A report released by a media firm backed by left-wing financier George Soros admits that low-skilled immigration hurts America’s middle and working-class.
ProPublica, backed by Soros, released a report where they not only confirmed President Trump’s argument that immigration should be merit-based to help Americans, but also conceded that the last four decades of low-skilled immigration has hurt U.S. workers:
Of course, the question of how immigration impacts GDP is a small slice of a much broader question of how immigrants and immigration policies affect our economy. Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, points out that a key question in any hypothetical scenario is whether the native born population is better off. A massive increase in immigrants may add to the size of the U.S. economy, but that doesn’t necessarily make things better for the people already here.
Increased immigration has differing effects depending on education and industry. The National Academies report suggests that some low-skilled workers (such as high school dropouts) who compete with low-skilled immigrants will lose wages and income even as business owners and investors profit from the overall growth in the economy. As Harvard economist George Borjas explains, the people who compete with immigrants are losing out to the people who employ immigrants.
Those nuances are often hidden in the overall employment numbers. According to Rutger’s Hunt, when economists talk about the effect of immigration on jobs, they ask whether the employment rate for natives has fallen or risen. And from a national perspective, there is broad agreement that increased immigration does not meaningfully change overall employment rates. But those numbers don’t capture people who are forced to change jobs, for example American workers who share job qualifications with immigrant workers and might be forced to move to lower-paying or less desirable jobs. For those individuals, the effect of immigration can be life-changing.
“Generally when it comes to immigration there are winners and losers,” said Michael Ben-Gad, a economics professor at City, University of London, “and those differences tend to be much, much bigger than a net number like GDP.”
Additionally, the Soros-backed media outlet revealed what immigration hawks like Attorney General Jeff Sessions have stated for decades, which is that immigrants are expensive for the native population.
“The National Academies report found that, in general, first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments, mainly at the state and local levels, than native-born generations,” the ProPublica report states.
Despite admitting that mass immigration of a low-skilled populous hurts American workers, ProPublica claims that overall, taking more than a million and a half immigrants a year is good solely because it slightly boosts Growth Domestic Product (GDP).
The conclusion that immigration has largely hurt the American middle and working-classes coincides with research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that found how U.S. workers have seen stagnant and decreasing wages in blue-collar jobs because of immigration programs like the low-skilled H-2B visa, Breitbart Texas reported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.