The American Action Forum, an organization closely aligned with the Republican National Committee, on May 5 released a “study” authored by Ben Gitis and Jacqueline Varas.
Bono (aka Paul David Hewson), one of rock music’s most recognized figures, has long been a political activist working towards the eradication of poverty, hunger, and disease throughout the developing world, focusing much of his effort on raising money to combat the AIDS pandemic in Africa. His work has brought him into contact with some of the world’s most powerful political leaders, including the last two U.S. Presidents.
On March 15, John Roth, the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs regarding the security of U.S. visa programs.
A March 7 story from Bloomberg Businessweek reported on a new poll that surveyed Americans on immigration. The Bloomberg lede was that 61 percent of Americans believe that “continued immigration into the country jeopardizes the United States.”
CNN’s self-proclaimed Reality Check Team took several statements made by candidates in the Republican Presidential Primary debate on February 13 and declared them either “true” or “false,” with varying degrees of in-between. Tami Luhby, CNNMoney correspondent took up Ted Cruz’s claim that the United States has “the lowest percentage of Americans working today in any year since 1977” and declared it to be unambiguously false.
The jobs report for January was just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Fewer jobs were created than anticipated, wage growth was better but still sluggish (perplexing some economists because of the “tightening labor market”), and it was revealed that exports fell 4.8% in 2015.
On Tuesday night, in his final State of the Union address, President Obama said that “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” While that statement may not be what is technically referred to as a political whopper, a la John McCain’s pronouncement in 2008 that “The fundamentals of the economy are strong;” or even Obama’s own promise that the 2009 stimulus bill would fund hundreds of “shovel-ready” projects, it is misleading, nonetheless.
Immigration does “grow the economy” and highly-skilled immigrants do contribute more in taxes than they receive in direct government services (education, healthcare, entitlements, etc.). It would be very difficult to find an economist who disagreed with the above statement.
The presidential primaries will become more interesting in the new year as voters will decide which candidate they prefer for their party’s nomination. The Iowa Caucus is February 1 and the New Hampshire primary is the following week. By the end of February, when Nevadans and South Carolinians have also weighed in, we will see whether Bernie Sanders can pose a challenge to Hillary Clinton, and whether Donald Trump’s dominance of media coverage translates to support in the voting booth.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) has published a report, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society, 50 years after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, which eventually resulted in an almost four-fold increase in immigration to the United States. The recent NAS report is similar to one it published in 1997 in that it trumpets the positives of immigration while ignoring the negative consequences of expansionist immigration policies. The report 18 years ago played up the fact that adding millions of immigrants “grows the economy” simply by increasing annual GDP, and it downplayed the enormous fiscal burdens and effects on American workers that result.
The new report deals with issues of assimilation, or as the NAS terms it, integration. Steven Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies looked at the report and has written up his initial thoughts. Camarota, who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on U.S. immigration policy, was disappointed in the lack of balance in the NAS “findings.”