You can’t have an economy with only knowledge workers. (Unskilled isn’t a correct term since many of these jobs, like construction, are skilled work.) Your choices are to have an economy with a large class of foreign workers with little political leverage, or an economy with a smaller class of native born workers with more leverage.
Social services don’t fix the underlying economic problems. For example, you can invest in schools, but at the end of the day those kids would have been better off being raised in a two-person family where the parents have access to well-paying jobs that don’t require a college education, than being raised by a single parent receiving a welfare check. Social services can’t replace everything you get from a functioning community where people have meaningful work.
The Great Society programs caused social welfare spending to dramatically increase starting around the same time as the 1965 INS dramatically increased immigration. But during that time, the upward mobility of black Americans in deindustrializing cities (look at Baltimore, Philly, etc.) decreased from what was happening a generation before.
Social services don’t fix the underlying economic problems. For example, you can invest in schools, but at the end of the day those kids would have been better off being raised in a two-person family where the parents have access to well-paying jobs that don’t require a college education, than being raised by a single parent receiving a welfare check. Social services can’t replace everything you get from a functioning community where people have meaningful work.
The Great Society programs caused social welfare spending to dramatically increase starting around the same time as the 1965 INS dramatically increased immigration. But during that time, the upward mobility of black Americans in deindustrializing cities (look at Baltimore, Philly, etc.) decreased from what was happening a generation before.