When will China pass America?

Much is being made over the fact that China just passed Japan to claim the title of "world's second-biggest economy." Although this has provoked a spate of hand-wringing over Japan's decline (see here and here and here, for example), more level-headed commentators point out that China has eleven times as many people as Japan; for 1.34 billion people to have remained permanently poorer than 1.27 million people would have been (and for a century, was) a human disaster of epic proportions. Sure, Japan has made a lot of mistakes, but those are most certainly not the reason for China's ascendancy.

The next question on everyone's lips, naturally, is: When will China pass the U.S. to become #1? The consensus in the media seems to be that China had better not get too confident; like Japan in the 80s, they argue, China's rapid growth has come at the expense of inefficient overinvestment, misallocation of capital, suppressed consumption, and the entrenchment of special interests that will not be easily dislodged when the boom finally runs its course.

And I agree: China does share many of Japan's weaknesses. Some of these, fact, seem far more severe in China than they did in Japan - the corruption, the pollution, the suppression of consumption, the state control of banks. These are the kind of things that raise a country's growth during the "extensive" phase, when all you have to do to grow is save, save, save, and invest, invest, and invest. But because the same people who received the cheap capital during the boom will continue to hold the strings of the state after the economy gets saturated with buildings and roads and machines, this growth model bakes inefficiencies into the economy. Growth goes faster, but crashes more abruptly and at a lower level.

That said, the sheer numbers involve make it HIGHLY unlikely that China will NOT overtake America in the near future. If China were twice as big as the U.S., I'd say there was some chance they'd never be richer than us. But they are 4.3 times as big.

To see how certain a thing this is, let's do some rough calculations in our heads. This is pretty easy, with the Rule of 70; to find out how fast something doubles, divide 70 by its percentage growth rate. Thus, if China is growing at 10% and America at 2%, China's economy will double in size relative to America's in 70/8 = 8.75 years.

Now, let's do some math. Japan's growth slowed when it hit about half of U.S. per capita GDP (in the late 70s). Same for South Korea in the late 90s. Assume for the moment that China's slows at around the same level. China's GDP per capita is now about 16% o...r 17% of America's. At a relative growth rate of 8% (the average for recent years), China will hit half of America's per capita GDP (and more than twice America's total GDP) in a little more than 15 years.

But perhaps China has more limitations than Japan and South Korea did; suppose that corruption, resource constraints, or China's size relative to its trading partners acts as a check on its growth. Suppose for this reason, China's growth slows when it hits 35% of America's per capita GDP (and 1.5 times America's total GDP). That's still 10 years of hyper-charged growth.

Now suppose that China's growth slows a little bit, so that the growth rate relative to the U.S. is only 6% (i.e. about how fast India is growing now). And assume China reaches only 35% of America's per-capita GDP before its growth slows even more. That's 14 more years of pretty fast growth!

Put this another way: for China to fail to overtake U.S. total GDP, they will have to stall out at 23% of U.S. per capita GDP - the average Chinese worker will have to less productive than an entry-level employee at Wal-Mart. This would mean that their growth would have to stall within 5 years (if we measure GDP in PPP terms, or if they allow their currency to appreciate) or 7 years (if we measure GDP in nominal terms, and they keep their currency undervalued forever and ever).

So, basically, unless China's growth crashes spectacularly and semi-permanently by the midpoint of this decade, their economy will be larger than that of the U.S. by the mid-2020s. That would be an unprecedented slowdown, MUCH more severe than what Japan experienced in the 90s, and at a far lower level of development. I doubt any reasonable China critic would predict such a Biblical disaster.

Thus, the inescapable answer is: China will soon be the world's largest economy, no matter how you measure things. This will happen in less than two decades. And GDP is a direct measure of national power. We must therefore prepare for a world in which the leading geopolitical hegemon will be a non-democratic country, a country with little stake in the existing system of international norms and institutions, a country with hundreds of millions of citizens still living in poverty.

How much of the world we knew in the 20th Century was dependent on the hegemony of free-trading democratic countries? How much of the seemingly unstoppable technological progress, the respect for international boundaries, the slow advance of human rights, etc. were dependent on the lucky fact that the U.S.-Britain-France alliance (and later, the U.S.-Britain-France-Japan alliance) had the most guns?

We're about to find out.

Why dictatorships fail

Dani Rodrik points out that, on average, democracies outperform dictatorships in terms of long-term economic growth and economic stability. Personally, I wouldn't make too much of this observation, since it's a small sample size (what if only America and its friends grew in the postwar period), there are a million kinds of selection bias at work (e.g. the "resource curse"), and there's a huge endogeneity problem (what if growth causes democracy instead of vice-versa).

But assume it's true. Why? Matt Yglesias thinks that it's because dictators in the past were just stupid:

[H]istorically [Rodrik's point has been right]. [But] if you’re a modern-day dictator, the lesson of history is clear that the less-corrupt, less-exploitive Singapore model was not only better for the Singaporeans it was better for the dictator. For all the same reasons that over the long term the revenue-maximizing tax rate equals the growth-maximizing tax rate, over the long-term dictatorship is more incentive-compatible than Mobutu seems to have realized.

However, Yglesias thinks, dictatorships have now become much smarter, and will now do significantly better:

Historically, few authoritarian regimes have seen that their own self-interest is best maximized via enlightened policies. But at least one interpretation of what’s happening in China is that the most important authoritarians around have figured this out (Abu Dhabi also seems to have) and this is driving major improvements in human well-being.

I heavily doubt this. Hasn't the human race had thousands of years to experiment with dictatorships? You'd think that if maximizing a country's long-term growth performance was always in a dictator's interests, that dictators would have figured this out long before now. Why should now suddenly be so different?

I think the explanation for the success of democracy lies elsewhere. In the modern era, we've seen many instances of dictatorships that grew rapidly - Imperial and then Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Taiwan and South Korea and Singapore in the 70s and 80s, Chile under Pinochet, etc. The problem is, they all seem to stall out at a moderate level of income; it's easy for dictatorships to get middle-class quick, but it's very hard for them to get rich.

My guess that it has to do with what political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita calls "the logic of political survival." The theory in a nutshell: no matter whether you're the leader of a democracy or a dictatorship, you have to pay people off to stay in power. In a democracy, you have to pay off voters, which requires public goods (because there are so many voters). In a dictatorship, you have to pay off your oligarch buddies, or the army, or a vast ruling party. Each one of those supporters asks for a lot more than a voter asks for in a democracy. Hence, dictatorships are forced to squander more state resources in direct payouts to regime supporters.

I'd add something to this theory. In a democracy, if you lose power you simply become part of the minority party in Congress or retire and go on posh speaking tours. In a dictatorship, if you lose power there's a fair chance you'll be riddled with bullets and hung on meathooks in the public square. Yglesias seems to think that this is a strength of dictatorships, because it will cause them to be very careful about keeping the country on a firm growth path:

But when growing dictatorships hit economic downturns, what tends to happen is you throw the dictators out of office. I’m not sure whether China’s leaders can keep delivering growth, but if they can’t it’ll be hard for them to stay in charge.

I see it very differently. When losing power means losing everything, dictators have an incentive to increase payouts to regime supporters by huge amounts, as a form of insurance. If a country is ever faced with an opportunity for long-term gain at the expense of short-term pain (e.g. deficit reduction, or curbing wasteful public works projects), a dictator is unlikely to take that opportunity. Prosperity in the long term is not worth the meathook treatment in the short term.

I think we can see this dynamic at work in China. Who are the regime's key supporters? Answer: local government officials. China has five layers of government (compared to our three or Japan's two). All those government officials have their hands in the pie; as Minxin Pei will tell you, much of China's economy consists of "private" factories owned by friends of local government officials. The government officials get massive kickbacks, the factory owners get cheap second-class-citizen migrant labor, license to destroy the local environment, and free land obtained by booting local peasants.

It's easy to see that China will not be able to afford this kind of economic system forever. Right now, the system works because China is so poor that kickbacks are relatively cheap, and because nearly every investment in a poor country tends to pay off. But as the economy grows richer, the kickbacks to the local government officials will become a greater and greater drain on the private sector (this is called Baumol's Cost Disease), even as the need for kickbacks forces China to maintain high levels of investment in projects that will never pay off. Michael Pettis and others report that this inefficiency is already starting to kick in.

Therefore, I do not share Yglesias' faith in the intelligence of dictators. No matter how intelligent they are, the logic of their political survival will force them to choose the short-term over the long-term. This time will not be different.

Why our country is going down the tubes, and what you can do about it

America is caught in a spiral of decline and stagnation.

Why? The most immediate cause is that we refuse to spend money on public goods:

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation...

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead...

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run...

[E]verything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right...

Krugman knows, of course - and has said in other columns - that antigovernment rhetoric never really convinced many Americans to give up public goods and public services. What really happened was that the conservative movement told white people that all the cost of public goods would be borne by them, while all the benefits would go to blacks and Hispanics. This is the argument that was successful. This is the argument that destroyed our government's ability to provide the economic foundations of a successful nation-state.

Surely, now that our economy is going down the tubes, white conservative Americans are going to wake up and realize that they need public goods too...right?

Except that people's minds don't quite work that way. Instead of convincing people of the need for public goods, economic downturns often lead people to switch to an "every tribe for itself" crisis mode. This is what Matt Yglesias is talking about when he says that economic insecurity breeds mass scapegoating, prejudice, racial tribalism, and paranoia:

Last year we had town halls gone wild, fueled by the threat of death panels pulling the plug on Grandma. This year, us-vs.-them controversies are proliferating, linked by a surge in xenophobia. This is our summer of fear.

So far, the summer of fear has featured a charge, led by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and former New York congressman Rick Lazio, to block the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center (which is to include a mosque) a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center. Meanwhile, with frightening speed, we've gone from discussing the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform to watching congressional Republicans call for hearings to reconsider the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States...

Fear, in essence, begets fear. The loss of a job, or the worry that one might be lost, raises anxiety. This often plays out as increased suspicion of people who look different or come from different places. While times of robust growth and shared prosperity inspire feelings of interconnectedness and mutual gain, in times of worry, the picture quickly reverses. Views of the world turn zero-sum: If he wins, what do I lose? Any kind of change looks like decline -- the end of a "way of life."...

Benjamin Friedman, an economist at Harvard whose 2005 book "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" argued that growth tends to foster liberal sentiments and open societies, whereas slowdowns undermine them, says this summer's events "are predictable consequences of this kind of sustained economic downturn."

"Manifestations like these have appeared in the U.S. at such times before," he told me, "most obviously in the 1880s and early 1890s," when a sustained period of economic stagnation coincided with the abandonment of the Reconstruction-era commitment to civil rights, the widespread adoption of anti-Chinese legislation and a nationwide wave of lynchings directed not only at blacks, but also Catholics and immigrants...

The lesson is simple: The current controversies are ultimately byproducts of our economic morass. To really dispel the atmosphere of suspicion, what's needed are ideas about how to boost the economy to bring unemployment down and earnings up. Finding policies that do all this will not be easy, but it is the only way to turn the national mood around.

This is a very common idea, and it is supported by a number of lab experiments.

So, America is trapped in a vicious circle: Underinvestment in public goods causes economic decline, which causes prejudice and tribalism, which causes underinvestment in public goods.

How can this cycle be broken? I believe that the only people who can break it are conservatives. If Republican voters realize that government is not the enemy, and that investment in public goods is crucial to their own children's futures, we can arrest the cycle of decline, and set ourselves back on the upward path of economic growth and greater social integration. If you vote Republican, the power to save the country is in your hands.

But for us liberals, there is just not much that we can do, other than to try persuade our conservative friends that roads and bridges and public education are not just a scheme to steal their money and give it to the brown people. If we fail to make that case, America has a hard, dark road ahead.

Anti-manufacturing bias in the economics blogosphere

The economics blog Vox claims that the U.S. will not be able to increase employment in the manufacturing sector through promotion of goods exports. The reason? Because manufacturing employment has been trending downward.

By this logic, policy can do nothing to reverse deflation, because inflation is trending downward. And policy can do nothing to reverse job losses, because unemployment is trending upward. In other words, policy is assumed to be ineffectual - no trend can be reversed! - and the conclusion is that policy is ineffectual. Ta-da!

Now, the Vox authors do give one piece of data to back up their assertion that the decline in manufacturing output is irreversible: increasing productivity in the manufacturing sector, which "translate[s] into a greater substitution of capital for labour, causing downward pressure on manufacturing employment." In other words, our machines are getting so good that we need fewer and fewer people in manufacturing.

I have several counterarguments.

1. Productivity in U.S. manufacturing also increased strongly from 1945-1970. During this time, U.S. manufacturing employment soared.

2. Productivity has also increased in the service sector over the past two decades, even as service-sector employment has soared.

3. Theoretically, there is no reason why increased multifactor productivity should reduce employment. If the manufacturing sector has constant returns to scale, employment should be independent of productivity.

4. An increase in productivity in manufacturing could be due not to technological improvements (as the Vox authors assert), but rather to some exogenous sectoral shift that forces less productive factories out of business (e.g. an undervalued Chinese exchange rate or a U.S. industrial policy that favors finance and other services).

Given these counterarguments, Vox's declaration that the downward trend in manufacturing is inevitable seems to be on very shaky ground.

Of course, they then go on to argue that promoting goods exports will create employment in the service sector, leading them to quietly declare that export promotion is a good idea anyway. This agrees with my idea that "industrial policy" is generally less effective than "sectoral policy" aimed at boosting exports.

But my basic point here is that the econ blogosphere seems to be biased against the idea of manufacturing. They seem to have decided that the shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy is as desirable as the shift out of agriculture into manufacturing. But there is just not very much data to back up that idea; at least, not that I've seen so far. I'm skeptical that the trend is entirely good, and I'm skeptical that the trend is entirely irreversible.

The return of industrial policy

The stars have aligned, and industrial policy is slowly starting to rise from its centuries-long slumber beneath the ocean floor...

President Obama and congressional Democrats -- out of options for another quick shot of stimulus spending to revive the sluggish economy -- are shifting toward a longer-term strategy that promises to tackle persistently high unemployment by engineering a renaissance in American manufacturing.

That approach, heralded by Obama last week in Detroit and sketched out in a memo to House Democrats as they headed home for the August break, is still evolving and so far focuses primarily on raising taxes on multinational corporations that Democrats accuse of shipping jobs overseas.

The strategy also repackages policies long pursued by the White House -- such as investing in clean energy, roads, bridges and broadband service -- with more than two dozen legislative proposals aimed at developing a plan for promoting domestic manufacturing.

Mark Thoma is highly skeptical of this, but his reasons are telling:

On the "Make It in America" initiative, I have a hard time getting excited about it, and it may leave the administration open to charges of protectionism (though I'm not sure how that charge would play with the Democratic base). I am not a big fan of industrial policy generally, it goes against the instincts that are beaten into economists during their training, but I don't have a better answer to the question of where will the good jobs come from in the future.

Economists are skeptical of industrial policy because they have been taught to be. This is not to say that industrial policy (in any of its many and various forms and incarnations) is a good thing. Rather, economists have the ability to write down models that support any conclusion they like, and generally have neither the inclination nor the ability to use data to destroy the models that don't work. The reason they have been taught to dislike industrial policy is because the people who taught them decided they disliked industrial policy, and hence wrote down models too simple to have a role for industrial policy. In Japan, by contrast, economists decided they liked industrial policy, and so wrote down models to support that conclusion (a fact I discovered while editing economics papers written by Japanese authors).

But what ends up happening is that policymakers end up making policy based not on any economic model, but on the ideological and intellectual assumptions that drove the creation of the prevailing models. When "neoliberalism" was politically popular, we got neoliberal policies and neoliberal models. Now that neoliberalism seems to the casual observer to have crashed and burned, we'll get something else. Maybe industrial policy, maybe something new. But it won't be backed up by data either. Policymakers will continue to "cross the river by feeling for the stones."

Economic security

In explaining the divisions between Democrats/liberals and Republicans/conservatives, I've often focused on cultural, regional, and racial divisions. This is because I fundamentally don't buy the story that the liberal-conservative divide is all about "rent-seeking" (i.e. wealth redistribution) - poor Democrats trying to use the government to steal money from rich Republicans, or vice versa. There's too much evidence against that view, in particular the fact that most poor people don't vote. So I've tended to buy into the idea that political ideologies and parties are held together by tribalism.

But every once in a while, I am led to question this view. This blog post by Matt Yglesias contains a very interesting graphic that makes me wonder if deep economic incentives really might be responsible for a lot of the liberal/conservative divide:



















Yglesias chooses to interpret this graphic in terms of the traditional "rent-seeking" explanation: business owners want favors and handouts from the government, so they vote Republican. But I think he's ignoring the other six panels. Why have "professionals" and "routine white-collar" workers tended Democratic over the last three decades, while both "skilled workers" and "non-skilled workers" trended Republican?

The answer that pops into my head is: economic security. Since 1980, our economy has become much less regulated, forcing firms to compete viciously to stay alive. since around the same time, globalization has gone into high gear, forcing massive continuing industrial restructuring as newly developed nations force their way into niches that U.S. firms used to dominate. Add to this the IT revolution, which is changing the very nature of work and eliminating the need for whole classes of workers on practically a yearly basis, and you have a recipe for massive economic uncertainty and insecurity.

I believe that it is this insecurity, more than rising inequality or decreasing mobility, which is driving Americans' discontent. Inequality as such doesn't bother us very much, and decreasing mobility has yet to really enter the public consciousness. But uncertainty - the daily fear of being downsized at any time, and behind that the vast looming terror of being made irrelevant by changing technology and trade patterns - is something that dogs each of us every day of our lives.

So how do we respond to inequality? I see two basic possibilities. The first is for us to respond as individuals - we "rise to the challenge," work hard, adapt our skills, and learn how to get by in ever-changing circumstances. The second option is for us to respond as a collective, seeking protection from the government in the form of industrial policy, trade protection, and government jobs.

I am guessing that people who choose the first option tend to vote Republican, and people who choose the second tend to vote Democratic.

Why does this make sense? After all, as Yglesias points out, Republicans often use government to benefit specific friendly firms (think: Halliburton); he might have also mentioned that much Republican-backed military spending is just corporate pork for defense contractors. So it is not immediate apparent that Republicans are the party of individual adaptability and Democrats are the party of collective economic security.

Still, looking at the breakdown in the graphic, as well as other things I know about voting patterns, it seems clear to me that the groups tending Democratic are either those most under threat from economic insecurity (traditional "routine white-collar" workers) and those most dependent on the government for their security (govt. workers, and also professionals, who are protected by govt. licensing). The groups who have chosen to go with the economic flow - entrepreneurs and "skilled workers" - are those that have shown the greatest trend towards the GOP. It is not clear why, but people seem to think that the Democrats will use the government to protect them against economic uncertainty, while the Republicans will give them free rein to adapt on their own.

Why this is, I'm not sure. The Democrats have not been more vocal in supporting entry restrictions for the professions, nor have they been particularly protectionist on trade. They have shown little appetite for re-regulating the industries deregulated under Reagan. Meanwhile, the Republicans offer hundreds of billions in defense contracts and corporate pork. Perhaps the divide comes down to pure rhetoric - Republican paeans to "small business" and economic individualism vs. Democratic reminders of the importance of government. Or maybe people believe that if and when popular pressure for trade protectionism and industrial policy becomes strong enough, it will be the Democrats who will be the first to cave in and take action.

Whatever is going on here, though, I think there is a lesson for both parties: economic security is a much bigger issue than either Democrats or Republicans seem to realize. There are policies out there that would mitigate the insecurity without damaging our economy - portable pensions, tax breaks for worker retraining, vocational education, tax-exemption for unemployment insurance, and government-sponsored job-matching programs, to name a few. Encouraging geographic mobility by ending the tax break for home mortgage interest is a step that deserves attention. And, in my opinion, the government needs to take a good hard second look at industrial policy.

My guess is that these policies, and the accompanying rhetoric of economic security, is a gold mine of electoral support that is just sitting there waiting to boost the fortunes of the first party that seizes it. Of course, this blog post is pretty much 100% supposition and me going out on an intellectual limb, so then again, maybe not.

Two Americas

Back in the mid-century, we used to have an America with room for both conservatives and liberals. Liberals got to have activist government, conservatives got to have a racist, sexist, mostly religious society. Then the bargain broke down, when liberals decided that the racism, sexism, and religiosity had to go, and conservatives retaliated by disallowing activist government. The result was a society that was more friendly and inclusive, and more economically dynamic, but less effective at spreading economic gains throughout society. This was the new bargain of the 80s and 90s.

The problem is, there were two types of conservatives - businesspeople and small-town traditionalist whites. The businesspeople got what they want from the 80s and 90s (money), while the small-town traditionalist whites got screwed out of their jobs AND had to put up with brown people, gay people, etc. So now the social compact is breaking down again, as the STTWs demand that the brown people shove off. This is the root of the Tea Party.

But America is constitutionally biased toward accepting the brown people, because we're a nation based on immigration. Back when Germans and Swedes were considered brown people, our leaders griped, but let them in anyway. And then when Italians and Greeks and Jews (and maybe Poles) were considered brown people, we had to let them in as well. Letting the "brown" people in is at the core of our national character.

Which is why to stop the brown people from coming in, conservatives would have to change our national character. Indeed, they would have to repeal the 14th Amendment, which grants birthright citizenship. But the small-town traditionalist whites are so upset at the death of their closed little world that they are willing to scrap the United States of America in retaliation:

On Sunday, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) became the highest-ranking Republican to call for the repeal of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Appearing on CBS' Face the Nation, Kyl said that he opposes allowing children of undocumented immigrants to be granted U.S. citizenship and wants Congress to hold hearings on the matter...

There are already a number of Republican officials who have preceded Kyl in calling for a reworking of the country's citizenship laws. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has proposed the piece of legislation that would repeal the 14th Amendment; he is joined on the House side by Rep. Jack Kimble (R-Calif.)...

Senate candidate Rand Paul (R-Ky.) caused a stir shortly after winning his primary by saying he supported stripping citizenship from children of the undocumented. Former congressman and potential Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo -- one of the staunchest anti-illegal immigration voices in national politics -- has made repeal of the 14th Amendment a major cause.

There are many obscure Republican candidates who have made the same proposal, including Kevin Craig in Missouri and Gary McLeod (an obscure Christian conservative who is challenging -- without much hope -- Majority Whip James Clyburn).

When moderates and liberals talk about "America," they are generally referring to the national institutions that formally define our country - the Constitution, the government, etc. When conservatives refer to "America," however, they generally mean something much different, something much closer to what Sarah Palin tellingly called "the real America." They refer to an American subculture defined by race and religion - a suburban (or small-town) "white" Christian nation.

If our suburbs become populated with Mexicans and Indians and Koreans, the moderate/liberal America will still be perfectly intact as long as the Constitution still reads the same. But the conservative America will either die or have to go through wrenching change (as it did in the 1800s when the Germans came, and in the 1900s when the East Europeans came). This is why conservatives are suggesting changing some of the core provisions of the Constitution - they are holding a gun to the head of our America, threatening to kill it unless we let their own America live.

But their threat is hollow. The Mexicans are here to stay, and the Indians and Asians will not stop coming as long as our labor market demands them. Conservatives do not have the votes to repeal the 14th Amendment. They must either change their America to accommodate the latest wave of "brown" people, or watch it die.