David Goldman (Spengler) acknowledges that “illegal immigration is a bad thing, and the social costs of a mass influx of poor and uneducated migrants from Mexico and Central America are significant.” Yet he doesn’t think it is “one of America’s bigger problems.”
That is partly because migration has been declining: “Migration actually fell after the 2008 crash because construction jobs disappeared. The best data we have suggest that net immigration from Mexico was negative between 2005 and 2010–that is, more Mexicans left the US than arrived. Hispanics, to be sure, are more visible in the workforce–their share of total employment has risen from about 14% 10 years to to 17% today–but that is due to the natural increase in the Hispanic population. In 1990, non-Hispanic whites had a fertility rate of 1.7 children per female, vs. 2.9 children for Hispanics. This bumper crop of Hispanic children has been entering the workforce for the past several years. But that has nothing to do with recent trends in immigration.”
Immigration makes for an easy target for American anger, but it’s mistargeted: “Americans are angry and are looking for someone (other than themselves) to blame, and popular rancor has attached itself to illegal immigration. That isn’t America’s problem. If Americans imagine that it is, they will look for consolation in misplaced against a scapegoat and avoid the hard problems ahead of them.”
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