An immigration watchdog group has released a report claiming that the rate of illegal and legal immigration to the United States has outnumbered the creation of jobs by two to one over the course of the last 15 years.
The figures appear to be a repudiation of the argument offered by President Obama and a number of immigration reform supporters that the executive action announced back in November to enact such reform would be good for the US economy and create more jobs for American workers.
“The key question for policymakers is whether it makes sense to allow in this number of legal immigrants and tolerate this level of illegal immigration when long-term job growth has not come close to matching these numbers,” says the report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). “Moreover, this record immigration has occurred at a time when job growth has not even kept pace with natural population increase, let alone new immigration. Unfortunately, new policymakers have given little thought to the absorption capacity of the US labor market when formulating immigration policy.”
The CIS claims that over 18 million immigrants – legal and undocumented ‒ came to the United States between 2000 and 2014, according to government figures; however, just 9.3 million new jobs were created, resulting in a dramatic decline in the number of Americans in the labor force and making a nonsense of claims that there is a shortage in the US workforce.