Do you have a link to the Insight report?
Here's the first couple of graphs:
It is no secret that tens of thousands of jobs in the software sector are being shipped to India, nor are many unaware that millions of manufacturing jobs, once filled by America's blue-collar middle class, have been moved to Communist China where desperate people are willing to work for substandard wages. What may not be understood is that 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since 2001, and nearly 400,000 ran out of their federal unemployment benefits in January of this year alone. Indeed the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average salary for U.S. workers has fallen from $44,570 to $35,410 since 2001, with nearly 5 million Americans working at part-time employment to make ends meet.
This bleak picture is wholly out of line with the reported "recovery" touted by Alan Greenspan, the top money man at the Federal Reserve. Despite what has been described as a jobless recovery, President George W. Bush last month proposed a more lenient immigration policy in an effort to "create a system that is fairer, more consistent and more compassionate."
The president appears to be responding to upbeat data provided by his top economic advisor, N. Gregory Mankiw, who recently announced that outsourcing American jobs overseas is actually good for the nation's economy. Mankiw assured, "I know there will be jobs in the future," and in fact has predicted 2.6 million new payroll jobs by the end of 2004. Not everyone agrees with that upbeat assessment of the nation's job market.
And the new immigration reform, say critics on both the left and right, invites mass immigration to the United States to "match willing foreign workers with willing U.S. employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs."
According to the fact sheet provided by the White House, "the Federal Government [will] offer temporary-worker status to undocumented men and women now employed in the United States and those in foreign countries who have been offered employment here." While the president's proposal has been short on specifics, the idea is that U.S. employers first must consider Americans for these jobs, the program will prevent exploitation of undocumented workers, and the process will become an incentive for temporary workers to return to their countries of origin when their temporary status expires.
In other words, the estimated 8 million to 12 million undocumented aliens now illegally residing in the United States, and the untold millions of other "willing employees" who may be granted temporary status in the United States, will, after making a living wage, return voluntarily to the countries from which they fled because they could not make ends meet there. Critics of the proposal quote the president's father, who was fond of saying in other contexts, "It doesn't seem prudent."