The open-borders brain trust at America’s Voice isn’t satisfied with hilarious attempts at demonizing restrictionists; now they’re trying to bully groups that, if anything, lean a little in their direction. The group, which was conceived of an as open-borders “war room,” has a posting up today denouncing the Pew Hispanic Center for testifying at a House immigration subcommittee hearing this morning on “New Jobs in Recession and Recovery: Who Are Getting Them and Who Are Not.” What the open-borders purists are upset about is a recent Pew report, “After the Great Recession: Foreign Born Gain Jobs; Native Born Lose Jobs,” whose title gets across the point, but which reports these specifics:
In the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor data by the Pew Hispanic Center.
As a result, the unemployment rate for immigrant workers fell 0.6 percentage points during this period (from 9.3% to 8.7%) while for native-born workers it rose 0.5 percentage points (from 9.2% to 9.7%).
My colleague Steve Camarota also testified, making a similar point based on his own work.
Pew is certainly not a restrictionist outfit and bills itself as a “fact tank” rather than a think tank. Generally that’s true, and they produce a lot of useful data. But this is a place whose senior demographer is Jeff Passel, who was actively engaged on the expansionist side of the mid-90s immigration debates when he was at the Urban Institute. My point is not that there’s anything wrong with that; Passel is a decent guy and does honest work, and we’d all be better off if more people on his side of the issue were like him. But if even his organization is not ideologically pure enough for the open-borders enthusiasts, then they really have gone off the deep end.