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The U.S. took in more than a million immigrants per year in the late 1990s, more than at any other time in history. For humanitarian and many other reasons, this may be good news. But as George Borjas shows inHeaven's Door, it's decidedly mixed news for the American economy--and positively bad news for the country's poorest citizens. Widely regarded as the country's leading immigration economist, Borjas presents the most comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date account yet of the economic impact of recent immigration on America. He reveals that the benefits of immigration have been greatly exaggerated and that, if we allow immigration to continue unabated and unmodified, we are supporting an astonishing transfer of wealth from the poorest people in the country, who are disproportionately minorities, to the richest. In the course of the book, Borjas carefully analyzes immigrants' skills, national origins, welfare use, economic mobility, and impact on the labor market, and he makes groundbreaking use of new data to trace current trends in ethnic segregation. He also evaluates the implications of the evidence for the type of immigration policy the that U.S. should pursue. Some of his findings are dramatic: Despite estimates that range into hundreds of billions of dollars, net annual gains from immigration are only about $8 billion. In dragging down wages, immigration currently shifts about $160 billion per year from workers to employers and users of immigrants' services. Immigrants today are less skilled than their predecessors, more likely to re-quire public assistance, and far more likely to have children who remain in poor, segregated communities. Borjas considers the moral arguments against restricting immigration and writes eloquently about his own past as an immigrant from Cuba. But he concludes that in the current economic climate--which is less conducive to mass immigration of unskilled labor than past eras--it would be fair and wise to return immigration to the levels of the 1970s (roughly 500,000 per year) and institute policies to favor more skilled immigrants.

Orley Ashenfelter is one of the two winners of the 2005 Society of Labor Economists' Jacob Mincer prize honoring lifetime achievement in the field of labor economics. His early work on trade unions brought neoclassical economics to bear on a subject that had been the domain of traditional institutionally oriented industrial relations specialists. In his Frisch-prize-winning 1980 article, Ashenfelter developed a theoretical and empirical framework for distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary unemployment. James Heckman is one of the winners of the 2005 Society of Labor Economists' Jacob Mincer prize for lifetime achievement in the field of labor economics. Heckman's work on selection, and on the creation of plausible policy counterfactions, has had a profound impact on labor economics and on microeconomics more generally. His work on program evaluation is extremely influential. He is a prolific author with over 200 published papers and many books.

Well, he's at it again. The Bordeaux wines of 1991, he writes in his newsletter, Liquid Assets, \"will not be as good as the 1990's, 1989's, 1988's, 1985's, 1983's or 1982's.\" Does that mean we should write them off? Not at all, Dr. [Orley Ashenfelter] said. \"They will be better than the 1987's, 1986's, 1984's and 1981's.\" That could be called damning with faint praise, at least where 1987 and 1984 are concerned, because they were not rated highly to begin with. But 1986 and 1981 were not too bad. So that makes 1991 an \"average vintage by the standards of the 1980's,\" in his opinion. It is quite a good vintage when compared with the so-so Bordeaux of the 1970's. \"When they are mature,\" he says of the 1991's, \"they will be better than the 1978's or the 1979's,\" two years he rates as \"delicious for current drinking.\" So what about the 1991's? \"Forget them for now,\" Dr. Ashenfelter said, because while they will be pretty good, they will be overpriced. To sell the wines, he said, he suspects that the Bordeaux growers will reduce the opening price -- the price at which the wines are first offered to the public in the spring after the harvest -- on the 1991's, compared with the 1990's, and then point to the wines as good values. \"This strategy always works well with uninformed consumers,\" he said.

That wasn't why we were there. The idea was to talk about the Ashenfelter Theorem, sometimes referred to as the ''Bordeaux equation.'' Mr. [Orley Ashenfelter] teaches economics at Princeton, a calling that, to hear him tell it, pays just below a subsistence wage. the tasters are far from obsolete. Mr. Ashenfelter can tell you that 1989 is going to be good. But there are going to be some 89's that are better than others and his formula can't identify them. He can argue that 1986 is poor, but there are some very good 86's and his formula can't single them out. The nebbiolo grape is the basis of all the great traditional wines of the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. ''Traditional'' is the buzzword here because cabernet sauvignon is creeping in at a few of the more pioneering wineries. Fortunately, the Piemontese are conservative and slow to change, so the old-style wines will be around for a long time. Nebbiolo, which comes from the word for fog, is the grape in the greatest Piedmont wines, Barolo and Barbaresco, but it shows up, too, in many lesser-known but marvelous wines like Ghemme, Gattinara and spanna. In fact, spanna is another name for the grape. Because it is still little-known and also, of course, because it is not made with the care of a great barolo, spanna is a fine bargain. This one from [Antonio Vallana] has depth and richness. The finish is a bit rough, but that goes with nebbiolo. The taste is that of a wine at three times the cost. A true bargain.

While the ''Bordeaux equation'' of Princeton's Prof. Orley Ashenfelter may put the noses of wine connoisseurs and merchants out of joint, it will never put them out of business (''Wine Equation Puts Some Noses Out of Joint,'' front page, March 4).

As Steve Ross, a wine enthusiast who is a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, points out, the simple statistical model does explain basic year-to-year variations without major slips. ''If you did not tell them a machine did it,'' Mr. Ross said, ''I think it would pass muster with the wise heads in the business.'' Mr. [Robert M. Parker Jr.] rates the 1986's as ''very good and sometimes exceptional.'' Peter A. Sichel, author of the influential Bordeaux Vintage and Market Report, said the 1986's have ''elegance and classic Bordeaux structure.'' New York stores, brimming with the vintage, are pricing the wines in the same range as the much-praised 1985's. comparison of Red Bordeaux ratings 1980-87 Source: Liquid Assets Newsletter; ''Hugh Johnson's Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine 1990''; ''Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide'' (1989-90 edition);

\"We have spent the last three decades not raising education levels at the rate the labor market demands,\" said David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \"So we have a growing surplus of less-educated workers.\" Maybe something else is going on. Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard, noted how some 40 years ago, the compensation of American workers became decoupled from productivity growth, which continued to advance even as wages stagnated. \"We haven't kept up improving skills as we did before,\" Professor Katz said. \"But it's not all about that.\" \"The best solution is that these people get their income through some citizen's ownership of the capital stock so that they are like rich people with much nonlabor income,\" he said. That \"will take some policies to make the most highly unequal part of income -- ownership of capital -- more equal.\"

\"We have spent the last three decades not raising education levels at the rate the labor market demands,\" said David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \"So we have a growing surplus of less-educated workers.\" Maybe something else is going on. Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, noted how some 40 years ago, the compensation of American workers became decoupled from productivity growth, which continued to advance as wages stagnated. \"We haven't kept up improving skills as we did before,\" Professor Katz said. \"But it's not all about that.\" \"The best solution is that these people get their income through some citizen's ownership of the capital stock so that they are like rich people with much nonlabor income,\" he said. That \"will take some policies to make the most highly unequal part of income -- ownership of capital -- more equal.\"

Paul Shaman, a professor of statistics at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania who is the statistical consultant retained by the Democrats, exploits the limits in Professor [Orley Ashenfelter]'s reasoning. Relationships between machine and absentee voting that held in the past, he argues, need not hold in the present. Could not the difference, he asks, be explained by Mr. [William Stinson]'s \"engaging in aggressive efforts to obtain absentee votes?\" Brian Sullivan, the statistical consultant working for the Republicans who is an economist with the Center for Forensic Economic Studies in Philadelphia, responds to some of Professor Shaman's and Ms. [Elizabeth Holtzman]'s objections. He analyzed the findings of a post-election poll of registered voters who had applied for absentee ballots. From the survey responses that he judged most reliable, he estimated that 84 percent of the absentee ballots had been illegally solicited or cast. By this reckoning, even if every legitimate absentee vote had gone to the Democrat, the Republican would still have won a majority in the overall vote. \"STATISTICS: Looking for Fraud in Philadelphia\" shows the margin of victory or defeat for the Democrats, by both absentee balot and voting machine ballot, in 22 elections in Philadelphia's senatorial districts over the last decade. (Source: Orley Ashenfelter, Princeton University)

The intuitive appeal of a condo auction (apart from the irrational hope of getting something for nothing) is that the open bidding will provide a realistic sense of what the real estate is worth in the market. But this auction - and, [Orley Ashenfelter] suspects, most condo auctions - did anything but: By waiting a few days, buyers could have had the same units for an average of 13 percent less.