http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigrants_economy.html
Steven Malanga
How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy
A handful of industries get low-cost labor, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
Summer 2006
The day after
Librado Velasquez arrived on Staten Island after a long, surreptitious journey
from his Chiapas, Mexico, home, he headed out to a street corner to wait with
other illegal immigrants looking for work. Velasquez, who had supported his
wife, seven kids, and his in-laws as a campesino, or peasant farmer,
until a 1998 hurricane devastated his farm, eventually got work, off the books,
loading trucks at a small New Jersey factory, which hired illegals for jobs
that required few special skills. The arrangement suited both, until a work
injury sent Velasquez to the local emergency room, where federal law required
that he be treated, though he could not afford to pay for his care. After five
operations, he is now permanently disabled and has remained in the United
States to pursue compensation claims.
“I
do not have the use of my leg without walking with a cane, and I do not have
strength in my arm in order to lift things,” Velasquez said through an
interpreter at New York City Council hearings. “I have no other way to live
except if I receive some other type of compensation. I need help, and I thought
maybe my son could come and work here and support me here in the United
States.”
Velasquez’s
story illustrates some of the fault lines in the nation’s current, highly
charged, debate on immigration. Since the mid-1960s, America has welcomed
nearly 30 million legal immigrants and received perhaps another 15 million
illegals, numbers unprecedented in our history. These immigrants have picked
our fruit, cleaned our homes, cut our grass, worked in our factories, and
washed our cars. But they have also crowded into our hospital emergency rooms,
schools, and government-subsidized aid programs, sparking a fierce debate about
their contributions to our society and the costs they impose on it.
Advocates of open
immigration argue that welcoming the Librado Velasquezes of the world is
essential for our American economy: our businesses need workers like him,
because we have a shortage of people willing to do low-wage work. Moreover, the
free movement of labor in a global economy pays off for the United States,
because immigrants bring skills and capital that expand our economy and offset
immigration’s costs. Like tax cuts, supporters argue, immigration pays for
itself.
But
the tale of Librado Velasquez helps show why supporters are wrong about today’s
immigration, as many Americans sense and so much research has demonstrated. America does not have
a vast labor shortage that requires waves of low-wage immigrants to alleviate; in
fact, unemployment among unskilled workers is high—about 30 percent. Moreover, many of
the unskilled, uneducated workers now journeying here labor, like Velasquez, in
shrinking industries, where they force out native workers, and many others work
in industries where the availability of cheap workers has led businesses to
suspend investment in new technologies that would make them less
labor-intensive.
Yet
while these workers add little to our economy, they come at great cost, because
they are not economic abstractions but human beings, with their own culture and
ideas—often at odds with our own. Increasing numbers of them arrive with little
education and none of the skills necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Many may wind up stuck
on our lowest economic rungs, where they will rely on something that immigrants
of other generations didn’t have: a vast U.S. welfare and social-services
apparatus that has enormously amplified the cost of immigration. Just as welfare
reform and other policies are helping to shrink America’s underclass by weaning
people off such social programs, we are importing a new, foreign-born
underclass. As famed free-market economist Milton Friedman puts it: “It’s just
obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”
Immigration
can only pay off again for America if we reshape our policy, organizing it
around what’s good for the economy by welcoming workers we truly need and
excluding those who, because they have so little to offer, are likely to cost
us more than they contribute, and who will struggle for years to find their
place here.
Hampering today’s
immigration debate are our misconceptions about the so-called first great
migration some 100 years ago, with which today’s immigration is often compared.
We envision that first great migration as a time when multitudes of Emma
Lazarus’s “tired,” “poor,” and “wretched refuse” of Europe’s shores made their
way from destitution to American opportunity. Subsequent studies of American
immigration with titles like The Uprooted convey the same impression of the
dispossessed and displaced swarming here to find a new life. If America could
assimilate 24 million mostly desperate immigrants from that great
migration—people one unsympathetic economist at the turn of the twentieth century
described as “the unlucky, the thriftless, the worthless”—surely, so the story
goes, today’s much bigger and richer country can absorb the millions of Librado
Velasquezes now venturing here.
But
that argument distorts the realities of the first great migration. Though
fleeing persecution or economic stagnation in their homelands, that era’s
immigrants—Jewish tailors and seamstresses who helped create New York’s garment
industry, Italian stonemasons and bricklayers who helped build some of our
greatest buildings, German merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans—all brought
important skills with them that fit easily into the American economy. Those
waves of immigrants—many of them urban dwellers who crossed a continent and an
ocean to get here—helped supercharge the workforce at a time when the country
was going through a transformative economic expansion that craved new workers,
especially in its cities. A 1998 National Research Council report noted “that
the newly arriving immigrant nonagricultural work force . . . was (slightly)
more skilled than the resident American labor force”: 27 percent of them were
skilled laborers, compared with only 17 percent of that era’s native-born
workforce.
Many
of these immigrants quickly found a place in our economy, participating in the
workforce at a higher rate even than the native population. Their success at
finding work sent many of them quickly up the economic ladder: those who stayed
in America for at least 15 years, for instance, were just as likely to own
their own business as native-born workers of the same age, one study found.
Another study found that their American-born children were just as likely to be
accountants, engineers, or lawyers as Americans whose families had been here
for generations.
What
the newcomers of the great migration did not find here was a vast
social-services and welfare state. They had to rely on their own resources or
those of friends, relatives, or private, often ethnic, charities if things did
not go well. That’s why about 70 percent of those who came were men in their
prime. It’s also why many of them left when the economy sputtered several times
during the period. For though one often hears that restrictive anti-immigration
legislation starting with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 ended the first great
migration, what really killed it was the crash of the American economy. Even
with the 1920s quotas, America welcomed some 4.1 million immigrants, but in the
Depression of the 1930s, the number of foreign immigrants tumbled far below quota
levels, to 500,000. With America’s streets no longer paved with gold, and
without access to the New Deal programs for native-born Americans, immigrants
not only stopped coming, but some 60 percent of those already here left in a
great remigration home.
Today’s immigration
has turned out so differently in part because it emerged out of the 1960s civil
rights and Great Society mentality. In 1965, a new immigration act eliminated
the old system of national quotas, which critics saw as racist because it greatly
favored European nations. Lawmakers created a set of broader immigration quotas
for each hemisphere, and they added a new visa preference category for family
members to join their relatives here. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman
Edward Kennedy reassured the country that, “contrary to the charges in some
quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants,” and “it will
not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
But,
in fact, the law had an immediate, dramatic effect, increasing immigration by
60 percent in its first ten years. Sojourners from poorer countries around the
rest of the world arrived in ever-greater numbers, so that whereas half of
immigrants in the 1950s had originated from Europe, 75 percent by the 1970s
were from Asia and Latin America. And as the influx of immigrants grew, the
special-preferences rule for family unification intensified it further, as the
pool of eligible family members around the world also increased. Legal
immigration to the U.S. soared from 2.5 million in the 1950s to 4.5 million in
the 1970s to 7.3 million in the 1980s to about 10 million in the 1990s.
As
the floodgates of legal immigration opened, the widening economic gap between
the United States and many of its neighbors also pushed illegal immigration to
levels that America had never seen. In particular, when Mexico’s move to a more
centralized, state-run economy in the 1970s produced hyperinflation, the
disparity between its stagnant economy and U.S. prosperity yawned wide.
Mexico’s per-capita gross domestic product, 37 percent of the United States’ in
the early 1980s, was only 27 percent of it by the end of the decade—and is now
just 25 percent of it. With Mexican farmworkers able to earn seven to ten times
as much in the United States as at home, by the 1980s illegals were pouring
across our border at the rate of about 225,000 a year, and U.S. sentiment rose
for slowing the flow.
But
an unusual coalition of business groups, unions, civil rights activists, and
church leaders thwarted the call for restrictions with passage of the inaptly
named 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized some 2.7 million
unauthorized aliens already here, supposedly in exchange for tougher penalties
and controls against employers who hired illegals. The law proved no deterrent,
however, because supporters, in subsequent legislation and court cases argued
on civil rights grounds, weakened the employer sanctions. Meanwhile, more
illegals flooded here in the hope of future amnesties from Congress, while the
newly legalized sneaked their wives and children into the country rather than
have them wait for family-preference visas. The flow of illegals into the
country rose to between 300,000 and 500,000 per year in the 1990s, so that a
decade after the legislation that had supposedly solved the undocumented alien
problem by reclassifying them as legal, the number of illegals living in the
United States was back up to about 5 million, while today it’s estimated at
between 9 million and 13 million. (MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN
OUR BORDERS AT ABOUT 40 MILLION AND BREEDING FAST)
The flood of immigrants,
both legal and illegal, from countries with poor, ill-educated populations, has
yielded a mismatch between today’s immigrants and the American economy and has
left many workers poorly positioned to succeed for the long term. Unlike the
immigrants of 100 years ago, whose skills reflected or surpassed those of the
native workforce at the time, many of today’s arrivals, particularly the more
than half who now come from Central and South America, are farmworkers in their
home countries who come here with little education or even basic training in
blue-collar occupations like carpentry or machinery. (A century ago,
farmworkers made up 35 percent of the U.S. labor force, compared with the under
2 percent who produce a surplus of food today.) Nearly two-thirds of Mexican
immigrants, for instance, are high school dropouts, and most wind up doing
either unskilled factory work or small-scale construction projects, or they
work in service industries, where they compete for entry-level jobs against one
another, against the adult children of other immigrants, and against
native-born high school dropouts. Of the 15 industries employing the greatest
percentage of foreign-born workers, half are low-wage service industries,
including gardening, domestic household work, car washes, shoe repair, and
janitorial work. To take one stark example: whereas 100 years ago, immigrants
were half as likely as native-born workers to be employed in household service,
today immigrants account for 27 percent of all domestic workers in the United
States.
Although
open-borders advocates say that these workers are simply taking jobs Americans
don’t want, studies show that the immigrants drive down wages of native-born
workers and squeeze them out of certain industries. Harvard economists George
Borjas and Lawrence Katz, for instance, estimate that low-wage immigration cuts
the wages for the average native-born high school dropout by some 8 percent, or
more than $1,200 a year. Other economists find that the new workers also push
down wages significantly for immigrants already here and native-born Hispanics.
Consequently,
as the waves of immigration continue, the sheer number of those competing for
low-skilled service jobs makes economic progress difficult. A study of the
impact of immigration on New York City’s restaurant business, for instance,
found that 60 percent of immigrant workers do not receive regular raises, while
70 percent had never been promoted. One Mexican dishwasher aptly captured the
downward pressure that all these arriving workers put on wages by telling the
study’s authors about his frustrating search for a 50-cent raise after working
for $6.50 an hour: “I visited a few restaurants asking for $7 an hour, but they
only offered me $5.50 or $6,” he said. “I had to beg [for a job].”
Similarly,
immigration is also pushing some native-born workers out of jobs, as Kenyon
College economists showed in the California nail-salon workforce. Over a
16-year period starting in the late 1980s, some 35,600 mostly Vietnamese
immigrant women flooded into the industry, a mass migration that equaled the
total number of jobs in the industry before the immigrants arrived. Though the
new workers created a labor surplus that led to lower prices, new services, and
somewhat more demand, the economists estimate that as a result, 10,000
native-born workers either left the industry or never bothered entering it.
In many American
industries, waves of low-wage workers have also retarded investments that might
lead to modernization and efficiency. Farming, which employs a million
immigrant laborers in California alone, is the prime case in point. Faced with
a labor shortage in the early 1960s, when President Kennedy ended a 22-year-old
guest-worker program that allowed 45,000 Mexican farmhands to cross over the
border and harvest 2.2 million tons of California tomatoes for processed foods,
farmers complained but swiftly automated, adopting a mechanical tomato-picking
technology created more than a decade earlier. Today, just 5,000 better-paid
workers—one-ninth the original workforce—harvest 12 million tons of tomatoes
using the machines.
The
savings prompted by low-wage migrants may even be minimal in crops not easily
mechanized. Agricultural economists Wallace Huffman and Alan McCunn of Iowa
State University have estimated that without illegal workers, the retail cost
of fresh produce would increase only about 3 percent in the summer-fall season
and less than 2 percent in the winter-spring season, because labor represents
only a tiny percent of the retail price of produce and because without migrant
workers, America would probably import more foreign fruits and vegetables. “The
question is whether we want to import more produce from abroad, or more workers
from abroad to pick our produce,” Huffman remarks.
For
American farmers, the answer has been to keep importing workers—which has now
made the farmers more vulnerable to foreign competition, since even
minimum-wage immigrant workers can’t compete with produce picked on farms in
China, Chile, or Turkey and shipped here cheaply. A flood of low-priced Turkish
raisins several years ago produced a glut in the United States that sharply
drove down prices and knocked some farms out of business, shrinking total
acreage in California devoted to the crop by one-fifth, or some 50,000 acres.
The farms that survived are now moving to mechanize swiftly, realizing that no
amount of cheap immigrant labor will make them competitive.
As foreign
competition and mechanization shrink manufacturing and farmworker jobs,
low-skilled immigrants are likely to wind up farther on the margins of our
economy, where many already operate. For example, although only about 12
percent of construction workers are foreign-born, 100,000 to 300,000 illegal
immigrants have carved a place for themselves as temporary workers on the
fringes of the industry. In urban areas like New York and Los Angeles, these
mostly male illegal immigrants gather on street corners, in empty lots, or in
Home Depot parking lots to sell their labor by the hour or the day, for $7 to
$11 an hour.
That’s
far below what full-time construction workers earn, and for good reason. Unlike
the previous generations of immigrants who built America’s railroads or great
infrastructure projects like New York’s bridges and tunnels, these day laborers
mostly do home-improvement projects. A New York study, for instance, found that
four in ten employers who hire day laborers are private homeowners or renters
wanting help with cleanup chores, moving, or landscaping. Another 56 percent
were contractors, mostly small, nonunion shops, some owned by immigrants
themselves, doing short-term, mostly residential work. The day laborer’s
market, in other words, has turned out to be a boon for homeowners and small
contractors offering their residential clients a rock-bottom price, but a big
chunk of the savings comes because low-wage immigration has produced such a
labor surplus that many of these workers are willing to take jobs without
benefits and with salaries far below industry norms.
Because
so much of our legal and illegal immigrant labor is concentrated in such
fringe, low-wage employment, its overall impact on our economy is extremely
small. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that immigration’s
net benefit to the American economy raises the average income of the
native-born by only some $10 billion a year—about $120 per household. And that
meager contribution is not the result of immigrants helping to build our
essential industries or making us more competitive globally but instead merely delivering
our pizzas and cutting our grass. Estimates by pro-immigration forces that
foreign workers contribute much more to the economy, boosting annual gross
domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars, generally just tally what
immigrants earn here, while ignoring the offsetting effect they have on the
wages of native-born workers.
If the benefits of
the current generation of migrants are small, the costs are large and growing
because of America’s vast range of social programs and the wide advocacy
network that strives to hook low-earning legal and illegal immigrants into
these programs. A 1998 National Academy of Sciences study found that more than
30 percent of California’s foreign-born were on Medicaid—including 37 percent
of all Hispanic households—compared with 14 percent of native-born households.
The foreign-born were more than twice as likely as the native-born to be on
welfare, and their children were nearly five times as likely to be in
means-tested government lunch programs. Native-born households pay for much of
this, the study found, because they earn more and pay higher taxes—and are more
likely to comply with tax laws. Recent immigrants, by contrast, have much lower
levels of income and tax compliance (another study estimated that only 56
percent of illegals in California have taxes deducted from their earnings, for
instance). The study’s conclusion: immigrant families cost each native-born
household in California an additional $1,200 a year in taxes.
Immigration’s
bottom line has shifted so sharply that in a high-immigration state like
California, native-born residents are paying up to ten times more in state and
local taxes than immigrants generate in economic benefits. Moreover, the cost
is only likely to grow as the foreign-born population—which has already
mushroomed from about 9 percent of the U.S. population when the NAS studies
were done in the late 1990s to about 12 percent today—keeps growing. And
citizens in more and more places will feel the bite, as immigrants move beyond their
traditional settling places. From 1990 to 2005, the number of states in which immigrants
make up at least 5 percent of the population nearly doubled from 17 to 29, with
states like Arkansas, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Georgia seeing the most
growth. This sharp turnaround since the 1970s, when immigrants were less likely
to be using the social programs of the Great Society than the native-born
population, says Harvard economist Borjas, suggests that welfare and other
social programs are a magnet drawing certain types of immigrants—nonworking
women, children, and the elderly—and keeping them here when they run into
difficulty.
Not
only have the formal and informal networks helping immigrants tap into our
social spending grown, but they also get plenty of assistance from advocacy
groups financed by tax dollars, working to ensure that immigrants get their
share of social spending. Thus, the Newark-based New Jersey Immigration Policy
Network receives several hundred thousand government dollars annually to help
doctors and hospitals increase immigrant enrollment in Jersey’s subsidized
health-care programs. Casa Maryland, operating in the greater Washington area,
gets funding from nearly 20 federal, state, and local government agencies to
run programs that “empower” immigrants to demand benefits and care from
government and to “refer clients to government and private social service
programs for which they and their families may be eligible.”
Pols
around the country, intent on currying favor with ethnic voting blocs by
appearing immigrant-friendly, have jumped on the benefits-for-immigrants
bandwagon, endorsing “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies toward immigrants who
register for benefits, giving tax dollars to centers that find immigrants work
and aid illegals, and enacting legislation prohibiting local authorities from
cooperating with federal immigration officials. In New York, for instance,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered city agencies to ignore an immigrant’s
status in providing services. “This policy’s critical to encourage immigrant
day laborers to access . . . children’s health insurance, a full range of
preventive primary and acute medical care, domestic violence counseling,
emergency shelters, police protection, consumer fraud protections, and
protection against discrimination through the Human Rights Commission,” the
city’s Immigrant Affairs Commissioner, Guillermo Linares, explains.
Almost certainly,
immigrants’ participation in our social welfare programs will increase over
time, because so many are destined to struggle in our workforce. Despite our
cherished view of immigrants as rapidly climbing the economic ladder, more and
more of the new arrivals and their children face a lifetime of economic
disadvantage, because they arrive here with low levels of education and with
few work skills—shortcomings not easily overcome. Mexican immigrants,
who are up to six times more likely to be high school dropouts than native-born
Americans, not only earn substantially less than the native-born median, but
the wage gap persists for decades after they’ve arrived. A study of the 2000
census data, for instance, shows that the cohort of Mexican immigrants between
25 and 34 who entered the United States in the late 1970s were earning 40 to 50
percent less than similarly aged native-born Americans in 1980, but 20 years
later they had fallen even further behind their native-born counterparts.
Today’s Mexican immigrants between 25 and 34 have an even larger wage gap
relative to the native-born population. Adjusting for other socioeconomic
factors, Harvard’s Borjas and Katz estimate that virtually this entire wage gap
is attributable to low levels of education.
Meanwhile,
because their parents start off so far behind, the American-born children of
Mexican immigrants also make slow progress. First-generation adult Americans of
Mexican descent studied in the 2000 census, for instance, earned 14 percent
less than native-born Americans. By contrast, first-generation Portuguese
Americans earned slightly more than the average native-born worker—a reminder
of how quickly immigrants once succeeded in America and how some still do. But
Mexico increasingly dominates our immigration flows, accounting for 43 percent
of the growth of our foreign-born population in the 1990s.
One
reason some ethnic groups make up so little ground concerns the transmission of
what economists call “ethnic capital,” or what we might call the influence of
culture. More than previous generations, immigrants today tend to live
concentrated in ethnic enclaves, and their children find their role models
among their own group. Thus the children of today’s Mexican immigrants are likely to
live in a neighborhood where about 60 percent of men dropped out of high school
and now do low-wage work, and where less than half of the population speak
English fluently, which might explain why high school dropout rates among
Americans of Mexican ancestry are two and a half times higher than dropout
rates for all other native-born Americans, and why first-generation Mexican
Americans do not move up the economic ladder nearly as quickly as the children
of other immigrant groups.
In
sharp contrast is the cultural capital transmitted by Asian immigrants to
children growing up in predominantly Asian-American neighborhoods. More than 75
percent of Chinese immigrants and 98 percent of South Asian immigrants to the
U.S. speak English fluently, while a mid-1990s study of immigrant households in
California found that 37 percent of Asian immigrants were college graduates,
compared with only 3.4 percent of Mexican immigrants. Thus, even an
Asian-American child whose parents are high school dropouts is more likely to
grow up in an environment that encourages him to stay in school and learn to
speak English well, attributes that will serve him well in the job market. Not
surprisingly, several studies have shown that Asian immigrants and their
children earn substantially more than Mexican immigrants and their children.
Given these realities,
several of the major immigration reforms now under consideration simply don’t
make economic sense—especially the guest-worker program favored by President
Bush and the U.S. Senate. Careful economic research tells us that there is no
significant shortfall of workers in essential American industries, desperately
needing supplement from a massive guest-worker program. Those few industries
now relying on cheap labor must focus more quickly on mechanization where
possible. Meanwhile, the cost of paying legal workers already here a bit more
to entice them to do such low-wage work as is needed will have a minimal impact
on our economy.
The
potential woes of a guest-worker program, moreover, far overshadow any economic
benefit, given what we know about the long, troubled history of
temporary-worker programs in developed countries. They have never stemmed
illegal immigration, and the guest workers inevitably become permanent
residents, competing with the native-born and forcing down wages. Our last
guest-worker program with Mexico, begun during World War II to boost wartime
manpower, grew larger in the postwar era, because employers who liked the cheap
labor lobbied hard to keep it. By the mid-1950s, the number of guest workers
reached seven times the annual limit during the war itself, while illegal
immigration doubled, as the availability of cheap labor prompted employers to
search for ever more of it rather than invest in mechanization or other
productivity gains.
The
economic and cultural consequences of guest-worker programs have been
devastating in Europe, and we risk similar problems. When post–World War II
Germany permitted its manufacturers to import workers from Turkey to man the
assembly lines, industry’s investment in productivity declined relative to such
countries as Japan, which lacked ready access to cheap labor. When Germany
finally ended the guest-worker program once it became economically unviable,
most of the guest workers stayed on, having attained permanent-resident status.
Since then, the descendants of these workers have been chronically
underemployed and now have a crime rate double that of German youth.
France
has suffered similar consequences. In the post–World War II boom, when French
unemployment was under 2 percent, the country imported an industrial labor
force from its colonies; by the time France’s industrial jobs began evaporating
in the 1980s, these guest workers and their children numbered in the millions,
and most had made little economic progress. They now inhabit the vast housing
projects, or cités, that ring Paris—and that have recently been the scene of
chronic rioting. Like Germany, France thought it was importing a labor force,
but it wound up introducing a new underclass.
“Importing
labor is far more complicated than importing other factors of production, such
as commodities,” write University of California at Davis prof Philip Martin, an
expert on guest-worker programs, and Michael Teitelbaum, a former member of the
U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. “Migration involves human beings, with
their own beliefs, politics, cultures, languages, loves, hates, histories, and
families.”
If low-wage
immigration doesn’t pay off for the United States, legalizing illegals already
here makes as little sense as importing new rounds of guest workers. The Senate
and President Bush, however, aim to start two-thirds of the 11 million
undocumented aliens already in the country on a path to legalization, on the
grounds that only thus can America assimilate them, and only through assimilation
can they hope for economic success in the United States. But such arguments
ignore the already poor economic performance of increasingly large segments of
the legal immigrant population in the United States. Merely granting
illegal aliens legal status won’t suddenly catapult them up our mobility
ladder, because it won’t give them the skills and education to compete.
At
the same time, legalization will only spur new problems, as our experience with
the 1986 immigration act should remind us. At the time, then-congressman
Charles Schumer, who worked on the legislation, acknowledged that it was “a
riverboat gamble,” with no certainty that it would slow down the waves of
illegals. Now, of course, we know that the legislation had the opposite effect,
creating the bigger problem we now have (which hasn’t stopped Senator Schumer
from supporting the current legalization proposals). The legislation also
swamped the Immigration and Naturalization Service with masses of fraudulent,
black-market documents, so that it eventually rubber-stamped tens of thousands
of dubious applications.
If
we do not legalize them, what can we do with 11 million illegals? Ship them
back home? Their presence here is a fait accompli, the argument goes, and only
legalization can bring them above ground, where they can assimilate. But that
argument assumes that we have only two choices: to decriminalize or deport. But
what happened after the first great migration suggests a third way: to end the
economic incentives that keep them here. We could prompt a great remigration
home if, first off, state and local governments in jurisdictions like New York
and California would stop using their vast resources to aid illegal immigrants.
Second, the federal government can take the tougher approach that it failed to
take after the 1986 act. It can require employers to verify Social Security
numbers and immigration status before hiring, so that we bar illegals from many
jobs. It can deport those caught here. And it can refuse to give those who
remain the same benefits as U.S. citizens. Such tough measures do work: as a
recent Center for Immigration Studies report points out, when the federal
government began deporting illegal Muslims after 9/11, many more illegals who
knew they were likely to face more scrutiny voluntarily returned home.
If America is ever
to make immigration work for our economy again, it must reject policies shaped
by advocacy groups trying to turn immigration into the next civil rights cause
or by a tiny minority of businesses seeking cheap labor subsidized by the
taxpayers. Instead, we must look to other developed nations that have focused
on luring workers who have skills that are in demand and who have the best
chance of assimilating. Australia, for instance, gives preferences to workers grouped
into four skilled categories: managers, professionals, associates of
professionals, and skilled laborers. Using a straightforward “points
calculator” to determine who gets in, Australia favors immigrants between the
ages of 18 and 45 who speak English, have a post–high school degree or training
in a trade, and have at least six months’ work experience as everything from
laboratory technicians to architects and surveyors to information-technology
workers. Such an immigration policy goes far beyond America’s employment-based
immigration categories, like the H1-B visas, which account for about 10 percent
of our legal immigration and essentially serve the needs of a few Silicon
Valley industries.
Immigration
reform must also tackle our family-preference visa program, which today
accounts for two-thirds of all legal immigration and has helped create a
40-year waiting list. Lawmakers should narrow the family-preference visa
program down to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and should exclude
adult siblings and parents.
America
benefits even today from many of its immigrants, from the Asian entrepreneurs
who have helped revive inner-city Los Angeles business districts to Haitians
and Jamaicans who have stabilized neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to
Indian programmers who have spurred so much innovation in places like Silicon
Valley and Boston’s Route 128. But increasingly over the last 25 years, such
immigration has become the exception. It needs once again to become the rule.
JOE LEGAL vs JUAN ILLEGAL
JOE LEGAL STILL GETS THE TAX BILLS FOR JUAN’S WELFARE STATE, UNDERGROUND
ECONOMY, ANCHOR BABY BREEDING FOR 18 YEARS OF WELFARE, OBAMACARE, “FREE”
EDUCATION, “FEE” EMERGENCY ROOM PLAN HEALTHCARE, AND “FREE” DREAM ACTS HANDED
OVER BY THE DEMS TO BUY JUAN’S ILLEGAL VOTES!
The
danger, as Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson argues,
is that of “importing poverty” in the form of a new underclass—a permanent
group of working poor.
THE ENTIRE REASON THE
BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/03/assualt-on-american-worker-joe-legal-vs.html
"We could cut unemployment in half
simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers," said
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs
Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on
immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal
immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce
immigration laws." REP. LAMAR SMITH – OUR NEXT PRESIDENT!
*
Unemployment
rates rise in 28 US states in June…… Obama’s solution? amnesty for 40 million
“unregistered” Mexican dems and legalization of Mexico’s looting!
more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast
The danger, as Washington
Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson argues, is that of “importing
poverty” in the form of a new underclass—a permanent group of working poor.
THE ENTIRE REASON THE
BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/03/assualt-on-american-worker-joe-legal-vs.html
"We could cut unemployment in half
simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers," said
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs
Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on
immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal
immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce
immigration laws." REP. LAMAR SMITH
DURING
OBAMA’S FIRST TERM 2/3s OF ALL JOBS WENT TO IMMIGRANTS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL.
FEDERAL WORKPLACE ENFORCEMENT of LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT of ILLEGALS
PLUMMETED 70% DURING HISPANDERING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM… and are expected to be
nonexistent during his second.
Obama and Justice Sotomayor
(A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER) Vow to Illegals to SABOTAGE E-verify!
VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY?
EMPLOYERS SAY NO TO HIRING AMERICANS… THE COST OF
OBAMACARE IS CHEAPER WHEN THEY HIRE MORE ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY
NUMBERS!
more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast
AMNESTY….LA
RAZA IS PRINTING OUT FRAUD I.D.s BY THE MILLIONS.
"They hauled them down to the
border," Sakuma said. "Three days later, they were standing in our
office, but they had a different name and a different Social Security
number."
DEPORTATION
– MORE LA RAZA and OBAMA PROPAGANDA!
DEMS WORRIED ABOUT INEQUALITY???
THIS
IS THE PARTY THAT HAS MARCHED MILLIONS OF MEXICANS OVER OUR BORDERS AND INTO
OUR JOBS AND VOTING BOOTHS.
OBAMA’S
AMNESTY HOAX TO LEGALIZE MEXICO’S LOOTING ALREADY COSTS US BILLIONS JUST IN CA
ALONE!
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS SABOTAGED
OUR BORDERS, LAWS AND VOTING TO BUILD THE DEMS’ LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF LOOTING
ILLEGALS!
WELFARE – THE
STAGGERING COST OF MEXICO’S LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA. THESE ARE !ONLY! WELFARE COST AND DO NOT INCLUDE THE
COST OF THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE, OR THE ULTIMATE COST OF MEXICO’S ASSAULT
ON OUR BORDERS, LAWS AND CULTURE… Push 2 for English!
According to the Centers for
Immigration Studies, April '11, at least 70% of Mexican illegal alien families
receive some type of welfare in the US!!! cis.org