Nick Gillespie: We need more workers, not fewer
Outrage over immigration is a primary reason Donald Trump and the Republicans have returned to power. Just before the presidential election, 56% of Americans told Pew Research they support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. In his first days in office, President Trump signed executive orders declaring a national emergency at our Southern border, allowing troops to be deployed there, and ending birthright citizenship as defined in the 14th Amendment.
Many of these actions won’t stick legally — or prove popular with voters. Deep down, Americans love immigrants because we see ourselves in them. According to the National Park Service, 40% of us trace our ancestry through Ellis Island, the East Coast immigration station that operated between 1892 and 1954. We want an orderly process where people are vetted, barred from most taxpayer-funded transfer programs, and able to work and pay taxes legally.
A Ronald Reagan-appointed federal judge immediately blocked Trump’s action on birthright citizenship, calling it “a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
The same Pew poll showing a majority in favor of mass deportations reveals even more significant numbers of Americans in favor of admitting more high-skilled workers (79%), letting international college grads stay (77%), and letting immigrants married to citizens remain (58%). And 64% of Americans think undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay if they meet specific requirements, such as passing a background check or having a job.
Even among Trump’s biggest supporters, there’s a fierce fight over immigrants on H-1B visas, granted to 85,000 highly educated foreign workers annually. While MAGA activists want the program scrapped, Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, has said he will “go to war” in support of the visas. Trump has declared that he likes “both sides of the argument” but favors expanding H-1Bs because “you’ve got to get the best people.”
Trump’s ambivalence reflects that of the American people. Despite being “a nation of immigrants” (the title of a bestselling 1958 book by then-Sen. John F. Kennedy), we have never been comfortable with newcomers. All of the fears about current immigration levels are either exaggerated or flat-out wrong.
While the southern border was egregiously poorly managed for most of Joe Biden’s uninspiring presidency, unlawful border crossings dropped to a four-year low at the end of last year. Vice President JD Vance’s unfounded campaign claims that Haitian refugees were spreading disease and eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, were flatly contradicted by city officials, as were reports that Venezuelan gang members took over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado.
As Cato Institute policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh has documented, legal and illegal immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans. In any case, violent crime is declining nationally and is lower than it was in 2020, the peak year of COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns.
Nor are immigrants “stealing” American jobs, either at the low end or the high end of the employment market. Since November 2021, the unemployment rate has been at or below 4% or lower. Unskilled immigrant workers pick crops, staff kitchens, do domestic jobs and work construction, all job markets that post many more jobs than are ever filled. The average H-1B visa job in tech pays about $132,000 a year, and there is scant evidence that employers pay foreign workers less than native Americans.
When Trump defended the H-1B program at a joint press conference with tech titans like Larry Ellison of Oracle, he stressed, “People like Larry, he needs engineers … like nobody’s ever needed them.” As the low unemployment rate shows, we need more workers, not fewer.
All employers should be free to hire the best people for their job openings, too. Immigrants tend to be self-starters and ambitious, which helps explain why they are 80% more likely to start companies and have higher labor force participation rates than native Americans (67% vs. 62%). They flow to vibrant areas like Texas, Florida and New York City, which need workers.
It’s understandable that, after a pandemic, a period of high inflation and economic and social anxiety, and weak leadership, Americans would be ambivalent about immigrants. But today’s newcomers deserve the opportunities that our grandparents and great-grandparents had as they came through Ellis Island — and caused just as much fear as today’s do on the surface. Their presence benefits us even more than it does them.
Editor’s note: Nick Gillespie is editor-at-large of Reason magazine and Reason.com. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
Ten years ago, Disney fired its American IT staff in Orlando, Fla., and replaced them with “high-skilled” foreign workers on H-1B visas.
The foreign workers were so “highly skilled” that the Americans they were replacing had to train them on how to do their jobs — and if they didn’t, they’d lose their severance pay.
The politicians fumed, with one senator saying, “This program was created to help fill jobs when there were labor shortages, not to take jobs away from anyone.”
Except for the H-1B visa program — like most immigration programs for “skilled” workers — is intended to replace American workers and hold down their salaries. H-1B workers, mainly from India, have been used by dozens of corporations to replace their American staff with cheaper foreign labor.
One aspect of the visa, which is especially attractive to employers, is that it ties the worker to a specific job, like the indentured servitude of earlier centuries. An American or permanent-resident worker is free labor — he can ask for higher pay, seek promotion into a new position, or change employers altogether. A foreigner can do these things only with great difficulty or not at all. Employers praise this as “loyalty,” but what they really mean is, “We own them.”
Is this a problem with this particular visa that can be fixed with a few tweaks? No, because the problem isn’t limited to one visa program.
At least as bad as H-1B is something called Optional Practical Training. This was supposed to be for foreign students to have a brief internship upon graduation before returning home. It has become a three-year work visa for certain foreign “students” who are no longer students, which they use until they can “graduate” to an H-1B visa.
Worse yet, because we pretend that the OPT workers are still students, their employers don’t have to pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment taxes. That means the federal government effectively gives an 8 percent subsidy to companies that hire young foreign graduates instead of young American graduates.
None of this is an accident. The National Science Foundation, one of the big government funders of university research, wrote a memo in 1989 calling for importing more foreign graduate students to hold down wages in tech.
The following year, Congress created the H-1B program.
In fact, there is no shortage of workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) — because if there were, wages in those fields would be going up, which they haven’t. And tech companies wouldn’t be laying off thousands of workers, either.
What’s more, millions of Americans with degrees in STEM aren’t working in STEM. That’s a large pool of workers available for recruitment (maybe at higher pay), but only if employers had an incentive to recruit them rather than short-circuiting the forces of supply and demand by bringing in workers from outside.
Does America benefit from the immigration of truly exceptional talents, the vaunted “best and brightest”? Yes, absolutely. But, really, how many Einsteins are there?
Elon Musk said he doesn’t want the H-1B program to be used as cheap labor because he only wants the top 0.1% of engineering talent. If this is true, reform is possible.
Our current system for bringing in “skilled” immigrants is akin — at best — to giving a participation trophy to every child in Little League.
Instead, we need a World Series for immigration, giving only the best of the best the greatest gift we can bestow — the right to live and work in the U.S. and eventually to become a member of the American people.
Editor’s note: Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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