About four-in-nine illegal aliens living in the United States have no high school diploma, according to the newest data from Pew Research Center.
Overall, about 44 percent of illegal aliens between the ages 25 to 64-years-old do not have a high school diploma, as well as about 21 percent of the more than 1.2 million legal immigrants that are admitted to the country every year, according to Pew Research Center analysis.
The data reveals the ever-growing workforce competition that the country’s poor, working class, and lower middle class are subjected to as the mostly low-skill, foreign-born population has grown to an unprecedented high of 44.5 million residents.
The Pew Research analysis found that while only eight percent of native-born American citizens lack a high school diploma, about 44 percent of illegal aliens have not graduated high school. Similarly, only 17 percent of illegal aliens hold a bachelor’s degree or more.
Illegal aliens from Mexico and Northern Triangle counties have a particularly high rate of lacking high school diplomas. For example, about 58 percent of illegal aliens from the Northern Triangle do not have a high school diploma, as well as about 57 percent of illegal aliens from Mexico.
Even among legal immigrants, the Pew Research analysis finds that only 37 percent have a bachelor’s degree or more, while 21 percent have no high school diploma.
The same study, as Breitbart News reported, discovered low English proficiency rates among illegal aliens and legal immigrants living in the U.S.
Despite a slight uptick in the number of illegal aliens who claim they are English proficient, still, only about 34 percent said they are proficient. Likewise, only about 57 percent of legal immigrants — that is, legal foreign-born residents whom the federal government has admitted to the country — are proficient in English, according to the Pew Research study.
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Borjas has previously called the country’s legal immigration system the “largest anti-poverty program” in the world at the expense of blue-collar Americans and middle-class taxpayers.
Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one-percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
Every year, a new flow of illegal aliens either cross the U.S.-Mexico border or overstay their visas and compete against the majority of working and middle-class Americans for oftentimes entry-level and generally lower wage jobs. Americans are not only subjected to this illegal labor market competition but also must compete against an additional 1.2 million legal immigrants who are admitted to the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.