Wall Street Journal
(Editorial)
April 25, 2015
The
good news is that Scott Walker is looking to advisers to educate him on
the issues he will have to address if he wants to be elected President.
The bad news is that
on the economics of immigration the Wisconsin Governor is listening to
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
In
a radio interview Monday with Glenn Beck, Mr. Walker said “the next
President and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal
immigration system that’s based
on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American
wages.” He went on to say, “I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to Senator
Sessions and others out there.” At the “forefront of our discussion
going foward,” he says, must be what legal immigration
is “doing for American workers looking for jobs” and what it “is doing
to wages.”
By
all means let’s have that discussion on jobs and wages. Because Mr.
Walker seems to be taking his cue from Senate hearings Mr. Sessions held
recently to spread a whopper:
that Americans with degrees in STEM subjects (science, technology,
engineering and math) can’t get jobs because foreigners are stealing
them.
Mr.
Sessions is the Senate’s leading crusader against any immigration,
legal and illegal, and his latest targets are H-1B visas for skilled
workers. Practically speaking,
these visas are the only way U.S. companies can bring foreign talent to
work in America, and more are going to STEM specialists.
The
Senator calls claims of a skilled-worker shortage a “hoax.” But the
numbers suggest otherwise: The U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services
announced last week that it
received a record 233,000 requests from American business for the
85,000 H-1B visas available.
This
unmet demand is why a bipartisan group of other Senators—including Mr.
Sessions’s fellow Republicans Orrin Hatch,Marco Rubio and Jeff
Flake—have introduced a bill
to make it easier to hire high-tech workers. But it’s going to be hard
to pass the Senate with Mr. Sessions chairing the immigration
subcommittee and his ally, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, chairing
Judiciary.
Their
argument is that America’s high-tech companies are looking for workers
to exploit. But the two Senators rely on anecdotes and a misleadingly
narrow measure of the
job market by the Census Bureau.
One
of Mr. Sessions’s favorite talking points is that 74% of Americans with
STEM degrees—he says about 11 million Americans—are working in non-STEM
jobs. The Census data
on which this is based also say only 3.8 million Americans with degrees
in these subjects hold STEM jobs.
But
a new study from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP)—a
pro-immigration think tank—shows how misleading this figure is. It notes
the National Science
Foundation’s “Science and Engineering Indicators 2014,” which reports
that the number of college-educated workers who say their jobs require a
least a bachelor’s degree level of expertise in a STEM subject is 16.5
million.
The
same NSF publication found that only 5% of Americans with a degree in
engineering or computing or math were involuntarily working outside
their chosen fields in 2010,
the most recent year for which statistics are available. The figure is
only 1.4% for those who earned a master’s degree in math or computer
science in the last five years.
The
NFAP concludes that Mr. Sessions’s data “would exclude every American
recipient of the Nobel Prize in the past 100 years who worked as a
professor, which would be
classified as a post-secondary teacher, and the CEO of Apple, since
management positions typically do not count as a STEM occupation under
government classifications.”
As
for jobs overall, in 2010 the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
concluded “there is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born
workers in either the short
or long run.” It also found that the long run effect on the income of
Americans is small but positive.
And
let’s ask this question. If more people, even people with skills such
as those on H-1B visas, are bad for an economy, why is the high-growth
state of Texas working
overtime to get people from other parts of the country to move there?
Under the Walker-Sessions model, shouldn’t that depress wages and take
jobs from those already there?
Economists
call this the lump of labor fallacy, which holds that the amount of
available work is fixed. If one person gets a job, another loses it. But
the addition of
new workers into a market, especially skilled workers, can increase the
productivity of companies in a way that expands the supply of work for
everybody.
Republicans
used to understand this basic economic principle, but the politics of
immigration is turning some of them into economists for the AFL-CIO. The
irony is that
Mr. Sessions’s view of labor economics requires believing that the most
innovative U.S. companies aren’t built on smarts or innovation but on
the exploitation of cheap foreign labor.
Mr.
Walker is right that the GOP needs to focus on raising the incomes of
average Americans, but the way to do that is with policies that increase
growth and improve upward
mobility. Zero-sum labor economics will do neither.
Correction:
An earlier version of this editorial mistakenly attributed to Mr.
Sessions a claim about the size of the U.S. STEM job market.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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