In Liberty and Tyranny, I explained how this wave of immigration was triggered by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which introduced a system of chain migration—that is, awarding preferences to family members of citizens and resident aliens. This was a radical departure from past immigration policy. For the first time, the law empowered immigrants in the United States to elicit further immigration into the country through family reunification. The late author Theodore White wrote that “the Immigration Act of 1965 changed all previous patterns, and in so doing, probably changed the future of America. . . . [I]t was noble, revolutionary—and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society.”6 As a result, in subsequent years immigrants have been poorer, less educated, and less skilled than those who preceded them—a pattern that continues today.7
Moreover, President Barack Obama, as a matter of unilateral executive policy, and in contravention of existing immigration law, has severely weakened deportation efforts. A report issued by Senator Jeff Sessions (R, Ala.) reveals that “interior deportations have fallen 23 percent since [2014] alone, and have been halved since 2011—when then–Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director (ICE) [John] Morton issued the so-called Morton Memos exempting almost all illegal immigrants from enforcement and removal operations. The effective result of the Administration’s non-enforcement policy is that anyone in the world who manages to get into the interior of the United States—by any means, including overstaying a visa—is free to live, work, and claim benefits in the United States at Americans’ expense.”8 In fact, Obama has gone further. In an unprecedented and unconstitutional act, he issued the so-called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which seeks to legalize nearly 5 million illegal aliens. As the Washington Post editorialized: “Mr. Obama’s move flies in the face of congressional intent.”9 For now, the federal courts, at the request of numerous states, have stayed the implementation of Obama’s fiat. The matter is likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
As Dr. Huntington described, the massive influx of aliens has been rationalized, in part, by what European scholars have promoted and conceptualized as “societal security.” It is an attempt to justify the deleterious effect unfettered, unassimilated immigration has on a society. It refers to “the ability of a society to persist in its essential character under changing conditions and possible or actual threats”; “the sustainability, within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and religious and national identity and custom.” Dr. Huntington wrote that it “is concerned above all with identity, the ability of a people to maintain their culture, institutions, and way of life.”10 However, in the United States, he added, “America has . . . been a nation of immigration and assimilation, and assimilation has meant Americanization. Now, however, immigrants are different; the institutions and processes related to assimilation are different; and, most importantly, America is different. . . .”11 “Assimilation of current immigrants is . . . likely to be slower, less complete, and different from the assimilation of earlier immigrants. Assimilation no longer necessarily means Americanization.”12
If assimilation no longer means Americanization, then in what kind of society will younger people and future generations live? Princeton University professor Dr. Douglas Massey points out that as a result of continuing high levels of immigration “the character of ethnicity will be determined relatively more by immigrants and relatively less by later generations, shifting the balance of ethnic identity toward the language, culture, and ways of life in the sending society.”13 Therefore, immigration without assimilation and Americanization undercuts the civil society as ethnic, racial, and religious groups self-segregate. The problem is magnified further when a nation abandons its own culture to promote multiculturalism, dual citizenship, bilingualism, and so on, and institutes countless policies and laws promoting and protecting the practices of balkanized groups and their infinite array of grievances.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) explains that as of 2010, there were approximately 40 million legal and illegal immigrants residing in the United States—an increase of 28 percent from 2000.14 One in five public school students (or 10.4 million) are from an immigrant home. It is further estimated that 28 percent of all immigrants are in the country illegally.15 The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has performed an analysis of the latest effort to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants and concluded that it would increase the immigrant population by about 10 million (approximately 3 percent) in 2023 and some 16 million people (about 4 percent) by 2033.16
Open-ended immigration takes a considerable toll on the job prospects of younger and less-skilled workers, as well as college-educated graduates. Typically, younger workers (those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine) are competing with recent immigrants for similar jobs. Many younger people begin working as waiters, construction workers, or grocery-store clerks. These are the types of jobs many illegal immigrants also seek. “How can that be?” you might ask. After all, as the argument goes, illegal immigrants do jobs Americans will not do. For example, the United States Chamber of Commerce advocates widespread amnesty to enable its members—mostly large corporations—to “utilize immigrant labor when U.S. workers are said not to be available.”17 The National Restaurant Association supports amnesty, in part, because “[t]here are too many jobs Americans won’t do.”18 The Independent Institute, a libertarian group, has insisted that low-skilled immigrants “do jobs that wouldn’t exist if the immigrants weren’t there to do them.”19 It claims that immigrants “aren’t substitutes for American labor.”20 They “free up American labor to do jobs where it is more productive.”21 The facts demonstrate otherwise.
Using the federal government’s own statistics, CIS explains that the Census Bureau has identified what it classifies as 472 civilian occupations. Of those occupations, six are considered majority immigrant (legal and illegal). Those six occupations amount to about 1 percent of the total workforce. However, jobs that are stereotypically thought to comprise mainly immigrants actually comprise mostly American citizens. Maids and housekeepers are 51 percent citizen; taxi drivers are 58 percent citizen; butchers are 63 percent citizen; landscapers or grounds workers are 64 percent citizen; construction workers are 66 percent citizen; porters, bellhops, and concierges are 72 percent citizen; and janitors are 73 percent citizen.22
Moreover, 16.5 million citizens have jobs in the sixty-seven occupations composed of a significant percentage of immigrants (25 percent or more).23 In other words, millions of Americans work in jobs that are incorrectly but widely considered “immigrant-type.” These “high-immigrant occupations” are mainly “lower-wage jobs” requiring “little formal education.” Notably, citizens in “high-immigrant occupations” have a much higher unemployment rate than citizens who work in jobs with a smaller percentage of immigrants.24 The logical conclusion is that although Americans hold more of the jobs in occupations that have a higher percentage of immigrants, untold numbers of Americans, particularly younger and less skilled, are having more difficulty finding jobs in these occupations as immigrants are filling a growing percentage of them.
As it happens, on April 22, 2015, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in part, that “Between 1970 and 2013, the estimated foreign-born population in the United States increased from 9,740,000 to 41,348,066, respectively, an increase of 31,608,066 persons, representing a percentage increase of 324.5% over this 43 year period; . . . [t]he reported income of the bottom 90% of tax filers in the United States decreased from an average of $33,621 in 1970 to $30,980 in 2013 for an aggregate decline of $2,641 or a percent decline of 7.9% over this 43 year period; . . . [t]he share of income held by the bottom 90% of the U.S. income distribution declined from 68.5% in 1970 to 53.0% in 2013, an absolute decline of 15.5 percentage points over this 43 year period.”25
Thus, statist immigration policies centered o
n endless waves of legal and illegal immigration have contributed significantly to the income deterioration of low-income American earners and the “inequality gap” between rich and poor, which the statists claim to abhor.
Although it is also repeatedly alleged that America must open immigration further to accommodate increased numbers of high-skilled and high-tech workers because the country is supposedly failing to produce enough homegrown college graduates with science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) skills to fill the demands of the fast-paced market, this, too, is false. Despite America’s mediocre education system, the evidence demonstrates that enough college students in the STEM disciplines are graduating to fill the market’s demand. A thorough analysis by scholars Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell from the Economic Policy Institute found that “for every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.”26
The report further states that “of the computer science graduates not entering the [information technology] workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable, and 53 percent say they found better job opportunities outside of IT occupations.”27 The three scholars conclude this indicates “that the supply of graduates (in STEM related fields) is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry.”28 Indeed, while demanding that the federal government substantially increase the number of high-skilled and high-tech immigrants in the country, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, American Express, Procter and Gamble, T-Mobile, and Microsoft recently slashed tens of thousands of employees.29 The Census Bureau reports that “74 percent of those who have a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering and math—commonly referred to as STEM—are not employed in STEM occupations.”30
Furthermore, in the STEM-related industries “wages have remained flat” and are “hovering around their late 1990’s levels.”31 That means the salaries of professionals in these fields have not increased in the last sixteen years. While salaries have not increased, “the flow of guestworkers has increased over the past decade and continues to rise.”32 “The annual inflows of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half the number of all new IT job holders.”33
Salzman, Kuehn, and Lowell conclude that “Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.”34 Consequently, immigration policies designed to increase the number of high-tech workers ensure that wages are kept lower than they otherwise might be.
At the other end of the formal education spectrum, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that high school dropouts “face a much higher unemployment rate than the national average.” In 2012–13, dropouts had an unemployment rate of 27.9 percent.35 The Foundation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that dropouts have been identified as the group “who face competition for jobs most directly from illegal aliens.”36 The number of unemployed citizens “without a high school diploma increased by 18.7 percent while the number of unemployed foreign-born persons decreased by 24.8 percent.”37 Despite the supposed economic recovery “following the Great Recession, employers continued to favor illegal alien labor despite millions of less-educated Americans who were unemployed.”38
Clearly, current immigration policies and trends are devastating to America’s younger people and future generations.
Andrew Sum and Ishwar Khatiwada, scholars with the Center for Labor Market Statistics at Northeastern University, explain that employment as a teen and young adult is particularly important and has a “wide array of private and social economic and educational benefits.”39 High unemployment among these younger people (like high unemployment generally) “reduces the volume of labor inputs into the production process and the level of real output of the U.S. economy.”40 Without a job, younger people lose the opportunity to gain experience and become more valuable for higher-skilled jobs, which they may seek in the future. In fact, the earnings of teens and younger adults are “used to generate additional consumption expenditures on goods and services, thereby raising aggregate demand throughout the economy and the level of employment of other adult workers.”41
In addition, employment at a young age discourages dropping out of high school. “[A] number of studies of the in high school work experiences of teens have found that youth with some in-school employment experience, especially Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged youths, are less likely to drop out of high school than their peers who do not work during their high school years.”42
Working at a younger age also benefits those who do not continue their education by attending college. Those who work in high school, “especially those who do not go on to enroll in four year colleges and universities, obtain a smoother transition into the labor market in the first few years after graduation from high school, avoiding problems of long-term idleness.”43 “[T]hose who learn new skills on their jobs, obtain significantly higher hourly earnings on their jobs in the first few years following graduation.” In the long term, these individuals “will secure significantly higher annual earning eight to ten years after graduation than their peers who did not work during high school.”44
Sum and Khatiwada found that youth employment is linked to lower rates of teen pregnancy and reductions in crime, particularly among young men. Simply put, “high rates of idleness among men reduce their work experience and their future earnings potential, thus making criminal activity more attractive.”45
Joblessness and underemployment among younger people have also changed the family dynamic, making it more difficult for young adults to leave home. For example, Pew Research reports that from 1968 to 2007 the percentage “of young adults living in their parents’ home was relatively constant [at about 32 percent].”46 By 2012, 36 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-one lived in their parents’ home.47 This “is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase.”48 Hence, 21.6 million young adults are now living with their parents (up from 18.5 million in 2007).49
More broadly, the overall employment trend for citizens is troublesome. CIS shows that 5.7 million more immigrants between the ages of 16 and 65 were working in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000. Conversely, 127,000 fewer native-born citizens were working in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000. This is particularly jarring in that during the same period, the total number of native-born citizens between the ages of 16 and 65 increased by more than 16.8 million. Furthermore, from 2000 to 2014, the population of working-age (16–65) individuals grew by 25.7 million (14 percent). Employment, however, only grew by 4 percent. Incredibly, while native-born citizens accounted for 66 percent of the total population growth from 2000 to 2014, immigrants have accounted for 100 percent of employment growth.50 Therefore, the working-age population in America is growing faster than jobs are being created, and the increasing supply of immigrants makes finding employment far more difficult.
These statistics reflect the larger trend of fewer total native-born workers in the United States. In 2000, there were approximately 41 million native-born, working-age Americans (those between ages 16 and 65) who were not working. By 2007, that number had risen to 48.2 million. In 2014, the number rose to 58 million.51 Seventeen million fewer native-born Americans are working today than were working fourteen years ago. The labor force participation rate of 62.9 percent (July of 2014) is lower than any time since 1979.52 This means that only 62.9 percent, or less than two-thirds of the population, is working.
By all measures, it is more difficult for all citizens, but especially younger people, to find work today than at any time in the last twenty years. Overall job prospects for younger people (in this case, individuals born between 1980 and 2000) are dreadful. In October 2013, FAIR disclosed that half of all unemployed workers were younger people (those between the ages of 16 and 34).53 The BLS reports that the labor participation rate for younger people between the ages of 16 an
d 19 in 2012 was 34.3 percent. In 2002, labor participation for civilians in this age cohort was 47.4 percent.54 The BLS predicts that by 2022, only 27.3 percent of civilians between the ages of 16 and 19 will be working.55 The labor participation rate for individuals between the ages of 20 and 24 was 70.9 percent in 2012. In 2002, the labor participation rate for civilians in this age group was 76.4 percent; by 2022, the labor participation rate for civilians between these ages will drop to 67.3 percent.56 Pew Research reveals that in 2012, 63 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 31 had jobs, but this is down from 70 percent of “same-aged counterparts who had jobs in 2007.”57
In addition to depressing job prospects and wages for American citizens, particularly the rising generation, unconstrained immigration is a major drain on the immense and already broke welfare state. Dr. Milton Friedman, who was sympathetic to open-ended immigration, was also intellectually honest about its impracticability given the federal government’s massive welfare and entitlement programs. As he explained: “[I]t is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”58 Moreover, as Dr. Huntington observed, there is a pronounced “erosion of the differences between citizens and aliens . . . [which] suggest the central importance of material government benefits for immigrant decisions. Immigrants become citizens not because they are attracted to America’s culture and creed, but because they are attracted by government social welfare and affirmative action programs. If these are available to noncitizens, the incentive for citizenship fades.”59 Of course, there are exceptions, including those escaping persecution and tyranny, but increasingly immigrants are drawn to America’s social welfare benefits, which the federal government encourages.
Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future Page 8