More Misinformation from the Media:
“But the debate goes beyond wages, research conducted by William Olney, associate professor of economics at Williams college, has found the availability of more low-skilled workers can prompt existing businesses to expand operations. Immigration also increases the number of small businesses in mobile, law-skilled intensive industries, such as manufacturing, wholesale trade and transportation and warehousing.
“Total immigrants, both legal and unauthorized, comprise roughly 17 percent, or more than 26 million, of the civilian U.S. workforce.
“It’s very difficult to imagine the economy functioning without this workforce, which has grown so large over a long period of time,” said Pia Orrenius, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Fewer immigrants could mean lowered rates of U.S. productivity, less innovation and fewer small businesses that are created. “It would create enormous problems that economists would call a recession.
“U.S. innovation can also get a boost from immigrant college graduates. . . . They patent at a rate higher than native workers. . . . Olney and other entrepreneurship researchers have found high levels of business creation among immigrants. . . .” – The Front Line in a Trump Immigration War: State Economies, Heesun Wee, special to CBS.com, 7/18/16
Fact Check: This article, unlike most pro-immigration articles, acknowledges that immigration can have downsides such as wage suppression. This is commendable. Nevertheless, the author attempts to make the case by citing various authorities that the status quo of immigration offers far more benefits than liabilities.
The key idea it puts forth is that a steady flow of immigrants is necessary to have an adequate supply of workers. But the truth of the matter is that we already have plenty of people who could work. Seven years ago, 80 million Americans 16 years and older were not participating in the labor force. This year the total reached 94 million. Many of them, of course, are students and retired people. But the number in the prime working age bracket of 25 to 64 totals more than 40 million.
Immigration is playing a role in this American exodus from the workforce by taking available jobs and driving down wage levels. The article notes that 26 million legal and illegal immigrants hold jobs in the U.S. No one is suggesting that legal immigrants go home. Encouraging the slow but steady exit of the remaining seven million illegal workers with effective immigration law enforcement would not throw a monkey wrench into the economy. As they leave, available Americans could take their places.
In the coming decades, we’re simply not going to need significant numbers of immigrants. Today we stand on the cusp of a great revolution of automation and mechanized labor. A study done at Oxford University two years ago projected that by 2033, just 18 year from now, nearly half the jobs in the U.S. now done by people would be done by machines.
The notion that immigrants have vastly superior talent as entrepreneurs doesn’t hold water. Statistics from the Census Bureau show that they and natives have almost exactly the same rate of business ownership. In any case, immigrants are much more likely to be welfare recipients than entrepreneurs. The claim that immigrants are more innovative and more likely to get patents is debatable.
Those who maintain that we must have mass immigration to thrive and innovate need to explain how America thrived, prospered and innovated in such an outstanding degree between 1920 and 1970 when we significantly restricted immigration.