Applying our The first and most politically unlikely scenario—but one that is nonetheless useful for comparison purposes—assumes that legal status and citizenship are both conferred on the undocumented in The second scenario assumes that the unauthorized are provided legal status in and citizenship five years thereafter. The third scenario assumes that the unauthorized are granted legal status starting in but that they are not given a road map to citizenship.
Under the first scenario—both legal status and citizenship in —U. Unauthorized immigrants would also be better off. Within five years they would be earning Over the 10 years, this immigration reform would create an average of , jobs per year.
Given the delay in acquiring citizenship relative to the first scenario, it would take 10 years instead of five years for the incomes of the unauthorized to increase Finally, under the third scenario—legal status only starting in —the cumulative gain in U.
The positive economic impacts on the nation and on undocumented immigrants of granting them legal status and a road map to citizenship are likely to be very large. The nation as a whole would benefit from a sizable increase in GDP and income and a modest increase in jobs. The earnings of unauthorized immigrants would rise significantly, and the taxes they would pay would increase dramatically. Given that the full benefits would phase in over a number of years, the sooner we grant legal status and provide a road map to citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, the sooner Americans will be able to reap these benefits.
It is also clear that legalization and a road map to citizenship bestow greater gains on the American people and the U. Robert G. Lynch is the Everett E. Nuttle professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Washington College. His areas of specialization include public policy, public finance, international economics, economic development, and comparative economics. He is the author of several papers and books that have analyzed the effectiveness of government economic policies in promoting economic development and creating jobs.
His research focuses on the economics of immigration policy, labor migration, and the intersection of immigration and employment laws. Patrick received the award for best dissertation in the field of migration studies in and his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Journal, and The Hill. This study was made possible by the generous support of the JBP Foundation.
The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the JBP Foundation. Pastor and Scoggins found in their study that naturalized citizens in earned 11 percent more than legal noncitizens after controlling for factors other than citizenship that may be responsible for their income differences.
Pastor and Scoggins wanted to measure the effect of citizenship on legal noncitizen immigrants only and attempted to control for the influence of unauthorized immigrants by using several controls.
This is important to note because the earnings increases from citizenship for unauthorized immigrants may be higher than they are for legal noncitizen immigrants since the undocumented receive two distinct sets of benefits—the benefits of legal status and the benefits of citizenship—whereas legal immigrants gain only the benefits of citizenship.
In fact, a U. Department of Labor study suggests that the earnings gains for unauthorized immigrants from legalization alone may outstrip the earnings gains from citizenship for already-legal immigrants.
Given that the income effect that Pastor and Scoggins estimated did not attempt to measure the income effect of citizenship on all noncitizens—as well as the probability that, if used as a proxy for such an effect, their income effect would probably understate the income effect of citizenship on all noncitizen immigrants—their estimate should not be compared directly to ours.
Unlike Pastor and Scoggins, we sought to measure the citizenship effect on all noncitizen immigrants. Hence, her estimate can be compared to ours. Using data from to , Shierholz found that naturalized citizens had family incomes that were about 15 percent higher than the family incomes of all noncitizen immigrants once factors aside from citizenship were taken into account.
In his study, Akbari, found a wage effect of citizenship for legal immigrants from developing countries—who represent the large majority of U. Akbari explicitly attempted to control for the biasing effect of the presence of unauthorized immigrants in the dataset he used by excluding Mexican immigrants because a large number of them are unauthorized.
In a longitudinal study, Bratsberg, Ragan, and Nasir followed a sample of young male legal immigrants from through and found that citizenship was associated with a wage gain of around 5. They measured the impact of citizenship on legal immigrants only, and their results therefore probably also understate the citizenship effect on all noncitizen immigrants. This much older cross-sectional study done in using Census data found that citizenship had a 15 percent effect on the earnings of foreign-born white men.
But the effect of citizenship fell to 7 percent and lost statistical significance once he controlled for the duration of residence in the United States. Given that white men constitute less than 8 percent of noncitizen immigrants today, however, it is not clear how relevant this study is to the present circumstances.
In a analysis using Census data on foreign-born men of all races, Chiswick and co-author Paul Miller reported a significant income effect of about 4 percent. These latter three studies probably understate the benefit of citizenship because they exclude women, for whom the citizenship effect was found to be larger than for men in both the Shierholz study—17 percent for women versus 12 percent for men—and Pastor and Scoggins study—13 percent for women and 9 percent for men— It was also larger in our estimates.
Nicole Prchal Svajlenka. In each of the three scenarios we have almost certainly understated the amount of additional taxes that will be paid by undocumented immigrant workers because the tax estimates include only taxes from the increased earnings of the previously undocumented.
While it has been widely documented that unauthorized workers are contributing billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes each year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that between 30 percent and 50 percent of the undocumented population fails to declare their income. To the extent that some of these immigrants—who are working in the underground economy—are not reporting their incomes for fear of being discovered and deported, however, legal status and citizenship is likely to push them into the legal economy, where they will be declaring their income and paying billions of dollars in taxes in addition to the amounts that we have calculated above.
The reporting of this income, however, may increase business deductions for labor compensation, offsetting part of the tax gain. In addition, some currently unauthorized immigrants who have income taxes withheld may—upon attaining legal status—file returns and claim refunds or deductions and exemptions that will offset some of the tax revenue gained from the higher reporting of income.
Robert Lynch Senior Fellow. Patrick Oakford Senior Policy Analyst. You Might Also Like. Sep 5, Nicole Prchal Svajlenka. Jan 19, Tom Jawetz. A more moderate legalization is obviously better than no legalization at all. Nobody knows the answer to the long term political consequences, they never have, and we should all stop pretending that we do and instead support policies that we know will be good when we can. If the hypothesized Biden bill fails then it would also open up other possibilities.
Politically, it would be a marker bill that shows where the Democratic Party stands and would be a starting point for future negotiations. More important is that a failure to legalize illegal immigrants in Congress will give more of a political justification for a Biden administration to take sweeping executive actions to legalize all illegal immigrants by granting them Temporary Protected Status TPS.
Under current statute , a president has the power to grant TPS to any immigrant in the United States if their home country faces a disaster. Immigration attorney and former deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation at the U.
A universal grant of TPS could be undone by a future president but, at minimum, it would allow some current illegal immigrants to adjust their status to a green card and thus shrink the pool of illegal immigrants. The major structural legal change to the immigration system under Trump is that the President now has the power to stop all legal immigration from abroad for any reason.
The failure of the immigration legalization bill in Congress would allow Biden to test the power of the president to at least legalize illegal immigrants using broad existing statutory authority. Beyond that, there are many smaller actions that Biden could follow that will reduce the illegal immigrant population as detailed here by my colleague David Bier.
No president should be making policy by executive decree but no president is likely to give up the power that Congress unwisely granted it, so you should expect many executive and agency actions from Biden here. There are many ways to legalize illegal immigrants. We proposed just such a reform here based on a portion of British immigration law.
This will reduce the potential for the illegal immigrant population to grow in the future. As evidenced by the Reagan amnesty , only 41 percent of the illegal immigrants who got a green card decided to naturalize. The overwhelming evidence is that expanding legal immigration reduces illegal immigration. Even nativists agree that legal immigration decreases illegal immigration. In short, illegals are the weak link in the migration chain.
Accordingly, any serious immigration policy must, in the first place, strive to keep out illegals. Unfortunately, none of the proposals now circulating will accomplish this goal.
Getting serious about immigration means getting serious about legal as well as illegal immigration. But insofar as we focus on illegals, our emphasis should not be on housing or schools, but on jobs that attract them. Yet, such an approach would force an examination of the complicity of U. Moreover, getting serious about workplace enforcement would lead to discussions of secure means of identification that employers could use to reliably determine who is here legally or not.
Such efforts, along with serious measures at the border, are what ought to be debated—not whether landlords and teachers should be enforcing our immigration laws. Meantime, the curious consensus against illegal immigration that has evolved in recent months threatens to intensify sentiment against illegals.
Worse, the current round of proposals, if enacted into law, will have, once again, falsely raised the expectations of the American people that this difficult problem is being addressed.
The history of immigration policy in the postwar era has been one of inaccurate predictions, unintended consequences and inflated expectations—and continuously rising levels of legal as well as illegal immigration. We need to be tough on illegals. But we also need to be tough on ourselves and face up to the fact that the immigration problem is much bigger and more deeply rooted than the easy targets aimed at in these hotly debated proposals.
Related Books. Related Topics Immigration U. States and Territories.
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