Economic Impact
Immigrants are essential to the U.S. economy, filling roles from high-skilled tech sectors to agricultural labor and driving economic growth. They also contribute to the tax base and consumer spending. We champion reform that will maximize this effect and create a more diverse and competitive workforce.
How Remittances Can Help Haiti Recover and Strengthen the U.S. Economy
Each year, millions of immigrants in the U.S. send billions of dollars in remittances to friends and family members in their home countries. It is easy to mistakenly assume that this represents a huge loss for the U.S. and in this economy, why are we allowing billions of dollars to be sent abroad? Like all things immigration-related, however, the relationship between remittances and the U.S. economy is much more complex than meets the eye. While it’s true that remittances are an important source of income for immigrant-sending countries, remittances are also a huge boost to U.S. exports and the U.S. economy. Read More
New Study Confirms Positive Impact of Immigration on Wages of Native-Born Workers
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) yesterday released a new study, Immigration and Wages, which confirms what many other economists have found: “that immigration has a small but positive impact on the wages of native-born workers overall.” The report, by economist Heidi Shierholz, finds that the “effect of immigration from 1994 to 2007 was to raise the wages of U.S.-born workers, relative to foreign-born workers, by 0.4% (or $3.68 per week).” Even the small (and shrinking) number of “U.S.-born workers with less than a high school education saw a relative 0.3% increase in wages (or $1.58 per week)” as a result of immigration during this period. Read More
Dear Reps. Smith and Miller, Don’t Confuse Your Talking Points with Facts
Representatives Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Gary Miller (R-CA) would like the public to think that they have the same concerns as most Americans today, releasing a joint statement expressing anxiety over the 15 million Americans currently without work. On its face, their statement—“we must enforce our current immigration laws to ensure illegals do not take away jobs that rightfully belong to American and legal workers”— makes sense. In a vacuum, if our economy provided only a set number of jobs available for American workers, Messrs. Smith and Miller would be correct. However, this is just not the case. Read More
Immigration Reform to be Discussed in State of the Union Address
Yesterday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs confirmed that President Obama is likely to address immigration reform—an issue President Obama promised to tackle within his first term—in the State of the Union Address today: “Well, I think one of the things the President will — has talked about and… Read More
Got Faith? A Closer Look at the Religious Movement for Immigration Reform
Today, hundreds of Evangelical leaders from around the country will join hands to raise awareness for comprehensive immigration reform during a National Day of Prayer. Like many faith groups, Evangelicals are the most recent to sign onto the national religious effort to “act on the Biblical mandate of compassion and justice toward immigrants” and call for reform of our broken immigration system. Some restrictionist groups, however, continue to criticize the role of religion and faith in the immigration reform movement—some even using the Bible as a weapon to condemn immigrants as law-breakers and sinners. Read More
What Does Scott Brown’s Victory Mean for Immigration Reform?
The election of Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown in Massachusetts provides an interesting twist in 2010 electoral politics. While some may argue that this loss is essentially a referendum on the current Administration and its agenda, the less dramatic but more likely conclusion is that the results were more about the candidates themselves. Democratic candidate Martha Coakley’s well-documented gaffes in the media made for entertaining fodder during a news cycle dominated by depressing news from Haiti. Her loss, while bad news for the Democrats in Congress who prefer having a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, does not necessarily derail the President’s agenda. To make wholesale assumptions that Republican Senator-Elect Scott Brown is going to automatically derail all of the President’s upcoming initiatives is not only pre-mature but impossible to determine. Read More
The Bay State’s New Senator Gains Diverse Constituents
Massachusetts Senator-Elect Scott Brown will shortly step into the Senate seat held for nearly half a century by one of the most loyal champions of immigrants to ever sit in Congress. Because of that history, Bay Staters have come to expect that their Senators will understand the important contributions of… Read More
Fatal Flaws: Social Security Administration Shows Us How E-Verify Doesn’t Work
The E-Verify website claims that the process for verifying whether workers are authorized for employment in the United States is simple. The practices of the Social Security Administration (SSA), the agency that jointly administers E-Verify with the Department of Homeland Security, tell a different story. According to a report released this month by the SSA Inspector General, though required by law, the agency failed to use E-Verify on nearly 20 percent of their new hires. The report documenting SSA’s myriad mishaps is proof of what workers’ rights advocates have long believed: E-Verify is still not ready for widespread use. Read More
Granting Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to Unauthorized Haitians Now an Urgent Matter
Tuesday’s devastating earthquake in Haiti is the latest and deadliest tragedy to befall one of the world’s poorest countries. As the death toll mounts and the full measure of the destruction is taken in, the call for urgent humanitarian relief is already being answered by the United States. Presumably, those relief efforts will be supplemented by additional long-term foreign aid packages, much like the relief that followed a series of hurricanes and tropical storms in 2008. Whenever a disaster of this magnitude occurs, however, the immigration arm of the government also must respond. DHS has already announced that it is temporarily suspending the removal of Haitians scheduled to be returned to their country. Thousands more—some here as temporary visitors, others seeking asylum or currently in immigration proceedings, and many more here as undocumented immigrants—face an uncertain future. Read More
New Report Estimates Economic Benefit of Legalizing Unauthorized Immigrants in California
A new report from researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) provides further evidence that immigration reform which includes the creation of a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants already in the United States would yield tangible economic benefits. The report, The Economic Benefits of Immigrant Authorization in California, by Dr. Manuel Pastor and co-authors at USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII), estimates that “unauthorized Latino immigrants in California…missed out on approximately $2.2 billion in wages and salary income last year alone due solely to their legal status, and the state lost out on the multiplied impacts of that potential income and spending, suggesting a total potential gain of $3.25 billion annually from authorization.” Read More
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