New immigration data

The immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies has a new analysis of Census data. There's nothing all that shocking in it, but it's a great update -- it shows once again how immigration is providing a disproportionate influx of low-skill, uneducated people:

Of adult immigrants, 31 percent have not completed high school, compared to 8 percent of natives. Since 2000, immigration increased the number of workers without a high school diploma by 14 percent, and all other workers by 3 percent.

One can make all sorts of economic arguments about immigration (it's probably about a wash for the native-born, who benefit from cheap labor but lose jobs and pay for immigrants' social services), but to me the best point is social. Intelligence and skills are distributed unevenly through the population, so some Americans have to work in low-skill occupations; bringing in other countries' poor people to compete with them is not in our nation's best interest.

It's true that technological progress has moved lots of Americans out of these low-level positions and into other fields -- in previous generations, even the very intelligent often worked on family farms. When good jobs will go unfilled otherwise , it's not a problem to bring in immigrants to replace the now-white-collar folks. But when American high school dropouts enter a who-can-work-cheapest contest with Third Worlders, immigration poses a threat in the forms of social instability, poverty, unemployment and racial tensions.

Hat tip: Borjas blog.