The clock runs out on S. 744 in January, but we have to get through the Fall and the looming lame duck session first. The lame duck has long been circled on the calendar as the most dangerous time for us, not just for legislative mischief but also for executive amnesty. As the mid-term election season heats up and boils over into the anticipated battles around the holidays, we're going to see the press-release-driven media fired up as well.
Our discussions about immigration have the dual tasks of exposing amnesty and expansion as the damaging public policies that they are, while also laying the ground work for some positive things to happen in the next Congress.
The best tool to pry open the minds of reporters may very well be the work of other reporters. These stories provide terrific (horrific?) context for any discussion of legalization or immigration expansion:
From "One-fifth of U.S. workers were laid off in past five years, study says," by Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2014:
- "One in five U.S. workers was laid off in the past five years and about 22% of those who lost their jobs still haven't found another one"
- "Almost half -- 46% -- of the estimated 30 million layoff victims who found new jobs said they paid less then their old ones..."
- "Asked to compare their salary and savings now to five years ago, 42% said they had less. That figure included 25% of respondents who said they had 'a lot less.'"
From "The American Middle Class Hasn't Gotten a Raise in 15 Years," by Ben Casselman, FiveThirtyEight, September 22, 2014:
- "...almost no matter how we break down the population, incomes are down since 1999. Moreover, most groups saw little if any improvement in income between 1999 and 2007, before the recession began..."
- "....And middle class incomes haven't just been stagnant. The middle class itself has also been shrinking."
From "Harvard survey finds falling wages, more part-time jobs and firms favoring robots over people," by Josh Boak, Associated Press, September 8, 2014:
- "The corporate executives who decide whether U.S. workers get meaningful raises have looked at the broader economy and have a message: Don't expect a pay increase anytime soon. And if you're counting on a full-time job offer in the future, your prospects may be dimming. That's the future that many U.S. executives envision."
From Why the Middle Class Isn't Buying Talk About Economic Good Times," by Neil Irwin, The Upshot, New York Times, August 20, 2014:
- "Middle-class American families' income is lower now, when adjusted for inflation, than when the recovery began half a decade ago."
This headline says it all: "The middle class is 20 percent poorer than it was in 1984" by Matt O'Brien, Wonkblog, Washington Post, July 29, 2014.
From "The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less," by Anna Bernasek, New York Times, July 26, 2014:
- "The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline."
From "Recovery Has Created Far More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones," by Annie Lowrey, New York Times, April 27, 2014:
- "With joblessness high and job gains concentrated in low-wage industries, hundreds of thousands of Americans have accepted positions that pay less than they used to make, in some cases, sliding out of the middle class and into the ranks of the working poor."
From "The Decline of Work," Wall Street Journal editorial, April 4, 2014:
- "The labor force participation rate, which measures the active portion of available workers not including drop-outs, now stands at 63.2%, a level last seen in August 1978..."
- "The total post-recession drop in labor participation approaches three percentage points, but what's notable is that the plunge has continued during the expansion..."
- "...after several years of 2% economic growth since 2009, the share of mid-career workers in their best earning years who are on the job is still historically and unusually low..."
- "All of this harms the country by losing the GDP that the missing workers would contribute and by spending far more on social programs. But the human costs are worse. People who want a job are losing a paycheck and the dignity of work, and the larger U.S. culture of work could be eroding."
From "More Men in Prime Working Ages Don't Have Jobs" by Mark Peter and David Wessel, Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2014:
- "More than one in six men ages 25 to 54, prime working years, don't have jobs -- a total of 10.4 million."
- "In the early 1970s, just 6% of American men ages 25 to 54 were without jobs. By late 2007, it was 13%. In 2009, during the worst of the recession, nearly 20% didn't have jobs."
- "Since the early 1970s, the average inflation-adjusted wage for high-school dropouts has fallen about 25%; for high-school graduates with no college degree, it is down about 15%. Simply put, many of the available jobs don't pay enough to get men to take them, particularly if securing a job requires moving, long commutes or surrendering government benefits."
- "Veterans typically can find $9-to $12-an-hour jobs in security or customer service, said Dale Prickett, who has worked with vets at a nonprofit community center and a college. The men, he said, are surprised at how tough it is to find $40,000-a-year jobs with a career path: 'It is a shot to the gut.'"
This interview with Roy from August is - as one of you put it to me, a "succinct/easily digestible" read on NumbersUSA's goals and strategies. Excerpt:
LW: What do you think is the most misunderstood or overlooked aspect of immigration?
RB: The cumulative size and effect of immigration policy. Most Americans have no idea that we give out lifetime work permits to around 10 million new immigrants each decade, or that that compares with around 3 million each decade on average before the current immigration wave was restarted by Congress in 1965. Most Americans and nearly all government leaders fail to consider that immigration policies have added (through new immigrants and births to immigrants) the majority of population growth while the U.S. burgeoned from 200 million in 1970 to nearly 320 million today. Nor that without immigration, the U.S. population would rise toward 400 million this century, but under current policies it is likely to surpass 600 million. All of this means that nearly all the frantic efforts to expand our infrastructure of roads, schools, sewage treatment, water, recreation, etc. are expenses directly related to immigration policies. Without mass immigration, America would have a chance to repair and replace the aging and crumbling infrastructures for the existing population rather than always putting that off to handle expansions.
If current immigration policies continue and double U.S. population this century, every single aspect of American life will be profoundly changed for our children and grandchildren by the end of this century -- individual liberty, personal mobility, quality of infrastructure, access to open spaces, freedom to live somewhere other than congested megalopolises, economic opportunity.
Polling consistently finds that those changes by mass immigration are opposed by large majorities of Americans of every political party, ideology, ethnicity, religion, income status and education.
Given the context above, two questions emerge:
Who should get the next jobs: Americans and legal immigrants already here, or do we bring in more immigrants to compete for the jobs?
Who should get the next jobs: Americans and legal immigrants already here, or someone in the country illegally who would benefit from an executive amnesty?
JEREMY BECK is the Director of the Media Standards Project for NumbersUSA
