While comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) remains stalled somewhere between the House, Senate, and the Administration, four noted experts were interviewed by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) about how immigration reform would affect the U.S. economy. These interviews were posted on CFR’s website yesterday. David Scott Fitzgerald, Associate Director for the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego; Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute; Mark Krikorian, Executive Director for the Center for Immigration Studies; and James Carafano, Director for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation offered opinions on immigration and the economy. While their opinions varied widely, there were notable areas of agreement: our system is in need of repair, and legalization would not be the great harm to our economy that restrictionists tout.

So how would mass legalization affect the U.S. economy overall?

According to Fitzgerald, the effect would be positive, as legalized immigrants would start paying federal income and payroll taxes. These taxes would offset any social welfare costs becoming available like unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Medicare. In the end, Fitzgerald hypothesizes that CIR would result in a “slight net fiscal benefit and slightly higher economic growth.” Meanwhile, economist Heidi Shierholz points out that while new immigrant workers would add to our labor supply, they would also be steady consumers of goods and services as well as create more jobs. Furthermore, Shierholz predicts that immigration actually boosts wages for native-born workers at all levels of education—including those without a high school diploma.

We might expect to hear the exact opposite from the other two participants. However, Krikorian, a long time immigration restrictionist opposed to any type of legalization, actually agreed that a legalization program would help make the economy bigger. Carafano, another restrictionist, states that legalization would “probably be a ‘wash’ on the U.S. economy,” but admits that “there might be some modest benefits gained in recouping some taxes, imposing some penalties, and avoiding the cost of detention and holding immigration hearings.” However, as expected, Krikorian and Carafano peddle back their legalization comments with the typical restrictionist qualification that the economic benefits of legalization would be wiped out by the costs of implementation and access to social services.

But wait a minute, if everyone agrees that legalization is good—or at least not bad—for the economy, why aren’t we all supporting legalization?

While many disagree on how to go about it, most advocates and policymakers on both sides of the spectrum agree that something needs to be done with our current broken immigration system. Even noted immigration restrictionists like Krikorian and Carafano struggle to deny that CIR will benefit our economy. Of course, immigrant advocates and restrictionists are going to continue to disagree on the solution to the immigration problem. But Congress and the Administration should take note of recent research and analysis on the economic benefits of immigration reform and use it to push forward with finding a solution.

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This week, the U.S. Census Bureau began distribution of the questionnaires for the 2010 Census. The results of the Census will form the basis for the apportionment of congressional districts and the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds, as well as serving to guide community-planning decisions across the country. However, Census 2010 has not been without its share of controversy. In October of last year, for instance, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) proposed an amendment to the Commerce, Justice and State appropriations legislation which would cut off financing for the 2010 Census unless the survey includes questions about immigration status. Additionally, some pro-immigrant activists have suggested that immigrants sit out the Census this year to protest the federal government’s failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform. Yet this would be self-defeating given the high economic and political stakes of an accurate count, and that fact that immigrants are already among those demographic groups who are typically under-counted in the Census.

Anyone living in an area that suffers from a large under-count of immigrants stands to lose out on political representation and federal funds. For instance, an undercount of Latino immigrants would impact anyone living in a state such as California, New York, or Illinois that has a large population of Latino immigrants—meaning that everyone in those states stands to lose political representation and access to economic and educational opportunities if immigrant residents aren’t fully counted in 2010.

According to a 2009 research report from the Census Bureau, roughly $435.7 billion in federal grant and direct assistance money “was allocated based on Census Bureau data”—including “annual population estimates, Decennial Census data, and other Census Bureau sources”—in Fiscal Year (FY) 2007. The 10 federal programs accounting for 83.4 percent of all funding “allocated annually using population and/or income statistics,” as of FY 2007, were:

• Medical Assistance Program {Medicaid} ($203.5 billion)
• Unemployment Insurance ($35.9 billion)
• Highway Planning and Construction ($34.2 billion)
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ($30.3 billion)
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($16.5 billion)
• Federal Pell Grant Program ($13.7 billion)
• Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies ($12.8 billion)
• Special Education Grants to States ($10.8 billion)
• National School Lunch Program ($7.8 billion)
• Head Start ($6.9 billion)

As the National Research Council notes in a 2009 study, “historically, a key issue has been, and remains, the differential net undercount of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, which has resulted in the repeated underrepresentation of areas in which those groups make up a large fraction of the residents. In particular, the differential net undercount of these groups has led to their receiving less than their share of federal funds and political representation.” In other words, because blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans tend to live in particular areas, everyone in those areas receives less political representation and federal funding if blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are under-counted.

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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.”

The proposed Start-up Visa Act of 2010 creates a two year visa (EB-6) for immigrant entrepreneurs who “can raise a minimum of $250,000 (with $100,000 of support from qualified venture capitalists or angel investors).” If, after two years, the immigrant entrepreneur creates five or more jobs and collects an addition $1 million in investment or revenue, he/she can obtain a green card.

This bipartisan legislation, as the Washington Post points out, is not a new concept. It’s a more accessible version of the existing EB-5 Immigrant Investor visa program which grants legal permanent residency to immigrants who can prove that their investment (of at least $500,000 to $1 million) in a U.S. business preserves or creates at least 10 U.S. jobs after two years. Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) proposed an earlier version of the Start-Up Visa Act (H.R. 4259) in the House back in 2009, but that bill was subsequently tucked into Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s immigration reform bill, CIR ASAP.

According to Sen. Lugar:

Our country should strive to attract to the United States the most talented and highly skilled entrepreneurs. We should channel the power of innovative thinkers from around the world and American investors towards creating jobs and encouraging economic growth and future prosperity.

Making the connection between immigration and job growth is not a difficult line to draw. According to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), immigrants have started 25 percent of U.S. public companies that were venture-backed—including Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and Intel. The NVCA also estimates that immigrant-founded venture-backed public companies currently employ 220,000 people in the United States and more than 400,000 people globally.

Just last week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before a Senate committee about how current immigration policy affects America’s bottom line:

I think our immigration policy which restricts severely the number of highly-trained skilled immigrants is a problem because bringing those kind of folks in helps our high-tech industries develop more competitively — become more competitive.

Needless to say, creating a new visa category to facilitate job growth is certainly one way to go about an economic stimulus—but lawmakers might also want to focus on fixing the immigration system we already have. Studies show that reforming our current immigration system to include a path to legalization for undocumented workers “would yield $1.5 trillion to the U.S. GDP over a ten year period, generate billions in additional tax revenue and consumer spending and support hundreds of thousands of jobs.” For a Congress so focused on fixing our economy and creating new jobs, those numbers are hard to ignore.

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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.

As a Washington Post article points out, the story of immigrant entrepreneurship is nothing new. Immigrants are behind many of the country’s largest corporations—Dow Chemical, DuPont, Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, Carnegie, Google, Yahoo, Intel, PayPal and YouTube—which provide thousands of jobs for working Americans. And while every small business owner in the Rust Belt may dream of being the next multi-millionaire, the day to day economic contributions of immigrants in these states are equally important.

Immigrants at all ends of the skill spectrum—high skilled, low skilled, entrepreneurs and laborers alike—pay taxes and generate consumer spending which in turn spurs American job growth. According to data from the Immigration Policy Center’s (IPC) state-wide studies:

In Wisconsin, migrant workers’ direct spending generates roughly $14.9 million per year in income to Wisconsin residents and business, and creates 417 jobs for Wisconsinites annually.

Immigrants are a large part of Illinois’ advancing job sectors, representing 27.7% of all net job creation in the “health diagnosing” sector from 2000 to 2005. In the Chicago metro area, consumer expenditures of undocumented immigrants generated more than 31,000 jobs in the local economy and added $5.45 billion annually to the gross regional product.

Immigrants in Indiana paid an estimated $2.3 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2007, according to a study by the Sagamore Institute.

Central Ohio is home to more than 45,000 Somali Americans—making it the second largest Somali population in the United States; second only to Minneapolis, MN. Somalis own more than 400 small businesses in Columbus, Ohio, which contribute revenue to the local economy.

Arab American employment accounted for $7.7 billion in total earnings in the four counties of the Detroit metropolitan area in southeast Michigan, generating an estimated $544 million in state tax. Arab American business and consumer spending supported an estimated 141,541 jobs in the four-county region in 2005.

You get the idea. Immigrants’ consumer spending, new businesses and tax revenue make up large portions of ailing state and local economies and are critically important to America’s economic recovery. Herman and Smith’s point is, given America’s long history of immigrant entrepreneurship, why make it harder for skilled immigrants to invest in the American economy on the state and local level? A working immigration system—one that encourages the creation of small businesses—benefits all Americans.

According to Newsweek:

Immigrants are good for our economy. The most skilled create jobs in technology and engineering, says Duke professor Vivek Wadhwa, who estimates that in 2005 immigrant-founded engineering and tech companies employed 450,000 people and generated $52 billion in sales.

Two highly respected Australian economists, Maureen Rimmer and Peter Dixon, studied the issue for the libertarian Cato Institute. “The net impact on U.S. households from tighter border enforcement is unambiguously negative,” they found, because even low-skilled immigrants expand the economic pie and create jobs farther up the ladder. Cato’s Dan Griswold says the study shows a $250 billion difference between the most and least restrictive immigration policies.

Clearly, our broken immigration system is not doing anyone any favors. We can’t build a strong robust economy on a system that doesn’t work. Smarter immigration policies, however, which harness immigrants’ raw economic and entrepreneurial power and integrate them into our society will not only speed the economic recovery process, but create jobs for Americans and help America—in both large and small cities—grow in the long term.

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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.

In How American Can Rise Again, Fallow addresses the most current wave of declinists—in particular, those who fear that America’s economy is falling behind other nations’. “Will the rise of other economies mean the decline of opportunities within America? What happens when China or India have all the jobs and all the money?” America’s economic advantage may have more to do with immigration than you’d think.

According to Fallow, a prospering China means a larger world economy and a larger world economy means a greater opportunity for America to step up and flex one its biggest muscles: its ability to attract the world’s best and brightest. How does this translate into an economic advantage? America’s economic and cultural advantage over competing nations is dependent on innovation, a thriving education system and a working immigration policy—which if fostered correctly, will allow American businesses to compete and win on the international stage—keeping America’s economic engine ahead of the curve.

Fallow writes:

The American advantage here is broad and atmospheric, but it also depends on two specific policies that, in my view, are the absolute pillars of American strength: continued openness to immigration, and a continued concentration on universities that people around the world want to attend… As the only truly universal nation, the United States continually refreshes its connections with the rest of the world—through languages, family, education, business—in a way that no other nation does, or will.

Immigrants have consistently played a role in America’s economic vitality and the growth of small and large businesses. Consider these facts:

• Immigrants have had a disproportionate role in innovation and technology—founding such companies as Yahoo, eBay and Google.

• Half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from 25% a decade ago.

• A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation found that immigrants are 50% likelier to start businesses than natives.

• Immigrant-founded technology firms employ 450,000 workers in the U.S. And according to the National Venture Capital Association, immigrants have started one quarter of all U.S. venture-backed firms.

• Last year, three Nobel Prize winners were naturalized U.S. citizens.

While it’s easy for critics of immigration to shift the blame for our country’s job loss or our economic woes on immigrants—despite evidence to the contrary—they might do well to consider the role immigrants have played, and will continue to play, in America’s continued economic growth. America’s advantage is our open economy—and the opportunity to succeed exists for anyone with the ambition and drive to do so. And, as Fallow points out, it’s ours to lose.

Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, says it best:

Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.

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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.

According to a report published today by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC), Many Happy Returns: Remittances and their Impact by Kristin Johnson, Ph.D., remittances perform several important functions:

• Remittances are critical resources for the poorest people in developing countries. Remittances increase the financial resources available to the poor and allow them to consume goods, such as food and clothing. When the poor are able to buy things, they expand the demand for goods and services and boost U.S. exports.

• Remittances help wealthier families in sending countries as well. While they might not need remittances to buy basic household goods, thanks to the remittances received, families can invest more in their own human capital and productivity. They can become better educated and trained, and can buy additional technology and equipment for their businesses, much of which is purchased from the U.S. This means that middle class families can also buy more goods, increasing the pool of people who can buy U.S. exports.

• When people in sending countries buy more, they’re often buying exports from the U.S. Remittances facilitate demand for U.S. exports and make U.S. goods more competitive. The U.S. states with large foreign born populations tend to increase exports to the home countries of the immigrant population. The 15 states with the highest foreign-born populations account for over half of all U.S. exports. In 2008, 23% of exports from California went to Mexico and China – the two countries that demonstrate the largest foreign born populations in that state. In other words, immigrants in the states help to boost the states’ exports.

• Remittances help build the financial infrastructure of a country. Remittances are increasingly made electronically, through U.S. and U.S. banking and financial business partners. Financial services and money transfer companies in the United States have enjoyed significant expansion, new partnerships, and significant increases in foreign transfer income through remittances. Building and stabilizing the financial infrastructure in sending countries benefits the U.S. by building markets for exports.

All of this comes into particular focus when considering Haiti, which will benefit from the remittance as it recovers from a devastating earthquake. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and it has received over a billion dollars in remittances in the last year. Remittances may account for up to 30% of Haiti’s national income. The majority of people who receive remittances are very poor, and the money they receive from immigrants abroad is, in some cases, the only income they have. In the short term, remittances, along with foreign aid and donations, will be vital to Haitians’ survival. In the medium-term, remittances will play a critical role in the rebuilding of the country’s physical and financial infrastructure.

Those same remittances will also have a net benefit for the U.S. Between 1990 and 2009, 50-60% of Haiti’s imports came from the U.S. The bulk of these imports are comprised of food products and household goods, with the largest dollar amounts realized in rice, wheat and meat products—48% of the food consumed in Haiti is imported. The remittances sent to Haiti mean that Haitians are able to get the most basic supplies like food and other goods, and that means more exports from the U.S.

It is simplistic to argue that remittances are bad because money is leaving the U.S., but upon further analysis, it becomes clear that remittances return to the U.S. in the form of increased exports. Remittances give individuals in foreign countries the ability to buy U.S. goods and the ability to invest in themselves which, in turn, allows them to buy even more U.S. goods.

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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.

Although these are relatively modest increases, they are a far cry from the dire claims of economists such as George Borjas that immigration significantly reduces wages for native-born workers. In fact, as the report explains, economists like Borjas base their analyses on faulty assumptions about how readily foreign-born and native-born workers can be “substituted” for one another in the labor market. Moreover, Borjas-style analyses are rooted in the incorrect assumption that because immigration increases the size of the U.S. labor force, and therefore increases the number of workers competing with each other for jobs, that it necessarily drives down wages. However, the EPI report clearly explains that this is not how the U.S. economy works in the real world:

An important thing to keep in mind is that the labor force is growing all the time. All else equal, more people, including more foreigners, do not mean lower wages or higher unemployment. If they did, every time a baby was born or a new graduate entered the labor force, they would hurt existing workers. But new workers do not just have supply-side impacts, they also affect demand. Those new graduates buy food and cars and pay rent. In other words, while new workers add to the supply of labor, they also consume goods and services, creating more jobs. An economy with more people does not mean lower wages and higher unemployment, it is simply a bigger economy. Just because New York is bigger than Los Angeles does not in and of itself mean workers in New York are worse off than workers in Los Angeles.

The EPI report builds on the work of economists such as Giovanni Peri who take a more nuanced, and realistic, view than Borjas does of how foreign-born and native-born workers “complement” each other in the labor market through the differing skills and abilities they bring with them to the workplace. When one fully accounts for the many differences between foreign-born and native-born workers in terms of education, occupational experience, and English-language ability, it becomes clear that they cannot simply be swapped for one another like batteries. In other words, immigrants tend to fill particular niches in the U.S. labor market and therefore are not competing with most natives for the same jobs. In fact, the presence of specialized immigrant workers in the labor force tends to increase the productivity, and therefore the wages, of their native-born counterparts.

As the EPI report makes clear, the plight of low-wage native-born workers can not be blamed on immigrants: “Declining job quality for the least-educated American workers is due to a host of factors aside from immigration, including declining unionization rates, the eroding real value of the minimum wage, and trade practices that expose U.S. workers with low levels of education to competition from much lower wage workers around the globe.” In short, scapegoating immigrants for the nation’s economic woes will do nothing to help American workers.

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The Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget request for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano unveiled yesterday, exemplifies the enforcement mentality which pervades the federal government’s approach to immigration. The two immigration-enforcement components of DHS—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—consume 30% of the department’s total budget, while the immigration-services component, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is allotted a mere 5%. However, the budget request does throw a few much-needed crumbs to programs such as Asylum and Refugee Services and Immigrant Integration and Citizenship.

The DHS budget request for FY 2011 totals $56.3 billion—an increase of 1.7% over the department’s enacted FY 2010 budget. The funding requests for the three immigration-related components of DHS break down as follows:

• CBP: $11.2 billion (a decrease of 2% from the enacted FY 2010 budget).

• ICE: $5.8 billion (an increase of 2%).

• USCIS: $2.8 billion (an increase of 2%).

The budget request for the E-Verify electronic employment-verification system ($103.4 million), which is housed within USCIS, represents a decline from FY 2010 ($137 million). But the number of positions devoted to the program would increase to 338 (from 298 this year).

Despite the emphasis on immigration enforcement, the DHS budget request also includes two notable increases for services within USCIS:

• Asylum and Refugee Services/Military Naturalizations: $207 million (up from $55 million in the enacted FY 2010 budget) and 744 positions.

• Immigrant Integration and Citizenship: $18 million and 23 positions (up from $11 million and only 3 positions in FY 2010).

Unfortunately, in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, the DHS budget continues to throw billions of dollars into enforcement-only measures which for decades have proven unsuccessful at dealing with unauthorized immigration, and which do nothing to help the millions of would-be immigrants trapped in visa backlogs. Until U.S. immigration laws are overhauled, DHS will continue its fanciful (and expensive) quest to enforce a broken immigration system.

Photo by Adam Norwood.

In last night’s State of the Union Address, President Obama’s comments on immigration were simple, ‘we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system—to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.’ It was neither detailed nor overly passionate, but signaled that immigration reform was still a priority for his administration under a broader push for greater civil rights.

However, President Obama’s minimalist approach to the issue has set off tensions on both sides of the issue. One particularly anti-immigrant crusader characterized the President’s comments on immigration as some sort of “code,” noting that ‘he (Obama) seemed to be trying to signal to the supporters of “amnesty” and comprehensive immigration reform that he was still behind them, but in words that the voters watching on TV wouldn’t understand.’ On the other hand some pro-immigrant groups have begun writing the obituary for immigration reform after last night, feeling the President just didn’t say enough.

Perhaps the President could have said more. He could have called for immigration reform as a component of rebuilding our economy and laid out the case for reform more systematically—making clear all the work going on behind the scenes at the White House and Department of Homeland Security to make immigration reform happen. But it’s important to remember a couple of things.

First, the mere mention (or lack of one) of an issue in the State of the Union cannot be underestimated. The Washington Times writes about what a SOTU mention can mean to public policy issues:

“A State of the Union address can launch major reforms, focus the nation’s attention or spark international tensions. But for many groups looking to advance their agenda, just earning a mention by the president is the Holy Grail. “It can have a very significant impact,” said Bob Dinneen, chief executive officer of the Renewable Fuels Association. Mr. Dinneen cited President George W. Bush’s address in 2006 as a case in point. In the speech, Mr. Bush talked about the need to stop the nation’s “addiction” to foreign oil and to embrace ethanol and other renewable fuel sources. “It really teed up a discussion about energy policy and led to the passage of the energy bill in 2007 that resulted in the renewable-fuel standard in this country,” Mr. Dinneen said. “So it was an important catalyst.”

Second, early this afternoon the Senate leadership discussed the ongoing work happening on immigration reform, with no signs of retreat. Congressional Quarterly (CQ) reported on the press conference today:

Senate Democratic leaders say they intend to press ahead with an immigration overhaul bill despite waning enthusiasm for the measure among many in their caucus. “It is something we’re committed to do,” Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters on Thursday. “And we’ll do it as soon as we can.” Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, who is leading the effort to draft a bill, said, “We are making good progress.”

It’s a well-known fact that the road to reform is uphill—that success demands resilience, commitment and dogged determination with no room for drama or distraction. Anyone in the fight for immigration reform knows that reform can’t come fast enough; that lives and futures are at stake. But determining the future of immigration reform on a “word count” in the State of the Union address is bad strategy. Instead, immigration advocates should keep Presidential promises in perspective, redouble their efforts and continue to hold Congress’s feet to the fire. As the President said last night, he can’t do it alone.

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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.

The notion that unemployed natives could simply be “swapped” for employed unauthorized immigrants is not valid economically. In reality, native workers and immigrants workers are not easily interchangeable. It is unrealistic to expect unemployed native workers to travel across the country or take jobs for which they are overqualified. Worse, removing millions of workers (at an enormous cost) from our economy would further reduce tax revenues and consumer spending, resulting in even more job loss.

In short, a better way to create jobs for Americans would be to legalize many of the unauthorized through comprehensive immigration reform, which would allow them to pay even more taxes and spend even more to stimulate our economy. These contributions would provide more jobs for American workers. The facts, not the talking points, show that immigrants who legalize improve their education, improve their wages, move out of poverty, buy homes, and become invested in their communities.

Particularly troubling is Miller’s statement about his home state: “At home in California, almost weekly I hear from my constituents that illegal immigration is exacerbating the unemployment crisis.” Yet, as the Immigration Policy Center, the University of Southern California and more recently, the California Immigration Policy Center have reported, immigrants are vital to California’s flailing economy and without them, California’s dire budget situation might even worsen. California’s immigrants comprise more than a third of California’s labor force, and pay more Social Security taxes on average than U.S. born households. If all unauthorized immigrants were removed from California, the state would lose $164.2 billion in expenditures, 72.9 billion in economic output, and approximately 717,000 jobs.

Everyone is looking for someone to blame for today’s economy, but we would do well not to blame those may be able to help us out of the crisis.

Photo by ryanjreilly.