While America Sleeps

Her Heritage is Traded for Gold

Mike Scruggs

At least since the 1986 amnesty, the United States has had an immigration policy that profits illegal immigrants and businesses that hire them but hurts American workers and taxpayers.

Numerous studies have shown what is now becoming obvious. Our immigration policies are steadily making our country more liberal and more Democratic as well as poorer.

Our immigration policy has really been a deliberate failure to enforce immigration policies at the workplace. Securing the border is important, but the real problem is that we have not turned off the job magnet that attracts illegal immigrants. Nearly 50 percent of illegal immigrants do not sneak over the border. It is easy to get temporary tourist, work, or student visas and then overstay their limit. This is sometimes called visa-skipping, and it is becoming more common as people realize that the U.S. has virtually abandoned internal enforcement of its immigration laws. A typical example of visa skipping would be an agricultural worker with a legal H2-A visa, who goes illegal to take a higher paying construction job. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that sealing our borders will only cut illegal immigration by about 25 percent. Squeezing the border end of the illegal immigration balloon without enforcing immigration laws at the employment end, only results in more illegal immigration by visa-skipping. When political leaders emphasize securing the borders as the principal solution to illegal immigration, it is reasonable to conclude that they have either not done their homework on immigration issues, or they do not want to crack down on employers using illegal immigrant labor. They may also favor some kind of amnesty without calling it amnesty.

Since U.S. immigration law is not enforced at the workplace, hiring illegal immigrant labor is cheap, convenient, unlikely to be prosecuted, and very profitable. Some states require verification of a potential employee’s immigration status. This has proved quite successful in reducing illegal immigration into those states. But supporters of low-cost illegal immigrant labor have so far blocked a mandatory national E-Verify law and worked to undermine its applicability and effectiveness. Moreover, the political leadership in some states has bowed to political pressure from state chambers of commerce, state farm bureaus, and powerful lobbying associations of employers using large numbers of illegal immigrants. Their lack of foresight and courage will likely bring many problems and cause their tax base to flee.

Importing millions of poorly educated, low-skilled workers who pay little tax and make disproportionate use of government assistance programs is much more likely to bankrupt rather than enrich a nation. Furthermore, many American workers are displaced and pushed to government assistance. The greatest impact on American workers, however, is downward pressure on wages caused by an oversupply of cheaper foreign labor. Harvard labor economist George Borjas and others have estimated that although foreign-born labor in the U.S. accounts for $1.6 trillion or 11 percent of the annual GNP, the net economic effect after increased fiscal expenditures for education, social welfare and healthcare, and law enforcement is actually negative. The real effect is an annual transfer of about $400 billion of wealth from American workers to the employers of foreign workers, many of whom are here illegally and using stolen or falsified social security numbers. Those 25 percent who are not guilty of identity theft or social security fraud are probably guilty of tax evasion. The Heritage foundation estimates that illegal immigrant households use $14,387 more per year in government benefits and services than they pay in taxes. Legalizing unlawful immigrants does not make them cheaper. Social Security and other entitlement increases offset by very little additional tax revenues run their annual cost up to $18,980 per household.

Yet the Republican leaders in the U.S. House--John Boehner, Eric Cantor, John Goodlatte, and Paul Ryan--have deserted their conservative voting base and the substantial majority of conservative Republicans in the House and are trying to deliver a Republican surrender on amnesty to President Obama, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid, and the Gang-of-Eight sponsors of the Schumer-Rubio Senate amnesty bill, S.744, which would also bring another 30 to 35 million legal immigrant workers into the U.S. over the next decade. This is when we have 20 million Americans who want a full time job and cannot find one.

Depressed American wages from flooding the labor market with lower paid foreign workers is not limited to lower levels of education and wages. Salaries of computer science graduates fell 2.5 percent from 2012 to 2013, and the overall average of tech worker wages has been stagnant for 15 years. There is NO shortage of American STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) workers or graduates. In fact, two-thirds of U.S. STEM graduates are unable to find work in STEM fields.

Senate Republican sponsors of S.744, Lindsey Graham (SC) and John McCain (AZ),  are now in their third attempt to pass an amnesty and massive foreign labor import program that would devastate American workers, escalate federal welfare and healthcare spending, and substantially increase the number of liberal Democratic voters and office holders. This is virtual suicide for the Republican Party and with that suicide will come the burial of every conservative issue including gun-rights, the protection of marriage, right to life, fiscal responsibility, and military preparedness. Why are they doing it?

Are Boehner, Cantor, Lindsey Graham, McCain, and others being bought for campaign donations and favorable TV ads by the U.S. Chamber, the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and other powerful special interest profiteers? Follow the money. The ideology of these people is not free enterprise; it is global profiteering unrestrained by social or patriotic concerns, especially not jobs for American workers.

By advancing Congress to an unprecedented betrayal of American workers, taxpayers, and the hopes and traditions of the American people, Boehner is diverting his party from probable victory to ignominious defeat In November. Can America survive Obama and Republican insanity?