Tag: RAISE act

Despite Trashing Attempts by Right-Wingers, DACA Kids Are the Young People Most Parents Want Their Children to Be

The following article by Steven Rosenfeld was posted on the AlterNet website September 6, 2017:

Six snapshots of who DACA recipients are: strivers, hard-working, responsible, honest, vetted—and more than half are women.

Credit: Gili Getz / Movimiento Cosecha

Within hours of President Trump announcing he would end the DACA program, some right-wingers took to the airwaves saying were fed up with being told to have sympathy for these youths and families that the federal government was poised to break up.

That was the case on CNN, when host Don Lemon had to cut off John Fredericks, a right-wing talk show host, who said that most Americans struggling to get through their days were tired of hearing about the 800,000 young people who didn’t have visas to be here. Continue reading “Despite Trashing Attempts by Right-Wingers, DACA Kids Are the Young People Most Parents Want Their Children to Be”

Fewer Immigrants Mean More Jobs? Not So, Economists Say

The following article by Binyamin Appelbaum was posted on the New York Times website August 3, 2017:

Farm workers removing weeds in a field in Stratford, Calif., in 2014. Economists say highly educated immigrants are good for the economy, but so are less skilled workers. Credit Matt Black for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When the federal government banned the use of farmworkers from Mexico in 1964, California’s tomato growers did not enlist Americans to harvest the fragile crop. They replaced the lost workers with tomato-picking machines.

The Trump administration on Wednesday embraced a proposal to sharply reduce legal immigration, which it said would preserve jobs and lead to higher wages — the same argument advanced by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations half a century ago.

But economists say the tomato story and a host of related evidence show that there is no clear connection between less immigration and more jobs for Americans. Rather, the prevailing view among economists is that immigration increases economic growth, improving the lives of the immigrants and the lives of the people who are already here. Continue reading “Fewer Immigrants Mean More Jobs? Not So, Economists Say”