by Seth Forman
The United States is deep into a season of severe discontent. Our politics are polarized, our Congress is moribund, and our purchasing power has tumbled. A Gallup poll in early 2024 showed that only 20 percent of Americans are satisfied with the “way things are going.” Nearly 70 percent believe the country is on the “wrong track.”
While innumerable failures of government factor into this public cynicism, evidence suggests that U.S. immigration policy is among its most powerful components. Despite our self-image as a “nation of immigrants” and our public celebration of “diversity,” a growing number of Americans sense that immigration, especially in its most frenzied illegal form of the past three years, is implicated in some of the country’s most vexing problems.
Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28 percent) than any other single issue, including “government.”
Given President Joe Biden’s widely disparaged policies on the southern border — U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers show 12.5 million border crossers from 2021 through 2024 — this could hardly be otherwise.
While net totals are difficult to parse, the bottom-line data from the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey shows that since Biden took office in 2021, the nation’s foreign-born population has grown from 45 million to 51.4 million as of February 2024 — an increase of 6.4 million. This number excludes most of those whom the U.S. Border Patrol calls “gotaways,” the estimated 1.8 million people who were detected making it across our southern border but were not caught.
Altogether, roughly 8.2 million newcomers have come into the country and stayed in the past three and a half years, an estimated 3.7 million of whom are here illegally. Today, the foreign-born make up an estimated 15.5 percent of the total population, surpassing the record set in 1890 of 14.8 percent.
Though Americans have reason to affirm the familiar immigration platitudes — such as that immigration accelerates economic growth and spurs the production of more and cheaper goods and services — the deleterious effects of recent in-migration have become too obvious to ignore, dividing Americans and shaking our trust in government and in each other.
While higher-paid workers continue to enjoy the benefits of cheap immigrant labor — new restaurants, well-coiffed golf courses, bountiful residential landscapes, and affordable nannies — it is now undeniable that the entry into the labor market of millions of low-skilled laborers has dampened the wages of the poorest native-born and established immigrant workers, those who compete against newcomers for jobs. As immigration economist George Borjas puts it, “Competition from immigrants dramatically reduces the wages of the workers whose qualifications most resemble theirs.”
In the U.S., immigrant workers have accounted for more than half of the seven million workers added to the labor force over the past 15 years, and many of these workers lack a high school diploma. Thus, the foreign-born account for 19 percent of workers overall, but 32 percent of those in occupations with median earnings below $30,000 per year.
The result has been a sharp decline in overall wages and salaries as a percentage of total national income. The think tank American Compass has shown that the compensation accruing to labor as a percentage of gross domestic product has declined from 63.3 percent in 2000 to 56.7 percent in 2020.
According to American Compass, when adjusted for inflation, the average wage of production and nonsupervisory workers was $28 per hour in 2022, the same as it was in 1972, offering fairly definitive proof that when employers face a growing market of low-skilled laborers, there is little incentive to raise wages.
Evidence that nonselective mass immigration hurts low-wage workers is so overwhelming that even longtime pro-immigration organizations have begun to concede this fact. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, for example, reported in May 2024: “Sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023.”
If the wall of silence surrounding the harm to low-wage workers has begun to crack, it would be a mistake to think the damage ends there. Tech industry salaries, for example, have long been smothered by H-1B and other college-related visa programs, which have pitted young American college graduates against overseas tech workers desperate to work for less.
And economists have long suspected that the endless infusion of cheap labor has discouraged investment and automation in industries such as agriculture, keeping productivity growth — the “mother’s milk” of rising incomes — low.
Less talked about, however, is mass immigration’s substantial contribution to a more universal crisis: affordable housing.
Home prices have doubled in the last decade, with much of that growth happening in just the last four years, and homeownership is increasingly out of reach for the average American. In February 2024, the median home price nationally was $400,500, and, according to real estate giant Zillow, the minimum income required to afford that home rose to $106,000, up from $59,000 in 2020.
It’s little wonder, then, that a March 2024 Harris poll found that 61 percent of renters who want to own a home agreed that “no matter how hard they work, they’ll never be able to afford a home.”
While numerous factors contribute to the seemingly inexorable rise in housing costs, it is obvious that large numbers of new residents — from anywhere — put upward pressure on prices and rents. Consider the numbers.
The U.S. currently builds around 1.5 million housing units annually, barely enough to meet the demand for the 1.5 million new households formed in a typical year, often when people move out of their families’ homes. Even if residential vacancy rates were unusually high (they are not), the arrival of around 2.5 million newcomers from abroad each year would generate a need for more housing than can reasonably be built.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Albert Saiz estimates that an “immigration inflow equal to 1 percent of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing values of about 1 percent.” This rate of increase, according to Saiz, “suggest[s] an economic impact that is an order of magnitude bigger than that found in labor markets.”
Given the close relationship between homeownership and family formation, the housing crisis is implicated in another troubling crisis: the “birth dearth.” Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the number of births in 2023 (3.59 million) was lower than in any year since 1979, while the number of children a woman in the U.S. is expected to have in her lifetime has declined to 1.62, the lowest rate ever recorded.
Once again, while there are numerous factors involved in record-low birth rates, recent declines in marriage and childbirth correlate inversely with the financial inability to house large families.
At stake in all of this, writes urbanist Joel Kotkin, “is the future of America as an aspirational country,” a nation where if a person works hard, stays out of trouble, and manages to save a little, they and their children will have a stake in national prosperity.
The truth is that since 1965, the year the Immigration and Nationality Act kicked off the enduring wave of 70 million people to the U.S., the country has become starkly more unequal.
Numerous data points bear this out, but a chart appearing at the website Statista seems most salient. It makes the point that in 2022, CEOs at the nation’s 350 largest publicly owned companies received 344.4 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in their industry. In 1965, CEOs earned 20.4 times the annual average salary of workers.
In a review of economist George Borjas’s 2016 book We Wanted Workers: Unravelling the Immigration Narrative, author Christopher Caldwell writes, “A big problem with the mass immigration that began in the United States in the 1970s was that it bred inequality.” In fact, the most enduring attribute of non-selective mass immigration, Caldwell concludes, “is not wealth creation. It is not entrepreneurship. It is not diversity. It is redistribution from the poor to the rich.”
If recent immigration’s effect on American economic life is less sanguine than we have been led to believe, its adverse effects are not limited to economics. While more difficult to gauge, demographic changes resulting from successive immigrant waves have undoubtedly played a part in the radicalization of American political life that first became apparent in the 2010s with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movements.
This shift to the extreme left was recently made most evident in the paroxysm of anti-Israel, antisemitic, and anti-American sentiment on college campuses after the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel.
After the attack, U.S. campuses exploded in a virulent mix of the familiar progressive extremism and revolutionary anarchism. However, perhaps for the first time in the U.S., the protests included a generous helping of Islamism and Arab nationalism. Exhortations to “globalize” Palestinian terrorism “from New York to Gaza” and “from the river to the sea” were accompanied by a deluge of 505 antisemitic incidents in the first three months following the attacks.
Americans, 80 percent of whom remain strongly supportive of Israel, were genuinely shocked that so many protesters could support Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group established in 1988 with a charter calling for the murder of Jews and the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic society where Israel now stands.
It was also difficult not to notice the large contingent of foreign students involved in and sometimes even leading the protests. Up until that point, the more than one million foreign students enrolled at American universities had rarely come up as a topic of public concern. Neither had the fact that 5.8 million students, as of 2022, were immigrants or children of immigrants.
But after October 7, it seemed reasonable to ask what influence the foreign and immigrant students (and faculty) had in the political transformation of American campuses.
Higher education researcher Neetu Arnold of the National Association of Scholars wrote:
[P]rotests are now havens for foreign students, especially those from Arab and Muslim countries, with their own set of nationalist and tribal grievances against Israel and the United States. In some cases, such foreign students appear to lead the protests in their pro-terrorism chants — some of which are in Arabic, or translations of Arabic slogans.
It is hard not to conclude that the growth in the percentage of immigrants and their children from 19 percent of the student population in the 1990s to 32 percent now has contributed in some ill-defined way to the evident political extremism.
This is especially so in light of the stunning recent book by George Mason University economist Garrett Jones, The Culture Transplant, which documents mounds of evidence that immigrant groups hang onto substantial parts of their native cultures even after four generations of residing in the U.S.
One assumes this non-assimilation includes those groups from the democracy-hating Muslim-majority countries. The marked decline in support for free speech among college students — and the general public — may be another indication that this is so.
The pro-Hamas protests solidified the growing perception that our immigration and student visa policies have failed America. More Americans, for example, now say legal and illegal immigration make the United States “worse off” (38 percent) than say it makes the nation “better off” (28 percent). It also helps explain why a Gallup poll from July 2024 found that 55 percent of American adults would like to see the number of new arrivals decrease. This is the first time since 2005 that a majority of Americans have said this.
That the preference of a majority of Americans for a more cautious approach to immigration has not been reflected in policy is a scathing indictment of our political system and its uneven distribution of power and representation.
Those searching for a reason why only one in ten adults “give high ratings to the way democracy is working in the United States or how well it represents the interests of most Americans” need look no further.
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Seth Forman is a weekend editor at The American Spectator and managing editor of Academic Questions, the quarterly journal of the National Association of Scholars.
Photo “Illegal Immigrants” by Chief Patrol Agent Gloria I. Chavez.
