A widely cited study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform claims that undocumented immigrants cost taxpayers $113 billion per year. Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh, author of the new CEI Web Memo, “A FAIR Criticism: A Critique of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s ‘The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers.’” finds that the study counts costs but ignores benefits, uses shoddy data, and is harmful to the ongoing immigration debate.
immigration
E-Verify is a program that checks the immigration status of new hires. The House is expected to vote on legislation that would make E-Verify mandatory nationwide. Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh thinks E-Verify should be scrapped altogether. Not only does it make it more expensive for companies to hire people, it misses over half of the undocumented immigrants it is supposed to identify.
President Obama made a speech on immigration reform this week. He is looking for a dance partner in Congress to ease restrictions on the immirgant-dependent high-tech sector. Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh points out that there are several bills already in Congress that would do just that, including the STAPLE Act and the DREAM Act.
You might’ve read about the unintended consequences of Georgia’s crackdown on undocumented workers. Well, the same thing is about to happen in Alabama. A few weeks after Governor Bentley’s signing of a bill that will attack undocumented workers, Hispanic immigrants are already fleeing the state. The Alabama law is one of the harshest in the recent spate of anti-worker and anti-business legislation. It criminalizes assisting undocumented workers and imposes harsh penalties on businesses employing them. Businesses will be forced to use the intrusive and wasteful E-Verify system, putting immigration enforcement costs on entrepreneurs. It makes all public officials into immigration agents too by requiring them to constantly enforce the law. More disturbingly, it allows for the arrest of individuals suspected of being in the country illegally, effectively making Alabamians guilty until proven innocent.
Practically, the law is just as stupid as Georgia’s. After tornadoes swept through the state, devastating large areas, including the city of Tuscaloosa, you’d think rebuilding would be a priority. But apparrently not if cheap, skilled, undocumented workers are doing the rebuilding. Contractors are predicting labor shortages, which will drive up the price of reconstruction. In a state that already suffers from tornadoes and hurricanes, making it more expensive to live in Alabama doesn’t sound like the brightest idea.
Who’d of thought it: cracking down on immigrant workers hurts the economy? Georgia’s learning the hard way as farms lose laborers and crops go unharvested. After its passing of strict anti-immigrant legislation in April, thousands of illegal workers have fled the state before the implementation of the law in July. This exodus of experienced farmhands meant 11,080 farm jobs left unfilled.
With a labor shortage to deal with, the government of the state of Georgia has a novel way of filling the vacancies: probationers. Atlanta also instituted a program to encourage those on probation to find work in the fields. Ex-cons, who find getting jobs difficult, aren’t exactly overjoyed at the opportunity, though. The grueling conditions and long hours of farm work discourage many new workers. Sometimes it only takes a few hours for them to quit.
Of course, the new workers cite wages as the reason for their high turnover rates, but you’ve got to wonder just how much would constitute “fair” pay. Whatever it is, it was high enough to make farmers turn to illegal workers in the first place. The lack of a stable workforce and skilled farmhands means less efficiency and less food. As food prices continue to rise, increasing the cost of labor on farms doesn’t sound like the smartest idea. The story’s too familiar though: politicians demagogue immigrants, then pass stupid bills, farmers complain, and almost everyone suffers.
My colleague Alex Nowrasteh has an op-ed in Investor’s Business Daily where he makes the case for liberalizing the H-1B visa for skilled immigrants.
An oft-neglected point he makes is that if companies can’t legally get the workers they want to come here, they’ll just go abroad to hire them. As with most anything else, prohibiting or limiting immigration comes with unintended, but not unforeseeable consequences.
Read the whole thing here.
Over at The American Spectator, my colleague Alex Nowrasteh and I make the case for expanding skilled immigration. Our main points:
- 1 in 8 Americans are foreign-born, but 1 in 4 American Nobel laureates since 1901 are foreign-born. Immigrants, it seems, are chronic overachievers. America would benefit by letting more in.
- The H-1B visa for skilled immigrants is capped at 85,000. In non-recession years, those 85,000 spots are typically filled in a single day.
- Genius-level intellects are missing out on the chance to flower at the world’s best universities. They’re also missing out on one of the world’s best entrepreneurial environments. And Americans are missing out on cutting-edge jobs in high-tech fields. Consumers lose out on products that are never invented.
- The number of Nobel-caliber intellects who have lost their opportunity to do research in this country is unknown. What is known is that the U.S. government has kept out millions of the most inventive, brilliant, and entrepreneurial people in the world for no good reason.
Read the whole piece here.
A U.S. Senate candidate in Alaska thinks that the U.S. should follow East Germany’s example when it comes to immigration. GOP nominee Joe Miller told a town hall audience, “The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. . . East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.”
He’s darn right “other things were involved.” See CEI’s video on the Berlin Wall for details. What a terrible choice of example.
Miller also forgets that East Germany’s 858 miles of fence weren’t meant to keep people out. That fence was meant to keep people in. Against their will. On pain of death.
It’s almost certain that Miller doesn’t really want the full-on East German border enforcement model. It was probably just a tasteless slip of the tongue. But he clearly favors a border fence. Which, of course, he should oppose if his goal is actually to reduce illegal immigration.
Many undocumented immigrants only stay in the U.S. for a few months. Get a job, make some money, go back home and share it with family. A border fence will keep a lot of people like that out, yes. But it also keeps current undocumented immigrants in. Unwillingly, in many cases.
If Miller wins his election, there is a lot he can do to reduce illegal immigration. Building an American version of the Berlin Wall is not one of them. As Alex Nowrasteh and I wrote, “The immigration black market only exists is because the government has made the legal market as cumbersome as it can.”
Miller should make legal immigration less cumbersome. People will come to America, no matter what. That’s what happens when you have one of the freest, richest, most dynamic nations on earth. That’s a fact of life that our broken immigration system does not take into account.
Neither, apparently, does Joe Miller.
Over at the Daily Caller, my CEI colleague Alex Nowrasteh makes the case for doing away with the cap on H1-B visas. The cap limits the number of highly skilled immigrants to 85,000 per year. In most years, all 85,000 spots are filled in a single day. Applications were down last year and this year because of the recession. But they’ll bounce back as soon as the economy does. At the very least, the cap should be substantially raised. It would be better if the cap were eliminated altogether.
The reason the cap exists is that some people think skilled immigrants take jobs away from Americans. Alex explains why that isn’t true:
There is no fixed number of jobs to be divided among Americans.
Foreign skilled workers don’t “take” American’s job; they complement them. Foreigners are not substitutes for U.S.-born workers even when they have similar skills and experience. In many situations, H-1B workers push Americans into managerial or other higher positions.
Many people also believe that skilled immigrants lower wages for native-born Americans. That isn’t true either:
If cash-strapped businesses could drastically cut wages by hiring more H1-B workers instead of native-born workers, then applications for H-1B visas would increase during recessions as businesses cut costs. The opposite is true. H-1B applications fall dramatically during recessions.
Firms that employ H-1B visa workers do so when they are expanding production and have trouble meeting their labor requirements domestically. Observing this effect, the National Foundation for American Policy reported in 2009 that for every H-1B position requested, U.S. technology firms increase their employment by five workers.
The government’s artificial limit on skilled immigration is prolonging the recession. The H1-B cap needs to be either raised or done away with entirely. American jobs depend on it.
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