My View: Trump right about immigration

Among Democrats, it is an article of faith that their party, and not the GOP, best represents poor and economically vulnerable Americans.

But on the critical issue of undocumented immigration, it is the policies of Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, which would best improve those Americans’ lives. And by their votes on 2014’s Measure 88, the undocumented-immigrant driver card referendum, many rank-and-file Oregon Democrats — if not their party’s elite — proved they may well agree.

More on Measure 88 below. First, let’s look at Trump’s and Clinton’s positions on undocumented immigration.

Trump wants to secure our southern border and, as he explained in late August, “strengthen and expand” the federal E-Verify system to assure employers vet their new hires for proof of legal U.S. presence. Clinton would continue the Obama policies which have lifted the threat of deportation from the great majority of undocumented immigrants and work, says her website, to “bring millions” of undocumented immigrants “into the formal economy.”

How would these competing approaches affect our low-income fellow citizens?

Over the past year, economist Edwin S. Rubenstein reported recently, “the foreign-born immigrant labor force grew five times faster than the native-born American labor force.” Many foreign-born U.S. workers — as many as 9 million, according to the Pew Research Center — are undocumented immigrants. And by any measure, they are taking jobs from low-income Americans.

Vernon M. Briggs Jr., professor emeritus at Cornell University, recently estimated that “57 percent of the adult illegal-immigrant population have not completed high school while an additional 24 percent have only a high-school diploma” — which puts those undocumented immigrants in direct competition for the kinds of jobs traditionally held by lower-skilled Americans. This harms, in particular, minorities, who comprise a disproportionate share of those Americans. One example: Last year, as per the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S.-born Hispanics who had not graduated from high school had an unemployment rate of 11.3 percent.

Consider as well black Americans — 8.4 percent of whom, the BLS reports, were unemployed in August (compared to 4.4 percent of the U.S. population overall). One reason: Undocumented immigrants take jobs in occupational fields that historically have employed large numbers of blacks.

In 2015, for instance, blacks (as per the BLS) comprised 8.1 percent of construction laborers, 14.5 percent of building-maintenance/groundskeeping workers, and 20.6 percent of nonrestaurant food servers. But vying with blacks for employment in those fields were undocumented immigrants — who, Pew has reported, recently have comprised 14 percent of workers in construction and extraction, 17 percent in building maintenance/groundskeeping, and 11 percent in food preparation and serving.

As noted above, however, there is electoral evidence that many Oregon Democrats understand the cause-and-effect relationship between undocumented-immigrant employment and U.S.-citizen unemployment. Via Measure 88 in 2014 — a year Democrats outnumbered Republicans statewide by almost 175,000 — Oregonians voted 2-to-1 to reject undocumented-immigrant driver cards. Many Democrats who opposed the cards, no doubt, premised their votes on the knowledge that legal driving privileges would have attracted more undocumented immigrants to our state and enabled them to reach their jobs more easily — which would have meant ever-fewer jobs for their low-income fellow Oregonians.

Economically vulnerable Americans, to whose interests the Democratic Party purports to be vitally committed, would be better served by the undocumented-immigration policies of Donald Trump than by those of Hillary Clinton. That knowledge should lead many Oregon Democrats, especially those who opposed driver cards, to support “The Donald” in November — and in doing so to help brighten the economic prospects of their poorer fellow citizens.

Richard F. LaMountain, a Cedar Mill resident, served as a chief sponsor of the 2014 referendum via which Oregon voters rejected undocumented-immigrant driver cards.