Robots Undercut the Case for More Immigrants

With technology destroying jobs for humans, adding tens of millions of new immigrants [illegal aliens] to America will only deepen inequality and poverty...

The next 10 years are expected to see a revolution in the application of Artificial Intelligence to every day tasks... The need for human labor in construction, meatpacking, and food preparation seems certain to contract.

In the debate over “paths to citizenship” [amnesty for illegal aliens] and “enforcement first,” we can lose sight of what “immigration reform” most fundamentally means to the future American labor market: a massive new influx of low-wage workers.

The United States already receives between 700,000 and 800,000 legal immigrants a year. (Before the economic crisis, the U.S. received an additional half-million illegal immigrants annually. Illegal migration slowed after 2009...

Including the newly legalized, Schumer-Rubio will admit potentially 30 million lawful residents to the United States over the next decade, triple the admissions expected under current law.

...But do the arithmetic, and you’ll see that Schumer-Rubio will continue to hold the door widely open to the least skilled. The bill allots up to 250,000 limits to certain occupational specialties. Half of these visas are reserved for low-skilled workers... They are 50 percent more likely to depend on a major social assistance program...

Schumer-Rubio will exert an even more extreme pro-poverty, pro-inequality effect...

I find it clarifying to think of the immigration policy of the past three decades as a massive subsidy to employers of cheap labor. They save a few dollars an hour. The rest of the country pays the associated costs of raising their workers up to an acceptable American standard of living...

Immigration does more than recruit the country’s future workforce. It shapes the country’s society and determines the country’s future electorate...