The New Argument for Voters: Children of Migrants Do Better Than Yours

Americans should welcome many more migrants because the migrants’ children will be more successful than the Americans’ children, says the advocates for a new pro-migration, pro-amnesty political campaign.

“No matter which country their parents came from, children of immigrants are more likely than the children of the U.S.-born to surpass their parents’ incomes when they are adults,”Two economists share their views in Time.com’s June 1 article.

The economic success of foreign children is higher because immigrants tend to settle in U.S. cities along the coast where they can find new employment opportunities and jobs, according Leah Boustan from Princeton and Ran Absramitzky at Stanford. Two economic historians collaborated on a new book. “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success,”Pro-migration lobbies are now heavily encouraging this.

Americans suffer because they tend to be less likely leave their civic wealth behind, as they write:

Many of the children of U.S.-born parents grow up in areas where their families settled long before, so economic mobility for them is often coupled with the costs of leaving home … In other words, U.S.-born families are more rooted in place, while immigrant families are more footloose—and this willingness to move toward opportunity seems to make all the difference.

“Their desire to give more people in other countries the opportunity to live in the United States may be laudable, but they seem to have an appalling lack of concern for their fellow Americans,”Steven Camarota (the research director for the Center for Immigration Studies) said this.

They “consistently understate the fact that immigration crowds out other Americans from moving to these high-employment, high-wage growth cities,” noted Jason Richwine, a Harvard Ph.D. who now works at the Center for Immigration Studies.

In prior studies from 2017 to 2021, the two authors admitted that Congress’s decision to block migration from 1924 to the 1970s was a huge benefit for many Americans. This cutoff enabled poor Americans to leave their hazardous coal-mining jobs and move to factory jobs. It also allowed them to transfer from the Southern Cotton Economy to California and North jobs. Farmers were forced to automate many of the jobs that had been performed manually.

However, Congress reintroduced immigration in 1965. It then doubled inflows in 1990. This effectively made American migrants redundant with international migrants. “By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low,” said a 2011 academic study, titled “Internal Migration in the United States.”

Richwine said that the inflow of labor from immigrants reduces investor pressure to relocate their investment into high-growth areas. “They don’t have to worry about finding the labor in America … where there are a lot of people looking for work.”

Midwest politicians including Senator Chuck Grassley, Sen. Todd Young and Rep. Jim Banks have begun to recognize the danger of migration-caused diversions in wealth-creating investing.

The two authors’ message is being pushed out via a variety of favorable book reviews, soft-touch interviews, and friendly media mentions — plus education curricula — because they are the faces of a new elite-backed campaign to extract more valuable consumers, workers, and renters from poor countries.

Campaign’s key selling point is the claim that immigrants are better off than Americans. “Just as in the past, immigrants often double their income — or more — by moving to the U.S. from their home country,”Boustan stated this during a presentation on June 7, at the investor-funded American Enterprise Institute. He added:

Children of immigrants that grow up close to the bottom of the income distributionc– so, think about the 25th percentile, for example — are more likely to reach the middle class that children of similar [income] U.S-born households.

The internationalist-minded authors laud the immigration of skilled immigrants  — but also minimize any obligation to curb the inflow of unskilled migrants who compete with millions of low-income Americans, despite historically low wages and work participation rates. Instead, they favor the inflow of more unskilled foreign workers to substitute for the rising number of discarded Americans who can do the blue-collar jobs.

Boustan stated that on the 7th of June:

It is obvious that our immigration system doesn’t have to choose immigrants based upon their educational level or wealth. It doesn’t mean that we have to change to an American-style point system. Rather, if we’re willing to plan with the future in mind and take a long view, we can continue to accept immigrants from poor countries who can do any of the jobs that need [to be done in]With the American economy’s trust, their children can succeed in both agriculture and services.

That claim is very different from her 2021 paper, where she argued to fellow academics there is a “growing consensus that … immigrants can be readily replaced with [wage-boosting] mechanization or automation.”

Her new 2022 book is also a turnaround from her coverage of black migration in an unpublicized 2017 book that was formally endorsed by the association of university economists, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The two authors say little about how migration policy can be reformed to boost productivity by American white-collar, blue-collar, or agriculture workers. That disregard complements their corporate allies’ eagerness to grow the U.S. consumer economy by extracting more workers, more consumers, and more renters from poor countries.

Boustany and Abramitzky seemed unconcerned by the growing economic catastrophe facing millions of Americans, many of whom are sidelined or alienated. They wrote, for example, “Time.com”

This April 2020: New York Times ran a special feature called “I Am the Portrait of Downward Mobility.” “It used to be a given that each American generation would do better than the last,”It was then that the piece started. “but social mobility has been slowing over time.”

In paging through the profiles, we couldn’t help noticing one group of Americans who defies this trend: the children of immigrants …

The contrast is the New York Times article made the effort to describe Americans who are losing out after the federal government doubled immigration rates in 1990 — and created a multi-decade bubble of cheap labor — at the request of investors and progressives

“My financial situation is vastly worse than that of my parents, who were 40 when I was born,”Lauren Bruce of Madison, Wis. told The New York Times. “They always owned houses and had new cars, never worried about seeing a doctor, benefited from solid pensions and preached that college was the secret to their success … There was a ladder. I’m not sure that ladder exists any more.”

“My parents, a mechanic and a waitress in rural Alabama, were able to purchase a home and land and save money for the future,” said Melissa Haddock, an administrator in Florence, Ala. “I live week to week and rent.”

“Since the late 1990s, mortality rates for middle-aged (45–55), White non-Hispanic (WNH) Americans began to rise while rates declined for all other demographic and age groups,”A study by the National Library of Medicine in 2021 found that these numbers are consistent with what they were. “Research suggests these causes of death (i.e., suicide, poisoning, alcohol-related liver disease) are driving the overall mortality rate for middle-aged WNHs and have been described as “deaths of despair” in the literature,” said the study.

“If we’re making immigration policy from the perspective of what is best for Americans, we have to want a system where employers are incentivized — and also politicians are incentivized — to get low-skilled Americans back to work,” Richwine responded. Richwine agreed. “get their social problems straightened out to the best extent that we can, to make them productive people,”He stated.

Richwine stated that employers and lawmakers can still import immigrant workers to help solve their problems.

All Americans should have an important part in society and economy. We have to take care of them. It’s nice to be able to say we care just out of the goodness of our heart, but the reality is that when low-skilled Americans become important cogs, then we’re going to naturally care a lot more about the fact that maybe they’re too dependent on welfare or maybe they need to kick that drug habit … There’s no incentive right now to do those things as long as there’s this steady flow of foreign labor.

Breitbart News asked Boustan if compensation would be offered to Americans who are harmed from future immigration into high-opportunity areas. Boustan ignored her conclusions from 2017 and avoided the question by saying, “I don’t know.”

There isn’t really a lot of strong evidence that immigrants who are coming into the U.S. today are displacing U.S. workers … I don’t think there’s strong evidence that immigrants are taking jobs or lowering wages for U.S. foreign workers, even lower-skilled U.S. foreign workers, some of whom are black.

Goldman Sachs, President Joe Biden’s economic advisors, and many other employers disagree with her claim that migrants do not lower Americans’ wages.

Stan Veuger, the AEI manager who organized the event, dismissed the question of compensation for the government’s migration policy:

I don’t think the way we usually run things is that if there is a public policy change or some development in the economy, that the federal government goes out and hands out checks to everyone who may or may not have had last out. I don’t think that’s how democratic capitalism typically works, but I understand the impulse. It’s obviously how other countries have organized themselves, especially until 1989 [when the Berlin Wall was removed].

Current laws provide that the federal government provides compensation for people who are injured as a result of mandated vaccines. It also offers retraining money to those who have lost their jobs through free trade. And it pays people whose property is damaged when roads are built by government. These programs are based on the belief that citizens can only be successful if there is a reciprocal benefit and obligation between government and citizen.

This view has been deemed outdated by progressive and business groups that want Americans treated more as economically dependent cogs than Americans with legal and moral rights.

Progressions are a good choice for investors

Boustan’s book is the spearhead of a PR campaign to break what she said is a political logjam. “Immigration has been stuck in a holding pattern,”She lamented June 7, 2009:

The House and Senate held out hope for a pathway to citizenship that would be passed in exchange of more intense efforts at the border. And that did not pass in 2013, and that’s the last that we’ve heard of an attempt at comprehensive immigration reform.

But that political impasse between elites and populists can be broken by the political alliance of globalist-minded Wall Street investors and her anti-nationalist progressive sector, according to Boustan:

Here I am at AEI, and I’ve heard from many conservatives saying “America works! Anyone can make it here! That’s the message of your research.” But I’ve also heard from many progressives who saw in our research a hopeful message that a diverse set of immigrant groups can contribute to our society.

Many state business leaders as well as local gentry elites from GOP-leaning states support the same campaign for workforce replacement, cheap labor and migration.

“We need immigrants,”Robert Leonard was a radio host from Iowa. “Every rural manufacturing leader I have spoken with, regardless of party affiliation … know immigrants can help solve their labor problems,”Leonard lives close to a factory selling robotic cow-milking machinery to dairy farmers complaining about labour shortages.

Like many other comfortable liberals, Boustan uses one crude term — “conservatives” — to hide the Politics 101 distinctions between business interests and mainstream public concerns.

Boustan’s ambitious campaign would combine the globalist, state business, and internationalist loobies to deliver more diverse migrants into the cities, jobs, and communities that would otherwise be filled by more influential and better-paid Americans and their children:

The conversation about immigration has been shifted by politicians. This shift actually took place within a single generation, right after World War Two. President Obama was instrumental in this change. [Harry]Truman and the Presidents of the United States [John]Kennedy [Lyndon]Johnson plans to redefine America “A Nation of Immigrants.” I take that sentiment for granted, that phrase “A Nation of  Immigrants.”This idea was first presented in Washington, and was then shared with the public. It led to the reopening of the border in 1965.

So we believe that a politician who takes this message seriously will succeed– a politician who is strong and emphasizing America as a nation of immigrants, rather than [being]Be defensive over this alleged perpetual border crisis

And here’s the message: “That immigrants contribute to our economy through science, innovation and vital services, that the children of immigrants from nearly every poor country can move up to the middle class, that immigrants are just as keen to become Americans now as they were in the past, and that America is a country that embraces diversity and lets in new ideas.”

Positive and positive messages about immigration are popular and can even win political support if they’re embraced with pride. We believe that we can reclaim the legacy of America’s “Streets of Gold.”

Boustan didn’t acknowledge in her AEI speech that Donald Trump had offered Americans a positive message on migration and won the White House in 2016. Trump’s America-first policy deflated the post-1990 cheap-labor bubble and raised employment and wages for many working-class Americans — even though it was partially blocked by pro-business groups in D.C. and allied appointees in his administration.

Transfer Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, equality-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

A wide range of good-sounding explanations are offered to explain the extraction migration policy. Progressives, for example, claim the U.S. has a thriving economy. “Nation of Immigrants,”Americans are obliged to take in refugees from abroad and the state is required to renew its population.

But the colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resource wealth from the poor home countries. A migration policy reduces the shareholder pressure to companies that they build up complementary resources. tradeWith countries in need

Progressives support the economic policy. They want to change America from being governed by a European-origin civil culture to a modern progressive-directed empire with resentful, competitive identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,”He boasted.

Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. These polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of foreign contract workers into careers sought by young U.S. graduates.