Poll: Wealthy Americans Most Supportive of Prioritizing Amnesty for Illegal Aliens

Wealthy Americans are the most supportive economic group of likely voters who want to see an amnesty for illegal aliens prioritized before securing the United States-Mexico border, a new poll reveals.

A Rasmussen Reports poll finds that the rich in the U.S. want to see an amnesty for the nearly 800,000 to 3.5 million illegal aliens who are enrolled and eligible for the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program more than any other economic group of Americans.

For Americans earning $200,000 or more annually, nearly 60 percent said they want to see DACA illegal aliens given a pathway to U.S. citizenship, a move that would likely flood the labor market with millions of newly legalized workers, thus keeping American workers’ wages low and stagnant.

Likewise, wealthy Americans are the least supportive of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a plan that President Trump has promised to execute. Less than 20 percent of likely voters earning $200,000 or more every year say a border wall on the southern border should be prioritized.

Even America’s upper-middle class, earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year, are highly supportive of a DACA amnesty being prioritized to provide employers and big businesses with a flood of newly legalized workers that would mostly compete against working and middle-class Americans for blue-collar jobs. Less than 20 percent of upper-middle-class likely voters, like the wealthy, support prioritizing a border wall.

The wealthy have the most to gain with a large-scale amnesty for illegal aliens.

For example, when in 1998  Steven Camarotta of the Center for Immigration Studies studied how mass immigration impacts the working-class versus the wealthy, his accumulation of research found net benefits for the rich and net negatives for America’s workers:

Recent work on the growth of income inequality between highand low-income families has found a connection between immigration and the widening income gap. Topel (1994) found that inequality increased more rapidly in the western United States because of the high concentration of immigrants in that region. Partridge, Rickman and Levernier (1996), using a panel of states, also concluded that the level of income inequality increases in high immigrant states. Both of these studies indicate that immigration seems to be driving down wages for those at the bottom of the economic scale, thereby increasing the gap between rich and poor. [Emphasis added]

Harvard Kennedy School professor George Borjas has noted in his recent research how immigration is a drain on American workers, while redistributing billions in wealth to businesses and employers.

But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated. [Emphasis added]

…

What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program. [Emphasis added]

Wealthy Americans and corporate America benefit greatly from not only continued illegal immigration to the U.S., but also mass legal immigration whereby more than one million immigrants are admitted to the U.S., the vast majority of which are low-skilled workers.

Mass immigration translates to a wage-crushing economy for American workers, who are forced to compete with floods of illegal and legal immigrants, while high-earners enjoy the benefits of cheap labor.

Blue-collar American workers have had to endure not only stagnant wages, but in many cases decreased wages because of mass immigration, as Breitbart News reported. In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.