'It would be a great way of dealing with a lot of the enduring problems we have'

Published: 1 hour ago
Paul Bremmer


The time may have finally arrived for the United States to cut back on legal immigration, according to one immigration expert. The nation has been absorbing 1.2 million to 1.3 million new legal immigrants per year in recent years, to say nothing of the hordes who have entered the country illegally.

But this is in a country where historically a plurality of Americans polled say immigration should be decreased.

Now Jason Richwine says many Americans don’t realize just how much legal immigration there is every year.

“I think the more people understand just how large the numbers are, I think people will have a better sense of how we are entering, really, a historic period, at least unprecedented since the 1910s when we had a large percentage of foreign-born as well,” said Richwine, an independent public policy analyst.

Richwine pointed out what the United States did after the large immigrant influx of the 1910s – it passed laws in 1921 and 1924 to curtail the number of legal immigrants admitted each year. The resulting decline in new arrivals gave immigrants already in the U.S. a chance to assimilate and gave wages a chance to adjust.

“That would be a nice thing to do now,” Richwine posited. “It would be a great way of dealing with a lot of the enduring problems we have with various ethnic disputes and class disputes. If you turn off the immigration spigot or at least tighten it somewhat, then I think we’ll have a better chance at dealing with some of these difficult social problems.”

Richwine authored a study this month that found immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers about $6,200 per year in welfare benefits, but natives only cost taxpayers about $4,400. He said the price tag associated with immigration makes it an emotional issue for a lot of people.

“Sort of counterintuitively, I’ve found in my own career that I will sometimes write about controversial social issues, and some people pay attention; some people don’t. It’s not a big deal,” he said. “But when I talk about issues that affect people’s wallets, people get really, really interested.”

Ordinary Americans may bristle at the high welfare cost of immigrants, to be sure, but Richwine noted corporate executives also have a huge financial stake in immigration. They want to import cheap labor to reduce costs and increase profits.

“So you know they’re going to fight tooth-and-nail to get the immigrants they want, to get the cheap labor they want because it directly affects their bottom line,” Richwine said.

Immigration proponents often say our country needs immigrants “to do the jobs Americans won’t do,” and Richwine said there is some truth to that. The labor force participation rate for native-born Americans is only 62 percent, while it is a slightly higher 65 percent for immigrants.

Richwine conceded native-born Americans have been leaving the workforce for a long time, even before mass immigration started. However, he said massive immigration levels exacerbate the problem of idleness among natives, particularly low-skilled ones. In his view, government and big business use immigration as a crutch rather than figure out how to get Americans back to work.

““Immigration has become a Band-Aid in a sense that we don’t have to work hard to figure out exactly what the problem is – why are [natives] not working? Is it because they get too much welfare? Is it because the wage isn’t high enough?” Richwine said. “If we didn’t have the Band-Aid of immigration, we would be forced to confront those problems rather than just allowing the immigrants to keep coming in and doing the jobs that natives will not actually do.”

Richwine said he feels for employers to some degree. Some employers have told him they used to have plenty of trouble with their largely native-born workforces: workers would not show up on time, they wouldn’t pay attention, they would be texting while they were supposed to be working. But when these employers hired immigrants, the foreigners showed up on time and worked hard all throughout the day.

Employers should not take the easy way out, in Richwine’s view.

“When work disappears from a community, that can really hollow out the entire civil structure,” he said. “All of civil society suffers a lot, and that’s what’s happening to lots of working class native neighborhoods and communities. That has to be dealt with. I don’t think we want to just sweep that problem under the carpet, but increasingly we are.

“We’re sweeping it under the carpet because we have immigration as a crutch. It’s a Band-Aid that we place over the underclass of the United States rather than getting to the root of the problem.”

Richwine hopes those who read his study will realize U.S. immigration policy is an “irrational hodge-podge,” as he termed it, that does not serve the interests of the American people. While he did not endorse any specific policy fixes in his paper, he shared one idea with WND.

He said Canada and Australia assign points to applicants based on certain characteristics, and those with enough points eventually become eligible to immigrate to the country. Those systems have their flaws, he conceded, but they might provide a good starting point for the U.S.

“One benefit of those systems is that it really forces you to sit down and say, ‘Okay, what do we want out of immigration? What are our goals? What are we trying to maximize? How should we weight those goals?'” Richwine explained. “That’s what a point system allows you to do, and so even as just a conversation starter it would be nice.”

http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/time-to-c...n-says-expert/