implementation.

I think the chain is making a mistake. I can certainly understand why it would want to finagle a way to boost sales without forcing franchisees to invest in new equipment, but those flatbreads and pizzas aren’t going to do it. They look terrible in their own right and they certainly seem woefully inadequate when compared to cheap items at fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Wendy’s or just any local pizza place for that matter.

(Apparently the new menu does require some investment, if I understand the press release properly:

In order to introduce the new menu, Dunkin’ Donuts shops have received an entirely new cooking platform. New cooking ovens, using patented technologies, deliver the “Oven-Toasted” result.

)

Dunk’ would be better off focusing on achieving and maintaining a high-level of execution of its concept. I’m talking about a well-trained staff that handles orders in a sanitary manner and on and on.

It would also behoove the company to understand that it can’t stretch its brand name in any direction without alienating at least part of the customer base. “America runs on Dunkin’” is a good enough slogan for guys like me who enjoy the New England-ish blue-collar lunch-pail aspect of the brand, but all-whimsical all-pastel ads and commercials - especially ones with Rachael Ray - sure try one’s loyalties.

Update 2/19:

There’s a lot of discontent among Dunkin Donuts franchisees over several of the company’s recent moves if one is to believe DD Independent Franchise Owners (DDIFO):

In a statement released on Thursday, the said 98% of surveyed franchise owners oppose the Sara Lee partnership that calls for the installation of self-service stations in office building break rooms, cafeterias and other venues with large food-service operations.

It also said that 97% oppose the Hess partnership, which calls for the installation of self-service coffee, hot chocolate and donut stations within Hess gas-convenience stations from New Hampshire to Florida.

Another day, another billion. Having worked out a compromise with the legislature over a billion dollar life-sciences bill, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is reportedly getting ready to hawk his next billion sized project: Commuter rail service from Boston to New Bedford and Fall River (two crummy cities in southeastern Massachusetts that have yet to overcome the end of whaling for oil or something).

Boston Globe reporter Peter J. Howe has an article on the topic in today’s paper. The governor’s PR flacks ought to be overjoyed that Howe structured the article the way he did. Here’s the second paragraph:

Experience in other Massachusetts cities where commuter rail service has been restored since 1994 - Brockton, Newburyport, and Worcester - demonstrates that train service to the Hub can be a big shot in the arm economically. In all three cities, since the year commuter train service returned, real estate values have climbed faster than state and county averages by most measures, in some cases much faster.

The rest of the article rather strongly suggests that boosting real estate prices may be the only shot in the arm that commuter rail service has provided for the three cities and towns mentioned.

I’m not surprised. Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote in 2006 on what rail road expansion is likely to do for a struggling city:

The idea that a railroad (high-speed, light rail, whatever you favor) to a town like Fall River would open up a world of opportunity previously denied its citizens is silly…

That’s not to say a railroad won’t help Fall River. I think it would, and I think it should be looked at closely, but it will help the city primarily by bringing in higher-educated, higher-earning white-collar workers looking for cheap housing and a convenient commute. I don’t think a railroad would do much for the people who already live there.