Now the target is legal immigration
With so many other confrontations over immigration already raging, it was easy to overlook a new skirmish that Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia started last week.
Cotton and Perdue proposed legislation that would cut in half the number of legal immigrants and refugees allowed into the United States from today’s combined level of about 1.1 million annually. Echoing President Trump, Cotton insisted high immigration levels undermined wages for working-class Americans.
The bill is unlikely to attract enough Democrats to break a Senate filibuster. But the legislation will still measure how many congressional Republicans are embracing Trump’s effort to redefine their party around a bristling defensive nationalism –– and how many congressional Democrats feel compelled to join them.
Although few Republicans represent places with large immigrant populations, in recent years most GOP legislators have hesitated to oppose legal immigration.
The last serious conservative push to reduce it came in 1996, and it failed decisively. Though restrictions cleared the House Judiciary Committee, one-third of House Republicans joined most Democrats to defeat them on the floor. In the Senate, legal immigration reductions attracted just 20 votes, drawing opposition from almost all Democrats but also nearly three-fourths of Republicans.
Cotton and Perdue would squeeze legal immigration even more tightly than the GOP proposed then. The Pew Research Center estimates that limiting future immigrants and refugees to about half their current level would, over roughly the next 50 years, reduce the foreign-born share of the population to just below 10%, down from around 14% now. Such a diminished share would track Trump’s campaign call to return the foreign-born population share to what he termed “historical norms.” (Though the number has been higher at most points in U.S. history, the foreign born share of the population has averaged about 10% since the Civil War, according to Pew research, largely because that population plummeted in the decades after Congress severely restricted immigration in 1924.)
Pew’s projections also suggest that with immigration cut in half, the number of working-age Americans in coming decades would remain essentially unchanged at around 175 million. By contrast, under current law and migration trends, the working-age population would increase by about 30 million over the next 50 years, with immigrants and their descendants contributing almost all of the increase.
Cotton and Perdue say preempting that growth would increase economic opportunities for native-born workers, and some economists agree — to a point. In an exhaustive study last fall, the National Academy of Sciences found “little evidence” that increased immigration significantly affected employment levels for native-born workers, but the researchers did see indications that it has pressured wages for lowerskilled workers –– primarily recent immigrants themselves but also native-born workers who didn’t finish high school (a slim share of the overall workforce). But even there, the study concluded immigration’s impact “is very small…when measured over a period of 10 years or more.”
Any benefit for native-born workers that might derive from squeezing immigration would carry other costs. Smaller workforce growth would mean lower overall economic growth. Fewer workers would threaten Social Security and Medicare. It’s estimated that the senior population will soar from about 48 million now to 86 million in 2050. Without more workers, the taxes needed to support those retirees could reach unsustainable levels, increasing pressure for benefit cuts. Immigration helps maintain a more sustainable balance between the working age and retired population, especially because a higher share of foreign-born adults (half ) than native-born (one-third) are younger than 45.
A version of that dynamic is already evident in Rust Belt states central to Trump’s electoral success. Cities there have been recruiting legal immigrants to combat population decline and replenish their workforce. A Chicago Council on Global Affairs study found that the nativeborn working-age population declined from 2000 to 2010 in dozens of Rust Belt cities as families left for faster-growing regions. Those cities mitigated the contraction by increasing their population of working-age foreign-born adults.
Like Trump’s protectionist trade agenda, the Cotton/Perdue immigration restrictions envision a zero-sum economy, in which any gains for foreign interests mean losses for domestic workers. That contrasts with the dynamic vision of mutual benefit that an alliance of companies — including Apple, Google, Intel and Facebook — presented in their legal brief opposing Trump’s seven-nation travel ban. “Immigrants make many of the Nation’s greatest discoveries, and create some of the country’s most innovative and iconic companies,” the brief says. “The energy they bring…is a key reason why the American economy has been the greatest engine of prosperity and innovation in history.”
In the Trump era, the chasm is quickly widening between those who believe the best way to ensure America’s prosperity (and security) is to build bridges to the world and those determined to erect walls against it.