July 2006
Also inside:
• China’s New Securities Law
• Environmental Site Assessments
• In Defense of Trial Lawyers
Special Committee
Section Inside!
The Great Divide
Immigration
july2006
CBA REPORT
this month’s feature
this month’s featureIIn 1990, 13 percent of all Major
League Baseball players were Latino.
Not Latino-American, but persons
born in Latin American countries. Today,
more than a quarter of major leaguers
are now from Latino countries. As Major
League Baseball recruited more Latinos
to play ball, Latin America produced
a richer supply of ball players. At first
blush, this doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t
the siphoning of talent have resulted in a
lesser supply of ball players?
The answer is, of course, that the
supply of workers is not fixed. As more
Latinos came to America to play ball,
more Latinos saw baseball as a viable ca-
reer. Latinos who might not have worked
as hard at their skills were now incen-
tivized to train harder. Investors built
baseball academies to teach these talented
but raw athletes. The supply grew with
demand. As a result, America baseball
fans now see many more Rodriguezes and
Gonzalezes and fewer Smiths and Joneses
than they did a generation ago.
This summer, as Americans consider
the important policy questions raised
by this country’s national immigration
discussion, it is important to take a step
back and survey the various economic
consequences of our immigration deci-
sions. These questions will need to be
asked again and again, year after year,
because immigration is always a very fluid
condition. The consequences of choos-
ing wrong answers are enormous, and the
consequences of choosing correctly are far
greater than just better baseball.
A good place to start is to take a look
at the Philippine nurse phenomenon.
America’s nurse shortage is at a criti-
cal juncture. Roughly one out of every
nine nursing jobs remains unfilled. This
country’s nursing shortage is so bad that
the issue is not an American-t