Media
Steven Camarota's Presentation
Oped by Hal Salzman: Two Simple Reforms Can Make H-1B Visas Great Again
Event Summary
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) hosted a panel to discuss the importance of immigration numbers, legal and illegal, and their impact on wages, the labor market, and the future of the American workforce. This timely panel, "Beyond the Border: Why Legal Immigration Numbers Matter," builds on the social media debate sparked by Elon Musk’s recent comment highlighting the need for more legal immigration and seeks to heighten awareness of the impact of legal immigration – both high-skilled and low-skilled.
Participants
Introduction by: Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas)
Steven Camarota, Director of Research, CIS (slides)
Michael Lind, Fellow at New America and author of, among others, Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.
Hal Salzman, Rutgers University, specializing in STEM labor markets and workforce development. (slides)
Moderator: Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, CIS
Date and Location
January 14, 2025
National Press Club
MARK KRIKORIAN: Good morning. My name is Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. We’re online at CIS.org. Thank you all for coming in, and thank you for whoever’s watching this live as we’re streaming it.
Joe Biden, when he was running for president in 2019, said we could afford to take in a heartbeat another 2 million people. What he didn’t tell us was it was 2 million illegal aliens every year that he was president. Having seen the consequences of the handling of immigration by the Biden-Harris administration and by the Mayorkas DHS, the debate over illegal immigration is in a sense kind of over. I mean, there will be back and forth about tactics and what have you, but with a majority of the public being asked specifically in these words, “Do you support mass deportation?” and a majority saying yes, the argument at least for now, I think, is settled. As Vice President J.D. Vance – or, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance said during his convention speech, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” And I think that’s – as much as consensus you’re going to have, that’s consensus for now.
But border control, deportations, E-Verify, and the rest aren’t actually immigration policy; they’re the means by which we enforce immigration policy. The immigration policy itself is how many people do we allow to move here and how do we select them. And in that regard, President Trump, for instance, said: “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” More recently, Elon Musk tweeted: “The legal immigration process in America needs to be greatly streamlined and expanded, while illegal should be shut down.” This is what I like to call the legal good, illegal bad approach to immigration, sometimes also described as high walls but wide gates.
But with the share of the foreign-born population in the United States now having exceeded anything ever recorded – it’s higher now, the share – not just the number, but the share – higher than even during the Ellis Island period – Americans have been pretty clear that they would prefer less overall immigration, legal or illegal. A Rasmussen poll last fall actually told people how much immigration – how much legal immigration we take every year – it’s about a million a year – actually, they said a million; it’s actually a little more than a million, so they in a sense maybe even undersold it – and then said: How many legal immigrants do you think the United States should take? And a majority of respondents said legal immigration should be half or less than it is now. In fact, about one out of five said it should be zero, which I’m not clear they actually wanted it to be zero but it was a way of saying this is a serious problem and needs to be addressed.
And so I thought it was important for us to have, or at least to start, a discussion about actual immigration numbers and the mechanisms we use to pick people. And so we have some panelists here who are uniquely qualified to talk about this issue.
First is Congressman Chip Roy. He’s a member of the House of Representatives from Texas. He serves on the House Judiciary Committee, which matters because that has oversight over immigration; also, Rules and Budget Committees; and is the policy chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
We have, also, from the Center for Immigration Studies, Steven Camarota, who is our director of research and is one of the top people in the country on the size – examining the size and scope of immigration in the United States.
After Steve speaks, Michael Lind is going to speak about focusing on the less-skilled side of the immigration – legal immigration. Michael is a fellow at New America, where he was co-founder. He is a columnist at Tablet, and also is the author of more than a dozen books. The one maybe that’s most relevant to this topic is called “Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.”
And then, last but not least, Hal Salzman is a professor at Rutgers University, an expert on high-skilled guestworker visa programs and their effect on the labor market.
So they’re going to speak in that order. Then we’re going to – I’m going to let them sort of talk among themselves if they’ll have questions for each other on the panel or comments. And then I want to take questions from those of you here live in the audience, but also those watching this stream. If you’re here live, you can just raise your hand. But if you are out in internet land watching the stream, email your question to [email protected] – [email protected] – and I’ll look through them and select them, and we’ll ask.
So, Congressman, if you could start the discussion.
REPRESENTATIVE CHIP ROY (R-TX): Sure. I’d be delighted to. Mark, thanks for this. Thanks for what you guys do at CIS and all of the work that you do to make sure people understand the truth about what’s going on with our very, very badly broken immigration system.
Todd Bensman is a – is a great asset, a good friend of mine, lives in Austin, Texas. If you don’t follow Todd, you should follow all his work on the Darien Gap and all of the ridiculous work of the nongovernmental organizations and the, frankly, network that involves our government with these NGOs and international organizations designed very specifically to undermine American sovereignty, because that’s what’s actually been going on. And his reporting on that has been fantastic.
And I want to start off by focusing a little bit on illegal immigration, even though I know the purpose of this is to talk more about legal immigration and kind of the state of affairs, because the backdrop for everything we’re talking about with legal immigration is the disastrous state of our current immigration system with respect to illegal immigration and the numbers that we’ve all seen. And I would remind people for a minute that President Trump ran in 2016 – which is, shockingly, now over eight years ago, when he started his campaign – on what? Build the wall. So 2016 it was so bad – so bad – that an entire presidential campaign was built around the idea that we needed a wall to stop the flow of illegal immigration. And since that time, some 10 million plus people have poured into our country illegally.
So if we set out to reverse the damage that’s been done over the next, say, four years of the Trump administration, what are the odds that we do that? What are the odds that we actually remove all of the people that people are saying we’re going to remove? I have great faith in Tom Homan. He’s a good and dear friend. I have great faith Stephen Miller, great faith in the president, and the motives and the desires to undo the damage of the Biden administration. But is anybody going to go to Vegas and bet up or down on whether we remove half of the people that have come here? Twenty percent? Would you go bet your life’s savings that we will remove even 20 percent of the people who have come here illegally? I’ll be interested to see how many people would go bet on that.
So, now, why does that matter? Because that’s the backdrop for the state of our population. Who’s here? What is America? Who are we? Who are the people who are here? Because the country is only what – a country is only defined by the people that make it up. We always talk about America being an idea. J.D. Vance is right: We’re not just an idea; we’re actually a nation of people with values, and a culture, and rule of law, and we’re supposed to actually acknowledge that reality.
So you’ve got all of these millions of people imported into our country illegally. You’ve got horrific stories like Alexis Nungaray, who I’ve come to know, in Texas, whose daughter Jocelyn was murdered at the hands of the dangerous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. And Alexis is going to be one of my guests at the inauguration on Monday because she’s been a hero. She has stood up and fought and demanded that we have changes because nothing should ever happen like happened to her again. We can go through all of those horrors, and I know that’s not the point here, but understand that backdrop.
And then we hear all of this chatter about H-1Bs and the need to have a reformed immigration system as if this is somehow new, as if we haven’t had this conversation now for decades, in which basically big corporate interests want cheap labor at the expense of American labor while the culture of our country is getting twisted around; while our open borders are being ignored; and while Republicans go out and campaign on securing them, never fully secure them, and never undo the damage of the fact that they were unsecured in the first place. That’s the truth. How do I know this? Well, in 2006 and ’(0)7, when I was on the Judiciary Committee dealing with all of those amnesty bills, which that’s what they were, and working through those problems; and then fast-forward to 2012 and ’13 during the Gang of Eight, all of the debates then; and then fast-forward to 2017 with Goodlatte and – Goodlatte I and Goodlatte II; we have utterly failed to ever address the problem.
And here’s the issue, right? So you talk about all of the numbers – the illegal numbers, yet we let in something like 3 million people a year to our country legally. A million-ish green cards, a million-ish guestworkers, a million-ish foreign students each year; 3 million. I mean, if you look at it, according to – I think we’ve let in more people than every country in the world combined, according to Pew. And everybody says: Oh, you guys have closed doors. You guys don’t let people in. It’s absolute hogwash. It’s completely false. We’ve allowed millions of people to come into our country. But then you go look and see what’s actually happening right now.
Well, the current employment situation in December 2024 according to BLS – the Bureau of Labor Statistics – shows nearly 7 million individuals are unemployed. Data shows another group of Americans not in the labor force but wanting a job is 5 ½ million people. But the question is, who are they? In December 2024, 716,000 fewer native-born Americans were working today than there was pre-pandemic. So where are the jobs going? The job growth has been going to foreign-born workers. So what’s the impact on the American worker, the American society? And you could talk about, well, we need high-skilled workers. We need STEM.
I mean, what the hell have we been doing in our education system? All I’ve heard about is the word STEM for the last two or three decades. But apparently we’re so woke and DEI folks we don’t actually have STEM. Seventy-five percent of college graduates who majored in a STEM field are not employed in a STEM occupation. What are we doing? I’ll tell you what we’re doing. We’re subsidizing big corporations to hire cheaper foreign labor while we subsidize American workers not to work or go take a job in some field that is not related to their STEM degree. That’s what’s actually happening.
And here’s my big bet. Republicans this year, through reconciliation and all of their big talk, what are they going to do? Republicans are going to kowtow to big corporate America, K Street, lobbyists, for cheaper labor and for tax cuts while the American worker gets screwed. That’s what’s going to happen if people don’t stand up and try to change that.
And here’s the last point that I’ll make. Fifty-one and a half million – why does that number matter? Because 51 ½ million is the number of people in the United States today who are foreign-born. That is about 16 percent of the population. That is the highest percentage that we’ve ever had in our country. That is higher than even after the massive influx in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And then what happened in the 1920s? America sensibly pumped the brakes. America said pause. Let’s make sure that we are assimilating people. Doesn’t matter where you’re from. Doesn’t matter what your background is.
But we are, in fact, Americans. We do, in fact, speak English. We do, in fact, believe in the rule of law, believe in the Constitution, believe in the Bill of Rights. We are, in fact, largely and heavily a Judeo-Christian nation. We have values that are supposed to guide and direct our country. And so we pumped the brakes for about 40 years, maybe even almost 50. Now, for the last 50 years we have jammed our foot on the accelerator through both legal and illegal immigration and anybody on K Street, anybody in corporate America who tells you otherwise is lying.
Anybody who says that they’ve not been the beneficiary of government provided ability to get cheap labor, they are lying. They have had that and the fact is they want more of it. They want more benefits and they don’t care if they roll over the average hard-working American family and the average hard-working American who’s been here multi generations and wants to work but we’re destroying the ethos and the culture of America by what we’re doing.
So my call to Republicans, my call to the president and the administration, is freeze what we’re doing. Figure out what the state of affairs is. Remove the people who have come here illegally. Repatriate them where they’re supposed to be. Reestablish the rule of law. Secure the border first. Border security first if you want America first, and get that done and then have a serious and robust conversation about what the state of our workforce is. Empower and educate and train Americans. Stop paying people not to work. Restore our strong free enterprise system and then let the market demand what we need. And then if we want guestworkers and then if we need some more visas, fine, let’s have that conversation. But we don’t need to just sit here with 3 million people pouring into our country legally every year while several million have been coming in illegally, and our entire country gets turned on its head.
With that, I will yield.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Congressman.
Steve Camarota is going to speak next. He’s got some slides you can see up there and, Steve, go ahead. Take it away.
STEVEN CAMAROTA: Well, thank you, Mark, and thank you all for coming. I am going to be speaking – I’ll try to provide as quickly as I can a generalized overview of the scale of immigration to the United States with a lot of focus on American workers. It’s the area I’m primarily interested in, I’ve focused on in my career, and so that will be what we’re talking about.
Just, you know, very briefly, before COVID the level of legal and illegal immigration to the United States was extremely high, as the congressman has already pointed out. Immigration did dip during COVID significantly. Legal immigration was slowed greatly. Illegal immigration for a time was greatly slowed. But then it rebounded dramatically as COVID ended, and as he also pointed out the foreign-born – the total percentage of the U.S. population that were not U.S. citizens at birth – has now hit, you know, a record and we’ve never been here before. And I think that’s important, and I will try to show you some numbers on that.
Overall, there are about 31 million immigrant workers. Again, that’s the foreign-born, legal and illegal. Probably about 2 million of that 31 million in the data are various guestworker programs and about maybe 9 (million) – 8 (million) or 9 million are illegal immigrants. The rest would be legal immigrants. So somewhere around two-thirds of the workers in the United States are permanent residents, somewhere around a fourth, a little more than that, are illegal immigrants, and then you have guestworkers in there.
So very briefly, I won’t talk that much about the border surge but it’s important to understand that the border surge was very much driven by policy, the release of 7 million-plus people into the United States by the administration, some of whom were flown in from various Latin American countries, probably about 2.4 million gotaways. These are people we saw entering but never stopped. We have unseen gotaways on top of that. Plus, we have visa overstays and, of course, legal immigration has been running full bore as well during this time period.
Now, there are a couple issues to keep in mind. One of them is the arrival of people is not the same as the overall stock of people who are foreign-born in the United States. Here we see something that I think starts to show you how unprecedented. These are not my numbers. These are from the Census Bureau. This is their estimate of net migration into the United States. I should point out it does include the U.S. born but that, roughly, equals out. We don’t have a net migration of many native-born or U.S.-born people out of the country relative to all those returning. It can be a little out of balance in some years one way or the other but what we’re really seeing here is the net migration of legal immigrants and illegal immigrants into the United States.
Keep in mind, this is taking into account perhaps the 1 million people who leave each year who are foreign-born. Now, that may seem like a lot but it could even be more. Remember, once the foreign-born population gets up to 50-plus million people 1 percent is 500,000. So if 2 percent are going home each year that’s, very roughly, a million people. And yet when the Census Bureau tries to account for those people who leave you still get this result that you see on your screen, something completely unprecedented. It looks like nothing like this has ever happened before. And, yes, illegal immigration is a big component of this but legal immigration at high levels is very important.
So here we see in the next slide the blue columns just show the number of people who are here who are foreign-born. That number is close to 52 million and their share of the population is now approaching 16 percent. That is the line. So you can see what the congressman mentioned: the reduction of immigration, both from World War I starting in 1914 and then legislation in the 1920s that greatly reduced the flow of people in. The foreign-born number and share fell. By the way, the reason the foreign-born percent is so much higher in the last – in the 1800s was the population was smaller so the foreign-born population numerically was smaller but it was a very large share of the population, particularly in the post-Civil War period.
Then that changed and we had a period of much lower immigration. One of the things that happens in that period, without a long discussion and this probably is very much related to immigration, is we get the great period of wage compression in the United States from the ’20s to the ’60s where the people at the top and the people at the bottom seem to have been drawn together. Yes, the people at the top always made more. They did after and before that. But they seemed – the bottom seemed to have done better. It’s also the time period when we create a middle class society. It does seem to have been a period of very significant improvement in the overall standard of living of the working class in the United States and it certainly coincides with low levels of immigration.
So in this chart I just want to show you sort of the aggregate impact of all immigration on the U.S. labor force. So what you see here is the share of these broad occupational categories in this figure here that are foreign-born or immigrants, legal and illegal, and what you notice is that the biggest increases tend to be at the bottom but by no means exclusively at the bottom. For example, computer and mathematical occupations have a very large – a high percentage of foreign-born but in general jobs like grounds keeping, farming, fishing, and forestry, factory work, food preparation and service, health-care support – not the doctors and nurses but the more unskilled people who help out in nursing homes or home health-care aides. These things tend to have had the biggest impact. Now, and so it is also true that, again, there are some skilled occupations with a larger impact, more like engineering as well as you can see here. But many of the occupations most heavily impacted by immigration tend to be at the bottom end.
The least impacted are, like, police and security because those jobs usually require a background check. So for one thing it excludes illegal immigrants. Also legal professions, you know, paralegals and lawyers, judges – that sort of thing. So other professions, if you want to know, that have very little impact would be, like, journalists, too. All jobs that require a very high knowledge of English tend to have lower foreign-born percentages.
So, now, this increase in the supply of labor that immigration and this explosion in immigration over the last 50, 60 years has coincided with one of the most troubling trends in the U.S. labor market and that is the increase in working-age men in America – it’s been well studied – who are not in the labor force, which means they don’t show up as unemployed. They’re neither working nor looking for work, and since we’ve excluded the elderly here this isn’t a function of the population aging. In fact, in a very long paper you could read on our website I’ve looked at these questions by different age cohorts and you still see the same decline even when you look at people in their twenties and thirties. Men are dropping out of the labor force, particularly, as this figure shows, that top line is those without a college degree. So what are they doing? Very briefly, they’re living on – you know, grandparents and parents are helping them. Girlfriends and significant others are helping them. A significant fraction – we’ve seen an explosion in disability even at the same time even among the young even at a time when jobs have become less dangerous. Obviously, there’s a lot of abuse going on. Some live also on other various welfare programs, often if they have children. But the big increases in nonwork are among nonmarried men and men without children.
Now, why care? Well, on the right there you can see that the number even through 2024 was nearly 19 million working-age men. And, again, it doesn’t matter which age group you look at. The trend is quite clear. Why care? Well, very briefly, there is a very large literature that shows that particularly men when they’re not in the labor force – that is, not looking and not working – that it’s very destructive to them. Whether it’s alcohol and substance abuse, obesity, social isolation, they are very unattractive partners for marriage so it limits family formation and it’s a disaster for society because it contributes to other things like abandoning children or crime and, again, social and political isolation. So it’s both bad for the individual men and for society when so many of them are out of the labor force.
So the big question is: Did immigration cause this? It almost certainly contributed to it, but I would not argue that it is the key cause here. What immigration does let us do as a society is ignore this social disaster. After all, why care about all these men out of the labor force when we can just hire eager immigrants? But as a society I would argue passionately that we have to address this problem.
OK. So I wanted to just look very briefly at wage trends and see, you know, where things are and this just looks at median weekly wages through the third quarter of 2024. Now, the labor market is supposed to be really hot and yet we don’t see dramatic growth in wages. And by the way, these are full time workers and this is their median weekly wages. Wages are flat. So, yes, we’re going to hear that employers find that they don’t have enough workers but it’s very hard to find any evidence of that in the actual wave data.
Here we see STEM workers now. Before I was dividing it by education and focusing more on the less educated but here we see people in science, technology, engineering, and math, and this is a different data set, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics was willing to do a special run for us of the employer costs for employee compensation survey and the beauty is we have both wages and benefits. And what do you see? It’s flat. We’re going to hear from Elon Musk and many others we are desperately short of science and technology and engineering and math, but wages are actually lower as best we can tell relative to COVID. And, again, I didn’t run these numbers. BLS – the Bureau of Labor Statistics – did it for us.
So let me briefly just look over something else which is the STEM field. Now, again, we’re going to hear a lot that there are not enough STEM workers. Now, this will be debated – don’t get me wrong – but what you see here is all the people who have a STEM degree – we asked that in several government surveys. This is from the American Community Survey. It’s from 2023 and it shows the share of people who have a STEM degree and are working but they’re not working in any STEM field.
So you have an engineering degree but you work in financial services. You have a science or math degree but you work in retail and you don’t do any kind of data analysis or computer programming or science or anything related to STEM. And we also have a bunch of people who are not in the labor force or are unemployed, and you see that too.
Overall, we have about 9 (million), 10 million STEM jobs and we have over 18 million people in America with STEM degrees. Just to give you one, I think, fascinating example which you don’t see up here is that even if you zeroed in on foreign-born engineers, something we’re going to hear we need a lot of, only about a fourth, at most a third, actually work as engineers. They too move out of that field because wages aren’t that great or whatever.
So I want to finish up. This is the entire STEM workforce. About – it shows – the line shows about 29 percent are foreign-born, 2.5 million of the STEM – of STEM workers in America. So we’ve seen a very large growth. And one of the key questions we have to ask is, is it wise to be so heavily dependent on STEM?
I threw this in at the last minute, this last slide. This is a slide that looks at immigration and sees how much younger it makes us. One of the arguments people are going to make is, well, look, we have to have all these immigrants because otherwise – you know, we’re just growing old. We’re not going to have enough workers to support the economy or we’re not going to have enough workers to support government.
But when you look at the numbers – and what you see here is the high, medium, and low Census Bureau; I only took these right from the Census Bureau’s projections – yes, immigration can add a lot. So if you had low immigration or population in 2060 it shows here on the one side will be 343 million or if we had high immigration it would be 397 million. Over on the right you can see how much immigration is. That’s net immigration of 60 million on the high and it’s 18.4 (million) on the low immigration. So a very big difference, over 40 million people in less than 40 years and, again, that’s net. That’s taking into account all the people who leave.
And, yet, what the figure on the other side shows you is the impact on the working age share is small. If you have very high immigration you get 58 percent of working age and here it’s defined as 18 (million) to 64 (million). If you have very low immigration or low immigration you get about 57.6 (million), less than a percentage point difference.
The reason mainly is the immigrants age over time, their fertility rates are not that high anymore, and immigrants arrive at all ages. Yes, a significant fraction of immigrants arrive in their fifties and sixties. So the overall impact on the age structure in the United States is not zero but it’s not that big. It can best be described as modest. If you had to put it on a bumper sticker or a long bumper sticker immigration ain’t no fix for an aging society.
All right. So, in conclusion, we’re at a record. We’ve never been here before. Any proposal to increase immigration is taking America into uncharted territory on the foreign-born share and this all has enormous implications for American workers. I would argue one of the biggest is crowding them out or discouraging them from going in and discouraging us as a country from dealing with the decline in work. And as I said in the rest of my presentation, when you look at wages, when you look at all the less educated people on the economic sidelines, when you look at all the people who have STEM degrees who don’t work in STEM, it’s very hard to find any evidence of a labor market. The one piece of evidence that we have a very tight labor market is testimonials from owners of business who are looking for workers, and that’s not something we should ignore. It’s not something we shouldn’t say, oh, that’s nothing – they just are all self-interested. But we need to look carefully at the data and say what are the wage trends and how many people are potentially available.
Thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Steve. That is a long bumper sticker. I guess if you have a long bumper it’ll fit.
MR. CAMAROTA: A big, big car.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah.
So Michael Lind next.
MICHAEL LIND: Yes. We’ve heard a lot about the history of immigration and particularly the cutoff of mass immigration in the early 20th century and this history is almost entirely missing from mainstream debates about this that you read about in the New York Times and the Washington Post and so on. They will cite academic economists doing algebraic equations and models that, not surprisingly, conclude that everybody benefits from immigration; nobody loses.
But we’ve had a number of natural experiments in American history of both high-immigration eras and low-immigration eras, and what we find is – and this is all in academic literature. I’m not going to cite every single academic author but some of this will be in an article I have forthcoming in Commonplace, published by American Compass.
So let’s go back to the earlier era of mass immigration that came to an end in the 1920s with restricted immigration laws which were marred by ethnic and racial bias but they were supported by much of organized labor including Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor who was a Jewish immigrant from Britain, and A. Philip Randolph, the great black union leader and civil rights leader. As a result of these 1920s restrictions, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population fell from 14 percent in 1920 – less than it is today, as we have seen – to 5 percent in 1970 before rising again as a result of post-1960s immigration.
Now, what was the consequence of that? Steve mentioned part of it. The cutoff of mass immigration during and after World War I created what a lot of economic historians argued was a high wage labor regime in American history, and two scholars, Joshua L. Rosenbloom and William Sundstrom, write most importantly, perhaps, restrictive immigration quotas passed in 1921 and 1924, spurred in part by xenophobia and concerns about European radicalism, made permanent the wartime cutoff of mass immigration of low-skilled labor.
Given this restriction of labor supply growth and ongoing productivity advances, labor earnings rose quite dramatically even in the 1920s when there was hostility on the part of Republican administrations to organized labor. A study by the Kansas City Fed similarly concluded that during the 1920s low-skilled workers in labor markets that experienced larger adverse shocks to their labor supply as a result of the disruptions to immigration were paid higher wages.
And that’s true in industry. It was true in agriculture in the 1920s. The same study notes that American farmers, once the low-wage immigrant labor was cut off, were quicker to mechanize and shift to less labor-intensive crops, and yet another study notes that the restriction of European immigration after the period of the 1880s to the 1920s led to increased opportunities for poor black and poor white Americans from the South who moved to northern industrial cities and, of course, with African Americans that was the great migration from the South to the industrial states of the Northeast.
So that’s one of the historical natural experiments that we can look at in terms of differences between high and low immigration regimes. The other historical precedents can be found in the mid-20th century during what was rather rudely called Operation Wetback in 1954 after “mojado,” or wetback, which was the term for immigrants coming across the Rio Grande into Texas and the Southwest illegally. Border Patrol removals of illegal immigrants peaked at around a million and – now, that was illegal and we’re talking about legal immigration. The legal immigration from Mexico was drastically reduced a decade later in 1964 when Congress terminated the bracero program, a legal guestworker program that had brought Mexican contract workers to labor on farms and ranches in the American Southwest.
According to one study, the result of the removal of legal guestworkers, the braceros, from the agricultural workforce were positive. Farmers who had been accustomed to braceros accelerated efforts to mechanize hand tasks. The United Farm Workers won a 40 percent wage increase in its first grape contract in 1966 following the abolition of this guestworker program.
Recapitulating what had happened in the 1920s after the mass immigration cutoff, the end of – which did not apply, by the way, to Western Hemisphere, to Latin American immigration – the end of the Bracero Program accelerated the adoption by farmers of less labor-intensive technologies where different crop mixes – now it varied depending on the crop. One study notes that farmers accelerated mechanization of the production of tomatoes, sugar beets, and cotton after the Bracero exclusion. For crops where no machinery was available, there tended to be larger and lasting declines in production.
Now, ironically, this combination of farm mechanization, farm worker unionization, and rising farm worker wages led the U.S. Labor Department in the 1960s to commission a study that concluded that within a decade farm workers would be obsolete, thanks to technological automation. And, of course, what has happened since then is there is this massive low-wage, partly legal guestworker, partly illegal farm worker population to this day. And the explosion of both illegal and legal guestworker/farm worker labor supply led business to abandon research into labor-saving technology.
A study notes that labor-saving mechanization research shriveled in the 1970s, as the supply of farm workers increased, and lawsuits challenged the use of public funds to develop machines that could reduce jobs for farm workers. With ever more unauthorized Mexicans arriving after peso devaluations and a rising demand for fresh fruits and vegetables, farmers planted more labor-intensive commodities and found an ample supply of seasonal workers among U.S. workers and newly arrived and unauthorized Mexican nationals.
So this brings us to the present. The Congressional Budget Office, in its Budget and Economic Outlook from 2024 to 2034, notes that a surge in immigration that began in 2022 continues through 2026, expanding the labor force and increasing economic output.
Now if you read the CBO report, you find this admission buried very subtly in Box 2/1, that greater immigration is projected to boost the growth rate of the nation’s real gross domestic product – GDP – by an average of 0.2 percentage points a year, from 2024 to 2034, leaving real GDP roughly 2 percent larger in 2034 than it would be otherwise.
Real GDP per person, however, would be 0.8 percent smaller in 2034 because of the increase in immigration than it would be otherwise in CBO’s assessment. And the reason that GDP aggregate gross domestic product is the wrong target to have is it measures both the expansion of the workforce and the increase in per-worker productivity. So you can flood the labor market with low-productivity workers; GDP, at the national level, can expand even while per-worker productivity goes down and average American wages go down. So for – Congressman Roy I’m sure agrees – the focus has to be on growing the economy through per-worker labor productivity, not through just expanding the number of warm bodies in the workforce.
Another natural experiment occurred with the reopening of the economy following COVID. The initial result of the reopening was a tight labor market with fewer immigrants joining the workforce thanks to pandemic-era restrictions. So the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that one response of employers to low immigration and a tight labor market immediately after COVID in 2021, 2022, was – guess what – massive investment in labor-saving technology. And this is a really remarkable statement by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. To put this investment effect into perspective, our estimate implies that, since 2021, the increase in labor issues due to, for example, tighter labor markets has spurred approximately an additional $55 billion investment in the U.S. economy.
This is a significant amount and one that is similar in size to the funding appropriated through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act for boosting domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing. We also found that the increase in investment has been driven by firms in industries that heavily employ routine manual tasks such as assembly-line work in the manufacturing sector, or packaging or labeling in the warehousing sector.
So the historical evidence is quite clear. High levels of mass immigration, whether it was from Europe after the Civil War up to the 1920s, were mostly Latin America in the late 20th century, tends to suppress wages for the people who compete with low-wage immigrants, legal and illegal – whether they’re legal or not, it’s the fact that they are unskilled workers and their competitors that does it, and the response throughout American history to – in all of these cases: the cutoff in the 1920s; the Bracero cutoff of legal immigration; the post-COVID cutoff, which was largely of legal immigration – has been to give employers two options.
One is – well, three options really – one is to raise wages to attract American workers, many of whom – as has been pointed out – are sitting on the sidelines. The second option is to invest in labor-saving technology which, as we’ve seen, just happened in the early years of this decade. And the third option is to go out of business, which is good because if your business model depends on low-wage, low-productivity labor, then in the long run, it’s good if that sector or that industry ceases to exist as we – in a technologically progressive, advanced industrial capitalist society, and the market should be allowed to work by rewarding high productivity, high-wage businesses, and by having the government subsidize one particular input to the production process – cheap labor – the government is actually – is thwarting what the result of industrial capitalism otherwise would be if we let market forces do their work.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Michael. Let’s do questions after the presentations.
Thank you, Michael. And, actually, one of things that really struck me about sort of up-skilling work at the low level is before Thanksgiving always the United Farm Workers have videos of farm workers out there working hard harvesting food. And they are – you know, these guys are really working at it. And one that really struck me was a farm worker kneeling in the dirt pulling radishes out really rapidly and then rubber-banding them together. And the person is obviously, you know, a hard-working guy. But a modern society shouldn’t depend on importing foreigners to kneel in the dirt and pull plants out of the ground. It just strikes me as ridiculous idea.
So Hal, you’re going to be – oh, Congressman, thank you.
REP. ROY: Sorry, guys.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you.
REP. ROY: Duty calls. Thank you.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I understand. Thank you.
So Hal now is going to be talking about sort of the other side of it, the higher-skilled H-1B, OPT – all of those aspects that were the subject of what I’ve come to call the Christmas Kerfuffle online where Elon Musk and various MAGA people were arguing about these specific issues. So Hal, take it away.
HAL SALZMAN: Thank you, yeah. Well, I was going to say I’ve been studying this, I realized, for about 25 years. I first studied H-1B in 1999 from the National Academies, and while this debate has been going on forever, I think Elon – we owe him a thanks for having solved the problem. (Laughter.) According to his last tweet, where he said 0.1 percent is the super talented, super motivated that will keep America winning, so I did some calculations, and it looks like that is 130 to 309 workers per year – (laughter) – who are super talented, assuming –
MR. KRIKORIAN: I’ll be generous and round it up to 500 a year, how about that? (Laughs.)
MR. SALZMAN: You know, I would go up in order of magnitude and say our current programs are more than sufficient, as I’ll come back to.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Sure.
MR. SALZMAN: So I think he solved – as you can see here – cut the Gordian Knot and solved the problem for us.
But on the assumption that – probably a safe assumption – this is not – the debate is not over, I thought I’d give you a quick tour of some of the key issues as I see it in the high-skill guestworker supply issue, which is the supply – kind of where they are coming from, the education, the education market, and some solutions.
So, in general, when you add up all of the guestworkers and the annual flow, it’s over 700,000, plus or minus. So the H-1B gets all the attention, but for various reasons, you know, and detail, other programs have expanded because of all the fight about H-1B and the cap, there have been workarounds – surprise, surprise – and when you start to add these up, it’s quite large. In fact, H-1B is not even the largest now. So we’re talking about 700,000 per year high-skill workers coming in.
This gives you one area of the supply, which is through the U.S. college system, and you can see the increase here, and in particularly the last one you will see, and I’ll focus on, is the master’s programs, for reasons that will become clear. So if we look at what has happened, is colleges are playing an important role as the labor market portal, as the entry portal into the labor market because of our legislation and the congressional sort of largesse and creative discount programs.
So it’s coming from these master’s programs in particular, and if we look at where the largest number of graduates are coming – you can see the list here of the universities – most of those are probably not what we would consider the IT powerhouses of talent and supply there. But there are a few name brands you will recognize, right? Carnegie-Mellon, NYU, and I think open this University of New York, Columbia – a few other places, along with the no-name, you know, universities.
But when we look further, look at these programs. This is the number of graduates who come here on an F visa – foreign students out of these programs. These are highly exclusionary, highly segregated programs. Even in your name brand places in what we would consider to be top-tier universities, they are running programs that cater to foreign students, targeting them. And, you know, if we’re interested in diversity, I don’t see it here; that the largest suppliers of, you know, the IT workforce coming out of these very segregated programs.
And – it’s a little dense here, but let me just point you to the middle column there. So this looks at the largest period of growth in these programs, from 2011 to 2016, and you will see some of these places went – you know, University of Central Missouri, another powerhouse in the IT world – (laughter) – went from 45 graduates in 2011; five years later, almost 1,300. And you go down the list, and you can see from a handful – hundreds up to – or rather, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, up to hundreds in five years. How you can scale up a program like that in a highly technical area leaves me a little bewildered. And you can see some of the places that have been highlighted that did it.
You know, obviously – and I would say clearly – is that these are not high-quality programs. And what we know from a number of investigative reports, these are programs that have been set up to attract foreign students because they pay full freight, so it’s a high-profit center for the universities – we’ve all gotten into the game given the revenue cuts for the revenue source, and it’s the price of entry into the labor market because of our work permit, OPT programs that you are guaranteed a three-year employment visa coming out of that.
And so you can see this list here is the complete list that accounts for 50 percent of the five-year increase, so this is where the supply has been ramping up in these places. And in fact, this is such a profitable business model that CSU, in a moment when their departments didn’t talk to their communications and PR group – (laughter) – said, we’re going to follow the market – the obvious thing, Econ 101 – and admit only out-of-state and foreign students, and stop taking in-state students. We’re going to get those who pay full freight.
Well, there was a lot of blowback and, you know, adjacent universities don’t admit this as a formal policy, but if you look at the numbers it’s sort of de facto what we’re doing because – obvious reasons – it a very high-profit program.
It also – I want to point out – we talk about STEM – and I can go into detail later. It’s really focused on one particular area, which is the IT labor market. And if you look at where the concentration of foreign students are by program, it’s computer science and somewhat in engineering. Now these are – the percent of graduates who come from a program that’s 50 percent or more foreign students, and then those that are 75 percent or more foreign – you know, the discriminatory sort of segregated programs, which are bringing the supplier, but not in other areas, and you have to ask yourself, why is it that IT seems to be the only field that is heavily dependent on foreign students, but not biology, not physical sciences, et cetera. And the reason is obvious: wages.
So the important period when we look at the history of this comes right after the dot-com bust during the recovery. And what you see here is computer science graduates were rising tremendously during the market demand, around 2000, dot-com, and going in, and the bust came, everything went down. In the recovery, you see a big shift to the red line, which is to guestworkers, that this was when there was a tremendous substitution reliance on guestworkers instead of trying to draw domestic talent. What you see leading up to it is we have the capacity to develop supply when demand is there, when the market is there, but they are high cost. And at the bottom you can see what happened to programmer salaries – that’s the explanation.
Now if we jump to the current period, I’ll just focus your attention on two lines, which is the top blue line, which over this period you can say that’s the IT workforce change, went about 4.7 over the base year. And after changes in the work permit OPT program, the focus was on foreign students, and you can see the increase here nine times out of these master’s programs as the supply. So industry shifted its supply, universities part of the game where we’re going to bring in IT workers.
So what’s to be done? I’m going to propose our 215 percent solutions. I mean, I would go with Musk’s 0.1 percent solution, but I have a feeling that’s not going to fly, and I think we should be a little more generous even though he’s going to accept it.
The first is – and this can be done through executive action – if the market’s demand is there, let the market speak. And I find this, you know, troubling positions of sociologists saying the economists might be right here. Let market demand – let’s say top talent is the top 15 percent – and this is beyond I think anybody’s definition – certainly much greater than Musk’s. So top 15 percent of wages, let’s adjust it for industry and occupation so it’s not dominated by one industry, but let every industry tap global talent for its top workers as long as it’s willing to pay for it. This will produce some competition, but it will take away the bottom low-wage, you know, supply there.
We can do regional adjustment. And this addresses an issue that, for example, Ro Khanna has proposed about how do we encourage diffusion of our, you know, Silicon Valley, high-tech industries and help development in middle America and other places, which is if companies want to move to a lower-wage area, they can pay less for their top workers. That would bring high-wage, higher-skill workers into low-wage areas. So we’ll also have kind of an additional benefit of regional development.
And the other is 15 percent of the class, so graduates from U.S. universities – foreign graduates, top 15 percent would get a three-, five-year visa like we do now, and what this would do is it would be a demand-driven program for diversity and stop the diploma mills because we would leave it up to consumers – the students – to go to universities that were not exclusively focusing on the class because only the top 15 percent will quality for an automatic visa, and that would let them there.
Presumably what our top global talent would do is they would, you know, hedge their bets and step down a university, and this would improve quality throughout the university tiers. Those of us who teach university know that the peer group makes a big difference, so by improving the competition, quality, interest, academic performance throughout our university system would help our domestic students as well.
And, as I think Haley talked about, investing domestically, because it will incentivize investment in domestic students. In other words, in order to keep your foreign pool, you need to have 85 percent or some large share of domestic students which means universities and industries won’t have to invest in bringing students into college, into these programs, and supporting them because it’s dependent on the graduating class, and not only do you have to bring them in – which we are doing a better job of – but what we’re not doing well at university is getting them to graduate. This will incentivize it. And it will provide sort of a cycling competition and cooperation, right, which is you have to cooperate to get everybody to the finish line, even as you compete, and it will increase it.
So to sum up, I think we can meet the needs of industry, provide more than what Musk asked, but using the 15 percent cap would make of the current pool – less than 10 percent of the current pool currently meets that wage standard. So over 90 percent of the pool, they’re being paid far less than the top – you know, the 85th percentile. That would free up, under the cap system, over 77,000 visas. So the cap issue, at least in the short term would not be a problem if we just said we’re only going to bring in top talent.
It would be diversity. We would bring back diversity into the university programs because students would not want to apply to a 100-percent foreign student program because it would limit their chances to a work visa. And it would bring back sort of what you call private-public partnership investment in U.S. education. In other words, to get supply that the industry needs, we’re going to have to invest in domestic populations. And there’s some very good work showing that when industry hires, for example, from the HBCUs, they step up and supply them. We’ve done studies and a number of other studies on labor market, is when then demand is there, both domestic students and the universities can produce supply.
So there’s my short –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you. Thank you, Hal.
I’m actually – lock arms with Elon Musk on this issue. And instead of 15 percent, I can live with the 0.1 percent that he wants. In fact I’d be generous and go up just one order of magnitude to 1 percent, instead of two orders of magnitude.
But in any case, I want to open it up a little bit – if the panelists have comments on each other’s presentations or something further they wanted to elaborate about what they said. Anyone? Michael? Or, I mean, feel free not to. It’s entirely up to you.
MR. LIND: Well, I think one audience member wanted me to expand briefly on the third option, which is that the business simply goes out of business.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, if their labor – if their business model is based on the cheap labor.
MR. LIND: Yeah. Yeah. And there you have – you have to use the economic concept of elasticity of demand, which simply means that depending on the product or the service, if the price goes up, if it’s price inelastic – that is, if you really need it, if it’s medicine or if it’s food – then you’re simply going to pay more money, so the demand will remain the same. The price will simply go up. If the price is elastic, that means as the price goes up, people consume more of it – or, as the price goes down, people consume more of it, but as it goes up then they’ll consume less.
And one phenomenon we’ve seen with modern mass unskilled immigration, legal immigration, is that you get price elastic expansions of jobs, which would not exist except for the presence of the cheap labor. So I’ll give you a couple of examples of this. In the last couple of decades there was a massive expansion in the U.S. of very cheap nail salons largely staffed by Vietnamese immigrants. And that is – it’s a luxury, right? And if the price was – went up before that because the labor was more expensive, they’re being paid a living wage, then more people are going to do their own nails, right? It’s going to be DIY. So that’s always an option is do it yourself instead of paying some poor person to do it for you.
Another example in both the U.S. and the U.K. has to do with hand-washing of cars – that is, labor-intensive carwashes. Now, in the United States the first automated carwashes were invented in the 1940s after World War II in the ’40s and ’50s when there was a tight labor market, wages were rising, and therefore it was – you know, people did the DIY, do-it-yourself, automated drive-through car wash. In London in the last couple of decades, because of this expansion of labor, much of it from Eastern Europe, and in the U.S., this large pool of low-wage immigrant labor in New York and New Jersey – there was actually a technological regression from automated carwashes to hand car-washing because it was literally – it was literally cheaper to hire a crew of two or three or four people with rags to wipe your car down, right, like in a Third World country, than to have the 1940s-style you know, “Leave It to Beaver” robot carwash. (Laughter.)
And so – but that just means that you have to be careful when people are predicting what will be the response to higher wages. It can be higher – to less immigration, tighter labor markets. It can be higher wages, it can be substitution of labor-saving technology, or it can just be – people will just not patronize that sector. They’ll do it themselves or they won’t do it at all.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Steve?
MR. CAMAROTA: I have a question – just a question I struggle with all the time and I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks. Why is it that people who generally are concerned about workers, who are generally concerned about both stagnant or declining wages and declining opportunities – let’s just go with the less-educated here, but you could apply it to anything – people who have voiced a lot of concern about all these men – and increasingly or to some extent U.S.-born women without a college degree, out of the labor market – who are – I’m not talking about the far left or anything – and there have been exceptions. People like Bernie Sanders at one point, you know, expressed concern.
But there was a whole tradition of progressives who were concerned about the labor market impacts of immigration. Just most recently the person who was most associated with that was the late Barbara Jordan, right? She headed a commission in the 1990s in which she pointed this issue out, and we need to prioritize it. Immigration was actually less back then. She was a lifelong Democrat, first African-American woman elected from the South. No one would accuse her of being conservative in any way that we understand that term, at least today. And yet she voices concern, and there were people in the Democratic Party who did, and all of that is gone.
You know, I mean, take an organization like the Economic Policy Institute here in Washington. They used to have more of a circumspect view, concerns about increasing the supply of labor, and now they’re basically immigration enthusiasts. Their position almost seems indistinguishable from the chamber of commerce, even though I’m sure they would say, well, we want lots of labor protections and minimum wage, but no concern about increasing the supply of workers.
And why is that? Does anybody have any thoughts, either of you, as to why that happened across the board? I don’t want to pick on EPI because they’re just like everybody else.
MR. LIND: I don’t want to filibuster, but Barbara Jordan was a friend of my family. My aunt, the late Shelby Hearon, the novelist, coauthored her memoir. Dr. Jordan performed the wedding ceremony for my cousin. So I know a little bit about that particular question.
MR. CAMAROTA: Yeah.
MR. LIND: Throughout her whole career – she was the first African-American representative from Texas and maybe the first female representative from the South –
MR. CAMAROTA: Representative from the South, yeah.
MR. LIND: – since the Reconstruction. Her power base outside of the African-American community was the Houston organized labor. The steelworkers had a foothold there from the defense plants in World War II. And so they were her patrons.
The Jordan Commission – the second of two commissions – presidential commissions appointed by president – by Democratic presidents – the Hesper Commission by Jimmy Carter, and then the Jordan Commission by Clinton – was heavily influenced by organized labor and people associated with it, like former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall.
So I think really 80 percent of this story is the decline in private sector organized labor where there’s competition with not just offshoring but with labor arbitrage in the form of immigration and the relative rise of the public sector unions, which – you can’t really be an illegal immigrant and become a schoolteacher or civil servant or whatever.
MR. CAMAROTA: They don’t worry anywhere near as much, right. Yeah.
MR. LIND: There’s all sorts of legal problems for that. And the subordination of organized labor to the Democratic Party, which took place in the late 1990s and around 2000 – and there’s a big shift, and the AFL-CIO goes from opposing more guest worker programs, you know, being more restrictive, because the gamble – and I kind of – it made sense at the time maybe – was that only the Democrats will help labor. The Republicans at that time – it’s changing now, with Trump and with J.D. Vance and Hawley and Rubio.
MR CAMAROTA: Yes. Yes. Right.
MR. LIND: But at that time they figured, well, our only chance is to accept whatever crumbs we can get from the Democratic Party, so therefore if the Democratic Party’s voters are expanded by immigration then our friends will help us out in the labor movement. So I think that was part of the thought process.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Hal, did you have any thoughts on that?
MR. SALZMAN: Well, I just wanted to put a quick word in for EPI.
MR. CAMAROTA: Yeah.
MR. SALZMAN: Yeah. I think – I’m not sure that you fully correctly characterized their position since I think they’re onboard with this, having published –
MR. CAMAROTA: Stuff from you.
MR. SALZMAN: Yeah, and these studies. So I think we’re – I think there are some of us who are still strongly defending, you know, rights of labor. I think Michael pointed that out. Labor unions have been so decimated through both Republicans and Democrats that they’re really not able to well articulate their position on these things.
MR. CAMAROTA: Yeah.
MR. SALZMAN: But I think you’re correct that there should be a stronger, more articulated position there, because – I wouldn’t write them off quite as easy as you did.
MR. LIND: And on that note – if I could just add something. On January 10, Robert Shapiro in the Washington Monthly, undersecretary of commerce under Bill Clinton, leaning – a left-of-center economist, predicted that Trump’s deportations would fail and they would have a terrible effect if they worked. Well, why? Because replacing them – the illegal immigrants, but the same thing applies to legal immigrants – replacing them will force their employers to pay higher wages – (laughter) –
MR. CAMAROTA: Oh no.
MR. LIND: – pushing up prices for the long term. So I am old enough to have lived to see the Washington Monthly, a formerly progressive Democratic magazine, publish a Clinton-Obama economic adviser warning that without immigration, wages might go up.
MR. CAMAROTA But this gets to a really fascinating question, right, because you will have stories in the media, and you start to get them, that, look, there is no job competition; immigrants only complement the native-born; no impact on wages; natives don’t make less as a result. However as soon as inflation became a concern, all of a sudden, well, we can’t – you know, we need more immigrant labor because that will drive down wages and hence improve the price situation. (Laughter.) It’s a fascinating – I guess what I’m saying is, how is it that advocates for that literally can talk out of both sides of their mouth?
MR. LIND: Well, I think of it as the borscht-belt theory of immigration – the old Jewish borscht belt in the Catskills, the comedy resorts. And the most famous joke is, the food in this place is terrible and the portions are too small. (Laughter.)
MR. CAMAROTA: – too small, right. (Laughter.) Like Camp Wobegon, right?
MR. LIND: So this is the borscht-belt theory of immigration, right? Immigration has no effect on wages and inflation will go up unless immigration suppresses wages. (Laughter.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: Actually, I always think of that as the – as the realtor theory of immigration. As the realtors say, it’s always a good time to buy a house – (laughter) – because they’re always making 6 percent off of it. (Laughter.) It’s always a good time to increase immigration.
MR. CAMAROTA: It’s fascinating.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Lauren, you had a question and we have couple from online. But think about if you have questions. I want to take some. Go ahead.
Q: Really, I had two questions. One, from – Lauren Villagran with USA Today.
Congressman Roy asked all of you would you be willing to bet your life savings that the new administration will be able to deport 20 percent of the people here illegally, and I’m curious whether any of you would. And if not, why not? What’s going to hold the administration back?
And then the second thing the congressman said that I’d love to hear your comment on is he said, I’d like us to see us freeze what we are doing in the way of legal immigration. From any of you on the panel, do you also agree that, for example, the current legal immigration system – family-based green cards, student visas, that lot – should also be frozen for a time?
MR. KRIKORIAN: I don’t know. Let me take it first. The illegal population as far as Steve has estimated – something like 15 million now?
MR. CAMAROTA: Fourteen, fifteen (million).
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, let’s say 15 million. So 20 percent would be 3 million? I don’t know. I don’t have much life savings honestly – (laughter) – so I mean, I wouldn’t – I’d probably bet less than my life savings but I think it’s in – that’s not crazy. Especially when you combine – if you were to combine not just actual deportations but also self-deportation, that once people get the message that the party is over, especially those who were here more recently, may well decide to go – to go back.
MR. CAMAROTA: So Bob Warren at the Center for Migration Studies estimates about 3(00,000) to 500,000 illegal immigrants typically have gone home each year on their own. So could you double that if there was a true enforcement regime? That’s what I think he’s – I think, yeah, you could get out-migration of a million a year.
MR. LIND: I think –
MR. KRIKORIAN: And so – I mean, but the point of that is you reduce the number coming in, increase the number going out, and that’s just how you change the thing.
MR. LIND: Well, the other D is deterrence.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.
MR. LIND: And so what we have found is that illegal immigration responds to demand. So when, in the Great Recession, demand collapses – because people have telephones, right? (Laughter.) I mean, they phone their relatives and said nobody’s hiring, right? If you get a few theatrical ICE raids, deportations, and so on, I think that could have a deterrent effect in other countries.
MR. CAMAROTA: Absolutely.
MR. LIND: That is, people – that would change the calculation about the risk of trying to go to the U.S., even if the number of deportations is not that high.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.
Hal, I had a question for you that someone that came in –
MR. CAMAROTA: Wait, Hal I think –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, OK, no, go ahead.
MR. SALZMAN: I was just going to say, wouldn’t it suggest just focusing on employers and hiring and have them get the message right?
MR. LIND: Well, of course.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Absolutely.
MR. SALZMAN: Wouldn’t that be more effective, is just change the market?
MR. LIND: Sure, sure. And that goes back to the Jordan Commission, right?
MR. CAMAROTA: Absolutely.
MR. LIND: And E-Verify and was based on one of their recommendations. If you have universal E-Verify with no exceptions for size of business, and it’s – and you punish employers –
MR. KRIKORIAN: And contractors, too.
MR. LIND: You frog-march a few contractors and employers in front of the cameras in handcuffs, then that is a huge deterrent factor.
MR. SALZMAN: Wouldn’t that be a more humane approach and probably more effective than –
MR. LIND: Oh, yes. But I think –
MR. SALZMAN: Then why has that been absent in the conversation?
MR. LIND: Because the kabuki theater about militarizing the border –
MR. SALZMAN: Right.
MR. LIND: – you know, does not affect the donor base of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Republican donor base is largely small business owners who have cheap-labor models, and they’re addicted to all kinds of low-wage labor. The professional class, which is the base of the Democratic Party, they have – their lifestyle in expensive big cities like New York and L.A., and now Boston, my hometown, depends on cheap maids and nannies and gardeners.
MR. SALZMAN: I think the point is it would be interesting to see the conversation shift to that rather than, you know, attacking people who are –
MR. CAMAROTA: Yeah. I mean, look –
MR. SALZMAN: I mean, that would be an interesting –
MR. KRIKORIAN: No, no, I agree.
MR. SALZMAN: It would not only be more humane; I think it would be a more effective policy.
MR. KRIKORIAN: In Tom Homan’s defense, he’s actually said there is going to be an uptick of employer – of worksite enforcement. And so I think the thing to look for, both public and media and everybody else, is when there is worksite enforcement – and there will be some – are there going to be calls to knock it off? Because years ago – I mean, we published a whole book on the – sort of a biography of employer sanctions by Jerry Kammer, a retired fellow of ours, and he talked about an example from Texas where a Luby’s Cafeteria was going to be raided. This was during the Clinton administration. And they had – you know, they had all kinds of leads and intel that the place was just full of illegal aliens. And so the congressman from there called the INS district director and said, hey, you know, this is an important employer, you know, we’d like you to lay off. And the INS district director said, Congressman, I mean, this is – we’re not making this up; we’ve got solid leads here. And so 10 minutes later Janet Reno, the attorney general, called up the INS district director and said knock it off.
So the thing I think to look for prospectively – we don’t know that’s going to happen; it might, but it might not. And so that’s, I think, a thing to keep an eye out for.
MR. SALZMAN: Right. And I think the point is, if they’re serious about it, that’s – that would be the policy to focus on. That and –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, I agree.
MR. LIND: But that’s not the media narrative. The media narrative is that it’s caused by supply, not demand. And as I was saying, it actually is – it’s the demand that drives it, right?
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.
MR. SALZMAN: Of course, of course.
MR. LIND: If there’s no hiring, most of these folks are not –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.
MR. SALZMAN: Well, I’m always amazed that the – (inaudible) – has been forgotten about, right?
MR. LIND: But the media – the media narrative –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, yeah. Your second question, and then I have a question for Hal that came in.
Was this freezing – well, I mean, I don’t know. I’m happy to hear about it, but the – you know, especially in those visa categories, at least for green card categories, where there’s enormous long wait lists because of the numerical caps, it’s not – I think it’s within an administration’s power to simply stop taking new applications. But that doesn’t stop immigration. That just stops the growth of the, you know, the waiting list.
But there was a question that came in from someone watching the stream, and this is I guess initially for you, Hal. Isn’t the O visa sufficient to actually bring in the 0.1 percent of people that Elon Musk wants?
MR. SALZMAN: More than.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah. And the O visa – it’s a nonimmigrant visa, but it’s supposed – it’s like the –
MR. SALZMAN: It’s for outstanding, exceptional –
MR. KRIKORIAN: For outstanding talents, yeah.
MR. SALZMAN: Yes. If they’re really exceptional, they would come in under the O visa. We have that provision.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So in a sense, if you’re not using the O visa, almost – isn’t that sort of almost an admission that the people aren’t exceptional?
MR. SALZMAN: Well, it’s – yes. We don’t even need that. We know – we know wages and a lot of studies have been done.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, right.
MR. SALZMAN: But it’s just, where is it easier to go? And right now, you know, the OPT and the three-year OPT is the easiest way to do it because it’s an automatic extension.
And it’s also interesting how these visa categories sort of create a labor market that no one would ever design, which is a very high-churn, time-limited stay.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.
MR. SALZMAN: And that’s also why I think it’s focused on the IT industry, because a lot of the low-end jobs – you know, they require some skill and initiative, but they’re not highly technical, highly specialized jobs, and so you can staff them with a high turnover labor force and low pay, and all those – you who have looked for tech help and helplines know that, that this is the staffing model that’s been created by this visa.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, right. Interesting.
I want to respect people’s time, but if there’s a question – yeah, a question from the audience, and then I have one from someone watching the stream.
Yes, Neil?
Q: Neil Monroe.
So I have to give up one of my questions, but here – (laughter) – do you see any white-collar professionals reacting to the revelations about the H-1B program and their children having difficulty getting jobs, their neighbors and peers losing career-track jobs? I focus on white-collar professionals because I think they’re very powerful, potentially, but so I’m watching for any trend in that sector.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Anybody have any thoughts on that?
MR. LIND: I’d be skeptical because I think that really – and I’m a southerner so maybe I’m biased – but the old gentry elite never viewed engineering jobs as a high status job, as being a lawyer, professor, doctor, politician, that sort of thing. And so the engineering was always I think kind of dominated by immigrant groups like German-Americans and Jewish-Americans and others. And so as long as they have their nonprofit jobs or their, you know, hedge fund jobs –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Lawyers.
MR. LIND: – or, you know, legal jobs – now, when you start replacing lawyers and professors –
MR. CAMAROTA: That would be a big deal.
MR. LIND: – and ministers and nonprofit executives with contract workers, I think that –
MR. KRIKORIAN: That was a – was it Ted Cruz? Who ran an ad a number of years ago of people streaming across the border but they all were wearing suits and had, you know attaché cases? (Laughter.) And the point was, then something would get done.
MR. LIND: Right.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Do you have a thought – any thoughts on that, anyone else?
Q: (Off mic) – the white-collar college graduates. (Off mic) – and they see their world need outsourcing.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I don’t know.
MR. CAMAROTA: There are organizations who are devoted to calling attention to that, as you know, but how much traction do they get?
MR. LIND: When you have the richest man in the world and his partner, Vivek Ramaswamy, saying that it’s their fault; that they’re inferior; they don’t have the skills; they have an inferior American culture, according to Ramaswamy; and you have the entire media agreeing that if your, you know, White protestant or Hispanic or African-American engineer can’t compete with these single Indian male indentured servants because they’re just not smart enough – it’s the responsibility of the individual. So everyone is telling you this – the media, the business elites, Elon Musk – that you’re inferior, that you have no grievance, you’re just whining because you’re not as good as the 25-year-old indentured servant from South Asia.
MR. SALZMAN: I just want to add one other –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Let’s try to take – oh, yeah, please. Yeah, go ahead.
MR. SALZMAN: I just want to add one quick point on that, which is, you know, on the media misrepresentation but also the academic study misrepresentation that, you know, we talk about education performance – that the lion’s share of high performing students comes from the United States on the – even though we have a lot of problems educationally here, we actually produce, you know, the largest share of, you know, math, science test score performance. You know, Finland, which comes out at the top, maybe – I guess it’s a problem of geography; people don’t understand it’s a very small nation, so even if it produces a very high percentage of high-performing people, it’s not very many people, whereas the U.S. does. So we have a very large stock of potential super talented, super motivated people here to fill the ranks.
The other is, you know, for whatever generalization about American culture and American students, we fill the STEM jobs with about 2 (percent) to 3 percent of a cohort of students from K-12 who go through college and go into the STEM fields. It’s a very, very small number of people. And the idea that we can’t move that needle to whatever it is to satisfy the demand is just silly, as I think you can see here. You know, Musk – 0.1 percent is a couple hundred people, you know, couple thousand, tens of thousands. We can easily fill that, and that’s been shown time and time again. I and others have done studies to show that when the market calls for demand, that we can produce that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Steve, if you’re going to say something, quick, because I want more questions.
MR. CAMAROTA: Really quick, really quick. But we have standardized test scores for foreign-educated and U.S.-educated STEM workers and just college graduates in general, and they do not in any way outscore their American counterparts. There’s just no evidence. Our system is giving us the best and the brightest.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Quick question, yes?
Q: Hi. Rebecca (sp) from the Associated Press.
Question for Mr. Lind. You had mentioned this kabuki theater at the southern border. Can you kind of just explain what you meant by that? And then also just more broadly for the panel, judging by your comments, you seem that there’s zero chance that they – the next administration will actually put in place E-Verify across the board?
MR. LIND: Well, the kabuki theater is the idea that you have great hordes of people wandering north, right, towards the U.S.-Mexican border with no – and they don’t know anybody on the other side of the border ,and they don’t have any jobs lined up, and so on. It doesn’t really work that way. I mean, I can tell you; I’m a Texan. You have, like, the developer outside of San Antonio – has a new subdivision and then he tells, you know, one of his Mexican-national employees, you know, we need some roofers and contractors starting in October, and everyone on this planet, even poor people, has cell phones now, right?
If you look at Europe, when people leave sub-Saharan Africa and then they go, you know, through Libya or whatever and they get on these NGO-sponsored boats that ferry them to Italy, they have people to meet. Their cousin is living in Paris. They have a job lined up, in many cases, in the hotel in Paris, right?
So this is basically – and, you know, I think CIS has emphasized this – this is not mass refugees wandering aimlessly in hope of salvation. This is an enormous organized global labor-trafficking scheme, which is organized at every level by economic elites – by the employers, by their friends in the governments, by the NGO sector. And all of this – this is labor trafficking, OK?
And I would bet you that only a minority – I mean, I haven’t – maybe there have been studies of this – of illegal immigrants don’t know somebody or don’t know where they’re going when they cross –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Which is migration runs through networks just like anything –
MR. LIND: It runs through networks. Chain migration, right?
MR. KRIKORIAN: If I could answer the E-Verify issue, the way it’s always been pictured is that mandatory E-Verity would require an act of Congress. It’s not really clear that’s true. We’ve published legal analysis that arguably the – administratively could be – they could require the use of E-Verify. Whether they’re going to do that, I don’t know.
The other option is what one of our writers calls G-Verify, where when an employer inputs the regular Social Security and IRS information anyway, that the government does the verification on their own. In other words, not that you go through a separate website and then submit the information, the way E-Verify works now. It’s still simple, it’s cheap, we’ve used it for years. It’s not that big a deal. But there are, like, data retention requirements, that sort of thing – document retention. And so the alternative would simply be for the Social Security Administration and IRS and DHS just to do that on their own every time somebody submits information. That would require kicking a lot of bureaucrats in the behind and setting up a kind of bureaucratic system to do that. Once it were set up, it would actually work.
MR. LIND: But they have to change the policy. Right now if your identity is stolen, your Social Security number is used by an illegal immigrant for employment purposes, the government has been forbidden –
MR. KRIKORIAN: To tell you.
MR. LIND: – since the Bush administration, to tell you.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah.
MR. LIND: I have received two letters from the IRS in the last seven years saying that we believe that your Social Security number is being used for employment; we cannot tell you who or where.
MR. KRIKORIAN: (Laughs.) Yeah.
MR. LIND: It’s your duty to check your credit rating to see if it’s ruined, right? And so I’ve looked into this, and it turns out that it’s either an executive order or a law, I don’t know.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I don’t know.
MR. LIND: But the Social – when you get a “no match” – right, that’s what it’s called, right?
MR. KRIKORIAN: A no-match letter, yeah.
MR. LIND: So it turns out there are two Michael Linds with the same – and one of them is me, and the other one is someone presumably –
MR. KRIKORIAN: A roofer somewhere.
MR. LIND: – working in Taco Bell or is a roofer in Arizona or something. (Laughter.)
But the government – my government – I pay taxes to this government – it knows who this person works for, who the company is, who the contractor is. Every two weeks they take this impersonator’s money that’s being paid to “Michael Lind,” supposedly, for the – for my retirement, and then they dump it because they know this is not the real Michael Lind. They know it. The government knows it. The dump it into the general Social Security suspense file.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Suspense file, yeah.
MR. SALZMAN: But that’s going to help your Social Security –
MR. LIND: No, it won’t help mine. It won’t help mine.
MR. CAMAROTA: But wait, they –
MR. KRIKORIAN: We’re running out of time here. I’d like to get one more question.
MR. CAMAROTA: Just very briefly, how much they go after employers is going to be a very important measure of how serious they are.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah.
MR. CAMAROTA: So we’ll have to see.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I agree.
Last question from the back.
Q: Right. Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. Great panel, thank you.
Real quick, with universities acting as essentially de facto immigration centers, is there – could you foresee, Professor Salzman or anyone on the panel, an opportunity to apply public pressure on alumni associations to get them to understand the impact this is having on American graduates?
MR. SALZMAN: It would be an interesting attempt to try that. I don’t – I don’t know.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, it seems like a 501(c)3 called, I don’t know, U.S. Tech Workers might want to organize something like that.
MR. SALZMAN: I think you have your new campaign there, Kevin, to start this.
MR. KRIKORIAN: (Laughs.) Exactly.
MR. SALZMAN: It’s just such an important source of revenue, I think it would – you know, it’s going to disrupt universities quite a bit. And I don’t know how you’re going to compensate for that. But it would be worth a try.
MR. KRIKORIAN: We’ve got like one minute left if, Michael or Steve, you had like a final thing. Steve, if you wanted to say something last?
MR. CAMAROTA: Well, I just always want to say that the starting point of any discussion over immigration is that America has never been here before in terms of the foreign-born number and share, and that however much immigration we have in the future, it’s taking us further and further into uncharted territory. Whether your concern is impact on hospitals and schools, whether the impact is on workers, whether you worry about cultural assimilation – and I think that’s got to be the starting point. And we often have a discussion about immigration without reflecting the numbers. It’s like discussing the budget without ever talking about how much money you’re going to spend. And that’s what essentially we have on immigration here.
MR. KRIKORIAN: As a wise man once said, numbers are of the essence.
So thank you for all the panelists. Thank you for coming. If you tuned in late, the whole recording is going to be online at CIS.org, as well as the PowerPoints will be there for you to examine. And when – if your Commonplace piece comes out in time, we’ll also link that to the page for the video. Thank you for everybody who tuned in, and I hope you’ll tune in to our next event. (Applause.)