We bring in 1.2 million LEGAL immigrants. 25% of the adults lack even a high school diploma. We are importing hundreds of thousands of high school dropouts annually. 57% of immigrant headed households with children are on welfare.
Also, if we are not producing enough engineers, there is nothing wrong with bringing in new citizen engineers who will pass this professional approach down for generations.
I agree we should have a merit based immigration system that brings in the people we need to be competitive in the global economy. However, we need to also reduce our legal immigration numbers. We don't need 1.2 million legal immigrants a year while 23 million Americans are looking for fulltime employment.
The decade ending in 2010 was the highest number of legal, permanent immigrants in our history--13.9 million--yet we saw a loss of 400,000 jobs during the same period. Immigration has nothing to do with meeting our job requirements.
The rationale the Left and the Chamber of Commerce gives for bringing in unskilled labor is that they are doing the jobs Americans will not do. Now, it is switching to skilled, white collar workers who do work Americans can't do. This is nonsense. It is all about cheap, exploitable labor. Americans are being priced out of the labor market as the average household income drops $4,500 in the last four years.