Friday, September 23rd, 2016
Stephan: It is an article of nativist faith and a common assertion of compulsive panderers to that community like Donald Trump -- and I use the word "faith" precisely to make the point that it is a belief completely inconsistent with the facts -- that immigrants cost the country money and take jobs away from "native born" Americans.
This is not only factually wrong it betrays the fundamental strength of the United States. The truth is every human in North America including Indians (I have to say that rather than native Americans for obvious reasons) are either themselves immigrants or descendants of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants; it is our strength not our weakness, as more than two centuries of history prove. Every business in America was started by an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant. Here are the facts.
Immigrants taking Oath of Allegiance
Credit: CNN
Do immigrants take jobs from Americans and lower their wages by working for less?
The answer, according to a report published on Wednesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is no, immigrants do not take American jobs — but with some caveats.
The question is at the heart of the furious debate over immigration that has divided the country and polarized the presidential race. Many American workers, struggling to recover from the recession, have said they feel squeezed out by immigrants.
Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has called for a crackdown on illegal immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers.” He promises to cut back legal immigration with new controls he says would “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.”
Hillary […]
Lies. I see it every time I go to the office. One bank I work for is laying off Americans because they want 50% off-shore.
It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just say facts are lies because you don’t like them.
I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. You can’t dismiss facts and call them lies because you don’t like them.
I don’t think the Times article was very convincing–it was just a headline and a few bullet points stating that some experts thought that immigration did not hurt American wage earners. However, they provided no deeper information to back up these statements. I thought the actual report might have more information and clicked through the link but the longer article wasn’t any better and I’m not going to pay $95 to pre-order the publication.
This article was the equivalent of “experts” stating what they believed to be true. It’s true that you can’t just say facts are lies because you don’t like them but it also true that even the experts at the New York Times or the Academy of Sciences experts can’t just call something a a fact and not provide some evidence.
Do your homework: https://www.google.com/search?q=do+immigrants+steal+jobs&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
The point I was trying to make was that I thought the article was a very tepid bit of journalism. I understand that there is disagreement on the subject but the “NY Times” article and the study that was linked, merely quoted experts opinions and provided no actual evidence.
(Actually Steve Hoviland’s comment, as brief and rude as it was, still was slightly better in that he actually provided one small data-bit of information—his own eye witness testimony! :P)
I appreciate the work you do to find articles on trending and controversial topics. I get a lot out of looking at the articles you post. So I don’t want to criticize too much, it’s just that I think this type of article was not at worth passing on. It was an article that if you believed the premise you would just scan it and pass over it and if you didn’t believe the premise, it would not enlighten you in any way. Except perhaps to prove that there are many academics who claim that immigration is a good thing for some people in some countries. But again, there was that lack of numbers problem.
Also, for what it’s worth, I did try to do my homework and read the first article provided from the link you posted when you googled “Do immigrants steal jobs?”. It was an article from “The Atlantic” entitled “Immigrants Aren’t Stealing People’s Jobs”. The research said it, “studied a cohort of 16 million American workers without high school diplomas. She found that within this group, immigrants and native-born workers do very different jobs.”
The claim was that the two groups weren’t even competing for the same jobs. But then the charts provided completely contradicted this “finding”.
The study compared the the top ten occupations of immigrants versus native workers with no high school diploma. However, in both groups, 7 out of 10 occupations were exactly the same: Maids/Housekeepers, Cooks, Construction Workers, Janitors/Cleaners, Grounds Workers, Driver/sales Workers & Truck Drivers, Laborers & Freight/Stock and Material Movers. And the numbers where not so dissimilar either. For instance, there were 376,154 Immigrant Construction Workers vs 292,376 Native (born) Construction Workers.
There chart showed the exact opposite of what the headline and study claimed to find. It showed that American born workers were competing directly for the same jobs with immigrants.
Finally, for the record, I am not sure what the truth is concerning immigrants and their effect on American jobs. I also consider myself to be pro-immigrant. But I am not competing for any jobs right now, so there is that to consider.
But, my point, again, is that if you want to claim science and logic are on your side, you have to provide that. The “NY Times” article sidestepped that by providing an “Appeal to Authority” study that uncritically reprinted the Academy of Science’s press release for a publication that hasn’t been released yet and presumably the reporter hadn’t even read. And the top Google pick on whether immigrants steal American jobs–the “Atlantic” article–stated that we need immigrants to do low skilled jobs because Americans aren’t doing those jobs and then provided evidence/numbers that directly contradicted that statement.