{"id":22836,"date":"2020-04-17T13:37:07","date_gmt":"2020-04-17T17:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/?p=22836"},"modified":"2020-04-17T13:37:10","modified_gmt":"2020-04-17T17:37:10","slug":"high-skilled-immigrants-media-bias-immigrationreform-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2020\/04\/17\/high-skilled-immigrants-media-bias-immigrationreform-com\/","title":{"rendered":"AP Misses the Mark in its Praise of College-Educated Immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recently, AP News<\/a> published an article celebrating that \u201calmost half of the foreign-born who moved to the U.S. in the past decade were college-educated.\u201d It also touts newly-released U.S. Census Bureau data<\/a> \u201cshow[ing]that 47% of the foreign-born population who arrived in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 had a bachelor\u2019s degree or higher, compared to 36% of native-born Americans.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article admits that this is a reversal of previous trends, i.e. that for decades the educational level of immigrants consistently lagged behind the educational attainment of native-born Americans. It states that 31 percent of new immigrants who arrived \u201cin or before 2009\u201d had college degrees. What the article fails to mention (and what research<\/a> from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) tells us) is that \u201cfrom 1970 to at least 2000 each new wave of immigrants was less educated relative to natives,\u201d which suggests that the radical transformation of our immigration system by the Immigration Act of 1965 was followed by a significant decline in the educational levels of immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact\nthat the U.S. has been getting more educated immigrants in the past decade is,\noverall, a good thing. That\u2019s because, in general, educated immigrants \u2013\nparticularly during the Information Age \u2013 can be more beneficial to the U.S.\nand its economy than arrivals with little education and low skill levels. They\nare also, on average, less likely to become \u201cpublic charges,\u201d i.e. burdens on\nthe American taxpayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\nare other factors to consider as well, not to mention that there is such a\nthing as \u201ctoo much of a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is\nimportant to keep in mind that media coverage, such as the AP article, pushes a\nkey talking point continuously promoted by the pro-mass-immigration lobby: the\nimplicit claim that immigrants are in general smarter, better, and more\nindustrious than native-born Americans, who, by contrast, are often depicted as\npoorly-educated, lazy, and entitled. That, of course, is quite insulting and\ncondescending. (Full disclosure: the author of this blog originally came to the\nUnited States as an immigrant.) It is also quite misleading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So is\nanother ploy often employed by the lobby, which hopes to convince Americans to\nbuy into the mass-immigration propaganda by attributing characteristics of a\nsubset of the immigrant population to the entire immigrant population. These\nadvocates stereotype by featuring the narrow cross-section of the most educated\nand successful newcomers and contrasting them with a broad cross-section of the\nAmerican public. That is a classic \u201capples and oranges\u201d comparison. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While\neducated immigrants can be a boon to the country, they can still have a\nnegative impact on American middle class professionals and college graduates \u2013\nwho are often saddled with tens of thousands in student loans \u2013 through\nincreased job competition and depressed wages that come with it. This is\nespecially true when legal immigration numbers are as high as they have been in\nrecent years, over 1 million per year. The current economic crisis caused by\nCOVID-19, with millions of Americans suddenly finding themselves out of work,\nfurther justifies limits on even well-skilled immigration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 2018 CIS study<\/a> also offers another reason to adopt a somewhat skeptical attitude towards the article\u2019s unbounded enthusiasm. The analysis found that even though the number of newly arrived immigrants with at least a bachelor\u2019s degree increased substantially (from 34 to 49 percent) from 2007 to 2017, this has not made new immigrants significantly better off. In other words, a college degree is not necessarily a guarantee of success. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore,\njust because we recognize that recent immigrants are better educated than any\nprevious waves during the past half-century or the native-born \u2013 and just\nbecause we acknowledge this to be a relative net benefit (when the numbers are\nreasonable) \u2013 does not mean we have to uncritically accept mass unchecked\nimmigration as an unadulterated, absolute good with no side effects whatsoever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, AP News published an article celebrating that \u201calmost half of the foreign-born who moved to the U.S. in the past decade were college-educated.\u201d It also touts newly-released U.S. Census Bureau data \u201cshow[ing]that 47% of the foreign-born population who arrived in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019 had a bachelor\u2019s degree or higher, compared to<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":15446,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[7],"tags":[1524,8410,1387,275],"yst_prominent_words":[1938,2140,8407,2134,7062,3977,8408,7293,8406,4615,5970,2736,5555,1980,1963,5967,5957,8409,1955,1939],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22837,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22836\/revisions\/22837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22836"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}