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Immigration is a hot-button issue, but I feel that much of the anti-immigration sentiment is driven by emotion more than fact. In this Zeitguide piece, Brad Grossman breaks down the issue in a digestible way and provides real economic statistics to support his points. We need to base our positions on fact, not fear. Check it out!
-Shepard
The immigration debate, as they say, sheds more heat than light. Between Donald Trump’s border wall ideas, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the President’s overhaul of immigration rules, these recent months have been a slow burn. It heated up even more last night during the GOP debates.
And there’s still more to come. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on the legality of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). A decision is expected in June—just as the presidential election kicks into high gear.
Some background: DAPA would allow up to 5 million undocumented immigrants who are the parents of citizens or permanent residents to avoid deportation and earn work permits. Obama announced it more than a year ago, but 26 states filed a lawsuit that spurred an injunction. Their argument? The President had overreached the limits of his executive powers.
Much of the political immigration debate, however, boils down to how immigrants – both documented and not — affect the U.S. economy. So how about a little light on that matter?
The Pew Research Center estimated that in 2014, there were 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, a number that has been fairly stable for a decade. That represents about 3.5% of the U.S. population. Overall, 14.3% of the population was born outside the United States.
Those who would reduce all forms of immigration argue that immigrants flood the job market, depressing wages and competing for jobs with Americans. But a closer inspection of the numbers reveals immigration tends to have either a neutral or positive economic impact.
When it comes to highly-educated immigrants, the benefits are very clear: they increase productivity and create new businesses. More than two-fifths of tech start-ups had at least one foreign-born founder from 2006-2012, according to the Kaufman Foundation. Likewise, a report by the Partnership for a New American Economy found that immigrants started 28% of all new small businesses in 2011 — and new enterprises are the primary driver of job growth in America.
In a paper for the Manhattan Institute in 2014, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth noted that “immigration increases economic efficiency by supplying more labor to low- and high-skill markets.” Highly educated immigrants — often in technology and science — generally provide complementary skills to native-born workers, increasing productivity. Less-educated immigrants provide much of the nation’s low-skill labor, she wrote, which has kept prices down in industries such as agriculture, hospitality and construction — which benefits most Americans.
It is true that many labor economists have concluded undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S.-born adults without a high-school diploma – 25 million of them – by anywhere between 0.4% to 7.4%. For everyone else, however, even illegal immigration is an economic boon.
According to a series of research papers by Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California-Davis, productivity grew more and skilled workers earned more money in states that had higher numbers of undocumented workers.
The commonly held notion that illegal immigrants don’t pay any taxes is also generally misguided. The IRS estimates about 6 million undocumented immigrants file individual income tax returns each year. They also contribute about $15 billion a year to Social Security through payroll taxes, but draw only $1 billion because few are eligible for benefits. Of course, they also pay state and local sales taxes and, directly or indirectly, property tax too. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office summed this up when they concluded that “tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — exceed the cost of the services they use.”
Between the election and the coming Supreme Court ruling, the issue of immigration won’t be out of the spotlight much in 2016. But as the political arguments ensue, it’s good to remember that immigration policy isn’t just about the fate of immigrants, but all of us.
Keep learning,
Team ZEITGUIDE
