Take away the FreeStuff and you'd be amazed at how many able, but not working AMERICANS, would get up off of their, er, couches...and get to work.
Many conservative advocates of high immigration respond that the reason so many natives are not working is that welfare is more attractive than work. There is clearly much truth in this argument. But, partly as a result of welfare reform, the number of people who work and receive non-cash welfare (e.g. food stamps, WIC, Medicaid) has greatly increased. Moreover, one of the reasons that welfare is attractive is that so many jobs pay less than they used to. Continually flooding the labor market with even more legal immigrant workers can only make this problem worse. Moreover, as I have pointed out before, immigrant households use non-cash welfare at higher rates than native households do.
There has also been a huge increase in Social Security disability, some of which surely reflects people gaming the system. But the numerical increase is nowhere near enough to explain the massive rise in non-work. Besides, people can work part-time and still collect disability payments. What’s more, the biggest increase in non-work is among the young, who are least likely to be disabled. Reforming welfare (again) and disability would certainly help in getting more people back into the labor market. But there has also been a big increase in people who are not working and not getting government assistance. If we hope to draw these folks back into jobs, then increasing wages and creating a tighter job market by reducing immigration would be extremely helpful. The Obama-Schumer-Ryan-Rubio-Paul-Boehner approach of dramatically increasing immigration makes absolutely no sense.