Study: U.S. immigration policy perpetuates poverty
U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform recommended curtailing family-based immigration and replacing the “failed and expensive regulatory system [for skill-based immigration] with one that is market-driven.” Along these lines, the Commission recommended that, “it is not in the national interest to admit unskilled workers” because “the U.S. economy is showing difficulty in absorbing disadvantaged workers.”
Fifteen years later, FAIR says, “U.S. politicians continue to ignore these recommendations, bowing to corporate demands for unskilled labor rather than taking a realistic look at immigration’s effect on poverty and the American worker.”
Since the current legal immigration system already admits hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers a year into an economy that does not create enough unskilled jobs to absorb them, then current calls for “comprehensive immigration reform” would mean that giving “permanent status to millions of illegal aliens who are not needed in the workforce, and it would reward unscrupulous employers who profited from hiring illegal workers, providing them with a legal low-wage workforce that would continue to have a negative impact on native workers,” FAIR says.
The report contains the following findings:
- In 2009, less than 6 percent of legal immigrants were admitted because they possessed skills deemed essential to the U.S. economy.
- Studies that find minimal or no negative effects on native workers from low-skill immigration are based upon flawed assumptions and skewed economic models, not upon observations of actual labor market conditions.
- There is no such thing as an “immigrant job.” The reality is that immigrants and natives compete for the same jobs and native workers are increasingly at a disadvantage because employers have access to a steady supply of low-wage foreign workers.
- Low-skilled immigrants are more likely than their native-born counterparts to live in poverty, lack health insurance, and to utilize welfare programs. Immigrants and their children made up 32 percent of those in the United States without health insurance in 2009.
- Research done by the Center for American Progress has found that reducing the illegal alien population in the United States by one-third would raise the income of unskilled workers by $400 a year.
- Defenders of illegal immigration often tout the findings of the so-called Perryman Report to argue that illegal aliens are responsible for job creation in the United States; yet, if one accepts the Perryman findings as true, that would mean that only one job is created in the United States for every three illegal workers in the workforce.
- It is true that if the illegal alien population decreased the overall number of jobs in the U.S. would be reduced, but there would be many more jobs available to native workers — jobs that paid higher wages and offered better working conditions.
