Why We Support Immigration Reform

  • Current immigration flows are wildly higher than the U.S. immigration tradition that nurtured America during most of its history. Traditional flows averaged around 250,000 a year from 1776 – 1976. Since 1990, around 1 million legal immigrants a year and more than 800,000 illegal immigrants a year settle permanently in the U.S.
  • Most immigrants are allowed in with no consideration of how they fit in the job market. Less than 10% of all foreign workers enter the country with any regard to their skills or whether the job market needs their skills.
  • Millions of Americans can’t find jobs. Around 14 million American workers who want a full-time job can’t find one. This counts the officially unemployed, those involuntarily in part-time jobs and those who recently dropped off the official unemployment list. These Americans are at all rungs of the job ladder but disproportionately are looking for work in the lower skilled jobs that are primarily taken by foreign workers.
  • Black underclass still exists. Some 40 years after Congress passed laws to provide for the full assimilation of black Americans into the country’s political, social and economic life, the lack of job opportunities for these descendants of the American slavery system is scandalous. Around 40% of black American men between 18 and 65 do not have a job.
  • Millions of American and immigrant workers make wages so low that they live in poverty. Increasing numbers of occupations have collapsed into poverty and near-poverty levels. Most of them are disproportionately filled with foreign workers. Occupations such as those in meatpacking, dry-walling, other construction trades and hospitality jobs that once paid decent to very good incomes have collapsed into near-poverty or poverty levels. Importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers into those occupations is a profound policy of injustice against the Americans struggling in them already.
  • Large numbers of American cities are choking on sprawl and congestion. Nearly 90% of U.S. population growth can be explained by new immigrants and births to immigrants. Every issue of overcrowding and infrastructure inadequacy would be much more easily resolved without adding 30 million or more immigrants and their children to our cities each decade.

About NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation

NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan immigration-reduction organization. We conduct research on the impacts of high numerical levels of immigration and educate the public, opinion leaders and policy makers on the results of those and other studies. Undergirding our work are beliefs in environmental sustainability, economic justice, the rule of law, and individual liberty, and opposition to federal immigration policies that threaten these values by forcing massive U.S. population growth.

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