Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Career Of Vernon Briggs, Jr.: A Liberal Economist’S Struggle To Reduce Immigration

Vernon M Briggs Jr

[Excerpt] At the conclusion of Cornell’s spring semester in 2007, Briggs ended his 47 years of college teaching. As he retired, Cornell honored him with emeritus status. Since then, he has occasionally given public talks and written articles on the need for immigration reform. He says his work still draws motivation from a principle he left with his students at the end of the last lecture in each of his classes over his entire career: “The mode through which the impossible comes to pass is effort.”

That quote from Justice Oliver Wendell Homes was passed on to Briggs by Michigan …

Illegal Immigration: The Impact On Wages And Employment Of Black Workers

Vernon M Briggs Jr

[Excerpt] Before addressing the specific issue of illegal immigration and its economic effects on black Americans, the broad subject needs to be placed in perspective. No issue has affected the economic well-being of African Americans more that the phenomenon of immigration and its related policy manifestations. Immigration defined the entry experience of the ancestors of most the nation’s contemporary black American community (as slaves who were brought as involuntary immigrants); it placed them disproportionately in the states that today comprise the “South”( at no point in American history has less than half the black population ever lived outside the South); …

Vernon Briggs: Real-World Labor Economist

Vernon M Briggs Jr

[Excerpt] Vernon Briggs stepped into a wastebasket and launched my career as a labor economist. In the spring of 1969, I was sleepwalking through the undergraduate economics program at the University of Texas and sitting in Dr. Briggs’s labor economics class. He was vigorously making a point when his misstep off the small classroom stage produced a roar of laughter but did not break his train of thought. He woke me up; I thought, “Man, I want to be as passionate about my life’s work as this guy.

The Human Resource Economics Of Vernon Briggs

Vernon M Briggs Jr

This essay examines the conception of human resource economics (HRE) that shaped the career of Vernon M. Briggs Jr. It probes the history of economic thought to describe the intellectual roots of HRE. It explores how HRE emerged to address the issues of economic growth, stabilization, and efficiency, as well as how it contributes to the public discourse on matters of social equity, economic opportunity, and government regulation. It explains the clash between human capital theory and HRE. And it outlines Briggs’s five dimensions of human resource development (HRD), which is his term for HRE that manifests itself in public …