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.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the job numbers for November 2015, and much of the media is repeating the Fed’s rote line that this is yet another “key indicator of economic strength,” and that maybe, just maybe, it is time to raise interest rates. Whether or not Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen decides to raise interest rates is an important topic to consider, but that discussion almost always neglects the plight of tens of millions of Americans.
The Pew Research Center released a new report on Thursday that is well-timed given Martin O’Malley’s emphatic, and unfounded, claim that “net immigration from Mexico last year was zero.” We pointed out that O’Malley was conflating legal and illegal immigration, and that he either misinterpreted or misrepresented data from 2007-2014 in order to make the point that illegal immigration was a thing of the past, so therefore is is unreasonable for Americans to demand a secure border.
Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, who is polling under 3 percent nationally and is only at 4 percent in his home state, responded to a question about border security in Saturday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate.