Amnesty poses great risk for 22 million unemployed Americans

 Editor’s note: David Stoll teaches at Middlebury College.  He is the author of “El Norte or Bust!  How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town” (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442220683).

After many ups and downs, comprehensive immigration reform is the grand bargain showing that Democrats and Republicans can still compromise to solve a big national issue.  In exchange for tighter border controls, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants will receive a path to citizenship.  The biggest players in the U.S. immigration debate will get more legal immigrants, more family reunification, more guestworkers and more sophisticated enforcement.

So will the rest of us – including the 22 million Americans who, according to the Labor Department’s U6 category, are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to even look for work. What are the implications for them?  If you believe American capitalism is a rising tide that lifts all boats, there’s nothing to worry about in the long run.  Immigrants are good for business and good for economic growth.

If you look at the U.S. labor force, there is plenty to worry about. The sociologist William Julius Wilson calls it “the disappearance of work,” visible first in inner-cities and now elsewhere. Declining youth employment, declining participation in the workforce, more off-the-books employment, stagnant or declining wages for most Americans – all have multiple causes, but the causes include the preference of American employers for foreign workers.