Posted on 07/03/2014 11:03:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
IF ANYONE ought to appreciate the power of immigration to stimulate employment, it is America's energetic anti-immigration advocates, whose jobs wouldn't exist if it weren't for the influx of immigrants they spend their days seeking to curtail.
Then again, appreciating anything about immigration — least of all the ironies of our endless debate on the subject — goes against the restrictionists' grain. Fulminating about immigrants is one of America's enduring pastimes, and it doesn't leave a lot of room for wry humor. Or for logical consistency. Which helps explain why immigrants can be depicted on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as indolent leeches who flock to the United States to go on welfare — and condemned on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for taking away jobsthat would otherwise go to Americans.
Last week the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors sharp reductions in immigration, released a report purporting to show that all net jobs created in the United States over the past 14 years have gone to immigrants, both legal and illegal. Using data collected by the Census Bureau, the report's authors, Steven Camarota and Karen Ziegler, note that between 2000 and 2014, the number of working-age native-born Americans with jobs declined by 127,000, while the number of immigrants with jobs climbed by 5.7 million.
"This is truly remarkable," Camarota and Ziegler write, "because natives accounted for two-thirds of overall population growth among the working-age population." As a result, the number of US-born natives who don't have jobs — both the unemployed as well as those who have dropped out of the labor force altogether — has swelled by 17 million since 2000. The takeaway? Far more native-born Americans would be working if immigrants hadn't soaked up all the job growth since the turn of the 21st century.
But the report's incendiary conclusion — "What employment growth there has been has all gone to immigrants" — doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
To begin with, the number of native-born Americans working in 2014 has not declined since 2000. It has increased by 2.6 million. The authors of the report acknowledge as much — in an endnote, on page 17. It is only by excluding the record-high cohort of workers 65 and older, one of the fastest-growing age groups in the labor market, that Camarota and Ziegler can claim that immigrants are taking all the available new jobs. But it is just as plausible to blame the long-term stagnation in the employment of "working-age" American natives on older employees as on those born in other lands. Should senior citizens who wish to work be forced to retire at 65?
In the zero-sum world of the anti-immigrant advocates, foreign-born workers can only gain at the expense of the native-born. But in the real world, immigration generally enlarges the economy, boosts productivity, and adds jobs. Immigrants amount to less than 13 percent of the US population. Yet 28 percent of all new American companies launched in 2011, as Rupert Murdoch wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay last month, were founded by immigrants.
Broadly speaking, immigrant workers and US-born workers are not substitutes but complements; because they tend to have different skills, they generally don't compete for the same jobs. Immigrants are more likely to be employed at the high or low ends of the labor market, explains Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, while most Americans have skills in the middle. Supplying the immigrant skills needed by the economy simultaneously enlarges demand for native skills.
Restrictionists hint at some kind of inverse correlation between gains in employment for US-born and foreign-born workers, but they can't show what doesn't exist. Look past their tendentious presentation of the data, as Nowrasteh wrote about an earlier Center for Immigration Studies report, and you notice that for the most part "net gains in employment for natives and immigrants move in the same direction." When natives gain, immigrants gain, and vice versa. We all work in the same labor market.
Which isn't to say that all workers are created equal. Not only are immigrants disproportionately entrepreneurial, they are also more likely to move to wherever work is to be found. Almost by definition, newcomers to the United States are self-selected for mobility and flexibility. Less encumbered by local ties, they're quicker to take advantage of employment opportunities. Their hustle is admirable, not a cause for resentment.
Immigrants aren't taking jobs that "belong" to Americans. They are fueling the economic engine that creates more opportunity for everyone, and we would be poorer by far without them.
Individual circumstances may vary, but that’s about the gist of it. You can send home and/or save a hell of a lot of $$$ when some other sap is paying all your living expenses.
“I suggest Jeff Jacoby move to a town near where any commercial agriculture is done. Little Mexico shit holes with high crime where drunks roam/fight in the streets and everything nearby is stripped of copper and aluminum at night - even guardrails on the highway... These people don’t even begin to pay the cost of law enforcement and providing their many children with a public education.”
He can come to the NYC metro area and see the same nonsense. The healthcare costs have closed up some hospitals already; the state that requires them to treat illegals continuously reduces the reimbursement until they have to close...
Yep, and after a few years Pedro will start his own construction business, employing many more just like him.
AS soon as his wife squirts out a few ‘lottery’ pups they can get green cards and citizenship.
Entry-level low-skill workers are bidding each other down, down, down for the available jobs, and our own unemployed --- mainly male, youth, and minority --- are bidding-down against the poorest people in the hemisphere.
"Aha," says the lib policy wonk. "That's why we have to raise the minimum wage!"
Which guarantees that the workforce will be cut, and/or mechanized. They've got a robot now that forms, grills, assembles with the fixin's, and wraps burgers , 360 of them a hour, at a price that it'll pay for itself in a year.
Ain't nobody can compete with that.
And you don''t have to deal with unions and employee pilfering ("inventory shrinkage").
If we have a 90% unemployed rate for black teenagers in the cities, the blitzkrieg of illegal aliens working under the table at every city restaurant is not conducive to solving the black teenage problem. Business owners who hire illegals earn a “Smuggler’s Profit” and have a huge advantage over businesses that obey the law. Legal immigration prevents this from happening.
America is being taken for a sucker!
We are paying for our own unemployed, our own infirm and our own disabled and our own welfare recipients, and now we are paying for the illegals who get medical care and education and welfare. And the ones in prison, we pay for them as well. It is a no-win situation.
tell that to the teens who can't find entry-level jobs after highschool, or the grandmoms, who can't find entry-level jobs after "retirement."
Years ago I remember Ann Coulter writing that maybe it was before WWII when we had high levels of immigration here that about 60% of the immigrants eventually returned to their home country. Like maybe they didn’t find the “pot of gold” here. But theses were the days before all the welfare benefits were available like they are now. And also, America now gives preferred status (e.g., affirmative action) to anyone who’s non white.
And I think that LEGAL immigration is also a disaster. Born and raised people here are in short order feeling like they’re living in a foreign country where they’re not even appreciated for what legacy they and their predecessors created for the “new arrivals”. And It’s just all conspiring to very rapidly turn this country into the kind of place that elects people like Barrack Obama. In other words, I think America’s a sinking ship because of immigration policies and I don’t see the fix.
Jeff Jacoby has always billed himself as a conservative but, in my experience, often reaches while posing as a conservative, to deliver a message destructive of the rule of law, which is an essential quality of the American republic. Here he joins the WSJ editorial page and Larry Kudlow with the same misrepresentative argument. Those Americans who suffer actual injury under this policy of amnesty are forbidden to take legal action to recover. How does that improve the country? It doesn’t. Instead it destroys the rule of law.
It is RACIST to impose SLAVE wages on LEGAL immigrants and minorities, by flooding the labor market with ILLEGAL Immigrants.
Find me an English speaking landscape laborer.
I had a lot of work done 5 years ago by a local landscape/hardscape contractor who had an entirely Black American crew. Most everyone else in that business around here has Hispanic crews, many likely illegal.
Three years ago, he threw in the towel for similar reasons.
It’s not all about the jobs, what concerns me more is the general wage suppression.
I disagree completely. We've exceeded our carrying capacity of new immigrants. We need about 20 years of very low immigration numbers to give what we've got a chance to assimilate. This was the historical norm until the latter part of the 20th century. We would have large waves of immigration, then respites where they would have a chance to merge into society.
We've been taking it like water from a firehose for 30+ years now. Time to shut it off for a while.
Repeat illegals previously deported should have "IA" tatooed on their forehead, then deported again. 3rd attempt should employ branding.
Pretty much agree....................
But if the illegals were deported would there be large numbers of immigrants to assimilate? No. If the illegals were removed then whatever it is that you fear would largely be irrelevant. We would have law abiding immigrants coming here - sounds good to me.
By the way, any time the phrase “carrying capacity” is used it sets off red flags that a Malthusian enviro-wacko is among us. Not that you used the term in that manner - just a heads up.
Of course they want our jobs. That’s why they come here. That want my job, they want your job. The question in the title is ridiculous.
ILLEGAL immigration. ILLEGAL Mr. Jacoby you tool.
Look it up. Or did Townhall throw away all of it’s dictionaries?
I did years ago.
Again, I think we've exceeded our limit for integrating even the 'legal' immigrants that are already here.
By the way, any time the phrase “carrying capacity” is used it sets off red flags that a Malthusian enviro-wacko is among us. Not that you used the term in that manner - just a heads up.
Yeah, there is that, but the phrase is pretty descriptive, in pretty much the precise way I was trying to use it.
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