New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark S. MacKenzie released a nonsensical statement about Center for Immigration Studies research cited by Senate Candidate Scott Brown in last night's debate:
For immediate release
Contact: Kurt Ehrenberg, New Hampshire AFL-CIO 603-854-4885
Scott Brown Can't Get His Facts on Immigration in NH Right: Relies on bogus report from nativist DC-based think tank
Mark MacKenzie, President of the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, issued the following statement following tonight's Senate debate:
"Tonight, Scott Brown recited the findings of a factually incorrect report from the Center for Immigration Studies. The report misrepresents reported statistics, relies on outdated, estimated data from 2010, and in many cases does not provide citation [sic] for its claims. Nonpartisan studies such as those issued by the Pew Research Center do not bear out the report's conclusions.
"This should come as no surprise. The Center for Immigration Studies is a conservative DC-based think tank. While CIS claims that it is an 'independent' organization, with a 'pro-immigrant' vision, it has a long history of standing up for anti-immigration causes. In 2005 one of its own senior policy analysts went on the record claiming that immigration threatens 'the American people as a whole and the future of Western civilization.'"
This report is clearly biased, clearly authored by out-of-state groups with an extreme agenda, and should not be cited by an aspiring Senator as fact.
Mr. Mackenzie clearly didn't look at the study before commenting.
The research conducted by myself and Karen Ziegler is based entirely on government data used to measure employment — the public-use files of the Current Population Survey (CPS) — and the data come from the first half of 2014 (January to June), not 2010.
We looked at those of working-age (16 to 65) from the first half of 2000 to the first half of 2014 and found that the total number of working-age (16 to 65) people in New Hampshire holding a job increased by about 30,000 from 2000 to 2014, and that 71 percent of that growth went to immigrants — legal and illegal. This is striking because natives accounted for 65 percent of the increase in the total size of the state's working-age population, yet most of the net gain in employment went to immigrants. The share of working-age natives in the state with a job has declined significantly as immigration has grown, and the number not working has increased significantly.
Mr. MacKenzie's other contention that other studies performed by the "Pew Research Center do not bear out the report's conclusions" is also incorrect. I personally know many of the researchers at Pew, and I am unaware of anything they have published contradicting our analysis.
Mr. MacKenzie's comments reflect the AFL-CIO's unwillingness to consider immigration's impact on American workers. In fact, the union actually supported the Senate's Gang of Eight bill last year that would have doubled the number of foreign workers allowed into the country at a time when so many Americans are struggling to find work.