National Academies of Sciences: Immigration Hurts Workers’ Wages, Boosts Corporate Earnings

By Joe Guzzardi
September 23, 2016
 
A blockbuster National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) report found that immigration transfers approximately $500 billion in reduced wages from American citizens and existing immigrants to recent immigrants, some unlawful, and also to major employers. NAS emphasizes that immigration, legal and illegal, creates a modest economic benefit for native-born Americans. But, NAS deemphasized the variable that mass immigration has reduced native-born workers’ wages, often hurting the least-educated and poorest. Corporations are the big winners when income is redistributed from working Americans to immigrants.
 
Titled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration,” the analysis underlined the consequences of low-wage, low-skilled immigration on U.S. workers which produces an approximate 5.2 percent decline in Americans’ incomes.
 
The NAS report presents eight different portraits of immigration’s fiscal effects, defined as taxes paid minus services used, of immigration on various states. Regardless of which of the eight scenarios applied, immigrants’ presence creates a fiscal deficit: California – $18.96 billion; Texas – $7.8 billion, New York – $5.79 billion, Illinois – $4.16 billion, New Jersey – $3.24 billion, Washington State – $2.51 billion, Massachusetts – $1.86 billion, Colorado – $1.18 billion, Arizona – $1.17 billion, Florida – $1.14 billion, Georgia – $1.02 billion, Nevada – $620 million, Oregon – $600 million, Virginia – $469 million, New Mexico – $429 million, and North Carolina – $424 million.
 
These staggering sums come during a time when H-1B nonimmigrant visa holders have displaced American workers with increasing frequency (Disney, Caterpillar, McDonald's, Southern California Edison and Toys “R” Us are among the many), when automation is accelerating, when about four million young workers enter a depressed labor market each year, and when month after month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports have shown that most hiring is in bartending and waiting tables, while manufacturing and energy jobs are in steep decline.
 
Mostly under the public’s radar, American universities employ 100,000 of the roughly 650,000 H-1Bs that work in the U.S. Those 100,000 hold high-status, high-paying jobs – professors, doctors, therapists, scientists and computer experts.
 
Each year, two million foreign-born nationals, including new legal permanent residents, refugees, asylum-seekers, guest workers and illegal aliens, join the labor force. Add to that visa over-stays and immigrants’ children who may be work-authorized DREAMers, and the millions of net annual additions to the labor pool have eroded American job opportunities and created an unsustainable expansion of available workers.
 
Despite the mountain of evidence that the NAS report presents, which proves that immigration hurts Americans financially and puts their jobs at risk, Obama wants higher immigration levels, and is indifferent to citizens’ ongoing plights. Many refugees of whom President Obama wants thousands more already hold jobs at Chobani Yogurt and several Iowa beef packers. At the United Nations Refugee Summit on September 21, Obama enlisted the help of major employers like Google and Goldman Sachs who pledged $650 million to provide job training and employment to refugees who will likely also displace Americans.
 
In his 2008 campaign, Obama promised to deliver “change we can believe in.” But few would have imagined that his agenda would include devastating American workers with his uncaring globalist vision.

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  A Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow, Joe may be contacted at
[email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @joeguzzardi19.