The Beck presentation is certainly connected to politics and elections. He starts off by blaming Congress for changing the immigration policy in 1965. He then says that people get angry about these numbers. However, they should not be angry with the immigrants. He says that no Congressional action should be taken until they review his charts. Beck clearly blames Congress for our current situation. They are the ones ignoring the popular will of the American people. It is only Congress that change the current glide path we are now on.
Beck's discussion establishes the fact that immigration is above traditional levels (although he never compares it as a percentage of the existing population), which is another discussion altogether.
I don't know how important that fact is. Percentages are less important than acutal numbers. But here are the facts about legal immigration:
Legal immigration alone in the 1990s likely matched or exceeded the previous historical peak decade of 1901-1910, when 8.8 million legal immigrants were admitted. Adding the settlement of illegal aliens makes the 1990s without doubt the period of greatest immigration in America's history.
The present level of immigration is significantly higher than the average historical level of immigration. This flow may be attributed, in part, to the extraordinary broadening of U.S. immigration policy in 1965. Since 1970, more than 30 million legal and illegal immigrants have settled in the U.S., representing more than one-third of all people ever to come to America's shores.
At the peak of the Great Wave of immigration in 1910, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. was less than half of what it is today, though the percentage of the population was slightly higher. The annual arrival of 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants, coupled with 750,000 annual births to immigrant women, is the determinate factor— or three-fourths— of all U.S. population growth.
The foreign-born population of the United States is currently 33.1 million, equal to 11.5 percent of the U.S. population. Of this total, the Census Bureau estimates 8-9 million are illegal immigrants. Other estimates indicate a considerably higher number of illegal immigrants.
Just one example: No one argues for increased immigration out of "compassion" for the Third World, or at least no one I'm aware of.
The Catholic Church for one. La Raza for another. It is also the reason we have the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, which issues 50,000 permanent resident visas. Here are the countries and number of visas for 2007 Notice that Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and the Ukraine receive high allocations.
The arguments in favor of open borders are about the business world's perception that the labor market is too tight, based on our sub-5 percent unemployment rate.
No serious person I am aware of proposes "open borders." Our unemployment rate has not always been under 5 percent since 1965 nor will it be in the future. Tight labor markets also mean higher wages for employees except if you can develop a source of cheap labor and exploit it. The median household income has actually been declining from 1999 to 2005. I believe that illegal immigration has contributed to that decline. That said, I am all in favor of recruiting the skills we need to compete in the world economy. I am not against raising the H1B visa levels. We need highly skilled and educated immigrants, which we select. We don't need the poor and uneducated from Latin America, who select themselves to come here.
Without immigration, the US would be suffering from negative population growth like most of Western Europe and Japan. We just need to control the numbers and types of immigrants. In 30 years, we have added about 100 million people to our population. The next 100 million will take less than that.
Beck never addresses this. At the beginning, he accepts a tight labor market as an unqualified good. What's more, he fails to square our current tight labor market with the out-of-control immigration he describes. How can the two simultaneously exist if Americans are all losing their jobs and wages to immigrants?
Our current tight labor market really exists at the top and bottom of the economic ladder. The median wage has been falling. Economic cycles come and go. Our immigration policy has not changed since 1965. What happens when the unemployment rate goes up? There is no relationship to our immigration policy.
A tight labor market can hamper the expansion of businesses and growth. It can also raise wages. The interests of business don't necessarily coincide with the long term interests of the US in terms of immigration policy. Who is the Cheap Labor Lobby?
What is happening in America is that a plentiful source of cheap labor is depressing wages. This lowers the costs of good and services to the consumer, but it also creates greater disparities in the distribution of wealth. This is the third world model. The Dems are seizing on this issue with Jim Webb leading the way.
Beck's presentation is basically about the numbers. Forget about economics and contemplate the overall impact upon our country and its future. Look at the Rector Study to see how the Senate bill will impact on raising the legal immigration numbers even more. Beck's point is that we can't absorb the numbers under legal immigration, let alone those coming from illegal immigration. Samuelson's What You Don't Know About the Immigration Bill makes a similar point.
Anyone who believes that immigration, legal and illegal, will not be major political issue is in for a rude awakening.
This is all policy stuff, though. Maybe someday it will matter politically. Our discussion from before was about immigration and how it affected the 2006 election. It's a different topic.