Working, Middle-Class Americans Support Trump’s Troops on Border While the Rich Oppose Plan

The majority of America’s working and middle classes support President Trump’s decision this month to send between 2,000 to 4,000 National Guard troops to the United States-Mexico border to provide logistical help to overwhelmed Border Patrol agents.

In a new Rasmussen Reports poll, about 51 percent of Americans earning $30,000 to $50,000 say the U.S. military should be used along the southern border to prevent illegal immigration. Similarly, 51 percent of Americans earning $50,000 to $100,000 said they too support sending troops to the border.

Meanwhile, wealthy Americans were the most opposed to Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops to the border. About 55 percent of Americans earning $200,000 or more said they oppose the plan. Less than 40 percent of wealthy Americans said they support troops on the border.

The poll reveals a divide between America’s classes on immigration: Working and middle-class Americans who have been harmed the most from mass illegal and legal immigration versus America’s wealthy, who benefit greatly from large inflows of immigration.

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]