Two painfully bad op-eds in the Washington Post today. First, Robert J. Samuelson writes,

What we have now — and would with guest workers — is a conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States while relieving it in Mexico. By and large, this is a bad bargain for the United States. It stresses local schools, hospitals and housing; it feeds social tensions (witness the Minutemen). To be sure, some Americans get cheap housecleaning or landscaping services. But if more mowed their own lawns or did their own laundry, it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

Worse still, Harold Meyerson writes

Every other advanced economy — certainly, those of the Europeans and the Japanese — has a conscious strategy to keep its most highly skilled jobs at home. We have none

…We need to unionize and upgrade the skills of the nearly 50 million private-sector workers in health care, transportation, construction, retail, restaurants and the like whose jobs can’t be shipped abroad.

My co-blogger has documented how “anti-foreign bias” and “make-work” bias lead to fear of foreign trade.

Meanwhile, more economic nonsense from Meyerson here.