Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign released a new ad on YouTube Tuesday focusing on immigration. Titled “Invasion,” the ad captures how Cruz seems to view what both legal and illegal immigrants to America represent. As the ad opens, (mostly) white men and women in business attire come running across what is implied to be the border between the United States and Mexico.
“I understand that when the mainstream media covers immigration it doesn’t often see it as an economic issue, but I can tell you it is a very personal economic issue,” says Cruz, who ranks first in the Washington Examiner‘s Republican presidential power rankings. “The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande. Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press, then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation.”
The only problem: There’s a reason most immigrants don’t come to America to be lawyers, bankers or journalists. Native-born Americans already dominate those fields. Immigrants come to work in food service, cleaning and construction jobs because native-born Americans are less likely to work in those fields. Immigrants aren’t taking those jobs from someone else; they’re filling openings native-born Americans can’t or won’t fill.
This isn’t just speculation. Data back it up.
About 1.4 percent of working native-born Americans were in legal occupations in 2014. That’s nearly three times more than the portion of foreign-born workers in legal occupations: 0.5 percent.
In contrast, only 3 percent of working native-born Americans are in cleaning jobs. Since relatively few Americans work in that field, immigrants are free to do so: 8.7 percent of foreign-born workers are in cleaning jobs.
“Because immigrants’ educational backgrounds typically complement, rather than displace, the skills of the native-born labor market, immigration increases economic efficiency by supplying more labor to low and high-skill markets,” wrote Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, where I was formerly employed.
Cruz didn’t mention immigrants living off welfare, but it’s a common complaint by those who oppose more immigration. The welfare reforms of 1996 are well-known, but a little-known feature of the law was that it eliminated most welfare eligibility for legal immigrants, who had previously been treated the same as U.S. citizens. Thanks to that reform, low-income immigrant families with children rely less on welfare programs than similar native-born American families, according to a 2011 paper.
Simply put: Immigrants by and large are not crossing the border to steal your jobs or live off your tax dollars.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
