Legal immigration is such a long, expensive and extended process that it encourages immigrants to cross the border illegally. Fixing this process can curb drug and gun trafficking, MCT Campus
Immigration in America began with the wide-eyed British settlers who landed in Virginia centuries ago in their quests for a better life. Immediately after, the debate about who else should be allowed to come here began. As the immigration issue once again bubbles to the top of our social consciousness, it is clear to all that the status quo is broken. We need a new system, one that respects the humanity of immigrants and realizes they can make America strong, if we let them.
With the fierce partisan battles unfolding on Capitol Hill regarding the deficit and Libya, it would be easy to cast aside immigration reform for less hectic times. However, we are in the midst of the largest wave of immigration in almost a century. There are 39 million foreign-born citizens living in the U.S. — almost 10 million of them in California — and the influx shows few signs of slowing.
Today, we have a perverse system that incentivizes and encourages illegal immigration, while making the legal alternative virtually inaccessible. It works like an old dam, allowing legal immigration to trickle through while illegal immigration seeps through the countless cracks in the system. Without comprehensive reform, it is only a matter of time before the whole structure collapses.
For many impoverished immigrant families, applying for residency or citizenship can be prohibitively expensive. The process takes years and thousands of dollars in fees, paperwork and lawyers with immigrants left to rot in perennial bureaucratic limbo. But for a couple hundred dollars a “coyote” can smuggle them across the border and into the loving arms of countless corporations. These profit machines then use and abuse the underpaid workers who are unable to complain about their deplorable treatment.
Nine years ago, my family and I legally immigrated to San Diego from Mexico. Since then, we’ve endured a Kafkian bureaucratic immigration labyrinth that effectively punishes legal immigrants. We’ve spent thousands of dollars to be fingerprinted, photographed, analyzed and approved countless times. But we have yet to receive the actual green cards the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service claims are on the way.
Despite these painfully obvious flaws, immigration reform hasn’t been forthcoming because of a deep-seeded fear of new immigrants. The libertarian CATO Institute found that anti-immigration feelings haven’t changed appreciably since the early 1930s. Common fears are that immigrants take Americans’ jobs, decrease potential welfare and drag down the country’s government and economy. Yet the CATO Institute found unanimous agreement among the nation’s top economists about the positive effect of immigration.
Here is the undeniable truth at the heart of the immigration debate: Immigrants make America richer and stronger. Every year, immigration alone adds up to $10 billion dollars to the GDP. Were we to reduce immigration by one third, GDP would decline by $80 billion throughout the next 10 years. But if we allow immigrants to become legal citizens, able to fully participate in the nation’s economy, GDP would increase by $180 billion.
The reason immigrants have such a huge positive impact is simple. More people means more demand for homes, clothing, food, iPods and just about everything else. But this increased demand translates to increased profits. As for jobs: Immigrants don’t just come here to find jobs, they create new ones. Immigrants have a rate of entrepreneurship nearly twice as high as native whites or African Americans. Today, nearly 30 percent of all entrepreneurs in America are immigrants.
The facts are clear and irrefutable. We need to stop demonizing immigration. Instead, we should harness its power for economic growth. To start, we need to streamline the process for legal immigration for those already here and those on their way. We need a process that allows them to work, live and most importantly, pay taxes legally while they work toward U.S. citizenship. This option needs to be clear and affordable. Given a reasonable option to come into the country legally, virtually all immigrants will do so. Then, we need to strengthen the U.S. / Mexico border to stop the trafficking of drugs and weapons. This is an obvious step, rooted in a nation’s right to protect its borders. And by allowing innocent immigrants to cross legally, it will reduce illegal traffic and free law enforcement to focus on illegal trafficking.
Reforming immigration will be far from easy. But it is time we recognize the undeniable benefits immigrants bring, and grant them the rights and freedoms they’ve earned.
— Leonardo Castaneda is an economics and journalism freshman.
— The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.
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It is too bad that they do not teach about our immigration history in school any more. It is shocking uninformed people are as to our past experiences with unlimited immigration. Five times between 1850 and 1914 large waves of immigrants came to the USA. Each wave resulted in high unemployment and economic recession. Unemployment of 30% in California resulted in the ridiculous Chinese Exclusion Act. Even after Ellis Island was opened unemployment exceeded 50% in the states of Maine, Kansas, and Michigan thanks to excessive immigration. Unemployment reached 32% for unskilled labor in 1910 thanks again to uncontrolled immigration. By comparison unemployment peaked at only 25% in the Great Depression. We started to control immigration to make excessive immigration driven unemployment a thing of the past.
From the Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty in 1986 to 2007, the year before the current recession started, the American Economy averaged 1.66 million new jobs created annually, our Native Born workforce grew by an average half million workers annually, and we admitted an average of a million new legal immigrant workers per year. There were 8.2 million unemployed people in 1986. Thus the number of unemployed should have fallen to 4.8 million by 2007. Instead 11.8 million people were unemployed in 2007. In 2006 the Pew Center estimated 7.2 million Illegal Immigrants were working in the USA. Per Pew they took jobs in professions where the US Government said unemployment was highest for American Workers. So for each new Illegal Immigrant Worker entering the USA an American Worker joined the unemployment ranks. Uncontrolled immigration still causes problems today.
This author has it backwards. That immigration dictates job growth. If you examine job growth since Simpson-Mazzoli it has been independent of immigration rates. Our current immigration system has given preference to people with needed skills and unskilled labor is not one of them. Fully 50% of our immigration is based on family re-unification and most of the people who come to American this way fall into the unskilled labor category. The slow process in this area limits the inflow so as not to overwhelm this labor market.
The facts stated above that show that Illegal Immigrants, who are mostly entering the unskilled labor markets, have directly contributed to our current unemployment problems by short circuiting this process. And this is borne out by the USBLS Unemployment Data. Unemployment exceeds 20% in many professions where most Illegal Immigrants work, while unemployment is 4.3% in professions where few Illegal Immigrants work.
In fact, the economic analyses that this author quotes really prove that Legal Immigration works just fine matching workers to US Labor Market needs. While Illegal immigration hurts the US Worker by by-passing that control.
The claim that a larger population leads to a larger GDP and that a larger GDP leads to a wealthier country is pure fallacy. The USA is the third most populous country on earth. China and India are the first and second most populous countries on earth. Yet China has 40% of the GDP that the USA does while having four times the population. India has 10% of the GDP that the USA has yet they have four times the population. Canada has the same GDP as India with less than 3% of the population of India. Who is better off?
The real measure of the comparative economic state of a country is Average Per Capita GDP. Total GDP says little about the wealth of nations. So the premise that millions of unskilled workers added to the US Economy will make us better off is a false premise. If those workers drag down Average Per Capita GDP then the net result is that Americans become universally poorer. Thus not all immigration is a benefit.
If one wants to see this phenomenon in practice all one has to do is look to some of the big Central and South American cities. Over the years, these cities acquired economic development while the countryside remained poor. The result was the development of shantytowns on the outer fringes of these cities of incredibly poor people who migrated from the incredibly poor countryside in search of opportunity. Because economies can develop only so fast, these shanty towns plunged those cities into an ever growing gap between the Haves and the Have Not’s. Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like what is happening in the USA now as lower paying job wages stagnate due to an oversupply of Labor in that labor market due to illegal immigration while the higher paid people where no such oversupply of Labor exists continue to experience wage increases. Thus the growing gap in wages between higher and lower paid Americans.
Every economic analysis done by people trying to justify Illegal or Open Immigration as being good ignores this real world experience. By the selective use of statistics you can prove almost anything. The true test is what happens in real life. The claim that increasing population always makes for a better economy flies in the face of real world experience, and thus is just a fallacy.