RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many Democrats see their party as the working man’s choice. They want to soften capitalism’s rougher edges, humanize big industry, and give the average American a fighting chance. One may (and should) disagree with their methods, but their intentions are good and their beliefs sincere.

That is not how the party elites feel. Their mantra is “open trade and open borders,” as Hillary Clinton told Wall Street bankers in a private speech. Recall how the Democrats supported President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “free trade” deal that would have gutted American industries. And it is Democrats who oppose President Trump’s attempts to stop illegal immigration, which hurts America’s poor.

The Democrats don’t care about American workers. They care about winning elections.

At this point, the chorus of “progressive” rhetoric reaches a fever pitch. “But we need immigrants to support the welfare state! We need immigrants to pay for Social Security!” Saying it does not make it so.

In truth, immigration is destroying the welfare state, in America and throughout the West. This is happening because immigrants receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. Of course, this is not true for every immigrant – some never collect government handouts – but it is true for the overall immigrant population. Studies from across the Western world prove this point.

A recent and comprehensive study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that although immigration is (theoretically) revenue-neutral in America, not all immigrants are created equal. Half of all immigrants actually receive more in government assistance than they pay in taxes, but thankfully, they are balanced out by the other half. Specifically, immigrants who came to America for family reasons, or arrived as refugees, cost a net present value of $170,000.

President Trump’s latest obloquy—calling a number of countries “shitholes” and asking why we are expected to accept their immigrants—is offensive for all the reasons you’ve probably heard: it’s insulting, racially divisive, callous, and so on. The United States has welcomed immigrants from various “shithole” countries for much of its history. Those schleppers worked, sweated, and saved, started businesses, paid taxes, and asked God to bless America.

If only that was all there was to it. As is so often case in this president’s administration, noxious wording is distracting from a serious public-policy debate. The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors.

During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.

Today’s unskilled immigrants are not so lucky. Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing positions plummeted from 19.4 million in 1979 to 11.5 million in 2010, even as immigrants were adding millions to the population of job seekers. In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6 percent of total employment. Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States. Adding to their troubles is frequently a lack of benefits, unreliable hours, and little chance for moving up the income ladder.

With President Trump’s blessing, various factions within the Republican Party are cracking the door open to an amnesty deal for illegal immigrants currently enrolled in the unlawful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Last week, Reps. Bob Goodlatte, Michael McCaul, Raul Labrador and Martha McSally introduced a relatively narrow and targeted amnesty for current DACA recipients that would come alongside increased border security, robust internal enforcement, and 21st-century reforms to our nation’s legal immigration system called the Securing America’s Future Act.

To be clear, the Goodlatte bill does contain amnesty. Amnesty, as The Heritage Foundation explained in 2013, “comes in many forms, but in all its variations, it … treats law-breaking aliens better than law-following aliens.” Conservatives have rightly opposed amnesty in the past as a failed policy that is anathema to the rule of law, fundamentally unfair to Americans and would-be legal immigrants, and a magnet that attracts more illegal immigration in the future. Those critiques remain as true today as they have been in the past.

Given the unique political circumstances and the legal quagmire created by former President Obama’s unlawful actions, many congressional conservatives are contemplating how best to limit the scope of an amnesty and thus its damage, while also securing important changes to address security, protect sovereignty and enhance economic competitiveness. The shift is exemplified by Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker and House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows urging the House to vote on the Securing America’s Future Act.

So why are some House conservatives — and many of their Senate colleagues — opening the door to amnesty?

First, the Goodlatte amnesty provision is extremely narrow. It would only allow illegal immigrants who currently have “deferred action on the basis of being brought to the U.S. as minors [to] get a 3-year renewable legal status allowing them to work and travel overseas.” In other words, there would be no permanent status or path to citizenship. And while the Pew Research Center estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants were eligible for DACA in 2012, only 790,000 ultimately took advantage of the program and fewer than 690,000 remain in it. That number is about 94 percent smaller than the Bush- and Obama-era amnesty proposals, which would have resulted in upward of 11 million illegal immigrants being eligible for one of the greatest gifts imaginable: American citizenship.