The nation's unending appetite for new and low-wage immigrant workers, now about about 1 million a year, is slashing the incomes of native-born Americans by $2,470 while boosting corporate profits, according to a new report on the cost of legal and illegal immigration.
"The U.S. is literally importing poverty," said the new report from the group Negative Population Growth Inc.
Critics of immigration and the administration's expansion of the green card worker program have long charged that native American workers have had to accept lower wages just to compete with cheap imported labor and the new report from Ed Rubenstein, president of ESR Research, bolsters those charges.
He found that while in past decades adding immigrant workers helped to increase wages and GDP, the flood that followed the 1986 immigration reform reversed that trend. The reason, he said, is that too much of the workforce is now immigrant labor, rising from 10 percent in 1996 to nearly 17 percent today.
Using a noted Harvard economist's wage formula, Rubenstein said that U.S. wages of native-borns in 2014 were reduced by an average of 5.8 percent. "This translates to an average wage loss of $2,470 per full-time native worker in 2014 -- money unavailable to native workers due to the presence of foreign-born competitors in the workforce," he wrote in the report provided to Secrets.
He also said found that immigrants are usually poorer than native-borns, and are often on some sort of welfare program. He said that those programs amount to $9,100 per immigrant in gross federal outlays.
What's more, as corporations have hired more lower-wage immigrants, they've increased profits.
As a result, while companies benefit, immigrant and native-born labor languishes.
Rubenstein concluded:
Immigration's biggest winners, then — at least among U.S. natives — are the wealthy, while its biggest losers are found disproportionately among the nation's poor and middle-class. Clearly, immigration exacerbates the economic divide between haves and have-nots.
Current levels of over 1 million legal admissions per year — and de facto amnesty and nonenforcement policies that serve to protect those aliens who are here unlawfully — are only placing greater economic strain on those citizens who can afford it least. Congress must revisit the current policy of mass immigration to reduce this injustice.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted atpbedard@washingtonexaminer.com
No comments:
Post a Comment