Well, the folks at NumbersUSA are up to their usual distortions. The virulently anti-immigrant grassroots organizing group snuck a spy into a private pro-comprehensive immigration reform summit last month. Click through to see the spy’s notes from the meeting, complete with Jim Robb from NumbersUSA’s snarky annotations.
Refuting all of Mr. Robb’s erroneous claims would be too time-consuming, so I’ve decided to just focus on the most egregious ones, starting with:
Misrepresentation #1: “Is the point of bringing in more illegal workers to promote the "free flow of labor?" Or is it to build an unstoppable voting block?”
Mr. Robb’s rhetorical statement is doubly incorrect. No one – least of all the pro-reform movement – is advocating the importation of more illegal workers. Comprehensive immigration reform is predicated on the notion of first staunching the flow of illegal immigrants, then overhauling our outmoded immigration system to better accommodate the “future flow” of legal immigrants. If Mr. Robb’s concern is a future influx of undocumented laborers, then NumbersUSA and their nativist allies would be well-advised to abandon their quixotic enforcement-only approach.
As for the assertion that proponents of CIR are trying “to build an unstoppable voting block”? NumbersUSA turns an issue of human dignity into one of political impact. How telling.
Misrepresentation #2: “Would love to do a snap poll of African Americans to find out how many agree with the statement that they 'are doing well where there are high immigration rates.'"
Anti-immigration hardliners like NumbersUSA propagate the idea that recent immigrants are “taking” large numbers of low-skill jobs from individuals lacking education and work skills, of which a disproportionate number are African-American. If this were actually the case, one would expect to find elevated levels of African-American unemployment in areas where there is a large number of recent immigrants and vice-versa. This just isn’t so.
In fact, in the ten states with the highest shares of recent immigrants in the work force, the African-American unemployment rate is about 4% lower than in the ten states with the lowest shares of recent immigrants in the work force. There is no statistical correlation between recent immigration and unemployment rates among any native-born ethnic group.
Misrepresentation #3: “…note the bogus, nearly laughable claims of America having a present and future labor shortage! Millions of unemployed Americans will be shocked to learn this.”
Even in the midst of an economic downturn, the demand for labor in some industries – agriculture, food processing and home health care to name a few – still lags behind the supply. Mr. Robb appears to believe that the economy is a zero-sum game: when an immigrant takes a job, a native-born worker is left without one.
This reasoning is fatuous. When an immigrant picks apples, the produce has to be packaged, shipped, and sold: jobs that are often held by native-born Americans. Bolstering this argument, the economist James Holt estimates that each farmworker creates, on average, three new jobs in the surrounding area.
Flimsy straw-man arguments are no match for hard data. It’s a shame NumbersUSA and their ideological brethren are so fond of brandishing the former with an utter paucity of the latter.