Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Trump served notice via Twitter about the new deal that Democrats would face in the new year: “There can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border,” he warned, “and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc. We must protect our country at all cost!”
Chain migration is the process by which foreign nationals permanently resettle in the U.S. and subsequently bring over their foreign relatives, and so on, until entire extended families are resettled within the country. The numbers are huge. On average, according to the White House, “every 2 new immigrants bring 7 additional foreign relatives to permanently resettle in the U.S.”
In just the last ten years, some 9.3 million people have been allowed to settle here permanently solely because of their familial ties to another immigrant. That’s more than the total population of Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and Cleveland – combined.
“This system of chain migration… de-skills the labor force, puts downward pressure on wages, and increases the deficit,” explains the White House website. The Trump administration is absolutely correct that low-skill immigrants increase the fiscal deficit by consuming more in benefits than they pay in taxes.
Despite low unemployment figures being reported, as President Obama’s chief economic adviser Jason Furman recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “some 9 million men of prime age – that is, between 25 and 54 – still are not working.” Furman ignored immigration, but it’s not just a coincidence that 9 million men exited the labor force during the same period that 9.3 million low-skill immigrants settled in the United States.
“The bulk of the decline in employment,” Jason Furman continued, “has been for men with a high-school diploma or less, who have seen their employment rates fall from 97% in 1964 to 83% today.” That’s the same group that is most harmed by the policy of allowing low-skill immigrants to come here and fight for the same jobs.
