I recently finished reading Mark Levin’s new book, Plunder and Deceit: Big Government’s Exploitation of Young People and the Future, which provides great insight into current events, explaining what’s really going on behind the hype. One of his best insights is into the cry for more STEM degrees. Sounds good, right? Not so fast.

Proponents of more immigration argue that we need more immigration for STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering or math). However, according to Lindsay Lowell from the Economic Policy Institute, “for every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.” Meanwhile, major tech companies have been slashing tens of thousands of jobs and wages have remained flat since the late 1990s. Perhaps most jarring of all, although 5.7 million more immigrants are working in recent years, 127,000 fewer native-born citizens are, and “immigrants have accounted for 100 percent of employment growth.”

Even the libertarian Milton Friedman, who has favored open-ended immigration, stated, “[I]t is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare…” The Heritage Foundation found that illegal immigrant households “received $24,721 per household in government benefits and services in FY 2010.” At the same time, they paid only $10,334 in taxes. The Heritage Foundation estimates the “lifetime cost of these benefits to the United States Treasury at $1.3 trillion.”

There’s more just like this on all the issues you keep hearing about in the news. Levin provides the ammo to discuss them intelligently and refute the hype. Read the full book review at The Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research