Betterage's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Beyond the clickbait headlines was a pretty ho-hum finding: immigration grows the population ... and there are consequences.
As is so often the case, the Times' story struggles to find room for the perspective of the people who stand to benefit from restrictions on non-immigrant guest worker programs: American workers.
The Goodlatte bill would close the asylum loopholes that open-borders organizers of the caravan hope to exploit. Since 2009, merely claiming a "credible fear" is usually enough to be released into the U.S. indefinitely, and frivolous claims have overloaded the system to the point that applicants with legitimate claims wait years to have their cases heard.
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.
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.
Industries that have been corrupted by a business model built on illegal hiring have a long way to go to make themselves attractive to a broader swath of the American workforce. E-Verify would make the transition easier by reducing the need for disruptive raids. 95 percent of business support mandatory E-Verify if it includes a safe harbor provision for employers who use the program in good faith. The Goodlatte bill (H.R. 4760) includes such a provision. It currently has 96 cosponsors and the backing of the White House.