Economics
Immigrants Boost Economic Vitality through the Housing Market
Abundant research shows that immigration is a net benefit to the United States’ economy. It leads to higher wages, business formation, job creation, and greater innovation – nationally and locally. Foreign workers who immigrate to the U.S. help alleviate labor force gaps left by a workforce increasingly nearing and entering retirement age. Furthermore, immigrants help fulfill growing healthcare needs of an aging population. In addition to these positive benefits of immigration, the favorable effect immigrant home-buyers have on the housing market is another important economic impact. Indeed, new research from the Americas Society/Council of the Americas and the Partnership for a New American Economy describes how the 40 million immigrants residing in the United States added $3.7 trillion to housing wealth in the U.S. The research, prepared by Jacob Vigdor at Duke University, uses county-level data on population and housing from the U.S. Census Bureau and American Community Survey from 1970 to 2010. The results show that immigration led to a boost in home values, particularly in neighborhoods hit hardest by the U.S. housing bust. Read More
Immigrants and Their Children Fill Gaps Left by Aging American Workforce
Over the next two decades, as the baby boom generation continues entering retirement, we will experience the largest exodus from the workforce by any generational cohort in American history. This wave of retirees will create a labor force deficit among the millions of jobs baby boomers depart from on top of new job growth industries create. Amid this great demographic shift, immigrants and their children are poised to play a critical role in filling workforce gaps left by massive baby boom generation retirements over the next twenty years, as a new forward-looking report from the Center for American Progress describes. Read More
CBO Gives High Marks to Senate Immigration Bill
Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its much-anticipated “scoring,” or cost estimate, of the Senate immigration bill. Overall, the numbers are good. Very good. The CBO projects 20 years ahead and predicts fiscal savings in the amount of roughly $1 trillion. In addition, the CBO explained in a separate report that the bill would have a host of economic benefits that are not captured in a strictly fiscal analysis, such as GDP growth, increased productivity, and long-term wage increases. Read More
Busting the Myth of the “Job Stealing” Immigrant
Some critics of the immigration bill now winding its way through the Senate claim that it would increase unemployment among native-born workers—especially minorities—by adding more immigrants to an already tight job market. In fact, both the legalization and “future flow” provisions of the bill would empower immigrant workers to spend more, invest more, and pay more in taxes—all of which would create new jobs. Contrary to the simplistic arithmetic of immigration restrictionists, employment is not a “zero sum” game in which workers compete for some fixed number of jobs. All workers are also consumers, taxpayers, and—in many cases—entrepreneurs who engage in job-creating economic activity every day. Read More
Immigrant Entrepreneurs Grow Industries and Create Jobs
As you might suspect, immigrant entrepreneurs are key drivers in the transportation, food and building services industries. And a recent report from the Immigrant Learning Center (ILC) shines a spotlight on immigrant entrepreneurship in these industries, with a particular geographic focus on Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Concerning the three industry areas, the ILC study – through an analysis of public data and interviews with immigrant business owners and industry representatives – finds the following: Read More
Three Ways Immigration Reform Would Make the Economy More Productive
By David Dyssegaard Kallick, Director of the Fiscal Policy Institute’s Immigration Research Initiative. A report just released by the Fiscal Policy Institute, Three Ways Immigration Reform Would Make the Economy More Productive shows that legalization of undocumented immigrants, done right, would do three things to increase economic productivity in the United States. Read More
How the Immigration Reform Bill Could Help Undocumented Farmworkers and Growers
Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants could become eligible for legal status under S. 744, the immigration reform bill the Senate is considering, including millions of undocumented farmworkers. The importance of finding a way to create a legal workforce within the agriculture industry is critical, as undocumented farmworkers make up an estimated 53 percent of agriculture workers. Read More
Medicare’s Health and Well-Being Depends on Immigrants
Immigrants’ access to affordable health care is one of the most contested issues in the current immigration reform debate. Most advocates of comprehensive immigration reform point to the need to ensure that aspiring citizens have opportunities to access appropriate health care since such access will impact their ability to learn, to work, and to contribute to their communities. On the other end of the spectrum, anti-immigration groups tend to inaccurately emphasize that newly legalized immigrants would represent an excessive fiscal burden. This prediction is based on a misleading characterization of immigrants as “takers”—in other words, as disproportionate consumers of public resources. Several studies have shown that this is just not the case. In fact, non-citizens use public benefit programs at a lower rate than similar low-income native-born citizens. With regard to medical expenditures in particular, immigrants tend to use less health care than their U.S.-born counterparts. Read More
Experts from Left and Right Agree on Economic Power of Immigration Reform
In recent years, study after study has demonstrated a simple yet economically powerful truth about broad-based immigration reform: workers with legal status earn more than workers who are unauthorized—and these extra earnings generate more tax revenue, as well as more consumer spending, which creates more jobs. As a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) points out, this fact implies that states with appreciable unauthorized populations stand to gain economically from immigration reform that includes a legalization program for the unauthorized. Moreover, a new open letter to Congressional leaders released by the conservative American Action Forum illustrates that it is not only liberal advocacy groups like CAP which recognize the economic potential of immigration reform. Read More
The W Visa: Why the Economy Benefits from A Robust New Worker Program
The Senate Judiciary Committee returns to its task of marking up S. 744 tomorrow, taking up, among other things, possible amendments to the W visa program for new nonimmigrant workers. This new program, blessed by both business and labor, is an effort to acknowledge the need for a more flexible system for meeting the demand for workers in certain occupations and industries that require less-skilled workers. At Tuesday’s hearing, several Senators challenged the idea that the American workforce needed to be supplemented with immigrant labor, but the evidence is overwhelming that there is both a need and an economic benefit to having a flexible and responsive program in place to bring in new workers where they are most needed. Read More
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