Immigration Is Making U.S. Poorer and Dirtier

Pacific Life Insurance, among others, has pulled its advertisements from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show following his observation that mass immigration is making America “poorer and dirtier.”...

Whether one agrees with the truth of a thing, strongly or otherwise, has no actual bearing on the truth of that thing. As a matter of fact, immigration is making our country poorer—save for those who profit from cheap labor—for one simple reason: we are absorbing masses of poor people who who remain concentrated in lower-skilled, low-paying jobs. Many of those poor, whether they arrive illegally or by chain migration, happen to be minorities, and in particular Latinos.

Latinos experience the third-highest rate of poverty behind blacks and Native Americans—but as the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, they constitute a greater number of poor than blacks and Native Americans combined (10.8 million, 9 million, 700,000, respectively), according to the Center for American Progress....

Accounting for litter, pests, population density, particulate matter air pollution, and nitrogen dioxide air pollution, cleaning and janitorial services company BusyBee found Los Angeles and San Francisco among the top-five dirtiest cities in America—L.A. is the runner-up to New York City, with San Francisco coming in fifth. In fact, Los Angeles and New York, both with the lion’s share of the nation’s immigrant populations, vie for the dirtiest city in America award. The annual cost of litter clean-up in Los Angeles alone is around $36 million. ...