Another Lesson From 1965: More Immigrants = More Poverty

The story so far: the 2013 Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill, which aims to double legal immigration from what are already historic highs, must be regarded as the 1965 Immigration Act on steroids. The 1965 Act notoriously unleashed an era of mass immigration after a 40-year lull, and shifted the ethnic mix of new immigrants from predominantly European to Hispanic and Asian. It is responsible for setting the US on the path to a white minority by 2040 or so...

Immigration increases the poverty rate in two ways: firstly, it increases labor market competition, tending to lower wages and displace American-born workers, forcing more of them into poverty; secondly, many immigrants are simply poor—the U.S. is literally importing poverty...

Data for 2011 show that the poverty rate for recent (non-citizen) arrivals is nearly twice that of natives...

Worse, optimism about second- and third- generation immigrants is misplaced: The poverty rate for native-born Hispanic adults, a community largely created by post-1965 public policy, is 21.5%—more twice the corresponding rate for whites...

The 1965 Immigration Act was a disaster for America. Incredibly, the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Act aims to compound that disaster.