Two of the favorite justifications for an illegal alien amnesty and massive immigration increases are:
- We need lots of new immigrants to avert a looming labor shortage, and
- We need lots of new immigrant workers to keep the Social Security system solvent.
If common sense is not enough to tell you that both of those statements are false, there is now data to back it up.
America’s younger workers – recent college graduates – not only suffer from high unemployment, but those who can find work often wind up in jobs for which they are overqualified and earning wages that make it difficult to pay off their college educations. They also are potentially losing out in hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings over their career, as they are starting out lower on the economic ladder than they would in a healthy economy.
Those under-utilized and underpaid workers should be the answer to our labor needs, but cheap labor interests and the politicians who serve them, would rather have access to more immigrant labor. Given the opportunity, America’s beleaguered younger working would be paying into the Social Security Trust Fund for the next four decades or so.
The data also show that many workers at the older end of the spectrum are delaying retirement, which means they will not be drawing Social Security benefits for quite as long as anticipated.
Thus, an immigration policy that allows younger Americans to fill the jobs they’re qualified to do, at decent wages, coupled with older workers staying in the labor force longer, could well result in both the alleged labor shortage problem and the Social Security solvency problem solving themselves.