WASHINGTON – The consensus of the political elite is that
opposition to immigration, both legal and illegal, is a losing issue for
Republicans in 2016 because it would cost them votes.
Many GOP analysts believe 2016 candidates need to support immigration to get
crucial Hispanic votes.
But evidence shows opposition to immigration may be a winning
issue for the GOP.
In fact, it might even help rebuild the Reagan coalition.
That’s because research and polling have shown the negative
effects and unpopularity of increased immigration among all races, including
Hispanics, and among people in every income level but the very top: Union
members, Blue-collar workers, White-collar workers, Small business owners, Business
executives, Minorities
“This is a winning issue,” former U.S. Rep. Michelle
Bachmann, R-Minn., asserted to WND.
“Working Americans want to see us hit the pause button on
immigration, as we did from the 1920s for decades, as America sought to
assimilate decades of immigration, and that was without a welfare state. Stand
up for the American worker, wages and jobs, prioritizing our people first.
That’s a winning issue every time.”
And the polls bear out her claims. In fact, polls show
it is such a winning issue, it may be hard to fathom why the GOP has not seized
upon opposition to increased immigration as one of its top priorities.
- A Reuters poll found Americans, by an almost 3 to 1 margin, wish to see immigration reduced, not increased; 45 percent want to see a reduction, 17 percent want to see an increase and 38 percent think it should stay the same.
- 63 percent said immigrants are a burden on the economy.
- 70 percent believed illegal immigration threatens traditional U.S. beliefs and customs.
- Gallup found 60 percent are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the country today. That was an increase of six percentage points from 2014.
- A Pew poll showed 69 percent want to restrict and control immigration rates. That included 72 percent of whites, 66 percent of blacks, and, significantly, 59 percent of Hispanics.
- Princeton Survey Research Associates found 61 percent want to restrict the number of highly skilled foreign workers entering the country.
- And, despite the constant refrain from big business that it hires immigrants because there are jobs “Americans won’t do,” the Polling Company found overwhelming support for raising wages rather than filling jobs by recruiting foreigners, by a margin of 75 percent to 8 percent.
- That overwhelming support was found among Hispanics, African-Americans, Republicans and Democrats.
When asked, “If U.S. businesses have trouble finding
workers, what should happen?” respondents were given two choices:
Those who agreed with “They should raise wages and improve
working conditions to attract Americans”:
- 86 percent of blacks
- 71 percent of Hispanics
- 73 percent of whites
- 74 percent of Republicans
- 79 percent of Democrats
- 74 percent of Independents
Those who agreed with “More immigrant workers should be
allowed into the country to fill these jobs”:
- 3 percent of blacks
- 11 percent of Hispanics
- 8 percent of whites
- 6 percent of Republicans
- 8 percent of Democrats
- 8 percent of Independents
But raising wages and improving working conditions to
attract Americans to fill jobs is not what is happening.
According to Bureau of Labor
statistics, almost all of the new jobs created in the U.S. economy from 2000 to
2014 went to foreign-born workers.
And U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said he knows why.
Writing in the New York Times in response to an editorial, Sessions asked, “Why would
many of the largest business groups in the United States spend millions
lobbying for the admission of more foreign workers if such policies did not cut
labor costs?”
He also observed the Times’ editorial, “like almost all
arguments made in favor of large-scale immigration, provides no numbers,” and
that since 2000, “Another 18 million immigrants have arrived in the United
States, while the share of Americans in the work force has declined almost five
percentage points.”
The unpopularity of increased immigration among voters could
make it a winning issue, but GOP candidates would have to overcome the
narrative among the mainstream media and political leaders of both parties that
such opposition is wrong and even bigoted.
When Donald Trump recently spoke up
about the negative effects of illegal immigration he was vilified in the press
and by several GOP presidential candidates but shot up in the polls to top place
in the race for the nomination.
Ann Coulter’s scathing indictment of
immigration “Adios America” immediately rocketed to No. 1 on Amazon’s list of political
bestsellers, but no one will debate her on the topic, except Geraldo Rivera.
Coulter has consistently pointed out
the facts and figures argue against increased immigration, and has called for a
moratorium on both legal and illegal immigration for more than a year.
In her most recent column, titled, “Media hide facts, call
everyone else a liar,” Coulter wrote, “When Donald Trump said something not
exuberantly enthusiastic about Mexican immigrants, the media’s response was to
boycott him. One thing they didn’t do was produce any facts showing he was
wrong.”
Perhaps the most pertinent fact not often heard in the media
narrative that America “has always been a nation of immigrants” is the
inaccuracy of the popular belief that current immigration levels are nothing
new, and are generally the same as they’ve always been.
In fact, the number of immigrants flooding into the country
today dwarfs anything in U.S. history.
- During the peak of the last great wave of immigration between 1920 and 1930, 14.2 million foreigners arrived in America.
- 40 million immigrants arrived between 2000 and 2010.
- 47 million more are expected by the end of this decade.
- That number jumps to 78 million a decade by the year 2060.
As WND has reported, the U.S. is experiencing an immigration explosion never
before seen in its history:
- According to U.S. Census numbers, immigration averaged only 195,000 per year from 1921 through 1970.
- With the change in immigration law in 1965, immigration levels skyrocketed from an average of 250,000 to one million a year.
- The number of foreign-born persons in the U.S. has doubled from 1990 to 2010, almost tripled since 1980, and quadrupled since 1970.
A graph of the numbers over the years vividly
illustrates just how different today’s astronomical immigration levels are from
the historic norm, and where they are heading, on a record-shattering pace.
A large body of evidence shows
the glut of immigrants is hurting American workers across the board, except for
the most affluent.
And the numbers suggest Republicans might make inroads with
many of the workers who once comprised the Reagan coalition, by strongly
opposing immigration.
Union members
Union leaders support amnesty and massive immigration but
union members do not.
The AFL-CIO once opposed amnesty because of the negative
effects of illegal immigration upon wages and unemployment rates, but now looks
at the onslaught of foreign workers as a way replenish dwindling membership.
And, suddenly, anyone who opposes that is a racist.
“The voices against immigration
reform, if you brush everything else aside, are really colored by bigotry,” said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in March.
By that standard, an overwhelming majority of the union
members Trumka represents are bigots.
- 63 percent of union households said immigration is too high; 5 percent said too low; 14 percent said just right.
- 58 percent said deportation laws should be enforced; 28 percent supported the legalization of illegal immigrants.
- 10 percent said immigration should be increased to fill unskilled job openings; 72 percent said plenty of Americans are available, employers just need to pay more.
- 13 percent said illegal immigration is caused by strict legal immigration laws; 74 percent said it was because of inadequate enforcement efforts.
Blue-collar workers
- 62 percent of blue-collar workers opposed the president’s actions to block the deportation of 5 million immigrants in the country illegally.
- That included 47 percent who strongly opposed it.
- Only about 32 percent supported it.
A study by Professor Eric Gould of Georgetown and Hebrew
University found trade policy and uncontrolled immigration have lowered
blue-collar wages and increased the wealth gap.
He wrote, “An influx of low-skilled immigrants increases
inequality … The overall evidence suggests that the manufacturing and
immigration trends have hollowed-out the overall demand for middle-skilled
workers in all sectors, while increasing the supply of workers in lower skilled
jobs. Both phenomena are producing downward pressure on the relative wages of workers
at the low end of the income distribution…”
Gould found increased immigration hurt blue-collar
employment.
“A similar interaction is shown to affect the employment
rate of non-college graduate native men – an increase in immigration coupled
with a decline in manufacturing lowers the employment rate of less-educated
men.”
And lower wages plus more foreign workers simply meant more
jobless Americans.
“The similarity of the results for inequality and the
employment rate of noncollege men reinforce the interpretation that these two
phenomena are putting downward pressure on the wages of less skilled men – thus
increasing inequality primarily at the bottom half of the wage distribution and
encouraging more and more men to drop out of the labor market altogether.”
Even Obama recognized the problem,
before his opinion apparently evolved, after he became president.
In his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama
wrote, “[T]here’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many
whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border — a
sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone
on before.”
“The number of immigrants added to the labor force every
year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century,” he
continued.
“If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides
some benefits to the economy as a whole — specially by keeping our workforce
young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan — it also
threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains
on an already overburdened safety net.”
Small Business Owners
The Zogby poll
found small business owners overwhelmingly oppose massive immigration and
support deportation.
- 67 percent said deportation laws should be enforced; 22 percent supported the legalization of illegal immigrants.
- 70 percent said all immigration is too high; 4 percent said too low; 13 percent said just right.
- 13 percent said immigration should be increased to fill unskilled job openings; 65 percent said plenty of Americans are available, employers just need to pay more.
- 10 percent said illegal immigration is caused by strict legal immigration laws; 79 percent said it is because of inadequate enforcement efforts.
Business executives
Zogby even found overwhelming opposition to massive
immigration and support for deportation among CEOs, CFOs, vice presidents and
other business executives.
- 59 percent said deportation laws should be enforced; 30 percent supported the legalization of illegal immigrants.
- 63 percent said immigration is too high; 5 percent said too low; 16 percent said just right.
- Significantly, just 16 percent said immigration should be increased to fill unskilled job openings; 61 percent said plenty of Americans are available, employers just need to pay more.
- 13 percent said illegal immigration is caused by strict legal immigration laws; 75 percent said it is because of inadequate enforcement efforts.
White-collar workers
Contrary to the assertions of
Silicon Valley kingpins, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and political elites (including virtually every conservative
senator except Sessions), there is no evidence of a need for increased visas
for foreign workers skilled in high-tech occupations.
That is because, also contrary to their assertions, there is
no shortage of American STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)
workers. In fact, just the opposite: there is a glut.
According to data from the U.S. Census only one in four Americans with a STEM degree is in a STEM
job.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
member Peter Kirsanow, a former member of the National Labor Relations Board,
asked Obama in a letter opposing amnesty, “[I]f there is a shortage of IT workers, why aren’t wages
increasing?”
Instead, he observed, IT wages “now hover around wage levels
of the late 1990s.”
Kirsanow said America produces far more science and
engineering graduates than there are job openings in their fields.
“The problem,” he continued, “is not that there are
insufficient STEM graduates; the problem is that tech companies do not want to
pay the wages American workers would demand absent a continual influx of
high-tech visa holders.”
He added, “The tech industry is begging for an increase in
foreign STEM workers not because there are not enough American STEM workers, or
because they are insufficiently talented, but due to its desire for young,
cheap, and immobile labor.”
Recent evidence supports those conclusions.
As WND reported, Disney replaced hundreds of its American IT workers this
year with people from India and elsewhere, then forced the Americans to train
their replacements or risk losing their severance packages. To add insult to
injury, the company then reportedly placed the laid-off Americans on a “black
list,” which forbids any Disney contractor from hiring them for up to a year.
Nonetheless, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is one of eight
Republicans and four Democrats to co-sponsor the “I-Squared” bill in the U.S.
Senate. It would triple the number of temporary guest workers allowed into the
U.S. on H1-B visas each year, from 65,000 to 195,000, while also allowing visa holders
to bring in family members.
The I-Squared bill has the backing of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, the Business Software Alliance and heavyweight executives from
Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Google among others.
Minorities
Even Hispanics see immigration as a threat to their jobs.
71 percent told the Polling Company that businesses should increase wages rather than hire more
immigrants.
African-Americans see the threat even more acutely, as 86
percent said businesses should increase wages rather than hire more immigrants.
The numbers back them up.
In 2008, a study for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
determined illegal immigration accounted for about 40 percent of the 18
percentage-point decline [from 1960-2000] in black employment rates. Immigrant
workers from 1990 to 2006 reduced the wages of low-skilled workers by 4.7
percent and college graduates by 1.7 percent.
Kirsanow recently wrote, “The briefing witnesses, well-regarded scholars from
leading universities and independent groups, were ideologically diverse. All
the witnesses acknowledged that illegal immigration has a negative impact on
black employment, both in terms of employment opportunities and wages.”
One of those scholars found “illegal immigrants and blacks
(who are disproportionately likely to be low-skilled) often find themselves in
competition for the same jobs, and the huge number of illegal immigrants
ensures that there is a continual surplus of low-skilled labor, thus preventing
wages from rising.”
Another scholar “found that illegal immigrants had displaced
U.S. citizens in industries that had traditionally employed large numbers of
African-Americans, such as meatpacking. There is little or no evidence that
these numbers have changed substantially for the better in the intervening
years.”
According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, black unemployment is soaring. In
March, more than 12.2 million black people of working age were not in the labor
force, meaning they had even stopped looking for a job for at least four weeks.
And, as of March, the black unemployment rate of 10.1
percent was more than twice the white unemployment rate of 4.7 percent.
A 2009 study by Harvard professor and economist George
Borjas found that a 10 percent increase of immigrants in a given job market
would reduce the wages of black men by 2.5 percent, lower their employment by
5.9 percent and increase their incarceration rate by 1.3 percent.
“It is evident that there is a negative correlation between
changes in employment propensities and the immigrant share, and that the
correlation is stronger for black men,” wrote Borjas.
After Obama announced his executive
amnesty in November, Kirsanow wrote , “The president’s edict purporting to grant legal status to
up to 5 million illegal aliens will have a devastating effect on the wage and
employment levels of all low-skilled American workers, but the competition from
(formerly) illegal aliens will be most acute in industries in which blacks
traditionally have been highly concentrated — including, but not limited to,
construction, hospitality, and service.”
“Moreover, numerous studies unequivocally show that illegal
immigration depresses wage rates. In the leisure and hospitality industries
alone, the wage suppression due to illegal immigration has decreased annual
wage rates by $1,500,” he added.
“Indeed, the edict could hardly come at a worse time for
black workers whose labor-participation rate is an abysmal 61.4 percent,” he
continued. “Black teen unemployment is 32.6 percent. The black
employment-population ratio is an appalling 54.7 percent. The last thing black
workers need right now is more competition from illegal aliens.”
Kirsa now concluded, “The most loyal constituency of the
Democratic Party is being thrown under the bus for the shining possibility of
an even larger voting bloc. And the members of the Congressional Black Caucus
cheer.”
Follow Garth Kant @DCgarth
Source: http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/gop-committing-suicide-by-ignoring-winning-issue/
No comments:
Post a Comment