January 11, 2025

WE WERE RIGHT ABOUT IMMIGRATION:

One unique point I do think I made in my 1992 National Review cover story: there is no economic justification for these modern massive immigrant inflows. It may increase gross domestic product, but virtually all of that is captured by the immigrants themselves. American workers don’t benefit—in fact, they are disadvantaged, because immigrant wage competition shifts income within the native-born community from labor to capital. I discussed this in Chronicles’ June 2009 issue, in an article titled “The Economic Impact of Immigration.”

There are more than 30 years of economic studies to back my point up. But I have to say that despite all the evidence of immigration’s harmful effect on the economy, I have made absolutely no impression. Both Canada’s Liberals and Britain’s Conservatives, as well as both Democrats and Republicans in America, have rationalized allowing their recent immigration surges on the grounds that it would stimulate economic growth.

Of course, these surges were not really motivated by economics. All these governments simply hate their underlying nations.

The Biden administration, needless to say, has not even bothered to offer any economic rationale at all for its enabling an unprecedented immigration surge.

True, but it’s there around the periphery: “The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly.”

—Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, January 2nd, 2025.

But it wasn’t a “moment” — it was a series of crises by design:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

And:

 

Is MSNBC getting into Bulwark territory with their sudden interest in illegal immigration?

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll