This Issue: Trump says we need more workers, but CBO report shows the impacts of mass immigration on workers

Last weekend, Pres. Trump told Fox News' Laura Ingraham that because of low unemployment, the United States needs more skilled foreign workers. Ingraham did a good job of pushing back against the notion, and our Eric Ruark helped back up her rebuttal in his recent blog: President Trump Is Wrong About Shortage of U.S. Tech Workers.

Coincidentally, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued a report this week that concludes that while mass immigration increases overall economic output, it adversely affects the wages of workers who compete directly against new immigrants.

This is nothing new. Steve Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies has been writing about this for years. In July 2019, Steve wrote in the National Review:

Wages have stagnated or declined for the less educated as well. Pew Research reports that since 2000, the bottom quarter of earners saw just a 4.3 percent real-wage increase -- equivalent to an annual raise of just 0.2 percent...

"Census Bureau data from the first quarter of 2019 show that 5 million adult immigrants without a bachelor's degree have been allowed to settle in the country just since 2010."

In 2016, the National Academy of Sciences also studied the economic impacts of mass immigration and found that immigration hurts workers who are most likely to compete directly with new immigrants.

"To the extent that negative wage effects are found, prior immigrants -- who are often the closest substitutes for new immigrants -- are most likely to experience them, followed by native-born high-school dropouts, who share job qualifications similar to the large share of low-skilled workers among immigrants to the United States."

Government data show that native-born high-school dropouts of working age are disproportionately minority Americans.

Pres. Trump has shown some understanding of how low-skilled mass immigration negatively affects American workers and the taxpayers who subsidize the public services used by low-wage immigrants and the education of their children. Unfortunately, he, like many Republicans, believes the problem is not mass immigration. Instead, he believes the problem is with the skill level of new immigrants, which is why his Administration supports keeping legal immigration at historically high levels, but shifting to a merit-based system.

This is where this week's CBO report misses the mark. It reinforces what we already know -- current immigration harms native-born low-skilled workers who compete directly with new immigrants, but it doesn't tell us how shifting from mostly low-skilled to mostly high-skilled immigration would impact American workers.

We've seen story after story about how the H-1B high-skilled guest worker program has stagnated wages for tech workers and forced older American workers out of work, but there's been little examination (aside from CIS) into how dramatically increasing the number of skilled foreign workers would further harm American workers and the American students who might aspire to those occupations.

Should the Trump Administration push legislation that creates a merit-based system, but keeps legal immigration levels at 1.1 million a year, it would be helpful if the CBO looked into the future impacts of such a plan.

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CHRIS Chmielenski NumbersUSA Deputy Director