The "New" Immigrants

City Journal’s Steven Malanga has THIS (excerpted) response to those he calls "open-borders advocates, who have clung tenaciously to the notion that all immigration is ultimately good for our economy.":

...the first great immigration, from 1880 to the mid-1920s, brought economic benefits to the country largely because the newcomers of that era brought much-needed skills with them; indeed, a 1998 study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that those earlier immigrants were on average more skilled than native workers, more than a third of whom still toiled on farms. Those skills are a key reason why many of those immigrants and their children succeeded so well.
One research report cited by the academy noted that the American-born children of those immigrants were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, and lawyers as were other native-born Americans.

Today’s immigration, the so-called second great wave, began roughly 50 years ago and has come increasingly to feature low-skilled, uneducated workers and their families at a time when succeeding in our economy demands ever-more education and skills. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, illegal immigrants alone —consisting almost entirely of unskilled workers— have crossed our borders at the rate of between 225,000 and 300,000 a year.

Legal immigration has also turned sharply toward the low-skilled, thanks to 1965 legislation that changed our national quota system so that the vast majority of legal immigration now hails from poorer countries. Not surprisingly, as low-skilled workers have arrived in ever-greater numbers, their fortunes have fallen.

Today, for instance, Mexican immigrants -- who overwhelmingly dominate the ranks of our low-skilled migrants -- typically begin work in America with a 40 percent wage gap compared with native-born workers. Rather than disappearing over time, moreover, that wage gap persists and may even be growing larger, according to work by the Harvard economist George Borjas.

Equally unsurprisingly, the advantage of such low-wage immigration to America’s broader economy is limited. An authoritative study by the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 found that immigration contributed a mere $10 billion to our (at the time) $8 trillion economy, an inconsequential amount, all the more so in that the cost of immigration was increasing ...

To my great consternation, the good man residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. is too far to the Left on this issue -- and I've told him that several times. That's my -- and your -- Constitutional right.