Although anti-immigrant campaign platforms might help win a primary in a state like Arizona, supporters of harsh immigrant enforcement measures must still address the resulting economic fall out. Last week, the Arizona Governor’s Task Force on Tourism and Economic Vitality hired HMA Public Relations, a Phoenix-based marketing communications and public relations firm, to the tune of $100,000 to “develop a series of needs and goals for Arizona tourism in light of the controversy created by SB 1070”—and, boy, do they have their work cut out for them. Similarly, cities like Fremont, Nebraska—where an anti-immigrant ordinance passed in June—are also being forced to run damage control. Fremont’s City Council is currently considering a property tax increase proposal to help shoulder the projected legal fees resulting from the city’s restrictive immigration ordinance.
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A new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Council on International Personnel (ACIP) highlights the enormous contributions that highly skilled immigrants make to the U.S. economy. The report, entitled Regaining America’s Competitive Advantage: Making Our Immigration System Work, rebuts the simplistic claims of immigration restrictionists that foreign-born professionals who come to the United States on temporary employment visas (such as H-1Bs) are somehow “stealing” jobs from native-born workers. As the report notes, the restrictionists overlook the myriad ways in which highly skilled immigrants fuel U.S. economic growth and create U.S. jobs through their innovation and entrepreneurship.
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Earlier today, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka discussed the complicated intersection of labor, immigration, and the United States economy. “The immigration system has always been important to the labor movement,” said Trumka. Both Secretary Solis and Trumka advocated for comprehensive immigration reform (CIR)—acknowledging the obvious economic benefits to all U.S. workers—and lamented the fact that Republicans have been unwilling thus far to come to the negotiating table on the issue. The lack of Republican cooperation is surprising, considering a CIR bill would be beneficial to U.S. workers and businesses, and was part of the impetus for Solis and Trumka to come together for the webinar.
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While comprehensive immigration reform looks to be stalled until the lame duck session or the beginning of the 112th Congress, chief executives of several major corporations and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg are joining together to form a coalition, “Partnership for a New American Economy,” advocating for immigration reform. Bloomberg stated the group’s intent, saying that “somebody has to lead and explain to the country why [immigration reform] is in our interests.” Although some may question the coalition’s intentions—Fox & Friends is busy trying to distort the coalition’s message as “borders first”—the group of mayors and successful CEOs may actually just want to make the economic case that “if America wants to remain economically competitive,” it needs to have policies in place that allow the world’s best and brightest to succeed and thrive here.
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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.
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With the passage of the $15 billion jobs bill in the Senate last week, job creation is certainly at the top of the Congressional priority list. As a way to further stimulate the economy, Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), introduced the Start-Up Visa Act of 2010 last week which incentivizes job creation through the promise of legal residence status—that is, “drives job creation and increases America’s global competiveness by helping immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to the United States.”
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Another independent evaluation of the E-Verify program once again confirms what advocates have been saying for years—E-Verify doesn’t work. A new evaluation of the federal employment authorization program—conducted by Westat, a research company, in December 2009—is now available on the E-Verify website. The system only detected unauthorized workers about half of the time. The evaluation found the program couldn’t confirm whether the documents workers were presenting were their own. As a result, “many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify,” according to Westat. The “inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers” is about 54%.
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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.
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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.
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