You are here: Home / Archives for Jack Martin

GIGO – Garbage in garbage out: Center for American Progress issues new report

May 17, 2013 By 8 Comments

GIGO – Garbage in garbage out: Center for American Progress issues new report

A new CAP report offers a panacea for the economic doldrums of the 24 states with the largest illegal alien populations. Too good to be true? You bet.

The analysis by Robert Lynch and Patrick Oakford takes their earlier national study that was built on erroneous assumptions about the increased earnings potential of illegal aliens receiving amnesty and parses those supposed increased economic output and tax payments among the high illegal alien states.

The authors state that, “Legal status and citizenship provide access to a broader range of higher-paying jobs.” They appear to be unaware of the survey data conducted among the beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty that found that five years after gaining legal status that there had been no significant gain in income relative to other workers and that many had actually lost ground economically. But even if it were true, it would simply means that amnesty would create greater competition for some jobs now held by legal workers. A greater number of job applicants would enable employers to hold down wages.

Filed Under: Amnesty 2013, Politics, Population

Census Bureau Projection Shows 127 Million More Residents in Next 45 Years

May 15, 2013 By 6 Comments

The U.S. Census Bureau has released new population projections based on alternative scenarios for the rate of immigration. In the high immigration scenario (a net increase from 747,000 immigrants in 2012 to 1.6 million per year in 2060) the U.S. population would reach 442.4 million by 2060 (up 127 million from today’s 315 million). According to the Census Bureau press release, this high immigration rate would also speed up the advent of today’s white majority losing its majority status by 2041. By 2060, the minority population – today at 37 percent – would comprise 58.8 percent of the population.

A second, low-immigration scenario would also assume an increasing level of immigration, but one that would reach 824,000 per year in 2060. A third scenario is based on a constant level of net international migration of 725,000 residents. This last scenario results in a total population in 2060 of 392.7 million, i.e., 50 million fewer residents than in the high scenario. There is not much difference between the low and constant immigration scenarios – about 5 million fewer residents in 2060 in with constant net immigration.

The level of immigration is slated to become the major factor in the population rise and in the changing ethnic composition of the country. The Census Bureau press release states, “International migration is projected to surpass natural increase (births minus deaths) as the principal driver of U.S. population growth by the middle of this century…” It already is the primary driver of U.S population growth if the children born here to the immigrants are added to the net international migration.

The Census Bureau did not offer a net-zero immigration scenario that has been offered previously. Net-zero immigration means arriving immigrants equal that of residents leaving the United States to live abroad.

Filed Under: Population, Society

Would the S.744 Amnesty Benefit the Social Security System?

May 13, 2013 By 5 Comments

At the request of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration (SSA) issued an impact assessment of the Gang of Eight’s amnesty legislation, S.744. The report, issued May 8, found that “Overall, we anticipate that the net effect of this bill on the long-range OASDI [Old Age Survivor, and Disability Insurance] actuarial balance will be positive.”

This will no doubt be touted by the bill’s sponsors as an argument for adopting their bill. However, the positive balance is an illusion based on the assumptions used in the analysis and, especially in the fact that the analysis is not “long-range” at all. It is only projected to 2024.

Among the questionable assumptions underlying the SSA’s analysis is that the legislation would reduce illegal immigration and, thereby, result in a large increase in Social Security tax collections from both workers and employers. The estimate also contemplates a large increase in workers paying into the system as a result of new legal immigration measures. That flow of newly arriving immigrants is larger than the flow of formerly illegal workers joining the program, and, therefore, most of the projected increased contributions will come from new legal immigrants.

The greatest deception, however, is that the projection does not extend to when those same workers begin receiving payments from SSA. Therefore, it ignores the fact that low wage workers – a large majority of illegal alien workers – withdraw benefits from the system in excess of contributions. Thus, if SSA were to project the impact of the amnesty legislation over a true “long-range” it would have to acknowledge that the impact would be negative.

Filed Under: Amnesty 2013, Law, Politics, Population, Society

Work Document Verification; Tilting at Windmills

May 10, 2013 By 3 Comments

An article in Politico on May 9 focused on the Gang of 8’s proposal to expand verification of employment identity documents. Opposition was noted among proponents of the legislation as well as opponents. Libertarians are concerned that the bill will create a national database of all workers, employers are concerned that the system would be unwieldy especially for small businesses, and advocates for effective reforms are concerned that the Gang of 8 bill bends over backwards to weaken the effectiveness of the system.

The concern about a national database of workers is absurd because that system already exists in the requirement for all workers to be registered with the Social Security Administration (SSA). In fact, work eligibility verification relies on accessing the SSA database. The real concern with the bill should be that it discards the current E-Verify system in favor of some new, undefined system. The current system has been improved over the years since it was established under a 1996 legislative mandate. Opponents of the system – both employers who are potentially exposed as knowingly hiring illegal workers, and illegal alien defenders who don’t want job opportunities to be denied to their community – criticize it for having an “error” rate of one or two percent. But, what is termed an error is someone legally entitled to work who is initially not verified by the E-Verify check. Virtually all of these “errors” result from name changes at marriage or misspellings in the SSA database. They are not errors – they simply require correcting the database, which has to be done at some point before the worker can receive retirement benefits.

Rather than focusing on false issues of privacy or error rates, persons who want to see effective protection of jobs for legal workers should focus on the fact that S.744 is aiming to discard a working, effective system to be replaced with an undefined system that will be created by an administration that identifies with the defenders of illegal aliens.

Filed Under: Amnesty 2013, Jobs, Law, Population, Society

Rubio is Wrong

May 9, 2013 By 15 Comments

Sen. Marco Rubio yesterday attacked the estimate by the Heritage Foundation that adoption of the Senate’s amnesty bill negotiated by the Gang of Eight would cost U.S. taxpayers $6.3 TRILLION over the next 50 years after subtracting tax receipts. He told the Tampa Bay Times that the flaw was Heritage’s assumption that “these people are disproportionately poor because they have no education, and they will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S. Quite frankly that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S.”

Rubio is wrong. A survey of beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty, five years after gaining legal status, found that on average they had not gained in income any more than other workers, and most had actually lost ground economically. That survey was the only one of its kind, and it did not include the agricultural worker amnesty recipients who were the least likely to have benefited from the amnesty.

Most of the arguments that adoption of the amnesty would be an economic benefit – like Sen. Rubio’s – are based on the assumption that newly legalized workers will get better jobs and move out of poverty. The experience with the beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty proves that assumption is naïve – at best – or deliberately misleading.

Filed Under: Amnesty 2013, Law, Politics, Population, Society

Immigration: Fueling U.S. Income Inequality

April 30, 2013 By 11 Comments

Income inequality in the United States has been rapidly growing over the past four decades. That fact is evident in the growing gap between average (mean) household income and median (mid-point) household income. The gap rose by 22 percentage points between 1970 and 2010, from 14.5 percent to 36.8 percent. The rapidly rising immigrant population — especially illegal immigrants — has contributed to this troubling social trend.

While legal immigration contributes to a shrinking middle class by disproportionately adding both high income and low-income earners, illegal immigration exacerbates income inequality by adding mostly low-wage earners and thereby, depressing wages for those workers. This is especially harmful to minorities — often immigrants themselves — that have larger shares of their populations living in poverty.

Click here to read FAIR’s latest report on the effects of immigration on U.S. income.

Filed Under: Amnesty 2013, Jobs, Population, Society
« Older Posts