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Economically vulnerable populations are often told that immigrants “take our jobs” and drag down wages. Research suggests otherwise.
This post originally appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future blog.
With the advent of Donald Trump, what was once covert in the Republican message has become overt. Yesterday’s dog whistle is today’s screaming siren. Case in point: anti-immigrant bigotry, which was most recently expressed in Donald Trump Jr.’s recent Skittles-themed Twitter attack on Syrian refugees. (The "offensive tweet:"
Think about that. Don Jr. compared people who are fleeing horrific violence to … tiny candies. This emotional inability to distinguish human beings from inanimate objects, and therefore to empathize with their suffering, seems to border on the sociopathic. (It seems the author has an inability to understand the concept of analogy. Trump didn't "compare" anything.
This smacks of the faux outrage that Leftists regularly manifest. They are quick to jump on the bandwagon at the smallest perceived slight, reading into simple statements all sorts of "dog whistles" and hidden meanings in an effort to paint their political detractors with convenient labels like racist, homophobe, hater, etc, etc, ad nauseum.)
Economically vulnerable populations are often told that immigrants “take our jobs” and drag down wages. Research suggests otherwise.
This post originally appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future blog.
With the advent of Donald Trump, what was once covert in the Republican message has become overt. Yesterday’s dog whistle is today’s screaming siren. Case in point: anti-immigrant bigotry, which was most recently expressed in Donald Trump Jr.’s recent Skittles-themed Twitter attack on Syrian refugees. (The "offensive tweet:"
Think about that. Don Jr. compared people who are fleeing horrific violence to … tiny candies. This emotional inability to distinguish human beings from inanimate objects, and therefore to empathize with their suffering, seems to border on the sociopathic. (It seems the author has an inability to understand the concept of analogy. Trump didn't "compare" anything.
This smacks of the faux outrage that Leftists regularly manifest. They are quick to jump on the bandwagon at the smallest perceived slight, reading into simple statements all sorts of "dog whistles" and hidden meanings in an effort to paint their political detractors with convenient labels like racist, homophobe, hater, etc, etc, ad nauseum.)
Even Wrigley, the candy’s manufacturer, distanced itself in a statement that said: “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it is an appropriate analogy.” (How about that. "Even" the CEO is outraged. Probably trying to win points so as to avoid being targeted as eeevil next time around.)
But anti-immigrant arguments aren’t always based solely on fear (Skittles = fear? Yes, all opposition to Leftists can only be an emotional reaction. It never, ever can be principled dissent based on thought.)
or dehumanization. (Which of course takes several leaps in logic to arrive at.)
Economically vulnerable populations are often told that immigrants “take our jobs” and drag down wages. (Now that the author has accomplished his pejorative [and irrelevant] characterizations, he's finally ready to address the subject of his article.)
Immigration, the report says, has “little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term.” Native-born teenagers who have not finished high school may work fewer hours, at least in the short term. (They won’t lose jobs.)Is it true? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine appointed an interdisciplinary task force to look at that question. It found that, on the contrary, “immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the United States.” (The report summary also says, "Projected over a future time horizon of 75 years, this analysis found that the fiscal impacts of immigrants are generally positive at the federal level and generally negative at the state and local level." This only makes sense in that the states bear the burden and suffer the impact of immigration to a much larger degree than does the federal government.
Also from the report summary: "The portion of the labor force that is foreign-born has risen from about 11 percent to just over 16 percent in the last 20 years." Now it seems obvious to me that if immigrants occupy 16% of the labor force, that means that 16% of the jobs are not held by native-born Americans. But maybe I'm just too simple to understand...
Last, what about demographics? What data might be revealed by analyzing legal immigrants vs. illegal? Immigrants from the south compared to, say, PHDs from India? There's a lot missing from the author's supposition that immigration is good.)
As far as the downside goes, that’s pretty much it. (Which is a spectacularly false assertion. I think the author is hoping that no one actually reads the report.)
On the upside, “the prospects for long-run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants” who create jobs for highly-paid and lower-income workers alike. And the study found that recent immigrants tend to have more education than earlier immigrants. (Ah, the author lets it slip. We are not talking about all immigrants, are we? Certainly we benefit from"high-skilled immigrants," but they are a very small percentage of the total immigration picture.)
“Immigrants,” the report concludes, “are integral to the nation’s economic growth.”
We now know what we have long suspected, thanks to political science research published at Princeton University: Political decision-making in this country is driven by corporate and ultra-wealthy elites, not by the democratic majority. (The author seems to be unaware that these decisions are made by Congress, who is elected by the people. There is no democratic majority charged with making these decisions.)
But if immigrants aren’t weakening wage growth and job prospects, who is? (Running with his false premise, the author looks to shift blame.)
Perhaps no group bears more responsibility for the plight of the middle class than billionaires. An IMF study (The International Monetary Fund is a global economic control network which basically seeks to impose a global economy based on redistributive principles. It is hardly a dispassionate source. It was the organization that implemented the bailout of Greece.)
confirms that increasing inequality, especially at the very top of the wealth and income scale, is weakening economic growth. (The organization is dedicated to social justice causes and other leftist goals. Naturally it would identify as a problem the very thing it seeks to ameliorate.
Left unsaid is how much equalization is necessary in order to satisfy the globalists. Should wealth be transferred with impunity? Is equality achieved when a person living in a cardboard box in Bangladesh has exactly the same income as a brain surgeon in New York city?
More specifically, if we grant the author's premise that income inequality needs to be remedied, at what point will we stop? And if it's government [or the IMF] that has that much power, what's to stop them from doing whatever they want? )
“In contrast,” the report found, “an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher … growth.” And higher growth means more jobs.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a world-leading expert on inequality, writes, “Our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth.” But instead of ensuring that lower-income and middle-class people share in economic growth, the opposite has been happening: Even after last week’s improved economic news, most of the economy’s gains are still going to the wealthiest Americans. (The direct result of the very initiatives the IMF approves of, like the corporate bailouts of 2008-2009. Fatcat CEOs helped themselves to taxpayer money, and yet the author doesn't see how this comes to bear?)
The 0.01 percent — the 16,000 wealthiest Americans — have as much wealth as 80 percent of the nation’s population, some 256,000,000 people. Their shared wealth comes to $9 trillion. And at the end of 2015, a mere 536 people in the United States had a collective net worth of $2.6 trillion. (Wealthy people have lots of money is a tautology.
The author is attempting to create envy in people who supposedly don't have anything because of the eeeevil rich. But the great majority of Americans, even among the poorest of us, have pretty comfortable lives. That's why this leftist hand wringing doesn't resonate with a lot of us. We have homes and cars and A/C and iphones aplenty.
But the author's leftist propensities require him to spout marxist agitprop.)
Why?
We now know what we have long suspected, thanks to political science research published at Princeton University: Political decision-making in this country is driven by corporate and ultra-wealthy elites, not by the democratic majority. (The direct result of big, powerful government, the kind of government the Left wants.)
This oligarchical usurpation of influence has led office holders at all levels to implement policies that kill jobs, depress wages and increase inequality. (The author doesn't seem to realize that influence exists because there is substantial dollars flowing through government. If government didn't control trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, the lobbyists would have nothing to influence.)
These policies include government spending cuts, tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporations, bad trade deals (which Trump says he opposes; the team suggests otherwise) and economically destructive deregulation. (Suddenly the author shifts to Trump, which is gratuitous.)
Billionaire cash is also impeding efforts to reduce the climate change and environmental destruction that has already caused irreparable harm to the planet — harm that could rapidly accelerate if the climate-denying Trump becomes president.
Know what also reduces inequality, helps create jobs and raises working people’s wages? Unions. It isn’t immigrants who are weakening the collective bargaining power of the American worker. Billionaires like the Koch Brothers are financing anti-union court cases and flooding our political system with cash (Um, Soros?) to eliminate one of the 99 percent’s most effective tools for economic self-improvement.
Right-wing corporations and billionaires are conducting class warfare on the 99 percent and environmental warfare on the planet. That’s why we need to enact a new, broad agenda: higher taxes on the wealthy, an increased minimum wage, strengthened workers’ rights, sweeping environmental measures and greater government spending for critical needs like infrastructure health and education. (A leftist litany of issues, divorced from any sense of economic or logical reality.)
To be sure, not all billionaires are trying to take your job, cut your pay, steal your democracy or destroy your planet. (Whew, I'm so glad to hear that. I wonder, who might be among such a despicable crowd?)
Donald Trump (Oh, Trump.)
claims to be a billionaire. (Who can know for sure?) But we can’t condemn all billionaires because of what Trump and his ilk have done. They’re human beings, for God’s sake, not pieces of candy.To safeguard democracy, we’ll also need fundamental campaign finance reform. (The author is reduced to incomprehensible babbling.)
And about those candies: We now know that the Skittles photo in Donald Jr.’s tweet was taken by a refugee and used without payment or permission. (Actually, a "former refugee" from 1974. That is, 40 years ago this guy fled Cyprus. He's not a refugee any more.
And, he took a picture of a bowl of Skittles and posted it on Flickr [I'm sure that he did not obtain permission from Wrigley to post it]. I sincerely doubt that he had the intention of making a living off the picture. Methinks he doth protest too much.)
The immigrant who took that picture is contributing to the cultural and economic life of his nation. (One might think the author is talking about America, but the photographer is British, a curious omission, wouldn't you say?
And by the way, his entry into Great Britain was legally accomplished.)
Too bad we can’t say the same about the guy who pilfered his photograph.
Immigration, the report says, has “little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term.” Native-born teenagers who have not finished high school may work fewer hours, at least in the short term. (They won’t lose jobs.)Is it true? The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine appointed an interdisciplinary task force to look at that question. It found that, on the contrary, “immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the United States.” (The report summary also says, "Projected over a future time horizon of 75 years, this analysis found that the fiscal impacts of immigrants are generally positive at the federal level and generally negative at the state and local level." This only makes sense in that the states bear the burden and suffer the impact of immigration to a much larger degree than does the federal government.
Also from the report summary: "The portion of the labor force that is foreign-born has risen from about 11 percent to just over 16 percent in the last 20 years." Now it seems obvious to me that if immigrants occupy 16% of the labor force, that means that 16% of the jobs are not held by native-born Americans. But maybe I'm just too simple to understand...
Last, what about demographics? What data might be revealed by analyzing legal immigrants vs. illegal? Immigrants from the south compared to, say, PHDs from India? There's a lot missing from the author's supposition that immigration is good.)
As far as the downside goes, that’s pretty much it. (Which is a spectacularly false assertion. I think the author is hoping that no one actually reads the report.)
On the upside, “the prospects for long-run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants” who create jobs for highly-paid and lower-income workers alike. And the study found that recent immigrants tend to have more education than earlier immigrants. (Ah, the author lets it slip. We are not talking about all immigrants, are we? Certainly we benefit from"high-skilled immigrants," but they are a very small percentage of the total immigration picture.)
“Immigrants,” the report concludes, “are integral to the nation’s economic growth.”
We now know what we have long suspected, thanks to political science research published at Princeton University: Political decision-making in this country is driven by corporate and ultra-wealthy elites, not by the democratic majority. (The author seems to be unaware that these decisions are made by Congress, who is elected by the people. There is no democratic majority charged with making these decisions.)
But if immigrants aren’t weakening wage growth and job prospects, who is? (Running with his false premise, the author looks to shift blame.)
Perhaps no group bears more responsibility for the plight of the middle class than billionaires. An IMF study (The International Monetary Fund is a global economic control network which basically seeks to impose a global economy based on redistributive principles. It is hardly a dispassionate source. It was the organization that implemented the bailout of Greece.)
confirms that increasing inequality, especially at the very top of the wealth and income scale, is weakening economic growth. (The organization is dedicated to social justice causes and other leftist goals. Naturally it would identify as a problem the very thing it seeks to ameliorate.
Left unsaid is how much equalization is necessary in order to satisfy the globalists. Should wealth be transferred with impunity? Is equality achieved when a person living in a cardboard box in Bangladesh has exactly the same income as a brain surgeon in New York city?
More specifically, if we grant the author's premise that income inequality needs to be remedied, at what point will we stop? And if it's government [or the IMF] that has that much power, what's to stop them from doing whatever they want? )
“In contrast,” the report found, “an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher … growth.” And higher growth means more jobs.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a world-leading expert on inequality, writes, “Our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth.” But instead of ensuring that lower-income and middle-class people share in economic growth, the opposite has been happening: Even after last week’s improved economic news, most of the economy’s gains are still going to the wealthiest Americans. (The direct result of the very initiatives the IMF approves of, like the corporate bailouts of 2008-2009. Fatcat CEOs helped themselves to taxpayer money, and yet the author doesn't see how this comes to bear?)
The 0.01 percent — the 16,000 wealthiest Americans — have as much wealth as 80 percent of the nation’s population, some 256,000,000 people. Their shared wealth comes to $9 trillion. And at the end of 2015, a mere 536 people in the United States had a collective net worth of $2.6 trillion. (Wealthy people have lots of money is a tautology.
The author is attempting to create envy in people who supposedly don't have anything because of the eeeevil rich. But the great majority of Americans, even among the poorest of us, have pretty comfortable lives. That's why this leftist hand wringing doesn't resonate with a lot of us. We have homes and cars and A/C and iphones aplenty.
But the author's leftist propensities require him to spout marxist agitprop.)
Why?
We now know what we have long suspected, thanks to political science research published at Princeton University: Political decision-making in this country is driven by corporate and ultra-wealthy elites, not by the democratic majority. (The direct result of big, powerful government, the kind of government the Left wants.)
This oligarchical usurpation of influence has led office holders at all levels to implement policies that kill jobs, depress wages and increase inequality. (The author doesn't seem to realize that influence exists because there is substantial dollars flowing through government. If government didn't control trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, the lobbyists would have nothing to influence.)
These policies include government spending cuts, tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporations, bad trade deals (which Trump says he opposes; the team suggests otherwise) and economically destructive deregulation. (Suddenly the author shifts to Trump, which is gratuitous.)
Billionaire cash is also impeding efforts to reduce the climate change and environmental destruction that has already caused irreparable harm to the planet — harm that could rapidly accelerate if the climate-denying Trump becomes president.
Know what also reduces inequality, helps create jobs and raises working people’s wages? Unions. It isn’t immigrants who are weakening the collective bargaining power of the American worker. Billionaires like the Koch Brothers are financing anti-union court cases and flooding our political system with cash (Um, Soros?) to eliminate one of the 99 percent’s most effective tools for economic self-improvement.
Right-wing corporations and billionaires are conducting class warfare on the 99 percent and environmental warfare on the planet. That’s why we need to enact a new, broad agenda: higher taxes on the wealthy, an increased minimum wage, strengthened workers’ rights, sweeping environmental measures and greater government spending for critical needs like infrastructure health and education. (A leftist litany of issues, divorced from any sense of economic or logical reality.)
To be sure, not all billionaires are trying to take your job, cut your pay, steal your democracy or destroy your planet. (Whew, I'm so glad to hear that. I wonder, who might be among such a despicable crowd?)
Donald Trump (Oh, Trump.)
claims to be a billionaire. (Who can know for sure?) But we can’t condemn all billionaires because of what Trump and his ilk have done. They’re human beings, for God’s sake, not pieces of candy.To safeguard democracy, we’ll also need fundamental campaign finance reform. (The author is reduced to incomprehensible babbling.)
And about those candies: We now know that the Skittles photo in Donald Jr.’s tweet was taken by a refugee and used without payment or permission. (Actually, a "former refugee" from 1974. That is, 40 years ago this guy fled Cyprus. He's not a refugee any more.
And, he took a picture of a bowl of Skittles and posted it on Flickr [I'm sure that he did not obtain permission from Wrigley to post it]. I sincerely doubt that he had the intention of making a living off the picture. Methinks he doth protest too much.)
The immigrant who took that picture is contributing to the cultural and economic life of his nation. (One might think the author is talking about America, but the photographer is British, a curious omission, wouldn't you say?
And by the way, his entry into Great Britain was legally accomplished.)
Too bad we can’t say the same about the guy who pilfered his photograph.
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