Minimum wage laws do harm in the short run and in the long run. People acquire lots of valuable human capital in their first jobs. The longer those first jobs are pushed out of reach, the longer it takes low-skill workers to develop crucial capacities that can put them on a promising career path.

What we need to do now is to create more openings for high-skill immigrants while reducing the number of slots for extended family reunification for low-skill immigrants, and Congress (though no the Obama administration) seems to be taking some steps in that direction. The Economist, while not addressing low-skill immigration, seems to be taking a similar view.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a...

At the heart of the debate over renewing No Child Left Behind, the nation’s education reform act which is overdue for reauthorization, is the question: what is the role of the federal government in K-12 education? Though the law was initiated and signed by a Republican president, presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, who once supported it, now talk about getting the federal government out of education. Democratic reformers, meanwhile, insist that the federal government has a role in telling states how to identify, punish and fix low-performing schools — despite little evidence that Washington has been good at any of these tasks.  Over the last decade, AEI Education has been exploring these concerns.

Up on Capitol Hill, there appears to be progress--bipartisan progress, even--toward changing our immigration laws to reflect current and emerging realities.

While Obama complained about "politicians" blocking comprehensive immigration bills, he was one of them himself. Some new approach is needed, and Obama did little to point the way. El Paso was all about election 2012, not serious immigration reform.

2010 census reveals Texas' economy has diversified far beyond petroleum, with booming high-tech centers, major corporate headquarters and thriving small businesses. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of Americans and immigrants, high-skill as well as low-skill.

The November 22 Republican presidential candidates’ debate, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow) and the Heritage Foundation, and presented by CNN, was probably the most substantive and serious presidential debate of this election cycle.