Americans are dissatisfied with immigration levels

Updated: May 11th, 2023, 3:23 pm
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  by  Jeremy Beck

The New York Times offers another example of how - despite protests to the contrary - lower wages is the desired outcome of immigration-expansionist policy:

Border by the numbers

Agents are processing and releasing so many illegal migrants so quickly that they are missing cases of human trafficking, writes Jessical Vaughan.

The United States has lost track of 20,000 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) released into the country, while others - as young as twelve - have been found working illegally.

"The government is clearly overwhelmed," writes NumbersUSA's Jared Culver.

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Southwest land encounters dropped significantly in January and still broke the 150,000 barrier.

More (less-visible) releases

Part of the administration's new strategy is to redirect the flow through quasi-legal channels. That includes "a new program to allow in up to 30,000 migrants a month from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua through a special parole program while promising to get tough on those who try to come outside the program," according to Stephen Dinan.

In other words, the strategy is to continue to release large numbers into the country, but to make it less visible.

Todd Bensman calls it an "accounting cheat [that] would impress Harry Houdini":

Under the illusion is this hard fact: the CBP One process does not enforce any of the U.S. immigration laws that actually deter mass migration by detaining and deporting. It does nothing to reduce the historic volume of foreign nationals who are pouring in nonstop.

"Instead, the program channels those migrants directly into American cities that will, in growing numbers, declare emergencies and demand federal bailouts to handle the influx."

House Republicans are taking longer to get a corrective border bill to the floor than anticipated. NumbersUSA is urging them to keep their promises.

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The Wages of A Low-Wage Strategy

Working-age men with less than a college degree are falling out of the labor force in record numbers, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. John Mac Ghlionn reports:

For more than 40 years, non-college-educated men have seen their weekly earnings fall some 17 percent; at the same time, college-educated men have seen theirs rise by 20 percent, adjusting for inflation. Depleted salaries have fed a perceived decline in social status, prompting an increasing number of men to leave the workforce entirely."

"Black Americans have paid a huge price for our essentially open border for the last forty years," Batya Ungar-Sargon tells Brendan O'Neill. "Over and over, businesses would rather hire illegal immigrants than hire Black Americans."

We've got a book about that.

Pamela Denise Long says "the U.S. has wasted two generations offshoring American jobs and importing foreign workers."

Let's Change That

We've covered immigration and unionization before. Deena Flinchum has an update from a new study:

The authors note that immigrants have always been less likely to join unions than native-born Americans—33 percent less likely over the past two and a half decades, to be specific. New arrivals are also less likely to feel solidarity with native-born Americans, regardless of their race or national origin, CATO notes.

"That's not a knock on immigrants; it's just human nature."

"It doesn't have to be this way," Flinchum concludes. "Humanely reducing immigration levels would help give American workers more bargaining power."

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Cast Down Your Buckets Where You Are

If we corrected our immigration system to encourage more domestic recruitment, and raised the labor force participation rate to what it was in the year 2000, six and a half million more Americans would be in the workforce today.

You might be old enough to remember when, way back in December, Big Tech lobbied for The Eagle Act, which would have turned guest worker visas into permanent work permits, regardless of numerical limits on employer-based green cards.

Oren Cass sees the irony:

The Realignment


Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump weren't so far apart on immigration in 2016

Do you think working-class Democrats have noticed the low-wage immigration strategy? Ruy Teixeira does:

"Meanwhile, black Americans remain deeply skeptical about unfettered immigration," writes Ungar-Sargon:

'Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,' sociologist and Compact contributor Musa al-Gharbi reported. 'And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or blacks.'"

JEREMY BECK is a V.P., Deputy Director for NumbersUSA