THE MYTH OF AN INTEGRATED EUROPEAN LABOR MARKET, AND THE IMMIGRATION MAGIC BULLET

Continental economic and labor integration, similar to the European Union experiment, is one of the Bush Administration’s long-term objectives for North America. However, commentator James C. Bennett notes that the benefits of European integration have been vastly overrated. “It is the folly of believing that lumping together a number of high-tax, high-regulation, high-unemployment economies will somehow make the whole more competitive than the sum of its parts,” Bennett writes. Moreover, he does not see immigration as a panacea to Europe’s economic woes. Mass infusions of immigrant workers from outside Europe, “hold out the threat of polarizing the coming political conflict between young taxpayers and retired benefit-payers along racial, religious and ethnic lines. As things stand now, young Ahmed is looking at having to pay a huge chunk of his paycheck for old Pierre’s lavish retirement benefits, the likes of which he will never see himself.”