{"id":22969,"date":"2020-05-14T14:15:33","date_gmt":"2020-05-14T18:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/?p=22969"},"modified":"2020-05-14T14:15:37","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T18:15:37","slug":"cato-mass-immigration-unemployed-immigrationreform-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2020\/05\/14\/cato-mass-immigration-unemployed-immigrationreform-com\/","title":{"rendered":"From Its Ivory Tower, Cato Throws More Fuel on the COVID Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Oddly oblivious to the burgeoning legions of unemployed Americans, the libertarian Cato Institute is touting a dozen proposals to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cato.org\/publications\/white-paper\/12-new-immigration-ideas-21st-century\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">accelerate and expand immigration<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cato\u2019s compendium of \u201cnew and interesting ideas\u201d includes: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Expediting family-sponsored and\nemployment-based immigration.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Allowing states to sponsor migrants based\non those states\u2019 criteria.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Enabling individual members of Congress\nto select immigrants for permanent residence. <\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Replacing immigration caps with a tax on\nnewcomers to promote \u201cgreater freedom of migration.\u201d<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Tying growth of employment\u2010based visas to growth in the most\nrelevant sectors of the U.S. labor force.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>That last one (the first in Cato\u2019s anthology) has some merit, but not\nnecessarily in the way Cato intended. The U.S. Department of Labor could and should\ndo a better job of updating its workplace certifications to ensure that work\nvisas don\u2019t flood the market and crowd out American workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Under current circumstances &#8212; and for the foreseeable future &#8212; the\ndemand for imported labor is, in fact, negative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The latest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bls.gov\/news.release\/empsit.nr0.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a> report shows that among the more than 30 million unemployed workers in America, 4.3 million were immigrants. That\u2019s a 455 percent increase from a year ago (versus a 295 percent rise for native-born workers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The jobless rate among immigrants jumped to 16.5 percent, 13.8\npercentage points higher than the previous year. (The native-born increase was\n10.6 percentage points.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So why would the U.S. want or need more immigrants?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jason Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, offered a standard\ncorporate\/libertarian response: \u201cImmigrant workers don\u2019t just increase the supply of labor but also the\ndemand for goods and services, which in turn requires businesses to hire more\npeople to meet the higher demand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s a debatable theory in normal times. But the ongoing economic\nupheaval is nowhere near normal. Pumping up immigration when 4.3 million\nimmigrants have already lost their jobs amid the COVID-19 chaos makes zero\nsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/money\/2020\/05\/06\/coronavirus-16-unemployment-rate-would-reflect-only-part-pain\/5172238002\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\" (opens in a new tab)\">USA Today<\/a>, \u201cSome economists reckon that one-third or more of Americans who were laid off in the weeks leading up to the April jobs survey aren&#8217;t even looking for work and so aren\u2019t counted as unemployed. That\u2019s an unusually high figure and reflects the unprecedented economic twilight zone created by the coronavirus pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Schemes to\nincrease immigration only serve to push Americans deeper into that twilight\nzone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oddly oblivious to the burgeoning legions of unemployed Americans, the libertarian Cato Institute is touting a dozen proposals to accelerate and expand immigration. Cato\u2019s compendium of \u201cnew and interesting ideas\u201d includes: Expediting family-sponsored and employment-based immigration. Allowing states to sponsor migrants based on those states\u2019 criteria. Enabling individual members of Congress to select immigrants for<\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2020\/05\/14\/cato-mass-immigration-unemployed-immigrationreform-com\/\" title=\"Read More\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":16837,"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":[7177],"tags":[8721,1524,902,400],"yst_prominent_words":[8720,2140,3901,3175,7083,1980,1963,3464,2137,2411,5967,5469,8719,3501,1945,1939,8375,2170,2128,1937],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22969"}],"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\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22970,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22969\/revisions\/22970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22969"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}