Italy renews calls for EU to take immigrants

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sweeping immigration legislation taking shape in the Senate will aim to overhaul the nation's agriculture worker program to create a steady supply of labor for farmers and growers, who rely more than any other industry on workers who have come to the country illegally.

Immigration reformers have the wind at their backs this week, buoyed by support not just from Republican senators, but an array of conservative interest groups who have signed on to their cause. But the reignited debate is also driving the opposition’s hardliners out into the open, offering the clearest picture yet of the fault lines Congress must overcome to pass a bill.

Should Labour pursue the preferences of the working class, or their interests? Of course, if people were rational and well-informed, there wouldn’t be a distinction between the two. But as Marx and Kahneman have shown, in the presence of ideology/cognitive biases, the two do diverge.I’m prompted to ask by Ed Miliband’s remarks on immigration. The significant thing is that he has made any at all. In his acceptance speech, he said:

Sunny draws my attention to the "awful" fact that the public are overwhelmingly hostile (pdf) to immigration. This raises the question: what if anything can be done to change this?

Lord Glasman’s call for an end to immigration shows that there is a nasty populist streak to Blue Labour.The counter-arguments to it are:

By SA Editor Miriam Metzinger: Stocks discussed on the in-depth session of Jim Cramer's Mad Money TV Program, Monday July 16. Heinz (HNZ)