The hour of conservative populism has arrived

John Fonte writes at National Review,

April 2015 is the month that conservative populism broke out and reached the major leagues of American politics.

...Wisconsin governor Scott Walker articulated a populist-tinged message, declaring that our legal-immigration system “ultimately has to protect American workers and make sure American wages are going up.” This set off a firestorm of controversy and placed conservative populism directly into the 2016 presidential race.

...Today, the conservative populist immigration coalition has reached a critical mass. It consists of three elements: an articulate and persistent political leadership; intellectual firepower from policy wonks, journalists, and media figures; and boots on the ground in the form of committed activists. Most important, these three pillars of the coalition are articulating a compelling narrative to the public at large.

This January, Jeff Sessions released the 23-page Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority, in which he noted the negative effect of mass immigration on American workers in both low-skilled and high-tech sectors. In a Washington Post op-ed, Sessions quotes our nation’s foremost labor economist, Harvard professor George Borjas, as reporting that the mass immigration of overwhelmingly low-skilled workers from 1980 to 2000 resulted in a 7.4 percent wage loss for lower-skilled Americans. In the construction industry today there are approximately seven workers for every job opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Census Bureau data revealed that between 2000 and 2014 the U.S. admitted about 14 million new immigrants, while the population of U.S.-born workers increased by 16.4 million. Nevertheless, “all net employment gains went to immigrant workers” rather than to American-born workers.

...In July 2014, five leading academic experts published in USA Today an article (“Bill Gates’ Tech Worker Fantasy”) demolishing Silicon Valley’s “worker shortage” argument. The scholars (Ron Hira, Howard; Paula Stephan, Georgia State; Hal Salzman, Rutgers; Michael Teitelbaum, Harvard; and Norman Matloff, UC Davis) declared: “None of us [independently] has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages. . . . If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising. . . . Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat . . . [since 1998]. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.” Using U.S. Census data, the scholars note that three out of four Americans (74 percent) with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degrees do not have a STEM job. This means that 11 million Americans with STEM degrees are not working in STEM employment. Further, American colleges annually graduate twice as many young people with STEM degrees as are currently working in STEM jobs. Specifically, among recent college graduates with STEM degrees, 55 percent in technology, 35 percent in science, 30 percent in math, and 20 percent in engineering cannot find jobs in those fields.

...In that USA Today article, Hira et al. wrote, “The facts are that, excluding advocacy studies by those with industry funding, there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers . . . who are willing and qualified to fill high-skill jobs in this country.” One of the authors of that article, Professor Salzman, notes that “guest workers make up two-thirds of all new IT hires.” Another of the authors, Professor Hira, bluntly states: “Most of the H-1B program is now being used to import cheaper foreign guestworkers, replacing American workers, and undercutting their wages.”

...Sessions wrote: “What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.”

Like the conservatives Jeff Sessions and Scott Walker, liberal icon Barbara Jordan was a patriot, who emphasized putting the economic interests of American workers at the center of immigration policy. Contrary to some hysterical responses to Sessions and Walker, no one today (nor anyone serious in the past) is (or was) talking about ending legal immigration; they simply advocate reasonable reductions. The Jordan commission’s report resulted in immigration legislation proposed by Representative Lamar Smith and Senator Alan Simpson (R., Wyo.) that would have cut legal immigration by about one-third, or back to Reagan-era levels, reversing the 1990 increase backed by George H. W. Bush. The Jordan–Smith–Simpson project was derailed by a Republican coalition of Big Business lobbyists (wanting cheaper labor) and Jack Kemp–style utopians (who waxed lyrical about increasing immigration). Barbara Jordan became seriously ill and soon died; President Clinton, who had originally favored cutting legal immigration, changed his mind; and the initiative failed. Twenty years later, we are stuck with the fruits of the anti-Jordan victory: wage stagnation and a weakening of the American working and middle classes.

Read more here.