Immigration Robs Poor to Benefit Rich

Virtually every credible economist has found that immigration increases growth, tax revenue, and wages—with the exception of a modest decrease in wages for those without a high school education. . . . No serious person can argue that we don’t have a shortage in the high-tech fields. . . .” – Jennifer Rubin, Right Turn column, washingtonpost.com, 1/6/15.

Fact Check: Perhaps the most credible economist on these issues is Dr. George Borjas of Harvard University. Business Week and the Wall Street Journal describe him as “America’s leading immigration economist.”

He agrees that immigration increases the size of the economy, just as it increases the size of the population. But the net benefit of immigration (legal and illegal) to native-born Americans is only $35 billion a year, or just 0.2 percent of the total GDP of the U.S. This gain, however, comes at the expense from a total reduction of U.S. workers’ wages per year of $402 billion—this reduction being the consequence of competition from immigrant workers.

Basically, immigration enriches America’s rich—often by providing them higher profits from the use of cheap immigrant labor—while reducing the incomes of poor and relatively poor Americans. Rubin dismisses their losses as “modest,” but for people who have trouble making ends meet, even a “modest” reduction is far from insignificant.

As for taxes, immigrants indeed pay them, but because many of them are low-income they receive more in social benefits than they pay into the system. Confirming this fiscal loss from immigration was the 1997 study conducted by the National Research Council, the most extensive study to date on the benefits and liabilities of immigration.

Lower-income American workers, however, are not the only Americans harmed by our immigration policies. Despite Rubin’s claim, plenty of serious people maintain that we don’t have a shortage of Americans to fill jobs in high-tech or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.

In fact, the Census Bureau reports that “only 26 percent of people with any type of four-year STEM degree are working in a STEM field. For those with a degree specifically in computer science, math or statistics, the figure is 49 percent, nearly the same for engineering degrees.”

Why aren’t they working in the fields for which they have trained? A big reason is that U.S. companies desiring cheap labor and servile workers have use the false claim of a worker shortage to import foreigners under temporary programs. “There is no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there is a shortage in the conventional sense,” observes Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. He adds that “[companies] may not be able to find [workers] at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

Salzman recently did a study for the Economic Policy Institute which found that real wages in tech fields haven’t increased since 1999. If there truly has been an on-going shortage of workers, wages would have risen—and risen significantly. “It seems pretty clear,” notes Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy research, “that the [tech] industry just wants lower-cost labor.”

Rubin claims to be a conservative, but it is clear that her version of conservatism has little to do with conserving the standards and character of our country. It’s mainly about conserving the advantages of economic elites. Their policy is the reverse of Robin Hood’s: rob from the poor and give to the rich.

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