The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report by Jason Richwine last week entitled “Immigrants Replace Low-Skill Natives in the Workforce.” The Cato Institute has previously pointed out the inaccuracies, methodological tricks, and disingenuous framing that have plagued CIS’s reports on numerous occasions, but this latest report performs poorly even relative to those prior attempts. More importantly, its underlying numbers actually buttress the case for expanding legal immigration.
The report’s central finding is that the share of native-born high school dropouts in their prime who are not working has grown at the same time as the population of similarly educated immigrants. While Mr. Richwine explicitly states that this finding “does not necessarily imply that immigrants push out natives from the workforce,” he goes on to imply exactly that throughout the report, blaming immigrants for “causing economic and social distress.”
First of all, “distress” would imply that at least some more prime-age, lesser-skilled natives are out of work—i.e. unemployed or out of the labor force—now than prior to the wave of immigration in the 1990s. But this is incorrect. The numbers of such workers in their prime (ages 25 to 54) actually declined by 25 percent from 1995 to 2014, according to Census data. For the last decade, the number has remained roughly constant. Richwine is just wrong to state that “an increasing number of the least-skilled Americans [are] leaving the workforce.” (Note that while the CIS report focuses on native men, the trends in all of the following figures are the same direction regardless of sex.)