There’s little evidence that less immigration means more opportunities for Americans to work.
Probably nothing will ever shake President Trump’s belief that illegal immigrants steal job opportunities from Americans. Mr. Trump insists that our labor markets are zero-sum, meaning that a job taken by a newcomer is one fewer job available for someone already here. Yet it’s worth noting that the past decade of fluctuating migration levels and unemployment rates seriously undermines that claim.
During that fateful debate with Joe Biden last year, Mr. Trump said that lax border security hurt all workers but was especially detrimental to the job prospects of blacks and Hispanics. “His big kill on the black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Biden. “They’re taking black jobs now, and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.”
Mr. Trump’s most significant accomplishment since his return to the White House has been to gain control of the southern border, as he promised. According to the Department of Homeland Security, illegal entries in July dropped to the lowest level ever recorded for the second month in a row. Mr. Trump has succeeded where previous administrations of both parties fell short, none more so than the Biden administration, which treated illegal immigration as a Fox News fixation no one else cared about.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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