Economist: Mass Immigration to U.S. Is World’s ‘Largest Anti-Poverty Program’

Decades of mass immigration to the United States, with more than 1.5 million legal immigrants entering the country every year, is the world’s “largest anti-poverty program” at the expense of blue-collar American workers and the middle class, says a Harvard University economist.

In an interview with Talking Points Memo, economist George Borjas detailed how more than five decades of mass immigration of low-wage foreign nationals to the U.S. have negatively impacted America’s poor, working class, and middle class in the labor force.

Borjas explains:

"Since 1965, we have admitted a lot of low-skilled immigrants, and one way to view that policy is that we were running basically the largest anti-poverty program in the world. That is actually not a bad thing at all. Except someone is going to have to pay the cost for that.

"This is the question that most progressives don’t want to face up to. They really want to believe that immigrants are manna from heaven. That everybody is really better off and that everybody is happy forever after. What they refuse to confront is the reality that nothing in the world is like manna from heaven. In any policy change, some people benefit a lot and some people don’t. And this point also applies to immigration, which has created the dynamics of where we are now."

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