Who would have guessed that the home states of the top two leaders in the U.S. House -- Wisconsin and California -- are nearly equally committed to large reductions in annual legal immigration?
That's what Pulse Opinion Research found in March polling of citizens likely to vote in November's midterm congressional elections.
An ad campaign for H-1B reform in San Francisco's BART train stations became a minor national story last week, but to get the reaction of the ad's target audience (American tech workers), you have to skip the news reports and look in the comments.
The New York Times rightly celebrates the "confounding" discovery that millions of working-age Americans aren't lost causes after all. But there is a downside: if we aren't going to give up on these Americans, we've lost a major justification for continued record levels of immigration.
This week, snow hit the Washington, D.C. area and commuters received a treat. I’m not talking about the beautiful white landscape, although that certainly was there. I mean that commuters, when the federal government shut down, got to experience what driving would be like if area population was dramatically smaller. That's a rare treat, indeed, in an area where population is booming, driven by immigration.
Recent economic numbers are encouraging, especially indicators that the long-term unemployed are reentering the labor market. Politicians and the media tend to fixate on the monthly job creation numbers and the official unemployment rate. These aren't inconsequential measures, but there is much more to the story.
Once again, we dodged a last-minute push to include a no-strings amnesty for DACA recipients in the $1.3 trillion spending package that will fund the government through the end of September. But lawmakers couldn't resist a push by business groups to increase the number of H-2B visas issued to foreign workers in 2018.
Terms like "chain migration," "amnesty" and "Dreamers" aren't going to go away - short-hand descriptors are necessary, if not always of equal value - but we should understand the underlying policy. The differences between "chain migration" and "family-based migration" (or between "Dreamers" and "DACAs") are significant beyond mere ideological virtue signaling.
Failure to get the idea of immigration limits contributes to a debate marked by distrust and incivility.
When Republicans in Texas went to the polls for the March 6th primary election, they weren’t just asked to elect candidates. They also voted on eleven non-binding ballot propositions. And by a 9-1 margin, Republican voters said employers should be required to use E-Verify.
If one relies on traditional media outlets, one will hear a very simple narrative --you can either be for or against immigration, and anyone who wants to reduce immigration falls into the latter category. In fact, most Americans want to see lower levels of immigration, and that view transcends political affiliation, ideology, religion, and race. Views on what "immigration reform" means are diverse, and so are the people who voice them. Fortunately, in the internet age it's easier to seek out these voices.