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.
An Anti-Immigrant Franchise Coming to a State Near You
Americans are frustrated by a lot of things these days and immigration is no exception. What specifically annoys people about immigration is different depending on their vantage point. Those who are caught up in the labyrinth of immigration processing and the complicated inner-workings of the immigration agency are frustrated. Those who can’t even get their foot in the agencies door because they have no way to legalize are stuck in limbo. Then there are those who may have no personal connection to immigration and have never dealt with the difficult process of legalization, but are concerned about the all too common stories about the havoc born from our broken immigration system. So it isn’t at all surprising that many Americans are looking high and low for solutions. Read More
Ending Birthright Citizenship Won’t Solve Our Immigration Problems
The people who brought you SB1070 in Arizona are now preparing to challenge one of the fundamental principles of the U.S. Constitution—birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship, or the principle of jus soli, means that any person born within the territory of the U.S is a citizen, regardless of the citizenship of one’s parents. This principle was established well before the U.S. Constitution, and was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. It was necessary to include the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment because the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 had denied citizenship to the children of slaves. Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment righted that injustice and became the foundation for civil rights law, equal protection, and due process in the United States. Read More
SB 1070 “Gets Tough” on Arizona’s Housing Market
With only six weeks until Arizona’s immigration enforcement law goes into effect, area housing analysts are already expecting the worst. According to the Arizona Republic, housing experts anticipate that SB 1070 will not only drive illegal immigrants out of the state, but legal residents and potential new homebuyers with them—“departures from a state where growth is the economic foundation.” The resulting exodus will likely spur more foreclosures and create more vacant homes and apartments, which as real-estate analysts point out, will scare off potential homebuyers who fear lower home values. With a budget deficit of $4.5 billion and an economy struggling to get back on its feet, a declining housing market is the last thing Arizonans need. Read More
Not In Competition: Immigrants and Native-Born Workers
High levels of unemployment have led some to propagate the myth that every immigrant added to the U.S. labor force amounts to a job lost by a native-born worker, or that every job loss for a native-born worker is evidence that there is need for one less immigrant worker. In fact, this has been the rationale behind any number of harsh legislative proposals targeting immigrants. These kinds of proposals may be appealing politically, but they reflect dangerously simplistic assumptions about labor-force dynamics. Moreover, such proposals distract from the far more important goal of creating economic policies that generate growth and create jobs for workers across the U.S. labor market. As data from the 2009 Current Population Survey illustrates, most immigrant and native-born workers are not competing with each other in today’s tight job markets. Read More
Trio of Republican Border Enforcement Amendments Fail
Three Republican amendments to the Supplemental Appropriations Act (H.R. 4899) failed this morning. The amendments, which included proposals to ramp up border security spending from Senators McCain (AZ), Kyl (AZ), and Cornyn (TX), failed to garner the necessary sixty votes needed for passage. The Supplemental Appropriations Act is a broader bill that funds the troop surge in Afghanistan as well as other national security measures. Read More
Divine Intervention: Why Evangelicals Matter in the Immigration Debate
In the latest faith-based immigration effort, a group of Evangelical leaders and hundreds of conservative grassroots advocates joined Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday to discuss the need for bipartisan support on an immigration bill. Today, a large group of Arizona faith leaders (Evangelicals, Christians, Catholics and members of the Jewish faith) planned to meet with Senator John McCain and the White House to urge immediate action on immigration reform and a repeal of Arizona’s enforcement law. This is not the first time the religious community has called for immigration reform, but the harsh Arizona law has led to greater urgency within the faith movement—especially among Evangelicals. Much like the rest of the country, religious leaders are pressing the federal government for a solution that goes beyond enforcement, arguing that family unity, legalization and integration issues must be resolved as well. Read More
Restrictionist Group Blames Immigrants for Teen Unemployment
In a new report, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) attempts to blame immigrants for the declining share of native-born teenagers in the United States who join the U.S. labor force during the summer months. However, in its rush to blame immigrants, CIS completely overlooks an even more important factor that has fueled declining labor-force participation rates among U.S. teenagers over the past decade and a half. As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes in a policy memo, a “startling omission” from the CIS report is the fact that school enrollment among teenagers “has dramatically increased, even in the summer. This increase more than makes up for the decline in teen employment.” In other words, many teenagers are staying out of the job market not because immigrants are out-competing them, but because they are getting an education. CIS should be applauding this fact given that education is critical to the eventual labor-market success of U.S. teenagers. Read More
‘Fox & Friends’ Trumpets Farcical Claim About Murders by Unauthorized Immigrants
The infotainment show Fox & Friends recently trumpeted the absurd and baseless claim that unauthorized immigrants kill 2,158 people in the United States each year. However, as Media Matters describes in detail, this random number is based on a 2005 article in the right-wing journal Human Events that uses a methodology no serious researcher could possibly endorse. The author of that article derived his “estimate” by assuming that unauthorized immigrants in the United States commit murders at exactly the same rates as the murder rates in their respective home countries. So unauthorized Mexicans are assumed to mimic the Mexican murder rate once they get here, unauthorized Salvadorans are assumed to mimic the Salvadoran murder rate, etc. As if this weren’t ludicrous enough, the author throws in an inflammatory and irrelevant comparison with the U.S. death toll in Iraq. In fact, empirical research over the past century has demonstrated repeatedly that immigrants to the United States, including the unauthorized, are far less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born. And no amount of grandstanding by Fox and Friends will change that simple fact. Read More
New Report Reveals Devastating Effects of Deportation on U.S. Citizen Children
Everyone’s heard stories about how deportation rips apart families—or they will if Arizona’s new law is enforced. Most people think of undocumented workers when they think about deportation, but legal immigrants are often deported too. Most of these immigrants—legal and undocumented—have families, and many of those families include U.S. citizen children. When their parents are deported, it is devastating for the children. A new report by the law schools at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, In the Child’s Best Interest, looks at the deportation of legal permanent residents (LPRs or green card holders) and the impact on their kids. Read More
Implementation Costs of SB 1070 to One Arizona County
Washington D.C. – Today, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer may sign into law a bill that has the potential to sink her state much deeper into the red than it already is. Touting a $10 million investment into local law enforcement from discretionary federal stimulus money the state received from… Read More
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