This week the Republican senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia introduced a bill that they said would cut legal immigration to the United States by 50 percent. They are right about that, but nearly everything else that they have said about their bill is false or misleading.

A smart reform would double green cards and peg future work visas to economic growth, responding to market forces rather than political whims.

They have justified this drastic cut in immigration by stating that the bill will, as they put it in February when announcing an earlier version, bring “legal immigration levels” back down to “their historical norms.” But the senators fail to consider the impact of population growth. A million immigrants to the United States in 2017 isn’t equivalent to the same number in 1900, when there were a quarter as many Americans.

A smart reform would double green cards and peg future work visas to economic growth, responding to market forces rather than political whims.
Controlling for population, today’s immigration rate is nearly 30 percent below its historical average. If their bill becomes law, the rate would fall to about 60 percent below average. With few exceptions, the only years with such a low immigration rate were during the world wars and the Great Depression. Surely, these are not the “norms” to which the senators seek to return.

Senator Cotton is trying to connect a slow increase in the immigration rate in recent decades to declining wages for Americans without a college degree, implying that low-skilled workers are facing more competition for jobs than in earlier years. But this correlation is spurious, because it ignores the size of the overall labor pool.

Less-educated Americans also faced less competition. The ranks of on-college educated workers swelled 50 percent in the postwar period, compared with just 16 percent in recent decades. During both periods, high school dropouts saw a near continuous decline in labor market competition — from workers born here or elsewhere. In contrast, college graduates actually dealt with more competition than they had before.

Read the source article at Cato Institute

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David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity