Labor surplus won't help middle class

...If mass immigration is the key to a robust economy, why are we in such bad shape? Why are more than 20 million people unemployed, or stuck in low-paying or part-time jobs? Why are tens of millions more working-age adults out of the labor force entirely? Why are we in danger of losing our middle class? After all, between 1971 and 2010, we admitted 31,427,846 legal immigrants to our country, and another 12 million are believed to be here illegally.

With all that immigration we should have prosperity coming out of our ears... But we don’t. By all economic indicators, we are substantially less well-off (except for those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder) than we were 40 years ago. Not only that, at the height of our economic prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s, when the rising tide really did lift all boats, immigration levels were about half of what they have been since 1970.

The obvious conclusion is that smart immigration policies can maximize the benefits of a healthy economy, or minimize the harm of an ailing one, but they are certainly not the key to economic vigor...

Of all the factors sapping the economic vigor of the middle class, immigration may be one of the few that is within our power to mitigate. We cannot change the realities of a global economy or technology that contribute to the disappearance of jobs and the erosion of American wages. What we can do is institute and enforce sensible immigration policies that limit the supply of workers chasing the jobs and wages that remain...