Background from Subcommittee on Immigration and the National
Interest
The overwhelming majority of immigration to the United
States is the result of our visa policies. Each year, millions of visas are
issued to temporary workers, foreign students, refugees, asylees, and permanent
immigrants for admission into the United States.
The lion's share of these visas are for lesser-skilled and
lower-paid workers and their dependents who, because they are here on
work-authorized visas, are added directly to the same labor pool occupied by
current unemployed jobseekers.
Expressly because they are admitted into the U.S. on legal
immigrant visas, most will be able to draw a wide range of taxpayer-funded
benefits, and corporations will be allowed to directly substitute these workers
for Americans. Improved border security would have no effect on the continued
arrival of these new foreign workers, refugees, and permanent
immigrants-because they are all invited here by the federal government.
The most significant of all immigration documents issued by
the U.S. is, by far, the "green card." When a foreign citizen is
issued a green card it guarantees them the following benefits inside the United
States: lifetime work authorization, access to federal welfare, access to
Social Security and Medicare, the ability to obtain citizenship and voting
privileges, and the immigration of their family members and elderly relatives.
Under current federal policy, the U.S. issues green cards to
approximately 1 million new Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs) every single year.
For instance, Department of Homeland Security statistics show that the U.S.
issued 5.25 million green cards in the last five years, for an average of 1.05
million new legal permanent immigrant annually.
These ongoing visa issuances are the result of federal law,
and their number can be adjusted at any time with a new federal law. However,
unlike other autopilot policies-such as tax rates or spending programs-there is
virtually no national discussion or media coverage over how many visas we
issue, to whom we issue them and on what basis, or how the issuance of these
visas to individuals living in foreign countries impacts the interests of
people already living in this country.
If Congress does not pass a new federal law to reduce the
number of green cards issued each year, the U.S. will legally add 10 million or
more new permanent immigrants over the next 10 years-a bloc of new permanent
residents larger than populations of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina
combined. All of these new permanent immigrants
will be added on top of the current population of permanent immigrants in the
United States.
This has substantial economic implications.
The post-World War II boom decades of the 1950s and 1960s
averaged together less than 3 million green cards per decade-or about 285,000
annually. Due to lower immigration rates, the total foreign-born population in
the United States dropped from about 10.8 million in 1945 to 9.7 million in
1960 and 9.6 million in 1970.
These lower midcentury immigration levels were the product
of a federal policy change: after the last period of large-scale immigration
that had begun in roughly 1880, immigration rates were lowered to reduce
admissions. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population fell for six
consecutive decades, from 1910 through 1960.
Legislation enacted in 1965, among other factors,
substantially increased low-skilled immigration. Since 1970, the foreign-born
population in the United States has increased more than four-fold-to a record
42.1 million today. The foreign-born share of the population has risen from
fewer than 1 in 21 in 1970, to presently approaching 1 in 7.
As the supply of available labor has increased, so too has
downward pressure on wages. Georgetown and Hebrew University economics
professor Eric Gould has observed that "the last four decades have
witnessed a dramatic change in the wage and employment structure in the United
States... 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."
During the low-immigration period from 1948-1973, real
median compensation for U.S. workers increased more than 90 percent. By
contrast, real average hourly wages were lower in 2014 than they were in 1973,
four decades earlier.
Harvard Economist George Borjas also documented the effects
of high immigration rates on African-American workers, writing that "a 10%
immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill
group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%."
Past immigrants are additionally among those most
economically impacted by the arrival of large numbers of new workers brought in
to compete for the same jobs. In Los Angeles County, for example, 1 in 3 recent
immigrants are living below the poverty line.
And this federal policy of new large-scale admissions continues unaltered
at a time when automation is reducing hiring, and when a record share of our
own workers here in America are not employed.
President Coolidge articulated how a slowing of immigration
would benefit both U.S.-born and immigrant-workers: "We want to keep wages
and living conditions good for everyone who is now here or who may come here.
As a nation, our first duty must be to those who are already our inhabitants,
whether native or immigrants. To them we owe an especial and a weighty
obligation."
It is worth observing that the 10 million grants of new
permanent residency under current law is not an estimate of total new
immigration over the next decade. In fact, the increased distribution of legal
immigrant visas tend to correlate with increased flows of immigration
illegally: the former helps provide networks and pull factors for the latter.
Most of the countries who send the largest numbers of citizens with green cards
are also the countries who send the most citizens illegally.
The Census Bureau estimates 13 million new immigrants will
arrive, on net, between now and 2024-hurtling the U.S. past all recorded
figures in terms of the foreign-born share of total population, quickly
eclipsing the watermark recorded 105 years ago during the 1880-1920 immigration
wave before immigration rates were lowered. Absent new legislation to lower
green card allotments and the unprecedented level of future immigration, the
Census Bureau projects immigration as a share of population will continue
setting new records each year, for all time.
Yet the immigration "reform" considered by
Congress most recently-the 2013 Senate "Gang of Eight" comprehensive
immigration bill-would have tripled the number of green cards issued over the
next 10 years. Instead of issuing 10 million green cards, the Gang of Eight
proposal would have issued at least 30 million green cards during the next
decade (or more than 11 times the population of the City of Chicago).
Polling from Gallup and Fox shows that Americans want
lawmakers to reduce, not increase, immigration rates by a stark 2:1 margin.
Reuters puts it at nearly a 3:1 margin. And polling from GOP pollster Kellyanne
Conway shows that by the huge margin of nearly 10:1 people of all backgrounds
are united in their belief that U.S. companies seeking workers should raise
wages for those already living here-instead of bringing in new labor from
abroad.
U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) serves on four Senate
committees: Armed Services, Budget, Environment and Public Works, and
Judiciary, where he is Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the
National Interest.
Visit Sessions online at his website <http://sessions.senate.gov/public/>
or via YouTube<http://www.youtube.com/user/SenatorSessions>,
Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeff-Sessions/23444159584?ref=search>,
and Twitter<http://twitter.com/SenatorSessions>. Note: Please do not
reply to this email. For further information, contact Sen. Sessions' Press
Office at (202) 224-4124.
Comments
Excessive immigration has been adopted by
Marxist Democrats and Liberal Republicans and their global corporate
contributors to destroy the US economy.
The goal of these elected officials and their corporate campaign donors
it to impoverish US citizens. They want to establish a global Communist
government using UN Agenda 21 to accomplish this.
We need to fire these elected officials, quit
the UN, end the Federal Reserve and return to our original US Constitution (as
written).
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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