The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“With the imminent demise of Title 42, which led to the automatic expulsion of many seeking asylum in the United States, scary stories about an ‘immigration surge’ and ‘border crisis’ are reliably back in the news. Politicians have mostly taken this opportunity to fearmonger about how our country will soon be overrun with ‘illegals.’ Rather than stoking panic, they should find ways to match the overwhelming need for workers in nearly every field at home to the overwhelming demand for entry from people who live abroad.
“Because right now there are . . . major challenges that a revamped immigration system could help solve. [They] require increasing legal immigration, rather than curbing it. . . .
One is the continued mismatch between demand for workers and the supply of available workers, which has disrupted supply chains. As of February, there were still nearly twice as many job vacancies as . . . unemployed workers available to fill those vacancies. . . . .
“But the Biden administration is still failing to process work permits for asylum seekers as quickly as the law requires, which means a lot of these immigrants might not be legally allowed to work. . . .
“Both parties have promised to mostly spare changes to Social Security and Medicare. Unfortunately, those two programs are among those facing the biggest budgetary challenges, thanks to demographic trends: The country is aging, fertility rates are well below replacement level, and so we do not have sufficient numbers of working-age people paying into the system to fund all the retirement benefits already promised.
“Again, there is a magic bullet to this: bring in more working-age immigrants. And yet this obvious solution has barely been discussed. Perhaps politicians have decided that the politics of immigration are too toxic to broach, even in service of a relatively painless solution to fiscal challenges.
“Beyond these acute problems, immigration, of course, offers other longer-term benefits. Our ability to attract the world’s best talent has supercharged U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship. And our reputation as a haven for persecuted peoples has served our strategic geopolitical interests over the years.
“Look, I’m not going to promise that more immigration will cure all of the nation’s ills. But it would help resolve a lot of the big ones.” — Earth to Politicians: The U.S. Has Too Few Immigrants — Not Too Many, Catherine Rampell. The Washington Post, 5/2/23 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: This writer, Catherine Rampell, thinks we have “too “few” immigrants, even as their total has risen to 48 million—far and away the highest level in our history. Today, one in seven inhabitants of the U.S. is an immigrant. In 1990, the ratio was just one in thirteen. Like most immigration enthusiasts, Ramnpell can’t seem to imagine that immigration—legal or illegal—could ever cause any problems. Thus, she mocks people who think that an out-of-control border could be scary or a crisis. If you don’t care about such things as American sovereignty and our rule of law, a broken border is indeed no reason to worry.
Rampell repeats the well-worn claim that we must flood our country with foreign workers to keep from having a “labor shortage.” She fails to note that an unflooded labor market is of great benefit to American workers because it encourages employers to raise wages and improve working conditions. Perhaps this is not one of her concerns because immigrants seldom compete for jobs as Washington Post columnists. Another reason not to take the “labor shortage” too seriously is that automation is rapidly replacing many jobs done by people. Within the next decade, millions of Americans now employed will have to look for work elsewhere because of this shift.
Contrary to Rampell’s assertion, mass immigration under current law is not going to bail out Social Security and Medicare by significantly lowering the average age of our population. The reason is that immigrants aren’t sufficiently young or fertile to make a great change in the nation’s profile of aging. Furthermore, the fact that so many immigrants work at low wage jobs means that their use of social services greatly exceeds their contributions to Social Security and Medicare. Rather than immigration, a better solution for those programs is raising the age for eligibility.
As immigration enthusiasts trumpet the alleged benefits of mass immigration, they never entertain the possibility of any downsides. They refuse to consider that unchecked diversity could weaken our national unity, a situation which will exacerbate every other problem in our society. Catherine Rampell says she won’t promise that immigration will cure all our ills. Earth to Catherine: That’s exactly what you and your fellow enthusiasts promise.