Remind Congress of its responsibility to manage immigration in the national interest.

Sixty years ago, a majority of Congress, and the president of the United States, vowed that they would not increase immigration, which was about 300,000 per year at the time. They broke that promise. And Congress has continued to break that promise every year for sixty years. As America is about to elect a new Congress, let's remind this one what most voters want:

"On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted"

Some of you may be surprised to hear it, but The New York Times podcast "The Daily" offers up one of the best non-NumbersUSA conversations about immigration that you will hear this year. After recapping the last hundred years of immigration policy, host Michael Barbaro and David Leonhardt arrive at a conclusion that must be difficult for many of their listeners to hear:

"Our current system is a broken promise," says Barbaro. And "the entire Democratic Party and Brand has gotten to a place where the way it talks about immigration in general is as far away from working class America as one can imagine."

Anyone who has read our books will be familiar with the broken promise of The Immigration Act of 1965. But Leonhardt and Barbaro are sharing that important history with a new audience who will hear - perhaps for the first time - how the top promise of the bill's supporters was that they were not increasing immigration numbers; and how that turned out not to be true. Just two years later, the Times itself reported on the giant loophole lawmakers had created, saying "the extent of the change has surprised even those who fought hardest for it."

Leonhardt and Barbaro talk about how the issue exploded in the 1980s and 1990s as legal and illegal immigration rose to new record highs.

They talk about Barbara Jordan educating the country on the fundamental difference between being "pro-immigrant" and "pro-immigration."

And they talk about how American elites won out over the working class by making the 1965 loophole the new status quo.

"It simply is not sustainable in a Democracy, to have our elected representatives promise us one thing and then have it do the exact opposite of what they promised," Leonhardt concludes.

"We're not going to get to a sustainable immigration system until Washington reckons with the past failure to produce what it promised the American people it was going to produce."

For more from Leonhardt, read his recent column, "A Political Misdiagnosis." Teaser: "Many voters of color are unhappy about the high immigration of the last few years."

No, we don't "need" migrant workers

Bill Clinton made news recently when he acknowledged on the campaign trail that the Biden-Harris administration was not properly vetting inadmissible migrants before releasing them into the United States. But Clinton - who once supported reducing immigration by a third - went on to defend mass immigration. "We have got to have somebody come here," he said, "if we want to grow the economy."

The New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro made a similar argument in an interview with J.D. Vance.

Andrew R. Arthur confronts these arguments in "Media Talking Points Crash Into Immigration Realities," for the Center for Immigration Studies. Garcia-Navarro appeared to believe, erroneously, that a majority of construction workers are in the U.S. illegally (the majority are actually U.S. citizens).

"So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?" She asked Vance.

Arthur quotes Vance's response at length. Excerpt (emphasis, Arthur's):

VANCE: The unemployment rate does not count labor-force participation dropouts. And again, this is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million -- just men, not even women, just men -- who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won't do those jobs. Americans won't do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won't do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages. Think about the perspective of an American company. I want them to go searching in their own country for their own citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them re-engaged in American society. We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers.

Clinton and Garcia-Navarro don't acknowledge the millions of Americans who have been sidelined from the labor force. Arthur points to his colleague Dr. Steven Camarota's studies of the labor force participation rate.

"As Camarota noted last September," Arthur writes, the labor force participation rate "has been declining for the past six decades in most every state, and as a consequence 'contributes to serious social problems, including suicide, crime, drug overdoses, and welfare dependency'."

Six decades...the same timeframe as Congress' broken promise to keep immigration at levels that support the American middle class.

The Houses Will Not "Rot In The Fields"

Oren Cass also scoffs at Garcia-Navarro's suggestion that America's construction industry would collapse without mass immigration:

"Flooding the low end of the domestic labor market with foreign workers may boost production but it erases the incentives to produce in ways beneficial to the lower-wage workers already here, or to share the proceeds of rising output with them. Total output may increase, but output per person will not. The nation might simultaneously become "wealthier" in aggregate and place itself on a lower trajectory for economic progress....

"....By contrast, when employing the nation's workers is a competitive imperative, and increasing productivity is the key to growth, that is what firms will do....If complaints about "jobs Americans won't do" elicited only laughter, and creating jobs that Americans would do were a non-negotiable prerequisite to generating profit, imagine what capitalism's awesome power might achieve."

Cass has a little fun with the old claim that without illegal, exploitable labor, the "crops would rot in the fields." He titled his essay, "The Houses Will Rot in the Fields..."

As for Clinton's claim that we should raise immigration to levels we've never seen before in order to "grow the economy," Cass disagrees:

"He has the wrong metric. 'Growing the economy' is not an end unto itself. The goal is prosperity, which requires growing the economy not merely by adding people, but rather by increasing the productivity of the people."

No "checkpoint" to consider the welfare of American workers?

Elsewhere in Cass' magazine, Sen. Marco Rubio writes:

"Today, men are less likely to enter the labor force, find a decent-paying job, build a family, and contribute to a community--and more likely to fall into depression, social isolation, substance abuse, or suicide--than at almost any other point in our nation's history....

"....far from working to help men, many elites are exacerbating the crisis--by overlooking, allowing, or outright encouraging mass migration, both legal and illegal."

Rubio is clear: "this isn't the migrants' fault." They didn't create the system by which the American government completes the human smuggling process and partners with nonprofits and staffing agencies "that connect migrants with local employers hungry for cheap labor."

That system was created by the current administration, and left unchecked by the current Congress.

"At no point in this process," writes Rubio, "is there a checkpoint that requires nonprofits, government officials, or employers to consider the welfare of American workers or the stability of communities where migrants are being placed. But a basic understanding of supply and demand predicts the upshot of this dynamic: fewer and lower-quality blue-collar jobs for US-born men."

The bottom line: Immigration is too high

Washington's broken promise makes housing less affordable, our communities less sustainable, and good jobs less obtainable. After decades of stagnant wages and a declining labor force participation rate, Congress should make it easier for Americans to find jobs, not harder.

Let them know that politicians come and go, but we will remain. We will not forget the broken promises. We will not forget the voting records. We will not stop fighting for the welfare of American workers and communities.

Thank you for all that you do,