Who's Really Missing?

Updated: May 16th, 2023, 12:54 pm

Published:  

  by  Andrew Good

We know that - even before the ongoing border crisis - our high immigration levels transfer nearly half-a-TRILLION dollars from workers to employers. We can see that high immigration numbers don't deliver the productivity outcomes advocates promise.

No matter. President Biden last week announced yet another lawless step to greenlight additional masses of foreign nationals into the U.S. The New York Times' Miriam Jordan describes this benignly as "a new back door."

It's no secret what is going on here:

In adopting the programs... [The Biden Administration] bypassed years of failed attempts in Congress to legalize undocumented workers already in the country or to make more visas available to employers who wish to bring in temporary workers.

...Employers with worker shortages are welcoming the arrivals as an important new labor pool.

Meet the new labor pool, more preferable than the existing labor pool!

This is the same New York Times that has been lamenting "missing foreign workers" since the pandemic.

But the data shows a very different story. In a new analysis by Steve Camarota appearing in National Review, there are dueling graphs that show two stark truths:

U.S. politicians have been flooding the labor market with millions of foreign workers for decades. The result is that millions of U.S. workers that would have been in the labor force have vanished among the ranks of the unjobbed.

Washington policymakers aren't just overlooking these Americans, they are actively rejecting them in line with the wishes of the corporate donor class.

But there is one piece of great news: the Florida state Senate passed a bill on Friday that will mandate that all employers with more than 25 employees use E-Verify for new hires. Governor DeSantis advocated for mandatory E-Verify, and it looks like there will be a newer, stronger E-Verify law in the state of Florida in the coming days.

Tell your elected officials: this is the way!

ANDREW GOOD is the Director of the Media Standards Program for NumbersUSA