"Nutty" Bill Clinton at It Again, Falsely Claims America Needs More Foreign-Born Workers

As if struggling unemployed Americans don’t face enough obstacles, former President Bill Clinton has added his unsolicited two cents to the wide spread call among open borders advocates for more immigration.

Clinton joins incumbent Barack Obama, Congressional Democrats and most Congressional Republicans when he urged that the United States “stop some of our nutty immigration policies.” By “nutty,” Clinton means restrictions on legal immigration where most newly-arrived immigrants compete with or take jobs from unemployed Americans.

During his Thursday speech to the Export-Import Bank Conference in Washington, D.C., Clinton repeated one of his familiar but also misguided themes. According to Clinton, as more “innovative” immigrants come to the United States, more jobs are created. Clinton’s exact words:

“We can accelerate [the economy] if we’d stop some of our nutty immigration policies and let people who can create jobs for others come into this country—that’s worth something.”

Listen to Clinton’s complete remarks here.

Once again, Clinton and his like-minded allies ignore overwhelming evidence that what the United States needs is not more immigration but rather an immigration moratorium.  Even the most casual economic observer can figure out that adding more than 100,000 immigrants every month, month in and month out year after year and issuing them work permits, is a disaster for the approximately 20 million unemployed and under-employed Americans.  Clinton is a graduate of Georgetown University, University College, Oxford and the Yale Law School. Surely someone like Clinton with diplomas from those prestigious institutions can do simple addition. Yet, he refuses to acknowledge the obvious.

Simply stated, no empirical evidences exists that the H-1B visa cap should be lifted, a goal Clinton  supports, or that there’s a relationship between the numbers of H-1B visas issued and new job creation.

Since 2001, the total numbers of H-1B visas issued to engineers has exceeded engineering job creation in every year.  At the same time, American colleges and universities produce more than enough science, math, and engineering graduates to fill available jobs.

Said Michael S. Teitelbaum, Vice President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation:

“No one who has come to the question with an open mind has been able to find any objective data suggesting general 'shortages' of scientists and engineers."

Teitelbaum’s summary of the non-shortage suggests that immigration advocates like Clinton should be ignored when they call for more nonimmigrant work visas.

The Urban Institute, a Washington D.C.-based non-partisan economic and social policy organization, confirmed Teitelbaum’s statement. Urban Institute analyst Harold Satzman, Ph.D. found that:

“The United States’ education system produces a supply of qualified [science and engineering] graduates in much greater numbers than jobs available."

Clinton is well compensated to turn a blind eye to Americans’ plight. Since he left the White House in 2001, Clinton’s aggregate income from speech making exceeds $75 million, an average of about $200,000 per speech. Almost two-thirds of Clinton’s total speech earnings, about $44.9 million, have come from 215 overseas events in 48 countries including Mexico, India and the Philippines. His domestic invitations are from globalist organizations like the Export-Import Bank.

Clinton faces two choices: tell the truth about the adverse impact of nonimmigrant worker visas on Americans and thereby risk losing his multimillion dollar income or keep promoting over-immigration in exchange for collecting $200,000 for twenty minutes of canned speeches.

Unsurprisingly, Clinton has opted for the latter.