Labor Day tomorrow: what should be our goal?

Former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm writes today in the Denver Post:

Our Labor Day goal should be to get Americans to work, not to import a limitless supply of cheap labor from the Third World.

Immigration transfers wealth. Immigration takes from U.S. workers and transfers that wealth to U.S. employers of immigrants. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that immigration costs American workers $402 billion annually in reduced wages and, not surprisingly, gives a similar gain to U.S. employers of immigrants.

One of America's dirty little secrets is the meteoric rise in American workers not in the labor force. In the year 2000, the United States had 40 million employment-age workers not in the labor force. As of July 2014, we have 92 million. America obviously has too many ways to avoid the world of work and too many ways for employers to avoid tapping into that vast reservoir of manpower.

How long is this vast number of underutilized Americans going to stay quiet? What is the cost of carrying these potential workers to the taxpayers? Employ an unemployed American and you put someone to work and reduce taxpayer costs. Import an unskilled immigrant and it costs American taxpayers about $100,000 in social costs over their lifetime, even if the immigrant is working, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

Andrew Sum of Northeastern University found that between 2008 to 2010, 1.1 million new migrants entered the U.S. and landed jobs, even as U.S. household employment declined by 6.26 million over that same period. Isn't there something wrong with that picture?

We have room for some immigrants, but they should be selected for their skills and talents and what they can do for our economy. Highly skilled immigrants increase the productivity of their fellow workers with "human capital spillover." But America, unlike other immigrant-receiving countries, (see chart) continues to minimize the number of immigrants we take for their skills and talents and gives a preference to "family reunification."

American capitalism and ingenuity has been a job-producing machine, but for the last decade we have been bringing in immigrants faster than our economy can produce jobs, thereby hurting American workers. The more people competing for existing jobs, the lower the wages. That should not be our goal this or any Labor Day.

Read more here.