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.
Can Immigrants Give America’s Rust Belt a Tune-Up?
Immigrants have long been a driving economic force in America’s large thriving metropolitan areas—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Dallas—where immigrants’ economic output produces a large and growing share of the U.S. gross domestic product. But what about the once thriving industrial heartland of the United States known as the Rust Belt? In a roundtable discussion yesterday in Akron, Ohio, authors Richard Herman and Robert Smith discussed their new book which points out how “immigrants and the businesses they create” can “provide rundown neighborhoods with a powerful jolt of new investment and spinoff job opportunities” and how our broken immigration system is taking away at least one tool for economic recovery in the cities that need the most help. Read More
How Immigrants Can Help America Rise Again
With the U.S. unemployment rate still hovering around 10 percent, it’s only natural for people to worry whether America’s recent economic decline is reversible. In this month’s issue of Atlantic Monthly, correspondent James Fallow takes a step back to address just that—what he calls "the fear of American declinism." In his historical and economic analysis of America’s overall well-being, Fallow finds that while America’s governing system is old, broken and in desperate need of reform, Americans should find comfort in “America’s cycle of crisis and renewal.” We’ve been here before, Fallow says, and if we want to move forward, we need to maintain and nurture the driving economic forces that have lined the road to renewal in the past—a thriving university system, a culture of innovation and a receptiveness to immigrants. Read More
Report Provides Solutions to Broken Asylum Employment Authorization Clock
Asylum applicants and their attorneys have long struggled to better understand how the employment authorization asylum clock (“EAD asylum clock”) functions. The clock, which measures the number of days after an applicant files an asylum application before the applicant is eligible for work authorization, affects potentially more than 50,000 asylum applicants each year. While the law requires asylum applicants to wait 150 days after filing an application to apply for a work permit and in some instances, permits the government to extend this waiting period by "stopping the clock" for certain incidents caused by the applicant, some applicants often wait much longer than the legally permitted timeframe to receive a work permit, which can cause a host of problems. Read More
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
All gifts are matched dollar for dollar
No one should face the immigration system alone
