Amnesty Will Raise Wages—And Pigs Will Fly Too!

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is typical of mass immigration advocacy groups in being either delusional or dishonest—or possibly both. Recently, it published an article promoting amnesty for illegal aliens, which it disingenuously describes as “immigration reform.”

According to CAP, granting amnesty to illegal aliens will “promote economic growth.” To bolster this conclusion, it cites a study which claims that amnesty will add $1.5 trillion to the economy over the next 10 years by raising wage levels of all workers! By coincidence, it just so happens that CAP was one of the sponsors of this so-called study.

Certainly when the illegals become legal they can move to better paying jobs, but what will happen to the wages of Americans who now hold those jobs? Are we supposed to believe that someone has repealed the law of supply and demand? Since no one has, that means those wages will go down. And once the illegals abandon their low-paying jobs, a new wave of illegals will arrive to take them again. By rewarding lawbreaking, we just get more of it. It’s happened after every past amnesty. And the newcomers will keep the wages of low-paying jobs low—to the detriment of disadvantaged Americans who also do those jobs.

If we want to raise wages, a good way would be to encourage eight million illegal workers to go home. That would force employers to pay higher salaries to American workers. Again, it’s the law of supply and demand.

Economics aside, CAP claims that most Americans favor amnesty, and cite polls to this effect. It doesn’t reveal, however, that these polls only give two alternatives: amnesty or mass deportations. The polls yield the desired result by not offering a third option, namely, attrition. This is the strategy to gradually tightening immigration law enforcement so that life for illegal aliens in the United States becomes increasingly difficult. In this situation, many or most illegals will leave on their own accord. This is what happened in 1954 under President Eisenhower, the only time when the U.S. seriously applied enforcement.

When attrition is offered as an option in polling, more Americans choose it than amnesty or mass deportations.

The CAP brazenly claims that “The American public wants its leaders to quit playing politics” and pass an amnesty. What we really need to quit is politics-as-usual, which allows the pro-amnesty lobbies of cheap labor and cheap votes to thwart the will of the American public.