The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media:
“President Joe Biden is looking to increase legal immigration levels across the board — a plan that has drawn criticism from immigration restrictionists who warn about the possible economic fallout. But economists say increasing legal immigration to the US could potentially aid the country’s economic recovery from the pandemic recession. . . .
“But immigration restrictionists have argued that it could impede the economic recovery from the pandemic by allowing foreign workers to compete with Americans for wages. . . .
“Some of the best-known research on the topic focuses on a single period of immigration in 1980, a time when the local economy was already suffering from high unemployment and high inflation.
“The so-called ‘Mariel boatlift’ brought roughly 125,000 Cubans, more than half of whom were high-school dropouts, to Miami over the course of five months after communist dictator Fidel Castro loosened emigration restrictions. . . .
“University of California Berkeley’s David Card found no significant effect on the wages of native-born Americans in Miami as a result of the boatlift. Harvard’s George Borjas, on the other hand, found that native-born males without a high school degree saw their wages decrease between 10 and 30 percent. Other economists have shed doubt on Borjas’ results,. . . .
“Immigration just doesn’t affect native-born wages or employment very much, the negative effects tend to be short term and the positive effects tend to be long term, writes Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies and the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. . . .
“Immigration restrictionists, therefore, seem to be overstating the negative effect of immigration on American workers’ wages while overlooking the potential benefits of bringing in more foreign workers. . . .
“Even immigrants and Americans who have the same educational levels and who might otherwise seem interchangeable, therefore, might not necessarily be competing for the same jobs. . . .“ – Biden’s Plan to Increase Legal Immigration Could Aid the Pandemic Economy Recovery, Nicole Narea, Vox, 6/11/21. [Link]
Fact of Above Quote: George Borjas is not just any economist. He is “America’s leading immigration economist” in the words of both Business Week and The Wall Street Journal. His extensive research has repeatedly shown that mass immigration harms American workers, particularly those at the bottom of our economic ladder.
Indeed, Borjas reveals that mass immigration helps to transfer wealth from the not-so-well-off to the wealthy. As immigrant labor suppresses wages levels for working-class Americans, the businesses that hire immigrants reap higher profits. It’s sort of like Robin Hood in reverse: robbing from the poor and giving to the rich.
Thus it is not surprising that immigration enthusiasts do whatever they can to discredit Borjas’ research. The writer of this article claims that “Other economists have shed doubt on [his] results.” She fails to note the doubt that Borjas, in return, has shed on their findings.
If the economic law of supply and demand has any meaning, it is unavoidable that more workers will place downward pressure on wages. Immigration enthusiasts try to get around this reality by claiming that immigrants mainly do jobs that Americans don’t want, so there is little competition which would drive down U.S. wages. This claim, however, is not true. In almost every U.S. job category, native-born Americans are the majority of workers.
The enthusiasts commonly maintain that immigration is good for the economy because of the alleged benefits of increasing the number of consumers, or the supposed number of immigrant entrepreneurs. One number they don’t mention is the number of new immigrant voters who vote for the Democrats, and their socialistic policies, by a margin on two to one.
Such policies bring economic stagnation. A case in point is Democrat-run California, the state with highest number and percentage of immigrants, and also one of the worst business climates in the U.S. Before mass immigration, California attracted business and had a thriving middle-class. Today it increasingly has the economic profile of a Third World country with a sharp division between rich and poor—and not much in between.
Immigration enthusiasts can point to some studies to back up their claims. Immigration restrictionists also can point to studies to support their view—as well as to what happens in the real world.