“The question I never hear answers by the pro-immigration side is: do we need more people in this country? A related question is, with the decline in manufacturing jobs: do we need more low-skilled workers in this country?”
Nice fake questions, @droppedit . Your subsequent posts make clear you know perfectly well the standard answer to the first question. Yes, we do need more people in this country. Our native population is aging and not replacing itself (and the situation would probably be worse if you factored out some relatively fringe native groups with high growth rates, like ultra-orthodox Jews). Without immigration, our demographic situation would be as bleak as Japan’s. If you want to see what rural decline could look like, look there. It is a wealthy country with crowded cities, but there are many places where houses and land literally have no value, and the population is not sufficient to sustain basic social infrastructure (schools, police, roads) without massive subsidies. Thanks to immigration, our social security system and Medicare probably won’t collapse. Thanks to immigration, we will continue to have a strong military. Thanks to immigration, at least some parts of rural America will thrive.
As to whether we need more low-skilled workers, I don’t think anyone argues that we should be rejecting high-skilled people in favor of low-skilled people. But there are still industries – a great deal of agriculture in those rural places, for example – which have a tremendous need for low-skilled, low-wage labor that has never been met by the native population, even during the Depression when some portion of the low-skilled native population became highly mobile. I’m sure that low-skilled immigrant labor, especially illegal immigrant labor, makes it harder for low-skilled natives to earn a living in areas where they actually compete, but it sure looks like, over any reasonably medium- and long-term period, the additional productivity represented by immigrants, even low-skilled ones, expands the economy and creates more opportunity, not less.
Also, over time, low-skilled workers turn into high-skilled workers. One of my great-grandparents came here as a 15-year-old with at best a 7th-grade education that included no math besides arithmetic. He died a wealthy businessman. His six children got bachelor’s degrees from Harvard and three of the Seven Sisters; one of them (also a Harvard PhD) was a Federal Reserve Board governor, another a respected doctor.
And maintaining an immigration system under which lots of low-skilled immigrants are illegal plays a huge part in suppressing wages for low-skilled workers, since illegal workers can’t effectively claim legal protections like minimum wage or overtime pay, not to mention joining unions. Illegal immigrants effectively pay kickbacks to employers to hire them, something native workers generally don’t do. The culprit there is not the immigrants; it’s the cumbersome legal immigration system that effectively creates supernormal profit opportunities for employers willing to take risks. (Much as alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition, and gambling prohibitions fund organized crime.
When my great-grandparents came here, they were not welcomed with open arms. They were not in a favored group, and they did not have valuable skills. But they didn’t face anything like the oppressive, exhausting, irrational immigration system we have now.