Fox News won’t tell you that there is no immigration crisis: In fact, U.S. needs more legal migrants

Judging from the questions asked by White House reporters during President Biden’s first press conference on March 25, much of the Washington press has bought into the rightwing media’s false narrative that there is an “immigration crisis” in America.

In fact, it’s the opposite: United States desperately needs more — not fewer — immigrants.

Ask most demographers, or most economists, and they will tell you that the

United States has an increasingly aging population and a shrinking work force. And the relative decline of both unauthorized and legal migration, especially during former President Trump’s term, has aggravated the problem.

“The crisis we have is one of too few immigrants, not of too many,” says Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center of Global Development, and Washington D.C., think tank. “If you look at U.N. projections, they suggest that, by 2050, the United States will need 50 million more workers to keep the current proportion of workers to the population overall.”

America’s fertility rates have dropped from 3.65 children per woman in 1960 to 1.73 children per woman in 2021, according to the World Bank. That’s way below the rate of 2.1 children per woman needed to replace annual deaths in the United States.

In the meantime, the growth of America’s total immigrant population has been slowing down in recent decades. The total rise in the U.S. foreignborn population went dropped from 11.5 million people in the 1990s to 8.8 million in the 2000s, to 4.8 million in this decade, according to the Pew Research Center.

Under Trump, the United States administratively reduced legal immigration — yes, you read that right — by about 49 percent, according to the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).).

“The drop in international migration, combined with falling birth rates, resulted in what may have been the slowest decade of population growth in U.S. history — and does not include the additional decline between 2019 and 2020 connected to COVID-19,” a NFAP study says.

All of this means that we will face a serious labor shortage in coming years, especially in areas such as nursing, agriculture, manufacturing and services. And if there aren’t enough workers to fill jobs that not enough Americans want to do, the U.S. government increasingly will be unable to collect the taxes it needs to pay for a growing population of retirees.

Of course, that’s not what you hear on Fox News and other right-wing media. They are bombarding us with misleading statistics that tell you about an alleged “avalanche” of undocumented migrants on the border, or about the rise of immigration in absolute numbers, without telling you about the decline in U.S. birth rates.

What’s happening today at the U.S. Southern border is a serious humanitarian problem of unaccompanied migrant children, but it’s not an economic problem.

Contrary to the way it is being portrayed in many media outlets, most of these migrants are not families with babies, but young men.

About 82 percent of migrants apprehended at the border this fiscal year are single adults, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol data.

Is it possible that Biden may have encouraged some of them to head north by sounding less cruel toward immigrants than Trump?

Maybe, but that shouldn’t be the issue. Rather, the issue should be the urgent need for Republicans in Congress to support Biden’s immigration bill.

It would significantly expand legal immigration to the United States, including temporary work programs.

Don’t be fooled by the ridiculous claims that we have an overall immigration crisis.

The real story is that the United States badly needs more legal immigrants, and that Republicans — who have embraced Trump’s anti-immigration stands — are failing to support the Biden administration’s bill that would do just that.

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